Book [PDF] The Stasi Files Unveiled Download

Author: Barbara Miller
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412847216
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 180

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1992 the massive files of East Germany's infamous Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, were made publicly available and thousands of former East Germans began to confront their contents. Finally it was possible for ordinary citizens to ascertain who had worked for the Stasi, either on a full-time basis or as an "unofficial employee," the Stasi's term for an informer. The revelations from these documents sparked feuds old and new among a population already struggling through enormous social and political upheaval. Drawing upon the Stasi files and upon interviews with one-time informers, this book examines the impact of the Stasi legacy in united Germany. Barbara Miller examines such aspects of the informer's experience as: the recruitment procedure; daily life and work; motivation and justification. She goes on to consider the dealings of politicians and the courts with the Stasi and its employees. Her analysis then turns to the way in which this aspect of recent German history has been remembered, and the phenomenal impact of the opening of the files on such perceptions of the past. The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany offers important new perspectives on the nature of individual and collective memory and is a fascinating investigation of modern German society. Barbara Miller graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1991 with a degree in German and psychology. She taught and researched in Germany and Austria before completing her doctoral thesis in Glasgow in 1997. She is now based in Sydney, Australia.

Author: Barbara Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351302663
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 112

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1992 the massive files of East Germany's infamous Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, were made publicly available and thousands of former East Germans began to confront their contents. Finally it was possible for ordinary citizens to ascertain who had worked for the Stasi, either on a full-time basis or as an "unofficial employee," the Stasi's term for an informer. The revelations from these documents sparked feuds old and new among a population already struggling through enormous social and political upheaval. Drawing upon the Stasi files and upon interviews with one-time informers, this book examines the impact of the Stasi legacy in united Germany. Barbara Miller examines such aspects of the informer's experience as: the recruitment procedure; daily life and work; motivation and justification. She goes on to consider the dealings of politicians and the courts with the Stasi and its employees. Her analysis then turns to the way in which this aspect of recent German history has been remembered, and the phenomenal impact of the opening of the files on such perceptions of the past. The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany offers important new perspectives on the nature of individual and collective memory and is a fascinating investigation of modern German society. Barbara Miller graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1991 with a degree in German and psychology. She taught and researched in Germany and Austria before completing her doctoral thesis in Glasgow in 1997. She is now based in Sydney, Australia.

Author: Mary Chamberlain
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351520350
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Get Book Here

Book Description
Colonial social policy in the British West Indies from the nineteenth century onward assumed that black families lacked morals, structure, and men, a void that explained poverty and lack of citizenship. African-Caribbean families appeared as the mirror opposite of the "ideal" family advocated by the white, colonial authorities. Yet contrary to this image, what provided continuity in the period and contributed to survival was in fact the strength of family connections, their inclusivity and support. This study is based on 150 life story narratives across three generations of forty-five families who originated in the former British West Indies. The author focuses on the particular axes of Caribbean peoples from the former British colonies of Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, and Great Britain. Divided into four parts, the chapters within each present an oral history of migrant African-Caribbean families, demonstrating the varieties, organization, and dynamics of family through their memories and narratives. It traces the evolution of Caribbean life; argues how the family can be seen as the tool that helps transmit and transform historical mentalities; examines the dynamics of family life; and makes comparisons with Indo-Caribbean families. Above all, this is a story of families that evolved, against the odds of slavery and poverty, to form a distinct Creole form, through which much of the social history of the English-speaking Caribbean is refracted. "Family Love in the Diaspora" offers an important new perspective on African-Caribbean families, their history, and the problems they face, for now and the future. It offers a long overdue historical dimension to the debates on Caribbean families.

