History after the end: post‐socialist difference in a (post)modern world

This paper makes an intervention in the debates on postmodernism as dominant social and cultural order of the present from the perspective of post‐socialist transformation. Grounded in an analysis of theoretical discourses and of qualitative interviews, it highlights the hierarchical time/space constructions and universalizing tendencies inherent in many proclamations of the postmodern epoch and contests the uncritical acceptance of the ‘end of history’ metanarrative. Post‐socialist transformation is shown to be a complex process that fits uneasily into pre‐given categories and disrupts an ordering logic that divides between a western, postmodern ‘us’ and ‘the rest’ of the world. My argument is formulated on the basis of research on the transformative processes in former east Germany.