What happens when an entire modern state's material culture becomes abruptly obsolete? How do ordinary people encounter what remains? In this ethnography, Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from that vanished socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory.
What Remains traces the unsettling effects of these unmoored artifacts on the German present, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts. Bach juxtaposes four sites where the stakes of the everyday appear: products commodified as nostalgia, amateur museums dedicated to collecting everyday life under socialism, the "people's palace" that captured the national imagination through its destruction, and the feared and fetishized Berlin Wall. Moving from the local, the intimate, and the small to the national, the impersonal, and the large, this book's interpenetrating chapters show the unexpected social and political force of the ordinary in the production of memory. What Remains offers a unique vantage point on the workings of the everyday in situations of radical discontinuity, contributing to new understandings of postsocialism and the intricate intersection of material remains and memory.

电影以一条资产阶级犬的视角，讲述它如何从一名电影制片人变成一只四条腿动物的故事：由于找不到拍摄电影的投资商，朱利安只能到农场当临时工。在一次舞会上，他邂逅了加拿大少女卡米尔，并让对方相信了他在为一部共产主义风格的童话电影勘察外景，他还承诺会让卡米尔当电影的女主角。出乎意料的是，卡米尔决定陪在他身边，这一举动点燃了朱利安心中的浪漫情怀……

《无须资本家打造资本主义》提供了一种向资本主义转型的新理论。通过讲述资本主义如何在资本家缺席的后共产主义中欧被打造的故事，它引导我们更为深刻地理解了现代资本主义起源的问题。《无须资本家打造资本主义》通过深入研究，深刻描绘了由中欧前共产党技术专家以及异议知识分子在社会主义体制废墟上构件的资本主义的显著特征。
这是由三位美国社会学家作出的开创性研究，它主要研究了匈牙利、波兰和捷克共和国从国家社会主义向资本主义转型的问题。