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This edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting connections between African and East German actors and institutions during the Cold War. With a special focus on negotiations and African influences on East Germany (and vice versa), the volume sheds light on personal and institutional agency, cultural cross-fertilization, migration, development, and solidarity.
This open access edited volume offers an analysis of the entangled histories of education and development in twentieth-century Africa. It deals with the plurality of actors that competed and collaborated to formulate educational and developmental paradigms and projects: debating their utility and purpose, pondering their necessity and risk, and evaluating their intended and unintended consequences in colonial and postcolonial moments. Since the late nineteenth century, the “educability” of the native was the subject of several debates and experiments: numerous voices, arguments, and agendas emerged, involving multiple institutions and experts, governmental and non-governmental, religious and laic, operating from the corridors of international organizations to the towns and rural villages of Africa. This plurality of expressions of political, social, cultural, and economic imagination of education and development is at the core of this collective work.
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.
Until the end of the Cold War in 1990, building projects and architectural icons played an important role in the self-portrayal of the competing systems. However, as the current research shows, we also find a large variety of forms of cooperation between the East, the South, and the West, not to forget the manifold cross-border entanglements within the South or the East. This book explores the intersection of two strands of research. On the one hand, interaction in the field of architecture and construction between actors from socialist countries and from countries of the Global South have increasingly won interest amongst historians of architecture and planning. On the other hand, in the context of the strongly emerging Cold War Studies, scholars have explored cooperation and circulation across the Iron Curtain with a focus on economic and research planning. This book connects perspectives of planning, construction and architectural design with those on economic interests and conflicts in projects and networks. Furthermore, it opens the view to the hubs of communication and exchange, and on patterns of longterm transformation and appropriation of architecture.
Im fed up of people starving (Ich habe es satt, dass andere hungern) was the motto of the East German third-world groups. Their aim was to improve the living conditions of people in the economically weak states in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The author traces the development of these developmental initiatives, which mostly emerged in the early 1980s and later, through all the historic changes: in the last decade of the GDR, during the dramatic upheavals in 1989/90 and in the Federal Republic in the 1990s. Against the background of these utterly different political contexts she analyses the concepts, practical work and development of the East German third-world groups. The main focus of the study are the relations of the East German third-world initiatives to their political and social milieu: the Church, the public, other alternative political initiatives, the West German third-world movement and above all the respective state actors.
Hier stellt der Herausgeber Hauptaspekte des Forschungsertrags aus den drei stärker sachthematisch angelegten Forschungsbänden vor und führt sie in einer integrierten Entwicklungsgeschichte zusammen. So soll die Gesamtgestalt der Dresdner Bank im Dritten Reich in ihrer historischen Genese greifbar werden.
Beinahe 30 Jahre lang glänzte die »Völkerfreundschaft« zwischen Kuba und der DDR im öffentlichen Diskurs der SED als Musterbeispiel ihres proletarischen Internationalismus. Doch die Rhetorik täuscht: Besonders in den Anfangsjahren der bilateralen Beziehungen nahmen die deutschen Kader ihre kubanischen »Genossen« in der Karibik als notorische Querschläger wahr, die mit ihrem Aufbegehren gegen den ideologischen Suprematieanspruch des Kremls die Stabilität des Ostblocks gefährdeten. Anhand bislang unveröffentlichten Quellenmaterials aus deutschen und kubanischen Archiven veranschaulicht Antonia Bihlmayer die Bemühungen der Regierung Walter Ulbrichts, die widerspenstigen Sozialisten in der Karibik auf Moskau auszurichten. Sie analysiert die Charakteristika dieser sozialistischen Zivilisierungsmission und beschreibt zugleich, wie sich diese beiden sozialistischen Enklaven ab Mitte der 1970er Jahre schließlich zu gleichwertigen »Juniorpartnern« der Sowjetunion entwickelten.
Anna Walentynowicz was one of the legendary members of the opposition in the People's Republic of Poland. Her dismissal from the Gdansk shipyard on 14th August, 1980, triggered the strike that led to the founding of the union Solidarnosc. Translated into German for the first time, and carefully edited, Walentynowicz's autobiographical memoirs convey a hitherto unknown picture of everyday life in the People's Republic, of the political opposition and the struggle led by Solidarnosc for democracy and human rights. German text.
Der britische Kriegsgeheimdienst Special Operations Executive (SOE) verfolgte seit 1940 die Strategie, Österreich als antideutschen Nationalstaat wiederzuerrichten, um die deutsche Hegemonie in Zentral- und Südosteuropa auf Dauer zu brechen. Der Autor analysiert die Aktivitäten der Österreich-Abteilung der SOE in Großbritannien, den USA, Schweden, der Türkei, der Schweiz, Italien, Slowenien und Österreich. Ihr wichtigster praktischer Beitrag zum Widerstand war die systematische Aufrüstung der slowenischen Partisanen in den Karawanken, die den einzigen größeren bewaffneten Widerstand im »Dritten Reich« leisteten. Doch die antideutsche Kooperation war bereits von ideologischer und geostrategischer Konkurrenz geprägt. Die Studie geht dieser Geopolitik des Widerstandes auf den Grund. Die Arbeit wurde mit dem Dissertationspreis des Arbeitskreises Deutsche England-Forschung und dem Herbert-Steiner-Anerkennungspreis des Dokumentationszentrums des Österreichischen Widerstandes ausgezeichnet.
Die DDR gewährte den während der Apartheid verfolgten südafrikanischen Kommunisten sowie Mitgliedern der Befreiungsbewegung ANC politisches Asyl. Sie lebten, arbeiteten und studierten in der DDR und erhielten umfangreiche Einsichten in den sozialistischen Alltag. Anja Schade zeigt auf, dass vielen dieser Exilierten der Sozialismus als Modell für eine Post-Apartheid-Gesellschaft galt, ihnen andererseits Mangelwirtschaft oder das Versagen von Meinungs- und Reisefreiheit nicht entgingen. Die Autorin geht der Frage nach, wie sich diese Erfahrungen im DDR-Narrativ damaliger Exilanten widerspiegeln.