With the 1990 unification of East and West Germany, two different and opposing societies merged. One of the many significant differences was school structure. West Germany, unlike other industrial countries, retained a traditional, highly selective, and early selecting system—sorting pupils at age 10 into one of the hierarchical tiers: Hauptschule, Realschule, or Gymnasium. East Germany had a more unified and modern system with the POS (Polytechnische Oberschule ) where pupils learned together to age 16. Despite its ideological content the East German system was internationally recognized as academically exemplary and even served as a model for reform in some western countries.

The unification process, however, was dominated by the West and the five new eastern states came to adopt a modified (two-tiered) version of the western system (minus the lowest-tiered Hauptschule).

Based on a year and a half of ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, this dissertation looks at various post-unification "remainders" in terms of memories, educational ideas and practices, and remnants of socialization processes left-over from eastern Germany. The thesis also researches remainders in the broader sense of those who are excluded from educational chances (i.e. Hauptschule pupils and children with a migration background). Since 2000 a number of "shocks" (from comparative tests and media exposure of dysfunctional schools) have shown the educational system to produce poor academic performance which is economically detrimental and socially unjust. Resulting reforms addressed mainly the content, but not the structure, of the tiered-system. The dissertation discusses what might be learned from the more socially just system of the former GDR while showing how an approach couched in such terms has been resoundingly resisted in the West (where mainly economic arguments and demographic imperatives have led to mobilization for change).

The dissertation also looks at the German concept of education as central to the reproduction of the nation-state: a site at which inequality can be reproduced as well as undone, and moreover, examines the uniquely German concept of Bildung as a discourse of self-formation and academic development (characterized by an engagement with alterity) which has the potential to be universalized.