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Book Review: Deserved: Economic Memories After the Fall of the Iron Curtain

28 May 2024
Reviewed by Professor Klaus Neumann

Eastern Europe’s transformation since the fall of the Berlin Wall still highlights deep East-West divides. Till Hilmar’s book explores how Czechs and East Germans have navigated post-1989 changes, emphasising the enduring economic disparities and differing cultural narratives of resilience and blame.

It is now almost 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. By the summer of the following year, most of the formerly state socialist regimes in Eastern Europe had been replaced by democratically elected governments. Soon, the time elapsed since 1989 will exceed the life span of the regimes that collapsed so swiftly then. More than a third of the people living in Europe today weren’t even born when the Wall fell; another quarter were under the age of 18. The likes of Gustáv Husák, Erich Honecker, and Nicolae Ceaușescu exited centre stage.

And yet, much to the surprise of many scholars and policy makers alike, the post-1989 economic, social, and cultural transformation of Eastern Europe is ongoing. The political divisions within the European Union demonstrate that there is still a wide gulf between Western and Eastern Europe – not because Western and Eastern Europe did not have much in common historically, but as the result of four decades of state socialist rule. Those living in the states that once formed the German Democratic Republic earn less on average than their compatriots in the rest of the Federal Republic. They often think and vote differently, and sometimes resent people that hail from West Germany because they are held responsible for a transition gone wrong.

The longevity of structural disadvantages and cultural traits has spawned a rich literature on what is often called “transformation.” Till Hilmar’s book makes a valuable contribution to that field of study. He investigated how people in the Czech Republic and in East Germany have made sense of the disruptive change their societies underwent after 1989.

The Czech Republic and East Germany had much in common before 1989. They were highly industrialised and – compared to others in Eastern Europe – affluent societies. Their people tended to be comparatively well educated. Unlike in, say, Bulgaria or Poland, there was little demand for unskilled labour. After 1989, their paths diverged. The Czech Republic weathered the transformation relatively well. “While East Germans experienced economic dissolution in the form of disappearing industry, skyrocketing rates of unemployment, and increasing wages, Czechs experienced a relatively high degree of industrial preservation, with low levels of unemployment and low wages.” Hilmar also observes that while “East Germans were subject to a patronizing discourse that blamed them for economic failure, […] Czechs were offered a cultural script of resilience and masculine economic nationalism.”

In order to establish how Czechs and East Germans have interpreted the post-1989 economic transformation, Hilmar conducted 67 interviews with people who were young adults at the time when the state socialist regimes collapsed. All of them belonged to either of two professions: health care and engineering. He found that their memories of the upheaval experienced after the end of state socialist rule were “informed by a cultural grammar of social inclusion and recognition.” That in turn was the outcome of having been socialized in societies that valued equality through work. After 1989, surprisingly, many of Hilmar’s respondents believed that they and others who had lived through the disruptive transformation were responsible for their own fate. In the eyes of many of his respondents, those who did well deserved to succeed, while those who failed were at least, in part, to be blamed for their misfortune.

The strength of Hilmar’s book lies in its contribution to memory studies. While memory studies scholars have paid a lot of attention to memories of repression, resistance, and political transformation, there is, as he rightly observes, “a dearth of approaches to economic change in sociological thinking about memory.” Hilmar’s work also demonstrates that we ought to be more attentive to how the resilience of moral economies shape the ways we perceive of change.

Hilmar’s book grew out of a doctoral dissertation. It is unfortunate that much of it still reads like a dissertation (albeit a very good one). That makes the book less attractive for non-specialist readers like myself. I did not have an issue with Hilmar’s prose, but with the fact that some of his text seems more designed to reassure examiners about the candidate’s ability to meet expectations specific to his academic discipline, than to appeal to readers interested in a particular subject matter.

In my view, the book would have also been more readable if his interviewees had played a more prominent role in it. It takes him 66 pages (about a third of the text) to get to the first interview. By then the reader already knows what to expect and could be forgiven for thinking that the excerpts from the interviews are to illustrate his findings, rather than that he was trying to make sense of what Czech nurses and German engineers told him.

I would have also liked to know more about the interviewees and about the setting of the interviews to be able to appreciate the narratives quoted by Hilmar. I would have liked to be able to visualise them and hear their voices when reading the book, rather than being left with the impression that I was being fed “data.” I concede this may be a non-sociologist’s complaint. It is, however, prompted by my conviction that Hilmar’s findings should be of interest to readers beyond a narrow band of specialists.

This is not merely a problem of readability. Hilmar writes that “When talking about the past in an interview, a researcher is interested in multiple things at the same time: what happened; how, and why is it remembered; and how does the present affect respondents’ memories?” Reading the excerpts quoted in Deserved, I was often left wondering whether an interviewee was commenting on the past or the present, and to what extent the interviews could be considered “oral histories.” It would have been easier to disentangle the “multiple things” Hilmar was interested in if the interviewees had been protagonists in his narrative.

All interviews were conducted in 2016 and 2017. That was when issues of migration and the so-called refugee crisis loomed large both in Germany and in the Czech Republic. This coincidence made me wonder to what extent the interviewees’ focus on deservingness was perhaps also informed by a discourse in which “undeserving” others featured prominently.

The book includes a brief epilogue in which Hilmar reflects on the rise of far right populism, particularly in Eastern Europe (including East Germany). This is a burning issue today, not just in former state socialist countries. “Right-wing populists give voice to a widespread sense of disappointment with the promises of meritocracy,” he writes. “[T]hey claim that merit needs to be restored and that this can be achieved only by purifying the realm of the market of the negative influence of politics.” I hope that Hilmar will pursue this argument further, if only because his approach may go some way towards explaining why voters support parties whose policies, if implemented, would see their core constituencies being worse off.

This is a review of Till Hilmar’s Deserved: Economic Memories After the Fall of the Iron Curtain (New York: Columbia University Press, 2024) ISBN: 

Klaus Neumann works for the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Research and Culture and is an honorary professor at Deakin University. His latest book — his first in German — is a history of local German responses to refugees.

This review article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.