From East Germans to Germans?
Author: Jennifer A. Yoder
Publisher:
Published: 1999
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis study examines the problems of integrating East Germans into a political system that they did not create.
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Comrades of Color
Author: Quinn Slobodian
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2015-12-01
Total Pages: 335
ISBN-13: 1782387064
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 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.
Becoming East German
Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2013-09-01
Total Pages: 313
ISBN-13: 0857459759
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFor 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.
Uprising in East Germany 1953
Author: Christian F. Ostermann
Publisher: Central European University Press
Published: 2001-01-01
Total Pages: 496
ISBN-13: 9789639241572
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"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.
State and Minorities in Communist East Germany
Author: Mike Dennis
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2011-08-01
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13: 0857451960
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBased 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.
Death in East Germany, 1945-1990
Author: Felix Robin Schulz
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2013-09-01
Total Pages: 248
ISBN-13: 1782380140
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAs 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.
Crossing the River
Author: Victor Grossman
Publisher:
Published: 2003
Total Pages: 354
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKFaced 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).
The People's State
Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2008-12-02
Total Pages: 470
ISBN-13: 0300176384
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.” Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives. Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.
Behind the Berlin Wall
Author: Patrick Major
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2010
Total Pages: 336
ISBN-13: 019924328X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOn 13 August 1961 eighteen million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. Patrick Major explores how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, 'caught out' by Sunday the Thirteenth.
Born in the GDR
Author: Hester Vaizey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016
Total Pages: 239
ISBN-13: 0198718748
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe 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.
