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Becoming East German
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.
The God behind the Marble
A history of Germans’ attempts to transform society through art in an age of revolution. For German philosophers at the turn of the nineteenth century, beautiful works of art acted as beacons of freedom, instruments of progress that could model and stimulate the moral autonomy of their beholders. Amid the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Germans struggled to uphold these ideals as they contended with the destruction of art collections, looting, and questions about cultural property. As artworks fell prey to the violence they were supposed to transcend, some began to wonder how art could deliver liberation if it could also quickly become a spoil of war. Alice Goff considers a variety of works—including forty porphyry columns from the tomb of Charlemagne, the Quadriga from the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Laocoön group from Rome, a medieval bronze reliquary from Goslar, a Last Judgment from Danzig, and the mummified body of an official from the Rhenish hamlet of Sinzig—following the conflicts over the ownership, interpretation, conservation, and exhibition of German collections during the Napoleonic period and its aftermath.
Antifascist Humanism and the Politics of Cultural Renewal in Germany
A study of German traditions of cultural renewal from their origins in antifascist activism in German exile communities in Europe and Latin America during World War II to their failure during the emerging Cold War in occupied Germany and the early German Democratic Republic.
Blood and Belief
"A wonderful, rich, and fascinating book, and a great read. Biale explores the meanings of blood within Jewish and Christian cultures from the blood of the sacrifices of the book of Leviticus to the blood of the Eucharist to the blood of medieval blood libels and the place of blood in Nazi ideology. Biale shows that blood symbolism stands at the center of the divide between Judaism and Christianity. This book will be the point of departure for all future studies of the subject."—Shaye J.D. Cohen, Harvard University "I know of no other work that, through numerous insights and useful distinctions, so alerts us to and comprehensively documents the ongoing constitutive role of Christian and anti-Semitic perceptions of Jewish existence and the interactions between them. Whereas much contemporary historiography has become so specialized that historians have surrendered the larger picture, David Biale's panoramic perspective reveals the great value and interest of this work."—Steven E. Aschheim, author of Beyond the Border: The German-Jewish Legacy Abroad
Socialist Laments
The Ruin -- The Socialists' Cemetery -- The Church -- Concentration Camp Memorials -- The Artists' Cemetery.
The Human Rights Dictatorship
Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.
American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005
Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender have assembled an essential reference for policymakers, administrators, and all those interested in the history and sociology of higher education.
Executing the Rosenbergs
In 1950, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for allegedly passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union, an affair FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover labeled the "crime of the century." Their case became an international sensation, inspiring petitions, letters of support, newspaper editorials, and protests in countries around the world. Nevertheless, the Rosenbergs were executed after years of appeals, making them the only civilians ever put to death for conspiracy-related activities. Yet even after their executions, protests continued. The Rosenberg case quickly transformed into legend, while the media spotlight shifted to their two orphaned sons. In Executing the Rosenbergs...
Mobility in the Russian, Central and East European Past
The "new mobilities paradigm" which emerged at the beginning of the twenty-first century has identified mobility as a process intrinsic to the human experience and fundamental to the formation of social and political structures. This volume breaks new ground by demonstrating the role of the journey as a key motor of human development in Russia, central and east Europe in the modern period. It does so by means of twelve case studies that examine different types of movement, both voluntary and involuntary, temporary and permanent, short- and long-distance, into, out of, and around the region.
