Demolition on Karl Marx Square

Author(s):  
Andrew Demshuk

Communist East Germany’s demolition of Leipzig’s intact medieval University Church in May 1968 was an act widely decried as “cultural barbarism”. Although overshadowed by the crackdown on Prague Spring mere weeks later, the willful destruction of this historic landmark on a central site called Karl Marx Square represents an essential turning point in relations between the Communist authorities and the “people” they claimed to serve. As the largest case of East German protest between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution, this intimate local trauma exhibits how the inner workings of a “dictatorial” system operated more broadly and exposes the often gray and overlapping lines between State and citizenry. Through deep analysis of untapped periodicals and archives, it introduces a broad cast of characters who helped make the demolition possible and restores the voices of ordinary citizens who dared in the name of culture, humanism, and civic pride to protest what they saw as an inconceivable tragedy. In this city that later started the 1989 Revolution triggering the fall of the Berlin Wall, residents from every social background desperately hoped to convince their leaders to step back from the brink. But as the dust cleared in 1968, they saw with all finality that their voices meant nothing, that the DDR was a sham democracy awash with utopian rhetoric that had no connection with their everyday lives. If Communism died in Prague in 1968, it had already died in Leipzig just weeks before, with repercussions that still haunt today’s politics of memory.

2015 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 88-107
Author(s):  
Louise K. Davidson-Schmich ◽  
Jennifer A. Yoder ◽  
Friederike Eigler ◽  
Joyce M. Mushaben ◽  
Alexandra Schwell ◽  
...  

Konrad H. Jarausch, United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects Reviewed by Louise K. Davidson-Schmich Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce, ed. The GDR Remembered:Representations of the East German State since 1989 Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 Reviewed by Friederike Eigler Peter H. Merkl, Small Town & Village in Bavaria: The Passing of a Way of Life Reviewed by Joyce M. Mushaben Barbara Thériault, The Cop and the Sociologist. Investigating Diversity in German Police Forces Reviewed by Alexandra Schwell Clare Bielby, Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s Reviewed by Katharina Karcher Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, ed., Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945 Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder


Author(s):  
Jim Tomlinson

This introduction outlines how the idea of a national economy subject to governmental management was constructed in Britain out of the dissolution of the unmanaged economy of the pre-1914 era. It argues that a key turning point came in 1931 with the departure from the gold standard and the introduction of protection. But, it is argued, it was only from the 1940s that national economic management was combined with ‘managing the people’, through major efforts to shape public opinion on the economy. This chapter also summarizes the development of the major kinds of economic statistics which underpinned both facets of economic management.


2013 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 255-291
Author(s):  
Márton Dornbach

It is difficult to imagine how collective memory might function without the watershed dates that structure our stories about the past. Almost by definition, however, such familiar milestones fail to capture the complex dynamics of the transition from one era to the next. A case in point is the dismantling of the Iron Curtain. As the anniversary commemorations of 2009 showed, this development came to be epitomized by the tearing down of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. One does not need to doubt the importance of this event to see that its sheer symbolic weight tends to obscure the intricacies of the Eastern European transition process. More often than not, accounts that foreground this turning point marginalize some sixty million Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks who embarked on the transition process well ahead of the citizens of East Germany.


Author(s):  
Andrew Demshuk

This book illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of “urban ingenuity” amid catastrophic urban decay. The book profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, the book shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such “urban ingenuity” was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Min Zhou ◽  
Yan Wang

<p>Mythology, as a special cultural carrier, can reflect people’s spiritual values in a certain period and region. In ancient Chinese mythology and ancient Greek mythology, there are some goddess with similar attributes or symbolic meaning. Their symbolic attributes essentially represent some specific areas of women’s values, such as fertility, wisdom, love and marriage. Based on the mythology of ancient China and Greece as well as the ancient social background of the two countries, this paper analyzes and compares the goddess images in the myths of the two countries from the perspective of fertility, wisdom, love and marriage in the female values. In the aspect of fertility, China in the matriarchal society showed the worship of the supremacy of women. In the aspect of wisdom, the ancient Greek society affirmed the importance of moral wisdom, and also emphasized the necessity of acquiring personal skills, interests and reputation. In the aspect of love and marriage, women in both countries were victims of the patriarchal society, but the ancient Greek society emphasized the pursuit of individual hedonism and freedom. What’s more, the goddess images in Chinese mythology are romantic, while the goddess images in ancient Greek mythology is more humanistic. From these aspects, the comparative analysis of the two goddesses can reveal the characteristics, social causes and evolution of the ancient women’s values of the people of the two countries.</p><p> </p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Lilis Muchoiyyaroh

Kartini's complex thinking about her nation was the result of observations and experiences that she experienced empirically. But Kartini's ideas about religion were explicitly influenced by the surrounding environment, both European and indigenous people themselves. This study focuses on the reconstruction of Kartini's thinking in the field of religion and the social background of the emergence of this thought. Therefore, this study uses historical methods with a social history approach to identify Kartini's ideas in the religious field. The reconstruction of her ideas as one of the national integration efforts that cannot be separated from the influence of the religiosity and social background of the people around her. Kartini's thinking about religion was critical, open, and pluralistic, which was concerned with the division of the nation due to religious differences.


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.


PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 594-609
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Emmerich ◽  
Nicole G. Burgoyne ◽  
Andrew B. B. Hamilton

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?


2010 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
W.T. Eijsbouts

Leipzig 1989: dissolution of the East German state people or Staatsvolk – Karlsruhe 2020: dissolution of the German people – Courts and the people as a neglected constitutional relationship – Bundesverfassungsgericht's versions of the people – Analysis of the concept of people – Forms of action – Political people breaks down into two: original and electoral people – Marbury v. Madison – Duality as a matter of doctrine and principle – Duality in Lissabon Urteil – Conflation and reduction of authority to vote – Subordination of electoral to original people – The Court's logic pushed into motion – Exposing the constitution


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document