Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic

Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic PDF Author: Chris Weedon
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004544909
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409

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Book Description
More than thirty years after German reunification, Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic addresses how life in the GDR is remembered, thereby enriching and complexifying the narratives of East German life found in public history, museums, tourist venues, film, media and popular fiction. The frequent stress on material lack, social restrictions and the repressive state is expanded and reconfigured by interviewees who variously both challenge and confirm widespread assumptions about what it meant to live in the GDR. Aimed at a wide readership, this book gives English-speaking readers access to varied and detailed accounts of everyday life, individual engagement with state institutions and different views of GDR politics, society and culture.

Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic

Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic PDF Author: Chris Weedon
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004544909
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 409

Get Book Here

Book Description
More than thirty years after German reunification, Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic addresses how life in the GDR is remembered, thereby enriching and complexifying the narratives of East German life found in public history, museums, tourist venues, film, media and popular fiction. The frequent stress on material lack, social restrictions and the repressive state is expanded and reconfigured by interviewees who variously both challenge and confirm widespread assumptions about what it meant to live in the GDR. Aimed at a wide readership, this book gives English-speaking readers access to varied and detailed accounts of everyday life, individual engagement with state institutions and different views of GDR politics, society and culture.

Born in the GDR

Born in the GDR PDF Author: Hester Vaizey
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198718748
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
The real life stories of eight East Germans caught up in the dramatic transition from Communism to Capitalism by the fall of the Berlin Wall - and what they feel about life after the Wall.

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.

Revenge of the Domestic

Revenge of the Domestic PDF Author: Donna Harsch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691059297
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
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The History of the Stasi

The History of the Stasi PDF Author: Jens Gieseke
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1782382550
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
A well-balanced and detailed look at the East German Ministry for State Security, the secret police force more commonly known as the Stasi. “This is an excellent book, full of careful, balanced judgements and a wealth of concisely-communicated knowledge. It is also well written. Indeed, it is the best book yet published on the MfS.”—German History The Stasi stood for Stalinist oppression and all-encompassing surveillance. The “shield and sword of the party,” it secured the rule of the Communist Party for more than forty years, and by the 1980s it had become the largest secret-police apparatus in the world, per capita. Jens Gieseke tells the story of the Stasi, a feared secret-police force and a highly professional intelligence service. He inquires into the mechanisms of dictatorship and the day-to-day effects of surveillance and suspicion. Masterful and thorough at once, he takes the reader through this dark chapter of German postwar history, supplying key information on perpetrators, informers, and victims. In an assessment of post-communist memory politics, he critically discusses the consequences of opening the files and the outcomes of the Stasi debate in reunified Germany. A major guide for research on communist secret-police forces, this book is considered the standard reference work on the Stasi.

Stasiland

Stasiland PDF Author: Anna Funder
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 1443406090
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterwards the two Germanies reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. In a country where the headquarters of the secret police can become a museum literally overnight and in which one in fifty East Germans were informing on their fellow citizens, there are thousands of captivating stories. Anna Funder tells extraordinary tales from the underbelly of the former East Germany. She meets Miriam, who as a sixteen-year-old might have started World War III; she visits the man who painted the line that became the Berlin Wall; and she gets drunk with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the East, once declared by the authorities to his face to “no longer exist.” Each enthralling story depicts what it’s like to live in Berlin as the city knits itself back together—or fails to. This is a history full of emotion, attitude and complexity.

Friendship without Borders

Friendship without Borders PDF Author: Phil Leask
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789206561
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 535

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Book Description
Across half a century, from the division of Germany through the end of the Cold War, a cohort of thirty women from the small German town of Schönebeck in what used to be the GDR circulated among themselves a remarkable collective archive of their lives: a Rundbrief, or bulletin, containing hundreds of letters and photographs. This book draws on that unprecedented resource, complemented by a set of interviews, to paint a rich portrait of “ordinary” life in postwar Germany. It shows how these women—whether reflecting on their experiences as Nazi-era schoolchildren or witnessing reunification—were united by their complex interactions with official power and their commitment to sustaining a shared German identity as they made the most of their everyday lives in both the GDR and the Federal Republic.

