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Cited by 358German History and SocietyMigration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical GeographyPost-Communist Economic and Political Transition

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

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

Berdahl, Daphne·1999·University of California Press eBooks
DOI 10.1525/9780520921320
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Abstract

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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Metadata

Authors
Berdahl, D.
Corresponding author
Berdahl, Daphne
Venue
University of California Press eBooks
Publisher
University of California Press
Published
1999-05-10
DOI
10.1525/9780520921320
OpenAlex
W4246822231
Cited by
358
References
0
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 15 · 2021: 6 · 2020: 47 · 2019: 25 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 9 · 2015: 8 · 2014: 18 · 2013: 23 · 2012: 15
FWCI
44.69
Type
book
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
University of California Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › German History and Society
  • Social Sciences › Demography › Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography
  • Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition
Keywords
Berlin Wall, German reunification, borderland identity, post-communist transition, liminality, personhood, social organization, gender, religion, nationality, everyday life under socialism, cultural practices, ritual

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