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.

City Plans

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stangl
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
City Center ◽  
German State ◽  
Design Competition ◽  
East German ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
The City

Between 1945 and 1949 a series of modernist plans were developed for Berlin. In this time of political turmoil, planners and politicians projected a broad range of meanings onto the plans. After the founding of the East German state, Lothar Bolz orchestrated the adoption of socialist realism as state policy, requiring a return to traditional urban design. This theory included a range of tenets guiding planning, but Walter Ulbricht intervened to assure that planning would be dominated by a concern for parade routes leading to an immense square in the city center. In response to West Berlin’s international building exhibition, the German Democratic Republic held their own design competition for a “socialist” city center in 1958. The recent introduction of industrialized building, along with uncertainty and debate over the nature of “socialist” architecture, was evident in designs with a range of influences, including international modernism, midcentury modernism, and socialist realism.

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?

Building a Rival Fourth Estate: RIAS’s Campaign against East Germany

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Professional Staff ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Fourth Estate ◽  
Personal Investment ◽  
East German ◽  
Socialist Unity

This chapter considers the development of models for news broadcasting at both RIAS and the stations of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). By this time the station had aimed to establish itself as a rival fourth estate in East Germany in order to compete with the official news organs of the Socialist Unity Party. Yet in performing this task, the station's staff confronted a range of apparent contradictions; in attempting to resolve these, RIAS crafted a style of journalism that drew on principles it had forged during the Berlin Airlift: it eschewed neutrality in favor of engagement, but worked to insure the news it broadcast was accurate. It also built a professional staff of reporters who, for a variety of reasons, felt a strong personal investment in seeing the collapse of the East German Communist regime and the reunification of Germany.

East Germany's North European Policy prior to International Recognition of the German Democratic Republic

2006 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 553-571 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL F. SCHOLZ
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
European Policy ◽  
Baltic Region ◽  
German State ◽  
Soviet Policy ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
East German ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Baltic

The main aim of the GDR's foreign policy was to promote the survival and stabilisation of the SED dictatorship, and the so-called ‘worldwide revolution’, by seeking external recognition. After it was granted full sovereignty in 1954–5 the East German state carefully cultivated relations with Western countries. The Scandinavian countries received special attention on the basis of common history, natural economic and transport links, a close relationship with their respective communist parties and East German conformity to Soviet policy in the Baltic region. Up to the 1970s the GDR's main aim was to end its own international isolation. Despite a few spectacular successes, not even Sweden was won over and the final breakthrough did not come until the government of the FRG embarked on its new and successful Ostpolitik. In 1972–3 the Scandinavian countries were among the first officially to recognise the GDR.

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.

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 German Democratic Republic

2009 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 509-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
Łukasz Gałecki ◽  
Andrzej W. Tymowski
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Collective Identity ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
National History ◽  
Real Socialism ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Integral Element

The 1989 revolution in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) constituted an integral element of wider revolutionary processes in Eastern Europe. But in contrast to what happened in Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, where the abrogation of real socialism meant return to one’s own national history, to distinctive national and state traditions, what happened in the GDR left its citizens in a great void, because they lacked a collective identity of their own. The crisis of GDR society came down to the fact that rejecting socialism meant rejecting one’s own country, and this had for a long time been against the wishes of the majority. As 1989 unfolded, opposition intellectuals continued to see the only alternative to the GDR to be a new, improved, but still socialist GDR. Meanwhile, the popular demonstration in Leipzig on 9 October 1989 signaled the end of the Communist regime. The destruction of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was its last dying breath. The paradox was that although the popular call for reunification with West Germany succeeded, the result was widespread frustration, not satisfaction. Moreover, it must be said that the pre-1989 opposition played only a small role in the transformation.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document