Taberner, S., & Finlay, F. (ed.). (2002). Recasting German identity: culture, politics, and literature in the Berlin Republic. Camden House.
“This collection of fifteen essays by scholars from the UK, the US, Germany, and Scandinavia revisits the question of German identity. Unlike previous books on this topic, however, the focus is not exclusively on national identity in the aftermath of Hitler. Instead, the concentration is upon the plurality of ethnic, sexual, political, geographical, and cultural identities in modern Germany, and on their often fragmentary nature as the country struggles with the challenges of unification and international developments such as globalization, multiculturalism, and postmodernism. The multifaceted nature of German identity demands a variety of approaches: thus the essays are interdisciplinary, drawing upon historical, sociological, and literary sources. They are organized with reference to three distinct sections: Berlin, Political Formations, and Difference; yet at the same time they illuminate one another across the volume, offering a nuanced understanding of the complex question of identity in today’s Germany. Topics include the new self-understanding of the Berlin Republic, Berlin as a public showcase, the Berlin architecture debate, the Walser-Bubis debate, fictions of German history and the end of the GDR, the impact of the German student movement on the FRG, Prime Minister Biedenkopf and the myth of Saxon identity, women in post-1989 Germany, trains as symbols and the function of the foreign in post-1989 fiction, identity construction among Turks in Germany and Turkish self-representation in post-1989 fiction, the state of German literature today.” – from Cambridge Core
Broadbent, P., & Hake, S. (ed.). (2012). Berlin divided city, 1945 – 1989: German Studies Workshop (2nd: 2008: University of Texas at Austin). Berghahn Books.
“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.
“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” · German History
“[An] important contribution to current scholarship on Berlin in the Cold War period. Although this is an anthology, it is well conceived to focus on various aspects of Berlin culture during the years of the Cold War.” · Stephen Brockmann, Carnegie Mellon”” – from Bergahn Books
Fritzsche, P. (1998). Reading Berlin 1900 (2. print). Harvard Univ. Press.
“The great cities at the turn of the century were mediated by words—newspapers, advertisements, signs, and schedules—by which the inhabitants lived, dreamed, and imagined their surroundings. In this original study of the classic text of urban modernism—the newspaper page—Peter Fritzsche analyzes how reading and writing dramatized Imperial Berlin and anticipated the modernist sensibility that celebrated discontinuity, instability, and transience. It is a sharp-edged story with cameo appearances by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Döblin. This sumptuous history of a metropolis and its social and literary texts provides a rich evocation of a particularly exuberant and fleeting moment in history.
“There is no shortage of studies by cultural historians addressing the rapid and unique development of Berlin from a medium-sized Prussian residence to a world-class metropolis during the period between 1871 and the First World War. Among these, Peter Fritzsche’s Reading Berlin ranks as one of the most intriguing and, in my opinion, one of the best. Fritzsche does not write a cultural history of the city—he lets the city write it, and he reads the city as a text. The source for this text is the newspaper page, that is, the popular press—the mass-circulation papers… [and] Peter Fritzsche uses the collage of newspaper impressions to create a valid picture of Wilhelmine Berlin… Reading Berlin is an excellent book. It is very well written, and it reflects an enormous knowledge—not only of historical details but also of the literature and arts of the time. The book’s fourteen illustrations are well chosen and are not the standard fare of ‘Kaisers Deutschland.’ The notes are thorough and should be of help to anyone wanting to engage in further research on the subject or on Berlin around in general. Reading Berlin can be recommended to scholars and to the general public, to historians as well as Germanists, indeed, to anyone with a serious interest in urban culture and the urban experience.”—Gerhard Weiss, Journal of Modern History”” – from Harvard University Press
Taylor, F. (2006). The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961 – 9 November 1989. Bloomsbury.
“The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed-wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall.
Frederick Taylor tells the whole gripping story of the post-war political conflict that led to the tragedy of a divided Berlin, when the city of almost four million was ruthlessly cut in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis. For the first time the entire world faced the threat of imminent nuclear apocalypse, a fear that would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989.
Weaving together official history, original archive research and personal stories, THE BERLIN WALL is the definitive account of a divided city and its people in a time when humanity seemed to stand permanently on the edge of destruction.” – from Frederick Taylor
Nooteboom, C. (2012). Roads to Berlin: detours and riddles in the lands and history of Germany. MacLehose Press.
“Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification. Nooteboom’s writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe, steeped in Romanticism and mythology, and to Germany’s baroque cities. With an outsider’s objectivity he has crafted an intimate portrait of the country to its present day.” – from Goodreads
