Where the world ended : re-unification and identity in the German borderland /
Focusing on the re-unification of Germany, this text asks what happens when a political and economic system collapses overnight. It concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life - including social organization, gender and religion.
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| Author / Creator: | |
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| Format: | eBook Electronic |
| Language: | English |
| Imprint: | Berkeley, Calif. : University of California Press, ©1999. |
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| Online Access: | Click here for full text at JSTOR |
| Summary: | Focusing on the re-unification of Germany, this text asks what happens when a political and economic system collapses overnight. It concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life - including social organization, gender and religion. When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and personhood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference?<br> <br> Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life--including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality--in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. Where the World Ended combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland. |
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| Item Description: | "An earlier version of chapter 7 appeared in A user's guide to German cultural studies ... Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997"--Title page verso. Print version record. |
| Physical Description: | 1 online resource (xiii, 294 pages) : illustrations, 2 maps |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-283) and index. |
| ISBN: | 0520214765 0520214773 0520921321 0585129576 9780520214767 9780520214774 9780520921320 9780585129570 |
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