Life Stories From The German Democratic Republic

More than thirty years after German reunification, Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic addresses how life in the GDR is remembered, thereby enriching and complexifying the narratives of East German life found in public history, museums, tourist venues, film, media and popular fiction. The frequent stress on material lack, social restrictions and the repressive state is expanded and reconfigured by interviewees who variously both challenge and confirm widespread assumptions about what it meant to live in the GDR. Aimed at a wide readership, this book gives English-speaking readers access to varied and detailed accounts of everyday life, individual engagement with state institutions and different views of GDR politics, society and culture.

Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic offers detailed accounts of everyday life, state institutions, and different views of politics, society and culture across decades that challenge and complexify our understandings of what it meant to live in the GDR.

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.

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a wealth of historical writing about the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at the macro level. This book supplements that record with a history written from the micro level, detailing what it was like to live in that society with the advantages of both an insider's and an outsider's perspectives. As a diplomat assigned to the U.S. Embassy in East Berlin, Dr. Sandford had sources of information inaccessible to most visitors from the West. Representing one of the four WWII Allied powers with occupation rights in Berlin, he experienced at firsthand the complexities of four-power control of that city. He also traveled freely within East Germany, speaking with GDR government officials, dissidents, and average citizens, including clergymen who shared their informed views on what was really going on in that society. Framed as a personal record for his two daughters who were small children at the time, this memoir describes Dr. Sandford's experiences and impressions of East Germany in its latter years (1984-87) and those of his family. With a combination of anecdotes, narrative descriptions, and informed analysis, it conveys the texture of life there both for local people and for resident diplomats. Finally, it recounts how he and his East German contacts experienced the fall of the Wall and the transition to democracy in their individual ways.

The real life stories of eight East Germans caught up in the dramatic transition from Communism to Capitalism by the fall of the Berlin Wall - and what they feel about life after the Wall.

A history of private life in the German Democratic Republic, showing how the private sphere assumed central importance in the GDR from the very outset, and revealing the myriad ways in which privacy was expressed, staged and defended by citizens living in a communist society.

The shifting patterns of relationships in Central and Eastern Europe require that students of international relations be well versed in the attitudes and internal structures of the nations involved. Until now, material in English on the German Democratic Republic has consisted primarily of journalistic reminiscences or narrow scholarly treatments. Recognizing the need and responding to it, the authors of this book—leaders in the study of the GDR—present an up-to-date and comprehensive look at the country, focusing on domestic political and social change. The authors are agreed that the GDR is not only here to stay, but is also a rather stable society that can withstand moderate, well-regulated processes of change. They address education, intellectual life, the military, foreign relations, and the economy, as well as the customary subjects of politics and governmental direction.