Accounting for Money: Keeping the Ledger of Monetary Memory in Germany

Abstract

This dissertation traces the socio-economic problem spaces and afterlives of the 1990 currency and economic union between West and East Germany, and the parallel process of creating the European single currency. Based on two and half years of full-time multi-sited (geographically and institutionally) fieldwork in Frankfurt am Main (West) and Leipzig (East) Germany, I show the pragmatic challenges of defining, enacting, and materializing relations of solidarity and obligation through new forms of monetary relations. I argue that the long and fraught histories of harmonizing east and west German regions offer critical insights for analyzing the new fault lines emerging between `core' and `periphery' nations in the euro-zone. My project therefore makes a contribution in narrating currency unions as emergent technical and social relationships, through which expert and lay understandings about money and economy are unwound and remade over time. In pursuing this line of inquiry, a key focus of my research included participatory research on the communications work of the German Central Bank (Deutsche Bundesbank) in Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig.