Intense Paradoxes of Memory: Researching Moral Questions About Remembering the Socialist Past

In 2007 two researchers embarked upon a project on the “social construction of the socialist past in eastern Germany”. The project sought to explore how the socialist past is remembered today, and the moral ambiguities condensed in memories. This is particularly relevant in eastern Germany, where debates about how to interpret the socialist past continue to strive. However, it soon became apparent that doing such an ethnographic project is no easy task. Both researchers became sucked into the debates they sought to explore, including the question of who people had been during GDR (German Democratic Republic, former East Germany) times and whether this mattered. Using the ethnographic self as a resource, this article explores the ethics of complicity or detachment in fieldwork situations where the researcher was invited to make judgements. It argues that ethnographers need to address the question of value‐judgements openly in their fieldwork, since they form an intrinsic part of all our humanity.     

Coming to Terms with the Stasi: History and Memory in the Bautzen Memorial

This paper examines the role played by the encounter of history and personal memories in the difficult process of coming to terms with the Stasi in present-day eastern Germany. While historians have made substantial progress over the last two decades in accounting for the wide range of ways in which the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is remembered by East Germans, the memorials and museums of the reunified Germany remain unable to integrate memories of dictatorial oppression and happiness in everyday life. Sites commemorating state repression are thus often assumed to lack impact on former GDR citizens whose memories differ from official versions of history. These assumptions are tested for the Bautzen Memorial, formerly known as the ‘celebrities’ prison' of the East German Ministry of State Security. Focusing on the differing receptions of GDR memorial sites, this article draws on interviews with two former political prisoners and with visitors to the Memorial who grew up in socialist East Germany. It argues that the open approach of the Memorial, which leaves visitors to draw their own conclusions from the exhibition, allows different stakeholders to find ways of personal engagement with the past at the site despite the disparities with their own memories.     

From Cold War battleground to a footnote to history? Labour history in divided and unified Germany

History of labor and industrial relations was a well-established and mutually contested subdiscipline in both parts of Germany during the Cold War. Though it did not stand in the center of the overall settling of accounts with the communist past in unified Germany the swift opening of all relevant archival sources made sure that these themes established themselves as relevant topics on the research agenda about the history of the GDR. Profiting both from an advanced state of art in West Germany and a handful of original innovators in East Germany the GDR was explored and increasingly understood as an essentially ‘work-centered society’ governed by a panoptic ‘welfare dictatorship’. When it came to interpreting the multifold and heterogeneous findings one line of reasoning gained peculiar attractiveness, namely to read the East German ‘case’ as a variant of Fordist modernization in the middle of the twentieth century which unable to face the challenges of globalization.     

Breaking ground—marginality and resistance in (post) unification Germany

Drawing on postcolonial theory and recent geographical debates on subaltern speech and marginal positioning this paper asks what the relevance of ‘place’ is for attempts to ‘transgress’ and ‘resist’ the marginalisation of (former) East Germans in (post)unification Germany. My intention is not to equate the postcolonial situation with that of East Germany after unification, but rather to engage the theoretical and political insights of postcolonial critiques to highlight the conflicts and contradictions that emerge from attempts to move ‘beyond’ oppressive binary constructions. Questions of speaking and listening, as well as seeing and being seen are attended to with a strong focus on the paradoxical places and spaces within which they come to matter in contradictory ways. How do the practices of listening/speaking, seeing/being-seen function to place particular groups in the social margin or centre of ‘(re)united’ Germany? Does ‘power’ reside less with the speaker than with the listener, or is it still important to claim voice (rather than being ‘given’ voice) as an ‘other’?The paper tries to work through some of the tensions, conflicts and concerns that have emerged from my PhD research on the construction of East German marginality through media practices, but also in German social, cultural, political and academic discourse. Perhaps the most significant of these conflicts is that of having lost one’s politically bounded place (as a GDR citizen) and yet finding oneself reconstituted in the (symbolic as well as socio-economic and political) margin of a nation that, to this date, is described as ‘divided within itself’. The sense of placelessness becomes politically relevant when ‘resistant’ or ‘transgressive’ acts are (to be) performed that have no ‘proper’ place from which to embark or in which to be staged. Similar to the post-colonial situation, where no ‘original beyond’ exists, and despite being frequently posited as a symbolically separate entity, ‘East Germans’ have no place for return, only an impossible situation of being constantly ‘out-of-place’ even in the locales that used to be ‘home’.     

