Justice in Lüritz

Experiencing Socialist Law in East Germany
1. Auflage 2010
ISBN: 978-0-691-14348-4
Verlag: Princeton University Press

Buch, Englisch, 256 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm, Gewicht: 445 g

As a child, Inga Markovits dreamt of stealing and reading every letter contained in a mailbox at a busy intersection of her town in order to learn what life is all about. When, decades later, working as a legal historian, she tracked down the almost complete archive of a former East German trial court, she knew that she had finally found her mailbox. Combining her work in this extraordinary archive with interviews of former plaintiffs and defendants, judges and prosecutors, government and party functionaries, and Stasi collaborators, all in the little town she calls "Lüritz," Markovits has written a remarkable grassroots history of a legal system that set out with the utopian hopes of a few and ended in the anger and disappointment of the many. This is a story of ordinary men and women who experienced Socialist law firsthand--people who applied and used the law, trusted and resented it, manipulated and broke it, and feared and opposed it, but who all dealt with it in ways that help us understand what it meant to be a citizen in a twentieth-century Socialist state, what "Socialist justice" aimed to do, and how, in the end, it failed. Brimming with human stories of obedience and resistance, endurance and cunning, and cruelty and grief, Justice in Lüritz is ultimately a book about much more than the law, or Socialism, or East Germany.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Markovits, Inga

Fachgebiete

• Rechtswissenschaften Recht, Rechtswissenschaft Allgemein Rechtsgeschichte, Recht der Antike
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Deutsche Geschichte

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix
CHAPTER 1: The Files 1
CHAPTER 2: The Beginning 8
CHAPTER 3: People 16
CHAPTER 4: Property 26
CHAPTER 5: Work 42
CHAPTER 6: Families 69
CHAPTER 7: Punishments 92
CHAPTER 8: The Party 141
CHAPTER 9: Hopes and Lies 182
CHAPTER 10: The End 219
Notes 243

Über Autor(innen)

Markovits, Inga
Inga Markovits holds the "Friends of Jamail" Regents Chair in Law at the University of Texas, Austin. She is the author of "Imperfect Justice: An East-West German Diary".