Politics And Popular Opinion In East Germany 1945 68

An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, the book also redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory.

Popular Protest in the East German Revolution is an incisive new study of dissent and protest in the German Democratic Republic, focusing on the upheaval of 1989-1990.

This book asks the reader to reassess the Cold War not just as superpower conflict and high diplomacy, but as social and cultural history. It makes cross-cultural comparisons of the socio cultural aspects of the Cold War across the East/West block divide, dealing with issues including broadcasting, public opinion, and the production and consumption of popular culture.

On 13 August 1961 eighteen million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. Patrick Major explores how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, 'caught out' by Sunday the Thirteenth.

This study examines transitions from Nazism to socialism in Brandenburg between 1945 and 1952. It explores the grassroots responses and their relative implications within the context of both punitive and rehabilitative measures implemented by the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) and the communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). The doctoral study is based on archival and oral history sources and addresses two main research questions: First, in what ways did people at the grassroots attempt to challenge the imposition of punitive measures, and did their responses have any effect on the manner in which these policies were implemented at a grassroots level? These punitive measures were designed to remove remnants of Nazism and included punitive Soviet practices, Soviet NKVD camps and denazification and sequestering. Second, to what extent did grassroots Brandenburgers participate in political organisations which were designed to integrate East Germans during the rehabilitative stage and what impact did these responses have on the post-war transition? This study focuses on the National Democratic Party and the Society for German-Soviet Friendship as well as examining wider factors which may have impeded and facilitated the processes of post-war transitions. Two main arguments are proposed. First, the imposition of wide-ranging punitive measures often posed an existential threat at a grassroots level, and therefore at times elicited grassroots actions, albeit severely restricted by practical and political constraints. In turn, these grassroots responses could occasionally have some local impact and somewhat affect the manner in which policies were implemented at a grassroots level in Brandenburg. Second, it is argued that the rehabilitative stage, despite some challenges, generally provided a favourable system for grassroots integration in which the needs of the policy makers and a significant proportion of grassroots individuals somewhat converged, eventually contributing to the partial stabilisation of the emerging East German socialist state. Copyright remains with the author Dr Julie Deering-Kraft Citations: Deering-Kraft, JN; (2013) Transitions from Nazism to Socialism: Grassroots Responses to Punitive and Rehabilitative Measures in Brandenburg, 1945-1952. Doctoral thesis (PhD), UCL (University College London). Available at http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1416290/

The impact of Communism on the twentieth century was massive, equal to that of the two world wars. Until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, historians knew relatively little about the secretive world of communist states and parties. Since then, the opening of state, party, and diplomatic archives of the former Eastern Bloc has released a flood of new documentation. The thirty-five essays in this Handbook, written by an international team of scholars, draw on this new material to offer a global history of communism in the twentieth century. In contrast to many histories that concentrate on the Soviet Union, The Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism is genuinely global in its coverage, paying particular attention to the Chinese Revolution. It is 'global', too, in the sense that the essays seek to integrate history 'from above' and 'from below', to trace the complex mediations between state and society, and to explore the social and cultural as well as the political and economic realities that shaped the lives of citizens fated to live under communist rule. The essays reflect on the similarities and differences between communist states in order to situate them in their socio-political and cultural contexts and to capture their changing nature over time. Where appropriate, they also reflect on how the fortunes of international communism were shaped by the wider economic, political, and cultural forces of the capitalist world. The Handbook provides an informative introduction for those new to the field and a comprehensive overview of the current state of scholarship for those seeking to deepen their understanding.

The third edition of A History of Germany traces the dramatic social, cultural, and political tensions in Germany since 1918. Offers a persuasive interpretation of the dynamics of twentieth-century German history Treats German history from 1918-2008 from the perspective of division and reunification, covering East and West German history in equal depth Covers the self-destructive Weimar Republic, the extremes of genocide and military aggression in the Nazi era, the division of the nation in the Cold War, and the collapse of communist East Germany and unification in 1990 New edition includes updates throughout, especially covering the Nazi period and the Holocaust; a new chapter on Germany since the 1990s; and a substantially revised and updated bibliography

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?