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Author: Gary Bruce Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199750815 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
Based on previously classified documents and on interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens, The Firm is the first comprehensive history of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. Focusing on Gransee and Perleberg, two East German districts located north of Berlin, Gary Bruce reveals how the Stasi monitored small-town East Germany. He paints an eminently human portrait of those involved with this repressive arm of the government, featuring interviews with former officers that uncover a wide array of personalities, from devoted ideologues to reluctant opportunists, most of whom talked frankly about East Germany's obsession with surveillance. Their paths after the collapse of Communism are gripping stories of resurrection and despair, of renewal and demise, of remorse and continued adherence to the movement. The book also sheds much light on the role of the informant, the Stasi's most important tool in these out-of-the-way areas. Providing on-the-ground empirical evidence of how the Stasi operated on a day-to-day basis with ordinary people, this remarkable volume offers an unparalleled picture of life in a totalitarian state.
Author: Gary Bruce Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0199750815 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 263
Book Description
Based on previously classified documents and on interviews with former secret police officers and ordinary citizens, The Firm is the first comprehensive history of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, at the grassroots level. Focusing on Gransee and Perleberg, two East German districts located north of Berlin, Gary Bruce reveals how the Stasi monitored small-town East Germany. He paints an eminently human portrait of those involved with this repressive arm of the government, featuring interviews with former officers that uncover a wide array of personalities, from devoted ideologues to reluctant opportunists, most of whom talked frankly about East Germany's obsession with surveillance. Their paths after the collapse of Communism are gripping stories of resurrection and despair, of renewal and demise, of remorse and continued adherence to the movement. The book also sheds much light on the role of the informant, the Stasi's most important tool in these out-of-the-way areas. Providing on-the-ground empirical evidence of how the Stasi operated on a day-to-day basis with ordinary people, this remarkable volume offers an unparalleled picture of life in a totalitarian state.
Author: Mike Dennis Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 0857451960 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 254
Book Description
Based 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.
Author: Gregory Witkowski Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press ISBN: 1501757652 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 297
Book Description
Communist regimes are defined by dictatorial power, state planning, and active propaganda machines. In The Campaign State, Gregory Witkowski explores the intersection of these three elements in East Germany by focusing on mass mobilizations. He dissects the anatomy of campaigns and argues that while mass mobilizations are often perceived as symbols of strength, they also indicate underlying systemic weaknesses. By focusing on the ability of regimes to mobilize individuals to transform society, he explains both the durability and the ultimate demise of the German Democratic Republic. This study seamlessly blends an analysis of top-down campaign initiatives with the influence of such mobilizations on the grassroots level. For more than thirty years, East German leaders doggedly extended such mobilization efforts, yet complete success remained elusive. Witkowski reveals how local leaders, campaign participants, and peasants acted in ways both compliant and noncompliant with party goals to create societal change. Campaigns became a ubiquitous part of life under communist rule. Witkowski shows that such mobilizations were initially an integral part of state-planning efforts and only later became ritualized, as party portrayals of goals and accomplishments diverged from East Germans' lived experience. He argues that incessant campaigns exposed a substantial gap between rhetoric and reality in the German Democratic Republic that undermined the regime's legitimacy. This valuable and original study will appeal to scholars and students of German history, Communism, and state planning.
Author: Raymond S. Wright, III Publisher: Genealogical Publishing Com ISBN: 9780806318158 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 586
Book Description
This is an exhaustive guide to family history sources in German archives at every level of jurisdiction, public and private. Anyone searching for data about people who lived in Germany in the past need only determine which archives today have jurisdiction over the records that were created by church or state institutions.
Author: Mary Fulbrook Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 019161727X Category : History Languages : en Pages :
Book Description
Dissonant Lives is not a standard 'history of Germany' in the twentieth century, or even of the German dictatorships. It is concerned with the ways in which Germans of different ages and life stages lived through this terrible period in German history, and how they interpreted, confronted, and responded to the multiple challenges of their times. In volume two, Mary Fulbrook explores the move from the Nazi dictatorship to the communism that succeeded it, examining the experiences and perceptions of selected individuals, and how major historical events affected the course of their lives and their outlooks. In doing so, she provides a new understanding of the ways in which not only the character of the German state, economy, and social structure changed over the century, but also the very character of the German people themselves.
Author: Felix Robin Schulz Publisher: Berghahn Books ISBN: 1782380140 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
As 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.
Author: Gary Bruce
Author: Gary Bruce
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Author: Mike Dennis
Author: Gregory Witkowski
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Author: Raymond S. Wright, III
Author: Mary Fulbrook
Author: Horst Kohl
Author: Felix Robin Schulz