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 Politics of Personal Information written by Larry Frohman and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2020-12-09 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1970s and 1980s West Germany was a pioneer in both the use of the new information technologies for population surveillance and the adoption of privacy protection legislation. During this era of cultural change and political polarization, the expansion, bureaucratization, and computerization of population surveillance disrupted the norms that had governed the exchange and use of personal information in earlier decades and gave rise to a set of distinctly postindustrial social conflicts centered on the use of personal information as a means of social governance in the welfare state. Combining vast archival research with a groundbreaking theoretical analysis, this book gives a definitive account of the politics of personal information in West Germany at the dawn of the information society.
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 Remembering the German Democratic Republic written by D. Clarke and published by Springer. This book was released on 2011-11-08 with total page 299 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 Medical Memories and Experiences in Postwar East Germany written by Markus Wahl and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-05-24 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book draws on the example of the major cities of Leipzig and Dresden to illustrate continuity and change in public health in the German Democratic Republic. Based on archival work, it will demonstrate how members of the medical profession successfully manipulated their pre-1945 past in order to continue practising, leading to persistence in the social conception of medicine and disease after Communism took hold. This was particularly evident in attitudes towards and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases and the pathology of deviant behaviour among young people.
Download or read book Divided Village The Cold War in the German Borderlands written by Jason B. Johnson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-05-18 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1983, then-US Vice President George H.W. Bush delivered a speech in London. He had just been in West Berlin and spoke about his first visit to the Berlin Wall. Bush then went on to describe another German wall he saw after Berlin: "if anything, that wall was an even greater obscenity than its eponym to the north." The story of that wall is a fascinating and valuable slice of the history of post-war Europe. That wall had gone up nearly two hundred miles southwest of Berlin at the edge of divided Germany, in the tiny, remote farming village of Mödlareuth. For nearly half the twentieth century, the Iron Curtain divided Mödlareuth in two. In this little valley surrounded by forests and fields, the villagers of Mödlareuth found themselves on the literal front-line of the Cold War. The East German state gradually militarized the border through the community while eastern villagers exhibited a range of responses to cope with their changing circumstances, reflective of the variable nature of the Cold War border through Germany: along the Iron Curtain, the size and isolation of the divided place influenced the local character of the division.
Download or read book What Remains written by Jonathan Bach and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-29 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when an entire modern state's material culture becomes abruptly obsolete? How do ordinary people encounter what remains? In this ethnography, Jonathan Bach examines the afterlife of East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, as things and places from that vanished socialist past continue to circulate and shape the politics of memory. What Remains traces the unsettling effects of these unmoored artifacts on the German present, arguing for a rethinking of the role of the everyday as a site of reckoning with difficult pasts. Bach juxtaposes four sites where the stakes of the everyday appear: products commodified as nostalgia, amateur museums dedicated to collecting everyday life under socialism, the "people's palace" that captured the national imagination through its destruction, and the feared and fetishized Berlin Wall. Moving from the local, the intimate, and the small to the national, the impersonal, and the large, this book's interpenetrating chapters show the unexpected social and political force of the ordinary in the production of memory. What Remains offers a unique vantage point on the workings of the everyday in situations of radical discontinuity, contributing to new understandings of postsocialism and the intricate intersection of material remains and memory.
