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During the twentieth century, Germans experienced a long series of major and often violent disruptions in their everyday lives. Such chronic instability and precipitous change made it difficult for them to make sense of their lives as coherent stories—and for scholars to reconstruct them in retrospect. Ruptures in the Everyday brings together an international team of twenty-six researchers from across German studies to craft such a narrative. This collectively authored work of integrative scholarship investigates Alltag through the lens of fragmentary anecdotes from everyday life in modern Germany. Across ten intellectually adventurous chapters, this book explores the self, society, families, objects, institutions, policies, violence, and authority in modern Germany neither from a top-down nor bottom-up perspective, but focused squarely on everyday dynamics at work \"on the ground.\"

During the twentieth century, Germans experienced a long series of major and often violent disruptions in their everyday lives. Such chronic instability and precipitous change made it difficult for them to make sense of their lives as coherent stories-and for scholars to reconstruct them in retrospect.Ruptures in the Everyday brings together an international team of twenty-six researchers from across German studies to craft such a narrative. This collectively authored work of integrative scholarship investigatesAlltag through the lens of fragmentary anecdotes from everyday life in modern Germany. Across ten intellectually adventurous chapters, this book explores the self, society, families, objects, institutions, policies, violence, and authority in modern Germany neither from a top-down nor bottom-up perspective, but focused squarely on everyday dynamics at work \"on the ground.\"

A series of studies have suggested that changes in others' income may be perceived differently in post-transition and capitalist societies. This paper draws on the German Socio-economic Panel Study (SOEP) matched with micro-marketing indicators of population characteristics in very tightly drawn neighbourhoods to investigate whether reactions to changes in their neighbours' income divide the German nation. We find that the neighbourhood income effect for West Germany is negative (which is in line with the 'relative income' hypothesis) and slightly more marked in neighbourhoods that may be assumed to be places where social interactions between neighbours take place. In contrast, the coefficients on neighbourhood income in East Germany are positive (which is consistent with the 'signalling' hypothesis), but statistically not significant. This suggests not only that there is a divide between East and West Germany, but also that neighbours may not be a relevant comparison group in societies that have comparatively low levels of neighbouring.

Across former East Germany today there are more than two dozen private museums devoted to representing everyday life under socialism. Some are haphazard collections in cramped spaces, others marketable mainstays of their local tourist economy. Historians have criticized them as at best amateurish and, at worst, a trivialization of the GDR's repressive practices. Yet, this article argues how, as a social phenomenon, these museums form an important early phase in postunification efforts by public cultural institutions to incorporate the GDR everyday into working through the past. The article examines the museum's modes of representation and shows how the museums lay claim to authenticity through a tactile, interactive, and informal approach. Despite valid criticisms, the article argues that the museums can be seen as helping overcome, rather than reinforce, the binary of totalitarianism and everyday life as antagonistic frameworks for understanding the socialist past.

Against a backdrop of increasingly vocal assertions that Germany's growing Muslim immigrant population is resisting integration through the development of a \"parallel society\" this article demonstrates how German social policy literature, the news media, and cinema converge to naturalize assumptions of cultural difference through a mythological process that generates polarized stereotypes of the cultural practices of Turks in Germany. This discourse freezes the Muslim woman as an oppressed other to the liberated Western woman and generates scripts for the liberation of Turkish women that limit their options by posing multiculturalism, hybridity, or humanistic individualism as the only models for integration. This discourse reinforces the misrecognition of practicing Muslims who are involved in Islamic groups or wear headscarves. I propose an alternative approach that focuses on the practical effects of competing discourses by tracing out ethnographically the micropolitics of everyday life to foreground the multiple positionings and identities that immigrants and their families occupy and to identify how they negotiate the contradictions and inconsistencies they experience.

This article uses the history of West German television as a lens to analyse the politics of consumption and domestic modernity during the ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s and early 1960s. Politicians, academics, broadcast executives, industry promoters, clerical leaders, and cultural critics engaged in a ferocious debate about the effects of the new mass media on West German society and family. While some championed the democratizing and modernizing effects of television, others decried its supposedly totalitarian and ‘feminizing’ qualities; their arguments, pro and con, marked a foundational moment in contemporary cultural criticism that continues to resonate. Installed in the family home, television accelerated the arrival of a highly commodified society and transformed the private habits of everyday life. Men in particular began to spend more leisure time on domestic pursuits, crossing traditional boundaries between public and private gender roles. Such private practices had larger effects: buying, watching, and thinking through television helped replace traditionalist social conservatism with its neoliberal variant and linked West Germany into the social, political, and cultural structures of corporate capitalism and western consumer society.

Moranda reviews The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker by Mary Fulbrook, Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics edited by Katherine Pence and Paul Betts, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic by Eli Rubin, Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR by Esther von Richthofen, Training Socialist Citizens: Sports and the State in East Germany by Molly Wilkinson Johnson, and Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic by Andrew Port.

Mary Fulbrook, ed., Power and Society in the GDR 1961-1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’ (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009)Jan Palmowski, Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR 1945-1990 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Esther von Richthofen, Bringing Culture to the Masses: Control, Compromise and Participation in the GDR (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009)

The book does not break new thematic ground, but its detailed analysis of the northwestern city of Osnabrück offers three unique perspectives: it describes the experiences of various ethnic groups, it treats the years from 1929 to 1949 as a distinct period, and it mines well the methodology of Aítagsges/ucJite or \"the history of everyday life.\" Almost all the memoirs and oral histories he consults, for instance, recall vividly the November 1938 Kristallnacht (night of broken glass) attack on Jewish shops and synagogues and the Allied bombing raids, especially in 1944 and 1945.