Where the world ended: re-unification and identity in the German borderland

When the Berlin Wall fell, people who lived along the dismantled border found their lives drastically and rapidly transformed. Daphne Berdahl, through ongoing ethnographic research in a former East German border village, explores the issues of borders and borderland identities that have accompanied the many transitions since 1990. What happens to identity and personhood, she asks, when a political and economic system collapses overnight? How do people negotiate and manipulate a liminal condition created by the disappearance of a significant frame of reference?Berdahl concentrates especially on how these changes have affected certain "border zones" of daily life - including social organization, gender, religion, and nationality - in a place where literal, indeed concrete, borders were until recently a very powerful presence. Borders, she argues, are places of ambiguity as well as of intense lucidity; these qualities may in fact be mutually constitutive. She shows how, in a moment of headlong historical transformation, larger political, economic, and social processes are manifested locally and specifically. In the process of a transition between two German states, people have invented, and to some extent ritualized, cultural practices that both reflect and constitute profound identity transformations in a period of intense social discord. Where the World Ended combines a vivid ethnographic account of everyday life under socialist rule and after German reunification with an original investigation of the paradoxical human condition of a borderland

Testing our borders: Questions of national and regional identity in the Oresund region

Drawing upon current debates as to whether or not cross-border cooperation projects pose a threat to the maintenance of national identity, this article explores the attitudes that inhabitants in the Danish-Swedish region of Øresund hold towards their respective nation-states and the emerging cross-border region. Analysis shows that there are sharp differences between Danes and Swedes when it comes to support for the Øresund region, with Swedes far more likely to identify with the cross-border region. These findings are then used to suggest how discussions of identity construction and potential identity trade-offs need to involve significantly greater nuance