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.
Table of Content
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 Mc Murtry
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
About the author
Katrin Schreiter is Senior Lecturer in German and History at King’s College London. She is the author of Designing One Nation: The Politics of Economic Culture and Trade in Divided Germany, 1949-1990 (2020).
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