Description
Book Synopsis Despite the nearly three decades since German reunification, there remains little understanding of the ways in which experiences overlapped across East-West divides. German Division as Shared Experience considers everyday life across the two Germanies, using perspectives from history, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and art history to explore how interconnections as well as fractures between East and West Germany after 1945 were experienced, lived and felt. Through its novel approach to historical method, the volume points to new understandings of the place of narrative, form and lived sensibility in shaping Germans’ simultaneously shared and separate experiences of belonging during forty years of division from 1945 to 1990.
Trade Review “All told, this volume successfully brings together its fascinating chapters into a powerful interdisciplinary analysis. German Division as Shared Experience is a significant achievement that will serve as a bedrock for future research on the ‘entanglement’ of the Cold War Germanies. The editors and contributors have produced a genuinely pathbreaking book.” • The Journal of Modern History
“Thanks to an innovative approach to history that draws on material as heterogeneous as it is sensitive to cultural experiences of daily life, following Bourdieu and Foucault, this helps to bring out and question the experiences of Germans for more than forty years of division from 1945 to 1990. It offers a stimulating and unprecedented insight into a past that is (re)discovered on both sides of the Wall, strangely close and dissimilar at the same time.” • Francia
“A refreshing, enlightening read across a good range of topics. This collection shows itself to be as integrated across disciplinary approaches as it shows the German experience to have been during and after the period of division.” • Mark Allinson, University of Bristol
“This genuinely engaging book offers an intriguing exploration of the diverse cultural practices that shaped experiences of postwar Germany.” • Paul Steege, Villanova University
Table of Contents List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: German Division as Shared Experience
Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski and Katrin Schreiter
Chapter 1. Narrating the Everyday: Television, Memory and the Subjunctive in the GDR, 1969–89
Jan Palmowski
Chapter 2. Tension of Germanness in the Global South: German Immigrants in Namibia
Heidi Armbruster
Chapter 3. ‘Ich bin parteilich, subjektiv und emotional’: Eigensinn and the Narrative (Re)construction of Political Agency in Inge Viett’s Nie war ich furchtloser
Katharina Karcher
Chapter 4. Asymmetrical (Be)longing: Villagers, Spatial Practices and the German ‘Other’
Marcel Thomas
Chapter 5. Everyday Displacements in Cold War Berlin: Short Prose from East and West
Áine McMurtry
Chapter 6. DEFA’s ‘Home-made’ Experiment: Traces of GDR Reality and International Avant-garde Film in Jürgen Böttcher’s Transformations (1981)
Franziska Nössig
Chapter 7. Style Identities and Individualization in 1980s East and West Germany
Alissa Bellotti
Chapter 8. Cultivating the Past: The Schrebergarten as a Political Space in Postwar German Literature
Katrin Schreiter
Chapter 9. Painting in East Germany: An Elite Art for the Everyday (and Everyone)
April Eisman
Chapter 10. The Perceptual Fabric and Everyday Practices of Jazz and Pop in East and West Germany
Michael J. Schmidt
Chapter 11. Alles Geschmackssache? Shaping (Gustatory) Tastes in East and West Germany
Alice Weinreb
Conclusion
Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski, and Katrin Schreiter
