Dates : 2024 – 2027
Intralaboratory Program Leader: Béatrice von Hirschhausen
Laboratory member involved in the program: Joséphine Lécuyer, Hélène Roth
Team: TERMS
Transversal subject concerned: Making the City: Processes, Actors, Practices
Partner Organisations: LNRS/UVSQ-Paris Saclay, Laboratoire Printemps UMR 8085, Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION, Centre Marc Bloch
Extralaboratory Program leaders: Laure de Verdalle, Carolin Leutloff-Grandits
Funding: German Research Foundation (DFG), Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR)
Description: While neighbouring village societies, formerly separated by the inner-German border, are today connected in a dense network of mobilities, share the same workplaces and the same social and economic stability, it is striking that they hardly cooperate beyond work or form deep social bonds or friendships. The project aims to shed light on this paradox by capturing and analyzing the life experiences, social practices, and worldviews of residents in the former border region of two ideologically hostile states.
The project uses the spatial proximity of the village societies along the former inner-German border to pose the question of the effects of the separation of the two German states as well as the multiple and often asymmetrical transformations that accompanied the reunification of the two German states and are still effective today.
The choice of three study sites straddling the former border will make it possible to examine the changes affecting both the West and the East, and to critically examine the nature of the processes underway since 1989, interpreted in the literature as either “convergence,” “integration,” or more recently, “co-transformation.” The decision to “revisit” villages that have been the subject of previous studies in the 1990s will add an original temporal depth to our analyses.
