Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland - Hardcover

Berdahl, Daphne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520214765 ISBN 13: 9780520214767

Verlag: University of California Press, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

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?

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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daphne Berdahl is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota.

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"Berdahl's vibrant book tackles core themes and weaves together pressing issues in dynamic ways. . . . It is theoretically sophisticated and well-written, [and] there are, to my knowledge, no books quite like this in the field at present. Its contribution will be original, its scholarship unquestioned."—Uli Linke, author of Blood and Nation

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"Berdahl's vibrant book tackles core themes and weaves together pressing issues in dynamic ways. . . . It is theoretically sophisticated and well-written, [and] there are, to my knowledge, no books quite like this in the field at present. Its contribution will be original, its scholarship unquestioned."—Uli Linke, author of Blood and Nation

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Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland

By Daphne Berdahl

University of California Press

Copyright © 1999 Daphne Berdahl
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520214765
Introduction

This is a book about borders, boundaries, and the spaces between them. It is about how geographical borders may be invested with cultural meanings far beyond their political intentions and how their dismantling may be so destabilizing as to generate new cultural practices and identities. Arguing that articulations, ambiguities, and contradictions of identity are especially visible in moments of social upheaval, I portray the rapid transformations in everyday life of an East German border village, Kella, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I ask what happens to people's sense of identity and personhood when a political and economic system collapses overnight, and I explore how people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference.

My study derives from a borderland situation, where this state of transition can be observed in particularly bold relief. Kella, the village in

which I lived and conducted fieldwork between December 1990 and August 1992, is directly on, and is partially encircled by, the former border between East and West Germany. Under the socialist regime it was situated not only within the Sperrgebiet , a restricted zone extending a width of 5 kilometers along the boundary, but also within the more restricted Schutzstreifen , or high-security zone, a 500-meter strip edging the border. A single road was the village's lifeline to the rest of East Germany. Its 600 residents needed special passes to reenter Kella, and only close relatives with police clearance were permitted to visit. To deter potential "escapes," all road signs pointing to Kella were removed and, like other Schutzstreifen communities, the village was discreetly omitted from nearly every map produced in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The crest of the wooded hills surrounding the isolated village lay in the West, where a lookout point ("the window to Kella") with a parking lot large enough to accommodate several tour buses provided a site from which westerners could gaze down on and ponder the Otherness of the East.

Almost overnight, the village was thrust from this extreme margin of the GDR to the geographical center of re-unified Germany.1 As a participant in and observer of most aspects of daily life—including parties, family gatherings, village festivals, church activities, village council meetings, weddings, funerals, shopping, cleaning, gardening, cooking, even pig slaughtering—I was able to witness and, to a large extent, experience a multitude of changes in Kella during my two-year stay. I observed, for example, the border fence being slowly dismantled, noting that as the political border disappeared, a cultural boundary between East and West was being maintained, indeed invented. I listened to the stories of many people, including former Communist Party (Sozialistsche Einheitspartei Deutschlands [SED], or Socialist Unity Party) members, struggling to come to terms with a devalued past. I witnessed the church, once an alternative institution preaching against the official values of the socialist regime, react to its diminished political function. I talked with women, those most affected by unemployment, about their feelings of superfluousness and isolation, and I watched as many villagers who were fortunate to have found work in the West struggled with feelings of humiliation and anger arising out of encounters with West

German coworkers. As face-to-face interaction in the village drastically declined through the closings of local factories and state-owned facilities, the disappearance of a barter economy, the dissolution of most village clubs and social organizations, the discontinuation of the village public-address system, and the installation in 1992 of telephones in every home, I heard people lament the loss of community—as well as occasionally applaud the loss of social control such interactions had entailed. I witnessed people negotiate their way through an influx of consumer goods as they discovered new ways of using consumption in the construction and expression of identity and difference. I observed how people responded to—and resisted—the opportunity, pressure, and desire to look and function like the West.

One of my principal aims in this project is to explore the way in which extralocal economic, political, and social processes intersect with the individual lives of people in a community, for it is "in the actions of individuals living in time and place" that these forces are embodied, interpreted, contested, and negotiated (Abu-Lughod 1991: 156). In doing so, I consider Kella as a borderland, both literally and metaphorically, a site for the construction and articulation of identities and distinctions through boundary-maintaining practices, as well as an interstitial zone, a place betwixt and between cultures. Kella is, as Gloria Anzaldúa writes of her borderland: "a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition" (1987: 3).

This study, then, is both an ethnographic account of German reunification and an attempt to understand the paradoxical human condition of a borderland.

Boundaries, Borderlands, and Border Zones

Boundaries are symbols through which states, nations, and localities define themselves. They define at once territorial limits and sociocultural space. A boundary is, as Georg Simmel has noted, "not a spatial fact with sociological effects, but a sociological fact which forms

space" (1908: 623). Boundaries—cultural, geographical, and territorial—identify people; they define who is inside and who is outside. The simple crossing of a border is a "territorial passage" that may alter spatiotemporal experience (Kelleher n.d.; Van Gennep 1960). Indeed, it is an act of definition and a declaration of identity, transforming one, in an instant, from a citizen into a foreigner.

Anthropologists have long emphasized the importance of studying cultural boundaries and processes of boundary maintenance as a means of understanding the dynamics of identity formation and expression. E. E. Evans-Pritchard's classic study of the Nuer (1940) implicitly examined how group identity and boundaries are relational concepts: community, ethnic or social identities, loyalties, and allegiances are constructed largely in relation if not in opposition to other social groups. Acculturation studies of the 1950s introduced the concept of "boundary-maintaining mechanisms" to explain how "closure" was achieved in cultural systems (SSRC 1953: 975). According to this view, cultural boundaries are maintained through "devices" like ritual initiations, secret activities, or legal barriers that function to restrict knowledge to group members and to shield a culture from external influences. In an important and influential argument, Fredrik Barth challenged certain assumptions of earlier acculturation theories and pointed out that "boundaries persist despite a flow of personnel across them" (1969: 9). Arguing that ethnic identity becomes meaningful only at the boundaries of ethnicity, Barth insisted on shifting the focus of investigation to "the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses" (p. 15).

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of California Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1999
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520214765
• ISBN 13: 9780520214767
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 294
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar