Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic PDF Download

Author: Peter C. Caldwell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521820905
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238

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Book Description
The introduction of state planning and party dictatorship dramatically altered the environment for social theory in the German Democratic Republic. But social thought did not disappear. By the mid-1950s, East German social theorists discovered the basic contradictions of state socialism that would eventually lead to its collapse: the inability of the plan to function without markets and its inability to permit markets; the inability of the party-state to guarantee the rule of law and yet also the need for a regular system of rules in a modern industrial society; and the contradictory philosophical claims of a Marxist-Leninist philosophy that rejected idealism, and Marxist-Leninist dogma with its idealistic claim to know the laws of social modernization. Making use of archival sources, Caldwell examines the articulation of these analyses, their subsequent suppression by party authorities in the late 1950s, and their return under the guise of cybernetics in the 1960s.

Author: Peter C. Caldwell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474262430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
Peter C. Caldwell and Karrin Hanshew's Germany Since 1945 traces the social, political and cultural history of Germany from the end of the Second World War right up to the present day. The book provides a narrative that not only explores the histories of East and West Germany in their international contexts, but one that also takes the significantly different world of the Berlin Republic seriously, analyzing it as a distinct and significant period of German history in its own right. Split into three parts roughly devoted to a quarter-century each, this book guides students through contemporary Germany from the catastrophe of war, genocide and the country's division to the very different challenges facing the reunified Germany of the 21st century. There are key primary source excerpts integrated throughout the text, as well as 32 images, numerous maps, charts and tables and a detailed bibliography to further aid study. The book is complemented by online resources which include sample syllabi and a pedagogical supplement. Germany Since 1945 underscores both the particularities of German history and the international trends and transactions that shaped it, giving good coverage to key aspects of post-1945 German society and politics, including: * East and West German paths to reconstruction * The development of consumer society and the welfare state * The politics of memory and coming to terms with the Nazi past * The Cold War * New social and political movements that opposed the postwar status * Immigration and the move toward a multicultural society This is an essential text for any student of contemporary German history.

Author: Corey Ross
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN: 9780340762660
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
When the Berlin Wall came down, historians found themselves unexpectedly challenged to reassess the nature of the German Democratic Republic. The period since the transformational changes of 1989-90 has seen feverish activity in the archives, as historians have sought to deepen understanding of how the regime functioned and to move beyond earlier views inescapably conditioned by Cold War antagonisms. No historical consensus has emerge and the controversy about the GDR is undiminished, in part because of the continuing importance of interpretations of the GDR's history to German political culture. The proliferation of published research has shifted the contours of debate and given rise to new issues, not always in clear-cut fashion. This study of the East German dictatorship is the first detailed mapping of the area, identifying key interpretational issues, describing the evolution of different approaches to them, and providing the author's own evaluation. A wide range of themes is covered, from state/society relations to the role of opposition to the GDR's place in the longer sweep of German history, and central aspects of the regime's foundation, internal organization, social and economic system, collapse, and 'after-life' receive close attention.

Author: Konrad Hugo Jarausch
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 9781571811820
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
A decade after the collapse of communism, this volume presents a historical reflection on the perplexing nature of the East German dictatorship. In contrast to most political rhetoric, it seeks to establish a middle ground between totalitarianism theory, stressing the repressive features of the SED-regime, and apologetics of the socialist experiment, emphasizing the normality of daily lives. The book transcends the polarization of public debate by stressing the tensions and contradictions within the East German system that combined both aspects by using dictatorial means to achieve its emancipatory aims. By analyzing a range of political, social, cultural, and chronological topics, the contributors sketch a differentiated picture of the GDR which emphasizes both its repressive and its welfare features. The sixteen original essays, especially written for this volume by historians from both east and west Germany, represent the cutting edge of current research and suggest new theoretical perspectives. They explore political, social, and cultural mechanisms of control as well as analyze their limits and discuss the mixture of dynamism and stagnation that was typical of the GDR.

