Books by John Borneman

"Death of the Father" is a comparative examination of the crises in symbolic identification and national traumas that have resulted from the defeat and/or implosion of regimes in Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan and Communist Eastern Europe.

This is an ethnographic investigation into the meaning of German selfhood during the Cold War. Borneman shows how ideas of kin, state, and nation were constructed through processes of mirror imaging and misrecognition. Using linguistics and narrative analysis he compares the autobiographies of two generations of Berlin's residents with the official versions prescribed by the two German states.