Books in the Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association series

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 "e;on the ground."e;

The Protestant and Catholic Reformations thrust the nature of conversion into the center of debate and politicking over religion as authorities and subjects imbued religious confession with novel meanings during the early modern era. The volume offers insights into the historicity of the very concept of "conversion."

Michel Foucault's seminal The History of Sexuality (1976-1984) has since its publication provided a context for the emergence of critical historical studies of sexuality. This collection reassesses the state of the historiography on sexuality - a field in which the German case has been traditionally central...

Ranging from the Reformation, through the ages of confessionalization, to the Enlightenment, Mixed Matches addresses the historical complexity of the socio-cultural institution of marriage.

This collection of essays examines German-language cultural production pertaining to modern China and Japan, and explicitly challenges orientalist notions by proposing a conception of East and West not as opposites, but as complementary elements of global culture, thereby urging a move beyond national paradigms in cultural studies.

David Warren Sabean was a pioneer in the historical-anthropological study of kinship, community, & selfhood in early modern & modern Europe. The significance of Sabean's scholarship is reflected in original research contributed by former students & essays written by his contemporaries, demonstrating Sabean's impact on the discipline of history.

This edited volume explores the crossings, permeations, and constructions of cultural and political borders between peoples and territories, examining how walls, borders, and boundaries signify both interdependence and contact within sites of conflict and separation.

The essays collected here reconstruct the experiences of vagrants, laborers, religious exiles, refugees, and other migrants during the last five hundred years of German history. These diverse contributions identify important commonalities between eras and contextualize Germany within broader migration histories.

Why is Germany imagined as the `land of music'? How has that image been made over time? Exploring examples that range from Bruckner to the Beatles, from classical song to sex-club dance music, a team of historians and musicologists explores these perennial questions in innovative and exciting ways.

Examining the material aspects of emotion, this volume encompasses technology, photography, aesthetics, and a variety of other historical themes in an innovative application of emotion studies. Feelings Materialized brings together an interdisciplinary group of Germanists to unveil the emotions embedded in the world of things and bodies.

For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule.

The essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation.

This discerning study analyzes and contextualizes Kracauer's early output, showing how he identified the quasi-theological roots of the era's cultural ferment.