scholarly journals Yugoslavia and the German Democratic Republic, 1968-1974

2020 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jasper Klomp
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Economic Cooperation ◽  
Time Interval ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Prague Spring ◽  
East German ◽  
Set Up

Following the Warsaw Pact’s military reaction against the Prague Spring, quarrels between the leaderships of the SFRY and GDR soared too. Divergences between Yugoslav and East German socialism were once again emphasised. This resulted in a six-year pause concerning visits by both states’ leaders to the respective other state. The analysis of political and economic contacts between the SFRY and GDR in the period 1968-1974 nevertheless reveals that in this time interval, multiple remarkable forms of economic affiliations were set-up by Yugoslav and East German partners. In a period of complex political relations, Yugoslav and East German actors aimed for mutually beneficial economic cooperation and an alleged alternative to capitalist globalisation.  

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.

The Principles of State Governance of the German Democratic Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 1(21) ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Kuźnik
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
German States ◽  
East German ◽  
State Governance ◽  
Council Of Ministers ◽  
National Defence

The aim of this article is to present the principles underlying the political system in force in the German Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1990, with a particular emphasis on the issue of the state of emergency law. The article describes the two Constitutions from 1949 and 1968 and the state institutions established under them, including the GDR People's Chamber, the Council of Ministers, the GDR State Council and the National Defence Council. It also discusses the constitutional solutions within the scope of the emergency law. The legal basis for the protection of the border between the two then existing German states was also considered. This article is based on the two East German Constitutions, other legal acts and on the principles of East German and Polish doctrine. The article consists of an introduction, three parts and a summary.

Everyday Communism: New Social History of the German Democratic Republic

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
SANDRINE KOTT
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German

Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 388 pp., £14.00 (pb), ISBN 1-57181-182-6.Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigensinn in der Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) 367 pp., €39.90 (hb), ISBN 3-412-13598-4.Annegret Schüle, ‘Die Spinne’. Die Erfahrungsgeschichte weiblicher Industriearbeit im VEB Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 398 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 3-934565-87-5.Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond, eds., The Workers' and Peasants' State. Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 272 pp., £15.99 (pb), ISBN 0-7190-6289-6.Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 331 pp., £19.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8078-5385-2.

Occupation, Reparations, and Rebellion: The Soviets and the East German Uprising of 1953

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-250
Author(s):  
Wayne Geerling ◽  
Gary B. Magee ◽  
Russell Smyth
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Internal Resistance ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Local Production ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
East German ◽  
Regional Factors ◽  
Local Companies

Abstract Analysis of the link between the Soviet occupation of East Germany and internal resistance within the German Democratic Republic reveals that ongoing payment of reparations by East Germans out of local production—via the Soviet’s ownership of prominent local companies—affected both the incidence and the intensity of unrest at the precinct level during the uprising of June 17, 1953. This result is robust when controlling for variation in the presence of Soviet military bases and deaths in Soviet nkvd Special Camps, as well as a host of regional factors potentially correlated with differences in unrest.

Der Poet als unbeugsamer Dissident

Daphnis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 560-583
Author(s):  
Michael Hanstein
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Small Volume ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
English Edition ◽  
Original Source ◽  
German Press ◽  
East German

In 1977 the East German author Hans Joachim Schädlich published Versuchte Nähe (English edition Approximation published in 1980), a small volume of short stories. While the Western German press praised Schädlich’s first work as a literary reflection of the society in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Schädlich was marginalized as a dissident in the GDR and had to move to West Germany. One of the short stories in Versuchte Nähe is about the last days of the German renaissance author Nicodemus Frischlin, who, arrested by German authorities, died in prison. The story was appreciated for its style using a “Luther-like language”. Schädlich’s story is mainly based on a biography of Frischlin written by David Friedrich Strauss, a famous and prolific 19th century German author and theologian. Schädlich’s modification of the original source includes a description of the conditions of imprisonment and the heroification of Frischlin as an uncompromising critic of a totalitarian regime.

Sports, Politics, and “Wild Doping” in the East German Sporting “Miracle”

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-142
Author(s):  
Mike Dennis
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Internal Controls ◽  
Health Threats ◽  
East German ◽  
Elite Sports ◽  
Group Interests

Although the German Democratic Republic is well known for its highly centralized and clandestine doping program, the elite sports edifice was not the orderly mechanism associated with the Communist dictatorship. Recent research has uncovered intrinsic operational malfunctions, divergent group interests, and rivalries as clubs and national associations pursued status and material rewards. Despite elaborate internal controls, one of the outcomes was widespread “wild doping,” exceeding officially prescribed norms on the level and types of dosages administered to athletes who received unauthorized experimental steroid substances by coaches and physicians, posing potentially serious health threats to both youngsters and adults.

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?

Popular Discontent and Political Activism in the GDR

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Fulbrook
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Peace Initiatives ◽  
East German ◽  
Apparent Stability

The German Democratic Republic was long noted for its apparent stability, efficiency and political quiescence, in contrast to the more turbulent domestic histories of neighbouring Poland and Czechoslovakia. In established narratives of East German history, the sole evidence of mass popular unrest before the autumn of 1989 was the June Uprising of 1953. After this, with a few isolated exceptions, East Germans simply kept their heads down. ‘Dissent’ was for the most part an activity associated with a few intellectuals–Harich, Havemann, Bahro–until the growth of oppositional movements associated with unofficial peace initiatives and environmentalist groups in the 1980s1. To all outward appearances, this sketch was correct. What now requires reconsideration, however, are the underlying reasons for these appearances, and the evaluation – indeed, the very characterisation – of patterns of popular political dissent in the GDR.

The Meanings of Labor: East German Women's Work in the Transition from Nazism to Communism

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth H. Tobin ◽  
Jennifer Gibson
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Rolling Mill ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Large Piece ◽  
Heavy Machinery ◽  
Paid Labor ◽  
East German ◽  
Ideological Commitment

In Christoph Wetzel's 1988 painting, An Everyday Story, the divided canvas proudly depicts women's accomplishments in the German Democratic Republic (Figure 1). On one side, a woman operates a large piece of heavy machinery in a rolling mill, cool and competent behind the enormous mass of metal and gears. On the other side, the same woman helps her two children prepare for school in the morning. In the act of combing her daughter's hair, she looks out directly at the viewer, her expression asking: “And what are you surprised at?” This painting, displayed as part of a 1995 exposition on art commissioned by government agencies in the GDR, graphically displays that government's ideological commitment to women's paid labor, especially in jobs that, in capitalist societies, are often thought to be inappropriate for women.

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