Focusing on East Germany’s capacity to innovate and diffuse technology, this book sheds light on the technological gap that has developed between the two Germanies. Dr. Bentley compares the sophistication of GDR and FRG technology in different industrial branches, evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the GDR’s research and development system, compares the R&D effort of the two Germanies, and discusses the government policies that affected technological change in GDR industry from 1945 to 1975. He identifies and analyzes hindrances to research, innovation, and diffusion in the fields of planning, organization, economic stimulation, and ideology, and looks at the formation of interest groups. He also compares evidence from the GDR with data from other countries, including the USSR.
Focusing on East Germany’s capacity to innovate and diffuse technology, this book sheds light on the technological gap that has developed between the two Germanies. Dr. Bentley compares the sophistication of GDR and FRG technology in different industrial branches, evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the GDR’s research and development system, compares the R&D effort of the two Germanies, and discusses the government policies that affected technological change in GDR industry from 1945 to 1975. He identifies and analyzes hindrances to research, innovation, and diffusion in the fields of planning, organization, economic stimulation, and ideology, and looks at the formation of interest groups. He also compares evidence from the GDR with data from other countries, including the USSR.
The establishment of the Communist social model in one part of Germany was a result of international postwar developments, of the Cold War waged by East and West, and of the resultant partition of Germany. As the author argues, the GDR’s ‘new’ society was deliberately conceived as a counter-model to the liberal and marketregulated system. Although the hopes connected with this alternative system turned out to be misplaced and the planned economy may be thoroughly discredited today, it is important to understand the context in which it developed and failed. This study, a bestseller in its German version, offers an in-depth exploration of the GDR economy’s starting conditions and the obstacles to growth it confronted during the consolidation phase. These factors, however, were not decisive in the GDR’s lack of growth compared to that of the Federal Republic. As this study convincingly shows, it was the economic model that led to failure.
This book discusses the strength of research and technology in the former German Democratic Republic, examining industrial labour productivity and utilising economic and technical indicators to analyse the technological levels of industry in the late 1980s.
Envisioning Socialism examines television and the power it exercised to define the East Germans’ view of socialism during the first decades of the German Democratic Republic. In the first book in English to examine this topic, Heather L. Gumbert traces how television became a medium prized for its communicative and entertainment value. She explores the difficulties GDR authorities had defining and executing a clear vision of the society they hoped to establish, and she explains how television helped to stabilize GDR society in a way that ultimately worked against the utopian vision the authorities thought they were cultivating. Gumbert challenges those who would dismiss East German television as a tool of repression that couldn’t compete with the West or capture the imagination of East Germans. Instead, she shows how, by the early 1960s, television was a model of the kind of socialist realist art that could appeal to authorities and audiences. Ultimately, this socialist vision was overcome by the challenges that the international market in media products and technologies posed to nation-building in the postwar period. A history of ideas and perceptions examining both real and mediated historical conditions, Envisioning Socialism considers television as a technology, an institution, and a medium of social relations and cultural knowledge. The book will be welcomed in undergraduate and graduate courses in German and media history, the history of postwar Socialism, and the history of science and technologies.
Trabant cars carried many East Germans westward after the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989. The car's 1950s design, obvious environmental incorrectness and all-plastic body became a symbol of the technological limitations of East German communism. But as Raymond G. Stokes points out in this text, eastern Germany in 1945 was one of the most highly developed, technologically sophisticated industrial areas in the world. Despite the evident failings of its technology by the late 1980s, the German Democratic Republic maintained advanced technological capability in selected areas. If the system itself was fundamentally flawed, what explains successes under the very same system? Why could the successes not be repeated in other areas? And if examples of success are so isolated, how did East Germany last as long as it did?
This analysis of the relationship between science and totalitarian rule in one of the most technically advanced countries in the East bloc examines professional autonomy under dictatorship and the place of technology in Communist ideology. In Cold War-era East Germany, the German tradition of science-based technology merged with a socialist system that made technological progress central to its ideology. Technology became an important part of East German socialist identity--crucial to how Communists saw their system and how citizens saw their state. In Red Prometheus, Dolores Augustine examines the relationship between a dictatorial system and the scientific and engineering communities in East Germany from the end of the Second World War through the 1980s. Drawing on newly opened archives and extensive interviews, Augustine looks in detail at individual scientists' interactions with the East German system, examining the effectiveness of their resistance against the party's totalitarian impulses. She explains why many German scientists and engineers who were deported to the Soviet Union after World War II returned to East Germany rather than defecting to the capitalist West, traces scientists' attempts to hold on to some aspects of professional autonomy, and describes challenges to their professional identity on the factory floor. Augustine examines the quality of science and technology produced under Communist rule, looking at failed research projects and clashing cultures of innovation. She looks at technological myth-building in science fiction and propaganda. She explores individual career strategies, including the role played by gender in high-tech professions, and the ways that both enterprises and individuals responded to increasing state and party control of research during the 1980s. We cannot understand the economic choices made by East Germany, Augustine argues, unless we understand the cultural values reflected in the East German belief in technology as indispensable to progress and industrial development.
An international cast of contributors (Americans, former East Germans, and former West Germans) take the reader on a journey from the view of science policymakers, to the construction of "socialist" institutions for science, to the role of espionage in technology transfer, to the social and political context of the chemical industry, engineers, nuclear power, biology, computers, and finally the career trajectories of scientists through the vicissitudes of twentieth-century German history."--BOOK JACKET.
