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Revenge of the Domestic examines gender relations in East Germany from 1945 to the 1970s, focusing especially on the relationship between ordinary women, the Communist Party, and the state created by the Communists, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The book weaves together personal stories from interviews, statistical material, and evidence from archival research in Berlin, Potsdam, Leipzig, Merseburg, and Chemnitz to reconstruct the complex interplay between state policy toward women and the family on the one hand, and women's reactions to policy on the other. Donna Harsch demonstrates that women resisted state decisions as citizens, wageworkers, mothers, wives, and consumers, and that...
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.
Ideological Equals: Women Architects in Socialist Europe 1945-1989 presents an alternative narrative of women in architecture. This edited collection focuses on the woman architect in a position of equality with their male counterparts.
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By and large, the histories of East and West Germany have been studied in relative isolation. And yet, for all their differences, the historical trajectories of both nations were interrelated in complex ways, shaped by economic crises, social and cultural changes, protest movements, and other phenomena so diffuse that they could hardly be contained by the Iron Curtain. Accordingly, A History Shared and Divided offers a collective portrait of the two Germanies that is both broad and deep. It brings together comprehensive thematic surveys by specialists in social history, media, education, the environment, and similar topics to assemble a monumental account of both nations from the crises of the 1970s to—and beyond—the reunification era.
Seit 2011 stehen Wendekinder, als letzte partiell in der DDR sozialisierte Gruppe, welche sich in Teilen selbst als Dritte Generation Ostdeutschland bezeichnen, im Fokus der Öffentlichkeit. Mit diesem Band liegt eine transdisziplinäre Betrachtung des Phänomens vor. Dabei wird das Forschungsfeld in den Dimensionen Diskurs, Typen und Positionierung(en) kartiert. Im zweiten Moment ist durch die Bildung eines Analyserasters, dem Rostocker-Generationen-Modell, eine Betrachtung der Frage nach dem „Zusammenwachsen“ der beiden deutschen Staaten gelungen. Die Vielfalt der Beiträge verdeutlicht eine initiale Erkenntnis: Es handelt sich bei den Wendekindern um eine hochgradig diverse Generation, welcher jedoch aufgrund ihrer doppelten Sozialisation eine ausgleichende triangulierende Vermittlerposition zukommt.
Kirchen sind keine Galerien. Zeitgenössische Kunst eignet sich in der Regel nicht für die Ausstattung von Kirchen. Welchen Sinn es trotzdem haben kann, Kunst in Kirchen zu zeigen, entwickelt der Autor in Auseinandersetzung mit der angelsächsischen Tradition der Site-specific Art. Was bedeutet es für Künstler und Gemeinden, wenn sich Kunst kontextsensibel auf den Kirchenraum bezieht? Welche Aufschlüsse entstehen für beide Seiten, wenn Kunst temporär als fremder Gast für Kirchenräume arbeitet?
Topf and Sons designed and built the crematoria at the concentration camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buchenwald, Belzec, Dachau, Mauthausen and Gusen. At its height sixty-six Topf triple muffle ovens were in operation – forty-six of which were at Auschwitz. In five years the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz had been the engine of the holocaust, facilitating the murder and incineration of more than one million people, most of them Jews. Yet such a spectacularly evil feat of engineering was designed not by the Nazi SS, but by a small respectable firm of German engineers: the owners and engineers of J. A. Topf and Sons. These were not Nazi sadists, but men who were playboys and the sons of train drivers. They were driven not by ideology, but by love affairs, personal ambition and bitter personal rivalries to create the ultimate human killing and disposal machines – even at the same time as their company sheltered Nazi enemies from the death camps. The intense conflagration of their very ordinary motives created work that surpassed in its inhumanity even the demands of the SS. In order to fulfil their own 'dreams' they created the ultimate human nightmare.
The ruling communist parties of the postwar Soviet Bloc possessed nearly unprecedented power to shape every level of society; perhaps in part because of this, they have been routinely depicted as monolithic, austere, and even opaque institutions. Communist Parties Revisited takes a markedly different approach, investigating everyday life within basic organizations to illuminate the inner workings of Eastern Bloc parties. Ranging across national and transnational contexts, the contributions assembled here reconstruct the rituals of party meetings, functionaries’ informal practices, intra-party power struggles, and the social production of ideology to give a detailed account of state socialist policymaking on a micro-historical scale.