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Across Eastern Germany, many castles and stately homes were used as shops, schools or community buildings during the GDR. Since the 1990s, many of them have been turned into museums. This paper discusses the challenges of dealing with the history of socialist reuse in East-German heritage buildings comparing the former Prussian castles of Schönhausen (Berlin) and Rheinsberg (Northern Brandenburg). The comparison is based on five in-depth semi-structured interviews providing insights into the considerations of curatorial decision makers. It shows that there is still a high sense of uncertainty in how to address the GDR past, in particular when the role of the building was not clearly political. Personal recollections of the recent past lead to uneasiness in addressing this part of history. At the same time, the paper shows how attitudes have changed over time. Today, the GDR past is increasingly seen as an opportunity to connect to a wider audience and foster a more participatory and democratic memory culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Television is a global phenomenon with national peculiarities. This article introduces a chronological and comparative analysis of the development of television in West and East Germany. A systematic view of this phenomenon involves both technical and social aspects. From a technical innovation available to the privileged, it turned into a mass medium that performs an integrative function by shaping and broadcasting the current discourse. The research objective was to find out the specifics of television in Germany and correlate the global trends with the national context. The XX century erased the borders between such incompatible phenomena as dictatorship and democracy, and all these phenomena affected the content of TV shows, people’s attitude to television, its new genres, social functions, etc. The author revealed five stages in the development of German television. Stage I (late XIX century – 1945) was the age of technical discoveries, attempts at their practical implementation, and the early regular broadcasting during the period of National Socialism. Stage II (late 1940s – 1950s) marked the restoration of television broadcasting and the parallel development of television in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Stage III (1960s –1970s) clarified the institutional framework and social functions of television. Stage IV (1980s – mid-1990s) saw the emergence of new broadcasting technologies and commercial TV channels, as well as the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the reunification of Germany. Stage V (since 1990s) is connected with digitalization.

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Copyright of Psychosozial is the property of Psychosozial-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Psychosozial is the property of Psychosozial-Verlag GmbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Political repression beneath the threshold of criminal prosecution is a phenomenon of past and present, predominantly authoritarian, regimes. This so-called quiet repression includes measures such as the limitation of freedom of speech, surveillance of (perceived) political opponents, or the spreading of rumors to socially isolate targets. Such experiences of chronic stress show significant psychological and physiological health consequences in affected individuals. However, societal awareness of quiet repression measures remains limited, hindering victims' access to support and complicating healthcare interventions. In the current paper, we present the design of a study conducted with individuals who endured quiet repression measures in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), a socialist state closely aligned with the former Soviet Union. We discuss the challenges encountered over the course of the study, and present the solutions found. Although every study population has their unique challenges and needs, we wish to inform future sensitive research within the realm of quiet political repression. Given the limited understanding of the phenomenon, there is a pressing need for further investigation aiming to improve acceptance and care for past and future victims.

