Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German BorderlandWhen 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? 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. |
Contents
The Village on the Border | |
Old boundary stones of Prussia and the GDR near Kella | |
Publicity Secrecy and the Politics of Everyday Life | |
The Seventh Station | |
The Kella chapel 1992 | |
The Seventh Station | |
Consuming Differences | |
ABM Women doing landscape Work for the village 1992 | |
The Dismembered Border | |
Women in Kellas unity parade recall the old cigar factory 1990 | |
Unityparade portrayal of deportations from Kella 1990 | |
Lowering the GDR flag for the last time on October 3 1990 | |
Carrying the GDR to its grave 1990 | |
Removal of the border fence near Kella 1992 | |
The border museum near Bad SoodenAllendorf 28 The original Tree of Unity 1991 | |
Borderlands | |
Opening a border crossing in Kella 1990 | |
Mowing our side of the garden 1992 | |
Designing Women | |
Painting silk 1991 | |
Women Working in the Kella clips factory in the 1960s | |
The replacement Tree of Unity 1996 | |
Glossary | |
The village center 1991 | |
Works Cited | |
Index | |
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Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland Daphne Berdahl No preview available - 1999 |
Common terms and phrases
Anthropology became Berlin Berlin Wall border crossing border fence border guards borderland boundaries Bourdieu Catholic church chapel chapter construction consumer consumption context cultural defined definition deportation discourses distinctions dynamic East and West East-West Eastern Europe eastern Germans Eichsfeld Eingaben Emma Eschwege everyday example exchange factory field fieldwork figure files first five former border former GDR forms of capital gender Grenze Heiligenstadt Heimat Heimatverein identity ideologies influence Jugendweihe Kampfgruppe Kella Konrad Martin mayor means memory Nazi negotiated office official one’s organization Ossis participants party members past people’s Photograph pilgrimage political Post-Communism practices priest production Protestant re-unification reflected regime regional relations religion religious residents of Kella ritual Schutzstreifen second economy socialist socialist rule society space Sperrgebiet Stasi state’s stories symbolic capital television tensions told Trabi University Press Verdery village village council village’s Wall Wende Wessis West German western relatives woman explained women