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Power and Society in the GDR, 1961-1979
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.
A Dictionary of Contemporary World History
Authoritative and up-to-date, this dictionary provides in-depth coverage of the major historical figures and events from 1900 right up to the present day. Jan Palmowski's comprehensive work will be of interest to a wide audience.
Inventing a Socialist Nation
Twenty years after the collapse of the German Democratic Republic, historians still struggle to explain how an apparently stable state imploded with such vehemence. This book shows how 'national' identity was invented in the GDR and how citizens engaged with it. Jan Palmowski argues that it was hard for individuals to identify with the GDR amid the threat of Stasi informants and with the accelerating urban and environmental decay of the 1970s and 1980s. Since socialism contradicted its own ideals of community, identity and environmental care, citizens developed rival meanings of nationhood and identities and learned to mask their growing distance from socialism beneath regular public assertions of socialist belonging. This stabilized the party's rule until 1989. However, when the revolution came, the alternative identifications citizens had developed for decades allowed them to abandon their 'nation', the GDR, with remarkable ease.
Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe
Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe maps the generation and growth of novel forms of belonging in the years after World War II, crisscrossing the continent from Madrid to Warsaw and from Athens to London. Even as Europe struggled to rebuild, new forms of identity, statehood, and citizenship were beginning to take shape. Rachel Chin and Samuel Clowes Huneke bring together a diverse group of scholars to illustrate how citizenship was reimagined in the postwar decades in unusual settings and unexpected ways, while highlighting how ordinary citizens, living in democratic and authoritarian regimes alike, struggled to forge new kinds of belonging through which to assert their human rights and dignity. Ultimately, Reimagining Citizenship in Postwar Europe contends that if we are to grapple with fraying citizenship in the twenty-first century, we must first look to when, how, and why citizenship originated in the calamitous years after World War II.
The Fall of the GDR
The book charts the dramatic months leading to one of the most profound changes of the 20th century, the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the restoration of German unity in 1990. The author analyses the nature of Communist rule in the GDR over 40 years, its few strengths and its many weaknesses, and the myths which grew up around it. This book places the GDR in its international setting as the proud ally of the Soviet Union in the Warsaw Pact. It examines the reactions abroad to the unfolding revolution. The text is based on a wide variety of written sources and many interviews with leading Communist figures, such as Krenz and Modrow, and with their opponents and successors, and former Stasi officers and the dissidents they tried to crush. It greatly benefits from the author's decades of involvement with East Germany, including personal friendships there, before 1989 and his eye-witness accounts of many of the events during Die Wende. It should be of interest not only to students of German politics, contemporary history and the Cold War, but to all who are curious about the momentous times through which we have lived.
The War Against Catholicism
This is an innovative and important study of the relationship between Catholicism and liberalism, the two most significant and irreconcilable movements in nineteenth-century Germany
Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin
On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall grew to become an ever-present physical and psychological divider in this capital city and a powerful symbol of Cold War tensions. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, including the built environment. In Architecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided Berlin Emily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in both halves of Berlin during the Wall era, revealin...
The Ashgate Research Companion to Imperial Germany
Germany's imperial era (1871-1918) continues to attract both scholars and the general public alike. The American historian Roger Chickering has referred to the historiography on the Kaiserreich as an 'extraordinary body of historical scholarship', whose quality and diversity stands comparison with that of any other episode in European history. This Companion is a significant addition to this body of scholarship with the emphasis very much on the present and future. Questions of continuity remain a vital and necessary line of historical enquiry and while it may have been short-lived, the Kaiserreich remains central to modern German and European history. The volume allows 25 experts, from acro...
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.
Gaullist Attack on Canada, 1967-1997
Drawing on the writings of leading Gaullists and on analysis of France's actions in other former French colonies, this veteran historian of France and New France contends that DeGaulle and his followers inflamed Quebec separatism as part of their agenda to resurrect France as a great power. Canada is criticized for its failure to recognize or respond to this threat. Includes a chronology of events from the May 1940 invasion of France by Germany. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