This article examines the genesis and development of the Festival of Political Songs (Festival des Politischen Liedes) in East Berlin under the German Democratic Republic from 1970 to 1990, looking at it as one of the main engines of the German Democratic Republic-musical field in the last twenty years of its existence. In this regard, the analysis of the empirical material (in-depth interviews and video recordings) serves first to outline the main social and cultural processes which interested the Festival from its inception to its end, and second to reflect upon some specific features of the Festival as an 'extraordinary event' in light of Bourdieu's concept of field. Departing from this perspective, I examine the genesis and development of the Festival, focusing especially on the contrasting effects produced by its institutionalization and internationalization and the ways these impacted both the Festival and the musical field: from the creation of music scenes, to the development of professional careers in different fields of cultural production and the mixing of mainstream and alternative musical trends. The final aim is to highlight the different understandings of publicness and openness associated with the Festival that defined its social, spatial and emotional structure during its twenty-year lifespan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Young Marx in the Lyric of the GDR Despite the compulsory exegeses of Marx conducted at universities in the GDR, which most poets completed, the work of the young Marx exerted a genuine creative fascination upon many of them, varying by gravity and intensity depending on the historical period. Bertolt Brecht, Hans Mayer, and Robert Havemann acted as mediators of Marx for the poets who emerged to dominate the lyric poetry of the GDR since the mid-1960s (Sarah Kirsch, Karl Mickel, Volker Braun, among others). Ernst Bloch’s most important work, „Das Prinzip Hoffnung“ (“The Principle of Hope”), which revolves around the utopian core idea of “the reconciliation of man and nature,” harkens back to the writings of the young Marx and can be regarded as central to the latter’s reception at the time. This is particularly evident in poems by Volker Braun and Karl Mickel, which will be considered here in more detail. Since the 1970s, however, socialist critique in poetry has increasingly been overlaid by a critique of civilization. This refocusing on the ‘globalist Marx,’ which had already been prepared by Karl Mickel’s poem „Der See“ (“The Lake”) (1963), has resulted in both the intensified resumption of Marxian / Blochian emblematics (Volker Braun) and a decided departure from any “principle of hope” (Günter Kunert). With postmodernism and the Wendezeit, lyrical insistence upon Marx seemed to have become obsolete. Yet along with the renaissance of nature poetry since the turn of the 21st century, Marx’s thinking – and particularly, the tradition of ‘Young Marx’ – has reemerged with new relevance to the “poetry of now” generation (Daniel Falb and others), who react critically to anthropogenic influence upon the climate and biosphere. In this context, the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’ occupies a key position in contemporary poetological reflection as well as in the practice of writing.

This article draws attention to the autobiographical remembrance of East German authors in their texts from the new millennium, viewing their autobiographical work through the lens of generational belonging. Using exemplary autobiographical texts, it demonstrates how they (re)construct memories of the East German past, what narrative strategies the authors use, and what their autobiographical texts bring to non-literary discourses. Generational differences are exposed mainly in the use of meta-autobiographical procedures to differing degrees or the integration of documentary media into the process of literary remembrance, as well as in the nature of autofiction. Generational affiliation is mainly thematized in the strongly factual texts of the youngest GDR-born authors, often associated with marketable self-staging practices. In contrast to the Aufbaugeneration (literally "build-up generation") which constructed the new East German society from the ruins of the postwar period, as represented by the deeply self-reflexive, fictional meta-autobiography of Christa Wolf, the autobiographies of young authors rarely reflect the complexity of the processes of remembering. By dealing with one's own origins and linking one's individual life story to larger socio-historical and political contexts, the most recent texts of the post-reunification generation in particular come close to autosociobiographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sketch for the cover of the second East German edition to Pippi Langstrumpf (1988) showing a girl standing on her head on horseback is the starting point for this article. It was drawn by Cornelia Ellinger, only one year before the fall of the Berlin wall. The sketch becomes a starting point for a discussion of humor and materiality in the reception of Pippi in the GDR. Just as the cover frames and delimits the text, our preconceptions frame our gaze and affect what we can see. However, this act is not just something that is imposed on us but an invitation to act ourselves, which makes issues of illustration, color choice and book format particularly important in a monolithic society, in an attempt to steer the reader's attention in a desired direction. The discussed sketch was never printed. Instead, the publisher chose a more blatantly humorous image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In both parts of