From London to Leipzig and Back: A Transnational Approach to the Endzeit  (R)Evolution (1976–92)

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-100
Author(s):  
Marlene Schrijnders
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East German ◽  
German City ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Relationship

Twenty-five years ago, just as the Cold War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the suitably-titled West German goth fanzine Glasnost announced that a festival called Wave-Gotik-Treffen was to be held in the East German city of Leipzig. Today, the Wave-Gotik-Treffen is the biggest such festival in the world. Initially, however, its significance lay in allowing East and West German goths to meet and dance together, revealing differences in their respective experiences and understanding of the dark subculture. This article will examine two inter-related questions. First, what was the relationship between ‘goth’, as a music and aesthetic, across the frontier of the cold war? Second, to what extent were the goth subcultures of East and West Germany informed by and understood in relation to the original goth subculture emergent within the UK? The article will feed into the debate on the politics of youth culture, but also on the ways by which subcultural meanings and identities are transmitted and redefined across national borders.

Post-unification (East) German Documentary and the Contradictions of Identity

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barton Byg
Keyword(s):  
West Germany ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East German ◽  
Innovative Enterprise ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Individual

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.

scholarly journals Introduction: Burdens and Beginnings: Rebuilding East and West Germany after Nazism

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 275-293
Author(s):  
Karen Hagemann ◽  
Konrad H. Jarausch ◽  
Tobias Hof
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
West Germany ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East And West ◽  
New Beginnings ◽  
Nazi Past ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThe introduction discusses the state of the current research on the post-1945 history of East and West Germany, explains the agenda of the special issue and discusses its main topics. The focus is the politics of survival in the chaos of collapse and the controversial debates about the agenda of the reconstruction. In these discussions different visions competed, from the restoration of traditions to efforts of a post-fascist modernization. The introduction questions the postwar success narrative by discussing the “burdens” of the Nazi past, such as Nazi perpetrators, displaced people, expellees and refugees, including the returning German-Jewish survivors. It also engages with the problems of the Cold War division by exploring the “new beginnings”, which were debated in relation to the past of Nazi, Weimar, and Imperial Germany, among them: cultural diplomacy, welfare policy and eldercare, family policy and gender roles, and popular culture. The essay calls for more comparative and transnational research of the postwar era, especially in the areas of the integration into the Cold War blocs, the postwar shifting of borders and peoples, narratives of victimhood, and memory tropes about the war and postwar.

After the Wall: Parental attitudes to child rearing in East and West Germany

2004 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harald Uhlendorff
Keyword(s):  
Parental Attitudes ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Child Rearing ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
Path Analyses ◽  
The Social ◽  
Family Orientation ◽  
Kinship Relations ◽  
East German ◽  
East And West

In the years following German reunification, East and West German parents (282 mothers and 207 fathers) were interviewed about attitudes to the rearing of their 7- to 13-year-old children and about their social networks. Path analyses show that East German parents engage in more protective and less permissive parenting, and that East German fathers raise their children in a more traditional and authoritarian manner than their West German counterparts. In part, these differences can be attributed to the strong family orientation of East German parents (many and intensive kinship relations, few friends). Further analyses show that corollaries of the social upheavals in East Germany, namely closer cohesion of the immediate family and a decrease in the social support provided by the extrafamilial environment, are associated with protective attitudes to parenting and hence with the tendency to limit children’s freedom of decision-making.

scholarly journals Reinventing Consumption Traditions through the Process of Unification of a Country: Understanding “Good Bye Lenin!”

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-153
Author(s):  
Ece Ceren Engür
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Times

This paper focuses on the change of consumption traditions in terms of re-unification of a country. The discussion bases on the movie, “Good Bye Lenin!”(2003) and chases the transformations on consumption trends in order to understand how the re-unification of East and West Germany influences the practices of everyday life after a four decade long segregation. The movie displays the 1990’s Germany during the times when the Berlin Wall falls and frames a family portrait which is dominated by an idealist and traditional mother character in the last days of her life.

