SAE Journal Spring 2001 1:1 Book Reviews Edited by Miklos Voros University of Chicago Daphne Berdahl. Where the World Ended: Re-Unification and Identity in the German Borderland. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999. 294pp. ISBN 0-520-21476-5 US$ 45.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-520-21477-3 US$ 16.95 (paper). Jeremy Straughn University of Chicago In the last decade, anthropologists in Eastern Europe have faced new dilemmas. Rapid social change has demolished older models of cultural and symbolic stability, while narratives touting the triumph of Western- style 'modernity' discount the diversity of trajectories and experiences with 'the transition.' In response, a new transition ethnography is revealing the ambiguous and contested character of 'modernization, while establishing social change as a valid topic of anthropological inquiry. One rather conspicuous dimension of change has been the reconfiguration of borders. To date, however, there has been surprisingly little study of postsocialist boundary shifts and their cultural consequences. In this context, Daphne Berdahl's Where the World Ended contributes a welcome and original exploration of the East German transition in a border village and its relation to the reconfiguration of boundaries and identities in 'the borderland' To signal the distinctiveness of the German borderland, Berdahl adopts the term Zwischenraum ("interstitial space") to name "the space between the boundaries of the known in which people negotiated the limits of the possible and, in so doing, helped define them" (p. 8). Like the well-known "borderland" concept of Renato Rosaldo, Zwischenraum has both geographic and symbolic connotations. For Berdahl, it is distinguished above all by its relation to political barrier, but it also includes cultural interpretations that give the latter meaning and power before and after its removal. In contrast to Rosaldo's "borderland" or related concepts like "hybridity," Berdahl's Zwischenraum is not a realm where essentialism and binary oppositions are potentially subverted. Instead, it is a space where negotiation and contestation help define, essentialize. and deepen symbolic boundaries—a space where, as she puts it, "ambiguity produces clarity." Berdahl's story begins in Kella (its real name), village in the heart of the Eichsfeld region—a Catholic island amid Lutheran Protestantism since the Reformation. Over the centuries, the village changed hands many times before falling to the Allies in 1945 and being ceded to Soviet authorities soon after. The sealing of the border in 1952 perched such border villages "at the end of the world" until reunification finally thrust them into the geographic center of the new Germany. Having begun her research in 1990, Berdahl uses oral and archival sources to reconstruct everyday life in a village lodged in the GDR's SchUtzstreifen (defense strip) for almost four decades. Her focus is on how cultural practices helped negotiate and define different sorts of boundaries, such as between people and state, orthodox and popular religion, Party and Church. The border itself became the object of legends, imaginings, and cautiously resistive practices that transcended, but sometimes reinforced, its intended political function. Thus, tales of failed escape attempts helped set the "limits of the possible," adding to the border's appearance of impenetrability, while personal encounters with bureaucracy left villagers searching for the raison d'etat behind inexplicable decisions. Berdahl wishes to demonstrate that the villagers were not entirely powerless, in spite of daunting odds. Some secretly resisted state legitimation strategies, she shows, by hanging mandatory national flags where they could not be seen by Westerners peering through the "window to Kella" (the book's cover affords us this hilltop view as it later looked). In devoutly Catholic Kella, the faithful also looked to religion as a platform for non-compliance with official norms, as when youngsters refused Jugendweihe, the socialist rite of 37