post-war Germany, the promise of progress played a central role in imagining and implementing new frameworks of social belonging and their formalization in the institution of citizenship. This article investigates how ideologies of progress were employed by various political and cultural actors in East Germany to support processes of citizenship formation and the consolidation of an independent statehood. I open with a brief historical discussion to argue that discourses of progress and futurity have played a significant role for all modern nation states independently of their ideological positioning. I will then proceed to show that the GDR, together with other socialist states, stands out in this regard due to the extent that its temporal politics were both modelled by and predicated on the particularity of its economic paradigm: the centrally planned economy. Following an analysis of the realm of formalized politics I will discuss how ideologies of progress manifested and were critically reviewed in the realm of literary production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper introduces video recordings from an archive of a research school of the Academy of Educational Sciences in the GDR as a relatively new source in the history of education. Based on selected video recordings, it presents a case study which focuses the practice of classroom research and reflection within this institution. The video recordings were part of a research study on the enhancement of students' cognitive activity through the implementation of problem-based instruction. While this new approach can be seen as a part of a broader educational reform in the context of the scientific-technological revolution, this case study addresses, in particular, the implementation and reflection of this new approach in practice. Doing so, it interprets the video recordings as a document of the strained relation between political expectations and the inherent logic of educational research in the GDR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the cultural diplomacy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) at the World Congress of Women in October 1975 in East Berlin. Organized by the Women’s International Democratic Federation to celebrate the UN International Women’s Year, the congress provided a space for communist and leftist advocates from across the globe to discuss women’s rights in connection with issues like global economic justice, anti-colonialism, and peace. But it also gave its host, the GDR, a platform to promote its emancipatory policies to women from the Global South. For weeks, delegates from Africa, Asia, and Latin America visited concerts, museums, and art exhibitions on women’s lives and took trips to neighbourhoods, kindergartens, schools, women’s advice centres, and hospitals across the GDR. Building on research on the performative dimensions of international diplomacy, this article discusses how the socialist regime transformed the congress halls, the city of East Berlin, and public institutions into ‘diplomatic stages’. It argues that while this performance was challenged by audiences like foreign journalists, Western delegates, and citizens, its success depended on the Demokratische Frauenbund Deutschlands (German Democratic Women’s League), the GDR's mass women’s organisation, and its networks to the international women’s movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material‐saving nail trusses – aspects of construction history from 1930 to 1990 Material‐saving wooden constructions, which were developed and optimized in particular during the war and post‐war period in the 20th century, are currently attracting renewed interest from the point of view of construction history, but also from an economic point of view. The article gives an overview starting with the first constructions at the end of the 1920s up to the type trusses of the GDR, which were built over agricultural buildings until 1990 and are often used today as supporting structures for photovoltaic systems and are therefore experiencing a renaissance. The focus of the article is on the chronological presentation of selected construction methods for hall and house roofs, differentiated between timbered and solid wall trusses. Both the responsible engineers and their origin, as well as essential fields of application and example buildings are discussed in the overview. A significant finding is the reduction in the period from 1930 to 1990 from a large number of nailed savings to type constructions, which essentially produced extremely material‐efficient timber trusses for gable roofs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lens of cinema, this article focuses on the subject of football as a powerful medium of political expression. It is the first comprehensive analysis of the 1989 DEFA film … und freitags in die “Grüne Hölle” by Ernst Cantzler and it reads the documentary in close relation to the historic developments during the late years of the GDR. Viewing the football stadium as a symbolic stand-in for East Germany, this article understands Cantzler’s work as a well-crafted montage that–metaphorically–lays out two possible scenarios for the end of German division: a peaceful revolution and a violent uprising. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of WISTA Wirtschaft und Statistik is the property of Statistisches Bundesamt and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In the early 1970s, East Germany opened its borders to visitors from West Germany and West Berlin. Soon after, East German authorities recorded several million entries from non-socialist countries each year. This article examines the intentions and obstacles to establishing a successful tourism business across the inner-German border. The author shows that the regime's attempts to develop the GDR into an attractive travel destination were shaped by (I) poor starting conditions, which could not be overcome for financial reasons; (II) bureaucratic hurdles resulting from a mistrust of its own people as well as of West Germans; (III) inefficient structures, which could not be corrected for political reasons; (IV) the constant desire to impress West Germany; and (V) the need for foreign currency. However, while other socialist states gave priority to economic considerations, in the GDR political hopes, aspirations or concerns were uppermost in the mind of policymakers when it came to tourism from the Federal Republic. The article therefore argues that travelling from West to East Germany must be understood as 'Cold War tourism,' as the conflict greatly informed the conditions and experience of travel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to investigate the working-class background of the failure of the economic reform of the 1960s in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The reform attempted to bring more incentives and market-like elements into labour organisation and management practices. However, there was an essential discrepancy between loyal party work and strong ideological commitment, and the 'capitalist' managerial practices. Despite the fact that the SED (the Communist Party of the GDR) invested a lot in the training of socialist technocrats, the regime's rigid ideology and its political constraints severely curtailed the extent to which technocrats could deploy their expertise. Egalitarianism and the 'workerist' ideology of the Party were effective obstacles in the implementation of the 'scientific-technical revolution', thus making a case for an aborted Fordism or a failed socialist modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic policy agenda of the SED has often been described as extremely orthodox in nature and—with the exception of a short period in the 1960s—hostile to reform. It is often overlooked that the GDR entertained the largest private sector of any of the CMEA economies up till the early 1980s. Besides the official propaganda, the SED leadership at no point abolished private entrepreneurship completely in the GDR. In this article, I analyze the ambiguous relationship between the state party and private entrepreneurship. I focus particularly on the late 1980s and the role private entrepreneurs were supposed to play in reforming and saving socialism in East Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides a comparative analysis of the coverage of the legacy of National Socialism in the memory policy of the FRG and historical policy of the GDR and various commemorative practices. The author revealed the conceptual apparatus that is used in professional historiography and public discourse. Its various contents and features of use in different chronological periods were also determined in the article. The author considered numerous methodological approaches used by researchers of memory problems. The difference between the concepts of "memory policy" and "memory culture" in content is that the first term provides for a set of government measures to preserve memory, while the second term is broader and focuses on involving public institutions and society in the discussion of "memory" problems. The article shows the differences in the attitude to the National Socialist past in the FRG and the GDR on specific examples. The author paid attention to new approaches to the memory of the World War II in modern Germany, which has resulted from the processes of migration and the transformation of the country into a multicultural community. Two factors influence contemporary debates about the politics of memory in Germany: a) globalization, cultural transfer and migration, which exacerbate conflicts in nationally oriented memory politics. Like most countries in Western Europe, Germany is an immigration country, comprising a population that can't longer be differentiated by nations and ethnic groups. Accordingly, historical memory refers less and less to national or ethnic historical foundations, as an ever-increasing proportion of the population has a second family origin and is therefore confronted with a past that lies beyond their ethnic beliefs; b) the Russian-Ukrainian war turned attention to the crimes of National Socialism during the Second World War (1939-1945) in Eastern Europe and Ukraine in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship treats congresses of the ruling communist parties in the Eastern Bloc as staged performances intended to manufacture support and signal new policy trends. This article, using the examples of extraordinary party congresses held during revolutionary times in Poland (1981) and the German Democratic Republic (1989) offers another per¬spective. It looks at the events as spaces where rank-and-file delegates could contest par¬ticular decisions of their organization, while simultaneously straying away from more radi¬cal forms of dissent. This article follows and compares the actions of delegates in both countries by highlighting how they disrupted the agenda of the congresses over the ques¬tion of elite corruption committed by former members of the party leadership and account¬ability for these wrongdoings. These episodes show that anti-corruption was a genuinely important moral preoccupation, as well as an argument for demanding change, and that, during the 1980s, ideas grounded in socialism still possessed major legitimacy.

