Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland

by Daphne Berdahl

When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and personhood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference?

Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life—including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality—in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. Where the World Ended combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland.

Genres: Nonfiction, Anthropology, History, Sociology

307 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a mine rich in poignant, specific description of everyday life in an East German border town. WtWE's strongest feature is the ethnographic writing and the detailed cataloguing of life as it changed after the wall fell. As someone interested in "really existing socialist societies", I loved learning about these experiences.

That said, the book also drove me completely nuts. If I have to read the phrase "negotiated, contested, and maintained" one more friggin' time I'm going to scream. The language around the theory was mind-numbingly repetitive. It's not clear to me why anthropologists must have 2-3 verbs in each sentence (are the verbs the real adjectives?), but it's clearly their scholarly convention. As someone living outside this camp, I found the style aggravating, to the extent that I stopped reading two chapters before finishing--something I never do.

[Rachel P · Rating 3 out of 5]

Where the World Ended is a very informative book with many anthropological theories and several one-page stories about Socialism, the German Borderland, and Re-Unification. While it isn't a book that I would pick up to read on my own for fun, as far as required reading for college goes, it wasn't bad.

[Damien A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in college. Fantastic look at what the world of post-socialism was like

[Amanda · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really enjoyed reading Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland because I felt it was a perfect introductory text to border studies as a discipline, which I am still mostly unfamiliar with. Although the content of the book was interesting in the way all ethnographies of a conflicted people are interesting to me, it was the method more than the scope of the book that I found to be most useful. Berdahl defined her terms and laid out her research methods clearly, and presented testimonies from the villagers’ histories that supported her claims, which made it easy to follow her logic and understand her conclusions. I found this book to be extremely helpful as an example of what border studies research can look like.

[Ke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is clear and filled with examples. I was specially interested in the gender issues related to the German identities.