Red Power: Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich and Indian Activist Networks in East and West Germany

2008 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 447-476 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. Glenn Penny

A curious photograph appeared in 1976 in the East-German newspaper Junge Welt (Fig. 1). Two well-known members of the American Indian Movement (AIM), Dennis Banks and Vernon Bellecourt, were shown together with an elderly German woman, Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, at her home in East Berlin. This photo, like so many of the photos of Indians in unexpected places, always seems to amuse people, leading them to ask with a snigger why the Indians were there. The Indians' presence in such places, however, is seldom a laughing matter, and in this case, scholars of the post-war era might find the answer to the simple question of the Indians' presence somewhat disconcerting.

1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (S5) ◽  
pp. 175-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine von Oertzen ◽  
Almut Rietzschel

In 1989, when Germany became reunified after forty years of separation, no one could overlook the fact that East and West Germany differed greatly with regard to the position of women. The most striking difference of all seemed to lie in the rates of female employment: 91 per cent of all East German women under the age of 60 were counted as being employed, compared to only 55 per cent in West Germany.


Author(s):  
Barton Byg

This chapter focuses on the three major themes that have helped make the integration between East and West German documentary filmmakers successful and have contributed new strengths to German independent documentary as a productive and innovative enterprise. It first illustrates the phenomenon of collaboration between filmmakers from both East and West Germany, which preceded the fall of the Berlin Wall and provides the basis for unique accomplishments in documentary. Then, partly based on these East–West collaborations, it discuss examples of German documentary's frequent explorations of non-European topics, which challenge the clear separation of European and non-European in both politics and film art. Here, the film collaborations between Helga Reidemeister and Lars Barthel will serve as a case study. Finally, also as a result of decades of experimentation with the nature of the film medium's presentation of ‘reality’, ‘history’, and the individual human subject, Thomas Heise's German ‘portrait film’ Barluschke (1997) is explored as an example of this defining quality of independent German documentary filmmaking in the context of the post-Cold War.


Author(s):  
Douglas K. Miller

The chapter situates Native American incarcerations within a long history of broken treaties, circumscribed sovereignty, land theft, forced removals, reservation and boarding school confinement, and economic and cultural paternalism. The framework that the chapter offers is one centered on what the author calls “settler custodialism,” where the root of Indian incarceration runs through the reservation system. The chapter locates Native American prisoner resistance within a longer trajectory of struggle against settler colonialism that has drawn on traditional ties to land, family, tribe, and community. The rising consciousness of the American Indian Movement (AIM) is linked directly to the incarceration of two of its principal founders, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt. From AIM’s police patrols to the Alcatraz Island prison takeover, the radicalization of the Red Power movement had more to do with its encounter with the carceral state than has been previously recognized. The chapter concludes that the prison also served as a blunt instrument to dismantle the Red Power movement when many of its leaders were incarcerated following the 1973 Wounded Knee operation.


Author(s):  
Werner Smolny

SummaryNearly 20 years after unification large differences of the labor market situation in East and West Germany persist. Wages are still considerably lower, the unemployment rate is about twice of the West German level, and the competitiveness of the East German economy seems to be low. This paper analyzes the process of (relative) wage adjustment in East Germany and the resulting development of competitiveness and unemployment differentials. We present estimates of the wage adjustment in East vs. West Germany based on wage convergence and effects of unemployment on wage growth. The central focus of the paper is the empirical analysis of the interaction of the development of competitiveness and the labor market situation. The results reveal large equilibrium gaps for wages and unemployment which are based on the wage-setting process, the behavior of competitiveness and the adjustment of unemployment.


2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Uhlendorff

In the years following German reunification, East and West German parents (282 mothers and 207 fathers) were interviewed about attitudes to the rearing of their 7- to 13-year-old children and about their social networks. Path analyses show that East German parents engage in more protective and less permissive parenting, and that East German fathers raise their children in a more traditional and authoritarian manner than their West German counterparts. In part, these differences can be attributed to the strong family orientation of East German parents (many and intensive kinship relations, few friends). Further analyses show that corollaries of the social upheavals in East Germany, namely closer cohesion of the immediate family and a decrease in the social support provided by the extrafamilial environment, are associated with protective attitudes to parenting and hence with the tendency to limit children’s freedom of decision-making.


