Download or read book East Germany a New German Nation Under Socialism written by Arthur W. McCardle and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "With the translations of these articles, original GDR essays are made available to the English-speaking public. The editors achieved their aim to present material 'essential for an understanding of the German Democratic Republic.' The introductions to each chapter, the footnotes, and the questions for discussion attest to their dedication."--GERMAN STUDIES REVIEW

Download or read book Science Under Socialism written by Kristie Macrakis and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An international cast of contributors (Americans, former East Germans, and former West Germans) take the reader on a journey from the view of science policymakers, to the construction of "socialist" institutions for science, to the role of espionage in technology transfer, to the social and political context of the chemical industry, engineers, nuclear power, biology, computers, and finally the career trajectories of scientists through the vicissitudes of twentieth-century German history."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book Becoming East German written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 313 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 The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic written by Feiwel Kupferberg and published by Transaction Publishers. This book was released on with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most public debate on reunited Germany has emphasized economic issues such as the collapse of East German industry, mass unemployment, career difficulties, and differences in wages and living standards. The overwhelming difficulty resulting from reunification, however, is not persisting economic differences but the internal cultural divide between East and West Germans, one based upon different moral values in the two Germanies. The invisible wall that has replaced the previous, highly visible territorial division of the German nation is rooted in issues of the past-the Nazi past as well as the German Democratic Republic past. In emphasizing economic differences, the media and academics have avoided dealing with typically German cultural traits. These include the psychological posture of West Germany, which emphasized not differences between East and West but the break with Germany's Nazi past. The adversarial posture of certain professional groups in East Germany towards the liberal and democratic values of West Germany have also been an obstacle. Reviewing the problems accompanying reunification, chapter 1 explores German culture and history and the moral lessons evolved from the Nazi past. Chapter 2 focuses on the East-West mindset and how differences in attitude affect efforts to adapt to reunification. Chapter 3 discusses the simulated break with Nazi Germany in the German Democratic Republic. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 analyze the roots of the adversary posture of the professional groups in East Germany towards the values of the Berlin Republic. Chapter 7 demonstrates the strong presence of inherited, typically German cultural traits among East Germans, such as a lack of individualism, suspicion of strangers, and obedience to authority. Chapter 8 documents the extent to which a right-wing extremist culture has remained latent in Eastern Germany. Chapter 9 documents the extent to which moral reasoning in the GDR relieves the individual of any kind of responsibility for the actions of the state, reproducing the way ordinary Germans rationalized their participation in the Nazi regime immediately after World War II. Chapter 10 concludes with an overview of the historical and sociological factors revolving around the discussion of Nazi Germany, the GDR and inner unification. This volume will be important for historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and a general public interested in Germany's reunification.

Download or read book The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic written by Feiwel Kupferberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most public debate on reunited Germany has emphasized economic issues such as the collapse of East German industry, mass unemployment, career difficulties, and differences in wages and living standards. The overwhelming difficulty resulting from reunification, however, is not persisting economic differences but the internal cultural divide between East and West Germans, one based upon different moral values in the two Germanies. The invisible wall that has replaced the previous, highly visible territorial division of the German nation is rooted in issues of the past-the Nazi past as well as the German Democratic Republic past. In emphasizing economic differences, the media and academics have avoided dealing with typically German cultural traits. These include the psychological posture of West Germany, which emphasized not differences between East and West but the break with Germany's Nazi past. The adversarial posture of certain professional groups in East Germany towards the liberal and democratic values of West Germany have also been an obstacle. Reviewing the problems accompanying reunification, chapter 1 explores German culture and history and the moral lessons evolved from the Nazi past. Chapter 2 focuses on the East-West mindset and how differences in attitude affect efforts to adapt to reunification. Chapter 3 discusses the simulated break with Nazi Germany in the German Democratic Republic. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 analyze the roots of the adversary posture of the professional groups in East Germany towards the values of the Berlin Republic. Chapter 7 demonstrates the strong presence of inherited, typically German cultural traits among East Germans, such as a lack of individualism, suspicion of strangers, and obedience to authority. Chapter 8 documents the extent to which a right-wing extremist culture has remained latent in Eastern Germany. Chapter 9 documents the extent to which moral reasoning in the GDR relieves the individual of any kind of responsibility for the actions of the state, reproducing the way ordinary Germans rationalized their participation in the Nazi regime immediately after World War II. Chapter 10 concludes with an overview of the historical and sociological factors revolving around the discussion of Nazi Germany, the GDR and inner unification.This volume will be important for historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and a general public interested in Germany's reunification.

Download or read book How Socialist East Germany s Elite Turned Capitalist written by Gerhard Schnehen and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 2021-05-01 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When East and West Germany re-united, the world was amazed — but this great moment should have been foreseen. East Germany, the GDR, was not transformed by a counterrevolution from the outside; the leadership was always capitalist at heart. The author shows how they were undermining the socialist foundations even in the 1950s, as soon as Stalin died. Gerhard Schnehen leads us through the historic events that led to the formation of the German Democratic Republic, GDR. He documents what others have left out of the story, explaining the underlying causes why the supposedly 'Communist' part of Germany collapsed in 1989, to be completely integrated into the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany. The reunited and imperialist Germany today is the dominant force in the European Union and the main ally of US imperialism, globalism and neoliberalism. With the rise to power of the Khrushchev clique, the GDR also changed colors. Guided by Khrushchev and his group, they introduced economic reforms leading to the restoration of a type of capitalism in the country where the profit principle was reinstated as the main regulator of social production. This in turn caused numerous and chronic crises in the country which in the West were then happily attributed to socialism or communism as a whole, inviting attacks on 'a system that cannot work.' However, such commentators completely ignore and do not want to discuss the fact that GDR’s 'socialism' was brought down very early, in the early sixties, by leading officials of the ruling party themselves, who introduced a whole series of capitalist 'reforms' in order to 'modernize socialism' and to make it 'more effective' (as the Ulbricht reformers put it). These so-called reforms are analyzed here at length, illustrating how they did away with socialist principles and restored capitalist principles into the economy in a way that made the country prone to the chronic crises typical of capitalism. This then led to a substantial part of the dissatisfied population turning away from socialism, the 'socialist' state and the SED ruling party, and looking toward West Germany for a better lifestyle. In late 1989, the GDR imploded and within months it was swallowed up by West German banks and corporations.

