Download or read book Building the East German Myth written by Alan L. Nothnagle and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows how communist youth propaganda contributed to East Germany's success
Download or read book The German Myth of the East written by Vejas G. Liulevicius and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-12-09 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the various different expressions of the distinctive German 'myth of the East' that has been such a marked feature of German culture over the last two centuries, influencing German attitudes both to Eastern Europe itself and also to Germans' own sense of identity.
Download or read book Hitler s Rival written by Russel Lemmons and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2013-01-01 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the life of German politician and activist Ernst Thèalmann, who once led the German Communist Party but lost the 1932 presidential election to Adolf Hitler, and examins how his legacy became one of the most important propaganda toold in centralEurope.
Download or read book Becoming East German written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.
Download or read book Anti fascist Resistance and German Soviet Friendship written by Catherine J. Plum and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book State and Minorities in Communist East Germany written by Mike Dennis and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on interviews and the voluminous materials in the archives of the SED, the Stasi and central and regional authorities, this volume focuses on several contrasting minorities (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, ‘guest’ workers from Vietnam and Mozambique, football fans, punks, and skinheads) and their interaction with state and party bodies during Erich Honecker’s rule over the communist system. It explores how they were able to resist persecution and surveillance by instruments of the state, thus illustrating the limits on the power of the East German dictatorship and shedding light on the notion of authority as social practice.
Download or read book Conflict and Compromise in East Germany 1971 1989 written by J. Madarász and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-08-08 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extensively researched empirical analysis of the GDR in the years 1971-1989 challenges current historical interpretations of GDR history. It focuses on four social groups - youth, women, writers and Christians - to highlight the stability of this socialist society until 1987. The strength of the regime is shown to have been based on a continuously negotiated process of give-and-take involving major parts of the population.
Download or read book Tailoring Truth written by Jon Berndt Olsen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2017-06 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By looking at state-sponsored memory projects, such as memorials, commemorations, and historical museums, this book reveals that the East German communist regime obsessively monitored and attempted to control public representations of the past to legitimize its rule. It demonstrates that the regime’s approach to memory politics was not stagnant, but rather evolved over time to meet different demands and potential threats to its legitimacy. Ultimately the party found it increasingly difficult to control the public portrayal of the past, and some dissidents were able to turn the party’s memory politics against the state to challenge its claims of moral authority.
Download or read book Training Socialist Citizens written by Molly Wilkinson Johnson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2008 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on archival, published, and oral history sources, this book analyzes the successes and limitations encountered by the East German state as it used participatory sports programs, sports festivals, and sports spectatorship to transform its population into new socialist citizens.
Download or read book Antifascism After Hitler written by Catherine Plum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-20 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antifascism After Hitler investigates the antifascist stories, memory sites and youth reception that were critical to the success of political education in East German schools and extracurricular activities. As the German Democratic Republic (GDR) promoted national identity and socialist consciousness, two of the most potent historical narratives to permeate youth education became tales of communist resistors who fought against fascism and the heroic deeds of the Red Army in World War II. These stories and iconic images illustrate the message that was presented to school-age children and adolescents in stages as they advanced through school and participated in the official communist youth organizations and other activities. This text delivers the first comprehensive study of youth antifascism in the GDR, extending scholarship beyond the level of the state to consider the everyday contributions of local institutions and youth mentors responsible for conveying stories and commemorative practices to generations born during WWII and after the defeat of fascism. While the government sought to use educators and former resistance fighters as ideological shock troops, it could not completely dictate how these stories would be told, with memory intermediaries altering at times the narrative and message. Using a variety of primary sources including oral history interviews, the author also assesses how students viewed antifascism, with reactions ranging from strong identification to indifference and dissent. Antifascist education and commemoration were never simply state-prescribed and were not as "participation-less" as some scholars and contemporary observers claim, even as educators fought a losing battle to maintain enthusiasm.
Download or read book Uncivil Society written by Stephen Kotkin and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2009-10-06 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded–and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies–East Germany, Romania, and Poland–to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germany’s pseudotechnocracy to Romania’s megalomaniacal dystopia, from Communist Poland’s cult of Mary to the Kremlin’s surprise restraint, Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy, an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing.
Download or read book Berlin Contemporary written by Julia Walker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2021-11-18 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years following reunification, Berlin was the largest construction site in Europe, with striking new architecture proliferating throughout the city in the 1990s and early 2000s. Among the most visible and the most contested of the new projects were those designed for the national government and its related functions. Berlin Contemporary explores these buildings and plans, tracing their antecedents while also situating their iconic forms and influential designers within the spectacular world of global contemporary architecture. Close studies of these sites, including the Reichstag, the Chancellery, and the reconstruction of the Berlin Stadtschloss (now known as the Humboldt Forum), demonstrate the complexity of Berlin's political and architectural “rebuilding”-and reveal the intricate historical negotiations that architecture was summoned to perform.
