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.

List of Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations

Introduction: German Division as Shared Experience
Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski and Katrin Schreiter

Chapter 1. Narrating the Everyday: Television, Memory and the Subjunctive in the GDR, 1969–89
Jan Palmowski

Chapter 2. Tension of Germanness in the Global South: German Immigrants in Namibia
Heidi Armbruster

Chapter 3. ‘Ich bin parteilich, subjektiv und emotional’: Eigensinn and the Narrative (Re)construction of Political Agency in Inge Viett’s Nie war ich furchtloser
Katharina Karcher

Chapter 4. Asymmetrical (Be)longing: Villagers, Spatial Practices and the German ‘Other’
Marcel Thomas

Chapter 5. Everyday Displacements in Cold War Berlin: Short Prose from East and West
Áine McMurtry

Chapter 6. DEFA’s ‘Home-made’ Experiment: Traces of GDR Reality and International Avant-garde Film in Jürgen Böttcher’s Transformations (1981)
Franziska Nössig

Chapter 7. Style Identities and Individualization in 1980s East and West Germany
Alissa Bellotti

Chapter 8. Cultivating the Past: The Schrebergarten as a Political Space in Postwar German Literature
Katrin Schreiter

Chapter 9. Painting in East Germany: An Elite Art for the Everyday (and Everyone)
April Eisman

Chapter 10. The Perceptual Fabric and Everyday Practices of Jazz and Pop in East and West Germany
Michael J. Schmidt

Chapter 11. Alles Geschmackssache? Shaping (Gustatory) Tastes in East and West Germany
Alice Weinreb

Conclusion
Erica Carter, Jan Palmowski, and Katrin Schreiter