From the Bonn to the Berlin Republic PDF Download

Author: Jeffrey Anderson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857458574
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the unification of East and West Germany in 1989/90 were events of world-historical significance. The twentieth anniversary of this juncture represents an excellent opportunity to reflect upon the evolution of the new Berlin Republic. Given the on-going significance of the country for theory and concept–building in many disciplines, an in-depth examination of the case is essential. In this volume, unique in its focus on all aspects of contemporary Germany - culture, historiography, society, politics and the economy - top scholars offer their assessments of the country’s performance in these and other areas and analyze the successes and continued challenges.

Author: Dieter Dettke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571813435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The "Berlin Republic" has become the key concept of post-Cold War Germany and as such has been widely discussed inside as well as outside Germany. Symbolized by the move of the government from Bonn to Berlin it signals all the tangible and intangible changes in Germany's position in the world that have taken place during the 1990s. Well known German authors, decision-makers, and cultural leaders as well as internationally renowned experts on German affairs contribute to this volume, examining various aspects of the New Germany and its old/new capital, such as history, foreign policy, art, architecture, and culture. In this way, the reader gains a varied but comprehensive picture of Germany after unification as perceived by its neighbors, friends, and allies.

Author: Michael Z. Wise
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
The decision to move Germany's government seat from Bonn to Berlin by the year 2000 poses an epic architectural challenge and has fostered an international debate on which building styles are appropriate to represent German national identity. Capital Dilemma investigates the political decisions and historical events behind the redesign of Berlin's official architecture. It tells a complex and exciting drama of politics, memory, cultural values, and architecture, in which Helmut Kohl, Albert Speer, Sir Norman Foster, and I. M. Pei all figure as players. If capital city design projects are symbols of national identity and historical consciousness, Berlin is the supreme example. In fact, architecture has played a pivotal role throughout Germany's turbulent twentieth-century history. After the fall of the monarchy, Germany gave birth to the Bauhaus, whose founders argued that their own revolutionary designs could shape human destiny. The century's warring ideologies, Nazism and Communism, also used architecture for their own political ends. In its latest incarnation, Berlin will become the capital of the fifth German state in this century to be ruled from that city. How will the official architecture of reunified Berlin, a democratic capital being built amid totalitarian remains, be different this time around? Th e Federal Republic of Germany, a highly stable democracy in stark contrast to its predecessors, has been struggling with burdensome architectural legacies. In the process, it has considered remedies as varied as outright destruction, refurbishment, and, in the case of the former Nazi Central Bank now being converted into the new Foreign Ministry, physical concealment.

Author: Christian F. Ostermann
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503607631
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 566

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Book Description
In the aftermath of World War II, American policymakers turned to the task of rebuilding Europe while keeping communism at bay. In Germany, formally divided since 1949,the United States prioritized the political, economic, and, eventually, military integration of the fledgling Federal Republic with the West. The extraordinary success story of forging this alliance has dominated our historical under-standing of the American-German relationship. Largely left out of the grand narrative of U.S.–German relations were most East Germans who found themselves caught under Soviet and then communist control by the post-1945 geo-political fallout of the war that Nazi Germany had launched. They were the ones who most dearly paid the price for the country's division. This book writes the East Germans—both leadership and general populace—back into that history as objects of American policy and as historical agents in their own right Based on recently declassified documents from American, Russian, and German archives, this book demonstrates that U.S. efforts from 1945 to 1953 went beyond building a prosperous democracy in western Germany and "containing" Soviet-Communist power to the east. Under the Truman and then the Eisenhower administrations, American policy also included efforts to undermine and "roll back" Soviet and German communist control in the eastern part of the country. This story sheds light on a dark-er side to the American Cold War in Germany: propaganda, covert operations, economic pressure, and psychological warfare. Christian F. Ostermann takes an international history approach, capturing Soviet and East German responses and actions, and drawing a rich and complex picture of the early East–West confrontation in the heart of Europe.

Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694322
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
A Berlin Republic brings together writings on the new, united Germany by one of their most original and trenchant commentators, Jürgen Habermas. Among other topics, he addresses the consequences of German history, the challenges and perils of the post-Wall era, and Germany's place in contemporary Europe. Here, as in his earlier The Past as Future, Habermas emerges as an inspired analyst of contemporary German political and intellectual life. He repeatedly criticizes recent efforts by historical and political commentators to 'normalize' and, in part, to understate the horrors of modern German history. He insists that 1945 - not 1989 - was the crucial turning point in German history, since it was then that West Germany decisively repudiated certain aspects of its cultural and political past (nationalism and antisemitism in particular) and turned towards Western Traditions of democracy: free and open discussion, and respect for the civil rights of all individuals. Similarly, Habermas deplores the renewal of nationalist sentiment in Germany and throughout Europe. Drawing upon his vast historical knowledge and contemporary insight, Habermas argues for heightened emphasis on trans-European and global democratic institutions - institutions far better suited to meet the challenges (and dangers) of the next century.

Author: Winand Gellner
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135761485
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
Since German unification in October, 1990, arguments have raged as to whether the integration process of the former East Germany into the western system has been a success. These essays offer fresh insight and perspectives explaining the effects of unification on Germany and the EU as a whole.

Author: Michael Gehler
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789143551
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Following the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, Germany has experienced recurring turmoil and reinvention. In this ambitious book, Michael Gehler explores the political path Germany has taken since the Yalta Conference, observing the different Germanies against the background of the Cold War, European integration, and international relations. Written from an independent perspective, it provides a valuable assessment of our own times, as he shows how the three Germanies (Bonn, Pankow, and today’s “Berlin Republic”) sought to establish governments that could create stable states.

Author: Manfred Wilke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782382895
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
The long path to the Berlin Wall began in 1945, when Josef Stalin instructed the Communist Party to take power in the Soviet occupation zone while the three Western allies secured their areas of influence. When Germany was split into separate states in 1949, Berlin remained divided into four sectors, with West Berlin surrounded by the GDR but lingering as a captivating showcase for Western values and goods. Following a failed Soviet attempt to expel the allies from West Berlin with a blockade in 1948–49, a second crisis ensued from 1958–61, during which the Soviet Union demanded once and for all the withdrawal of the Western powers and the transition of West Berlin to a “Free City.” Ultimately Nikita Khrushchev decided to close the border in hopes of halting the overwhelming exodus of East Germans into the West. Tracing this path from a German perspective, Manfred Wilke draws on recently published conversations between Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht, head of the East German state, in order to reconstruct the coordination process between these two leaders and the events that led to building the Berlin Wall.

Author: Christian F. Ostermann
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9789639241572
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
"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.

Author: Paul Hockenos
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195181832
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
Over the course of his long and controversial career, Joschka Fischer evolved from an archetypal 1960s radical--a firebrand street activist--into a shrewd political insider, operating at the heights of German politics. In the 1980s he was one of the first elected Greens and went on to become Germany's foreign minister from 1998 to 2005. His famous challenge to Donald Rumsfeld's case for invading Iraq--"Excuse me, I am not convinced"--won him worldwide recognition, and the Bush administration's contempt.Here is both a lively biography of Joschka Fischer and a gripping history 'from below'of postwar Germany. Paul Hockenos begins in the ruins of postwar Germany and guides us through the flashpoints of the late sixties and seventies, from the student protests and the terrorism of the Baader-Meinhof group to the evolution of Europe's premier Green party, and brings us up to the present in the united Germany. He shows how the grassroots movements that became the German Greens challenged and changed the republic's status quo, making postwar Germany more democratic, liberal and worldly along the way. Despite the ideological twists and turns of Fischer and his peers, the lessons of the Holocaust and the Nazi terror remained their constant coordinates. Hockenos traces that political journey, providing readers with unique insight into the impact that these movements and the Greens have had on Germany.Informed by hundreds of interviews with key figures and fellow travelers, Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic presents readers with one of the most intriguing personalities on the European scene, and paints a rich picture of the rebellious generation of 1968 that became the political elite of modern Germany.