Dirk Spilker. The East German Leadership and the Division of Germany: Patriotism and Propaganda 1945-1953. Oxford Historical Monographs Series. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006. xi + 296 pp. $109.20 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-928412-2.
Reviewed by Mary Fulbrook (University College London)
Published on H-German (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Out of that Darkness: The Twisted Path to German Division
Why, following defeat in the Second World War, was Germany divided into two opposing states, the capitalist Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the western zones and the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the Soviet zone of occupation? Why, despite a variety of gestures and overtures in the early postwar years, were attempts at reunification at this time a failure? Should early postwar German history be summarized in terms of a series of "missed opportunities," or rather in terms of propagandistic posing masking pragmatic policies or long-term intentions of a quite different hue? And do these questions even matter very much any more, some two decades after the collapse of the Soviet empire which had played such a major role a half century earlier? In attempting to answer these questions, Dirk Spilker provides a detailed account that may serve to lay out some of the debates about historical might-have-beens, missed opportunities, and lost turning-points to rest.
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Christian Dirks. "Die Verbrechen der anderen": Auschwitz und der Auschwitz-Prozess der DDR. Das Verfahren gegen den KZ-Arzt Dr. Horst Fischer. Paderborn Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2005. 408 pp. EUR 42.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-506-71363-6.
Harald Schmid. Antifaschismus und Judenverfolgung: Die "Reichskristallnacht" als politischer Gedenktag in der DDR. Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung Berichte und Studien. Göttingen V&R unipress, 2004. 153 pp. EUR 16.80 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89971-146-2.
Jan Philipp Spannuth. Rückerstattung Ost: Der Umgang der DDR mit dem "arisierten" und enteigneten Eigentum der Juden und die Gestaltung der Rückerstattung im wiedervereinigten Deutschland. Essen, Klartext Verlag, 2007. 255 pp. EUR 27.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-89861-656-0.
Reviewed by Andrew Beattie (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales [Sydney])
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
East Germany's Handling of the Holocaust
In the decade after 1989, the German Democratic Republic's (self-)image as the "better Germany"--the negation of fascist Germany and the embodiment of the antifascist resistance--was vigorously contested. Scholars, politicians, intellectuals, and publicists critically scrutinized the GDR's handling of the National Socialist past.[1] Deficiencies and blind spots in its treatment of victims of the Holocaust were exposed, as was its pragmatic integration of former Nazis. A new consensus held that, in contrast with its self-depiction, the GDR was by no means "better" than the Federal Republic of Germany, which it had mercilessly attacked as the barely tamed continuation of fascist interests. Instead, the many shortcomings of West Germany's efforts to "come to terms" with the Nazi past now appeared as unfortunate bumps on the road to an honest, self-critical approach to German responsibility for Nazi genocide, while the GDR's mendacious antifascism, having amounted to little more than an instrument for regime legitimation, met its deserved end in 1989-90.
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Katharina Klotz. Das politische Plakat der SBZ/DDR 1945-1963: Zur politischen Ikonographie der sozialistischen Sichtagitation. Aachen Shaker Verlag, 2006. 157 pp. EUR 49.80 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8322-4138-4.
Reviewed by Heather Mathews (Department of Art, Pacific Lutheran University)
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
The Power of Images
With this short but comprehensive study of the first two decades of poster design in the GDR, Katharina Klotz provides a useful reference for scholars of East German visual culture and its role in the creation of a socialist identity.
Klotz begins by situating the imagery and use of GDR posters in a historical lineage of "visual agitation" stretching from the Reformation to the French Revolution, to nineteenth-century caricature and the First World War. Citing Walter Benjamin, she links the "aestheticization of politics" and the development of a socialist visual vocabulary to the contemporary conviction that the poster could be used as a tool to convert the "irrational" masses (p. 10). During the Weimar era, posters grew to play an extensive role in the characterization of the political goals of competing parties, garnering the poster a status it was to retain through National Socialism and into the postwar period. For GDR designers, these earlier German models were important points of orientation, as was the Soviet socialist poster.