Download or read book Power and Society in the GDR 1961 1979 written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009-05-01 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The communist German Democratic Republic, founded in 1949 in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany is, for many people, epitomized by the Berlin Wall; Soviet tanks and surveillance by the secret security police, the Stasi, appear to be central. But is this really all there is to the GDR1s history? How did people come to terms with their situation and make new lives behind the Wall? When the social history of the GDR in the 1960s and 1970s is explored, new patterns become evident. A fragile stability emerged in a period characterized by 'consumer socialism', international recognition and détente. Growing participation in the micro-structures of power, and conformity to the unwritten rules of an increasingly predictable system, suggest increasing accommodation to dominant norms and conceptions of socialist 'normality'. By exploring the ways in which lower-level functionaries and people at the grass roots contributed to the formation and transformation of the GDR from industry and agriculture, through popular sport and cultural life, to the passage of generations and varieties of social experience the contributors collectively develop a more complex approach to the history of East Germany.
Download or read book A History of Germany 1918 2008 written by Mary Fulbrook and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-08-10 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third edition of A History of Germany traces the dramatic social, cultural, and political tensions in Germany since 1918. Offers a persuasive interpretation of the dynamics of twentieth-century German history Treats German history from 1918-2008 from the perspective of division and reunification, covering East and West German history in equal depth Covers the self-destructive Weimar Republic, the extremes of genocide and military aggression in the Nazi era, the division of the nation in the Cold War, and the collapse of communist East Germany and unification in 1990 New edition includes updates throughout, especially covering the Nazi period and the Holocaust; a new chapter on Germany since the 1990s; and a substantially revised and updated bibliography
Download or read book Prussia in the Historical Culture of the German Democratic Republic written by Marcus Colla and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No example demonstrates the fluidity of the past within the German Democratic Republic more powerfully than the history of the Prussian state. Initially attacked in East German official histories as the historical engine of German militarism and reaction, Prussia underwent a remarkabletransformation in official and public memory from around the end of the 1970s. This was the so-called 'Prussia-Renaissance', in which, for the first time, the East German state began to recognise and even celebrate figures from Prussian history who had not served a 'progressive' agenda. But the'Prussia-Renaissance' was also a political and cultural phenomenon with a wide public resonance. The 'Prussia-Renaissance' may have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon, but it evidently opened a deep vein in the historical memory of the German Democratic Republic that defied reduction to 'highpolitics' alone. This book asks why.Using the case study of Prussia, Marcus Colla presents a multi-perspective approach to the way that a distinctive 'historical culture' was constructed in the German Democratic Republic. It not only evaluates the roles played by political figures, historians, and cultural elites, but also heritagepreservationists, exhibition curators, heimat museums, television producers, novelists and playwrights, and singers - the purveyors of what we might more generally term 'popular culture'. In essence, Colla poses four fundamental questions for our understanding of life, politics and culture incommunist East Germany: how was history there made? How was it understood? How was it contested? And how was it used?
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of German Politics Culture written by Sarah Colvin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 514 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of German Politics and Culture offers a wide-ranging and authoritative account of Germany in the 21st century. It gathers the expertise of internationally leading scholars of German culture, politics, and society to explore and explain historical pathways to contemporary Germany the current ‘Berlin Republic’ society and diversity Germany and Europe Germany and the world. This is an essential resource for students, researchers, and all those looking to understand contemporary German politics and culture.
Download or read book The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture written by André Fischer and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-15 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Myths are a central part of our reality. But merely debunking them lets us forget why they are created in the first place and why we need them. André Fischer draws on key examples from German postwar culture, from novelists Hans Henny Jahnn and Hubert Fichte, to sculptor and performance artist Joseph Beuys, and filmmaker Werner Herzog, to show that mythmaking is an indispensable human practice in times of crisis. Against the background of mythologies based in nineteenth-century romanticism and their ideological continuation in Nazism, fresh forms of mythmaking in the narrative, visual, and performative arts emerged as an aesthetic paradigm in postwar modernism. Boldly rewriting the cultural history of an era and setting in transition, The Aesthetics of Mythmaking in German Postwar Culture counters the predominant narrative of an exclusively rational Vergangenheitsbewältigung (“coming to terms with the past”). Far from being merely reactionary, the turn toward myth offered a dimension of existential orientation that had been neglected by other influential aesthetic paradigms of the postwar period. Fischer’s wide-ranging, transmedia account offers an inclusive perspective on myth beyond storytelling and instead develops mythopoesis as a formal strategy of modernism at large.