Discourse on Jewish life in the German Democratic Republic has often offered a clichéd portrayal of a society in which Jewishness was subsumed into the antifascist founding myth of the GDR, leaving Jews as either self-hating (Stalinist) Jews or as citizens forced to deny their Jewish origins. In particular, Cold War narratives have often differentiated between Jewish communists who were in exile in the Soviet Union, and thus seen afterwards as more loyal, and those who were in exile in the West, and thus more likely to be suspected of disloyalty. This paper focuses on non-Soviet exiles and their descendants to explore the diversity of Jewish identity, politics and culture in the GDR, ranging from assimilationist communist identity to explicit engagement with Jewish traditions and even the Jewish religion. Surveying through the generations from pre-Nazi communist activism to the GDR-born children of such activists, it finds a diversity that belies monochrome portrayals of GDR life, while also establishing that, far from being mere passive instruments in the service of an SED-led (neo-)Stalinist society, Jews in the GDR were agents in the establishing of their own multi-faceted identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reunified Germany emerged on the map of Europe in 1990. At first, settling an account with the communist Germany proceeded in a simplified way – everything about them seemed evil. Over time, this judgement became less biased and more comprehensive. At the beginning of the 21st century, the “trend for the East”, which was called Ostalgie, prevailed. From that point forward, dealing with their past balances between a sentimental journey to the time of the German Democratic Republic and a harsh assessment of that reality. Until this day, modern Germany constitutes two unequal parts, as the polls confirm. They continue to be divided by a mental barrier — an invisible ‘wall in people’s heads’, and many residents of the new lands still feel foreign in their own country. Their dissatisfaction is consciously and effectively exploited by the populist Alternative for Germany party. How the East German heritage becomes an instrument of political influence is the leading question of this article. The sources, mainly German, consist primarily of subject literature, documents, statistical reports and analysis of public opinion research centres, as well as comments of experts and press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Zeitschrift für Psychosomatische Medizin und Psychotherapie is the property of Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines the figure of Thomas Müntzer in Marxist historiography, as well as the "utopianisation" of Müntzer in Ernst Bloch's 1921 study on Thomas Müntzer as Theologian of the Revolution. I review some of the differences in Martin Luther and Müntzer in their competing views for the future after the break from Rome, and the theological thrust of Müntzer's vision. This is then connected with elements from Bloch's Müntzer, chiefly focussing on spirit and history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship treats congresses of the ruling communist parties in the Eastern Bloc as staged performances intended to manufacture support and signal new policy trends. This article, using the examples of extraordinary party congresses held during revolutionary times in Poland (1981) and the German Democratic Republic (1989) offers another perspective. It looks at the events as spaces where rank-and-file delegates could contest particular decisions of their organization, while simultaneously straying away from more radical forms of dissent. This article follows and compares the actions of delegates in both countries by highlighting how they disrupted the agenda of the congresses over the question of elite corruption committed by former members of the party leadership and accountability for these wrongdoings. These episodes show that anti-corruption was a genuinely important moral preoccupation, as well as an argument for demanding change, and that, during the 1980s, ideas grounded in socialism still possessed major legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Leipzig Trade Fair was the first multilateral international exhibition the People's Republic of China (PRC) attended since 1949. The fair was a venue for the People's Republic of China to trade with both the West and the East and demonstrated China's industrial development and ideology to the rest of the world. Until the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, the PRC and German Democratic Republic (GDR) both reaped economic and political benefits from their participation in the Leipzig fair. This study frames the history of China and the Leipzig Trade Fair mainly from the Chinese perspective by focusing on the decision-making and contention of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy elites, as well as the efforts of middle-ranking Chinese trade officials to promote trade. It also examines the role of the Leipzig fair in China's trade relations with both the West and the East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article deals with samizdat writing in the GDR, which could not be published legally. Thus, authors published their critical texts on handbills and smaller booklets. The article shows forms of distribution and focuses the analysis on individual examples and actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No state has ever been as identified with its borders as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The guest editors' introduction to this special issue analyzes the development of the historiography of the borders of the GDR, showing how new approaches to the country's history have also impacted scholarship on the everyday history of the border. We argue for approaches that understand the border simultaneously as a site of conflict and cooperation and that situate the border not just alongside its geographical neighbors, but within broader flows of natural