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 "on the ground."
"The studies collected in this fascinating 'experiment in collaborative scholarship' are richly empirical, brimming with compelling insights, and thought-provoking in their use of stories from everyday life to illuminate extremely important aspects of the German experience in the twentieth century and its decisive epochs. Overall, it constitutes a major contribution to the interdisciplinary scholarship of modern Germany and Europe." · Dennis Sweeney, University of Alberta
