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This thesis seeks to chart the development of a comprehensive system of diabetes care in a socialist state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). There have been few seminal studies to date on chronic diseases using state socialism, and in particular the GDR, as a contextual base. The thesis serves to highlight the fact that chronic diseases were acknowledged, treated and rationalised behind the Iron Curtain. It uses diabetes as a case study to shed light on what exactly the state socialist response was to a rising, and potentially debilitating, disease. It is therefore primarily concerned with what makes diabetes management in the GDR, first, distinctly state socialist, and, second, unmistakably East German. Following the Second World War, a radically different approach to health developed out of the rubble in the Soviet Zone and later GDR. The principle of social hygiene, firmly within the realm of epidemiology, focused on the economic and social causes of disease. It allowed for the previously marginal diabetes to become a focus of attention when East German diabetologists discovered an unexpectedly higher incidence of the disease than previously assumed. Aware that diabetes could lead to complications, the addition of a Marxist-Leninist productionist critique meant that the prevention of invalidity and keeping people in work were of paramount concern, leading to the development of an elaborate screening programme and a prevailing attitude of 'prevention first'. When the diabetologist responsible for the creation of the GDR's showcase '(Central)Institute for Diabetes', Gerhardt Katsch, proclaimed that diabetics were 'conditionally healthy and able to work', it chimed with the expectations of a regime of which he and his ideas were now a part. Surveying the entirety of the GDR's lifetime, this thesis begins by looking at the introduction of new institutions catering to the needs of diabetics, from outpatient specialist polyclinics to a boarding school for diabetic children, and examines the influences underpinning them. The thesis is structured chronologically with embedded themes in a deliberate attempt to reveal how broader events, including autarkic economic policies, diplomatic relations and political upheaval came to shape the novel, East German approach to diabetes.

Articulating an original reading strategy that builds on both American feminist affect theory and anthropological models of historical consciousness, this dissertation advances a new theoretical account of the role played by the sensory or bodily awareness of history in Polish and East German literature. Its argument consists of, on the one hand, an account historical experience in the state-socialist period in People’s Poland and in the German Democratic Republic that focuses on specific, qualitative experiences of historical time and that places them in their cultural contexts and historical genealogies. These qualitative temporalities appear as concrete amalgamations of emotion and time. The three such amalgamations on which this dissertation focuses are: Stalinist cheerfulness and its “elastic” sense of history; the empty lateness of pre-Solidarność Poland in the 1970s, and the atmospheric depression hanging over Berlin directly before the Mauerfall. On the other hand, this argument presents a theoretical account of historical consciousness as such, which uses the example of socialist historical consciousness to argue that the categories of feeling, affect, and emotion are, in fact, central to how history is experienced throughout Modernity. This is, again, a wholly original argument that builds on literary, historical, anthropological, and cultural-studies theory to advance a new understanding of historical time, outside of chronology, simultaneity, and forms of linear ordering. These readings of the Polish and East German literature are, at once, an attempt to deprovincialize the socialist novel by elucidating its universal claims about the relationship of historical knowledge to historical experience.

My dissertation is a comparative study of the mutually constitutive relationship between homelessness as a cultural worldview and statelessness as a political condition. By focusing on socialist Yugoslavia (1945-1991), I examine how the modernist theme of homelessness—once viewed as an expression of cosmopolitan aspirations among its most progressive writers—turns into a devastating everyday reality for those rendered genuinely stateless in the course of the Yugoslav wars. My point of departure is the high modernist prose of Danilo Kiš, the so-called “last Yugoslav writer,” whose work is widely thought to have presaged a future yet to be lost in the break-up of this region. By returning to Kiš’s fictionalized autobiographical trilogy—Early Sorrows (1970), Garden, Ashes (1965), and Hourglass (1972)—I show how Kiš develops a philosophy of history in which homelessness is the metaphysical, historical, and formal problem he tries to work through rather than posit as an essential human condition. The importance of rethinking the paradigmatic status of the apatride figure is highlighted in chapters two and three, where I show a post-Yugoslav constellation emerging in world literature around the idea of bezdomnost—a term used explicitly in reference to Martin Heidegger’s Heimatlosigkeit (existential homelessness), and thematized by a number of post-Yugoslav authors, including Aleksandar Hemon and Dubravka Ugrešić. What comes into view here is a nexus of transnational works centered less on a set of shared experiences than on a common belief in the representational, explanatory, and civic virtues of homelessness and its power to contest nativism—now on a global scale. In contrast to Hemon’s “audacity of despair,” I return in the dissertation’s final chapters to the “dialectic of hope” in the writings of the WWII generation of German émigré scholars. I propose that the exiled members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory—in their sustained critique of the excesses of existentialism—remain as relevant today for a literary study of political demise as they once were for the study of fascism and nihilism.