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.     

“A plague of wild boars”: A New History of Pigs and People in Late 20th Century Europe

This paper looks at an ungulate irruption of wild boars that occurred in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that this hybrid phenomenon resulted from the confluence of three historically specific, intertwined factors in late 20th century Europe: first, East Germany's embrace of development ideology to remake their farms and forests; second, the simultaneous introduction of a specifically East German conservation program; and third, a new era in the longue durée of human–pig relationships. This ungulate irruption was particular to the GDR and the central European landscape of the Cold War, and only becomes visible through careful attention to the historical context and the materiality of pigs (Sus scrofa). For this reason it is possible to call these pigs new creatures of development. More broadly this paper asks both historians and social scientists to account for the temporal and spatial context when analyzing hybrid phenomena, while also raising important questions about the meaning and application of the neologism Anthropocene.     

Strategic R&D as an answer to the oil crisis. West and east German investment in coal refinement and the chemical industries, 1970–1990

Abstract

In reaction to the oil‐price shocks of 1973/4 and 1978/9 both of the German states reconsidered coal refinement as a technological answer to economic and political constraints. In the GDR the chemical industry in particular could not do without this technology, but the state did not undertake a major R&D programme, preferring rather to continue with existing plants and processes. The disastrous consequences of this policy were felt when the Soviet Union cut off oil supplies to the GDR in the early 1980s, so damaging irreversibly not only the chemical industry, but the entire East Germany economy too. In the FRG the chemical industry was an active interlocuter with the federal government but notwithstanding the offer of generous subsidies was always prudent about the need for a switch back to coal from oil, and believed that new R&D programmes in the coal refining area were not imperative given Western German leadership in the field. In the event it was sectors of the economy other than the chemical industry which benefitted from the federal government's concerns about the oil price rises in the 1970s.     

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.     

The fateful Indian recognition of West Germany, 1949

India’s recognition of West, but not East, Germany was the foundation of an inconsistent policy on Germany from India and many other non-aligned countries. It was the outcome of a lack of professionalism, indecisiveness, the pragmatic considerations of a junior Indian diplomat in Berlin, and the laconic approval of the anti-communist secretary-general of the Ministry of External Affairs, Girja Shankar Bajpai. Neither Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru nor his advisor V.K. Krishnan Menon were involved at all. Officials around Foreign Secretary K.P.S. Menon held that the GDR should also be recognised in due course, but did not exercise sufficient influence. India would stand by its decision for 23 years and thereby set an example for other non-aligned countries.     

Healthy for Family Life: Television, Masculinity, and Domestic Modernity during West Germany's Miracle Years

This article uses the history of West German television as alens to analyse the politics of consumption and domestic modernityduring the ‘economic miracle’ in the 1950s and early1960s. Politicians, academics, broadcast executives, industrypromoters, clerical leaders, and cultural critics engaged ina ferocious debate about the effects of the new mass media onWest German society and family. While some championed the democratizingand modernizing effects of television, others decried its supposedlytotalitarian and ‘feminizing’ qualities; their arguments,pro and con, marked a foundational moment in contemporary culturalcriticism that continues to resonate. Installed in the familyhome, television accelerated the arrival of a highly commodifiedsociety and transformed the private habits of everyday life.Men in particular began to spend more leisure time on domesticpursuits, crossing traditional boundaries between public andprivate gender roles. Such private practices had larger effects:buying, watching, and thinking through television helped replacetraditionalist social conservatism with its neoliberal variantand linked West Germany into the social, political, and culturalstructures of corporate capitalism and western consumer society.     

