Acknowledgments

Different versions of this paper were presented at meetings of the Council of European Studies, at a conference on German national identity at Emory University, and at the Center for 21st Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I am grateful to these audiences as well as to two anonymous CSSH reviewers for their probing questions and incisive comments. I also, thank Robert Berdahl, Kriszti Fehervery, Andreas Glaeser, and Alf Lüdtke for conversations that have enriched this work. Thanks also to Ursula Dahlinghaus for her assistance in the final preparation of this manuscript. Funding for the research was provided by a University of Minnesota McKnight Land-Grant Professorship and a Fulbright Fellowship. Finally, as always, I owe a debt of gratitude to John Baldwin, who made this research, and so much more, possible.

Immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, one of the most pervasive media images consisted of East Germans on a frenetic, collective shopping spree. For many western Germans, as well as for much of the world, the “triumph” of capitalism and democracy seemed to be reflected and confirmed in the “consuming frenzy” (Konsumrausch) of the “Ossis” (East Germans). Although these images of consumption following the collapse of socialism were new, they were structured by and contributed to a dominant narrative of “democratization” and national legitimacy in which access to consumer goods and consumer choice are defined as fundamental rights and democratic expressions of individualism. Indeed, many observers have since suggested that the transitions of 1989 were not about demands for political or human rights, but for consumer rights (e.g., Bauman 1992; Borneman 1992; Drakulic 1991). They were also, I would add, about consumer rites—about the making of citizen-consumers.

My aim in this paper is to interrogate visions, meanings, and the boundaries of citizenship in the context of East Germany's transition from state socialism to a consumer market economy. My argument is that these transformations are suggestive of a more general phenomenon concerning the relationship between citizenship and late or “millennial capitalism” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000). I am thus proposing an alternative ethnography of the nation-state that focuses not on state practices, bureaucracies, or institutions but on performances and practices of citizenship and national belonging. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the eastern German city of Leipzig, I explore an emerging and transformative relationship between citizenship and mass consumption especially visible in the radically de-industrialized former GDR. The nation-state and national belonging are forged not only through neoliberal ideologies of consumer democracy and the “freedom to choose” as in market life, I argue, but also through the activities, places, and objects of consumption.¹

Delivering the Goods: Citizenship, Consumption, and National Legitimacy

A “defining mark of modernity,” argue James Holston and Arjun Appadurai, is the association between citizenship and nationality as definitive of “the meaning of full membership in society” (Holston and Appadurai 1996:187). As renewed discussions of citizenship within public and academic discussions have revealed, however, liberal notions of citizenship and citizenship rights have been transformed in the face of large-scale movements of people and goods, the globalization of production, the consolidation of supranational institutions like the European Union, and an increasingly complex and interconnected system of global capitalism. In contrast to an emphasis on civil or political rights in earlier modes and ideals of citizenship, and unlike the notion of social rights that is at the center of T. H. Marshall's classic formulation (1992),²

Citizenship may thus be understood as an on-going process, a social practice, and a cultural performance rather than a static category. It entails complex and often contradictory struggles over the definition of social membership, over categories and practices of inclusion and exclusion, and over different forms of participation in public life. “Citizenship,” writes Gershon Shafir, is not “just a bundle of formal rights but the entire mode of incorporation of a particular individual or group into society” (1998:23).

In the context of contemporary debates over globalization and the future of the nation-state, a move beyond traditional conceptions of citizenship must also include, among other areas of inquiry, a focus on consumption and the marketplace. The relationship between citizenship and capitalism, and theorizing about this dynamic, has a long history in social theory, including Marx's discussion of modern citizenship rights in his critique of the liberal state in “On the Jewish Question” (in Tucker 1972), as well as Marshall's penetrating description of citizenship as the “instrument of social stratification” (1992:39). Along similar lines, scholars have more recently observed that access to consumer goods and the concept of choice in relation to consumption emerged in the middle of the twentieth century as a fundamental political right in Western industrialized societies (Bauman 1992; 1998; De Grazia 1996; McGovern 1998; Cohen 1998). This transformation, argue Jean and John Comaroff, is one critical aspect of the “culture of neoliberalism”: “a culture that . . . re-envisions persons not as producers from a particular community, but as consumers in a planetary marketplace” (2000:304). The most explicit connection between citizenship and consumption is made in a recent study by Néstor García Canclini, who points out that “redefining citizenship in connection with consumption and political strategy requires a conceptual framework for examining cultural consumption as an ensemble of practices that shape the sphere of citizenship” (Canclini 2001:22).

