Where the world ended berdahl pdf

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 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. With our online resources, you can find Where the World Ended or any type of ebook, for any type of product. To start downloading, you must first log in you already have an account , if you dont have an account then you must first register. For you who dont have an account, please register for FREE.

Get BOOK. Where the World Ended. 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.

By Daphne Berdahl. Where the World Ended is an ethnographic study of Kella, a small village directly on the former border between East and West Germany. Like many other Schutzstreifen societies communities located in high-security exclusion zones , not only were any signs pointing to Kella removed in order to hinder fugitives from reaching the border, the village was also removed from most maps produced in the GDR, or purposely hidden behind a geographical symbol, for the same reason, This was not the first time Kella had been a borderland village of conflicting identities, for over the past two hundred years it defined the border between the Catholics and the Protestants, and the states of Prussia and Hesse.

It is interesting to note why Berdahl chose Kella for her study- she states how she wanted a village located in the border zone, however, since all villages in this zone had been inaccessible under socialism and the construction of new homes restricted, it was difficult to locate housing, and it turns out Kella was the only area equipped to accommodate her research. Despite making this study largely anthropology rather than history, we gain a real understanding of life in a secluded, socialist community.

We respond emotionally and subjectively to people and their experiences as we, too, have our own stories and memories to share. Our connections to people and their lives are instinctive, whereas we learn facts in a more objective manner. Villagers responses gives us a greater understanding of why so many East Germans rushed to the West after the fall of the Wall in , stating how the state had taken away their freedom for forty years, but soon voiced their disappointment at the lack of community feel, and perhaps now, even lesser freedoms.

This is even more evident when looking at the lives of former East German women, since a vast majority of Kellan women lost their jobs at the Clip Factory and had to return to the domestic sphere, along with losing any political power Ursula Meyer was voted mayor when the wall fell down, however was ousted at the first meeting of the new, Christian Democratic Union dominated village.

Nevertheless, due to their proximity to the border, villages such as Kella and other Schutztreifen were forced to deal with issues on a more concentrated scale, and this leads me to believe studies on these whereabouts should be more prominent in East German history. The sealing of the border in perched such border villages "at the end of the world" until reunification finally thrust them into the geographic center of the new Germany.

Having begun her research in , Berdahl uses oral and archival sources to reconstruct everyday life in a village lodged in the GDR's SchUtzstreifen defense strip for almost four decades. Her focus is on how cultural practices helped negotiate and define different sorts of boundaries, such as between people and state, orthodox and popular religion, Party and Church.

The border itself became the object of legends, imaginings, and cautiously resistive practices that transcended, but sometimes reinforced, its intended political function. Thus, tales of failed escape attempts helped set the "limits of the possible," adding to the border's appearance of impenetrability, while personal encounters with bureaucracy left villagers searching for the raison d'etat behind inexplicable decisions.

Berdahl wishes to demonstrate that the villagers were not entirely powerless, in spite of daunting odds. Some secretly resisted state legitimation strategies, she shows, by hanging mandatory national flags where they could not be seen by Westerners peering through the "window to Kella" the book's cover affords us this hilltop view as it later looked. Others found their niche by agreeing to monitor their neighbors as Grenzhelfer border helpers or as anonymous lay informants for the secret police.

In interpreting such activities, Berdahl carefully avoids tendentious pigeonholes that see only 'victims' and 'perpetrators' under the old regime. Following the lead of Alltagsgeschichte the history of everyday life , she insists that quotidian practices mounted "a simultaneous contestation and affirmation of the regime'' p.

Her approach is partly persuasive, though one has the sense that most of the time these practices did neither. Moreover, opportunities for dissent are often coopted beforehand, as when criticism is channeled through sanctioned outlets like Eingaben grievance petitions , town meetings, and seasonal cabarets. Her assertion at the end of Chapter 2 that everyday life "both helped constitute state power and contributed to its collapse" ibid is somewhat surprising, as we have seen little that might have destabilized the political order.

On balance, however, she seems to find that most villagers were neither activists nor ideologues; instead, their main concern was to establish a sanctuary where they could manage daily life with a modicum of autonomy and occasionally win symbolic concessions. Convincingly, she shows that the well-fortified and mysterious border was more porous than some Westerner's used to think. Ties to the West could be sustained through correspondence and care packages, and television images became legally viewable, though officially discouraged, after Access to Western goods, as well as "connections," Church offices, and cash reserves, undermined socialist collectivism to some extent, distinguishing local notables with nicknames like "J.

