Mobilizing Womanpower: Women, Engineers and the East German State in the Cold War

2005 ◽  
pp. 225-269
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Women Engineers ◽  
German State ◽  
East German ◽  
The Cold War

Soldiers, Citizens, and the State: East German Army Officers in Post-Unification Germany

2009 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-287
Author(s):  
Andrew Bickford
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The State ◽  
Smooth Transition ◽  
The West ◽  
German Government ◽  
German State ◽  
German Army ◽  
Army Officers ◽  
East German ◽  
The Cold War

Despite official narratives of a relatively smooth transition, of the merging of “those things which belong together,” German unification and the formation of a new German state has been an uneven project filled with friction and animosity. While the West German government celebrated the “victory” of unification, and stated that all East Germans wanted unification, one group of East Germans did not look forward to the dissolution of the GDR: members of the East German military, the Nationale Volksarmee (National People's Army, or NVA). Disbanded immediately upon unification, the overwhelming majority of NVA officers were left unemployed overnight, stripped of their status as officers and portrayed by the West Germans as the “losers” of the Cold War. For these men, unification was not a joyous, desired event; rather, it represented the end of their careers, security, status, and the state they had sworn to defend. As such, the “fall” into democracy for these men was from the start fraught with uncertainty, disappointment, anomie, and a profound sense of loss.

Can You Spare 5 Minutes? Cold War Women’s Radio on RIAS Berlin

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-297
Author(s):  
Joan L. Clinefelter
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Radio Station ◽  
German State ◽  
West Berlin ◽  
East German ◽  
Domestic Lives ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Access To Food ◽  
Female Audience ◽  
The U.S

Throughout the 1950s, the American propaganda radio station RIAS Berlin transformed women’s radio into an anti-communist medium designed to enlist German housewives into the Cold War. Based in West Berlin, RIAS—Radio in the American Sector—broadcast a full array of shows deep inside East Germany as part of the U.S. psychological war against communism. One of its key target audiences was German homemakers. Drawing upon scripts held in the German Radio Archives in Potsdam, Germany, this article analyzes the program Can You Spare 5 Minutes? (Haben Sie 5 Minuten Zeit?). It explores how RIAS inscribed the international contest between democracy and communism onto the domestic lives of women. The show built a sense of solidarity by treating typical “female” topics such as cosmetics, childcare, and recipes. In this way it forged a bond between its listeners that provided an opening for political messaging. Programs contrasted access to food, marriage rights, and educational policy in the rival Germanies to demonstrate the benefits of democracy and the need to resist the East German state. Women’s radio on RIAS, far from offering mere fluff, provided its female audience a political education.

Women Agents in the East German State Security

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Thomas Wegener Friis ◽  
Helmut Müller-Enbergs
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
German State ◽  
State Security ◽  
Controlling Images ◽  
Intelligence Studies ◽  
East German ◽  
Women's Role ◽  
The Cold War

In the communist camp during the Cold War, exercising power was a male domain. The Ministry of State Security (MfS) of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was no exception. Within the organization, women were employed but they rarely made a career. In the bottom of the State Security hierarchy were the agents. This article examines who were the women agents in the rank of the MfS. Based on statistical materials, it gives an overview of women’s role and the character of their covert work. Inspired by Andrea Petö’s introduction of the concept of controlling images to intelligence studies, particular focus is devoted to the question whether the MfS agents complied to the stereotypes of women in intelligence work.

Stereotypes and Jewish Musical Topics in East German Film: Ambiguities and Allosemitism in Hotel Polan und seine Gäste

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Frühauf
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Film Music ◽  
Jewish Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Jewish Family ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
German Film ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
East German ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The miniseries Hotel Polan und seine Gäste tells the story of three generations of a Jewish family of hoteliers in Bohemia from 1908 to National Socialist persecution. Produced by GDR television in the early 1980s, the series was subsequently broadcast in other European countries and met with a mixed reception. Later on, scholars evaluated it as blatantly antisemitic and anti-Zionist. This essay seeks to re-evaluate these prerogatives by centring the analysis of the miniseries on a close reading of its music—a method not often used in Jewish studies, but a suitable lens through which to interrogate the employment of stereotypes, especially in film, and in light of textual sources from the Cold War era often being reflective of ideologies rather than facts. Employing critical theories of cultural studies and film music, it seeks to identify stereotypes and their dramatic placement and to analyse their operation. It asserts that story, image, and sound constitute both synchronous and asynchronous agents that perpetuate various stereotypes associated with Jews, thereby placing Hotel Polan in the liminal space of allosemitism. Constructed through difference from a perceived norm, Hotel Polan ultimately represents a space in which the egregious stereotype and the strategic employment of types meet. Its deployment of Jewish musical topics specifically shows that it is less their dramatic function that is of relevance, but the discourse that they have the power to enable.

