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 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 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 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 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 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 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 After Auschwitz written by Enrico Heitzer and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2021-01-14 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the moment of its inception, the East German state sought to cast itself as a clean break from the horrors of National Socialism. Nonetheless, the precipitous rise of xenophobic, far-right parties across the present-day German East is only the latest evidence that the GDR’s legacy cannot be understood in isolation from the Nazi era nor the political upheavals of today. This provocative collection reflects on the heretofore ignored or repressed aspects of German mainstream society—including right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism and racism—to call for an ambitious renewal of historical research and political education to place East Germany in its proper historical context.
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 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 Germany s Cold War written by William Glenn Gray and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2003-11-20 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using newly available material from both sides of the Iron Curtain, William Glenn Gray explores West Germany's efforts to prevent international acceptance of East Germany as a legitimate state following World War II. Unwilling to accept the division of their country, West German leaders regarded the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as an illegitimate upstart--a puppet of the occupying Soviet forces. Together with France, Britain, and the United States, West Germany applied political and financial pressure around the globe to ensure that the GDR remain unrecognized by all countries outside the communist camp. Proclamations of ideological solidarity and narrowly targeted bursts of aid gave the GDR momentary leverage in such diverse countries as Egypt, Iraq, Ghana, and Indonesia; yet West Germany's intimidation tactics, coupled with its vastly superior economic resources, blocked any decisive East German breakthrough. Gray argues that Bonn's isolation campaign was dropped not for want of success, but as a result of changes in West German priorities as the struggle against East Germany came to hamper efforts at reconciliation with Israel, Poland, and Yugoslavia--all countries of special relevance to Germany's recent past. Interest in a morally grounded diplomacy, together with the growing conviction that the GDR could no longer be ignored, led to the abandonment of Bonn's effective but outdated efforts to hinder worldwide recognition of the East German regime.
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 Crossing the River written by Victor Grossman and published by . This book was released on 2003 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with an accusation from the US Army's highest legal authority in 1952, Grossman left his unit stationed in Bavaria and swam the Danube to East Germany. He traces his childhood and experiences as a student, worker, and soldier; then describes life in his new home among a surprisingly large community of defectors. There is no index. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).
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 Dictatorship as Experience written by Konrad Hugo Jarausch and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1999 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A decade after the collapse of communism, this volume presents a historical reflection on the perplexing nature of the East German dictatorship. In contrast to most political rhetoric, it seeks to establish a middle ground between totalitarianism theory, stressing the repressive features of the SED-regime, and apologetics of the socialist experiment, emphasizing the normality of daily lives. The book transcends the polarization of public debate by stressing the tensions and contradictions within the East German system that combined both aspects by using dictatorial means to achieve its emancipatory aims. By analyzing a range of political, social, cultural, and chronological topics, the contributors sketch a differentiated picture of the GDR which emphasizes both its repressive and its welfare features. The sixteen original essays, especially written for this volume by historians from both east and west Germany, represent the cutting edge of current research and suggest new theoretical perspectives. They explore political, social, and cultural mechanisms of control as well as analyze their limits and discuss the mixture of dynamism and stagnation that was typical of the GDR.
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.
