Comrades of Color
Comrades of Color

Author: Quinn Slobodian

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2015-12-01

Total Pages: 335

ISBN-13: 1782387064

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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.

Power and Society in the GDR, 1961-1979
Power and Society in the GDR, 1961-1979

Author: Mary Fulbrook

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9781845454357

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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.

Becoming East German
Becoming East German

Author: Mary Fulbrook

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2013-09-01

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 0857459759

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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.

Coming Home to Germany?
Coming Home to Germany?

Author: David Rock

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 9781571817181

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The end of World War II led to one of the most significant forced population transfers in history: the expulsion of over 12 million ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1950 and the subsequent emigration of another four million in the second half of the twentieth century. Although unprecedented in its magnitude, conventional wisdom has it that the integration of refugees, expellees, and Aussiedler was a largely successful process in postwar Germany. While the achievements of the integration process are acknowledged, the volume also examines the difficulties encountered by ethnic Germans in the Federal Republic and analyses the shortcomings of dealing with this particular phenomenon of mass migration and its consequences.

The GDR Today
The GDR Today

Author: Stephan Ehrig

Publisher: Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781787070721

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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.

Cinema in Service of the State
Cinema in Service of the State

Author: Lars Karl

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2015-12-01

Total Pages: 406

ISBN-13: 1782389970

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The national cinemas of Czechoslovakia and East Germany were two of the most vital sites of filmmaking in the Eastern Bloc, and over the course of two decades, they contributed to and were shaped by such significant developments as Sovietization, de-Stalinization, and the conservative retrenchment of the late 1950s. This volume comprehensively explores the postwar film cultures of both nations, using a “stereoscopic” approach that traces their similarities and divergences to form a richly contextualized portrait. Ranging from features to children’s cinema to film festivals, the studies gathered here provide new insights into the ideological, political, and economic dimensions of Cold War cultural production.

Socialist Modern
Socialist Modern

Author: Katherine Pence

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 9780472069743

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This book explores the ways in which modernity shaped the relationship between socialist state and society in East Germany. The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over. Where most of the literature over the past two decades has been driven by the desire to uncover the relationship between power and resistance, complicity and consent, more recent scholarship has tended to concentrate on the everyday history of East German citizens. experience of life in East Germany, with a particular view toward addressing the question: what did modernity mean for East German state and society? As such, the collection moves beyond the conceptual divide between state-level politics and everyday life so as to bring into sharper focus the specific contours of the GDR's unique experiment in Cold War socialism. What unites all the essays is the question of how the very tensions around socialist modernity shaped the views, memories and actions of East Germans over four decades. the Cold War, Eastern Europe, the history of communism, European social history and the history of everyday life, gender history, as well as modernity and socialist popular culture.

Taking on Technocracy
Taking on Technocracy

Author: Dolores L. Augustine

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2021-09-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1800731981

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The German abandonment of nuclear power represents one of the most successful popular revolts against technocratic thinking in modern times—the triumph of a dynamic social movement, encompassing a broad swath of West Germans as well as East German dissident circles, over political, economic, and scientific elites. Taking on Technocracy gives a brisk account of this dramatic historical moment, showing how the popularization of scientific knowledge fostered new understandings of technological risk. Combining analyses of social history, popular culture, social movement theory, and histories of science and technology, it offers a compelling narrative of a key episode in the recent history of popular resistance.

After Auschwitz
After Auschwitz

Author: Enrico Heitzer

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2021-01-14

Total Pages: 323

ISBN-13: 178920853X

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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.

Studies in GDR Culture and Society 9
Studies in GDR Culture and Society 9

Author: Margy Gerber

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13:

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The dialogue between East and West is evident in several of the essays included here, which are revised versions of papers on GDR culture and society. The general topic of the symposium - which was interdisciplinary in its approach - was dimensions of change in the GDR.