Catching-up of East German Labour Productivity in the 1990s

2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ray Barrell ◽  
Dirk Willem te Velde
Keyword(s):  
East Germany ◽  
Labour Productivity ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Foreign Firms ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
East German ◽  
East And West ◽  
Organization Of Production

Abstract We provide empirical evidence for exogenous and endogenous catching-up of East German labour productivity to West German levels. We argue that labour productivity in East Germany has caught up faster than has happened elsewhere. The sudden formation of the German Monetary Union was followed by large transfers to East Germany, migration of workers to West Germany, reorganization and privatization of East German firms. This has quickly led to a partial closing of the organizational, idea and object gaps that existed between East and West Germany. This paper analyses labour productivity in East and West Germany using both aggregate German data and unbalanced panel analysis of developments in East and West Germany. Factors affecting the organization of production, and especially privatization and `foreign' firms, are found to be particularly important in this context.

scholarly journals Hidden Behind the Wall: West German State Building and the Emergence of the Iron Curtain

2011 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 506-535 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sagi Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
German Economy ◽  
State Building ◽  
West Germany ◽  
State Agencies ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
German State ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East German

It is widely accepted that the inter-German border was constructed by East German authorities to halt the emigration to the west, which had damaged the East German economy and undermined the East German state agencies' power. This article argues that this is an inaccurate understanding, which mistakenly treats perceptions and insights gained from studying the Berlin Wall as representative of the mostly rural border between East and West Germany. It emphasizes crucial transformations of frontier society during the 1950s, highlighting the important role of western as well as eastern policy in shaping them.

How Robust is the IAT? Measuring and Manipulating Implicit Attitudes of East-and West-Germans

2001 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrich Kühnen ◽  
Michael Schießl ◽  
Nadine Bauer ◽  
Natalie Paulig ◽  
Claudia Pöhlmann ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
West Germany ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
East German ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
Dimension 2 ◽  
East And West ◽  
Underlying Processes ◽  
East West ◽  
Representative Samples

Abstract. We investigated consequences of priming East-West-German related self-knowledge for the strength of implicit, ingroup-directed positive evaluations among East- and West-Germans. Based on previous studies we predicted opposite effects of self-knowledge priming for East- and West-Germans. Since in general the East-German stereotype is regarded as more negative than the West-German one, bringing to mind East-West-related self-knowledge (relative to neutral priming) was expected to attenuate ingroup favoritism for East-Germans, but to increase it for West-Germans. After having fulfilled the priming tasks, participants worked on an IAT-version in which the to be classified stimuli were East- or West-German city names (dimension 1) and positive or negative adjectives (dimension 2). Results of Experiment 1 showed (a) that East- and West-German students implicitly evaluated their ingroups as more positive than the outgroups and (b) confirmedthe predictions of the priming influence. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with more representative samples from East- and West-Germany. The results are discussed with regard to underlying processes of implicit attitudes in intergroup contexts.

Representing a “Better Germany”: Competing Images of State and Society in the Early Cultural Diplomacy of the FRG and GDR

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 372-392
Author(s):  
Lorn Hillaker
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Early Years ◽  
West Germany ◽  
International Treaties ◽  
East And West Germany ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Image Building ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractIn the early years of the FRG and GDR, cultural diplomacy was largely defined by each country's need to establish a role for itself within its respective Cold War bloc. In the sphere of foreign policy, competition between East and West Germany to achieve recognition both from Western states and the so-called Third World was heightened by the FRG's Hallstein Doctrine (1955–1970). Cultural diplomacy offered a route outside traditional channels of diplomacy to convince foreign politicians to support or at least have favorable views of either German state. The cultural diplomatic media of this early period focused on each state's rebuilding and adherence to international treaties as well as on countering the legacy of the Second World War. As division continued into the 1950s, cultural diplomacy on each side of the iron curtain worked to cultivate an image of a peaceful, friendly state superior both to its Nazi predecessor and to its rival across the German-German border, setting the terms for an image-building contest that would continue throughout the Cold War.

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