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Article: The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Historian
- Article date:
- June 22, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2009 Phi Alpha Theta, History Honor Society, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany. By Jonathan Zatlin. (New York, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xviii, 377. $75.00.)
As a student living in East Germany, this reviewer's idee fixe about the problems it faced realizing communist utopian ideals was that one could not simply transplant a nineteenth-century Marxist ideology onto a modern consumer society. This proved to be an even more difficult task in a country like East Germany that had a strong capitalistic consumer-oriented Western neighbor with the same cultural traditions and history. Of course, economic historians present more complex analyses of such ...