Building the East German Myth PDF Download

Author: Alan L. Nothnagle
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Mythology
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Shows how communist youth propaganda contributed to East Germany's success

Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857459759
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
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.

Author: Russel Lemmons
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813140900
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 440

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Book Description
Describes the life of German politician and activist Ernst Thèalmann, who once led the German Communist Party but lost the 1932 presidential election to Adolf Hitler, and examins how his legacy became one of the most important propaganda toold in centralEurope.

Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 184545913X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
The communist German Democratic Republic, founded in 1949 in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany is, for many people, epitomized by the Berlin Wall; Soviet tanks and surveillance by the secret security police, the Stasi, appear to be central. But is this really all there is to the GDR1s history? How did people come to terms with their situation and make new lives behind the Wall? When the social history of the GDR in the 1960s and 1970s is explored, new patterns become evident. A fragile stability emerged in a period 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'. By exploring 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 the contributors collectively develop a more complex approach to the history of East Germany.

Author: Catherine J. Plum
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Author: J. Madarász
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1403938369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
This extensively researched empirical analysis of the GDR in the years 1971-1989 challenges current historical interpretations of GDR history. It focuses on four social groups - youth, women, writers and Christians - to highlight the stability of this socialist society until 1987. The strength of the regime is shown to have been based on a continuously negotiated process of give-and-take involving major parts of the population.

Author: Elaine Kelly
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199998108
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
When the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was founded in 1949, its leaders did not position it as a new state. Instead, they represented East German socialism as the culmination of all that was positive in Germany's past. The GDR was heralded as the second German Enlightenment, a society in which the rational ideals of progress, Bildung, and revolution that had first come to fruition with Goethe and Beethoven would finally achieve their apotheosis. Central to this founding myth was the Germanic musical heritage. Just as the canon had defined the idea of the German nation in the nineteenth-century, so in the GDR it contributed to the act of imagining the collective socialist state. Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic uses the reception of the Germanic musical heritage to chart the changing landscape of musical culture in the German Democratic Republic. Author Elaine Kelly demonstrates the nuances of musical thought in the state, revealing a model of societal ascent and decline that has implications that reach far beyond studies of the GDR itself. The first book-length study in English devoted to music in the GDR, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic is a seminal text for scholars of music in the Cold War and in Germany more widely.

Author: Stewart Anderson
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789206456
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Following World War II, Germany was faced not only with the practical tasks of reconstruction and denazification, but also with the longer-term mission of morally “re-civilizing” its citizens—a goal that persisted through the nation’s 1949 split. One of the most important mediums for effecting reeducation was television, whose strengths were particularly evident in the thousands of television plays that were broadcast in both Germanys in the 1950s and 1960s. This book shows how TV dramas transcended state boundaries and—notwithstanding the ideological differences between East and West—addressed shared issues and themes, helping to ease viewers into confronting uncomfortable moral topics.

Author: Quinn Slobodian
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782387064
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
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.

Author: Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472025880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Beyond Berlin breaks new ground in the ongoing effort to understand how memorials, buildings, and other spaces have figured in Germany's confrontation with its Nazi past. The contributors challenge reigning views of Germany's postwar memory work by examining how specific urban centers apart from the nation's capital have wrestled with their respective Nazi legacies. A wide range of West and East German cities is profiled in the volume: prominent metropolises like Hamburg, dynamic regional centers like Dresden, gritty industrial cities like Wolfsburg, and idyllic rural towns like Quedlinburg. In employing historical, art historical, anthropological, and geographical methodologies to examine these and other important urban centers, the volume's case studies shed new light upon the complex ways in which the confrontation with the Nazi past has directly shaped the German urban landscape since the end of the Second World War. "Beyond Berlin is one of the most fascinating, deeply probing collections ever published on Germany's ongoing confrontation with its Nazi past. Its editors, Gavriel Rosenfeld and Paul Jaskot, have taken the exploration of Germany's urban memorial landscape to its highest level yet." ---James E. Young, Professor and Chair, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, University of Massachusetts Amherst, and author of The Texture of Memory and At Memory's Edge "This is a top-notch collection of essays that positions itself in the populated field of memory studies by bringing together original contributions representing the best of new scholarship on architecture, urban design, monuments, and memory in East and West Germany. Taken together, the essays remind readers that the Nazi past is always present when German architects, urban planners, and politicians make decisions to tear down, rebuild, restore, and memorialize." ---S. Jonathan Wiesen, Department of History, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale