Amnesiopolis

Amnesiopolis PDF Author: Eli Rubin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191046183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It focuses particularly on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place - one defined by pure functionality and rationality - a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism. Eli Rubin employs methodologies from critical geography, urban history, architectural history, environmental history, and everyday life history to ask whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. Amnesiopolis asks: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no-as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried-literally-in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a panopticon-like effect, giving the Stasi the possibility of more complete surveillance than they previously had.

Amnesiopolis

Amnesiopolis PDF Author: Eli Rubin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191046183
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Get Book Here

Book Description
Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It focuses particularly on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place - one defined by pure functionality and rationality - a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism. Eli Rubin employs methodologies from critical geography, urban history, architectural history, environmental history, and everyday life history to ask whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. Amnesiopolis asks: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no-as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried-literally-in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a panopticon-like effect, giving the Stasi the possibility of more complete surveillance than they previously had.

Communism in Eastern Europe

Communism in Eastern Europe PDF Author: Melissa Feinberg
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000518337
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
Communism in Eastern Europe is a ground-breaking new survey of the history of Eastern Europe since 1945. It examines how Communist governments came to Eastern Europe, how they changed their societies and the legacies that persisted after their fall. Written from the perspective of the 21st century, this book shows how Eastern Europe’s trajectory since 1989 fits into the longer history of its Communist past. Rather than focusing on high politics, Communism in Eastern Europe concentrates on the politics of daily life, melding political history with social, cultural and gender history. It tells the history of this complicated era through the voices and experiences of ordinary people. By focusing on the complex interactions of everyday life, Communism in Eastern Europe illuminates the world Communism made in Eastern Europe, its politics and culture, values and dreams, successes and failures. This book is an engaging introduction to the history of Communist Eastern Europe for any reader. It is ideal for adoption in a wide array of undergraduate and graduate courses in 20th century European history.

The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures

The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures PDF Author: Aga Skrodzka
Publisher:
ISBN: 019088553X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 799

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Book Description
Looking at monuments, murals, computer games, recycling campaigns, children's books, and other visual artifacts, The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures reassesses communism's historical and cultural legacy.

Socialist Laments

Socialist Laments PDF Author: Martha Sprigge
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019754634X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
Antifascist and socialist monuments pervaded the landscape of the former German Democratic Republic (1949-89), presenting a distorted vision of the national past. Official commemorative culture in East Germany celebrated a selective set of political heroes, seeming to leave no public space for mourning those who were excluded from the country's founding myths. Socialist Laments: Musical Mourning in the German Democratic Republic examines the role of music in this nation's memorial culture, demonstrating how music facilitated the expressions of loss within spaces of commemoration for East German citizens. Music performed during state-sponsored memorial rituals no doubt bolstered official narratives of the German past. But it simultaneously provided an outlet for mourning in highly politicized environment. The book presents both a history and theory of musical mourning in East Germany. Using a site-specific approach to analysis, author Martha Sprigge demonstrates how the multiple semantic networks opened up by these musical works facilitated many memorial associations without necessitating the overt articulation of a mourned subject. Throughout the country's forty-year existence, music offered East German citizens an audible outlet for working through traumatic losses-both collective and individual-that was distinct from other artistic expressive possibilities. The book reveals the ways that East Germany's extensive commemorative repertoire helped composers, performers, and audiences navigate between the inevitable need to mourn on the one hand, and the seeming impossibilities of mourning on the other.

German Division as Shared Experience

German Division as Shared Experience PDF Author: Erica Carter
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1805393588
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
Despite the nearly three decades since German reunification, there remains little understanding of the ways in which experiences overlapped across East-West divides. German Division as Shared Experience considers everyday life across the two Germanies, using perspectives from history, literary and cultural studies, anthropology and art history to explore how interconnections as well as fractures between East and West Germany after 1945 were experienced, lived and felt. Through its novel approach to historical method, the volume points to new understandings of the place of narrative, form and lived sensibility in shaping Germans’ simultaneously shared and separate experiences of belonging during forty years of division from 1945 to 1990.

Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity

Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity PDF Author: Veronica E. Aplenc
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1612498140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

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Book Description
After the Second World War, Yugoslavia’s small regional cities represented a challenge for the new socialist state. These cities’ older buildings, local historic sites, and low-quality housing clashed with socialism’s promises and ideals. How would the state transform these cities’ everyday neighborhoods? In the Slovene republic’s capital city of Ljubljana, the Trnovo neighborhood embodied this challenge through its modest housing, small medieval section, vast gardens, acclaimed interwar architecture, and iconic local reputation. Imagining Slovene Socialist Modernity explores how urban planners, architects, historic preservationists, neighborhood residents, and even folklorists transformed this beloved neighborhood into a Slovene socialist city district. Aplenc demonstrates that this urban redesign centered on republic-level interpretations of a Yugoslav socialist built environment, versus a re-envisioned Slovene national past or design style. This interdisciplinary study sheds light on how Yugoslav state socialism operated at the republic level, within a decentralized system, and on the diverse forces behind success or failure. With its focus on vernacular architecture, small-scale historic sites, single-family homes, and illegal housing, this book expands our understanding of the everyday built environment in socialist cities.

Bowling for Communism

Bowling for Communism PDF Author: Andrew Demshuk
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501751670
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 346

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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?

Free Berlin

Free Berlin PDF Author: Briana J. Smith
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262047195
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
An alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to collective creativity and social solidarity. In pre- and post-reunification Berlin, socially engaged artists championed collective art making and creativity over individual advancement, transforming urban space and civic life in the process. During the Cold War, the city’s state of exception invited artists on both sides of the Wall to detour from artistic tradition; post-Wall, art became a tool of resistance against the orthodoxy of economic growth. In Free Berlin, Briana Smith explores the everyday peculiarities, collective joys, and grassroots provocations of experimental artists in late Cold War Berlin and their legacy in today’s city. These artists worked intentionally outside the art market, believing that art should be everywhere, freed from its confinement in museums and galleries. They used art as a way to imagine new forms of social and creative life. Smith introduces little-known artists including West Berlin feminist collective Black Chocolate, the artist duo paint the town red (p.t.t.r), and the Office for Unusual Events, creators of satirical urban political theater, as well as East Berlin action art and urban interventionists Erhard Monden, Kurt Buchwald, and others. Artists and artist-led urban coalitions in 1990s Berlin carried on the participatory spirit of the late Cold War, with more overt forms of protest and collaboration at the neighborhood level. The temperament lives on in twenty-first century Berlin, animating artists’ resolve to work outside the market and citizens’ spirited defenses of green spaces, affordable housing, and collectivist projects. With Free Berlin, Smith offers an alternative history of art in Berlin, detaching artistic innovation from art world narratives and connecting it instead to Berliners’ historic embrace of care, solidarity, and cooperation.

Amnesiopolis

Amnesiopolis PDF Author: Eli Rubin
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198732260
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It focuses particularly on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place -- one defined by pure functionality and rationality -- a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism. Eli Rubin employs methodologies from critical geography, urban history, architectural history, environmental history, and everyday life history to ask whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. Amnesiopolis asks: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no -- as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried -- literally -- in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a panopticon-like effect, giving the Stasi the possibility of more complete surveillance than they previously had.

Home Screens

Home Screens PDF Author: Lorrie Palmer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350253979
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
How do film and television makers around the world depict public housing? Why is public housing so often chosen as the backdrop for drama, horror, social critique, rebellion, violence, artistic creativity, explorations of race relations and political intrigue? Home Screens answers these questions by examining the ways in which socialized housing projects around the world are represented on screen. The volume brings together a diverse group of interdisciplinary scholars, who explore documentary and fictional portrayals of the architecture of public housing, and the communities that inhabit it, ranging from the 1950s to the present. Examining international film and media texts such as Die Architekten (1990), Swagger (2016), Cooley High (1975), Mee-Pok Man (1995), Treme (2010–2013), Mamma Roma (1962), The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), and Below the Lion Rock (1972–1976), essays within this book consider public and private attitudes toward socialised housing, explaining how onscreen representations shape perceptions of these ubiquitous, often-stigmatized urban locations.