The economic and cultural function of money in the planned economy of the German Democratic Republic, 1980-1990, is the subject of Jonathan Zatlin’s dissertation in the Department of History. The Currency of Socialism: Money in the GDR and German Unification, examines how the split between the economic and cultural modes of exchange in the officially sanctioned, socialist “market” and those in the black markets, which functioned as sites of alternative value systems, caused the fragmentation of money as a medium of exchange and led ultimately to the collapse of the GDR.