Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic. By Heather L. Gumbert. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Pp. xii + 242. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-0472119196.

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-280
Author(s):  
Scott Moranda
2020 ◽  
pp. 58-62
Author(s):  
Harry R. Targ

Victor Grossman's A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee is at once an exciting adventure story, an engaging autobiography of a radical opponent of U.S. imperialism, and a clear-headed assessment of the successes and failures of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) at the onset of the Cold War until 1990, when its citizens voted to merge with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany). Most poignantly, Grossman compares the benefits workers gained in the GDR, the FRG, and even the United States during the Cold War.


Author(s):  
Stefan Berger

This chapter demonstrates the overwhelming dominance of a Marxist, Soviet-inspired agenda, and the supremacy of social and especially economic history. During the Cold War, only the historians in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) followed the Western path. Their counterparts in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) adhered to the Marxist-Leninist framework of history-writing prescribed by the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). The divided world of the Cold War ensured that history-writing in the FRG and GDR became highly polarized. Anti-communism remained the underlying rationale of much historical writing in the FRG during the 1950s, and anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism comprised the ideological backbone of the GDR’s historical profession. Ultimately, the Cold War was crucial in incorporating West and East German historians into different transnational networks. After 1945, the two Germanies were attempting to regain some kind of national as well as historiographical ‘normality’ following major political and historiographical caesuras.


2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-95
Author(s):  
Thomas Berger

Jeffrey Anderson, German Unification and the Union of Europe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Thomas Banchoff, The German Problem Transformed: Institutions, Politics and Foreign Policy, 1945-1995 (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1999)


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anandita Bajpai

Cordial Cold War examines cultural entanglements, in various forms, between two distant yet interconnected sites of the Cold War—India and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Focusing on theatre performances, film festivals, newsreels, travel literature, radio broadcasting, cartography and art as sites of engagement, the chapters spotlight actual spaces of interaction that emerged in spite of, and within, the ambits of Cold War constraints. The inter-disciplinary collection of contributions sheds light on the variegated nature of translocal cultural entanglements. By foregrounding the role of actors, their practices and the sites of their entanglement, the book exposes how creative energies were mobilized to forge zones of friendship, mutual interest and envisioned solidarities.


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