Vécu et perception de la frontière entre la RDA et la RFA

Armbruster, Heidi and Meinhof, Ulrike (2003) Vécu et perception de la frontière entre la RDA et la RFA. Revue Geographique de l’Est, 43 (4), 151-160.

Abstract

This chapter is based on our study of Border identities on the former German-German border in the region of northern Bavaria/southern Thuringia. It discusses narratives about three historical phases of border definition: The late 1950s which saw a gradual coming to terms with division on both sides; the 1960s onwards where the Cold War confirmed the status quo for people on either side, and the period after 1989/90, which led to a dissolution of the sociopolitical division with the fall of the wall, but without necessarily creating a new sense of togetherness. We explore the significance of landscape and embodied knowledge in our data. Evidently, the border we are concerned with was a virtually unsurmountable physical construct which cut through a once unified cultural region and changed people’s lives in often dramatic ways. The border landscape was always both: an item of tangible geography and a cultural and cognitive map, both shaping and constraining people’s experiences and personal histories. By looking at the significance of the border landscape in people’s narratives we investigate the relationship between the physical and the cultural, and elucidate in how far the experience of historical transformation is narrated as embodied spatial knowledge.

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