Download or read book Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic written by Andrew I. Port and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the reasons why the post-World War II Communist regime in East Germany outlasted both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.
Download or read book Remembering the German Democratic Republic written by D. Clarke and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Memories of and attitudes to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, within contemporary Germany are characterized by their variety and complexity, whilst the debate over how to remember the GDR tells us a lot about how Germans see themselves and their future. This volume provides a range of international perspectives.
Download or read book The German Democratic Republic Since 1945 written by Martin McCauley and published by New York : St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 1983 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Synthetic Socialism written by Eli Rubin and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eli Rubin takes an innovative approach to consumer culture to explore questions of political consensus and consent and the impact of ideology on everyday life in the former East Germany. Synthetic Socialism explores the history of East Germany through the production and use of a deceptively simple material: plastic. Rubin investigates the connections between the communist government, its Bauhaus-influenced designers, its retooled postwar chemical industry, and its general consumer population. He argues that East Germany was neither a totalitarian state nor a niche society but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens. To East Germans, Rubin says, plastic was a high-technology material, a symbol of socialism's scientific and economic superiority over capitalism. Most of all, the state and its designers argued, plastic goods were of a particularly special quality, not to be thrown away like products of the wasteful West. Rubin demonstrates that this argument was accepted by the mainstream of East German society, for whom the modern, socialist dimension of a plastics-based everyday life had a deep resonance.
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 Revenge of the Domestic written by Donna Harsch and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher description
Download or read book DDR Ansichten written by Thomas Hoepker and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The charm of the photographs by Thomas Hoepker (*1936 in Munich) lies in their documentary quality, their authenticity, and their testimonial character, for they were produced by an impartial eye. Hoepker was a photojournalist for magazines such as Stern and Geo for many years. In the early seventies he and his wife, journalist Eva Windmöller, were accredited in the German Democratic Republic, and they spent several years reporting on politics and everyday life in East Berlin. In this volume, Hoepker documents life in East Germany from 1959 to the political turn of events in the late eighties: photos of children playing on the Berlin Wall, party rallies, propaganda posters, ramshackle old façades from the Imperial Era and new apartment blocks, Sunday outings and empty supermarket display cases, as well as portraits of artists such as Wolf Biermann tell tales of a vanished nation. Exhibition schedule: Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin May 11-October 3, 2011 - Galerie Christian Hiltawsky, Berlin May 27-July 9, 2011 - Haus der Geschichte, Bonn July 1, 2011-June, 2012 - Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, Kapelle der Versöhnung, Berlin July-August, 2011
Download or read book The Plans That Failed written by André Steiner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The establishment of the Communist social model in one part of Germany was a result of international postwar developments, of the Cold War waged by East and West, and of the resultant partition of Germany. As the author argues, the GDR’s ‘new’ society was deliberately conceived as a counter-model to the liberal and marketregulated system. Although the hopes connected with this alternative system turned out to be misplaced and the planned economy may be thoroughly discredited today, it is important to understand the context in which it developed and failed. This study, a bestseller in its German version, offers an in-depth exploration of the GDR economy’s starting conditions and the obstacles to growth it confronted during the consolidation phase. These factors, however, were not decisive in the GDR’s lack of growth compared to that of the Federal Republic. As this study convincingly shows, it was the economic model that led to failure.
Download or read book Within Walls written by Paul Betts and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-11-22 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of private life in the German Democratic Republic, showing how the private sphere assumed central importance in the GDR from the very outset, and revealing the myriad ways in which privacy was expressed, staged and defended by citizens living in a communist society.
Download or read book Stasi State Or Socialist Paradise written by Bruni De la Motte and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Much has been written about how awful the German Democratic Republic supposedly was: a people imprisoned by a wall and subjugated by an omnipresent Stasi security apparatus. Such descriptions are based largely on prejudice, ignorance and wilful animosity. This book is an attempt to provide a more balanced evaluation and to examine GDR-style socialism in terms of what we can learn from it. The authors, while not ignoring the real deficiencies of GDR society, emphasise the many aspects that were positive, and demonstrate that alternative ways of organising society are possible. This volume is an updated and much expanded edition of the authors' booklet first published in 2009. Thee have added more detail on how the GDR came into being as a separate state, about how society functioned and what values determined the every-day life of its citizens. There is also a whole new section on what happened in the aftermath of unification, particularly to the economy. While unification brought East Germans access to a more affluent society, freedom to travel throughout the world and the end to an over-centralised political system, it also brought with it unemployment, social breakdown and loss of hope, particularly in the once thriving rural areas." -- From back cover.
Download or read book The German Democratic Republic written by Peter Grieder and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2012-11-02 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A clear, concise and thought-provoking introduction to the history of East Germany which engages critically with key debates and advances new interpretations of the origins, development and demise of the GDR. Peter Grieder also offers an original conceptualization of the GDR as a totalitarian welfare state.
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 335 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 Four Color Communism written by Sean Eedy and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-02-03 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As with all other forms of popular culture, comics in East Germany were tightly controlled by the state. Comics were employed as extensions of the regime’s educational system, delivering official ideology so as to develop the “socialist personality” of young people and generate enthusiasm for state socialism. The East German children who avidly read these comics, however, found their own meanings in and projected their own desires upon them. Four-Color Communism gives a lively account of East German comics from both perspectives, showing how the perceived freedoms they embodied created expectations that ultimately limited the regime’s efforts to bring readers into the fold.
Download or read book Technological Change In The German Democratic Republic written by Raymond Bentley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-11 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on East Germany’s capacity to innovate and diffuse technology, this book sheds light on the technological gap that has developed between the two Germanies. Dr. Bentley compares the sophistication of GDR and FRG technology in different industrial branches, evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the GDR’s research and development system, compares the R&D effort of the two Germanies, and discusses the government policies that affected technological change in GDR industry from 1945 to 1975. He identifies and analyzes hindrances to research, innovation, and diffusion in the fields of planning, organization, economic stimulation, and ideology, and looks at the formation of interest groups. He also compares evidence from the GDR with data from other countries, including the USSR.
Download or read book Classical Music in the German Democratic Republic written by Kyle Frackman and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2015 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Approaches the topic of classical music in the GDR from an interdisciplinary perspective, questioning the assumption that classical music functioned purely as an ideological support for the state.
Download or read book Translation Under State Control written by Gaby Thomson-Wohlgemuth and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-01-13 with total page 475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Gaby Thomson-Wohlgemuth explores the effects of ideology on the English-to-German translation of children’s literature under the socialist regime of the former German Democratic Republic. Giving prominence to extra-textual factors, the study undertakes a close investigation of the East German censorship machinery, showing that there was a close correlation between the socialist ideology propagated by the regime and the book selection process itself. Through an analysis of the contents of the print permit (censorship) files and the afterwords found in many books, Thomson-Wohlgemuth demonstrates that literature was re-written not only to placate the censor but also to directly guide the reader down the correct ideological path, both in the selection and interpretation of each translated text. Thomson-Wohlgemuth begins this engaging study with a concise but thorough historical background of East German children's literature, setting the context for an examination of how the state and party operated to control the development of the genre. She highlights the fact that there was multi-level censorship at work, with the Unity Party propagating certain ideological literary policies, and the publishers self-censoring when selecting suitable texts for translation and publication. This book serves as an exemplary study of how publishers collaborated with the state in all Eastern European countries, and should be of interest to historians and children’s literature scholars alike.
