Homemade Pornography and the Proliferation of Queer Pleasure in East Germany

Like other Eastern Bloc countries, East Germany sought to control even its citizens’ leisure time in the 1960s and 1970s, with the goal of making it useful or at least not subversive to state interests. Certain hobbies, like amateur photography, found support from the state in the form of increased access to equipment and supplies. Other scholarship has shown that sex was a locus of privacy and self-assertion in a society with a high degree of surveillance and state control. Focusing on a previously unanalyzed collection of erotic photographs of men, the article argues, first, that the support for amateur photography makes the state an unwitting participant in the creation and circulation of these illicit images and, second, that the images are an archive of queer men’s self-presentation and critique in a context wherein their existence and affect are transgressive.

Human Capital in Business

Employees are rated as the most valuable asset of an organization. Therefore, the care, development, and maintenance of strong staff motivation are essential to achieve the core business goals. In the early 90s human capital had completely different value in the post-socialist countries. Unlike East Germany, in Bulgaria private property and entrepreneurship did not exist during the Soviet period. The education of an entrepreneurship spirit in free people had to start from scratch. The first part of the chapter examines the most important theoretical contributions and basis of the human capital and human capital resource theories. The second part is dedicated to the practical implications of these concepts in a newborn Bulgarian company which has a vision to transform the society it operates in. In addition, the chapter analyzes how these concepts reflect on a broader business audience, thus becoming a role model for multiplication of other companies from the responsible business circle in Bulgaria.

Image Under Fire: West German Development Aid and the Ghana Press War, 1960–1966

During the 1960s, development aid helped West Germany project a benign image while it discouraged diplomatic recognition of East Germany. In Ghana, however, this effort clashed with the Pan-Africanist aims of President Kwame Nkrumah. Four periodicals under his control attacked West Germany as neo-colonialist, militarist, racist, latently Nazi and a danger to world peace. West German officials resented this campaign and tried to make it stop, but none of their tactics, not even vague threats to aid, worked for long. The attacks ended with Nkrumah's overthrow in early 1966, but while they lasted, they demonstrated that a small state receiving aid could use the press to invert its asymmetric political relationship with the donor.

Disenchanting Socialist Internationalism: Polish Workers in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, 1962−91

This article seeks to paint a more nuanced picture of the role plaid by socialist internationalism in East Germany and Czechoslovakia regarding the employment of foreign labour, focusing on Poles. The long-term cooperation with Warsaw provides a suitable perspective on how to interpret particular periods and milestones of the schemes as a whole. The article partly dissociates from contemporary writing on the subject, which perceives socialist internationalism either as an instrument of propaganda, masking ruthless exploitation, or as a genuine value that inspired and permeated foreign labour recruitment. Based on documents from archives of all three countries in focus, it is argued that the schemes were clearly driven by the economic needs from the very beginning. Except for limited-scale cooperation with countries of the Global South, socialist internationalism came largely to the fore during the 1970s as a substitutional objective, when the economic goals of the foreign labour recruitment proved unreachable, and policymakers were at pains to reshape the meaning of the schemes (running already in full gear). However, with growing and unmanageable economic difficulties, the idealist rhetoric of internationalism plaid an ever more important role in framing the labour force cooperation until the end of communist regimes.

‘Kapitalisten’ and ‘Prywaciarze’. A Comparison of Nationalisation Campaigns in the GDR and Poland

This paper compares nationalisation campaigns in the German Democratic Republic and socialist Poland, with particular focus on industry. It is based on secondary literature as well as material from both the German and Polish statistical offices. The main finding is a surprising lack of simultaneity in the nationalisation campaigns in the two countries, which possibly had a significant impact on the course of economic transformation in East Germany and in Poland.