Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Path to the Berlin Wall
The long path to the Berlin Wall began in 1945, when Josef Stalin instructed the Communist Party to take power in the Soviet occupation zone while the three Western allies secured their areas of influence. When Germany was split into separate states in 1949, Berlin remained divided into four sectors, with West Berlin surrounded by the GDR but lingering as a captivating showcase for Western values and goods. Following a failed Soviet attempt to expel the allies from West Berlin with a blockade in 1948–49, a second crisis ensued from 1958–61, during which the Soviet Union demanded once and for all the withdrawal of the Western powers and the transition of West Berlin to a “Free City.” Ultimately Nikita Khrushchev decided to close the border in hopes of halting the overwhelming exodus of East Germans into the West. Tracing this path from a German perspective, Manfred Wilke draws on recently published conversations between Khrushchev and Walter Ulbricht, head of the East German state, in order to reconstruct the coordination process between these two leaders and the events that led to building the Berlin Wall.
Inside Party Headquarters
Everyday life in the East German Socialist Unity Party revolved heavily around maintaining the “party line” in all areas of society, whether through direct authority or corruption. Spanning a long period of the GDR’s history, from 1946 through 1989, Rüdiger Bergien presents the first study that examines the complexities of the central party’s communist apparatus. He focuses on their role as ideological watchdogs, as they fostered an underbelly and “inner life” for their employees to integrate the party’s pillars throughout East German society. Inside Party Headquarters reviews not only the party’s modes power and state interaction, but also the processes of negotiation and disputation preceding formal Politburo decisions, advancing the available detail and discourse surrounding this formative and volatile stretch of German history.
Playing Politics with History
The ensuing debates and disagreements over the recent past, examined by the author, open up a window into the wider development of German memory, identity, and politics after the end of the Cold War."--BOOK JACKET.
Peace and Survival
None
After the Berlin Wall
A revelatory history of the commemoration of the Berlin Wall and its significance in defining contemporary German national identity.
German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal
This book examines how democracy was rethought in Germany in the wake of National Socialism, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. Focusing on a loose network of public intellectuals in the immediate postwar years, Sean Forner traces their attempts to reckon with the experience of Nazism and scour Germany's ambivalent political and cultural traditions for materials with which to build a better future. In doing so, he reveals, they formulated an internally variegated but distinctly participatory vision of democratic renewal - a paradoxical counter-elitism of intellectual elites. Although their projects ran aground on internal tensions and on the Cold War, their commitments fueled critique and dissent in the two postwar Germanys during the 1950s and thereafter. The book uncovers a conception of political participation that went beyond the limited possibilities of the Cold War era and influenced the political struggles of later decades in both East and West.
The Liberal Script at the Beginning of the 21st Century
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. 21st-century liberalism is being contested on multiple fronts and by a wide range of actors. To understand these challengers, it is important to have a better grasp of their common target. This book introduces the "liberal script" as an analytical concept that allows us to analyze and problematize liberal thinking, as well as its different components and linkages and the tensions that they produce. What happens when the pursuit of market efficiency is incompatible with social ju...
The Walls between Conflict and Peace
The Walls between Conflict and Peace discusses how walls are not merely static entities, but are in constant flux, subject to the movement of time. Walls often begin life as a line marking a radical division, but then become an area, that is to say a border, within which function civil and political societies, national and supranational societies. Such changes occur because over time cooperation between populations produces an active quest for peace, which is therefore a peace in constant movement. These are the concepts and lines of political development analysed in the book. The first part of the book deals with political walls and how they evolve into borders, or even disappear. The secon...
Western Marxism and the Soviet Union
The ‘Russian Question’ was an absolutely central problem for Marxism in the twentieth century. Numerous attempts were made to understand the nature of Soviet society. The present book tries to portray the development of these theoretical contributions since 1917 in a coherent, comprehensive appraisal. It aims to present the development of the Western Marxist critique of the Soviet Union across a rather long period in history (from 1917 to the present) and in a large region (Western Europe and North America). Within this demarcation of limits in time and space, an effort has been made to ensure completeness, by paying attention to all Marxist analyses which in some way significantly deviated from or added to the older theories.
The Use and Utility of Ultimata in Coercive Diplomacy
Ultimata feature as a core concept in the coercive diplomacy scholarship. Conventional wisdom holds that pursuing an ultimatum strategy is risky. This book shows that the conventional wisdom is wrong on the basis of a new dataset of 87 ultimata issued from 1920–2020. It provides a historical examination of ultimata in Western strategic, political, and legal thought since antiquity until the present, and offers a four-pronged typology that explains their various purposes and effects: 1) the dictate, 2) the conditional war declaration, 3) the bluff, and 4) the brinkmanship ultimatum. The book yields a better understanding of interstate threat behaviour at a time of surging competition. Background materials can be consulted at www.coercivediplomacy.com.
