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Composing the Party Line
This book examines the exercise of power in the Stalinist music world as well as the ways in which composers and ordinary people responded to it. It presents a comparative inquiry into the relationship between music and politics in the German Democratic Republic and Poland from the aftermath of World War II through Stalin's death in 1953, concluding with the slow process of de-Stalinization in the mid-to late-1950s. The author explores how the Communist parties in both countries expressed their attitudes to music of all kinds, and how composers, performers, and audiences cooperated with, resisted, and negotiated these suggestions and demands. Based on a deep analysis of the archival and cont...
The Socialist Good Life
What does the good life mean in a "backward" place? As communist regimes denigrated widespread unemployment and consumer excess in Western countries, socialist Eastern European states simultaneously legitimized their power through their apparent ability to satisfy consumers' needs. Moving beyond binaries of production and consumption, the essays collected here examine the lessons consumption studies can offer about ethnic and national identity and the role of economic expertise in shaping consumer behavior. From Polish VCRs to Ukrainian fashion boutiques, tropical fruits in the GDR to cinemas in Belgrade, The Socialist Good Life explores what consumption means in a worker state where communist ideology emphasizes collective needs over individual pleasures.
Teaching a Dark Chapter
Teaching a Dark Chapter explores how textbook narratives about the Fascist/Nazi past in Italy, East Germany, and West Germany followed relatively calm, undisturbed paths of little change until isolated "flashpoints" catalyzed the educational infrastructure into periods of rapid transformation. Though these flashpoints varied among Italy and the Germanys, they all roughly conformed to a chronological scheme and permanently changed how each "dark past" was represented. Historians have often neglected textbooks as sources in their engagement with the reconstruction of postfascist states and the development of postwar memory culture. But as Teaching a Dark Chapter demonstrates, textbooks yield n...
Living with the Land
For a long time agriculture and rural life were dismissed by many contemporaries as irrelevant or old-fashioned. Contrasted with cities as centers of intellectual debate and political decision-making, the countryside seemed to be becoming increasingly irrelevant. Today, politicians in many European countries are starting to understand that the neglect of the countryside has created grave problems. Similarly, historians are remembering that European history in the twentieth century was strongly influenced by problems connected to the production of food, access to natural resources, land rights, and the political representation and activism of rural populations. Hence, the handbook offers an o...
Migrating Memories
Charts the transnational story of Romanian Germans in modern Europe - their migration, their position as a minority, and their memories.
The Stalin Cult in East Germany and the Making of the Postwar Soviet Empire, 1945–1961
This book examines the construction, dissemination, and reception of the Stalin cult in East Germany from the end of World War II to the building of the Berlin Wall. By exporting Stalin’s cult to the Eastern bloc, Moscow aspired to symbolically unite the communist states in an imagined cult community pivoting around the Soviet leader. Based on Russian and German archives, this work analyzes the emergence of the Stalin cult’s transnational dimension. On one hand, it looks at how Soviet representations of power were transferred and adapted in the former “enemy’s” country. On the other hand, it reconstructs “spaces of agency” where different agents and generations interpreted, man...
Dropping out of Socialism
The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.
Marginal Spaces and Cultures of Dissent in Socialist Romania's Black Sea
This book analyzes two Romanian villages – 2 Mai and Vama Veche – as spaces of relative freedom during the last decades of socialist rule. This microhistorical study refutes simplistic views of the communist past which focus on political figures and events, and instead explores ordinary people and everyday life. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, it considers a broad range of sources, including official Communist Party documents, secret police files, personal memoirs, oral history interviews, ethnographic films, songs, and artistic performances. This book intertwines three narrative threads: that of the visitors (mainly members of the Romanian intelligentsia, young people, and hippies); that of the local inhabitants; and that of 'authority' (local and central state agents actively engaged in surveillance and supervision). In doing so, it interrogates the spectrum of consent/dissent and resistance/collaboration hitherto neglected in scholarship.
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.
The Age of Interconnection
A panoramic view of global history from the end of World War Two to the dawn of the new millennium, and a portrait of an age of unprecedented transformation. In this ambitious, groundbreaking, and sweeping work, Jonathan Sperber guides readers through six decades of global history, from the end of World War Two to the onset of the new millennium. As Sperber's immersive and propulsive book reveals, the defining quality of these decades involved the rising and unstoppable flow of people, goods, capital, and ideas across boundaries, continents, and oceans, creating prosperity in some parts of the world, destitution in others, increasing a sense of collective responsibility while also reinforcin...