Author: Barbara Miller
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781138538771
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Get Book Here

Book Description
In 1992 the massive files of East Germany's infamous Ministry for State Security, the Stasi, were made publicly available and thousands of former East Germans began to confront their contents. Finally it was possible for ordinary citizens to ascertain who had worked for the Stasi, either on a full-time basis or as an "unofficial employee," the Stasi's term for an informer. The revelations from these documents sparked feuds old and new among a population already struggling through enormous social and political upheaval. Drawing upon the Stasi files and upon interviews with one-time informers, this book examines the impact of the Stasi legacy in united Germany. Barbara Miller examines such aspects of the informer's experience as: the recruitment procedure; daily life and work; motivation and justification. She goes on to consider the dealings of politicians and the courts with the Stasi and its employees. Her analysis then turns to the way in which this aspect of recent German history has been remembered, and the phenomenal impact of the opening of the files on such perceptions of the past. The Stasi Files Unveiled: Guilt and Compliance in a Unified Germany offers important new perspectives on the nature of individual and collective memory and is a fascinating investigation of modern German society. Barbara Miller graduated from the University of Glasgow in 1991 with a degree in German and psychology. She taught and researched in Germany and Austria before completing her doctoral thesis in Glasgow in 1997. She is now based in Sydney, Australia.

Author: Olga Shevchenko
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351521675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
Over the past decade, historians and sociologists have increasingly used visual materials, in particular photographs, in their work. This volume brings together historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and media and visual scholars to articulate how photography, as a practice and as a visual medium, can provide insights into national memory, collective identities, and the historical imagination. This collection allows the reader to trace parallel conceptual developments occurring in the sociology and anthropology of memory and in the history and theory of photography, and to illustrate the unique "angles of vision" these disciplines offer. Photographic images commonly accompany historical accounts, from documentaries to family scrapbooks, and since the early days of commercial photography, pictures have been viewed as tools to capture memories. Later critical writing has challenged this equation by inverting it: photos, along with other archival practices, were often viewed as falling short of their supposed function as vessels of memory and at times even denounced as devices that distorted memories. How does photography participate in the formation and maintenance of collective identities and shared memory discourses, from the family to the nation? Furthermore, how can we begin to conceptualize photography's effects on the historical imagination of individuals and groups? Double Exposure endeavors to answer these questions by calling attention to the variety of contexts in which images circulate and to the narratives from which they spring and which they, in turn, shape. This is the latest volume in Transaction's Memory and Narrative series.

Author: Paul Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351314068
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
Between Generations concerns powerful memories that continue to shape the present, but in this case in almost all families throughout the world. What is it that parents pass down to their children? How can we understand the mixture of conscious and unconscious models, myths, and material inheritance that are intertwined in both family and individual life stories? These questions turn out to be unexpectedly complicated, and answering them has suggested how a life-story approach can provide a new key to research on the dynamics of the family and on social change. Because culture is the essence of what makes individual humans into a group, the core of human social identity, its continuity is vital. Cultures are always changing, but the stability of languages, religions, and cultural habits can be astonishing. In contrast to the claims of culture to represent tradition over centuries, stands the sheer brevity of individual human life. Hence, the universal necessity for transmission between generations exists. This edition in the Memory and Narrative series, brings together, contributions from the Americas and Asia as well as from Western and Eastern Europe. They combine the techniques of life story research with the insights of family therapy. Interdisciplinary and intellectually stimulating, the volume will appeal to students in many areas, including history, sociology, literature, psychology, and anthropology.

Author: Luisa Passerini
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 135150598X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 262

Get Book Here

Book Description
Understanding Europe's past became an urgent matter with the events of August 1991 in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union. The invasion of Moscow's streets by Russian people rejecting an attempted coup d'etat was the culmination of a process that had been initiated years before and raised crucial questions: To what extent can these events be considered the end of an era stretching from World War I to the 1980s, when Europe experienced many forms of dictatorship? To what extent can the various forms of dictatorship Europe experienced in the twentieth century be grouped together? Can any sort of affinity be established between them? The new introduction to the paperback edition of this volume in the Memory and Narrative series, Leydesdorff and Crownshaw underline the fundamental importance of the struggle for memory and its meaning. Memory and Totalitarianism explores the remembered experiences of individuals living under different totalitarian regimes, and examines the construction of memory in the aftermath of those regimes' collapse. It attempts to situate the findings of oral history in the context of contemporary memory. It wrestles with the most painful memories that Europeans have of this century at the end of the Cold War. These memories compare with oral history's research into such experiences as racist attitudes against blacks in the South, or the cultural and psychological effects of apartheid in South Africa, or the Aborigines' claim to their own history and to a new idea of history in Australia. Totalitarianisms are products of the twentieth century that go far beyond earlier manifestations of absolutism and autocracy in their effort to completely control political, social, and intellectual life. They were made possible by modern industrialism and technology. Therefore the theme of the book expands to include many other experiences that relate to totalitarian mentalities.