Author(s):  
Carlo M. Horz ◽  
Moritz Marbach

How do economic opportunities abroad affect citizens’ ability to exit an authoritarian regime? This article theorizes the conditions under which authoritarian leaders will perceive emigration as a threat and use imprisonment instead of other types of anti-emigration measures to prevent mass emigration. Using data from communist East Germany's secret prisoner database that we reassembled based on archival material, the authors show that as economic opportunities in West Germany increased, the number of East German exit prisoners – political prisoners arrested for attempting to cross the border illegally – also rose. The study's causal identification strategy exploits occupation-specific differences in the changing economic opportunities between East and West Germany. Using differential access to West German television, it also sheds light on the informational mechanism underlying the main finding; cross-national data are leveraged to present evidence of the external validity of the estimates. The results highlight how global economic disparities affect politics within authoritarian regimes.


Worldview ◽  
1984 ◽  
Vol 27 (5) ◽  
pp. 11-12
Author(s):  
Thomas Kielinger

Amidst the sound and the fury that attended last year's missile controversy came an astonishing development in relations between the two Germanies, one which seemed to go against the prevailing winds of East-West tensions. While Moscow and its stalwart ally East Berlin were threatening hellfire if Bonn went ahead with NATO plans to station Pershing II missiles, exchanges on all levels between East and West Germany were never more relaxed. And (touch wood) 1984 continues on the same promising note on which 1983 left off.


Urban Studies ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 47 (6) ◽  
pp. 1241-1255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce D'Arcus

Drawing on recent theories of citizenship that argue the city as the pre-eminent ‘difference machine’, this paper argues that it is also a crucial site for the production of resistance as a social identity and practice. This argument is presented through an analysis of an example from the ‘Red Power’ movement in the US in the 1960s and early 1970s. The paper examines how American Indian activism—while often dramatised in rural reservation locations and centred on rather grand abstractions quite far removed from typically urban concerns and politics—also has a profoundly urban historical geography.


2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 464-494
Author(s):  
Dario Pasquini

This article compares Italian and German memory cultures of Fascism and Nazism using an analysis of Italian and West- and East-German satirical magazines published from 1943 to 1963. In the early post-war period, as a consequence of the anti-Fascist and anti-Nazi policies in Italy and in Germany that had been put into effect by the Allied occupation authorities, a significant part of the Italian and German public felt anxiety regarding the Fascist and the Nazi past and feared these past regimes as potential sources of contamination. But many, both in Italy and Germany, also reacted by denying that their country needed any sort of ‘purification’. This article’s main argument is that the interaction between these two conflicting positions exercised different effects in the three contexts considered. In Italy, especially during the years after 1948, the satirical press produced images that either rendered Fascism banal or praised it, representing it as a phenomenon which was an ‘internal’ and at least partly positive product of Italian society. I define this process as a sweetening ‘internalization’ of Fascism. In East Germany, by contrast, Nazism was represented through images linking the crimes committed in the Nazi concentration camps, depicted as a sort of ‘absolute evil’, with the leadership of the FRG, considered ‘external’ to ‘true’ German society. I define this process as a ‘demonizing’ externalization of Nazism, by which I mean a tendency to represent Nazism as a ‘monstrous’ phenomenon. In the West German satirical press, on the other hand, Nazism was not only ‘externalized’ by comparing it to the East German Communist dictatorship, but also ‘internalized’ by implying that it was a negative product of German society in general and by calling for public reflection on responsibility for the Nazi crimes, including West Germany as the Nazi regime’s successor. The demonization of the regime also played a crucial role in this self-critical ‘internalization’ of Nazism.


2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ray Barrell ◽  
Dirk Willem te Velde

Abstract We provide empirical evidence for exogenous and endogenous catching-up of East German labour productivity to West German levels. We argue that labour productivity in East Germany has caught up faster than has happened elsewhere. The sudden formation of the German Monetary Union was followed by large transfers to East Germany, migration of workers to West Germany, reorganization and privatization of East German firms. This has quickly led to a partial closing of the organizational, idea and object gaps that existed between East and West Germany. This paper analyses labour productivity in East and West Germany using both aggregate German data and unbalanced panel analysis of developments in East and West Germany. Factors affecting the organization of production, and especially privatization and `foreign' firms, are found to be particularly important in this context.


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