The Official Concept of the Nation in the Former GDR PDF Download

Author: Joanna McKay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429806000
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
First published in 1998, this volume joined the effort to understand the former German Democratic Republic, with the aim of reaching a better understanding of the psychologically painful process of German reunification following the collapse of East-German communism in 1989. While born illegitimate and artificial, the country determined the lives of millions of people, despite having now disappeared from the map. This study from Joanna McKay incorporates previously unavailable archive material and focuses on some of the most challenging, ever-present tasks for the GDR leaders. In particular, she examines how they approached explaining the division with West Germany without undermining the legitimacy of the GDR.

Author: Marcus Colla
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192865900
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
No example demonstrates the fluidity of the past within the German Democratic Republic more powerfully than the history of the Prussian state. Initially attacked in East German official histories as the historical engine of German militarism and reaction, Prussia underwent a remarkabletransformation in official and public memory from around the end of the 1970s. This was the so-called 'Prussia-Renaissance', in which, for the first time, the East German state began to recognise and even celebrate figures from Prussian history who had not served a 'progressive' agenda. But the'Prussia-Renaissance' was also a political and cultural phenomenon with a wide public resonance. The 'Prussia-Renaissance' may have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon, but it evidently opened a deep vein in the historical memory of the German Democratic Republic that defied reduction to 'highpolitics' alone. This book asks why.Using the case study of Prussia, Marcus Colla presents a multi-perspective approach to the way that a distinctive 'historical culture' was constructed in the German Democratic Republic. It not only evaluates the roles played by political figures, historians, and cultural elites, but also heritagepreservationists, exhibition curators, heimat museums, television producers, novelists and playwrights, and singers - the purveyors of what we might more generally term 'popular culture'. In essence, Colla poses four fundamental questions for our understanding of life, politics and culture incommunist East Germany: how was history there made? How was it understood? How was it contested? And how was it used?

Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781845454357
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
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.

Author: Frank Jacob
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110729296
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
Nationalism was declared to be dead too early. A postnational age was announced, and liberalism claimed to have been victorious by the end of the Cold War. At the same time postnational order was proclaimed in which transnational alliances like the European Union were supposed to become more important in international relations. But we witnessed the rise a strong nationalism during the early 21st century instead, and right wing parties are able to gain more and more votes in elections that are often characterized by nationalist agendas. This volume shows how nationalist dreams and fears alike determine politics in an age that was supposed to witness a rather peaceful coexistence by those who consider transnational ideas more valuable than national demands. It will deal with different case studies to show why and how nationalism made its way back to the common consciousness and which elements stimulated the re-establishment of the aggressive nation state. The volume will therefore look at the continuities of empire, actual and imagined, the role of "foreign-" and "otherness" for nationalist narratives, and try to explain how globalization stimulated the rise of 21st century nationalisms as well.

Author: TARIK CYRIL AMAR
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190916281
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
James Bond's Socialist Rivals focuses on blockbuster television series in the former Soviet bloc of the Cold War to recover a world of spy fiction entertainment that was both hugely popular and of great and deliberate political importance for the Communist regimes.

Author: Hannes Siegrist
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633861861
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
The book deals with the expansion and institutionalization of intellectual property norms in the twentieth century, with a European focus. Its thirteen chapters revolve around the transfer, adaptation and the ambivalence of legal transplants in the interface between national and international projects, trends and contexts. The first part discusses the institutionalization of copyright and patent law in the frame- work of the bigger political and economic projects of the twentieth century. The second and third parts of the collection review relevant processes in the communist regimes and the post-communist societies, respectively. The essays point at processes of enculturation, trans-nationalization and universalization of norms, as well as practices of incorporation and resistance. The contributors lay a particular emphasis on the role and activity of social actors in the establishment and validation of intellectual property norms and regimes, from the function of experts and creation of expert cultures to the compelling power of popular street protests.

Author: Jan Palmowski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9781107690424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Twenty years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, historians still struggle to explain how an apparently stable state imploded with such vehemence. This book shows how 'national' identity was invented in the GDR and how citizens engaged with it. Jan Palmowski argues that it was hard for individuals to identify with the GDR amid the threat of Stasi informants and with the accelerating urban and environmental decay of the 1970s and 1980s. Since socialism contradicted its own ideals of community, identity and environmental care, citizens developed rival meanings of nationhood and identities and learned to mask their growing distance from socialism beneath regular public assertions of socialist belonging. This stabilized the party's rule until 1989. However, when the revolution came, the alternative identifications citizens had developed for decades allowed them to abandon their 'nation', the GDR, with remarkable ease.

Author: Sabine Kuhlmann
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030536971
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This open access book presents a topical, comprehensive and differentiated analysis of Germany’s public administration and reforms. It provides an overview on key elements of German public administration at the federal, Länder and local levels of government as well as on current reform activities of the public sector. It examines the key institutional features of German public administration; the changing relationships between public administration, society and the private sector; the administrative reforms at different levels of the federal system and numerous sectors; and new challenges and modernization approaches like digitalization, Open Government and Better Regulation. Each chapter offers a combination of descriptive information and problem-oriented analysis, presenting key topical issues in Germany which are relevant to an international readership.

Author: Bulent Gokay
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317881338
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
From the hardening grip of Soviet domination under Brezhnev to the collapse of communism and its aftermath, Bulent Gokay provides the essential introduction to Eastern Europe in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 spelt the end of reformist communism and the tightening of Soviet control throughout Eastern Europe. In spite of this, several countries within the Soviet Bloc managed to retain varying degrees of independence over the next two decades. Focusing on the struggle towards economic and social modernisation in the region and the competing influences of East and West in a dangerous Cold War. Bulent Gokay shows how individual circumstances and diverse national characteristics made a uniform application of the Soviet model impossible, and charts the growing resistance to domination and the momentous events which finally toppled Soviet power in the region.

Author: Martin Mevius
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317986407
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
There are two popular myths concerning the relationship between communism and nationalism. The first is that nationalism and communism are wholly antagonistic and mutually exclusive. The second is the assertion that in communist Eastern Europe nationalism was oppressed before 1989, to emerge triumphant after the Berlin Wall came down. Reality was different. Certainly from 1945 onwards, communist parties presented themselves as heirs to national traditions and guardians of national interests. The communist states of Central and Eastern Europe constructed "socialist patriotism," a form of loyalty to their own state of workers and peasants. Up to 1989, communists in Eastern Europe sang the national anthem, and waved the national flag next to the red banner. The use of national images was not the exception, but the rule. From Cuba to Korea, all communist parties attempted to gain national legitimacy. This was not incidental or a deviation from Marxist orthodoxy, but ingrained in the theory and practice of the communist movement since its inception. The study of communist national legitimacy is an exciting new field. This book presents examples of communist attempts to co-opt nationalism from both sides of the iron curtain and lays bare the striking similarities between such diverse cases as the socialist patriotism of the Bulgarian Communist Party and the national line of the Portuguese communists, between Romanian communist nation building and the national ideology of the Spanish Communist Party. This book was published as a special issue of Nationalities Papers.