Author: Junko Sakai
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351484958
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 481

Get Book Here

Book Description
The globalization of the world economy today means that more and more people are experiencing working in another culture. Focusing on the real experiences of workers in Japanese transnational finance companies, this book not only throws light on this specific case, but at the same time raises timely questions and insights concerning the newly emerging multicultural work experiences world-wide. The Clash of Economic Cultures: Japanese Bankers in the City of London reflects on contemporary discussions in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies of individual global movement and cultural interaction. While there are some studies on Japanese multinational companies in Europe, they have typically assumed stereotyped differences in management systems and work cultures. This book, however, breaks the mold by looking at the culture and individuals' subjective views about their working lives and also their own worldviews; this perspective illuminates the difficulties in working relationships between Japanese and Europeans. Junko Sakai reveals, through 100 transcribed interviews, the influence of power relationships on people of different groups in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity. The Clash of Economic Cultures shows uneven transformation of economic and cultural hegemony between East and West. This book gives voice to Japanese men and women whose voices are rarely heard, and to the British who have worked for non-Westerners in the West. It is also a significant and timely analysis of the increasing influence of non-Western companies in London. It will be of great interest to cultural anthropologists, business historians, sociologists and scholars in Japanese and Asian studies, as well as those involved in international finance and management.

Author: Paul Thompson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351503898
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Get Book Here

Book Description
Any life story, whether a written autobiography or an oral testimony, is shaped not only by the reworkings of experience through memory and re-evaluation, but also by art. Any communication has to use shared conventions not only of language itself, but also the more complex expectations of ""genre,"" the forms expected within a given context and type of communication. This collection of essays by international academics draws on a wide range of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities to examine how far the expectations and forms of genre shape different kinds of autobiography and influence what messages they can convey. After investigating the problem of genre definition, and tracing the evolution of genre as a concept, contributors explore such issues as: How far can we argue that what people narrate in their autobiographical stories is selected and shaped by the repertoire of genre available to them? To what extent is oral autobiography shaped by its social and cultural context? What is the relationship between autobiographical sources and the ethnographer? Narrative and Genre presents exciting new debates in an emerging field and will encourage international and interdisciplinary discussion. Its authors and contributors are scholars from the fields of anthropology, cultural studies, literary analysis, psychology, psychoanalysis, social history, and sociology.

Author: Pilar Riano-Alcala
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351521497
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Get Book Here

Book Description
Dwellers of Memory is an ethnographic study of how urban youth in Colombia came to be at the intersection of multiple forms of political, drug-related, and territorial violence in a country undergoing forty years of internal armed conflict. It examines the ways in which youth in the city of Medellin reconfigure their lives and, cultural worlds in the face of widespread violence. This violence has transgressed familiar boundaries and destroyed basic social supports and networks of trust. This volume attempts to map and understand its patterns and flows. The author explores how Medellin's youth locate themselves and make, sense of violence through contradictory and shifting memory practices. The violence has not completely taken over their cultural worlds or their subjectivities. Practices of remembering and forgetting are key methods by which these youth rework their identities and make sense of the impact of violence on their lives. While the experience of violence is rooted in urban space and urban youth, the memory dwellers use a sense of place, oral histories of death, and narratives of fear as survival strategies for inhabiting violent neighborhoods. The book also examines fissures in memory, the contradictory constructions of young people's subjective selves, and practices of gendered violence and terror. All have and continue to pose risks to the historical memory and cultural survival of the residents of Medellin. Dwellers of Memory offers an alternative ethnographic approach to the study of memory and violence, one that calls into question whether the, role of the ethnographer of violence is to be a mere witness of terror, or to oppose it by writing against it. It will be of interest to sociologists, anthropologists, and students of, ethnography.