Download or read book Erfahrung Erinnerung Geschichtsschreibung written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Wallstein Verlag. This book was released on 2016-07-04 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Individuelle Erfahrungen, generationelle Prägungen und das »kollektive Gedächtnis" als Herausforderungen an die Geschichtsschreibung der beiden deutschen Diktaturen im 20. Jahrhundert. Wie werden Menschen von der Zeit beeinflusst, in die sie hineingeboren wurden? Wie finden ihre individuellen Erinnerungen Niederschlag, nicht nur in der öffentlichen Repräsentation von Geschichte, sondern auch in ihren Lebensweisen und Handlungen? Was bedeutet eine solche Herangehensweise für die Geschichtswissenschaft? Gilt der traditionelle Anspruch von Objektivität in der Geschichtsschreibung überhaupt noch, in Anbetracht der Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts? Und wenn wir Subjektivität in die Geschichte einbeziehen wollen, ohne Strukturen und Ereignisse aus den Augen zu verlieren, welche neuen Formen der Geschichtsschreibung können und sollten wir entwickeln? Mary Fulbrook widmet sich diesen Fragen mit Blick auf die beiden deutschen Diktaturen. Sie setzt sich dabei kritisch mit dem Begriff des »kollektiven Gedächtnisses" auseinander und betont die Bedeutung individueller Erfahrungen und generationeller Prägungen für unser Verständnis der deutschen Geschichte im 20. Jahrhundert.
Download or read book The Campaign State written by Gregory Witkowski and published by Northern Illinois University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communist regimes are defined by dictatorial power, state planning, and active propaganda machines. In The Campaign State, Gregory Witkowski explores the intersection of these three elements in East Germany by focusing on mass mobilizations. He dissects the anatomy of campaigns and argues that while mass mobilizations are often perceived as symbols of strength, they also indicate underlying systemic weaknesses. By focusing on the ability of regimes to mobilize individuals to transform society, he explains both the durability and the ultimate demise of the German Democratic Republic. This study seamlessly blends an analysis of top-down campaign initiatives with the influence of such mobilizations on the grassroots level. For more than thirty years, East German leaders doggedly extended such mobilization efforts, yet complete success remained elusive. Witkowski reveals how local leaders, campaign participants, and peasants acted in ways both compliant and noncompliant with party goals to create societal change. Campaigns became a ubiquitous part of life under communist rule. Witkowski shows that such mobilizations were initially an integral part of state-planning efforts and only later became ritualized, as party portrayals of goals and accomplishments diverged from East Germans' lived experience. He argues that incessant campaigns exposed a substantial gap between rhetoric and reality in the German Democratic Republic that undermined the regime's legitimacy. This valuable and original study will appeal to scholars and students of German history, Communism, and state planning.
Download or read book Gerhard Richter Individualism and Belonging in West Germany written by Luke Smythe and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-07-29 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reevaluates the art of Gerhard Richter (b. 1932) in relation to his efforts to achieve belonging in the face of West Germany’s increasing individualism between the 1960s and the 1990s. Richter fled East Germany in 1961 to escape the constraints of socialist collectivism. His varied and extensive output in the West attests to his greater freedom under capitalism, but also to his struggles with belonging in a highly individualised society, a problem he was far from alone in facing. The dynamic of increasing individualism has been closely examined by sociologists, but has yet to be employed as a framework for understanding broader trends in recent German art history. Rather than critique this development from a socialist perspective or experiment with new communal structures like a number of his colleagues, Richter sought and found security in traditional modes of bourgeois collectivity, like the family, religion, painting and the democratic capitalist state. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history as well as German history, culture and politics.
Download or read book Migration and the Construction of German Identities 1949 2004 written by Bethany Erin Hicks and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2023-10-23 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Migration, in its many forms, has often been found at the center of public and private discourse surrounding German nationalism and identity, significantly influencing how both states construct conceptions of what it means to be "German" at any given place and time. The attempt at constructing an ethnically homogeneous Third Reich was shattered by the movement of refugees, expellees, and soldiers in the aftermath of the Second World War, and the contracting of foreign nationals as Gastarbeiter in the Federal Republic and Vertragsarbeiter in the German Democratic Republic in the 1960s and 70s diversified the ethnic landscape of both Cold War German states during the latter half of the Cold War. Bethany Hicks shows how the regional migration of East Germans into the western federal states both during and after German unification challenged essential Cold War assumptions concerning the ability to integrate two very different German populations.
