Dr. Rubin Publishes Amnesiopolis

Dr. Eli Rubin, associate professor in the Department of History, has published a book titled Amnesiopolis:  Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany with Oxford University

Press. Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism.

The book focuses particularly on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place—one defined by pure functionality and rationality—a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism.

Rubin received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and in 2005 his dissertation was awarded the Fritz Stern Prize for the Best Dissertation by the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. His first book, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic, was published in 2008. From 2007-09 he held an Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung Postdoctoral Fellowship in Germany as a fellow of the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung in Postdam.