The Western Connection: Western Support for the East German Opposition

2003 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 74-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belinda Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Financial Support ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Secret Police ◽  
The West ◽  
Media Attention ◽  
East German ◽  
Environmental Network ◽  
The Relationship

Without help from the west, the small East German opposition,such as it was, never would have achieved as much as it did. Themoney, moral support, media attention, and protection provided bywestern supporters may have made as much of a difference to theopposition as West German financial support made to the East Germanstate. Yet this help was often resented and rarely acknowledgedby eastern activists. Between 1988 and 1990, I worked withArche, an environmental network created in 1988 by East Germandissidents. During that time, the assistance provided by West Germans,émigré East Germans, and foreigners met with a level of distrustthat cannot entirely be blamed on secret police intrigue.Outsiders who tried to help faced a barrage of allegations and criticismof their work and motives. Dissidents who elected to remain inEast Germany distrusted those who emigrated, and vice versa,reflecting an unfortunate tendency, even among dissidents, to internalizeelements of East German propaganda. Yet neither the helpand support the East German opposition received from outside northe mentalities that stood in its way have been much discussed. Thisessay offers a description and analysis of the relationship betweenthe opposition and its outside supporters, based largely on one person’sfirst-hand experience.

The Neue Marx-Lektüre and the ‘Monetary Theory of Value’ in the East German Labour-Value Measurement Debate

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-60
Author(s):  
Paula Maria Rauhala
Keyword(s):  
Social Relation ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Monetary Theory ◽  
Measurable Quantity ◽  
The West ◽  
East German ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Value Measurement ◽  
Labour Time

Abstract Proponents of a monetary interpretation of Marx’s theory of value (monetäre Werttheorie) argue that one cannot estimate the amounts of socially necessary labour time that lie behind the prices, an interpretation usually ascribed to the West German Neue Marx‑Lektüre. As Hans-Georg Backhaus began fleshing out his monetary interpretation in the early 1970s, he referred explicitly to debate among economists in early‑1960s East Germany about the possibility of estimating quantities of labour value in terms of commodities’ labour content. In fact, scholars who articulated a powerful position in the latter discussion closely approximated the Neue Marx-Lektüre’s ‘monetary interpretation’. They held that expressing labour value in terms of labour time is impossible: the substance of value is not a measurable quantity of labour time but, rather, a social relation. Hence, it is problematic that Neue Marx-Lektüre adherents today should maintain an inaccurate contrast between their reading of Capital and that of ‘traditional Marxism’.

Moving against Disappearance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Richard Giersdorf
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The West ◽  
Pedestrian Movement ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
The Social ◽  
East German

Nearly a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany was subsumed into the West German national structure. As a result, the distinct political systems, institutions, and cultures that characterized East Germany have nearly completely vanished. In some instances, this history was actively—and physically—eradicated by the unified Germany. This chapter works against the disappearance of East German culture by reconstructing the physicality of the walk across the border on the day of the opening of the Berlin Wall and two choreographic works depicting East German identities on stage. The initial re-creation of the choreography of a pedestrian movement provides a social, political, and methodological context that relates the two dance productions to the social movement of East German citizens. Both works take stances on the political situation in East Germany during and after the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, although one is by a West German artist, Sasha Waltz, and the other by East German choreographer Jo Fabian.

How Udo Wanted to Save the World in ‘Erich's Lamp Shop’: Lindenberg's Concert in Honecker's East Berlin, the NATO Double-Track Decision and Communist Economic Woes

2015 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
LORENZ M. LÜTHI
Keyword(s):  
Economic History ◽  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Messages ◽  
East Berlin ◽  
East German ◽  
Peace Activist ◽  
Nuclear Missiles ◽  
Double Track

AbstractThe concert given by the West German rock star Udo Lindenberg in East Berlin on 25 October 1983 links cultural, political, diplomatic and economic history. The East German regime had banned performances by the anti-nuclear peace activist and musician since the 1970s, but eventually allowed a concert, hoping to prevent the deployment of American nuclear missiles in West Germany. In allowing this event, however, East Germany neither prevented the implementation of the NATO double-track decision of 1979 nor succeeded in controlling the political messages of the impertinent musician. Desperate for economic aid from the West, East Germany decided to cancel a promised Lindenberg tour in 1984, causing widespread disillusionment among his fans in the country.

