• Book on “Working-Class Culture in East and West Germany.” The third volume in a three-volume project that reconstructs the proletariat as an imaginary subject in literature, theater, art, photography, film, criticism, and political theory. The larger project covers one hundred years of cultural texts and practices conceived in the name of the proletariat and identified with the figure of the worker as the embodiment of modern class society and the myth of the people or folk. Neither a history of the German working class nor of socialism in its nineteenth and twentieth century manifestations, the individual case studies are concerned with the overdetermined (i.e., utopian, anticipatory, and compensatory) function of culture in forging class identifications and providing visions of community, nation, folk, and the people. The volume on the postwar years (1945-1962) traces the Nazi culture of work and its forgotten legacies in the very different approaches to labor and industry in East and West Germany. Topics to be addressed: the changing face of class and work in the “postclass” societies of the Economic Miracle and of “real existing socialism,” the worker as a figure of leftist nostalgia and orthodoxy, and the function of labor migration in the shift from proletariat to precariat. In the research phase.

• “German Cinema in the Age of Media Convergence.” A rewriting of German film history from the perspective of media convergence, with case studies on the aesthetic, cultural, economic, and institutional implications of film’s relationship to literature, theater, music, dance, and television. The theoretical implications for film historiography and media archeology are an integral part of the analysis; 50 % completed.