Domestic Disputes: Examining Discourses of Home and Property in the Former East Germany

Domestic Disputes is the first monograph in German studies to offer a critical examination of the home ownership crisis in the former East Germany that resulted from unification policy, taking as its focus news media, made-for-television movies, cinematic releases, and prose fiction that depict property disputes between former East and West Germans. In the cultural productions discussed in this book, anxieties about social disenfranchisement through unification policy are dramatized in narratives in which Westerners acquire, or attempt to acquire, property in the former East Germany. Each chapter addresses a different type of narrative that has emerged to frame those anxieties, including those of neocolonial Western takeover, the engagement with difficult family histories, masculinity crises in the West, and the corporatization of home. Domestic Disputes is the first book-length study to outline the way in which homes were awarded to individuals and families as the former East Germany privatized and to offer in-depth examinations of the narratives that emerged from that social phenomenon.