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Best known as the state youth organization of the German Democratic Republic, the Free German Youth (FDJ) operated widely in West Germany during the early Cold War era. This article provides a brief history of the West-FDJ, as it was known, and concentrates on its prominent efforts challenging Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's rearmament policies in the early 1950s. While the decision to ban the organization in 1951 was justified by concerns about the fragility of the young democratic state, the Adenauer government's strident response also served as a politically expedient strategy to undermine resistance to West Germany's remilitarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the GDR, literature and poetry played a prominent role. They were considered to have great potential to educate the people, but at the same time were feared to be dangerous for the well-being of the state. As of the 1960s, the state had established a comprehensive system to develop, support and instruct but also control the writing of aspirational young and amateur writers. In this, they were supported by mass organizations such as the Free Federation of German Trade Unions (FDGB) or the Free German Youth (FDJ). For this work ‚at the grassroots' the institutions at the district level of the GDR were eminently important. This paper takes the district of Gera as an example. It outlines the specific institutions and structures which were installed in this district. Considering political contexts and aesthetic manifestations of anthologies published in Gera, we will analyse cultural-political conflicts and aspects of literary and societal developments of the GDR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article outlines the history of poetry project as well as its political, pedagogical, and aesthetic contexts, and develops corresponding research questions. It mentions the GDR instituted a comprehensive development program to instruct and motivate young adults to write poetry under the umbrella of the Free German Youth (FDJ), starting in the 1960s.

In the early 1970s, Angela Davis was an iconic figure in the GDR, nowhere more so than among youth. The press supported solidarity cam-paigns for Davis, mainly organized by the FDJ (Free German Youth). Against the backdrop of Davis's imprisonment in 1970 and her trial in 1971–72, jour nalistic and fictional writing as well as radio plays appeared for a young audience. The article compares the ways in which Davis appears as a po litical figure in literature for youth, and argues that literary portraits were dominantly shaped through the ideological discourse of antifascism and the interest to inveigh against the politics of the USA. By examining texts that were originally addressed towards young audiences or reissued for them, the article gives an account of different generic texts such as Maximilian Scheer's radio play Der Weg nach San Rafael: Für Angela Davis (1971), the youth novel Schwarze Rose aus Alabama (1972) by Werner Lehmann, and the travelogue Unterwegs zu Angela (1973) by the German-Australian writer Walter Kaufmann. Also included are narrations in magazines such as Bum-mi (1973) and Neues Leben (1971; 1973). The article shows that all examples served ideological images that were communicated to youth, while distract-ing from Davis's radical call for freedom of all people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on official SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) local archives and “field materials” (such as school chronicles and minutes of teachers’ conferences) from East Berlin, this article focuses on one actor in the school system who embodied the authority of the SED State in 1950s everyday life: the headteacher. Until now, the headteacher has been a neglected figure in German historiography, which has focused above all on the “new teachers” (Neulehrer) as a result of a wide denazification drive and who were often only considered by West German historians as a “transmission belt” of SED ideology. This figure of political authority seems to be a good vantage point to understand how the SED implemented the basic elements of its socio-political programme at the grass-roots level. Indeed, schools were a place where the SED State gradually entrenched its power during the 1950s. Heads of school had to engage in attempting to turn East German teachers into “political educators” and East German pupils into “socialist personalities”. They were principally involved in a huge process of transformation of school buildings and school temporality, and in the establishment of SED domination. The SED claimed a “total partisan commitment” by headteachers, which was summed up in August 1949 during the 4th pedagogic congress in Leipzig. The aim of this article is to present this professionnal group in East Berlin and to prove that political authority (embodied by headteachers) was the product of social interactions between the representatives of the school system and society. In the early 1950s, 244 headteachers 632 E. Droit were active in the comprehensive schools of East Berlin; 40% of them were older than 60 – their pedagogic experience was that of the Weimar Republic – and it was above all a masculine profession (75% of East Berlin headteachers were men) where women were often faced with misogynistic behaviour from teachers. During the first decade of the GDR’s existence, this professional group was marked by a process of homogenisation. In the early 1950s, about 50% of the headteachers in East Berlin were members of the SED, which was an extreme high degree of political commitment for the time. The SED’s goal was to quickly control this key position in order to recruit new members among the teachers, to control the teaching staff ideologically (the SED expected a growing awareness of the teachers’ political function) and to eradicate former social democratic influences. Within the schools, headteachers contributed to transforming the school system into an instrument of stabilisation of SED domination and to limiting social autonomy. For example, they succeeded in eliminating the democratical pupils’ councils, which were born after the Second World War, and establishing new form of pupil representation which were under the control of the official youth organisations. Since the end of the 1940s, the only two SED-approved mass organisations for youth – the Pioneer Organisation for children between six and 14 years old and the Free German Youth for older teenagers and young adults – were allowed to take an active part in the school system, especially in the organisation of leisure-time activities and ideological education. The micro-historical “bottom-up” perspective on state–society relations sheds new gloomy light on the everyday interactions between the headteachers and others actors in the school system (teachers, pupils). At the local level, headteachers were faced with contradictions, which are due to a discrepancy between the SED’s claim that it was all-powerful and the reality they had to deal with. Schools were clearly defined as a place for political involvement. Local permanent FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, Free German Youth) functionaries were theoretically members of each pedagogic team in any given school. Their presence reflected the will of the SED to control the schools. But the headteachers had to deal with the scepticism of teachers who would not accept them as educators. Tensions and rivalry marked the relationships between teachers and FDJ functionaries. The latter did not consider the former as real members of the pedagogic team. It led the headteachers to look for agreements with teachers in order to preserve a form of “social peace” within the pedagogic teams. This kind of strategy was at the same time a danger for their position as headteachers because ignoring or diminishing the impacts of the actions of the FDJ functionaries could eventually have caused them to be relegated to another school as a simple teacher. Finally, headteachers often depended on some degree of grass-roots cooperation with teachers in order to carry out orders from above. In short, the exercise of political authority was based on interdependent relationships and implied a subtle mix of coercion and mutual accommodation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information about East German summer camp programs for children that are reportedly full of communist propaganda and violence. Examples of East German abuse of children are given, such as group repression in schools and factories, and violent attacks on individuals by the East German youth group Freie Deutsche Jugend. Additionally, the article notes that East German courts wrongfully accuse some young people of being enemies of the state and of socialism.