The analytical utility of the category citizenship, in contradistinction to an analytics of nationality (although the two are obviously closely related) lies in its focus on the public sphere, the role of the state, as well as on questions of the rights, duties, and obligations of national membership, all of which have been transformed by the cultural and economic dominance of consumption and the market.

The consequences of this relation between consumption, citizenship, and political rights have been profound, resulting, for example, in the emergence of the female “citizen consumer” empowered politically through consumption (De Grazia 1996; Davis 1996), as well as a redefinition of the rights and obligations of citizenship itself. As De Grazia argues, the latter change has resulted in a new kind of “post-political citizenship” in which an individual's “presence in the public sphere is defined not so much by the transformation of the political system as by a notion of the self, of collective identity, and of entitlement associated with the diffusion of mass consumption” (1996:356).

This redefinition extends to the duties and obligations of citizenship as well. Because mass consumption is linked to economic prosperity,³

This relationship between consumption and national legitimacy has particular relevance in the German context. The post-war economic miracle in West Germany, for example, was largely based upon the promise, and premise, of entitlement and prosperity as the products of democratic freedoms, as Ludwig Erhard, its architect, suggested: “Every citizen must be conscious of consumer freedom and the freedom of economic enterprise as basic and inalienable rights” (quoted in De Grazia 1996:283). Further, as Erica Carter (1997) has argued in a provocative study of consumption and gender in post-war West Germany, economic prosperity became an important element in a developing West German national identity, with women as consumers playing a major role as active agents in economic integration. In the search for a new, unencumbered national narrative, Carter suggests, ideas of German nationhood were transposed throughout the 1950s onto a flourishing social market economy. This notion of the economy as a focus of national sentiment attained renewed visibility immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Indeed, “Deutschmark nationalism,” a term coined by Habermas to describe what he saw (and feared) as a rise in nationalist sentiments based on the promise of a consumer-oriented market economy supported by the “almighty” Deutschmark, is widely viewed as having been the driving force behind the landslide victory of the coalition parties associated with Helmut Kohl's Christian Democratic Party in the East German elections of March 1990.

Consuming Metaphors

The fall of the Berlin Wall thus quickly came to be a key symbol affirming the relationship between national legitimacy and mass consumption. The eastern bloc “economies of shortage” (Kornai 1992) contrasted sharply with the affluence and abundance of consumer goods in the West, and nowhere was this disparity more evident than in divided Germany. Local and state-level practices, including the exchange of political prisoners and dissidents for western currency, West German state loans to the GDR, images on western television (whose airwaves easily crossed the otherwise impermeable border), and the coveted Westpakete (western packages) full of chocolates, coffee, and hand-me-down clothing for eastern relatives, reflected this imbalance and confirmed an image of the prosperous “golden West,” a paradise that, if attained, could solve most every problem.⁵

After the fall of the Wall, images and metaphors of prosperity and consumption continued to define distinctions between East and West. West German triumphalist discourses hailed the end of the Cold War while newspapers featured photos of East Germans gawking at western products (a typical headline, for example, read: “Waiting, Marveling, Buying”). The 100 DM Begrüßungsgeld (“welcome money”) handed to all first-time visitors from the GDR by the West German state as well as spontaneous gifts of cash from individual West Germans not only helped finance the easterners' spending spree, but also helped define consumption as the organizing metaphor for the collapse of socialist rule. Consumption thus not only became an important symbolic marker of this historic moment (represented most tangibly in what people chose to purchase with their “welcome money”), but became constitutive of the meaning of the transition (Wende) itself: state socialism collapsed not merely because of a political failure, but because of its failure, quite literally, “to deliver the goods” (Borneman 1992:252). As the historian Ina Merkel has observed: “The struggle between the systems did not take the form of armed conflict, but was rather shifted to the marketplace. And it was here, in the sphere of consumerism, that the battle was won” (1998:282).

Citizenscapes

Since German re-unification,⁶

More recently, many efforts have been devoted to educating eastern German consumers about the consequences and implications of their purchasing choices after the radical decline in demand for and production of eastern German products following re-unification. Explained the head of the supermarket chain Konsum, the East German consumer cooperative and one of the few surviving remnants of socialist commerce: “When the Wall fell people didn't want to hear about products made here [in the former GDR]. Everyone clamored for the things that you couldn't get here, like Coca Cola, and that hurt our regional industry. . . . Since 1992 we have been working to make people aware that they strengthen their economy when they buy local products.”