Faust's Gold

Faust's Gold PDF Author: Steven Ungerleider
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1466891858
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Steven Ungerleider's Faust's Gold is the stunning expose of the East German sports juggernaut of the 1970s and 1980s that forced young athletes to unknowingly take steroids. For nearly twenty-five years, East Germany's corrupt sports organization dominated international athletics. While the German Democratic Republic's secret "State Plan" was in effect, more than ten thousand unsuspecting young athletes--some as young as twelve years old--were given massive doses of performance-enhancing anabolic steroids. These athletes achieved miraculous success in international competitions, including the Olympics, but for many of them, their physical and emotional health was permanently damaged. Faust's Gold draws on the revelations of the ongoing trials of former GDR coaches, doctors, and sports officials who have now confessed to conducting ruthless medical experiments on young and talented athletes selected for Olympic training camps. It also draws on the extensive research of Brigitte Berendonk, who escaped from East Germany to begin a decade-long crusade to bring justice to her fellow athletes, and that of her husband, Professor Werner Franke. Berendonk's story, and those of her colleagues in the GDR, offers a unique insight into a bizarre regime. Faust's Gold is a true-life detective story that plunges into the dark, secretive world of the GDR doping scam, where elite competitors and their families are up against a formidable opponent: the East German secret police, known as the STASI. What emerges is a complex tapestry of the politicized modern Olympics that culminates in a powerful testimony to the massive wrong done by one Eastern Bloc nation to its world-class athletes.

DDR Ansichten

DDR Ansichten PDF Author: Thomas Hoepker
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783775728133
Category : Germany (East)
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
The charm of the photographs by Thomas Hoepker (*1936 in Munich) lies in their documentary quality, their authenticity, and their testimonial character, for they were produced by an impartial eye. Hoepker was a photojournalist for magazines such as Stern and Geo for many years. In the early seventies he and his wife, journalist Eva Windmöller, were accredited in the German Democratic Republic, and they spent several years reporting on politics and everyday life in East Berlin. In this volume, Hoepker documents life in East Germany from 1959 to the political turn of events in the late eighties: photos of children playing on the Berlin Wall, party rallies, propaganda posters, ramshackle old façades from the Imperial Era and new apartment blocks, Sunday outings and empty supermarket display cases, as well as portraits of artists such as Wolf Biermann tell tales of a vanished nation. Exhibition schedule: Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin May 11-October 3, 2011 - Galerie Christian Hiltawsky, Berlin May 27-July 9, 2011 - Haus der Geschichte, Bonn July 1, 2011-June, 2012 - Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer, Kapelle der Versöhnung, Berlin July-August, 2011

The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures

The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures PDF Author: Jennifer Hofmann
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 031642644X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
In a world of spycraft, betrayals, and reversals, a Stasi officer is unraveled by the cruel system he served and by the revelation of a decades-old secret, in this “story that John le Carré might have written for The Twilight Zone” (Washington Post). On November 9, 1989, Bernd Zeiger, a Stasi officer in the twilight of his career, is deteriorating from a mysterious illness. Alarmed by the disappearance of Lara, a young waitress at his regular café with whom he is obsessed, he chases a series of clues throughout Berlin. The details of Lara’s vanishing trigger flashbacks to his entanglement with Johannes Held, a physicist who, twenty-five years earlier, infiltrated an American research institute dedicated to weaponizing the paranormal. Now, on the day the Berlin Wall falls and Zeiger’s mind begins to crumble, his past transgressions have come back to haunt him. Who is the real Lara, what happened to her, and what is her connection to these events? As the surveiller becomes the surveilled, the mystery is both solved and deepened, with unexpected consequences. Set in the final, turbulent days of the Cold War, The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures blends the high-wire espionage of John le Carré with the brilliant absurdist humor of Milan Kundera to evoke the dehumanizing forces that turned neighbor against neighbor and friend against friend. Jennifer Hofmann’s debut is an affecting, layered investigation of conscience and country.