Demolition on Karl Marx Square

Demolition on Karl Marx Square PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190645148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
Communist East Germany's demolition of Leipzig's perfectly intact medieval University Church in May 1968 was an act decried as "cultural barbarism" across the two Germanies and beyond. Although overshadowed by the crackdown on Prague Spring mere weeks later, the willful destruction of this historic landmark on a central site symbolically renamed Karl Marx Square represents an essential turning point in the relationship between the Communist authorities and the people they claimed to serve. As the largest case of public protest in East German history between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution, this intimate local trauma exhibits the inner workings of a "dictatorial" system and exposes the often gray and overlapping lines between state and citizenry, which included both quiet and open resistance, passive and active collaboration. Through deep analysis of untapped periodicals and archives (including once-classified State documents, Stasi, and police records, and extensive private protest letters), it introduces a broad cast of characters who helped make the inconceivable possible, and restores the voices of not a few ordinary citizens of all stripes who dared in the name of culture, humanism, and civic pride to protest what they saw as an inconceivable tragedy. In this city that later started the 1989 October Revolution which ultimately triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall, residents from every social background desperately hoped to convince their leaders to step back from the brink. But as the dust cleared in 1968, they saw with all finality that their voices meant nothing, that the DDR was a sham democracy awash with utopian rhetoric that had no connection with their everyday lives. If Communism died in Prague in 1968, it had already died in Leipzig just weeks before, with repercussions that still haunt today's politics of memory.

Demolition on Karl Marx Square

Demolition on Karl Marx Square PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190645148
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
Communist East Germany's demolition of Leipzig's perfectly intact medieval University Church in May 1968 was an act decried as "cultural barbarism" across the two Germanies and beyond. Although overshadowed by the crackdown on Prague Spring mere weeks later, the willful destruction of this historic landmark on a central site symbolically renamed Karl Marx Square represents an essential turning point in the relationship between the Communist authorities and the people they claimed to serve. As the largest case of public protest in East German history between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution, this intimate local trauma exhibits the inner workings of a "dictatorial" system and exposes the often gray and overlapping lines between state and citizenry, which included both quiet and open resistance, passive and active collaboration. Through deep analysis of untapped periodicals and archives (including once-classified State documents, Stasi, and police records, and extensive private protest letters), it introduces a broad cast of characters who helped make the inconceivable possible, and restores the voices of not a few ordinary citizens of all stripes who dared in the name of culture, humanism, and civic pride to protest what they saw as an inconceivable tragedy. In this city that later started the 1989 October Revolution which ultimately triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall, residents from every social background desperately hoped to convince their leaders to step back from the brink. But as the dust cleared in 1968, they saw with all finality that their voices meant nothing, that the DDR was a sham democracy awash with utopian rhetoric that had no connection with their everyday lives. If Communism died in Prague in 1968, it had already died in Leipzig just weeks before, with repercussions that still haunt today's politics of memory.

Demolition on Karl Marx Square

Demolition on Karl Marx Square PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190645121
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
The 1968 demolition of Leipzig's medieval University Church represents an essential turning point in relations between Communist authorities and the people they claimed to serve. The largest East German protest between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution, this intimate story clarifies how the "dictatorial" system operated and lost public belief.

Three Cities After Hitler

Three Cities After Hitler PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822988577
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 601

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Book Description
Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.

Bowling for Communism

Bowling for Communism PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751670
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 327

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Book Description
Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

The People's State

The People's State PDF Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300176384
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 470

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Book Description
What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.” Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives. Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.

Curating (Post-)Socialist Environments

Curating (Post-)Socialist Environments PDF Author: Philipp Schorch
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839455901
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In which ways are environments (post-)socialist and how do they come about? How is the relationship between the built environment, memory, and debates on identity enacted? What are the spatial, material, visual, and aesthetic dimensions of these (post-)socialist enactments or interventions? And how do such (post-)socialist interventions in environments become (re)curated? By addressing these questions, this volume releases ›curation‹ from its usual museological framing and carries it into urban environments and private life-worlds, from predominantly state-sponsored institutional settings with often normative orientations into spheres of subjectification, social creativity, and material commemorative culture.

The Lost German East

The Lost German East PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107020735
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
After 1945, Germany was inundated with ethnic German refugees expelled from Eastern Europe. Andrew Demshuk explores why they integrated into West German society.

The Civil War in France

The Civil War in France PDF Author: Karl Marx
Publisher: DigiCat
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 92

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Book Description
The Civil War in France is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx. It presents a convincing declaration of the General Council of the International, pertaining to the character and importance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune at the time.

Marx Returns

Marx Returns PDF Author: Jason Barker
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1785356615
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Karl Marx is a revolutionary. He is not alone. It is November 1849 and London is full of them: a bunch of fanatical dreamers trying to change the world. Persecuted by a tyrannical housekeeper and ignored by his sexually liberated wife, Marx immerses himself in his writing, believing that his book on capital is the surest way of ushering in the workers’ revolution and his family out of poverty. But when a mysterious figure begins to take an obsessive interest in his work Marx’s revolutionary journey takes an unexpected turn... Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels's collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history's most exceptional minds, in this next fiction offering from Zero Books.

Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (RLE Marxism)

Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (RLE Marxism) PDF Author: Boris Nicolaievsky
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131748486X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
Strife has raged about Karl Marx for decades, and never had it been so embittered as at the time of this book’s first publication, 1936. Marx had impressed his image on the time as not other had done. To some he was – and still is – a fiend, the arch-enemy of human civilisation, and the prince of chaos, while to others he is a far-seeing and beloved leader, guiding the human race towards a brighter future. The arena in which Marx was fought about in 1936 was in the factories, in the parliaments and at the barricades. In both camps, the bourgeois and the socialist, Marx was first of all, if not exclusively, the revolutionary. This book sets out to describe the life of Marx the fighter.