Berlin Divided City, 1945-1989

A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin's cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin's identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War.

List of contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Philip Broadbent and Sabine Hake

PART I: COLD WAR BEGINNINGS

Chapter 1. Life Among the Ruins: Sex, Space, and Subculture in Zero Hour Berlin

Jennifer Evans

Chapter 2. The Propagandistic Role of Modern Art in Postwar Berlin

Maike Steinkamp

Chapter 3. Back to the Future: New Music’s Revival and Redefinition in Occupied Berlin

Elizabeth Janik

Chapter 4. The Nylon Curtain: Architectural Unification in Divided Berlin

Greg Castillo

Chapter 5. Mediascape and Soundscape: Two Landscapes of Modernity in Cold War Berlin

Heiner Stahl

PART II: EAST BERLIN, THE SOCIALIST CAPITAL

Chapter 6. Painting the Berlin Wall in Leipzig: The Politics of Art in 1960s East Germany

April Eisman

Chapter 7. “You Have to Draw a Line Somewhere”: Tropes of Division in DEFA Films from the early 1960s

Mariana Ivanova

Chapter 8. Building the East German Television Tower

Heather Gumbert

Chapter 9. Transparency in Divided Berlin: The Palace of the Republic

Deborah Ascher Barnstone

PART III: WEST BERLIN, SHOWCASE OF THE WEST

Chapter 10. “I Still Have a Suitcase in Berlin”: Hildegard Knef’s Cold War Movies

Ulrich Bach

Chapter 11. Benno Ohnesorg, Rudi Dutschke, and the Student Movement in West Berlin: Critical Reflections after Forty Years

David Barclay

Chapter 12. Berlin and Post-Meinhof Feminism: Yvonne Rainer’s Journeys from Berlin/1971

Claudia Mesch

Chapter 13. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin as a Cold War Project

Paul Jaskot

Chapter 14. Beyond the Berlin Myth: the Local, the Global and IBA 87

Emily Pugh

PART IV: BERLIN AFTER UNIFICATION: LOOKING BACK AND BEYOND

Chapter 15. Stereographic City: Berlin Photography in the Wende Era

Miriam Paeslack

Chapter 16. Divided City, Divided Heaven? Berlin Border Crossings in Post-WendeFiction

Lyn Marven

Chapter 17. Interview with Barbara Hoidn

Notes on Contributors

Index

About the author

Philip Broadbent is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He has published on literary representations of post- 1990 Berlin and contemporary European fiction. His current book project looks at the emergence of cool aesthetics in West Germany.

Sabine Hake is the Texas Chair of German Literature and Culture in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of six books, including Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin (2008) and Screen Nazis: Cinema, History, and Democracy (2012), and has published numerous articles and edited volumes on German film and Weimar culture.

Summary

A great deal of attention continues to focus on Berlin’s cultural and political landscape after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but as yet, no single volume looks at the divided city through an interdisciplinary analysis. This volume examines how the city was conceived, perceived, and represented during the four decades preceding reunification and thereby offers a unique perspective on divided Berlin’s identities. German historians, art historians, architectural historians, and literary and cultural studies scholars explore the divisions and antagonisms that defined East and West Berlin; and by tracing the little studied similarities and extensive exchanges that occurred despite the presence of the Berlin Wall, they present an indispensible study on the politics and culture of the Cold War.

Additional text

"Eschewing the primacy of political history, the authors provide a nuanced picture of a city that, in many respects, was less divided than the Cold War mindset would have us believe...This interesting volume demonstrates the many ways in which East and West Berlin were mutually influential, and how commonalities extended beyond the division."� �� English Historical Review

"This volume taps into the on-going fascination with Berlin but, refreshingly, broadens the historical and conceptual scope, asking us to reconsider some of the assumptions we tend to make about the relationship between East and West Berlin during the time of the city's division...The volume is so well conceived and simply so interesting that most readers will probably want to read it in its entirety...It demonstrates what an essay collection can accomplish when it grows out of a shared discussion. The broad range of topics and the interdisciplinary perspectives presented in this book could not have been achieved by an individual author. The editors deserve praise for the volume's coherence and consistency."� �� The German Quarterly

"Adopting an explicitly interdisciplinary approach, this volume ambitiously aims to offer more than just a cultural history of Cold War Berlin...[Its] mix of spatial and chronological demarcations proves insightful inasmuch as the best essays transgress and even undermine them, in effect articulating one of the editors' stated emphases 'on the continuities of urban culture beyond historical ruptures and spatial divides"� �� �����Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon

Product details

• Authors: Philip Hake Broadbent
• Assisted by: Philip Broadbent (Editor), Sabine Hake (Editor)
• Publisher: BERGHAHN BOOKS, INC
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.09.2012
• EAN: 9780857458025
• ISBN: 978-0-85745-802-5
• No. of pages: 222
• Series: Culture & Society in Germany; Culture & Society in Germany; Culture & Society in Germany
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Urban Studies, History: 20th Century to Present