East Germany: Peking-Pankow Axis?

1960 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 85-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. Esslin
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Great Weight ◽  
The West ◽  
Sun Tzu ◽  
Art Of War ◽  
The World ◽  
Communist China ◽  
East German ◽  
National Defence

To the ordinary man in the drab East German street Communist China is a bore: it strikes him that the main use of this remote and shadowy ally is to help inflate the numerical strength of the “socialist camp” by a few useful hundreds of million souls. He realises that this is meant to overcome his feeling of isolation, to convince him that he is allied not only with a collection of uncouth Balkan tribes and formidable but unloved Russians, but also with a nation that can be claimed to be among the oldest civilised countries of the world, that had invented gunpowder long before even a German monk, Berthold Schwarz, invented it for the West. But on the whole the exploitation of the cultural prestige of the Chinese ally is poverty stricken and inept. Reprints of pre-war editions of a few Chinese novels like The Dream of the Red Chamber, an occasional art book of Chinese paintings or an edition by the publishing house of the Ministry of National Defence of an old Chinese Treatise on the Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated from the Russian, hardly carry great weight or conviction.

The Authoritarian Governor’s Dilemma

2020 ◽  
pp. 59-77
Author(s):  
Henry Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Control Agency ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Party Leader ◽  
Secret Police ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
Ex Ante ◽  
East German ◽  
Significant Mass

Even authoritarian leaders cannot rule alone. This chapter explores the politics of indirect authoritarian governance through coercive institutions in socialist Poland and East Germany. It explains why the Polish Bezpieka’s staff and secret informant network shrank after 1956 despite significant mass opposition to the regime, while the East German Stasi grew to become a much larger agency. Authoritarian governors face a problematic tradeoff between the competence of the secret police and their ability to control it. When goal divergence with the police leads a regime to exert more control, agency competence suffers and the regime must turn to violent ex post repression, rather than ex ante deterrence and subversion of threats. In Poland, replacement of the Stalinist party leader in 1956 created significant goal divergence between the upper ranks of the secret police and the new elites the police had previously victimized. Elites shrank the coercive agency to exert control over it, despite significant mass opposition to the regime. In East Germany, in contrast, continuity of Stalinist leadership led to less goal divergence between elites and the secret police, enabling its continued growth.

scholarly journals German-Slavic toponymic contacts in East Germany

Neophilology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 434-443
Author(s):  
Andrei N. Belyaev
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Slavic Language ◽  
German Language ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
The West ◽  
Slavic Languages ◽  
The North ◽  
Geographical Environment ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
The Relationship

We consider the issues of the relationship between the German language and the Sorbian language. The material of the study is the toponyms that are common in the territory that extends in the east to the course of the rivers Bober, Quays and Oder, in the north – to the vicinity of Berlin, and in the west goes beyond the Saale River. The relevance of the study is due to the desire for a more in-depth study of German-Slavic language contacts issues. The novelty of the work lies in the consideration of the issue in various aspects: language levels, sociolinguistic, areal. We study the mechanisms and properties of adaptation of Slavic toponyms at all linguistic levels, clarify the methodology for describing the integration process of borrowed toponyms, describe the phase’s characteristic of the integration process. We show that among the Slavs and Germans, semantic parallelism in the acts of nomination is often noted, due to the geographical environment. We establish that the linguo-geographic relations that developed during the German-Lusatian to-ponymic interaction are heterogeneous in nature. We conclude that interlanguage contacts in the field of toponymy were complex and did not have a monolithic character, as was previously be-lieved. As a prospect for further research, it is planned to study the Slavic Germanic place names in the Slavic languages.

