That Was the Wild East presents critical insight into popular film culture and art house cinema in Germany from 1990-1999. It examines box-office hits and cult films, such as the "Trabi comedies" and unification farces, which delighted local and international audiences, but which have been granted scarce critical attention up to this point. The first detailed account of the representation of German unification on film to appear, either in English or German, this work provides valuable and engaging source material otherwise inaccessible to non-German readers. In her focus on a range of "unification films," Leonie Naughton analyzes impressions of unification fostered in films from the East and West, along with the comic and tragic anxieties these films attribute to life in the "new" Germany. The ways in which German filmmakers represented unification throughout the 1990s are discussed with reference to a broad range of recent German films, and Naughton examines both divergent and convergent cinematic impressions of life in a recently unified Germany by 1990s filmmakers. Those interested in film studies and film history, German history and culture, as well as German unification and recent developments in German cinema, will find this book especially appealing.

Through eleven case studies conducted across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, The Wild East examines a variety of economic sectors and business enterprises that regularly flout the law, such as coal, oil, real estate, and industrial labor. Bridging anthropology and political economy, the case studies explore how state regulative law is ignored or selectively manipulated and reveal the workings of regulated criminal economic systems in which politicians, police, judges, and bureaucrats are closely intertwined. Disrupting the existing literature on South Asia’s informal economy, The Wild East also suggests avenues for future research that will be of critical value to students and scholars of economics, anthropology, sociology, criminology, comparative politics, political science, and international relations.