Dissertation
THE POLITICS OF DREAMING: COLLECTIVE MEMORIES, EMOTION, AND IMAGINARIES IN BERLIN
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
01/2020
Handle:
https://hdl.handle.net/2376/111807
Abstract
Since the end of WWII, German politics and society have been marked by memories of historical violence. Following the eras of German division and reunification, German scholars, politicians, and casual citizens alike continue to engage memories of violence and debate how to integrate them into their sense of self and identity. While much of that debate occurs through public and official discourses, many people also confront those memories in their own private reflections. This is a dissertation about those reflections as they occur in the dreams of millennials living in Berlin. Contrary to other recent scholarship of Germany, I argue that millennial dreams show how collective memories of the past remain fundamental to the ways in which people understand themselves and the society around them. To support my argument, I draw on twenty-four months of ethnographic research in Berlin and explore the cultural and political phenomena that sustain the relevance of historical memories to the young adults living there. First, I explore how concepts of self and Other arise in dreams as well as the political discourses that prompt people to consider them during sleep. I compare this data to other scholarship of Germany and suggest that dreams reproduce a defensive relationship to history. Next, I consider the role of death in German society and examine how images of death surface in various dream images. Through my analysis, I suggest these images indicate people use dreams to scaffold their emotional reactions to a series of cultural anxieties. Finally, I investigate images of cultural spaces that arise in dreams and highlight the imaginaries they reflect. By further relating this imagery to theories of self, I suggest millennials in Berlin are in pursuit of balance between conflicting sociocultural values. This dissertation points to the importance that political themes have for the culture of dreaming in Berlin and ultimately shows how collective memories are central to studies of identity, selfhood, emotion, and cultural psychodynamics.
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Details
- Title
- THE POLITICS OF DREAMING: COLLECTIVE MEMORIES, EMOTION, AND IMAGINARIES IN BERLIN
- Creators
- Matthew D. Newsom
- Contributors
- Jeannette M. Mageo (Advisor)Julia Cassaniti (Committee Member)Rachel Halverson (Committee Member)Rob Quinlan (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Anthropology, Department of
- Theses and Dissertations
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 240
- Identifiers
- 99900581700001842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Dissertation