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.

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?

History, Politics, and East German Film: The Thomas Müntzer (1956) Socialist Epic

2006 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 30-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Walinski-Kiehl
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Political Values ◽  
Essential Requirement ◽  
German Film ◽  
The Past ◽  
State History ◽  
East German ◽  
Scientific Laws

Historians in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), unlike their western counterparts, could never allow themselves the luxury of studying the past for its own sake because, in this Marxist-Leninist state, history and politics were always inextricably linked. The GDR's leaders were committed communists who had long recognized history's apparent political power. They were convinced that, for the new “Workers' and Peasants' State” to acquire legitimacy among its own people, a German historical narrative, based on the ascertainable “scientific” laws of Marxism, was an essential requirement. East German citizens had endured twelve years of anti-communist Nazi rule and, consequently, the task of integrating them into a republic, where an entirely different set of political values predominated, was a fairly daunting undertaking.

Making sense of East Germany’s 1968: Multiple trajectories and contrasting memories

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna von der Goltz
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Life Story ◽  
The Other ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Prague Spring ◽  
East German ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Life Story Interviews

This article investigates contrasting memories of East Germany’s 1968 based on a sample of six life story interviews. Given the iconic events of West Germany’s 1968, there has been a growing interest in the events happened on the other side of the Iron Curtain. In unified Germany, however, commemorations of 1968 in the German Democratic Republic have focused on a particular type of 68er biography: those who broke with the regime as a result of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia on 21 August 1968 and chose to pursue various forms of opposition in its wake. This article lends more nuance to the subject by examining three individuals who chose this path alongside three others who followed a different trajectory. The crushing of the Prague Spring and their own imprisonment for protesting against it led the latter to shun open opposition in favour of pursuing change from within official structures. By highlighting the plurality of East German experiences and memories of this period, this article seeks to make a contribution both to the study of the international 1968 and to the thriving scholarship on how the East German past is remembered in united Germany.

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.

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.

The Principles of State Governance of the German Democratic Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 1(21) ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Kuźnik
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
German States ◽  
East German ◽  
State Governance ◽  
Council Of Ministers ◽  
National Defence

The aim of this article is to present the principles underlying the political system in force in the German Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1990, with a particular emphasis on the issue of the state of emergency law. The article describes the two Constitutions from 1949 and 1968 and the state institutions established under them, including the GDR People's Chamber, the Council of Ministers, the GDR State Council and the National Defence Council. It also discusses the constitutional solutions within the scope of the emergency law. The legal basis for the protection of the border between the two then existing German states was also considered. This article is based on the two East German Constitutions, other legal acts and on the principles of East German and Polish doctrine. The article consists of an introduction, three parts and a summary.

Everyday Communism: New Social History of the German Democratic Republic

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
SANDRINE KOTT
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German

Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 388 pp., £14.00 (pb), ISBN 1-57181-182-6.Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigensinn in der Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) 367 pp., €39.90 (hb), ISBN 3-412-13598-4.Annegret Schüle, ‘Die Spinne’. Die Erfahrungsgeschichte weiblicher Industriearbeit im VEB Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 398 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 3-934565-87-5.Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond, eds., The Workers' and Peasants' State. Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 272 pp., £15.99 (pb), ISBN 0-7190-6289-6.Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 331 pp., £19.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8078-5385-2.

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.

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