Illusions of care: Iraqi students between the Ba’thist State and the Stasi in socialist East Germany, 1958–89

For four decades, Iraqi students came to the German Democratic Republic for education, political refuge, or to burnish their credentials. In 1969, Iraq opened diplomatic relations with the GDR, simultaneously extending its persecution of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) into East Germany by means of a complex bureaucratic apparatus of diplomatic organs, security services and student organisations. While ICP members were eventually protected by the Stasi, this entangled them in a system that offered care at the cost of obedience. The on-going campaign against ICP students ultimately played an outsized role in undermining the relationship between the SED and the Iraqi Ba’th.     

Politics and Public Policy

Abstract

Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others has been widely praised as the first German film to confront the horrors of the East German communist regime. But the film's politics may be ambiguous. As critical as it is of East Germany, it does not offer a ringing endorsement of West Germany. For example, the film's playwright-hero seems to have artistic problems in the West, just as he did in the East. The film's equivocal attitude toward communism is epitomized by its apparently positive view of the Marxist author Bertolt Brecht. This essay compares The Lives of Others with Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in an effort to understand Donnersmarck's attitude toward his East German predecessor and what it means for his larger view of communism and its relation to art.     

Changing Regional Inequalities in United Germany

An American geographer and specialist on Germany analyzes temporal patterns of regional socioeconomic inequalities within Germany since unification. The results, based on analysis of changing distributional characteristics of GDP per capita, infant mortality, and unemployment, indicate a lack of progress in reducing regional inequalities within the country. Although the inequalities are not particularly severe by EU standards, promises made at the time of unification and the German constitution's requirement that regional equality be achieved are among pressures confronting German politicians and regional policy makers in achieving equality across the country. The author notes a number of domestic and international conditions that complicate and impede regional equality. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O18, O52, R11, R12. 2 figures, 6 tables, 70 references.     

Performing the global through the local—globalisation and individualisation in the spatial practices of young East Germans

This paper aims to show how young people in former East Germany respond to the globalising processes that are part of the transformation of their society from a state-socialist to a capitalist one. It focuses particularly on the differential ways in which young people perform their identities as global/local subjects through the uses that they make of urban space. While emphasising the agency of young people, the paper seeks to examine the dialectic between globalising forces that are largely beyond their control and the negotiation of these forces in everyday practices of identity-formation. Conceptually, the paper draws particularly on the work of Beck (2000) Beck, U. 2000. “What is Globalization?”. Cambridge and Oxford: Polity Press.  [Google Scholar], Beck and Gernsheim (2002) Beck, U. and Beck-Gernsheim, E. 2002. Individualization. Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, London: Sage.  [Google Scholar] and Giddens (1994) Giddens, A. 1994. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press.  [Google Scholar] in order to conceptualise the connections between globalisation and individualisation, as well as on feminist and recent geographical work on performativity (Butler, 1990 Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London and New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar], 1993 Butler, J. 1993. Bodies that Matter. On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, London and New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]; Rose, 1996 Rose, G. 1996. “As if the mirrors had bled: masculine dwelling, masculine theory and feminist masquerades”. In BodySpace: Destabilising Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, Edited by: Duncan, N. 56–74. London and New York: Routledge.  [Google Scholar]; Gregson and Rose, 2000 Gregson, N. and Rose, G. 2000. ‘Taking Butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18(4): 433–452. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]; Thrift, 1996 Thrift, N. 1996. Spatial Formations, London: Sage.  [Google Scholar]; Dewsbury, 2000 Dewsbury, J.-D. 2000. ‘Performativity and the event: enacting a philosophy of difference’. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18(4): 473–496. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar]; Dewsbury and Naylor, 2002 Dewsbury, J.-D. and Naylor, S. 2002. Practicing geographical knowledge: fields, bodies and dissemination. Area, 34(3): 253–260.  [Google Scholar]) in order to gain an embodied understanding of the ways in which individuals construct themselves as global/local subjects.     

“With almost clean or at most slightly dirty hands”. On the self-denazification of German geography after 1945 and its rebranding as a science of peace

Since the 1980s there is an overall agreement that German academic and applied geography between 1933 and 1945 were closely linked to the ideology and practice of National Socialism. There is very little historical work, however, on how geography was reestablished in Germany after the end of National Socialism. This paper deals with West German geography after 1945 and the attempts to reestablish geography as a legitimate discipline within academia. Taking the influential paper by German geographer Carl Troll as a starting point, this paper deals, on the one hand, with the way geographers positioned geography in relation to National Socialism, and how they told the history of their recent past. It then asks what the defeat of Germany and the experiences of the war in general meant for how geographers in Germany thought about the relation between the discipline and politics. It is argued that a number of cleansing and legitimating strategies that freed geography from direct involvement with National Socialism, went hand in hand with a very quick adaption to the new world order and a rebranding of geography as a science of peace.     

