This is an ethnographic investigation into the meaning of German selfhood during the Cold War. Borneman shows how ideas of kin, state, and nation were constructed through processes of mirror imaging and misrecognition. Using linguistics and narrative analysis he compares the autobiographies of two generations of Berlin's residents with the official versions prescribed by the two German states.

Belonging in the two Berlins is an ethnographic investigation into the meaning of German selfhood during the Cold War. Taking the practices of everyday life in the divided Berlin as his point of departure, Borneman shows how ideas of kin, state, and nation were constructed through processes of mirror-imaging and misrecognition. Using linguistics and narrative analysis, he compares the autobiographies of two generations of Berlins residents with the official version of the lifecourse prescribed by the two German states. He examines the relation of the dual political structure to everyday life, the way in which the two states legally regulated the lifecourse in order to define the particular categories of self which signify Germanness, and how citizens experientially appropriated the frameworks provided by these states. Living in the two Berlins constantly compelled residents to define themselves in opposition to their other half. Borneman argues that this resulted in a de facto divided Germany with two distinct nations and peoples. The formation of German subjectivity since World War II is unique in that the distinctive features for belonging - for being at home - to one side exclude the other. Indeed, these divisions inscribed by the Cold War account for many of the problems in forging a new cultural unity.

* Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Silver Medal Society of Illustrators * * Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, NPR, Comics Beat, The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal This “ingenious reckoning with the past” (The New York Times), by award-winning artist Nora Krug investigates the hidden truths of her family’s wartime history in Nazi Germany. Nora Krug was born decades after the fall of the Nazi regime, but the Second World War cast a long shadow over her childhood and youth in the city of Karlsruhe, Germany. Yet she knew little about her own family’s involvement; though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it. After twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier. In this extraordinary quest, “Krug erases the boundaries between comics, scrapbooking, and collage as she endeavors to make sense of 20th-century history, the Holocaust, her German heritage, and her family's place in it all” (The Boston Globe). A highly inventive, “thoughtful, engrossing” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune) graphic memoir, Belonging “packs the power of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and David Small’s Stitches” (NPR.org).

In Cosmopolitan Anxieties, Ruth Mandel explores Germany’s relation to the more than two million Turkish immigrants and their descendants living within its borders. Based on her two decades of ethnographic research in Berlin, she argues that Germany’s reactions to the postwar Turkish diaspora have been charged, inconsistent, and resonant of past problematic encounters with a Jewish “other.” Mandel examines the tensions in Germany between race-based ideologies of blood and belonging on the one hand and ambitions of multicultural tolerance and cosmopolitanism on the other. She does so by juxtaposing the experiences of Turkish immigrants, Jews, and “ethnic Germans” in relation to issues including Islam, Germany’s Nazi past, and its radically altered position as a unified country in the post–Cold War era. Mandel explains that within Germany the popular understanding of what it means to be German is often conflated with citizenship, so that a German citizen of Turkish background can never be a “real German.” This conflation of blood and citizenship was dramatically illustrated when, during the 1990s, nearly two million “ethnic Germans” from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union arrived in Germany with a legal and social status far superior to that of “Turks” who had lived in the country for decades. Mandel analyzes how representations of Turkish difference are appropriated or rejected by Turks living in Germany; how subsequent generations of Turkish immigrants are exploring new configurations of identity and citizenship through literature, film, hip-hop, and fashion; and how migrants returning to Turkey find themselves fundamentally changed by their experiences in Germany. She maintains that until difference is accepted as unproblematic, there will continue to be serious tension regarding resident foreigners, despite recurrent attempts to realize a more inclusive and “demotic” cosmopolitan vision of Germany.

Until the end of the Cold War, the politics of national identity was confined to isolated incidents of ethnics strife and civil war in distant countries. Now, with the collapse of Communist regimes across Europe and the loosening of the Cold War's clamp on East-West relations, a surge of nationalism has swept the world stage. In Blood and Belonging, Ignatieff makes a thorough examination of why blood ties--in places as diverse as Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Germany, and the former Soviet republics--may be the definitive factor in international relation today. He asks how ethnic pride turned into ethnic cleansing, whether modern citizens can lay the ghosts of a warring past, why--and whether--a people need a state of their own, and why armed struggle might be justified. Blood and Belonging is a profound and searching look at one of the most complex issues of our time.