Many supermarkets throughout eastern Germany will note next to a particular product if it has been produced in the “Five New Federal States”; others specifically specialize in eastern German products.⁷

In the new Germany, then, consumption has entailed the work of making citizen-subjects. The emergence of such “citizenscapes”⁸

Thus, although the pursuit of material prosperity was a critical feature of nation-building on both sides of the inter-German border (Borneman 1992; Carter 1997; Merkel 1999),¹⁰

Actually Existing Citizenship

The radical de-industrialization of the former GDR and the absorption of East Germany into a West German model of nationhood based on a consumer democracy have reconfigured the symbolic spaces of citizenship and created new boundaries of belonging. Visible in the industrial ruins and strip malls that surround most urban centers, this shift in balance is mapped onto the cultural landscape.

Leipzig, for example, where over 90 percent of manufacturing jobs have been eliminated since 1989 and unemployment remains steady at around 17 percent,¹²

These projects reflect the heavy investment of western capital in Leipzig, more than in any other city in the former GDR besides East Berlin. Long a center of international trade because of its centuries-old trade fair, Leipzig is struggling to reclaim its status as the financial capital of eastern Germany.¹⁴

A 1998 conversation with a woman in her mid-forties, still employed as a librarian at the national library, first brought this to my attention. “Have you seen our downtown?” she inquired. I didn't realize it was a leading question. “Well, Leipzig does not consist of this glittering downtown alone. Beyond these colorful façades there is much depression. People can't participate in this prosperity. In fact, the different degrees to which people are excluded from this new prosperity is a source of depression, tension, and difficulty. We have a middle class and an unemployed class here, but neither group can truly afford to participate in the luxuries offered downtown.” She paused, and then continued, her voice growing increasingly adamant as she spoke: “In a sense, we don't really experience these changes as being real. It all comes from outside, from the West. Everything is pumped in from the West. The fact that all the renovations, construction, up-scaling of the downtown are not the product of people's labor here but of western investment capital makes people feel alienated from their own city. . . . There is much resentment toward the people who shop at these stores (although I don't know anyone who can actually afford to). This is a model from the West that was imported here and many Leipzig citizens are having an allergic reaction to this model, in part because it is not theirs, in part because they are excluded.”

New categories of inclusion and exclusion—Wendegewinner and Wendeverlierer (winners and losers of the “transition”)—designate who is in and who is out in the new society. “My uncle and cousin are Wendegewinner,” one young man told me. “He purchased the state store he had worked in after 1989. He has done very well and now drives the biggest BMW available!” Another man, a musician in the state orchestra, also characterized himself as belonging to this category: “I'm an exception. You could say I have profited from the transition. Look, we live well,” he said, gesturing to his new house full of modern furnishings including leather sofa, solid wood wall cabinets, and brand-name electronics.

At the other end of the spectrum are the “transition losers”—the unemployed, the underemployed, the homeless, the poor. These are the people whose presence in the new society is unsettling, for they are reminders not only of the human costs of a capitalist market economy, but also of the new nation-state's failure “to produce convincing fantasies of the commensurability of its citizens” (Holston and Appadurai 1996:202). Often these transition losers rarely venture into the new symbolic spaces of social membership, knowing they make others uncomfortable and feeling deeply ashamed of their situation. As one woman who had been unemployed for three years after re-unification told me: “Unemployment is for our understanding the worst thing that there is. We were all raised to be socialists, and we were taught that labor is what separates humans from animals. That is what we learned. Suddenly to be without work is unthinkable for us. It makes us feel subhuman.” Lacking the resources to consume, they are excluded from the rights and responsibilities of participation in the public sphere of a consumer democracy. “We used to all belong to the bottom half [of society],” I was frequently told, “now we are third-class German citizens.” Although granted formal social, political, and civil rights, these people are outsiders in a (West) German nation-state founded and forged through an ideology of prosperity and entitlement associated with mass consumption. As one worker at a debt-counseling center—an increasingly expanding social service in the eastern German states—observed: “It doesn't matter how the debts were acquired, the consequences are all the same. It affects people's sense of self-worth to be perceived losers and to be increasingly relegated to the margins of society in their daily lives. In other words, people lose access to the criteria that define modern life.” In a context where citizenship “is measured increasingly by the capacity to transact and consume” (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000:306), the presence of “transition losers” throws into sharp relief the contrast between what several scholars have called “formative” and “substantive” citizenship, or the difference between citizenship as an institution and citizenship as lived. It also reflects what Zygmunt Bauman has identified as a redefinition of poverty in a consumer society: “. . . having no access to a happy or merely normal life means to be consumers manquées, or flawed consumers. And so the poor of a consumer society are socially defined, and self-defined, first and foremost as blemished, defective, faulty and deficient—in other words, inadequate—consumers” (1998:38).

Somewhere in between the transition winners and losers are the majority of eastern Germans.¹⁵

Urban Outfitters

Over a decade after the collapse of socialism, eastern Germans are still receiving formal instruction about consumption, the spirit of capitalism, and their rights and obligations as citizen-consumers. To illustrate, I turn now to a “motivational seminar for women” held in the summer of 1998 and sponsored by the Leipzig Center for the Unemployed, a non-profit organization with major funding from the state. Although not advertised as such, the seminar was led by a Mary Kay Cosmetics consultant, Anita Mueller, who works extensively with women who are unemployed or are being retrained in another profession after losing their jobs. Many of her seminars are thus held at technical colleges and schools shortly before students enter the job market. Attended by a handful of women ranging in age from their late-twenties to late-forties, the presentation began with Anita introducing herself as an empathetic fellow Ossi. A steel worker in the GDR, Anita had spent several years on unemployment after 1989. “I faced a lot of despair and depression after the Wende,” she told her small audience, “and I want to help others pull themselves out of the resignation that comes with being unemployed. It was so painful for me to see the products of my hard labor dismissed. I had no self-confidence left. Learning how to present myself was critical in helping me develop a new sense of self.” She then pulled out laminated paper containing in large bold print the English words “Image” and “Outfit.” “Learning about self-presentation and body language means understanding these two terms,” she continued. “Outward appearances are very important; they are not only a façade. In order to cultivate this you will need to learn certain techniques that I will begin to introduce today.”

For the next three hours, Anita demonstrated these techniques using Mary Kay products on two volunteers. Throughout the procedure she would pause to lecture on color combinations, the importance of appearing neat and clean, and the implicit messages of body language. Her presentation was lively and animated, often eliciting smiles and laughter from her audience. Sitting back with her arms across her chest or leaning forward with her cheek slumped into her hand, for example, she asked: “What kind of image does that convey to you? Not a very positive one.” Similarly, she passed around a notebook with before and after photos of Mary Kay makeovers. “Which woman will find work?” she asked, “the one with the pale face and stringy hair or the same person with a neat, cultivated appearance?”

Such “image seminars” have become a standard component of job-retraining programs and company-sponsored educational seminars. “Image and identity consulting” is a relatively booming entrepreneurial business in Leipzig, with individual business names like “Style and Image Consultation,” “Outfit Angelika Schneider,” “Image Identity” [in English], and “Personality Consultation, Training, and Coaching.” Its practitioners work in a variety of institutional contexts as well as with individual clients, and the local Volkshochschule (community education) offerings in the subject are unparalleled in comparable western German contexts. While the seminars and consultations may represent the most extreme form of socialization into the norms of mass consumption, they do throw into sharp relief Canclini's positing of consumption as a “means of thinking” that “creates new ways of being citizens” (2001, quoted in Yudice 1995).

The starting point for most seminars, and the selling point for individual consultations, is a promise of “success” based on culturally competent consumption practices. “That is the way society is today,” one consultant began, “people don't say, ‘what can this person contribute’ but ‘how does he or she look?’” Another session with a different consultant was more gender-specific. Noting the importance of self-presentation, Antje explained to a group of trainees: “This is especially so with women. People will consider whether they want to do business by whether the woman is attractive—but not erotic. It is important to learn how to manipulate not only your clothing, but to use [your clothing] to manipulate people.” Underlying these promises of success is a notion of consumption as a learning process in contrast to the experience of consumption under socialism, as one woman explained to me: “So many former GDR citizens will say to me: ‘Why do I have to present myself this way? This was never necessary earlier in the GDR.’ But of course this is never a topic in the old federal states [West Germany].”

A typical seminar at a job-training program, then, begins by noting the importance of first impressions (“You never get a second chance to make a first impression”), and focuses largely on color coordination and fashion styles. “Compare what happens to her face with this color,” one consultant told a group of trainees as she draped an olive-green scarf across the unsuspecting volunteer's chest, “you see the pores, pimples, and blemishes.” She contrasted this with a softer blue, “more flattering for her skin tone and type.” Body types and practices are also commonly covered as an important topic, with tips for dealing with the “plus and minus points” of proportions, eyes, noses, foreheads, legs, and so forth. Indeed, body habitus frequently plays a critical role in personality assessments and estimations. Consultants often ask to observe the walking strides and bodily mannerisms of clients in order to determine “personality types,” the terms for which are either drawn from a culturally shared vocabulary (“natural, romantic, dramatic”) or from a practitioner's specific training (“raffiné, tonique, sophistique”). Images and ideals of femininity are conveyed through magazine illustrations, make-up tips, and fashion choices. Despite the fact that it has been over a decade since the collapse of socialist rule, the need for such lessons is still explained in terms of the past, as one consultant explained to me in the spring of 2001: “In the West femininity is encouraged differently. . . . They were always competing with each other for men, for a man who could earn enough money, and for that you had to present yourself well, you had to sell yourself. Whereas the East German women said, ‘I earn my own money. I don't have to present myself like this’. . . . The majority of women [in the GDR] didn't really take care of themselves, and didn't really know what it meant to be a woman. Didn't know how to live this on the outside. . . . Not everyone has learned this yet, so I still have work to do!”

