After the Berlin Wall Germany and Beyond

by Gerstenberger, Katharina; Braziel, Jana Evans Evans

• ISBN13: 9780230111929
• ISBN10: 0230111920
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-10-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Twenty years after its fall, the wall that divided Berlin and Germany presents a conceptual paradox: on one hand, Germans have sought to erase it completely; on the other, it haunts the imagination in complex and often surprising ways. Similarly, Cold War divisions resonate in the global image of the "new Germany." Several overlapping themes run through the essays: the exportation of German post-wall debates into other cultural contexts and representations of the Wall within non-German settings; the emergence of visual, literary, and psychological imagery derived from the Berlin Wall well beyond its existence; the importance of space, geographical, political, as well as imagined, in the aftermath of the Wall; and the continued artistic as well as socio-historical engagement with East Germany as a state that no longer exists but whose memory reverberates in sometimes unexpected ways not only today but as a projection into the future.

Author Biography

Katharina Gerstenberger is a professor of German and head of the Department of German Studies at the University of Cincinnati She is the author of Truth to Tell German Women's Autobiographies and Turn-of-the-Century Culture [2OOO) and Writing the New Berlin The German Capital in Post-Wall literature (2008) She has published widely on post-war and contemporary German-language authors Her work has appeared in Monatshefte, Women in German Yearbook, German Quarterly, Gegenwartsliteratur and several anthologies, including German Literature in the Age of Globalization (2004), Spatial turns Space, "place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture (2010),and Generational shifts in Contemporary German Culture (2010) Together with Patricia Herminghouse she credited German Literature in a New Century Trends, Traditions, Transformations, Transitions (2008)"'she also, served as coeditor of the Women in German Year book Jana Evans Braziel is a professor of English and Comparative Literature and an affiliate faculty member in Africana Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Cincinnati Braziel's Schoarly and pedagogical interests are in American hemispheric literatures and cultures, Caribbean studies, Haitian studies and the intersections of diaspora, transnational activism,.and globalization Braziel is the author monographs Duvalier's Ghosts Race, Diaspora, and U.S Imperialism in Haitian literatures (2010), Caribbean Genesis Jamaica Kincaid and he Writing of New Words (2009), Artfsts, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora {2008) and Diaspora An Introduction (2008) Braziel's works in progress include the books Entangled Gardens Genesis, Environmentalism, and Political Economy in Caribbean

Table of Contents

Sex and the City: German Culture in World Culture Twenty Years After--Sander L. Gilman * From the Berlin Wall to the West Bank Barrier: How Material Culture is Used in Psychological Theory--Christine Leuenberger * Exploring Master Keaton’s Germany: A Japanese Perspective on the End of the Cold War--Shannon Granville * Ending Cold War Divisions and Establishing New Partnerships: German Unification and the Transformation of German-Polish Relations--Jonathan Murphy * The Counterrevolution in Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War--Robert Snyder and Tim White * ‘Seventh of November' from Berliner Ensemble--Douglas Cowie * “There was no time for shame”: The Politics of Shame and the State--Daniel Elam * The "Wall in the Mind" and Nostalgia for Separation in Reunified Germany--Paul Kubicek * Specters of Work: Literature and Labor in Post-Socialist Germany--Hunter Bivens * A New Era, or a Lost Wager?--Benjamin Robinson * After the Fall of the Wall: German Visual Culture in the New Europe--Anna Dempsey * History in Context: The Spreebogen and Das Haus am Werderschen Markt in the Context of the Architectural Debates”--Carol Anne Costabile Heming * Architectural Polemics from Berlin to Beijing--Daniel Purdy * Berlin Wall Installations in the United States--Richard Schade