Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellow, 1998-1999

Jonathan R. Zatlin, History: The Currency of Socialism: Money in the GDR and German Unification, 1980 - 1990. This dissertation argues that the method and pace of German unification was determined by a political and economic culture peculiar to East Germany. By exploring the function of money in the planned economy, Mr. Zatlin shows how the legacy of socialism, and not the lure of capitalism, led East Germans to embrace the West German mark and political institutions. Despite what most commentators have claimed, forty years of official anit-capitalist rhetoric and daily experience with the planned economy did not simply vanish along with the Berlin Wall. On the contrary, socialism continued to inform politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) even as East Germans voted in the parliamentary elections of March 1990 to surrender their monetary -- and therefore political -- sovereignty. East German desire for the West German mark was conditioned by the ruling Socialist Unity Party's (SED) tireless invocations of the Marxian labor theory of value and the everyday experience of economic shortage, which had taught East Germans to reify money and treat it as an object of limited equivalency, rather than a medium of exchange.