Across half a century, from the division of Germany through the end of the Cold War, a cohort of thirty women from the small German town of Schönebeck in what used to be the GDR circulated among themselves a remarkable collective archive of their lives: a Rundbrief, or bulletin, containing hundreds of letters and photographs. This book draws on that unprecedented resource, complemented by a set of interviews, to paint a rich portrait of “ordinary” life in postwar Germany. It shows how these women—whether reflecting on their experiences as Nazi-era schoolchildren or witnessing reunification—were united by their complex interactions with official power and their commitment to sustaining a shared German identity as they made the most of their everyday lives in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.

Across half a century, from the division of Germany through the end of the Cold War, a cohort of thirty women from the small German town of Schönebeck in what used to be the GDR circulated among themselves a remarkable collective archive of their lives: a Rundbrief, or bulletin, containing hundreds of letters and photographs. This book draws on that unprecedented resource, complemented by a set of interviews, to paint a rich portrait of “ordinary” life in postwar Germany. It shows how these women—whether reflecting on their experiences as Nazi-era schoolchildren or witnessing reunification—were united by their complex interactions with official power and their commitment to sustaining a shared German identity as they made the most of their everyday lives in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.

What exactly does it mean to be a close friend? With smart phones, social media and the Internet, the technical barriers to making new friends and keeping up with old ones have all but disappeared. What remains are more subtle borders resulting from cultural diversity, and these can be much more perplexing to navigate. These cultural differences in close friendships are the primary focus of Friends Beyond Borders.It turns out that we in the U.S. think quite differently about our friendships compared to people in many other cultures around the globe. Cross-cultural research shows that people from various cultures can have very different, even conflicting, ideas about what it means to be a good friend. One's friendly intentions can be seen as patently unfriendly by someone from another culture—they simply wouldn't fit with how others think about, feel about, and behave toward their close friends. In Friends Beyond Borders, Roger Baumgarte demystifies these differing approaches to friendship. He describes six distinct cultural styles of close friendship, each comparing what might be typical in the U.S. with what would be found in contrasting cultures. Although each culture might have a dominant style of friendship, he makes it clear that all six of these styles can be found within any given culture, especially one as diverse as the U.S. You will come away from this book thinking about your own friendships, whether or not they cross cultural borders, in new and creative ways. You might very well gain a renewed enthusiasm for your closest friends. Beyond cultural issues, there's also a chapter devoted to Facebook, taking primarily a social research perspective, attempting to explain and defend clearly and empirically what social media have to do with close friendships. The results of these studies surprised even the author. There's a chapter entitled “Friends make good medicine” which reviews the empirical research demonstrating the numerous benefits, including health benefits, of cultivating close and satisfying friendships. People who regularly make time for their friends tend to live much longer, have lower levels of stress, and are even less likely to catch a cold. These are but a sampling of those benefits.Friends Beyond Borders will inspire you to invest more in your close friendships, and help you to appreciate more fully these important people in your lives. Written with a touch of humor and genuine affection, Friends Beyond Borders offers both a researcher's perspective and numerous personal anecdotes about the roles that culture and gender play in our experience of close friendship.

Michaël Ferrier is a prize-winning novelist, essayist and academic whose cosmopolitan life – he grew up in Chad and France, has Mauritian roots and lives in Japan – has inspired him to write some fascinating novels that cross generic and geographical boundaries. This book is the first ever monograph dedicated to his works, which explore themes as various as an African childhood, notions of Frenchness, inter-identities, and post-Fukushima life in Japan. Hybridity is key to his themes, forms and genres, which include – as befits a twenty-first century author – a website, called ‘Tokyo-Time-Table’ and discussed in this study. Kawakami uses an eclectic range of frameworks to analyse Ferrier’s output, ranging from translingualism to Environmental Humanities and Ferrier’s own vision of his oeuvre, which he discloses for the first time in this book in the interview that he grants Kawakami. This interview, first published in this volume, is rich in insights into Ferrier’s views on dreams, Japan, the internet, and collaborating with other artists. This book is an indispensable guide to an author who is one of the rising stars of contemporary French and Francophone literature, and a unique voice that crosses all kinds of borders across the globe.

From the 100-part Penguin Great Ideas series comes a rumination on relationships, courtesy of one of the most influential French Renaissance philosophers. Michel de Montaigne was the originator of the modern essay form; in these diverse pieces he expresses his views on friendship, contemplates the idea that man is no different from any animal, argues that all cultures should be respected, and attempts, by an exploration of himself, to understand the nature of humanity. Penguin Great Ideas: Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves—and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war, and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked, and comforted. They have enriched lives—and destroyed them. Now Penguin Great Ideas brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals, and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. Other titles in the series include Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, and Charles Darwin's On Natural Selection.

Globalization is often thought of as an abstract process that happens "out there" in the world. But people are ultimately the driving force of global change, and people have bodies that are absent from current conversations about globalization. The original scholarly research and first-person accounts of embodiment in this volume explore the role of bodies in the flows of people, money, commodities, and ideas across borders. From Zumba fitness classes to martial arts to fashion blogs and the meanings of tattooing, the contributors examine migrating body practices and ideals that stretch across national boundaries.

Often perceived as unbridgeable, the boundaries that divide humanity from itself--whether national, gender, racial, political, or imperial--are rearticulated through friendship. Elora Halim Chowdhury and Liz Philipose edit a collection of essays that express the different ways women forge hospitality in deference to or defiance of the structures meant to keep them apart. Emerging out of postcolonial theory, the works discuss instances when the authors have negotiated friendship's complicated, conflicted, and contradictory terrain; offer fresh perspectives on feminists' invested, reluctant, and selective uses of the nation; reflect on how the arts contribute to conversations about feminism, dissent, resistance, and solidarity; and unpack the details of transnational dissident friendships. Contributors: Lori E. Amy, Azza Basarudin, Himika Bhattacharya, Kabita Chakma, Elora Halim Chowdhury, Laurie R. Cohen, Esha Niyogi De, Eglantina Gjermeni, Glen Hill, Alka Kurian, Meredith Madden, Angie Mejia, Chandra T. Mohanty, A. Wendy Nastasi, Nicole Nguyen, Liz Philipose, Anya Stanger, Shreerekha Subramanian, and Yuanfang Dai.

The cosmopolitan idea of justice is commonly accused of not taking seriously the special ties and commitments of nationality and patriotism. This is because the ideal of impartial egalitarianism, which is central to the cosmopolitan view, seems to be directly opposed to the moral partiality inherent to nationalism and patriotism. In this book, Kok-Chor Tan argues that cosmopolitan justice, properly understood, can accommodate and appreciate nationalist and patriotic commitments, setting limits for these commitments without denying their moral significance. This book offers a defense of cosmopolitan justice against the charge that it denies the values that ordinarily matter to people, and a defence of nationalism and patriotism against the charge that these morally partial ideals are fundamentally inconsistent with the obligations of global justice. Accessible and persuasive, this book will have broad appeal to political theorists and moral philosophers.

This book asks how we understand the relationship between ethics and power in humanitarian action.