Download or read book Remembering East Germany written by Richard A. Zipser and published by Bookbaby. This book was released on 2021-12-29 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering East Germany is a memoir focused on experiences Richard A. Zipser had while travelling and doing research in communist East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. The memoir is based primarily on a 396-page file the East German secret police--the Stasi--compiled on him with the help of at least ten informants over a twelve-year period. The reports in the file provide a kind of factual foundation for the memoir, as do reports about Zipser found in the Stasi-files of other persons, various printed materials, letters he wrote and received, and some memories as well. After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification in 1990, Zipser was able to obtain a copy of his Stasi-file, a process that took seven years from beginning to end. His memoir provides unique insights into a society and literary scene that no other Westerner was able to experience so intensely. It reflects, on several levels, how he experienced communist East Germany and how it in turn experienced him. This fascinating book transports its readers back in time to the chilling Cold War days of yesteryear.
Download or read book Remembering East Germany From Oberlin to East Berlin written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
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 Legacies of Stalingrad written by Christina Morina and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2011-09-19 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Christina Morina's book examines the history of the Eastern Front war and its impact on German politics and society throughout the postwar period. She argues that the memory of the Eastern Front war was one of the most crucial and contested themes in each part of the divided Germany. Although the Holocaust gained the most prominent position in West German memory, official memory in East Germany centered on the war against the USSR. The book analyzes the ways in which these memories emerged in postwar German political culture during and after the Cold War, and how views of these events played a role in contemporary political debates. The analysis pays close attention to the biographies of the protagonists both during the war and after, drawing distinctions between the accepted, public memory of events and individual encounters with the war.
Download or read book Narratives in the Making written by Anselma Gallinat and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the three decades that have passed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the historical narrative of East Germany is hardly fixed in public memory, as German society continues to grapple with the legacies of the Cold War. This fascinating ethnography looks at two very different types of local institutions in one eastern German state that take divergent approaches to those legacies: while publicly funded organizations reliably cast the GDR as a dictatorship, a main regional newspaper offers a more ambivalent perspective colored by the experiences and concerns of its readers. As author Anselma Gallinat shows, such memory work—initially undertaken after fundamental regime change—inevitably shapes citizenship and democracy in the present.
Download or read book Memories of Life in East Germany Snapshots written by Richard A. Zipser and published by Bookbaby. This book was released on 2022-07-15 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The German Democratic Republic, commonly referred to as East Germany, was neither democratic nor a republic. It was a repressive dictatorship. "Memories of Life in East Germany: Snapshots" is a memoir comprised of 58 short prose texts focusing on experiences Richard A. Zipser had or things he observed while traveling and doing research in communist East Germany during the 1960s, 70s and 80s. This book is a companion piece to his first memoir, "Remembering East Germany," which he published in 2021. Like its predecessor, Snapshots offers readers the unique perspective of an American who, as an outsider living in East Germany, gained unusual insider knowledge and experience of that totalitarian society. Through the snapshots which capture telling moments, people, events, and encounters, Zipser partially recreates the bygone world he experienced firsthand as a young professor, for the benefit of English-speaking readers today. This fascinating book, like its "sibling" memoir, provides unique insights into a closed society behind the Iron Curtain that no other Westerner was able to experience so intensely. It reflects, on multiple levels, how Zipser experienced communist East Germany and how it in turn experienced him. His book will transport its readers back in time to the chilling Cold War days of yesteryear and East Germany, a country that in 1990 suddenly and unexpectedly vanished. Richard A. Zipser is Professor Emeritus of German at the University of Delaware. His field of specialization is literature of the former German Democratic Republic (East Germany). He is the author of several major books on different and very important aspects of East German literature and cultural policy.
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 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 Media of Testimony written by S. Jones and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-08-06 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Media of Testimony explores testimony relating to the Stasi in different cultural forms: autobiographical writing, memorial museums and documentary film. Combining theoretical models from diverse disciplines, it presents a new approach to the study of testimony, memory and mediation.
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 After the Berlin Wall written by Hope M. Harrison and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-09-26 with total page 483 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revelatory history of the commemoration of the Berlin Wall and its significance in defining contemporary German national identity.