scholarly journals Children’s Literature and Translation Under the East German Regime

2003 ◽  
Vol 48 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 241-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriele Thomson-Wohlgemuth
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
Children's Books ◽  
Children’S Books ◽  
The Status ◽  
East German ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract This paper describes the status of translation and publication of East German children’s literature during the period of the Cold War. It briefly gives an indication of the high value placed on translation and translators in the socialist regime. Finally it focuses on the main criteria influencing the translation and publication of children’s books with the economic and ideological factors being the most significant and gives brief examples from the East German censorship files.

“Football More Important Than Berlin”

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-137
Author(s):  
Heather L. Dichter
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
National Interest ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
East German ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Foreign Ministries

In the early 1960s Portugal and the Netherlands confronted the problem of East German participation in the UEFA Junior Tournament and Olympic qualification. Although not very important tournaments, domestic governments feared they would cause a public backlash against themselves and NATO should the East Germans not be allowed to participate. These games became tied up with debates over NATO policies, national interest, and public opinion. The popularity of football prompted some states to attempt to use the national interest exception to the East German travel ban. These football matches brought the Cold War into the smaller NATO member states’ national boundaries. By hosting sporting events the Netherlands and Portugal engaged directly with their NATO allies over Cold War policies with which they did not fully agree or which they believed would cause public opinion problems at home and abroad. NATO diplomats, foreign ministries, and the leaders of national and international football federations spent months in protracted negotiations over whether minor football matches involving the German Democratic Republic would even take place during the height of the Cold War as each group attempted to appear blameless in the court of public opinion.

From Stalin to Mao

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elidor Mëhilli
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Small Country ◽  
Political Unity ◽  
Nazi Occupation ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This book interprets socialism as a form of globalization by telling the unknown history of a small country that found itself entangled in some of the biggest developments of the Cold War. Within two decades, Albania went from fascist Italian rule to Nazi occupation, a brief interlude as a Yugoslav satellite, and then to a heady period of borrowings—government advisers, brand new factories, school textbooks, urban plans, and everything in between— from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. With Soviet backing, Albania’s regime launched a bold experiment: turn illiterate peasants into conscious workers. Ambitious but poor, the country also turned into a contact zone between East German engineers, Czech planners, and Hungarian geologists who came to help build socialism from scratch. Then, the socialist world shattered. During the Sino-Soviet conflict of the 1960s, Albania’s party clique switched allegiance to China, seeing in Mao’s patronage an opportunity to keep Stalinism alive. Combining an analysis of ideology with a keen sense of geopolitics, this book explores this strange connectivity of socialism, showing how socialism created a shared material and mental culture—still evident today across Eurasia—but it failed to generate political unity.

‘The Continuation of Politics by Other Means’: Britain, the Two Germanys and the Olympic Games, 1949–1972

2009 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 443-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. GERALD HUGHES ◽  
RACHEL J. OWEN
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
East Germany ◽  
West Germany ◽  
German State ◽  
German States ◽  
British Perspective ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
International Sport ◽  
The Olympic Games

AbstractThis article evaluates the interplay between international sport and international politics during the cold war through an examination of the two Germanys and the Olympics from a British perspective. Germany was at the centre of Olympic and cold war politics between 1945 and the early 1970s, and the two German states competed fiercely over questions of national legitimacy. West Germany was initially successful in denying international recognition to the ‘other’ German state. East Germany countered this by developing a strategy that utilised international sport, particularly the Olympic Games, to further its claims for statehood. While recognising the flaws in the West German case against East Germany, British policy was constrained by the need to accommodate Bonn's sensibilities, given that the Federal Republic was a major ally. An examination of this ‘Olympian’ struggle from a British perspective tells us much about the West's cold war strategy and casts new light on this arena of East–West competition.

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