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Anna Saunders. Honecker's Children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany, 1979-2002. Manchester Manchester University Press, 2007. xii + 252 pp. $74.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7190-7411-0.
Reviewed by Catherine Plum (Department of History, Western New England College)
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
A Tale of Unpatriotic Youth and Continuity before and after the Wende
Anna Saunders's Honecker's Children is an excellent contribution to a developing literature on the East German communist youth organization,[1] the Free German Youth (FDJ), and an even larger collection of recent work on the economic insecurity and political disposition of eastern German youth following the collapse of communism.[2] By focusing on institutional efforts to promote patriotism among youth, Saunders tackles broader questions, such as the degree to which young people can be influenced from above and the correlation between lack of patriotism and the fall of the GDR. She argues convincingly that the period of revolution and reform before the decisive turn toward reunification was a brief moment of heightened youth patriotism and political activism. She maintains, however, that despite educational efforts to promote patriotism, young people in the 1990s developed a new distrust of politics and political institutions that suddenly appeared to have entered a state of economic and social turbulence--a response to events similar to the youth stance that had emerged in East Germany in the 1980s. Saunders challenged herself to research and compose a balanced comparison between youth experience of patriotic education in the late Erich Honecker era and the first decade after German reunification. The result is a successful, comprehensive comparison that helps to explain continuities and some differences across this temporal and social divide.
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Babett Bauer. Kontrolle und Repression: Individuelle Erfahrungen in der DDR (1971-1989). Historische Studie und methodologischer Beitrag zur Oral History. Schriften des Hannah-Arendt-Instituts für Totalitarismusforschung. Göttingen Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2006. 492 pp. ISBN 978-3-525-36907-4; EUR 56.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-525-36907-4.
Reviewed by Peter Barker (Department of German Studies, University of Reading)
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Individual Experiences of Repression in the GDR
In an attempt to create a typology of individual experience of state repression in the GDR, Babett Bauer presents a total of twenty-seven interviews with individuals from Karl-Marx-Stadt/Chemnitz. At the center of the study is the attempt to create a theoretical basis for oral history that brings together the subjective experiences of repression of individuals and sets them against the official accounts of those experiences as recounted in the documentation created by the state security apparatus. Any attempt to create categories of human behavior in a society such as the GDR is difficult because of the wide range of possible interactions between personal circumstances and differing reactions on the part of state structures, but the author has succeeded in creating a credible typology.
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Clemens Heitmann. "Schützen und helfen"?: Luftschutz und Zivilverteidigung in der DDR 1955 bis 1989/90. Berlin Christoph Links Verlag, 2006. 500 pp. EUR 29.90 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-86153-400-6.
Reviewed by Dolores L. Augustine (Department of History, St. John's University [Queens])
Published on H-German (May, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
The Social Militarization of the GDR
The first major scholarly work on civil defense in the GDR, Clemens Heitmann's study finds itself at the intersection of four major scholarly enterprises. First, Heitmann himself presents this as a study about the extent and limits of totalitarianism in the GDR, a theme most cogently formulated by Jürgen Kocka and Sigrid Meuschel (oddly not given her due here). Second, this work strives to elucidate the nature of a system that drew its citizens into participation in the building of a socialist modernity. Heitmann's work serves as a corrective to any urges to gloss over the oppressive aspects of this project. Third, this book ties into a much older theme of German history and historiography: social militarization. And fourth, this study illustrates and advances the goals and methods of "new military history." In line with the German conception of _Gesellschaftsgeschichte_, Heitmann promises at the onset of his study to employ the techniques and approaches of military, social, political, and gender history, along with a history of mentalities.
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Jan C. Behrends, Thomas Lindenberger, Patrice G. Poutros, eds. Fremde und Fremd-Sein in der DDR: Zu historischen Ursachen der Fremdenfeindlichkeit in Ostdeutschland. Berlin Metropol, 2003. 376 pp. EUR 21.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-936411-01-0.
