At a moment in which the outlook for the European project seems bleak and representative democracy is in crisis, [...] Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders has much to offer specialists interested in how dissatisfied and disaggregated citizens negotiate the identities they are forced to share, at least superficially, with one another.

German History

The book maps theories of fantasy and collective identity onto the post-transition period and the experience of eastern Germans, adding new dimensions to a burgeoning literature on post-unification identity in Germany. To this end, Gook disentangles complicated theoretical scholarship – from Freud to Zizek – in order to show how the imaginary and the symbolic help to anchor both collective (national) identities and a sense of (the individual) self.

Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe

Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders provides a detailed introduction to the complexity of memory and space in Germany (and particularly Berlin) following re-unification, and substantially expands on a number of key and emerging considerations relevant to scholars interested in recent German history. In particular, the combination of media, landscape, history, and politics brings new insight to a field that frequently addresses the problems of re-unified Germany from a limited disciplinary perspective

Society & Space

Gook, an investigator at the ARC Center of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, takes a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, examining East German culture via politics, popular culture, film, and ethnography. . . .Overall, this book provides a fresh analytical approach to the persistent puzzle of divided identities.

Europe Now

This book, situated at the intersections of psychosocial and cultural studies, political science and anthropology, contributes original and important ideas to the discussion of how psychoanalytic theories might be applied to questions of remembrance, commemoration and nostalgia and helps to elucidate how a liberal capitalist nation-state manages crises and disruptions.

Silke Arnold-de Simine, Senior Lecturer in Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London

Ben Gook shows in his theoretically sophisticated and quietly passionate study that the complacent tale of successful German unification not only forgets the erasure of eastern Germans' experiences and expectations when the wall came down and the future seemed open but also reproduces the inner-German division it sought to heal. Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders is an auspicious debut.

A. Dirk Moses, Professor of Global and Colonial History, European University Institute, Florence