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.
What Remains?
This book tells the story of the German Democratic Republic from “the inside out,” using the lens of generational change to deconstruct an intriguing array of social identities that had little to do with the “official GDR” version authoritarian rulers regularly sought to impose on their citizens. The author compares the “identities” of five societal subgroups (GDR writers and intellectuals; pastors and dissidents; women; youth; and working-class men), exploring the policies defining their lives and status before/during/after the 1989 Wende, as well as the diverging “exit, voice and loyalty” dilemmas encountered by each. The “dialectical” components treated in this work ce...
Culture from the Slums
Culture from the Slums explores the history of punk rock in East and West Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. These decades witnessed an explosion of alternative culture across divided Germany, and punk was a critical constituent of this movement. For young Germans at the time, punk appealed to those gravitating towards cultural experimentation rooted in notions of authenticity-endeavors considered to be more 'real' and 'genuine.' Adopting musical subculture from abroad and rearticulating the genre locally, punk gave individuals uncomfortable with their societies the opportunity to create alternative worlds. Examining how youths mobilized music to build alternative communities and identities...
Scandal
The Boston Globe'sPulitzer Prize - winning coverage of clergy sexual abuse of minors in 2002 led to what few would hesitate to call the most significant scandal in the history of the Catholic Church in the United States. In contrast, Catholics themselves disagree about whether the voting records of some Catholic politicians or the particular policies and practices of Catholic institutions might be called scandalous. Such questions often both reflect and intensify divisions within the Catholic community. Whether understood as negative public relations or as an action, attitude, law, or institution influencing another to sin, scandal affects the Catholic Church's proclamation of the good news of God's saving love. This makes theological reflection about scandal an essential aspect of being Catholic today. Failure to engage in this reflection risks truncating the tradition and obscuring the Good News. This book invites this reflection in order to understand differences in perception and judgment, make appropriate courses of action more clear, and enable Catholics to participate more effectively and authentically as a faith community in public life.
We Were the People
On the night of November 9, 1989, an electrified world watched as the Berlin Wall came down. Communism was dead, the Cold War was over, and freedom was on the rise—or so it seemed. We Were the People tells the story behind this momentous event. In an extraordinary series of interviews, the key actors in the drama that transformed East Germany speak for themselves, describing what they did, what happened and why, and what it has meant to them. The result is a powerful firsthand account of a rare historical moment, one that reverberates far beyond the toppled wall that once divided Germany and the world. The drama We Were the People recreates is remarkable for its richness and complexity. He...
Pope Francis: The Last Pope?
Pope Francis: The Last Pope? reveals the possible reasons for the choice of historical abdication of Benedict XVI and traces the process that led to the election of Cardinal Bergoglio: the Pope who many have prophesized will be the last and will bring the Catholic Church to its end. The book details the history of this prophecy, which was hidden away in the Vatican for hundreds of years and predicts that the reign of the last Pope will herald the beginning of "great apostasy" followed by "great tribulation." It also explores the recent scandals in the Catholic Church and addresses questions including What pressures decreed the end of the pontificate of Benedict XVI? What powers have an inter...
The People's State
What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.” Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives. Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.
Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe
Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe brings together historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, urban planners and political activists to break new ground in the globalisation of knowledge about informal housing. Providing both methodological reflections and practical examples, they compare informal settlements, unauthorised occupation of flats, illegal housing construction and political squatting in different regions of the world. Subjects covered include squatter settlements in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, squatting activism in Brazil and Spain, right-wing squatting in Germany, planning laws and informality across countries in the Global North, and squatting in post-Second World War UK and Australia.
Free Berlin
An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity. In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of exp...
Breaking Boundaries
This book examines the controversial younger generation of poets who were 'born into' the established socialist state of the German Democratic Republic. Introducing an extraordinary decade of GDR poetry, it focuses on the ways in which this experience is translated into the metaphorical and linguistic structures of their texts, and the ways in which they set about breaking the literary and political boundaries which were imposed upon them, radicalizing notions of the subject, of history, of language, of the poetic enterprise itself. The volume also assesses what will remain - after the fall of the Wall, and the revelations of the 'Stasi' files - of this radical poetic project. This unique study examines the poetry of some fifty writers from both the official and the underground publishing scenes, offering them up as a case-study in the vexed negotiations between aesthetics, ethics, and politics, and as a contribution to the rewriting of German literary history after 1945.
East Germany in Comparative Perspective
As a new decade begins the popular demand for change has meant that the social and political fabric of the the Eastern Bloc countries has been irrevocably altered. This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the key political, economic and social areas of East German society, such as the military and the church, areas which will intrinsically involved with the movement for change.
