Description
Book Synopsis A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin’s cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin’s identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War.
Trade Review “Eschewing the primacy of political history, the authors provide a nuanced picture of a city that, in many respects, was less divided than the Cold War mindset would have us believe…This interesting volume demonstrates the many ways in which East and West Berlin were mutually influential, and how commonalities extended beyond the division.” · English Historical Review
“This volume taps into the on-going fascination with Berlin but, refreshingly, broadens the historical and conceptual scope, asking us to reconsider some of the assumptions we tend to make about the relationship between East and West Berlin during the time of the city’s division…The volume is so well conceived and simply so interesting that most readers will probably want to read it in its entirety…It demonstrates what an essay collection can accomplish when it grows out of a shared discussion. The broad range of topics and the interdisciplinary perspectives presented in this book could not have been achieved by an individual author. The editors deserve praise for the volume’s coherence and consistency.” · The German Quarterly
"Adopting an explicitly interdisciplinary approach, this volume ambitiously aims to offer more than just a cultural history of Cold War Berlin…[Its] mix of spatial and chronological demarcations proves insightful inasmuch as the best essays transgress and even undermine them, in effect articulating one of the editors’ stated emphases ‘on the continuities of urban culture beyond historical ruptures and spatial divides" · German History
"[An] important contribution to current scholarship on Berlin in the Cold War period. Although this is an anthology, it is well conceived to focus on various aspects of Berlin culture during the years of the Cold War." · Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon
Table of Contents List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake
PART I: COLD WAR BEGINNINGS
Chapter 1. Life Among the Ruins: Sex, Space, and Subculture in Zero Hour Berlin
Jennifer Evans
Chapter 2. The Propagandistic Role of Modern Art in Postwar Berlin
Maike Steinkamp
Chapter 3. Back to the Future: New Music’s Revival and Redefinition in Occupied Berlin
Elizabeth Janik
Chapter 4. The Nylon Curtain: Architectural Unification in Divided Berlin
Greg Castillo
Chapter 5. Mediascape and Soundscape: Two Landscapes of Modernity in Cold War Berlin
Heiner Stahl
PART II: EAST BERLIN, THE SOCIALIST CAPITAL
Chapter 6. Painting the Berlin Wall in Leipzig: The Politics of Art in 1960s East Germany
April Eisman
Chapter 7. “You Have to Draw a Line Somewhere”: Tropes of Division in DEFA Films from the early 1960s
Mariana Ivanova
Chapter 8. Building the East German Television Tower
Heather Gumbert
Chapter 9. Transparency in Divided Berlin: The Palace of the Republic
Deborah Ascher Barnstone
PART III: WEST BERLIN, SHOWCASE OF THE WEST
Chapter 10. “I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin”: Hildegard Knef’s Cold War Movies
Ulrich Bach
Chapter 11. Benno Ohnesorg, Rudi Dutschke, and the Student Movement in West Berlin: Critical Reflections after Forty Years
David Barclay
Chapter 12. Berlin and Post-Meinhof Feminism: Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971
Claudia Mesch
Chapter 13. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin as a Cold War Project
Paul Jaskot
Chapter 14. Beyond the Berlin Myth: the Local, the Global and IBA 87
Emily Pugh
PART IV: BERLIN AFTER UNIFICATION: LOOKING BACK AND BEYOND
Chapter 15. Stereographic City: Berlin Photography in the Wende Era
Miriam Paeslack
Chapter 16. Divided City, Divided Heaven? Berlin Border Crossings in Post-WendeFiction
Lyn Marven
Chapter 17. Interview with Barbara Hoidn
Notes on Contributors
Index
