Description:
Frontmatter -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Introduction Home in the East -- Chapter 1 Home in the East as a Bureaucratic Nightmare: On Property Claims, Media Representations, and the Informative Function of Television Movies -- Chapter 2 Home in the East as a Site of Competing Histories: Our House (Griesmayr, 1991) and The Same Old Song (Stöckl, 1992) -- Chapter 3 Home in the East as a Capitalist Battlefield: The Brocken (Glowna, 1992) and No More Mr. Nice Guy (Buck, 1993) -- Chapter 4 Home in the East as an Instrument of the Patriarchy: Judith Hermann’s “Summerhouse, Later” (1998) and Where Love Begins (2014) -- Chapter 5 Home in the East as a Threat to Men’s Control: Peter Schneider’s Eduard’s Homecoming (1999) and Karen Duve’s Rain (1999) -- Chapter 6 Home in the East as a Thing of the Past: Jenny Erpenbeck’s Visitation (2008) and Kathrin Gerlof’s Now That’s a Story (2014) -- Chapter 7 Home in the East as Corporate Overlord: Juli Zeh’s Unterleuten (2016) -- Coda Home in the East as an Ongoing Issue: Sonja Blattner’s drüben Series and the Importance of Considering Medium -- Works Cited -- Index
Domestic Disputes is the first monograph in German studies to offer a critical examination of the home ownership crisis in the former East Germany that resulted from unification policy, taking as its focus news media, made-for-television movies, cinematic releases, and prose fiction that depict property disputes between former East and West Germans. In the cultural productions discussed in this book, anxieties about social disenfranchisement through unification policy are dramatized in narratives in which Westerners acquire, or attempt to acquire, property in the former East Germany. Each chapter addresses a different type of narrative that has emerged to frame those anxieties, including those of neocolonial Western takeover, the engagement with difficult family histories, masculinity crises in the West, and the corporatization of home. Domestic Disputes is the first book-length study to outline the way in which homes were awarded to individuals and families as the former East Germany privatized and to offer in-depth examinations of the narratives that emerged from that social phenomenon