This dissertation puts forth a new interpretation of the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War by examining the energy and financial markets that developed in the wake of the 1973-74 oil crisis. Drawing on newly released archival documents from both public and private archives throughout Europe and North America, it places the history of communist and capitalist states in the 1970s and 1980s in comparative perspective. The intertwined histories of oil, sovereign debt, and austerity touched every society on both sides of the Iron Curtain after the oil crisis. Energy and financial markets forced governments to impose economic and social restraint on their own societies, so the survival of political regimes and governing ideologies in both East and West came to depend on governments’ ability to impose discipline. Governments that could successfully impose discipline without inviting a destabilizing social backlash survived; those that could not, collapsed. Thus, this dissertation proposes that the end of the Cold War was fundamentally different from its beginning. The competition between democratic capitalist states and state socialist regimes began as a race to expand the social contracts that prevailed in their societies, but it ended as a competition to discipline their respective social contracts. The Cold War, in other words, began as a race to make promises, but it ended as a race to break promises. Explaining the peaceful and abrupt end of the Cold War has long been a significant challenge for historians. Some have focused their explanations on the unique role played by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and, to a lesser extent, U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Others have focused on the role of civil society and non-violent protest in spurring the revolutions of 1989. In contrast, this dissertation contends that the peaceful end of the Cold War was primarily the product of socialist states’ desire to gain political legitimacy through democratic elections in order to implement economic and social discipline. Through detailed case studies of the collapse of the communist regimes in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, this work demonstrates that the pressure to implement austerity in communist states significantly explains why communism collapsed and the Cold War ended peacefully.

Art and cultural historians have long characterized the relationship between East Germany’s experimental artists and its state bureaucrats as at best one of division, opposition, and hostility. In this view, artists are either victims or pawns of the state. In “Infiltration and Excess: Experimental Art and the East German State, 1980 – 1989” I expand this framework to reveal how experimental culture actually engaged with the state and exposed and critiqued its core disjunctions. I focus on artists who used body-based practices, like performance, film, and photography, to create new vocabularies for representation, as well as their uses of reproducible media in the creation and circulation of their work. By the Cold War’s final decade, the GDR government’s inability to produce a collective and coherent public significantly frayed its power. Thus, I argue that experimental practice was not only an antidote for, but also a diagnosis of a weakening state: a foil and a mirror to official culture. In fact, the East German experimental arts scene produced an alternative public—a counter-public—with commitments to culture, community, and interdisciplinarity that state socialism had sought to inspire. This irony, really an inversion of state socialist principles, lies at the heart of my dissertation. Oversimplified narratives of the Cold War era have consistently defined the Eastern Bloc by its victimization or complicity under Communism, leaving little room for details about regional variation in culture or civic politics. My scholarship—based on substantial archival research and numerous interviews—highlights one case among many, joining an emerging field of academics and artists whose work examines the Cold War past as a means of revitalizing and globalizing areas of the world once again at risk of cultural and political isolationism.

In this dissertation, the author examines the spread of popular culture in Hungary during the long 1960s, with particular emphasis on how the Hungarian government's policy on popular culture affected Hungarian youth culture. Drawing on literature and theory from consumption, popular culture, and youth culture, the author uses a variety of primary source documents to demonstrate that throughout the 1960s, the Hungarian state socialist government promoted cultural consumption in a way that spoke to popular demand while couching this consumption within the rhetoric of modern socialism. Cultural products were depoliticized and increasingly subsumed into the market reforms that were being implemented during this period, meaning that culture, too, had to answer in some way to consumer demand. As consumption and mass media became associated with modernity, the government argued that products of popular culture were in keeping with their efforts to build socialism not because of their content, but because these products were consumed in a socialist manner. The introduction of Hungarian socialist popular culture also served as a way to provide an alternative to Western variants, which were becoming increasingly available in the era of peaceful coexistence. All of these elements can be seen in the discussion of Hungarian youth culture, where many aspects of youth culture were allowed, and even promoted, and the government argued that the consumption of youth culture was acceptable as long as it was symbolic of young people's search for something new. This argument can be clearly seen in Hungarian beat music, which was representative of the complex relationship between the state, the musicians, and the youth audience. This relationship that led to the creation of a distinct, Hungarian version of popular music that met youth demand and at the same time served the interests of the socialist government. The contents of this dissertation provide a unique perspective on current literature on state socialist consumption and culture, arguing that in the long 1960s in Hungary, the government achieved a measure of success in its attempt to create a distinct type of socialist popular culture.

This dissertation is a historical ethnography of actually existing state socialism in Viet Nam. It examines the administrative practices of low-level cadres, whom I term peasant-bureaucrats, and the historiography that surrounds them. I argue that these low-level cadres were state socialism's subalterns who, by virtue of their structural location within the Vietnamese Party/state (the bottom), found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having to serve their bureaucratic superiors and the people they ostensibly represented, often simultaneously. Importantly, the subaltern status of these peasant-bureaucrats was relational and relative rather than absolute and fixed. By tracing how various peasant-bureaucrats negotiated these conflicting demands (or failed to do so) over time, what I describe as the practice of partial disclosure, it becomes possible to develop a more nuanced view of what everyday life was like following the August Revolution of 1945 to the present. Such an approach moves discussion beyond previous studies of state socialism in Viet Nam, which have largely stressed either domination or resistance. The research draws upon a wide range of archival, literary, and ethnographic materials to explore several overlapping domains: the everyday conduct of low-level Party/state cadres, the models they used for mass mobilization campaigns, and the historiography surrounding them both. My dissertation is, as a consequence, also an extended study of bureaucracy itself---its personnel, its symbols, and its practices---for this is how most Vietnamese actually encounter the socialist Party/state on a routine basis. It is through such encounters and, importantly, efforts to avoid them that ordinary people form theories about how different segments of the Party/state actually function, the limits of its power and authority, as well as the precise location of its blind spots. It is also through such quotidian interactions that the bureaucratic practices associated with the Party/state and, increasingly, non-governmental organizations infiltrate everyday life to affect how people conceive of themselves and conduct their lives. This approach permits me to reexamine what Vietnamese state socialism was and what it is becoming now, as well as demonstrate the limits of some of our own analytical categories in the process.