05.KuTheFi.19_625 MA S. FTMK interdisziplinär I: Made in the G.D.R.? East Germany beyond Spreewald-Gherkins, Stasi, and Skinheads

Lehrende/r: Dr. Grit Wesser

Veranstaltungsart: Seminar

Anzeige im Stundenplan: S FTMK interdisz

Semesterwochenstunden: 2

Unterrichtssprache: Englisch

Min. | Max. Teilnehmerzahl: - | 6

Anmeldegruppe: FTMK interdisziplinär I

Inhalt:
In the anthropological modus operandi of making ‘the strange familiar and the familiar strange’, this seminar explores the so-called ‘other Germany’ through the lens of specifically anglophone historical and anthropological scholarship. It aims at a nuanced investigation of the GDR’s everyday life in its social, economic, and political facets and examines what remains today. It analyses the processes of reshaping the past and of imagining the future of Germany through critically assessing the challenges of German (Re)- Unification and of post-Wende memory politics.
The course is structured into four parts:
Part I: Two States, One Nation? Connecting Kinship and the State: Love, Sexuality and Socialist Feminism (Week 1-4)
Part II: Producing and Consuming: From the Economy of Shortages to the Disenchantment with Market Economics (Week 5-7)
Part III: Vorwärts und nicht vergessen: From East Germany’s International Solidarity and Anti-Fascism to Right-Wing Extremism (Week 8-11)
Part IV: What Remains? Becoming and Reinventing the Ossi and the Politics of Memory (Week 12-14)

Empfohlene Literatur:
Selected Course Readings (in alphabetical order):

• Bach, Jonathan. 2017. What Remains: Everyday Encounters with the Socialist Past in Germany. New York: Columbia University Press.
  
• Berdahl, Daphne. 1999. Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  
• Gallinat, Anselma. 2017. Narratives in the Making: Writing the East German Past in the Democratic Present. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
  
• McLellan, Josie. 2011. Love in the Time of Communism: Intimacy and Sexuality in the GDR. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  
• Shoshan, Nitzan. 2016. The Management of Hate: Nation, Affect, and the Governance of Right-Wing Extremism in Germany. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
  
• Slobodian, Quinn (ed.). 2017. Comrades of Colour: East Germany in the Cold War World. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books. Zeitraum April-Juli 2024
  

Zusätzliche Informationen:
Grit Wesser (she/her) is a social anthropologist working on the relationship between kinship and ‘the state’. She has explored this connection through ethnographic and historical fieldwork on a life cycle ritual (her PhD research in eastern Germany) and on people’s knowledge attainment about the practices of the state security apparatus in the former GDR/East Germany (interdisciplinary research project ‘Knowing the Secret Police’).

Grit earned her MA (Hons) in Social Anthropology and Politics (2011) and her PhD in Social Anthropology (2016) from the University of Edinburgh. She held teaching and research positions at the University of Edinburgh, Newcastle University, and the International College of Dundee. Her research interests include kinship and gender, memory and history, ritual and personhood, the anthropology of surveillance, and the anthropology of food with a regional focus on (East) Germany.