Becoming East German

Socialist Structures and Sensibilities After Hitler
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-78533-027-8
Verlag: Berghahn Books

Buch, Englisch, Band 6, 314 Seiten, Paperback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 457 g

Reihe: Spektrum: Publications of the German Studies Association

For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fulbrook, Mary

Port, Andrew I

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Weltgeschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction: The Banalities of East German Historiography

Andrew Port

Part I: Memory and Identity after Nazism

Chapter 1. East Germans in a Post-Nazi State: Communities of Experience, Connection, and Identification

Mary Fulbrook

Chapter 2. Divisive Unity: The Politics of Cultural Nationalism during the First German Writers’ Congress of October 1947

Andreas Agocs

Chapter 3. Communicating History: The Archived Letters and Memories of “The Red Orchestra”

Joanne Sayner

Chapter 4. Remembered Change and Changes of Remembrance: East German Narratives of Antifascist Conversion

Christiane Wienand

Part II: Health, Food, and Embodied Citizens

Chapter 5. Perceptions of Health after World War II: Heart Disease and Risk Factors in East and West Germany, 1945-75

Jeannette Madarász

Chapter 6. Socialism Fights the Proletarian Disease: East German Efforts to Overcome Tuberculosis in a Cold War Context

Donna Harsch

Chapter 7. The Slim Imperative: Discourses and Cultures of Dieting in the German Democratic Republic, 1949-1990

Neula Kerr-Boyle

Chapter 8. Luxury Dining in the Later Years of the German Democratic Republic

Paul Freedman

Part III: Constraints and Conformity: Friends, Foes, and Disciplinary Practices

Chapter 9. Expectations, Predispositions, and the Paradox of Working-Class Behavior in Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic

Andrew Port

Chapter 10. Israel as Friend and Foe: Shaping East German Society through Freund- and Feindbilder

David Tompkins

Chapter 11. Humiliation as a Weapon within the Party: Fictional and Personal Accounts

Phil Leask

Chapter 12. Playing the Game: Football and Everyday Life in the Honecker Era

Alan McDougall

Afterword: Structures and Subjectivities in GDR History

Mary Fulbrook

List of Contributors

Über Autor(innen)

Port, Andrew I
Andrew I. Port is an Associate Professor of history at Wayne State University in Detroit, and Editor-in-Chief of Central European History. He is the recipient of a Marie Curie FCFP Senior Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) and the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies. His first book, Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (2007), appeared in German translation as Die Rätselhafte Stabilität der DDR (2010), and his current project looks at German reactions to genocide in other parts of the world since 1945.

Fulbrook, Mary
Mary Fulbrook, FBA, is Professor of German History at University College London. Her most recent books are A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012) and Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (2011). She is currently directing an AHRC-funded collaborative project on Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe: Communities of Experience and Identification since 1945. A former Chair of the German History Society, and Chair of the Modern History Section of the British Academy, she has written widely on the GDR.

Mary Fulbrook, FBA, is Professor of German History at University College London. Her most recent books are A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust (2012) and Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships (2011). She is currently directing an AHRC-funded collaborative project on Reverberations of War in Germany and Europe: Communities of Experience and Identification since 1945. A former Chair of the German History Society, and Chair of the Modern History Section of the British Academy, she has written widely on the GDR.