Piecework and the Sovietization of the East German Workplace

2012 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 717-743
Author(s):  
Wayne Geerling ◽  
Gary B. Magee
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Formative Period ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
East German ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Early Formative

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the significance of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and all that it purported to stand for has been largely cast aside. Other than as a cautionary tale, the GDR has been widely seen as offering little to contemporary political discourse. By contrast, in recent years, its experience, especially in its early formative period, has attracted a lot of attention from historians. In part this burst of activity can be attributed to the opening of closed archives in eastern Europe, but it is also related to the desire to understand better how a flawed system could maintain such seeming stability for so long, and then, how all that could collapse so suddenly and ignobly in 1989. Was its demise inevitable, rooted, as it were, in the DNA of the system, or were there alternative paths that could have been taken? Much of the recent research is founded on the premise that insights and answers to such questions can be uncovered by going back to the origins of the system. This article is written in the same vein. Its aim is to shed light on how aspects of the East German workplace evolved in the period between the beginnings of Soviet occupation and the establishment of a Soviet-style planned economy by 1949–50.

Occupation, Reparations, and Rebellion: The Soviets and the East German Uprising of 1953

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-250
Author(s):  
Wayne Geerling ◽  
Gary B. Magee ◽  
Russell Smyth
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Internal Resistance ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Local Production ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
East German ◽  
Regional Factors ◽  
Local Companies

Abstract Analysis of the link between the Soviet occupation of East Germany and internal resistance within the German Democratic Republic reveals that ongoing payment of reparations by East Germans out of local production—via the Soviet’s ownership of prominent local companies—affected both the incidence and the intensity of unrest at the precinct level during the uprising of June 17, 1953. This result is robust when controlling for variation in the presence of Soviet military bases and deaths in Soviet nkvd Special Camps, as well as a host of regional factors potentially correlated with differences in unrest.

What Is and to What End Does One Study the History of East German Literature?

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 594-609
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Emmerich ◽  
Nicole G. Burgoyne ◽  
Andrew B. B. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
The Right

East german literary history is a case study of how political and cultural institutions interact. the state's cultural regime mo-nopolized the right to publish within its borders and demanded that the nation's new art describe contemporary life or its precedents. Even authors seen in the West as dissidents understood themselves, more often than not, as pursuing that goal and the broader aims of socialism with their work. During the lifespan of the German Democratic Republic, this political albatross weighed on all literary scholarship. Even now, whatever their feelings toward the socialist state, scholars, critics, and readers are bound to approach a text from East Germany as an artifact of its political culture—and rightly, because the political sphere encroached heavily on the artistic. But since German unification, the rise and fall in the stock of so many East German authors has directly resulted from political revelations, raising a number of troubling questions. Though historical distance seemed to have sprung up as abruptly as the Berlin Wall had come down, to what extent does scholarship from the German Democratic Republic represent only a heightened case of what is always true of literary history— namely, that political motivation colors critical evaluation? Is it possible to consider a work of literature with no recourse to the social and political circumstances under which it was written? And would it even be desirable to do so?

Hanns Eisler and Faust in the German Democratic Republic

2019 ◽  
pp. 202-220
Author(s):  
Joy H. Calico
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The United States ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
East German ◽  
National Identity Formation ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone

When Austrian composer and committed Marxist Hanns Eisler was forced out of the United States in 1948, he returned to Vienna and hoped to settle there. Instead, a commission for Goethe’s bicentennial celebration the following year drew him to East Berlin and the SBZ (Soviet Occupation Zone), soon to be the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany), and set him on the path to be that country’s most prominent composer. This chapter examines the piece Eisler wrote for that commission, Rhapsodie für großes Orchester (Rhapsody for large orchestra) (1949), which set text from Goethe’s Faust II, as well as his libretto for a proposed opera entitled Johann Faustus. East German reception of these pieces reveals the centrality of Goethe’s Faust for national identity formation in the fledgling GDR.

THE POLITICS OF TIME AND STATE IDENTITY IN THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 223-251
Author(s):  
Marcus Colla
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Federal Republic ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Official Language ◽  
German Federal Republic ◽  
State Identity ◽  
East German

ABSTRACTThe communist regimes of Eastern Europe carried a particular set of assumptions about the way past, present and future related to one another. In the case of the German Democratic Republic (the GDR), these assumptions manifested themselves in official language and propaganda as a defence of the regime's dynamic and forward-looking historicity against the ‘ahistorical’ and ‘nostalgic’ modes of understanding that supposedly typified the historical consciousness of its West German adversary. By this view, the German Federal Republic – and the capitalist West more generally – lacked both a meaningful past and a meaningful future. This article investigates how the East German regime articulated its historicity as a direct expression of its state identity. In particular, it examines how it sought to rationalise newly emerging historical and cultural practices in the GDR within the framework of a modern and progressive socialist historicity, and how it deployed these as an argument against the ‘nostalgic’ practices of the Federal Republic.

scholarly journals Documentary Photography from the German Democratic Republic as a Substitute Public

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 88
Author(s):  
Anne Pfautsch
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Critical Discourse ◽  
Private Sphere ◽  
Documentary Photography ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Critical Position ◽  
East German ◽  
Actual Life

