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."