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

Despite the nearly three decades since German reunification, there remains little understanding of the ways in which experiences overlapped across East-West divides. German Division as Shared Experience considers 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. Through 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 years of division from 1945 to 1990.

Erica Carter is Professor of German and Film at King’s College London. Her books include Béla Balázs:  Early Film Theory (2010), Dietrich’s Ghosts: The Sublime and the Beautiful in Third Reich Film (2004) and How German is She? Postwar West German Reconstruction and the Consuming Woman (1997).

Jan Palmowski is Pro Vice-Chancellor for Postgraduate and Transnational Education at the University of Warwick. His most recent book is Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945-90 (2009).

Katrin Schreiter is Senior Lecturer in German and History at King’s College London. She is the author of Designing One Nation: The Politics of Economic Culture and Trade in Divided Germany, 1949-1990 (2020).