Download or read book Don t Need No Thought Control written by Gerd Horten and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-06-05 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don’t Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent.

Download or read book Comrades of Color written by Quinn Slobodian and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2015-12-01 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In keeping with the tenets of socialist internationalism, the political culture of the German Democratic Republic strongly emphasized solidarity with the non-white world: children sent telegrams to Angela Davis in prison, workers made contributions from their wages to relief efforts in Vietnam and Angola, and the deaths of Patrice Lumumba, Ho Chi Minh, and Martin Luther King, Jr. inspired public memorials. Despite their prominence, however, scholars have rarely examined such displays in detail. Through a series of illuminating historical investigations, this volume deploys archival research, ethnography, and a variety of other interdisciplinary tools to explore the rhetoric and reality of East German internationalism.

Download or read book The People s State written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-02 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.” Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives. Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.

Download or read book Envisioning Socialism written by Heather Gumbert and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating. Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period. A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.

Download or read book East Germany written by David Childs and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Hidden Hand written by Jeffrey Gedmin and published by American Enterprise Institute. This book was released on 1992 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of the roots of the reunification of Germany, arguing that Erich Honecker's rigid communist regime was undermined by the conflict between Moscow and East Berlin. In the end, Gorbachev's objective - a radical renewal of socialism - turned out to be unattainable.

Download or read book Picturing Socialism written by J. R. Jenkins and published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This vibrant history of the former German Democratic Republic's public art reveals a barely known but visually and theoretically rich cultural legacy. Picturing Socialism shows how works of art and design in the urban spaces of East Germany were the site of a sustained struggle between practitioners, critics and political leaders. This was not the oft-assumed conflict between artistic freedom and political dogma; at stake was the self-identity of the republic as socialist. Art and its relationship to architecture functioned as the testing ground for East Germany's relationship to socialist realism and modernism against the backdrop of Cold War competition from the neighbouring Federal Republic. Picturing Socialism makes a timely contribution to the recent groundswell of interest in the legacy of East Germany's art and architecture, illuminating and elucidating the public art which has been lost or remains under threat since unification in 1990.

Download or read book Uprising in East Germany 1953 written by Christian F. Ostermann and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A detailed introductory essay to provide the necessary historical and political context precedes each part. The individual documents are introduced by short headnotes summarizing the contents and orienting the reader. A chronology, glossary and bibliography offer further background information."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book A Reversal of Fortunes written by Rachel Alsop and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of state socialism in East Germany brought about a drastic reduction in the labor market and the consequent masculinization of employment. Alsop (gender studies, U. of Hull) asks what processes of continuity and change for women's employment can be identified in the rise of state socialism and it's later demise. She finds that women's reduced chances for paid employment was due both to the perception the men had a greater claim to employment and to the replacement of the East German model of welfare with the West German system which prioritized the nuclear family. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Download or read book Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism written by Anna Holian and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2011-08-30 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In May of 1945, there were more than eight million “displaced persons” (or DPs) in Germany—recently liberated foreign workers, concentration camp prisoners, and prisoners of war from all of Nazi-occupied Europe, as well as eastern Europeans who had fled west before the advancing Red Army. Although most of them quickly returned home, it soon became clear that large numbers of eastern European DPs could or would not do so. Focusing on Bavaria, in the heart of the American occupation zone, Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism examines the cultural and political worlds that four groups of displaced persons—Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Jewish—created in Germany during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The volume investigates the development of refugee communities and how divergent interpretations of National Socialism and Soviet Communism defined these displaced groups. Combining German and eastern European history, Anna Holian draws on a rich array of sources in cultural and political history and engages the broader literature on displacement in the fields of anthropology, sociology, political theory, and cultural studies. Her book will interest students and scholars of German, eastern European, and Jewish history; migration and refugees; and human rights.

Download or read book Making Their Place written by Katja Guenther and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-29 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The collapse of state socialism in eastern and central Europe in 1989 had a dramatic impact on women. Witnessing the loss of state support for their economic activity, the curtailing of their reproductive rights, and the rise of gender ideologies that value women primarily as mothers and wives rather than as active participants in the workforce, women across eastern and central Europe organized on a local level to resist these changes. Making Their Place brings to light how feminist movements in two eastern German cities, Erfurt and Rostock, utilized local understandings of politics and gender to enhance their possibilities for meaningful social change. The book chronicles the specific reasons why place matters, the importance of localized experiences during the socialist era, and how history shapes contemporary identities, cultures, and politics. What emerges is the fascinating story of the different ways people have struggled to define themselves, their values, and their understandings of gender in a period of monumental social, economic, and political upheaval.