Download or read book Introducing the GDR written by and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 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 Introducing the G D R written by Herbert Arndt and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Rereading East Germany written by Karen Leeder and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first volume in English about the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a cultural phenomenon, with essays by leading scholars providing a chronological and genre-based overview along with close readings of individual works. It addresses the history and context of GDR culture, including the two decades since its decline.
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 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 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 The GDR Today written by Stephan Ehrig and published by Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The GDR Today promotes interdisciplinary approaches to East Germany by gathering articles from a new generation of scholars in a variety of fields. Exploring East German everyday life, cultural policies, memory and memorialisation, the volume aims to offer new impulses to the study of the GDR.
Download or read book Introducing the GDR written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The communist German Democratic Republic was founded in 1949 in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany. This book looks at its history and how people came to terms with their new lives behind the Wall. In the 1960s and 1970s, a fragile stability emerged 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.' These essays explore 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.
Download or read book After the Socialist Spring written by George Last and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009-03-01 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.
Download or read book Born in the GDR written by Hester Vaizey and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The real life stories of eight East Germans caught up in the dramatic transition from Communism to Capitalism by the fall of the Berlin Wall - and what they feel about life after the Wall.
Download or read book The Fall of the GDR written by David Childs and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-30 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book charts the dramatic months leading to one of the most profound changes of the 20th century, the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the restoration of German unity in 1990. The author analyses the nature of Communist rule in the GDR over 40 years, its few strengths and its many weaknesses, and the myths which grew up around it. This book places the GDR in its international setting as the proud ally of the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Pact. It examines the reactions abroad to the unfolding revolution. The text is based on a wide variety of written sources and many interviews with leading Communist figures, such as Krenz and Modrow, and with their opponents and successors, and former Stasi officers and the dissidents they tried to crush. It greatly benefits from the author's decades of involvement with East Germany, including personal friendships there, before 1989 and his eye-witness accounts of many of the events during Die Wende. It should be of interest not only to students of German politics, contemporary history and the Cold War, but to all who are curious about the momentous times through which we have lived.
Download or read book Remembering the German Democratic Republic written by D. Clarke and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 275 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 Bringing Culture to the Masses written by Esther von Richthofen and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores how cultural life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was strictly controlled by the ruling party, the SED, through attempts to dictate the way people spent their free time. It shows how people's cultural life in the GDR developed a dynamic of its own.
Download or read book Memorializing the GDR written by Anna Saunders and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-05-23 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since unification, eastern Germany has witnessed a rapidly changing memorial landscape, as the fate of former socialist monuments has been hotly debated and new commemorative projects have met with fierce controversy. Memorializing the GDR provides the first in-depth study of this contested arena of public memory, investigating the individuals and groups devoted to the creation or destruction of memorials as well as their broader aesthetic, political, and historical contexts. Emphasizing the interrelationship of built environment, memory and identity, it brings to light the conflicting memories of recent German history, as well as the nuances of national and regional constructions of identity.