Former Nazi Officers in the Near East: German Military Advisors in Syria, 1949–56

In the early days of the Cold War, Syria was the first Arab country where former officers of the German Wehrmacht played an active role as military advisors. This was due, in part, to the fact that Germany was not burdened by its past political relations to Arab states for, in contrast to the Western powers, Germany which had never had territorial ambitions in the Near East. Even in the very early stages, German advisors contributed considerably to the development of Syria's armed forces and military intelligence. The advisory activities of German experts became even more intensive as a result of increased trade between the two countries; however, in 1956 the political situation in Syria worsened and the country began moving towards the Eastern Bloc putting an end to the non-official activities of German military advisors.     

Experiencing Displacement: The Transformation of Women's Spaces in (Former) East Germany

Based on a comparison of two different research projects carried out in (former) East Germany, this paper analyses the effects of German (re)unification and postsocialist transformation as a specific, gendered form of displacement. We show how new divisions between "public" and "private" have affected women's sense of self and identity, cautioning against the notion that geographical restructuring will inevitably result in an empowering dissolution of fixed, placebound identities. Instead, we emphasise that places are connected to identities through relations of power and social practices that create unequal conditions for engagement in the (re)production of space. Feminist approaches to citizenship are discussed as one way of challenging the current marginalisation of East German women in unified Germany.     

Acknowledging economic realities. The CMEA policy change vis-à-vis the European Community, 1970–3

In the early 1970s, the economic consequences of European Community (EC) policies forced the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA) to devise its trade policy vis-à-vis the outside world. With the implementation of its Common Commercial Policy, the EC was about to change the rules and conduct of its foreign trade. The East–West trade boom that took off in the 1960s had created significant commercial links, and substantial dependencies, across the Iron Curtain. The smaller members of the CMEA began to advocate an opening up towards the EC due to their fears of worsening trade prospects caused by the new EC policies. After reconsideration of its allies' commercial needs, the Soviet leadership was pressured to change its mind in favour of a common approach vis-à-vis the EC. This article follows the debate within the CMEA Executive Committee on the socialist countries' dependency on the Western market and on the advisability of opening up to the global market. It relies on official CMEA documents as well as Soviet and German Democratic Republic (GDR) policy-making documents. This article analyses the process of socialist integration in connection with the simultaneous developments taking place in their Western European counterparts, and thereby fills a gap in the historiography of Europe in the Cold War.     

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.     

有关"社会主义转型国家"城市社会空间的研究述评

1990年代西方学者对于“社会主义转型国家”城市社会空间进行了大量研究。尽管中东欧社会主义转型国家与中国城市社会空间演进有某些共同点,如郊区化、内城区衰落、居住隔离等,但两者的分异机制迥然不同,前者为“社会主义向资本主义的彻底的急速转型”,后者为“社会主义前提”的渐进转型。这对中国城市社会空间的深入研究具有较大的指导意义。     

A Duty to Forget? The 'Hitler Youth Generation' and the Transition from Nazism to Communism in Postwar East Germany, c. 1945-49

In Soviet-occupied East Germany during the mid- to late 1940s,a remarkable but scarcely remarked-upon transition took place.Hundreds of thousands of young Germans who had previously beenmembers of the Nazi youth organizations, the Hitler Youth (HJ)and the League of German Girls (BDM) flocked to join the Communist-ledFree German Youth (FDJ), a unisex ‘united youth organization’founded under Soviet auspices in March 1946. This paper examinesthe experiences of this ‘twice betrayed’ generation,whose members rapidly—though with varying degrees of enthusiasm—switchedallegiance from Nazism to Communism after the Second World Warand ultimately exchanged life in one authoritarian youth organizationfor life in another. Drawing on archival and interview material,it first seeks to outline Communist attitudes towards denazificationamong the young in the postwar period, before going on to examinefrom a grass-roots perspective the experiences, motivations,and attitudes of those who exchanged their HJ or BDM membershipbooks for those of the FDJ. Despite, or perhaps because of,East Germany's strongly-espoused and rigidly dogmatic ‘anti-fascism’,open discussion of the Nazi past was—for a variety ofreasons—taboo during the immediate postwar period, particularlyamong the young. This paper concludes by discussing the reasonsbehind this ‘pact of silence’ between the Communistsand the ‘Hitler Youth generation’—and howit impacted upon subsequent generations of young people ‘borninto socialism’.     