This paper discusses artistic documentary photography from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the mid-1970s until the fall of the Berlin Wall, and suggests that it functioned as a substitute public–Ersatzöffentlichkeit–in society. This concept of a substitute public sphere sometimes termed a counter-public sphere, relates to GDR literature that, in retrospect, has been allocated this role. On the whole, in critical discourse certain texts have been recognised as being distinct from GDR propaganda which sought to deliver alternative readings in their coded texts. I propose that photography, despite having had a different status to literature in the GDR, adopted similar traits and also functioned as part of a substitute public sphere. These photographers aimed to expose the existing gap between the propagandised and actual life under socialism. They embedded a moral and critical position in their photographs to comment on society and to incite debate. However, it was necessary for these debates to occur in the private sphere, so that artists and their audience would avoid state persecution. In this paper, I review Harald Hauswald’s series Everyday Life (1976–1990) to demonstrate how photographs enabled substitute discourses in visual ways. Hauswald is a representative of artistic documentary photography and although he was never published in the official GDR media, he was the first East German photographer to publish in renowned West German and European media outlets, such as GEO magazine and ZEITmagazin, before the reunification. In 1990, he founded the ‘Ostkreuz–Agency of Photographers’ with six other East German documentary photographers.

East German Conversions to Islam after the Collapse of the Berlin Wall

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esra Özyürek
Keyword(s):  
High School ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Life Story ◽  
Authoritarian Regime ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
German State ◽  
East German

This chapter analyzes the conversion and life-story narratives of two East Germans who both grew up during the closed, authoritarian regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). When the wall fell, Zehra was a twenty-year-old woman from a family of regime opponents just about to begin her life after graduating from high school. Usman was a thirty-year-old man with an established position as a chemist at an East German state-run factory. The fall of the wall transformed both their lives radically, recasting them as second-class citizens with no foreseeable way out in the united Germany. Both Zehra and Usman converted to Islam shortly after the collapse of the East German Communist regime in 1989.

The Last of the Mohicans: How Walter Ulbricht Endured the Hungarian Crisis of 1956

2004 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 88-121 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johanna Granville
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Early Years ◽  
German History ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
East European ◽  
Hungarian Revolution ◽  
East German ◽  
Socialist Unity ◽  
German Historian

According to German historian Hermann Weber, 25 percent of allpublished studies on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) havefocused on the early years of the regime of the Socialist Unity Party(SED), 20 percent on the 1980s and collapse of the dictatorship, andonly 3 percent on the years in between.1 While the GDR itself maynot have become a mere footnote in history as novelist Stefan Heympredicted, studies of East German history in the 1950s—before theconstruction of the Berlin Wall, when the regime of Walter Ulbrichtwas most vulnerable—are exceedingly rare.2 Archive-based studies ofUlbricht’s response to the Hungarian revolution of 1956 are rarerstill.3 A recently edited volume of essays published in Germanyabout responses to the Hungarian revolution, for example, includedthe reactions of nearly every East European country, except those ofthe GDR.

Breaking with bourgeois rules and traditions

2015 ◽  
Vol 83 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 487-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Löhnig
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Family ◽  
East German ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone ◽  
Family Models

When World War II ended in 1945, the plan was to build a society in the Soviet occupation zone and, later on, in the German Democratic Republic, which would break with the previously dominant bourgeois rules and traditions. Marriage and the family were utilized to achieve this goal. As the marriage law in force was the same in all parts of Germany between 1938 and 1955, this development has to be illustrated by analyzing the divorce files of the East German courts of Dresden and Leipzig in the late 1940s. By reviewing these documents, one cannot only reveal political and economic influences, but also discover the new household and family models of a socialist society.


Judging the Past: The Prosecution of East German Border Guards and the GDR Chain of Command

1999 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 303-330 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter E. Quint
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Deadly Force ◽  
German Unification ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
The Past ◽  
Chain Of Command ◽  
East German ◽  
The Subject

Transitions from dictatorship to democracy often raise the perplexing question of whether a new government may punish actions which, although reprehensible, were considered legal under the old regime. In these instances, the desire for condign punishment of evil acts confronts the principle that forbids retroactive criminal prosecutions. After German unification, problems of this type arose in trials of East German border guards for the use of deadly force at the Berlin Wall, along with prosecutions of military and civilian officials higher in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) chain of command. In this article, the author discusses these prosecutions and analyzes the response of the German courts to the difficult problems of retroactivity that the cases raise. In its concluding section, the article suggests that these cases may evoke issues concerning the legitimacy of the GDR that were the subject of bitter debates during Germany's divided past.

The East German Ministry for State Security and Iraq, 1968–1989

2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 4-23
Author(s):  
Joseph Sassoon
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Arab World ◽  
State Security ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
East German ◽  
Close Cooperation ◽  
New Evidence

Despite the close relationship between the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Iraq from the late 1960s until the mid-1970s, new evidence from documents of the former East German Ministry for State Security (Stasi) and the Iraqi Ba'th Party archives, combined with interviews of senior East German diplomats who served in the Arab world, indicates that the Stasi changed its policy in the second half of the 1970s and persisted with that policy in the 1980s after the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War. This article gives an overview of relations between the Stasi and Iraq following the rise of the Ba'th to power in 1968 under Saddam Hussein (who later became president of Iraq in 1979) and examines Iraq's efforts to obtain assistance from the Stasi. The Iraqi regime's persecution of Communists within Iraq and its targeting of Iraqi Communists in Eastern Europe were important in discouraging the Stasi from establishing close cooperation with Iraq.

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