Relative to the state: Speaking practice and political position in post -socialist East Berlin.

Over fifteen years after the dissolution of the East German state, a sense of the East German citizenry as a social group remains. Through the 1990 reunification of East and West Germany, Western political and economic systems replaced Eastern counterparts virtually overnight, a situation of sudden institutional change rather than gradual transformation. Speaking practice among those with former East German citizenship reveals a surviving and changing Eastern political subjectivity; post-socialist transition is apparent in the pragmatic and metapragmatic domains. This dissertation is based on fieldwork conducted among former employees of the East German light bulb manufacturer Berliner Gluhlampenwerk (BGW) from September 2001 to August 2003. It examines language use as evidence of ways in which the social group perseveres, in the absence of the state and workplace that have defined its existence. The dissertation focuses on the concepts of private and public as foundations for speech event types through which speakers discursively manage political talk. Analysis embraces a Bakhtinian concern with voice and chronotope in studying the former coworkers' evaluation of and self-situation relative to the German states in space and time. Insights and analytic methods from sociolinguistics and an ethnography of speaking approach reveal ways that speakers invoke voices linked indexically through speech event type to the two German states and to sets of moral evaluations of the states. Close analysis with attention to these semiotic practices demonstrates speakers' practices of situating themselves in space in time, in relation to others, and also in relation to the two German states. The history of German states underlies ways of making reference, using linguistic varieties, and invoking morally-charged voices in storytelling practice. Speakers' attention to ways of referencing the state and its history in discussing work history makes speaking practice a form of political self-presentation. Furthermore, common ways of positioning the self relative to the state promotes the maintenance of an East German social group, despite diversity of political opinion among its members.PhDCommunicationCommunication and the ArtsCultural anthropologyPolitical scienceSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/126664/2/3276133.pd