When the Berlin Wall fell, Germany united in a wave of euphoria and solidarity. Also caught in the current were Vietnamese border crossers who had left their homeland after its reunification in 1975. Unwilling to live under socialism, one group resettled in West Berlin as refugees. In the name of socialist solidarity, a second group arrived in East Berlin as contract workers. The Border Within paints a vivid portrait of these disparate Vietnamese migrants' encounters with each other in the post-socialist city of Berlin. Journalists, scholars, and Vietnamese border crossers themselves consider these groups that left their homes under vastly different conditions to be one people, linked by an unquestionable ethnic nationhood. Phi Hong Su's rigorous ethnography unpacks this intuition. In absorbing prose, Su reveals how these Cold War compatriots enact palpable social boundaries in everyday life. This book uncovers how 20th-century state formation and international migration--together, border crossings--generate enduring migrant classifications. In doing so, border crossings fracture shared ethnic, national, and religious identities in enduring ways.

A Companion to Border Studies “Taking into consideration all aspects this book has a very important role in the professional literature of border studies.” Cross-Border Review Yearbook of the European Institute “Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” Choice “This book, with its interdisciplinary team of authors from many world regions, shows the state of the art in this research field admirably.” Ulf Hannerz, Stockholm University “This volume will be the definitive work on borders and border-related processes for years into the future. The editors have done an outstanding job of identifying key themes, and of assembling influential scholars to address these themes. David Nugent, Emory University “This urgently needed Companion, edited by two leading figures of border studies, reflects past insights and showcases new directions: a must read for understanding territory, power and the state.” Dr. Nick Vaughan-Williams, University of Warwick “This impressive collection will have a broad appeal beyond specialist border studies. Anyone with an interest in the nation-state, nationalism, ethnicity, political geography or, indeed, the whole historical project of the modern world system will want to have access to a copy. The substantive scope is global and the intellectual reach deep and wide. Simply indispensable. ” Richard Jenkins, University of Sheffield Dramatic growth in the number of international borders has coincided in recent years with greater mobility than ever before – of goods, people and ideas. As a result, interest in borders as a focus of academic study has developed into a dynamic, multi-disciplinary field, embracing perspectives from anthropology, development studies, geography, history, political science and sociology. Authors provide a comprehensive examination of key characteristics of borders and frontiers, including cross-border cooperation, security and controls, migration and population displacements, hybridity, and transnationalism. A Companion to Border Studies brings together these disciplines and viewpoints, through the writing of an international collection of preeminent border scholars. Drawing on research from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the Americas, the contributors argue that the future of Border Studies lies within such diverse collaborations, which approach comparatively the features of borders worldwide.

Uses ethnographic tools to analyze political disorder and its representation at the end of the Cold War.

Over the course of the 20th century, Germans from virtually all walks of life were touched by two problems: forging a sense of national community and coming to terms with widespread suffering. Arguably, no country in the modern Western world has been so closely associated with both inflicting and overcoming catastrophic misery in the name of national belonging. Within this context, the concept and ideal of "sacrifice" have played a pivotal role in recent German political culture. As the seven studies in this volume show, once the value of heroic national sacrifice was invoked during World War I to mobilize German soldiers and civilians, it proved to be a remarkably effective way to respond to a wide variety of social dislocations. How did the ideals of sacrifice play a role in constructing German nationalism? How did the Nazis use this idea to justify mass killing? What consequences did this have for postwar Germany? This volume opens up discussions about the history of 20th-century German political life.

Intelligentsia assumes the right to speak in the name of the entire nation and to extrapolate its own tastes, values and choices to it. Therefore, intelligentsia's voices have been in many ways decisive in the discussions about Ukrainian national identity, which gained momentum in the post-Soviet Ukrainian society. The historical and cultural cityscape of L'viv is an especially apt site for investigation of the nexus intelligentsia-nation not only in the Ukrainian, but in the East-Central European context. This borderline city, while not being a remarkable industrial, administrative or political centre, has acquired the reputation of a site of unique cultural production and a principal center of the Ukrainian nationalist movement throughout the twentieth century. Here the popular conceptions of intelligentsia have been elaborated at the intersection of various cultural, historical and political traditions. This study addresses Ukrainian-speaking intelligentsia and intellectuals in L'viv both as a discursive phenomenon and as the social category of cultural producers who in the new circumstances both articulate the nation and are articulated by it.