East German pragmatism,China’s policy of differentiation,and Soviet miscalculation: Hermann Matern’s 1961 trip to China revisited

This paper shows that Hermann Matern’s 1961 visit to China was mainly a trade mission whose connection with political affairs was minor and who had only an indirect influence on the Berlin Crisis. It further demonstrates that there was no Sino-East German rapprochement during Matern’s visit, but quite the contrary –relations between the two countries actually deteriorated, resulting in the East German delegation failing to achieve their goals. Yet, Soviet miscalculation and misunderstanding of China’s policy led them to substantially increase their economic assistance to East Germany, so as to ‘win their German comrades back’ to the Soviet side.     

The German question in Jakarta Indonesia in West Germany’s foreign policy, 1955–65

This article explores a hitherto unexamined chapter of German Cold War politics: West Germany’s relations with Indonesia between 1955 and 1965. Indonesia was a peculiar case, as in the late 1950s and early 1960s, President Sukarno turned his country into a radical champion of ‘anti-imperialism’. This included actions directed against the Netherlands, Britain, Malaysia, and the United States. As part of a comprehensive strategy to isolate East Germany in the ‘Third World’, West German diplomacy nevertheless tried to maintain solid relations with Sukarno’s increasingly unpredictable Indonesia, even if that meant undermining the position of Western allies.     

From Inchoate Pronouns to Proper Nouns: A Theory Fragment with 9/11, Gertrude Stein,and an East German Ethnography

Despite the elaborate means human beings deploy to render the world predictable and transparent, we nevertheless continually confront situations which are uncertain and opaque. This is especially so in the modern world, in which supralocal institutions and information mediated from afar allow the actions of unaccounted strangers beyond our face‐to‐face knowledge to affect us closely. One of the chief means we use to gain purchase in such situations is to document them, and documentary’s main technique is to move the at‐first‐unknown persons into an understandable narrative: hence the idea that some unknown others (“inchoate pronouns”) become understandable characters (“proper nouns”). This theory is elaborated through a journalistic documentation of the attack on the World Trade Center, a literary representation of the occupation of France during the Second World War, and an ethnographic depiction of current difficulties in East Germany.     

正确认识和看待民主社会主义

认识和看待民主社会主义,应本着马克思主义实事求是的态度,坚持马克思主义辩证唯物主义的科学方法,把民主社会主义置于欧洲特定的社会历史背景中去考察,了解民主社会主义存在的历史合理性,以避免主观偏颇;把民主社会主义置于科学社会主义的理论体系中去考察,把握民主社会主义的非马克思主义本质属性,以划清其与科学社会主义的界限,避免是非不清;把民主社会主义置于中国现实国情背景中去考察,明确不能走此发展道路的缘由,以坚定走中国特色社会主义道路的信念,避免信念动摇。     

The Cold War Politics of Cultural Minorities: Jews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic, 1976-1989

This article compares cultural identity politics relating toJews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from1976 to the collapse of communism in 1989. Drawing on stateand party sources, oral histories, literature and documentsfrom the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), it juxtaposesstate constructions of minority identities with the views andactions of Jewish and Sorbian students, writers and intellectuals.In its first three decades, the East German Communist party(SED) generally treated Jewish culture with suspicion or indifferenceand often conflated Jewishness with the capitalist West. Incontrast, the party celebrated a folkloric vision of Sorbianculture that linked Germany with the Slavic East. By the mid-1980s,the SED altered its posture towards Jews and Sorbs. In the GDR'sfinal decade, SED officials attempted to cultivate Jewish culturewhile viewing Sorbs with increased suspicion. The main reasonfor this shift was that SED officials placed Cold War foreignpolicy concerns over Marxist–Leninist ideological consistency.Treatment of Sorbs worsened as Sorbs forged ties with dissidentsin other Eastern Bloc nations. Meanwhile, celebrations of Jewishculture aimed to improve the GDR's ties with Western Europeby embracing Western Holocaust memory. The article also showsthat SED efforts to cultivate minority cultural identities oftenbackfired at the grassroots level. The minority cultural imagespromoted by the state often had little resonance outside leadershipcircles. Average GDR citizens frequently grew disenchanted withSED cultural minority policies, ultimately helping by the 1980sto destabilize the regime.     

The mosaic versus the melting pot: Canada and the USA

Ownership represents a key relation between people and places. Eastern European transformations since the late 1980s confront western norms of private property rights within a capitalist system with the legacies of an alternative ownership system and with attempts to establish property markets from first principles. The developments in the former GDR and in eastern Germany after German reunification offer an opportunity to question assumptions of use and value which underlie western models of property tenure. While common themes of privatisation and commodification link eastern and western experiences, the particular manifestations of transformations in eastern Germany challenge the claims of the primacy of ownership and the legitimacy of claims for control over the built environment.     

严修《东游日记》中的黔籍留日学生

清未,在贵州学政严修竭力推崇东西洋文明的启蒙下,开启黔人跨出国门,学习法政、科技、教育,探寻国家复兴之路。1902年至1904年,严修两次东游日本,与黔籍留日学生频繁往还交流,又增添了一层深厚的师友之情。黔籍留日学生回国,又多得严修人脉的多方推荐和关照,为贵州乃至全国培养造就了一批民国初年崭露头角、驰骋政坛及文化教育界之俊杰。