National Identity in Divided and Unified Germany PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download National Identity in Divided and Unified Germany PDF full book. Access full book title National Identity in Divided and Unified Germany by Joakim Ekman. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Joakim Ekman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783836465946
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Get Book Here
Book Description
Following World War II, Germany was divided in two parts. For a period of more than 40 years, two German states developed in separation from each other, and because of the horrors of the recent past, both states badly needed to develop new national self-images. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the communist regime desperately tried to foster a distinct socialist GDR identity among the East Germans. In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the successful economic and political development led to the emergence of a new, post-war national identity. The Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989, and Germany was formally unified not even a year later, on October 3, 1990. The past decades have shown, however, that Germany has had difficulties in becoming informally unified. This study examines attitudinal differences between East Germans and West Germans, and asks if differences today are primarily ascribable to different historical experiences, or rather an outcome of the uneasy unification process.
Author: Joakim Ekman
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783836465946
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Get Book Here
Book Description
Following World War II, Germany was divided in two parts. For a period of more than 40 years, two German states developed in separation from each other, and because of the horrors of the recent past, both states badly needed to develop new national self-images. In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the communist regime desperately tried to foster a distinct socialist GDR identity among the East Germans. In the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), the successful economic and political development led to the emergence of a new, post-war national identity. The Berlin Wall was opened on November 9, 1989, and Germany was formally unified not even a year later, on October 3, 1990. The past decades have shown, however, that Germany has had difficulties in becoming informally unified. This study examines attitudinal differences between East Germans and West Germans, and asks if differences today are primarily ascribable to different historical experiences, or rather an outcome of the uneasy unification process.
Author: Andreas Staab
Publisher: Praeger
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200
Get Book Here
Book Description
Analyzes the development from the divided to the unified Germany and asks to what extent East Germans have adopted a national identity in line with that of the West Germans. The text examines such identity markers as attitudes toward territory, economics, ethnicity and mass culture.
Author: R. Wittlinger
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230290493
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 196
Get Book Here
Book Description
Wittlinger takes a fresh look at German national identity in the 21st century and shows that it has undergone considerable changes since unification in 1990. Due to the external pressures of the post-cold war world and recent domestic developments, Germany has re-emerged as a nation which is less hesitant to assert its national interest.
Author:
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780889463516
Category : Berlin (Germany)
Languages : en
Pages : 293
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Jonathan Grix
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567536068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book explores the nature of the dramatic growth in a distinct sense of East German identity in the years since the events that led to formal unification in 1990. While it is problematic to see 'East Germanness' as a singular and homogenous identity, it can be perceived as a distinctive phenomenon and a level of identification that exists alongside local, regional and national identities. The essays in this volume hope to challenge the commonly held misconception that East German regional identity is a problem that needs to be overcome in the process of unification. Through analyses of the social, political and cultural behaviour of East Germans and their perception of their own place in German society, this volume makes a complex and nuanced contribution to discussions on German national identity and the unification process.
Author: Siobhan Kattago
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313074771
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 208
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ambiguous Memory examines the role of memory in the building of a new national identity in reunified Germany. The author maintains that the contentious debates surrounding contemporary monumnets to the Nazi past testify to the ambiguity of German memory and the continued link of Nazism with contemporary German national identity. The book discusses how certain monuments, and the ways Germans have viewed them, contribute to the different ways Germans have dealt with the past, and how they continue to deal with it as one country. Kattago concludes that West Germans have internalized their Nazi past as a normative orientation for the democratic culture of West Germany, while East Germans have universalized Nazism and the Holocaust, transforming it into an abstraction in which the Jewish question is down played. In order to form a new collective memory, the author argues that unified Germany must contend with these conflicting views of the past, incorporating certain aspects of both views. Providing a topography of East, West, and unified German memory during the 1980s and the 1990s, this work contributes to a better understanding of contemporary national identity and society. The author shows how public debate over such issues at Ronald Reagan's visit to Bitburg, the renarration of Buchenwald as Nazi and Soviet internment camp, the Goldhagen controversy, and the Holocaust Memorial debate in Berlin contribute to the complexities surrounding the way Germans see themselves, their relationship to the past, and their future identity as a nation. In a careful analysis, the author shows how the past was used and abused by both the East and the West in the 1980s, and how these approaches merged in the 1990s. This interesting new work takes a sociological approach to the role of memory in forging a new, integrative national identity.
Author: Jan-Werner Müller
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300083880
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 332
Get Book Here
Book Description
This important book not only examines changing notions of nationhood and their complicated relationship to the Nazi past but also charts the wider history of the development of German political thought since World War II, while critically reflecting on some of the continuing blind spots among German writers and thinkers.
Author: Mary Fulbrook
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 9780745610450
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256
Get Book Here
Book Description
For over half a century, Germans have lived in the shadow of Auschwitz. Who was responsible for the mass murder of millions of people in the Holocaust: just a small gang of evil men, Hitler and his henchmen; or certain groups within a particular system; or even the whole nation? Could the roots of malignancy be traced far back in German history? Or did the Holocaust have more to do with European modernity? Should Germans live with a legacy of guilt forever? And how, if at all, could an acceptable German national identity be defined? These questions dogged public debates in both East and West Germany in the long period of division. Both states officially claimed to have "overcome the past" more effectively than the other; both sought to construct new, opposing identities as the "better Germany". But, in different ways, official claims ran at odds with the kaleidoscope of popular collective memories; dissonances, sensitivities and taboos were the order of the day on both sides of the Wall. And in the 1990s, with continued heated debates over past and present, it was clear that inner unity appeared to be no automatic consequence of formal unification. Drawing on a wide range of material - from landscapes of memory and rituals of commemoration, through private diaries, oral history interviews and public opinion poll surveys, to the speeches of politicians and the writings of professional historians - Fulbrook provides a clear analysis of key controversies, events and patterns of historical and national consciousness in East and West Germany in equal depth. Arguing against "essentialist" conceptions of the nation, Fulbrook presents a theory of the nation as a constructed community of shared legacy and common destiny, and shows how the conditions for the easy construction of any such identity have been notably lacking in Germany after the Holocaust. This book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students in history, politics, and German and European Studies, as well as established scholars and interested members of the public.
Author: D. Clarke
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230349692
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Get Book Here
Book Description
Memories of and attitudes to the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, within contemporary Germany are characterized by their variety and complexity, whilst the debate over how to remember the GDR tells us a lot about how Germans see themselves and their future. This volume provides a range of international perspectives.
Author: Nancy Ruth Reagin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780511318962
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 247
Get Book Here
Book Description
"Is cleanliness next to Germanness, as some 19th century nationalists insisted? This book explores the relationship between gender roles, domesticity, and German national identity between 1870 and 1945. After German unification, approaches to household management that had originally emerged among the bourgeoisie became central to German national identity by 1914. Thrift, order, and extreme cleanliness, along with particular domestic markers (such as the linen cabinet) and holiday customs, were used by many Germans to define the distinctions between themselves and neighbouring cultures." "After 1933, this idealized notion of domestic Germanness was racialised and incorporated into an array of Nazi social politics. In occupied Eastern Europe during World War II Nazi women's groups used these approaches to household management in their attempts to 'Germanize' Eastern European women who were part of a large-scale project of population resettlement and ethnic cleansing."--Jacket.
