Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police

by Andreas Glaeser

Overview

More than a decade after unification, Germany remains deeply divided. Following East and West German police officers on their patrols through the newly-united city of Berlin and observing how they make sense of one another in a fast-changing environment, Andreas Glaeser explains how East-West boundaries have been maintained by the interactions of institutions, practices, and cultural forms-including diverging patterns of understanding rooted in vastly different social systems, readily revived Cold War images, the continuing search for an adequate response to Germany's Nazi past, and the politics and organization of unification, which impose highly asymmetrical burdens on east and west. Glaeser also leverages his ethnography to develop an innovative approach to studying identity formation processes. Central to his theory is an emphasis on the exchange of identifications and the particular ways in which they are deployed and recognized in interpretations, narratives, and performances as parts of face-to-face encounters, political discourses, and organizational practices.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226297842
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/05/1999
Edition description:	1
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Andreas Glaeser is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Viewing Each Other through Space
2. The Political Organization of Identification
3. Times Ajar
4. Performing Work
5. Challenging Sincerity
6. Individual Rights and the Morality of States
7. Building, Shifting, and Transgressing the Public-Private Divide
Conclusion
List of Acronyms or Abbreviations
References
Index

What People are Saying About This

John Van Maanen

Remarkable, Divided in Unity is an extraordinary ethnography that crosses many disciplines — history, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, cultural studies — while telling a fascinating tale of East and West Germany.
— John Van Maanen, author of Tales of the Field: On Writing Ethnography