Human Capital, Job Tasks and Technology in East Germany After Reunification

2007 ◽  
Vol 201 ◽  
pp. 97-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Spitz-Oener
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Age Groups ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Historical Event ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
The West ◽  
Job Tasks ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East German ◽  
Surprising Finding

At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, employees in East Germany were at least as well educated as employees in West Germany in terms of formal educational qualifications. However, it is unclear to what extent the skills and knowledge acquired through the East German education system, and through employment in a socialist labour market, are transferable to the new market-based economy. This study aims to shed light on this issue by giving a comprehensive description of the work of those employees who remained employed after the first phase of restructuring (i.e. in 1991) in East Germany, and comparing it with work in West Germany. Overall, the similarity between workplaces in East and West Germany soon after reunicication is striking. In addition, the patterns of task changes between 1991 and 1999 were very similar in both parts of Germany. Neither the level of task inputs in1991 nor the changes in task inputs between 1991 and 1999 were driven by cohort effects, a surprising finding given how differently the age groups were affected by the historical event. The Largest difference between the east and the west exists in terms of workplace computerisation. Although East Germany has caught up rapidly, it was still lagging behind the west in terms of computer use in 1999.

The Purge of Lawyers after the Breakdown of the East German Communist Regime

1995 ◽  
Vol 20 (01) ◽  
pp. 223-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erhard Blankenburg
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
The West ◽  
The Core ◽  
East German ◽  
Communist Past

When in East Germany communist rule broke down, West Germans stood ready to take over. The end of communism also meant the end of the German Democratic Republic state; unification came as unconditional surrender to the western Federal Republic of Germany. The purge of the former regime's leaders therefore became intertwined with the West German takeover. With the takeover came Western politicians, managers, and professionals, forcing East Germans to compete fur jobs and influence. Opportunistic strategies with regard to the future buildup thus mixed with the desires for revenge and justice toward those responsible for the communist past. In this article I focus especially on the screening of the East German legal profession for reemployment in the unified Germany. In the West German tradition the legal profession forms the core of the civil services. In communist states lawyers had remained relatively marginal to the center of political power. Thus Western perceptions of the role of law account for the demise of the East German legal profession. That demise is taking place at a time when the Western regime is in need of many more legally trained people than ever worked in East Germany.

Kompensationsgeschäfte der DDR - Instrumente einer europäischen Ost-West-Wirtschaftsintegration?

2008 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthias Judt
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
East Germany ◽  
The West ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
East German ◽  
Potential Losses ◽  
Foreign Commerce ◽  
Investment Goods

AbstractThe article deals with the issue of countertrades, GDR foreign commerce enterprises contracted with western firms in order to secure the modernizing of its economy. It discusses the argument of whether those contracts could establish new forms of European East-Westintegration between Comecon and EEC economies.Starting from rather unfavorable general trading conditions in the 1950s and early 1960s, East Germany could intensify its trade relations with western countries in the late 1960s. Based on its international recognition in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it also got easier access to western credits to finance large-scale investment programs in the economy. With varying success and in order to refinance those imports from the West, GDR officials tried to conclude contracts pre-engaging western partners to accept mandatory deliveries by East German enterprises in return. The author defines three major forms of such contracts, distinguishable by the level and the type of GDR counter deliveries, agreed on by the contracting partners.Since East Germany failed to put through high levels of its own counter deliveries, these projects contributed to its long-term indebtedness. Moreover, this kind of business, unintentionally created potential losses in the GDR’s foreign trade firms due to various factors. Western companies themselves started to market East German products received in fulfillment of countertrade contracts. Western deliverers of investment goods managed to secure higher prices for their deliveries and lower ones for East German goods in order to subsidize the marketing of East German products they had taken over. That put additional pressure on the already decreasing competitiveness of East German export goods. Finally, the article presents a judgment on the advantages and disadvantages of the countertrade concept for East Germany itself.

scholarly journals Industrial Espionage and Productivity

2020 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 1055-1103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albrecht Glitz ◽  
Erik Meyersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Economic Returns ◽  
The West ◽  
High Quality ◽  
Industrial Espionage ◽  
East German ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Flow Of Information

In this paper, we investigate the economic returns to industrial espionage. We show that the flow of information provided by East German informants in the West over the period 1970–1989 led to a significant narrowing of sectoral TFP gaps between West and East Germany. These economic returns were primarily driven by relatively few high-quality pieces of information and particularly large in sectors closer to the West German technological frontier. Our findings suggest that the East-to-West German TFP ratio would have been 13.3 percent lower at the end of the Cold War had East Germany not engaged in industrial espionage in the West. (JEL L16, N44, O33, O38, O47, P24)

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