In this book, Jonathan Bach makes an important contribution to the scholarship on the politics of memory in Germany. He shows that research on the memory of East Germany—which often focuses on the commemoration of state repression—has overlooked the vibrant and significant memory politics of everyday life. What Remains highlights the material legacies (things and places) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the ways in which they have been “appropriated” by ordinary people in the decades since 1989. Extremely rich in empirical detail and theoretical insight, the book is organized into case studies that provide remarkable breadth and depth on a variety of themes. The author explores the nostalgic revival of East German products, as well as the display of the items of East German life as artifacts in (mostly) grassroots museums. He also examines central sites of memory, focusing on the debates and practices surrounding the dismantled Palace of the Republic and three key sites that commemorate the Berlin Wall.

Bach rightly argues that analyses of memories of state repression do not do justice to the complexity of remembering East Germany. His systematic focus on everyday life is important for our understanding of the practical mechanisms through which politics and change are manifested in public acts of memory. Bach examines the unsettling effects of the processes of negotiating the meaning of the everyday by showing “how material culture from the past comes to circulate in overlapping economies of the present: the marketplace for ‘East’ products, the symbolic economy of national symbols, the creative economy of twenty-first century Berlin, and the global memory economy” (p. 3).

The theoretical frames in What Remains engage with different forms of nostalgia, layers of inheritance, and temporalities. I found Bach’s discussion of the concept of “appropriation” the most intriguing. Appropriation, defined as the “making of what was once someone else’s into mine/yours” (p. 171), not only coherently links to the diverse cases presented here but will also be broadly applicable to research beyond Germany. Encapsulated in the author’s analysis of appropriation is his understanding that processes of memorialization are not straightforward and not easily categorized as laudatory or counterproductive. Instead, we need to pay attention to how individuals, groups, and institutions creatively make use—for economic, symbolic, or autobiographical purposes—of the things and sites that connect them with their past. Such processes are important because they allow the shaping of politics and society “from below,” especially in times of rapid transformation. Appropriation, for Bach, is a “key mechanism by which things once thought bygone or deemed unworthy of memory are actively (re)incorporated into the present” (p. 7).

Thus, “memory value” is seen as a value unto its own, but one that is not given and requires agency. In particular, the creation of memorial sites, of nostalgic meaning, and above all of authenticity requires work. One aspect that Bach neglects in this context is how positive memories of the GDR and its end (such as of the joy of succeeding in spite of “the system” or the solidarity experienced in defeating a repressive political regime) are navigated through mechanisms of everyday appropriation. Such positive remembering would seem to be highly relevant not only for top-down ceremonies and the creation of foundation myths but for the life stories of ordinary people as well.

In each of the four main chapters, the author trains his eye on the labor of creating mnemonic meaning—and who does that work. In each case, he shows the progression from unstructured, bottom-up remembrance to its institutionalization into markets and the state. His lead case study about the commodification of objects of nostalgia as “East products” argues that they enable popular and performative ways of reckoning with the past. These cultural practices give agency to individuals and subtly undermine the dominant narratives about collective memory. His second case provides an impressive account of how local, mostly privately initiated museums have worked to safeguard the material legacy of the GDR. He argues that the practice of collecting and “visiting with” everyday “stuff” represents an act of mourning, not so much for the state but for a way of life.

The second half of the book shifts attention from the artifacts of everyday consumption to the built spaces that once signified state socialist power, analyzing the processes of “unbuilding” and reimagining of the “Palace of the Republic” and the Berlin Wall. Chapter 3 identifies three “modes of inheritance” at work in the “Palace”—which housed the (mostly powerless) East German parliament and a national cultural center with stages, restaurants, and cafés. Condemned due to asbestos contamination and a lack of political will, the Palace was demolished between 2005 and 2008. It is now being replaced with the “Humboldt Forum”—a modern building that replicates the façade of the old castle that was torn down by the GDR in 1950. It is set to open in late 2019. Bach analyzes its post-1989 meanings, from marker of socialist identity after unification, to conservative myth of timeless unity and aesthetics, to a performative mode that sought to appropriate the empty space of the Palace as an artistic space and as a nondogmatic way of bidding farewell.

The final chapter tackles an issue that has been the object of much scholarly analysis, as well as popular fascination: the Berlin Wall. Bach concentrates on a close analysis of three sites that are pivotal to his interest in how built spaces are appropriated and made authentic: the central memorial sites at Bernauer Strasse, Checkpoint Charlie, and the East Side Gallery. While there might be sites that would lend themselves more easily to a discussion of vernacular memory (for instance, the Palace of Tears or the Marienfelde Refugee Memorial), Bach uses these three effectively to make clear the ways in which these sites were claimed for informal use after 1989 and how agency was needed to turn them into sites of memory. As he does throughout the book, the author provides the larger discursive and political contexts in which “the wall, once detemporalized, taken out of time, and consigned to an initially relatively minor presence in an otherwise burgeoning memorial landscape, came to be retemporalized and made available for appropriation in new, often antagonistic ways” (p. 139).

Bach is clearly not only a perceptive but a longtime observer of German politics and culture: The book includes a photograph, taken by the author himself, of the historic moment of the painting of the East Side Gallery in 1990. What Remains is eloquently but accessibly written, with expert translations of sometimes very difficult-to-translate German terms. One of the author’s central insights is that German society is no longer grappling only with how to memorialize difficult pasts but also with how to self-reflexively tackle the ways in which the past was and is commemorated, and what different approaches may mean for the future. At the heart of the book is the question of whether and how Germany, which has built its collective identity on critically confronting the Nazi past, can allow a pluralistic memorial culture to develop. Far from denoting regressive nostalgia, such pluralism may signal that society is no longer in need of protective taboos. This book illustrates the importance of delving deeply into everyday culture in order to develop a sophisticated understanding of politics.