Introduction

Abstract

This introduction orients the reader to how and why this ethnography emerged from the author’s serendipitous encounter with East German intellectuals in the summer of 1990, several weeks before their nation, the GDR, officially came to an end. It does so in two ways. First, it provides a summary about this ethnography’s location in and contribution to the academic literature examining the GDR during what Germans have come to refer to as the Turn (die Wende), a shorthand to describe the end of the socialist GDR and its unification with capitalist West Germany. Second, it describes the logic of carrying out this ethnographic research project, from its first phase in 1990-91 to the follow up interviews with East German intellectuals a quarter century later, in 2014.