Download or read book Transnational Imaginations of Socialism written by Teresa Malice and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2022-12-31 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Town twinning refers to the postwar phenomenon of administrative exchange between analogous municipalities. Cold War-related research has mostly interpreted it as an instrument to pursue European integration, or to solidify détente "from below". However, municipalities were not only administrative, neutral actors, but also bearers of political content. This is particularly visible in the case of Italian towns located in the Western bloc, guided by socialist-oriented administrations, and their "twin" counterparts in the German Democratic Republic. This volume explores the connections initiated by such towns in the 1960s-1970s, focusing on socialist-specific conceptions which fueled the policies implemented by "red" municipalities, in managing local economies and social policies, but also in maintaining a lively and interconnected transnational microsociability among grassroots activists. Despite the increasing ideological divergences between Eastern and Western communists, and between Italian democratic communists and the more dogmatic and repressive, strictly pro-Soviet ones in the GDR, communication continued to flourish on the local level. The book explores what still linked the two worlds together, the "bright side of socialism": in this case, a common symbolism related to the past, practical exchanges in the present dimension, and a shared future imagination and conception of the town on the basis of a socialist horizon, built around welfare and services for citizens and workers.
Download or read book Death in East Germany 1945 1990 written by Felix Robin Schulz and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-09-01 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As the first historical study of East Germany‘s sepulchral culture, this book explores the complex cultural responses to death since the Second World War. Topics include the interrelated areas of the organization and municipalization of the undertaking industry; the steps taken towards a socialist cemetery culture such as issues of design, spatial layout, and commemorative practices; the propagation of cremation as a means of disposal; the wide-spread introduction of anonymous communal areas for the internment of urns; and the emergence of socialist and secular funeral rituals. The author analyses the manifold changes to the system of the disposal of the dead in East Germany—a society that not only had to negotiate the upheaval of military defeat but also urbanization, secularization, a communist regime, and a planned economy. Stressing a comparative approach, the book reveals surprising similarities to the development of Western countries but also highlights the intricate local variations within the GDR and sheds more light on the East German state and its society.
Download or read book Antifascism After Hitler written by Catherine Plum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-20 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Antifascism After Hitler investigates the antifascist stories, memory sites and youth reception that were critical to the success of political education in East German schools and extracurricular activities. As the German Democratic Republic (GDR) promoted national identity and socialist consciousness, two of the most potent historical narratives to permeate youth education became tales of communist resistors who fought against fascism and the heroic deeds of the Red Army in World War II. These stories and iconic images illustrate the message that was presented to school-age children and adolescents in stages as they advanced through school and participated in the official communist youth organizations and other activities. This text delivers the first comprehensive study of youth antifascism in the GDR, extending scholarship beyond the level of the state to consider the everyday contributions of local institutions and youth mentors responsible for conveying stories and commemorative practices to generations born during WWII and after the defeat of fascism. While the government sought to use educators and former resistance fighters as ideological shock troops, it could not completely dictate how these stories would be told, with memory intermediaries altering at times the narrative and message. Using a variety of primary sources including oral history interviews, the author also assesses how students viewed antifascism, with reactions ranging from strong identification to indifference and dissent. Antifascist education and commemoration were never simply state-prescribed and were not as "participation-less" as some scholars and contemporary observers claim, even as educators fought a losing battle to maintain enthusiasm.
Download or read book Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes written by Paul Corner and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-10 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A team of internationally acknowledged experts examines the question of popular opinion in totalitarian regimes, looking at the ways in which ordinary people experienced everyday life in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and Fascist Italy, with consideration also of Poland and East Germany between 1945 and 1989.
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 States of Liberation written by Samuel Clowes Huneke and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2022-01-27 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: States of Liberation traces the paths of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of the Second World War to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin. Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to queer politicians and secret police bureaucrats, States of Liberation tells the remarkable story of how the two German states persecuted gay men – and how those men slowly, over the course of decades, won new rights and created new opportunities for themselves in the heart of Cold War Europe. Relying on untapped archives in Germany and the United States as well as oral histories with witnesses and survivors, Huneke reveals that communist East Germany was in many ways far more progressive on queer issues than democratic West Germany.
