This Is Not Nostalgia: Economic Memory in Post-1989 East Germany and the Czech Republic.

How do varying economic trajectories shape individual and group memories of the past? This paper develops a theoretical notion of "economic memory" out of two cases of transforming societies after 1989: East Germany and the Czech Republic. Economic memory is concerned with the value of skills in transforming labor markets as well as with the evaluation of change in interpersonal relations and strong ties. Because economic memory is born out of a transformation context, it offers a crucial theoretical alternative to the image of "nostalgia". The paper brings scholarship on social memory (Jeffrey Alexander, Maurice Halbwachs, Avishai Margalit) together with economic sociology (E.P. Thompson, Viviana Zelizer) and the sociology of valuation and cultural inequality (Michele Lamont). It engages the comparison of two groups with a different likelihood of social mobility after 1989 (engineers and care-workers), embedded in the analysis in the historical comparison of social mobility trajectories post-1989 as well as in the specific cultural and temporal-economic dimensions of East-Central European varieties of capitalism. It seeks to go beyond a mere structural comparison of economic processes, instead asking what we can learn from these rapid transformations about economic perceptions of inequality and notions of deservingness (McCall 2013). Such an approach conceptualizes the post-socialist space as a site to think about temporalities of the economic and to engage in cultural sociological theory-building.