Conflict and Compromise in East Germany, 1971–1989

Conflict and Compromise in East Germany, 1971–1989
Author: J. Madarász
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2003-08-08
Genre: History
ISBN: 1403938369

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.

Bringing Culture to the Masses

Bringing Culture to the Masses
Author: Esther von Richthofen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781845454586

This text explores how cultural life in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was strictly controlled by the ruling party, the SED, through attempts to dictate the way people spent their free time. It shows how people's cultural life in the GDR developed a dynamic of its own.

After the 'Socialist Spring'

After the 'Socialist Spring'
Author: George Last
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 286
Release: 2009-03-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1845459016

Historical analysis of the German Democratic Republic has tended to adopt a top-down model of the transmission of authority. However, developments were more complicated than the standard state/society dichotomy that has dominated the debate among GDR historians. Drawing on a broad range of archival material from state and SED party sources as well as Stasi files and individual farm records along with some oral history interviews, this book provides a thorough investigation of the transformation of the rural sector from a range of perspectives. Focusing on the region of Bezirk Erfurt, the author examines on the one hand how East Germans responded to the end of private farming by resisting, manipulating but also participating in the new system of rural organization. However, he also shows how the regime sought via its representatives to implement its aims with a combination of compromise and material incentive as well as administrative pressure and other more draconian measures. The reader thus gains valuable insight into the processes by which the SED regime attained stability in the 1970s and yet was increasingly vulnerable to growing popular dissatisfaction and economic stagnation and decline in the 1980s, leading to its eventual collapse.

Power and Society in the GDR, 1961-1979

Power and Society in the GDR, 1961-1979
Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2009
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781845454357

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.

Four-Color Communism

Four-Color Communism
Author: Sean Eedy
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 230
Release: 2021-02-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800730012

As with all other forms of popular culture, comics in East Germany were tightly controlled by the state. Comics were employed as extensions of the regime’s educational system, delivering official ideology so as to develop the “socialist personality” of young people and generate enthusiasm for state socialism. The East German children who avidly read these comics, however, found their own meanings in and projected their own desires upon them. Four-Color Communism gives a lively account of East German comics from both perspectives, showing how the perceived freedoms they embodied created expectations that ultimately limited the regime’s efforts to bring readers into the fold.

Embracing Democracy in Modern Germany

Embracing Democracy in Modern Germany
Author: Michael L. Hughes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 312
Release: 2021-01-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 1350153761

Across the modern era, the traditional stereotype of Germans as authoritarian and subservient has faded, as they have become (mostly) model democrats. This book, for the first time, examines 130 years of history to comprehensively address the central questions of German democratization: How and why did this process occur? What has democracy meant to various Germans? And how stable is their, or indeed anyone's, democracy? Looking at six German regimes across thirteen decades, this study enables you to see how and why some Germans have always chosen to be politically active (even under dictatorships); the enormous range of conceptions of political culture and democracy they have held; and how interactions among various factors undercut or facilitated democracy at different times. Michael L. Hughes also makes clear that recent surges of support for 'populism' and 'authoritarianism' have not come out of nowhere but are inherent in long-standing contestations about democracy and political citizenship. Hughes argues that democracy – in Germany or elsewhere – cannot be a story of adversity overcome which culminates in a happy ending; it is an ongoing, open-ended process whose ultimate outcome remains uncertain.

Uprising in East Germany 1953

Uprising in East Germany 1953
Author: Christian F. Ostermann
Publisher: Central European University Press
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2001-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9789639241572

"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.

Celluloid Revolt

Celluloid Revolt
Author: Christina Gerhardt
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2019
Genre: History
ISBN: 1571139958

Provides new insights into German-language cinema around 1968 and its relationship to the period's epoch-making cultural and political happenings. The epoch-making revolutionary period universally known in Germany as '68 can be argued to have predated that year and to have extended well into the 1970s. It continues to affect German and Austrian society and culture to this day. Yet while scholars have written extensively about 1968 and the cinema of other countries, relatively little sustained scholarly attention has thus far been paid to 1968 and West German, East German, and Austrian cinemas. Now, five decades later, Celluloid Revolt sets out to redress that situation, generating new insights into what constituted German-language cinema around 1968 and beyond. Contributors engage a range of cinemas, spanning experimental and avant-garde cinema, installations and exhibits; short films, animated films, and crime films; collectively produced cinemas, feminist films, and Arbeiterfilme (workers' films); as well as their relationship to cinemas of other countries, such as French cinéma vérité and US direct cinema. Contributors: Marco Abel, Tilman Baumgärtel, Madeleine Bernstorff, Timothy Scott Brown, Michael Dobstadt, Sean Eedy, Thomas Elsaesser, IanFleishman, Christina Gerhardt, Lisa Haegele, Randall Halle, Priscilla Layne, Ervin Malakaj, Kalani Michell, Evelyn Preuss, Patricia Anne Simpson, Fabian Tietke, Andrew Stefan Weiner. Christina Gerhardt is Associate Professor of German and Film Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Marco Abel is Professor of English and Film Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

From Helsinki to Belgrade

From Helsinki to Belgrade
Author: Vladimir Bilandžić
Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 3899719387

After the heads of state and government of almost all European countries, the USA, and Canada signed the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki on August 1st, 1975, little was heard about the CSCE process. However, far away from the headline-grabbing meetings between the leading politicians of the USA and the USSR as well as the Geneva negotiations on disarmament, the Helsinki process proved to be an efficient framework for the East-West negotiations. The inconclusive Belgrade CSCE Meeting of 1977-1978 - after six months the delegations were only able to agree on a brief final document - was nevertheless a significant milestone for the CSCE process itself: negotiation rules were drawn up, interpreted, negotiated and re-negotiated. The contributions to this volume offer solid insights into the follow-up meeting in Belgrade in 1977/78, the Cold War, and in particular the CSCE process.