Just watched Jodi Dean on the Communist Horizon (via Mark). An uncommonly intelligent and insightful Q&A session follows her talk. Good job everyone.
I find such discussions compelling, but never quite know how to integrate them in my own work about East Germans and communism. I think it’s fanciful to claim that all East Germans who have some fond remembrance of the GDR are politically committed communists: indeed, to make that claim, I would end up siding with the conservatives who run ridiculous government inquiries into school curriculum to understand why communism still has an appeal to those growing up in eastern Germany etc. But this is, perhaps, where Dean’s talk is most useful for me—she observes, as I have too, that it is not the left but the right who are far more attentive and cautious about the remnants of “values” and traces of an emancipatory, communist politics in Germany today.
