No abstract

How do individuals make sense of events that are associated with major social-systemic changes? The paper explores the relationship between "German reunification" and processes of meaning making and identity formation by former citizens of the German Democratic Republic. Analyzing twenty-six in-depth, life-history interviews of East Germans born in two different generational cohorts, I examine the various narrative strategies employed that allow these East Germans to embed the experience of the German reunification through means of narrative emplotment. Diverting from a notion that it is historical events that shape our autobiographical memories, I argue that historical events are selected from a historical tool kit which provides individuals with narrative resources from which narrative identity can be formulated. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/d69JXE0Ryqw.

unashamedly echo the ethos of nineteenthcentury U.S. expansionism (Chapter 3). The concepts of social death and hauntings, therefore, provide compelling ways to center violence in the study of contemporary migration. That Patterson's and (to some extent) Gordon's theories were derived from the case study of Black enslavement in the United States is also noteworthy. In effect, Migration and Mortality offers readers different ways to reflect on the relationship between past and present forms of racial capitalism.Paradoxically, all this talk of death can actually be life-affirming. Deaths can ''light a spark'' (p. 284) and ''electrify the living'' (p. 11)-just as George Floyd's murder did. Grieving the deaths that society does not consider grievable can be a political act. Migration and Mortality insists that we grieve.

No abstract