Word: borneman
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Most separation-inspired items--the Ex, ex-wife toilet paper, ex-boyfriend voodoo dolls--may be intentionally designed to evoke laughter from the otherwise painful situation of a breakup. "They're filling a need," says Princeton anthropologist John Borneman. But he and other experts worry that the surge of products is symptomatic of an increasingly fickle investment in marriage. "A classic case where market intervention is sapping the moral fiber of a society," Popenoe says...
Though some, like judge Erika Gruner, spring from proletariat homes, they have all in some way risen to the highest occupational or intellectual rungs of the country. The reader should therefore not be surprised that many of those Borneman interviewed mourn the foregone possibilities of socialism and the progress left behind. On the positive side, the lean toward intellectuals blesses this book with an overview of East German society to which the working class might not have had access...
...typical example of the East German intellegensia on which Borneman focuses is Regine, a film-maker from East Berlin. She dealt with the government-imposed isolation from the West by making the best of her situation. Regine worked for the state, producing documentary films about socialist life. This occupation allowed her to inform the masses. Such work, she concedes, gave her "a touch of the self-congratulatory condescension intellectuals feel in indulging the less gifted." Though such thinking seems arrogant, it represented the dedication of Bourneman's intellectuals to socialism, though not to the state itself...
Bourneman emphasizes that virtually all of his interviewees separated themselves from the bureaucratic evils of the state. He includes plenty of emotional and philosophical inferences to prove this point, and they strengthen this book by making these though processes accessible. "Frau Gruner's socialism always exhibited a critical distance," Borneman writes. "She learned to be skeptical of any form of established wisdom...
Well-written and thoughtful, this book will endear itself to casual readers who have an interest in human drama. Borneman provides us with two stories: one about a nation that is rapidly disappearing, another a tale of the willingness of this nation's citizens to sacrifice and work on a system in which they believe. In the end East Germans will not be forgotten--their stories are mirrored in the dedication of good people around the world...