At the core of these consultation practices is a discourse of individual fulfillment, self-discovery, and even healing through consumption. The narratives told in seminars, echoed in all of my conversations with image consultants, reveal a notion of an inner self that both defines and is defined by an outer “image” or “identity” realized through consumption. “People don't understand the critical relationship between who you are and what you wear,” one consultant told me. Another consultant promised her audience, “Today I am going to help you bring out the things that you keep inside, to show you how to make the best of your personality. I will show you how to harmonize what is inside with what you wear on the outside through styles and colors, so you will be able to answer the question: what kind of person is this?”

At issue in this work is the body of the consuming citizen; what is communicated is not only the performative aspect of citizenship in a consumer democracy, but also the notion, described recently by Patton and Caserio (2000:6), of the good citizen as an “all-consuming agent of late capitalist production.” Like fashion magazines and media images, such image seminars and consultations “contribute directly to transmuting the idea of political freedom into that of self-realization through consumer choice” (Gal and Kligman 2000:107). In this sense, they are one instance of a much larger convergence of the consumer with the democratic citizen.

Yet the post-socialist context gives these practices particular meaning, reflecting important linkages between production and consumption both here and elsewhere.¹⁶

Rather than thinking of such practices and performances as indicative of the “postmodern citizen consumer” inhabiting a space beyond the purview of the nation, however, I am suggesting that in the context of the “triumph” of capitalism and democracy associated with the new Germany—including notions of the nation-state as a locus of distribution, an arbiter of economic prosperity, and a champion of consumer choice contrasted with the material failures of state socialism—these and similar practices could be construed as local, global, as well as national. Anita Mueller, the industrial worker turned Mary Kay Cosmetics representative, embodied, indeed epitomized, the larger shift in balance from socialist production to late capitalist consumption and its implications for citizenship. Participation in the public sphere and membership in the new society depend not on what you produced, but on what, how, and where you consume. My discussions with debt counselors and social workers in Leipzig, for example, revealed one particular indication of this shift: whereas in the first years after the Wende clients would name unemployment as their chief reason for seeking assistance, more recently people cite a mounting consumer debt as a primary concern.

Conclusion

In a provocative essay about Asian immigrants in the United States, Aihwa Ong defines citizenship as “a cultural process of ‘subjectification,’ in the Foucauldian sense of self-making and being-made by power relations that produce consent through schemes of surveillance, discipline, control, and administration” (1996:738). Concerned with how criteria of belonging are established, Ong is careful to point to disciplinary schemes outside of the state that nevertheless can have national effects. I am suggesting here that consumption be viewed as one such disciplinary scheme, as a cultural process of subject-making that defines categories and criteria of belonging. In the context of a nation-state built in large part upon the promise of economic prosperity and the freedom to consume, global commodity flows may be re-appropriated in forging the nation and defining its citizens.

This relationship between national citizenship and mass consumption is, however, not unique to the German context, even though it may be especially visible there. Indeed, in the wake of September 11th, we have witnessed an intensification of this dynamic in the United States: whereas the patriotic response in World War II was to enlist in the army or cultivate a victory garden, we were urged as a nation to go shopping. In New York, banners streamed the streets saying: “Fight Back New York: Go Shopping”¹⁷

The dramatic transitions from socialism in Eastern Europe, as Katherine Verdery has noted, provide a unique opportunity “to broaden a critique of Western economic and political forms by seeing them through the eyes of those experiencing their construction” (1996:11). As one debt counselor told me at the conclusion of our two-hour conversation: “People have called this into question . . . thinking perhaps that it is not so ideal, this economic system. But it can't be questioned any more. It's been decided worldwide.” Indeed, it is in such moments of transition as that in post-Wall Germany that the relationship between economic systems, political entities, and culture—“cosmologies of capitalism” (Sahlins 1988)—may be observed in particularly bold relief. The work of consumption in post-socialist eastern Germany has reflected and constituted certain boundaries of national belonging, even as it simultaneously situates Germany and its “social market economy” within a neoliberal global order. Citizenship and the nation-state have become linked to consumer rights—and rites.