Reviewed by Jeffrey Jurgens (Anthropology Program, Bard College)
Published on H-German (June, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Making, Managing, and Excluding "Others" in East Germany
For many years, the social circumstances and lived experiences of labor migrants, refugees, applicants for political asylum, and other "foreigners" in postwar Germany were largely the preserve of sociologists and social workers--historians, with few exceptions, did not engage with these topics. A substantial and still growing body of historiographic scholarship has since remedied this situation, but even now the focus largely remains on the policies, practices, and meanings of "otherness" in West Germany and the reunified Federal Republic rather than East Germany more specifically. _Fremde und Fremd-Sein in der DDR_ offers a productive initial corrective to this lacuna that also speaks to the alarming racism and xenophobia that emerged in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) after 1989-90.
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Schultze, Sven: Luftfahrtforschung und -ausbildung in der DDR. Hightechkaderschmiede oder "Gartenmöbelforschung"? Die Fakultät für Leichtbau / Luftfahrtwesen der TH Dresden. Hannover: Ibidem Verlag 2008. ISBN 978-3-89821-877-1; 151 S.; EUR 24,90.
Rezensiert für H-Soz-u-Kult von:
Rainer Karlsch, Berlin
E-Mail: [mailto]rkuek@t-online.de[/mailto]
Seit 1990 sind eine ganze Reihe von lesenswerten Studien zur kurzen Geschichte der zivilen Luftfahrtindustrie in der DDR publiziert worden.[1] Im Mittelpunkt standen dabei Fragen nach dem Modernisierungskonzept der SED-Führung, den verkehrspolitischen Planungen, der Rolle der aus der Sowjetunion zurückgekehrten Luftfahrtingenieure und ihren technischen Leitbildern, der technischen und wirtschaftlichen Leistungsfähigkeit des im Aufbau befindlichen Industriezweiges und nach den Motiven für den abrupten Abbruch des Flugzeugbaus im Frühjahr 1961. Die Luftfahrtindustrie zählt daher zu den von Technik-, Wirtschafts- und Zeithistorikern am besten untersuchten Industriezweigen der DDR überhaupt. Angesichts der Vielzahl der Publikationen zum Thema erstaunt es, dass die universitäre Luftfahrtforschung bisher kaum untersucht wurde. Diese Forschungslücke versucht Sven Schultze mit seiner Studie, hervorgegangen aus seiner Magisterarbeit am Lehrstuhl für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Potsdam, zu schließen.
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André Meier, dir. Do Communists Have Better Sex? (Sex im geteilten Deutschland). First Run/Icarus Films, 2006. 52 mins., color, subtitles in English.
Reviewed by Benita Blessing (Ohio University)
Published on H-German (February, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Getting It on in the Cold War
This film, a mixture of scholarly research and light-hearted presentations of stereotypes about the role of sex in divided Germany (from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall), is a welcome addition to recent discussions of sexuality in East and West Germany. With interviews from well-known historians and sexuality experts (Dagmar Herzog, Gisela Staupe, Dietrich Mühlberg, and Kurt Starke), newsreel footage about sex education films from East and West Germany, scenes of the everyday "West" and "East" body, and even a clip from a pornographic film made by the amateur film club of a GDR factory, the film has enough content to warrant serious consideration for academic use at the research and classroom level.
But where the director might have offered in-depth analyses of the private and public topic of sexuality and sexual mores, the insertion of numerous "humorous animation sequences" (as described on the back cover of the DVD) throughout the film take the place of critical discussion, offering the viewer instead facile stereotypes that all too often leave one cringing in embarrassment. It will be difficult for some scholars or students to get beyond one of the first animated scenes, in which a doctor measures the penises of a West German man (16.9 cm) and an East German man (17.5 cm). No evidence in the film backs up such an absurd cartoonish claim, nor is there a discussion of penis size having anything to do with sexual pleasure in Germany or elsewhere.
Still, it is worth watching the entire film, if nothing else for a basis of discussion about the politics of sex and people's everyday experiences of intimacy. More significantly, the film offers a plethora of concrete examples of historical evidence and its uses.
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