German Studies Association

Carter, E. (Organiser)

Activity: Participating in or organising an event › Participation in conference

Description

Seminar: Experience and Cultural Practice: Rewriting the Everyday History of Post-war Germany

Period	1 Oct 2015 → 4 Oct 2015
Event type	Conference
Location	Washington DC, United KingdomShow on map

Documents & Links

During four decades of division, the German governments developed policy, customs, and cultural representations that worked towards the creation of two separate national identities in a divided country. These pursuits affected the two populations’ everyday life and shaped the way in which they experienced and navigated Cold War era challenges such as nuclear deterrence and détente or economic boom and crisis. They also shaped how Germans worked, what they ate, and what they saw. But separation was coupled with moments of shared experience. Television brought western mores into GDR living rooms; visits across the border by family members, party functionaries, cross-cultural traffic amongst artists, writers, and sub-cultural youth made life on both sides of the border an experience of simultaneous alienation and proximity. This seminar explores how German-German lives were lived in a double consciousness of division and mutual belonging. The focus is on everyday experience, and its shaping within the two Germanys across a range of sites and cultural forms, including print and literary culture, visual representations, monuments, film, television, and radio, as well as cultural practices and rites of passage that helped define individual and communal modes of belonging. Jacques Rancière’s concept of political aesthetics functions as one starting point for exploring culture’s part in shaping those ‘self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously disclose (...) the existence of something in common.’ Participants are invited to explore how political community across and within the German-German border was shaped by everyday cultural and aesthetic practice. The aesthetic will be understood not as a domain separate from daily life, but as those modes of sense perception and experience which create ‘forms of perceptible community (and) unite people within living ties.’ Discussion centres on three categories of experience - time, space and the body - and on the intersection between micro-histories of embodied experience, and macro-histories of political community within and across the Cold War divide. With its emphasis on interdisciplinarity, the seminar and the emerging essay anthology seek to make a novel methodological contribution to our understanding of everyday life in divided Germany. While previous studies of everyday life have often focused on the two separate German states, this volume will consider everyday experience as a site of socio-cultural negotiations that may have produced simultaneities as well as dissimultaneities, ambivalent processes of convergence alongside the deep rifts of ideological division and Cold War.

German Studies Association

Description

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Related content

Research output

German Division as Shared Experience: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Postwar Everyday