Paul Merker, the GDR, and the Politics of Memory
Author: Alexander D. Brown
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published:
Total Pages: 236
ISBN-13: 3031620682
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Divided Memory
Author: Jeffrey Herf
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-11-01
Total Pages: 558
ISBN-13: 0674416619
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA significant new look at the legacy of the Nazi regime, this book exposes the workings of past beliefs and political interests on how--and how differently--the two Germanys have recalled the crimes of Nazism, from the anti-Nazi emigration of the 1930s through the establishment of a day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in 1996.
Disrupted Knowledge
Author: Tina Sikka
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2023-03-27
Total Pages: 333
ISBN-13: 9004536418
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Disrupted Knowledge, editors Tina Sikka, Gareth Longstaff, and Steve Walls present a collection of critical essays that interrogate social and cultural relations emerging out of the intersecting 'disruptions' of Covid-19 and the possibilities that these 'disruptions' contain.
Divided Memory
Author: Jeffrey Herf
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2013-11-01
Total Pages: 424
ISBN-13: 0674416627
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA “valuable” study of how political narratives about the nation’s Nazi past differed in East and West Germany (The Wall Street Journal). A significant new look at the legacy of the Nazi regime, this book exposes the workings of past beliefs and political interests on how—and how differently—the two Germanys recalled the crimes of Nazism, from the anti-Nazi emigration of the 1930s through the establishment of a day of remembrance for the victims of National Socialism in 1996. Why, Jeffrey Herf asks, would German politicians raise the specter of the Holocaust at all, in view of the considerable support its authors and their agenda had found in Nazi Germany? Why did the public memory of Nazi anti-Jewish persecution and the Holocaust emerge, if selectively, in West Germany, while it was repressed and marginalized in “anti-fascist” East Germany? And how do the politics of left and right come into play in this divided memory? The answers reveal the surprising relationship between how the crimes of Nazism were publicly recalled and how East and West Germany separately evolved as a Communist dictatorship and a liberal democracy. This book, for the first time, points to the impact of the Cold War confrontation in both West and East Germany on the public memory of anti-Jewish persecution and the Holocaust. Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Heuss, Kurt Schumacher, Willy Brandt, Richard von Weizsacker, and Helmut Kohl in the West and Walter Ulbricht, Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, Paul Merker, and Erich Honecker in the East are among the many national figures whose private and public papers and statements Herf examines. His work makes the German memory of Nazism—suppressed on one hand and selective on the other, from Nuremberg to Bitburg—comprehensible within the historical context of the ideologies and experiences of pre-1945 German and European history as well as within the international context of shifting alliances from World War II to the Cold War. Drawing on West German and East German archives, this book is a significant contribution to the history of belief that shaped public memory of Germany’s recent past. “Groundbreaking . . . admirably subjects both East and West to equal scrutiny.” —Forward “[A] masterful book.” —German History
Jurek Becker
Author: Sander L. Gilman
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2003-12-15
Total Pages: 305
ISBN-13: 0226293939
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn the first biography of this figure, Sander Gilman tells the story of Becker's life in five worlds: the Polish-Jewish middle-class neighborhood where Becker was born; the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps where Becker spent his childhood; the socialist order of the GDR, which Becker idealized, resisted, and finally was forced to leave; the isolated world of West Berlin, where he settled down to continue his writing; and the new, reunified Germany, for which Becker served as both conscience and inspiration.
Stalinism Revisited
Author: Vladimir Tismaneanu
Publisher: Central European University Press
Published: 2009-11-10
Total Pages: 454
ISBN-13: 6155211817
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDeals with the period of takeover and of 'high Stalinism' in Eastern Europe (1945–1955). These years are considered to be fundamentally characterized by institutional and ideological transfers based upon the premise of radical transformism and of cultural revolution. Both a balance-sheet and a politico-historical synthesis that reflects the archival and thematic novelties which came about in the field of communism studies after 1989.
Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic
Author: Elaine Kelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 265
ISBN-13: 0199998094
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhen the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded in 1949, its leaders did not position it as a new state. Instead, they represented East German socialism as the culmination of all that was positive in Germany's past. The GDR was heralded as the second German Enlightenment, a society in which the rational ideals of progress, Bildung, and revolution that had first come to fruition with Goethe and Beethoven would finally achieve their apotheosis. Central to this founding myth was the Germanic musical heritage. Just as the canon had defined the idea of the German nation in the nineteenth-century, so in the GDR it contributed to the act of imagining the collective socialist state. Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic uses the reception of the Germanic musical heritage to chart the changing landscape of musical culture in the German Democratic Republic. Author Elaine Kelly demonstrates the nuances of musical thought in the state, revealing a model of societal ascent and decline that has implications that reach far beyond studies of the GDR itself. The first book-length study in English devoted to music in the GDR, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic is a seminal text for scholars of music in the Cold War and in Germany more widely.
The Devil in History
Author: Vladimir Tismaneanu
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2014-03-14
Total Pages: 334
ISBN-13: 0520282205
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Devil in History is a provocative analysis of the relationship between communism and fascism. Reflecting the author’s personal experiences within communist totalitarianism, this is a book about political passions, radicalism, utopian ideals, and their catastrophic consequences in the twentieth century’s experiments in social engineering. Vladimir Tismaneanu brilliantly compares communism and fascism as competing, sometimes overlapping, and occasionally strikingly similar systems of political totalitarianism. He examines the inherent ideological appeal of these radical, revolutionary political movements, the visions of salvation and revolution they pursued, the value and types of charisma of leaders within these political movements, the place of violence within these systems, and their legacies in contemporary politics. The author discusses thinkers who have shaped contemporary understanding of totalitarian movements—people such as Hannah Arendt, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, Albert Camus, François Furet, Tony Judt, Ian Kershaw, Leszek Kolakowski, Richard Pipes, and Robert C. Tucker. As much a theoretical analysis of the practical philosophies of Marxism-Leninism and Fascism as it is a political biography of particular figures, this book deals with the incarnation of diabolically nihilistic principles of human subjugation and conditioning in the name of presumably pure and purifying goals. Ultimately, the author claims that no ideological commitment, no matter how absorbing, should ever prevail over the sanctity of human life. He comes to the conclusion that no party, movement, or leader holds the right to dictate to the followers to renounce their critical faculties and to embrace a pseudo-miraculous, a mystically self-centered, delusional vision of mandatory happiness.
AntiFascism and Memory in East Germany
Author: Josie McLellan
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2004-10-07
Total Pages: 240
ISBN-13: 0191515337
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAntiFascism 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 casts new 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 East Germans, 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 of their pre-war past.
Restitution and Memory
Author: Dan Diner
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 428
ISBN-13: 9781845452209
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe myriad debates on restitution and memory, which have been going on in Europe for decades, indicate that World War II never ended. It is still very much with us, paradoxically re-invoked by the events of 1989/90 and the expansion of Europe to the east in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and economic globalization. The growing privatization and reprivatization in Eastern Europe revive pre-war memories that lay buried under the blanket of collectivization and nationalization of property after 1945. World War II did not only result in the death and destruction on a large scale but also in an a far-reaching revolution of existing property relations. This volume offers an assessment of the problematic of restitution and its close interconnection with the discourses of memory that have recently emerged.
