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 Shattered Past written by Konrad H. Jarausch and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-24 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Broken glass, twisted beams, piles of debris--these are the early memories of the children who grew up amidst the ruins of the Third Reich. More than five decades later, German youth inhabit manicured suburbs and stroll along prosperous pedestrian malls. Shattered Past is a bold reconsideration of the perplexing pattern of Germany's twentieth-century history. Konrad Jarausch and Michael Geyer explore the staggering gap between the country's role in the terrors of war and its subsequent success as a democracy. They argue that the collapse of Communism, national reunification, and the postmodern shift call for a new reading of the country's turbulent development, one that no longer suggests continuity but rupture and conflict. Comprising original essays, the book begins by reexamining the nationalist, socialist, and liberal master narratives that have dominated the presentation of German history but are now losing their hold. Treated next are major issues of recent debate that suggest how new kinds of German history might be written: annihilationist warfare, complicity with dictatorship, the taming of power, the impact of migration, the struggle over national identity, redefinitions of womanhood, and the development of consumption as well as popular culture. The concluding chapters reflect on the country's gradual transition from chaos to civility. This penetrating study will spark a fresh debate about the meaning of the German past during the last century. There is no single master narrative, no Weltgeist, to be discovered. But there is a fascinating story to be told in many different ways.
Download or read book Playing Politics with History written by Andrew Beattie and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2008 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ensuing debates and disagreements over the recent past, examined by the author, open up a window into the wider development of German memory, identity, and politics after the end of the Cold War."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Photography Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene written by Bergit Arends and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-07-09 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving beyond existing scholarship, this book connects photography, archives, ecology and historical change and critically applies the Anthropocene as framework to the in-depth study of artists’ projects. It discards single modes of seeing environmental transformations in favour of a multiple and de-centred environmental imagination. Bergit Arends uses multidisciplinary perspectives to view localized environmental, social and political issues through research-based artistic practices. The book not only makes available original research into newly and recently discovered archives of ecological and historical change but also shows how this research is manifest in exhibition formats. This book presents international, transhistorical projects by contemporary visual artists who use archives together with photography as documentary and performative media for the comparative study of environments and places. A wide array of artists from diverse backgrounds working primarily in Europe and North America from the 1970s to the present day are discussed and set in relation to Anthropocene narratives. Case studies include environmental archive-based work by Nguyen the Thuc, Christiane Eisler, Chrystel Lebas, Mark Dion, Joy Gregory and Philip Miller. The book will be of interest to scholars working in photography, archive studies, art history, visual culture, environmental humanities and ecocriticism.
Download or read book Competition in Socialist Society written by Katalin Miklóssy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the concept of "competition", which is usually associated with market economies, operated under state socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where the socialist system, based on command economic planning and state-centred control over society, was supposed to emphasise "co-operation", rather than competitive mechanisms. The book considers competition in a wider range of industries and social fields across the Soviet bloc, and shows how the gradual adoption and adaptation of Western practices led to the emergence of more open competitiveness in socialist society. The book includes discussion of the state’s view of competition, and focuses especially on how competition operated at the grassroots level. It covers politico-economic reforms and their impact, both overall and at the enterprise level; competition in the cultural sphere; and the huge effect of increasing competition on socialist ways of thinking.
Download or read book Communist Planning versus Rationality written by János Matyas Kovács and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-14 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume examines concepts of central planning, a cornerstone of political economy in Soviet-type societies. It revolves around the theory of “optimal planning” which promised a profound modernization of Stalinist-style verbal planning. Encouraged by cybernetic dreams in the 1950s and supporting the strategic goals of communist leaders in the Cold War, optimal planners offered the ruling elites a panacea for the recurrent crises of the planned economy. Simultaneously, their planning projects conveyed the pride of rational management and scientific superiority over the West. The authors trace the rise and fall of the research program in the communist era in eight countries of Eastern Europe, including the Soviet Union, and China, describing why the mission of optimization was doomed to fail and why the failure was nevertheless very slow. The theorists of optimal planning contributed to the rehabilitation of mathematical culture in economic research in the communist countries, and thus, to a neoclassical turn in economics all over the ex-communist world). However, because they have not rejected optimal planning as “computopia,” there is a large space left behind for future generations to experiment with Big Optimal Plans anew—based, at this time, on artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Download or read book Strategies of Humor in Post Unification German Literature Film and Other Media written by Jill Twark and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01-18 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fourteen chapters in this anthology feature original analyses of contemporary German-language literary texts, films, political cartoons, cabaret, and other types of performance. The artworks display a wide spectrum of humor modes, such as irony, satire, the grotesque, Jewish humor, and slapstick, as responses to unification with the accompanying euphoria, but also alienation and dislocation. Kerstin Hensel’s Lärchenau, Christoph Hein’s Landnahme, and vignette collections by Jakob Hein (Antrag auf ständige Ausreise und andere Mythen der DDR) and Wladimir Kaminer (Es gab keinen Sex im Sozialismus) are interpreted as examples of the grotesque. The popular films Lola rennt, Sonnenallee, Herr Lehmann, NVA, Alles auf Zucker!, and Mein Führer—Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler are reexamined through the lens of traditional and more recent humor or comic book theories. The contributors focus on how each artwork enriches four prominent postwall German cultural trends: post-unification identity reconstruction, Vergangenheitsbewältigung (including Hitler humor), New German Popular Literature (Christian Kracht’s ironic subtexts), and immigrant perspectives (a “third voice” in the East-West binary reflected here pointedly in Eulenspiegel cartoons). To date, no other scholarly work provides as comprehensive an overview of the diverse strategies of humor used in the past two decades in German-speaking countries.