Author: Stephen Kotkin
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 158836917X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. In one of modern history’s most miraculous occurrences, communism imploded–and not with a bang, but with a whimper. Now two of the foremost scholars of East European and Soviet affairs, Stephen Kotkin and Jan T. Gross, drawing upon two decades of reflection, revisit this crash. In a crisp, concise, unsentimental narrative, they employ three case studies–East Germany, Romania, and Poland–to illuminate what led Communist regimes to surrender, or to be swept away in political bank runs. This is less a story of dissidents, so-called civil society, than of the bankruptcy of a ruling class–communism’s establishment, or “uncivil society.” The Communists borrowed from the West like drunken sailors to buy mass consumer goods, then were unable to pay back the hard-currency debts and so borrowed even more. In Eastern Europe, communism came to resemble a Ponzi scheme, one whose implosion carries enduring lessons. From East Germany’s pseudotechnocracy to Romania’s megalomaniacal dystopia, from Communist Poland’s cult of Mary to the Kremlin’s surprise restraint, Kotkin and Gross pull back the curtain on the fraud and decadence that cashiered the would-be alternative to the market and democracy, an outcome that opened up to a deeper global integration that has proved destabilizing.

Author: Seth Howes
Publisher: Camden House (NY)
ISBN: 1640140689
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Documents the rich allusiveness and intellectual probity of experimental filmmaking-a form that thrived despite having been officially banned-in East German socialism's final years.

Author: J. Madarász
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230625665
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 206

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Book Description
Working in East Germany explores economic tendencies, political relationships and social situations that combined to create a specific socio-political habitat in East Germany after the building of the Berlin Wall. Conditions were peculiar to say the least, especially if compared to Western standards. Nevertheless, the majority of the population perceived their lives as part of a 'socialist normality' that most East Germans adjusted to successfully. This book writes the people back into the history of East Germany.

Author: Larson Powell
Publisher: Screen Cultures: German Film a
ISBN: 1640140727
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
This is the first book in any language on the films of Konrad Wolf (1925-1982), East Germany's greatest filmmaker, and puts Wolf in a larger European filmic and historical context.

Author: Michael L. Hughes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350153761
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Book Description
Across the modern era, the traditional stereotype of Germans as authoritarian and subservient has faded, as they have become (mostly) model democrats. This book, for the first time, examines 130 years of history to comprehensively address the central questions of German democratization: How and why did this process occur? What has democracy meant to various Germans? And how stable is their, or indeed anyone's, democracy? Looking at six German regimes across thirteen decades, this study enables you to see how and why some Germans have always chosen to be politically active (even under dictatorships); the enormous range of conceptions of political culture and democracy they have held; and how interactions among various factors undercut or facilitated democracy at different times. Michael L. Hughes also makes clear that recent surges of support for 'populism' and 'authoritarianism' have not come out of nowhere but are inherent in long-standing contestations about democracy and political citizenship. Hughes argues that democracy – in Germany or elsewhere – cannot be a story of adversity overcome which culminates in a happy ending; it is an ongoing, open-ended process whose ultimate outcome remains uncertain.

Author: Katherine Pence
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 9780472069743
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
This book explores the ways in which modernity shaped the relationship between socialist state and society in East Germany. The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over. Where most of the literature over the past two decades has been driven by the desire to uncover the relationship between power and resistance, complicity and consent, more recent scholarship has tended to concentrate on the everyday history of East German citizens. experience of life in East Germany, with a particular view toward addressing the question: what did modernity mean for East German state and society? As such, the collection moves beyond the conceptual divide between state-level politics and everyday life so as to bring into sharper focus the specific contours of the GDR's unique experiment in Cold War socialism. What unites all the essays is the question of how the very tensions around socialist modernity shaped the views, memories and actions of East Germans over four decades. the Cold War, Eastern Europe, the history of communism, European social history and the history of everyday life, gender history, as well as modernity and socialist popular culture.