Skip to main content
Kent Academic Repository

‘Everywhere’ and ‘on the spot’: locality and attachments to the fallen ‘out of place’ in contemporary rural Germany

Tradii, Laura (2022) ‘Everywhere’ and ‘on the spot’: locality and attachments to the fallen ‘out of place’ in contemporary rural Germany. History and Anthropology, . ISSN 0275-7206. E-ISSN 1477-2612. (doi:10.1080/02757206.2022.2139251) (The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided) (KAR id:97741)

The full text of this publication is not currently available from this repository. You may be able to access a copy if URLs are provided. (Contact us about this Publication)
Official URL:
https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2022.2139251

Abstract

This paper, based on 15 months of fieldwork and archival research carried out in 2018/2019 for my PhD in Social Anthropology, takes as its object the everyday coexistence with the Second World War military dead scattered across the rural landscape of Brandenburg, formerly part of the German Democratic Republic (1949–1990). Focusing on the practices through which the living relate to the war dead ‘out of place’, I argue that the construction of the war dead as valued members of the social collectivity does not necessarily depend upon their ritual ‘separation’. Indeed, the physical proximity of the misplaced and unrelated war dead in my fieldsite results in their adoption and conceptualization as local dead. I contextualize attachments to the fallen in the local history of chaotic ‘total war’, which collapsed the boundary between the military and civilian experience of war, and transformed the spaces of everyday life into battlefields.

Item Type: Article
DOI/Identification number: 10.1080/02757206.2022.2139251
Uncontrolled keywords: war history, second world war, death, body, postsocialism
Subjects: D History General and Old World > DD Germany
H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General)
Divisions: Divisions > Division of Arts and Humanities > School of History
Funders: University of Cambridge (https://ror.org/013meh722)
Depositing User: Laura Tradii
Date Deposited: 03 Nov 2022 15:51 UTC
Last Modified: 04 Nov 2022 10:09 UTC
Resource URI: https://kar.kent.ac.uk/id/eprint/97741 (The current URI for this page, for reference purposes)

University of Kent Author Information

  • Depositors only (login required):

Total unique views for this document in KAR since July 2020. For more details click on the image.