German Division as Shared Experience : Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postwar Everyday
- Submitting institution
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King's College London
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics
- Output identifier
- 112297143
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Berghahn
- ISBN
- 9781789202427
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- July
- Year of publication
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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2
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- Yes
- Additional information
- My contribution includes co-editorship of the entire manuscript, contribution to the conceptualization and writing of the introduction and conclusion, and a single-author chapter. The introduction outlines the programmatic focus on 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. It uses critical social theory to cut across disciplinary lines to examine how individuals and communities are actively involved through modes of linguistic, narrative, poetic or performative cultural production which shape their relation to larger political and social processes in the two postwar Germanies.
My chapter applies the methodology by using Lefebvre’s concept of space as politically inscribed through practice or representation to the German lieu de mémoire of the allotment garden. Using four novels as its example, this chapter explores the garden as a repository of a collective destructive past in modern German literature, innovatively crossing the disciplinary boundaries of history and literary studies and offering a surprising perspective on an everyday space that has traditionally been seen as apolitical and an individual place of refuge.
The conclusion summarises the epistemological contribution to interdisciplinary research: Historicizing cultural production not solely through contextualization that embeds aesthetic forms and cultural practices, but also through attention to the historicity of aesthetic form and practice itself. Through the critical lenses of Williams, Rancière, Lefebvre and others it emerges that image, text, sound, taste and touch act in the world to shape perception, meaning, and sense. With 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-five years of division, 1945 to 1990.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