Social,economic and political dilemmas of reform in Yugoslavia

All of the communist party‐ruled states of Eastern Europe, from the elder brother of the ‘socialist family’, the Soviet Union, to non‐aligned, sui generis Yugoslavia, are in some degree of economic crisis. Gone are the once loudly trumpeted assurances that the socialist ‘economic formation’ by its very nature — its centrally planned and directed economy, its leadership by a communist party armed with the ‘scientific’ social and economic theory of Marxism‐Leninism and its foundation on the principles of proletarian social justice — excluded the possibility of economic ailments such as sluggish growth rates, inflation, social inequality and unemployment. It is now admitted that precisely these problems currently threaten virtually all communist systems. The principal issue for the political elites in these countries (with the perhaps temporary exception of relatively prosperous East Germany and Czechoslovakia and perennially contrary Romania) is not whether radical reform is necessary, but how to implement the requisite economic, social and quasi‐political reforms without undermining the foundations of ‘socialism’ and of the communist party's domination that they identify with it Yugoslavia is a valuable test case of the general project of reform in communist systems, since it consciously undertook to dismantle the of Stalinist system it had been establishing under Soviet tutelage at the end of World War II in response to Stalin's ostracism of Tito in June 1948. From its inception the Yugoslav reform process was informed by a commitment to return to the sources of Marxian social and economic theory in order to build an authentic socialist system untrammeled by the structures and immoral practices of Stalinist ‘etatism’. Worker self‐management, ‘market socialism’, the decentralisation of political and economic decision‐making, periodic rotation in office, and a number of other formally democratic, participatory socio‐political processes, most of which Gorbachev and his supporters have been discussing under the rubric of perestroika, glasnost’ and demokratizatsiia, have all been tried in one form or another in Yugoslavia during the past four decades.     

Defying Moscow: East German-Chinese relations during the Andropov-Chernenko interregnum, 1982–1985

Using newly available East German and Chinese sources, this article sheds light on how East Germany actively defied Moscow's objections to expand relations with China in the early 1980s. Amidst increasing East German-Soviet tensions, East German leader Erich Honecker actively sought relations with China not only for reasons of prestige but also to gain a potential market for East German goods. This interest was initially reciprocated on the Chinese side, as Beijing looked towards East Germany as a leading industrial state for potential economic lessons during Deng Xiaoping's Reform and Opening Process.     

Several issues influencing the course of German history

The course of German history is very sinuous. German nationalism, the imbalance of the political and economic development generated by the influence of the historical and cultural traditions, the might of the Junker feudal aristocracy, the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the postwar reeducation of democratization imposed by the western allied powers on Germany, the developed education and technology, etc. are all important factors that influenced Germany’s history. __________ Translated from: Wuhan Daxue Xuebao, Renwen Kexue Ban 武汉大学学报: 人文科学版 (Wuhan University Journal, Humanity Science), No. 3, 2004     

Comecon and the South in the years of détente: a study on East–South economic relations

The article deals with the economic relations of the socialist bloc with less-developed countries in the 1960s and 1970s. It focuses on the economic policies envisaged by technocrats and policy-makers in the Comecon's Commission for technical assistance. It argues that the original formula based on autarky, whereby socialist aid aimed at building a clear alternative to the West and less-developed countries were advised to introduce Soviet-style planning, nationalisation and industrialisation, was progressively abandoned during détente. Doubts on the appropriateness of the Soviet model emerged, especially in Eastern European governments. Trade became increasingly crucial and the strategy of promoting an international division of labour based on mutual advantage turned into an obsession with importing strategic raw materials. In the mid-1970s, despite the official socialist view, the East pursued ‘realist’ policies that made sense in terms of economics rather than ideology. The myth of socialist modernity as a variant of industrial modernity had definitely collapsed, and socialist countries' participation in the Western-dominated world economy became a necessity. Eventually, the developing world became the place where a joint East–West co-operation could take place, often in the framework of the so-called trilateral co-operation, where Western Europe had a special role.