In a recent university seminar, I wanted to give my students a sense of how capitalism is a way of being, rather than being the way of being. Hoping to paint an affective picture, I turned to personal anecdote.

Travelling in the mid-1990s, a handful of years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I met a young German duo who had grown up under communism in the German Democratic Republic. After traipsing through Prague’s underground and late nights swinging on statues, we concocted a follow-up visit to their northern town of Greifswald, where – along with walking on the frozen waves of the Ostsee, listening to the ice singing as it cracked, and not visiting the town’s famous nuclear reactor – I was exposed to something far more compelling.