Towards a Historical Materialist Approach to Racism in Post-'Unification' Germany
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper problematizes the subtext of ‘race’, which underpinned the contradictory process of German ‘unification’. The following question guides my inquiry: how and why have ‘white’ East German workers in post-‘unification’ Germany come to think of their ‘Germanness’/’whiteness’ as meaningful? Clearly drawing from the work of David R. Roediger, I argue that ‘white’ East German workers were paid the ‘wages of Germanness’. The concept is fleshed out as I interrogate three interrelated dimensions of changes pertaining to the lived experiences of (‘white’) East German workers: (1) German citizenship regulations with its lines of inclusion and exclusion; (2) the qualifier East denoting the existence of various degrees of Germanness; (3) individualized market dependence giving rise to conflicted emotions. Setting in motion a process of extensive and complex change, ‘unification’ had an impact on social relations of power, lived experiences and cultural means. The concept ‘wages of Germanness’ expresses the connections between political, ideological and economic aspects of ‘unification’, and further brings into focus the historical legacy of racialized notions of Germanness. Using the framework of historical materialism, this paper articulates a critique of hegemonic ideology, which suggests that racism in post-‘unification’ Germany was, by and large, spatially confined to <em>East </em>Germany.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".