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.
Download or read book Stasi written by John O. Koehler and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this gripping narrative, John Koehler details the widespread activities of East Germany's Ministry for State Security, or "Stasi." The Stasi, which infiltrated every walk of East German life, suppressed political opposition, and caused the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of citizens, proved to be one of the most powerful secret police and espionage services in the world. Koehler methodically reviews the Stasi's activities within East Germany and overseas, including its programs for internal repression, international espionage, terrorism and terrorist training, art theft, and special operations in Latin America and Africa. Koehler was both Berlin bureau chief of the Associated Press during the height of the Cold War and a U.S. Army Intelligence officer. His insider's account is based on primary sources, such as U.S. intelligence files, Stasi documents made available only to the author, and extensive interviews with victims of political oppression, former Stasi officers, and West German government officials. Drawing from these sources, Koehler recounts tales that rival the most outlandish Hollywood spy thriller and, at the same time, offers the definitive contribution to our understanding of this still largely unwritten aspect of the history of the Cold War and modern Germany.
Download or read book AntiFascism and Memory in East Germany written by Josie McLellan and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2004-10-07 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AntiFascism and Memory in East Germany is a book about remembering and about forgetting, about war, and about the peace which eventually followed. In the unlikely setting of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Spanish Civil War became the subject of a debate which both predated and outlasted the Cold War, involving historians, veterans, politicains, censors, artists, writers, and Church activists. Examining these multiple memories and interpretations of Spain castsnew and unexpected light on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and the relationship between history and memory under state socialism.The ruling Socialist Unity Party made full use of the antifascist legacy as legitimation for a non-democratic state. But despite dogged attempts at control and censorship, the state was unable to silence competing voices. All over East Germany, International Brigade veterans preserved their version of events - in letters to each other, in communications with the party, in discussions with friends and family around the kitchen table, and in memoirs written for the 'desk drawer'. For younger EastGermans, the war retained an undeniably romantic aura. From their perspective, Spain was a far-away land to which they were forbidden to travel, the stuff of camp-fire singalongs and fantasies of adventure.This book dissects the relationship between state-sponsored history, the lobbying of veterans, cultural interpretations of war, and the memory traces left behind by marginalised or politically oppositional groups and individuals. It is a cultural history of memory under state socialism, a social history of veteran groups and their relationship with the state, and a political history of communist culture. Above all, it is the story of how post-war Europeans came to terms with the heavy burden oftheir pre-war past.
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 Learning from the Germans written by Susan Neiman and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As an increasingly polarized America fights over the legacy of racism, Susan Neiman, author of the contemporary philosophical classic Evil in Modern Thought, asks what we can learn from the Germans about confronting the evils of the past In the wake of white nationalist attacks, the ongoing debate over reparations, and the controversy surrounding Confederate monuments and the contested memories they evoke, Susan Neiman’s Learning from the Germans delivers an urgently needed perspective on how a country can come to terms with its historical wrongdoings. Neiman is a white woman who came of age in the civil rights–era South and a Jewish woman who has spent much of her adult life in Berlin. Working from this unique perspective, she combines philosophical reflection, personal stories, and interviews with both Americans and Germans who are grappling with the evils of their own national histories. Through discussions with Germans, including Jan Philipp Reemtsma, who created the breakthrough Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibit, and Friedrich Schorlemmer, the East German dissident preacher, Neiman tells the story of the long and difficult path Germans faced in their effort to atone for the crimes of the Holocaust. In the United States, she interviews James Meredith about his battle for equality in Mississippi and Bryan Stevenson about his monument to the victims of lynching, as well as lesser-known social justice activists in the South, to provide a compelling picture of the work contemporary Americans are doing to confront our violent history. In clear and gripping prose, Neiman urges us to consider the nuanced forms that evil can assume, so that we can recognize and avoid them in the future.
Download or read book Remembering Communism written by Maria N. Todorova and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2014-10-01 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past. The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.
Download or read book Guilt Suffering and Memory written by Gilad Margalit and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unresolved tensions in German postwar memorials