Download or read book The Many Faces of Germany written by John Aloysius McCarthy and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 440 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the shifting of American foreign policy away from "old" Europe, long-established patterns of interaction between Germany and the U.S. have come under review. Although seemingly disconnected from the cultural and intellectual world, political developments were not without their influence on the humanities and their curricula during the past century. In retrospect, we can speak of the many different roles Germany has played in American eyes. The Many Faces of Germany seeks to acknowledge the importance of those incarnations for the study of German culture and history on both sides of the Atlantic. One of the major questions raised by the contributors is whether the transformations in the transatlantic dynamics and in the importance of Germany for the U.S. have had a major influence on the study of things German in the U.S. internally. The volume gathers together leading voices of the older and younger generations of social historians, literary scholars, film critics, and cultural historians.
Download or read book State and Minorities in Communist East Germany written by Mike Dennis and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2011-08-01 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Based on interviews and the voluminous materials in the archives of the SED, the Stasi and central and regional authorities, this volume focuses on several contrasting minorities (Jehovah’s Witnesses, Jews, ‘guest’ workers from Vietnam and Mozambique, football fans, punks, and skinheads) and their interaction with state and party bodies during Erich Honecker’s rule over the communist system. It explores how they were able to resist persecution and surveillance by instruments of the state, thus illustrating the limits on the power of the East German dictatorship and shedding light on the notion of authority as social practice.
Download or read book Speaking the Taboo written by Paul Cooke and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2021-11-22 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wolfgang Hilbig is a writer who is widely acknowledged as one of the most important to have emerged from the former GDR. In this study, the first in English, Paul Cooke explores the interplay of aesthetic and social ‘taboos’, as defined by the official discourse of the GDR, in a cross-section of Hilbig’s critical writing, poetry and prose. The protagonists in Hilbig’s texts suffer from a profound crisis of identity due to the disparity between the state’s official presentation of life in the East and their own experience. Cooke argues that through their exploration of the ‘taboo’, i.e. that which is excluded from the state’s official discourse, Hilbig’s characters attempt to break through the banal rhetoric of the ruling elite in order to realise an authentic sense of self.
Download or read book After the socialist Spring written by George Last and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2009 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Part III-Stable Instability: Economic Stagnation and the End of TransformationChapter 7-From Ulbright to Honecker; Chapter 8-Stabilisation and Stagnation; Chapter 9-Economic Crisis and Popular Dissatisfaction-The Road to 1989; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
Download or read book The Rush to German Unity written by Konrad Hugo Jarausch and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 1994 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ideal source for general readers and students, "The Rush to German Unity" explores whether solving the old German problem (by bringing down the Berlin Wall) has merely created new difficulties for Germany and challenges to overcome.
Download or read book Comrades in Arms written by Tom Smith and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-02-03 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Without question, the East German National People’s Army was a profoundly masculine institution that emphasized traditional ideals of stoicism, sacrifice, and physical courage. Nonetheless, as this innovative study demonstrates, depictions of the military in the film and literature of the GDR were far more nuanced and ambivalent. Departing from past studies that have found in such portrayals an unchanging, idealized masculinity, Comrades in Arms shows how cultural works both before and after reunification place violence, physical vulnerability, and military theatricality, as well as conscripts’ powerful emotions and desires, at the center of soldiers’ lives and the military institution itself.
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 277 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.
Download or read book The Politics of Magic written by Qinna Shen and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-15 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shen's study will be significant reading for teachers and students of folklore studies and for scholars of German, Eastern European, cultural, film, media, and gender studies.
Download or read book German Reunification and the Legacy of GDR Literature and Culture written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-04-17 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the tumultuous events of 1989/1990, writers, cultural practitioners and academics have responded to, reconstructed and reflected upon the process and enduring impact of German reunification. This bilingual volume provides a nuanced understanding of the literature and culture of the GDR and its legacy today. It explores a broad range of genres, combines perspectives on both lesser-known and more established writers, and juxtaposes academic articles with the personal reflections of those who directly experienced and engaged with the GDR from within or beyond its borders. Whether creative practitioners or academics, contributors consider the broader literary and intellectual contexts and traditions shaping GDR literature and culture in a way that enriches our understanding of reunification and its legacy. Contributors are: Deirdre Byrnes, Anna Chiarloni, Jean E. Conacher, Sabine Egger, Robert Gillett, Frank Thomas Grub, Jochen Hennig, Nick Hodgin, Frank Hörnigk, Therese Hörnigk, Gisela Holfter, Jeannine Jud, Astrid Köhler, Marieke Krajenbrink, Hannes Krauss, Reinhard Kuhnert, Katja Lange-Müller, Corina Löwe, Hugh Ridley, Kathrin Schmidt.