The crux of her story arrives with the fall of the Wall in Berlin in November Though witnessed from afar, the event instantly transformed Kella, eliminating travel restrictions and ending decades of isolation from both West and East It also inaugurated a transition between political states, which Berdahl likens to "liminality.

Upon her arrival, the author finds a number of projects underway that remold the personal and collective past for new times. The village Heimatverein heritage association , which long promoted regional and confessional identity around the Eichsfeld, stages a commemorative unity parade featuring familiar stereotypes: officious border guards, plaintive would-be escapees, and intransigent heads of state. Other parishioners are seeking to memorialize Kella's "faith and suffering" under socialism by restoring religious markers like seventh Station of the Cross and a cordoned-off chapel.

Such representations, she insists, are not simply obsessions with a bygone era, as some have argued; like the everyday practices of the past they both contest and affirm present-day realities. This celebratory mood changes in the midst of her two-year stint in Kella, due in part of economic disaster. In , a toy factory and a suspender-clip factory, which had employed two-thirds of the town's working adults, shuts down for good. Some workers are urged into early retirement or secure new jobs in the West, but with the closing of nurseries, day-care centers, and after-school programs, women in particular are often excluded from full-time employment In the aftermath, multiple gender ideologies compete for the hearts and minds of female residents, but also interact with the East-West cleavage.

Thus, West German and Catholic images of motherhood make a virtue of separate spheres, while socialist and Western feminist egalitarianism claim vindication in defeat For some informants, Western-style recreational shopping offers a welcome alternative to their former "worker-mother" role, while others choose to don their distinctive Kittel smocks again, the old symbol of the woman worker and now an expression of Ossi Eastern pride.

This new East German particularism is one of the more puzzling consequences of reunification. Though the reasons are still hotly debated, fresh perspectives are in short supply. Berdahl's own take is not entirely unique, but it is plausible in many ways.

In her view, Ossi identity is provoked by the hegemony of Western culture and norms pp. As a result familiar practices and products are defended under the motto "not everything was bad about the GDR.

Interestingly, Berdahl finds much continuity with the past here. As before, taste and conspicuous consumption drive social distinctions, even if cash is usurping connections in importance. These forms of "Ostidgie" nostalgia for the East are not unique to Kella, as Berdahl points out; however, what role the borderland plays is not always clear.

Westerners' well-meaning efforts at reconciliation often betray paternalism or worse, as when the mayor of neighboring Meinhard presents Kella with a street sign that reads "Meinhard: Subdistrict Kella" p.

Although Kella seems to stand in for all of eastern Germany at times, one clear difference is the deep symbolism of crossing the ok border. Thus, in , the first encounter Western houses, roads, and store windows is "like going back to the future" for the villagers, a reminder of what might have been, as well as what the future might bring. Among their first stops is the "window to Kella," that privileged vantage point from which Westerners had looked down on their Eastern kinfolk.

For years thereafter, this spot becomes a kind of pilgrimage destination for Easterners. This provocative point is illustrated during an evening stroll to the look-out, when two women remark that Kella will soon be "as good as any village in the West," whereas "the inland area [of eastern Germany] is supposed to be much worse" p.

In Berdahl's interpretation, the women have embraced an identity of "in-betweenness" which accepts Western norms about the direction of change, but still sees them as Other.

This vignette may explain why Berdahl does not believe border-crossing prevents the hardening of identities, as others have argued Instead, the border-crossing routinizes transition as part of everyday life, inscribing interstitiality onto both the landscape and the villagers themselves p. Perhaps this is why the borderland creates "lucidity" and "clarity": it offers a sense of identity and place that reunification has been unable to provide. By the end of the book, Berdahl has contributed a rich, engrossing portrayal of everyday life in the East German borderland and shown how boundaries and identities were reconfigured after reunification.

One weakness, perhaps, is the uncertain concreteness of "Zwischenraum" itself. Initially, Berdahl distances her concept from the "exclusively metaphorical Along the way, however, Zwischenraum is sometimes detached from the "contextual specificity" and "dense materiality" that makes it distinctive. Thus, during the socialist period, it turns out that the central dynamic of Zwischenraum—negotiating limits to state power— only "functioned more completely" in the borderland, while operating "in some form throughout the GDR" p.

After reunification, the "literal borderland" the Window to Kella is similarly revealed to be a place where Kella's "in-betweenness" is merely "most visible," whereas it may also symbolize "'the transition' itself" p. While understandable, such departures leave one wondering whether we actually need a new concept here.