resources, pollution, narcotics, migration, and disease. Drawing on the interdisciplinary field of border studies, we argue that global approaches can help contextualize the exceptional and encourage scholars to ask new questions about which elements of GDR bordering practices were part of the globally emerging normalcy of border regimes, and which were unique to East Germany. In these ways, this special issue seeks to reveal new aspects of East German history and, in turn, make the GDR more legible within border studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) treated the Berlin Wall as an official state border, but the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) did not recognize it as an official state border and thus did not impose entry controls. This asymmetric recognition opened up a gap in the regime of border policing and turned divided Berlin into one of the most significant sources of unauthorized migration into the FRG, creating tensions in Berlin, West Germany, and western Europe more broadly. Countries including France, Denmark, and the Netherlands all pressured the FRG to shut the open border in Berlin. This article examines how West German authorities sought to respond to their demands without recognizing the Berlin Wall as a state border. West German authorities pursued two broad strategies. The first involved internalizing the border through institutionalized racial profiling in West Berlin. The second entailed externalizing the border by asking the GDR to enforce FRG visa and passport requirements. Although both forms of border policing have often been associated with the end of the Cold War, this article shows that they were adopted earlier, and in response to Cold War imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it lacked a significant domestic market for internationally trafficked drugs, East Germany emerged as an important corridor for narcotics smugglers in the 1970s due to its position between supply countries in Asia and consumer countries in the West. The unique geography of West Berlin created a large market of consumers surrounded by East German territory, forcing traffickers to pass through the GDR border. Efforts by officials in both Germanys and the United States to cooperate on the problem of narcotics trafficking revealed conflicts between the geography of the Cold War—where the GDR border was the front line in the ideological conflict between East and West—and the international drug prohibition system, which sought global interstate collaboration in the name of a "universal international society," against the common threat of crime. As Cold War tensions declined in the 1980s, border enforcement cooperation between East and West became increasingly viable as both sides reoriented toward the view that Europe had to defend itself from the threats posed by mobilities of those in the global south. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the course of the Elbe River from Czechoslovakia through the German Democratic Republic (GDR) into the Federal Republic, where it flows into the North Sea. As the GDR's main water artery, the Elbe's border crossings became a site of security concern for the GDR. Traversing the GDR's border with fellow communist state Czechoslovakia as well as its rival West German state, the river linked the GDR to a larger ecological system as well as transnational sociopolitical dynamics. These connections illuminated the GDR's crucial position in central Europe and beyond. Yet the Elbe also presented challenges for the GDR in terms of controlling information, people, and pollution that streamed into—and out of—the country. The river thus was a precious and contested resource that revealed the communist dictatorship's limited ability to control nature, humans, or interactions between the two. Ultimately, the Elbe's border crossings were a site of transnational and global connection that called into question the GDR's domestic legitimacy and international standing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Mozambique’s failed campaign to join the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA). It explores the motives and strategies of the Mozambican politicians who led the campaign and the reactions of planners and politicians in Eastern Europe, embedding them in a longer history of their bilateral and multilateral economic relations and the various steps before, during and after the accession campaign from the 1960s to the late 1980s. The dynamics in this debate shed light on the CMEA’s transition from geographical expansion to stagnation and the broader shift from visions of economic convergence to an acceptance of divergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the interplay of renegade poetics and conversion semantics in Wolf Biermann’s autobiography Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten (2016). The autobiographical first-person narrator places himself in a line with famous renegades who legitimize his own renegade status. In the process, the concept of the renegade undergoes a rhetorical intensification into a paradox through attributive extension, modeling the courage and truthfulness of the autobiographical self. Staged orality and a colloquial tone assert the authenticity of the self. The liminal figure of the transition from belief in communism and its realization in the GDR to identification with the parliamentary democracy of the Federal Republic is reflected with close reference to the author’s own artistic-literary work. Intertextual references such as the adoption of Heinrich Heine’s poem title »Enfant perdu« for one of his own poems on the flight of Robert Havemann’s son from the Republic make the change of sides a literary motif. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Copyright of Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Historic artifacts speak to the fact that in various historic periods there existed various cultural forms. Recently discovered artifacts presented in this article are unique artifacts of post-war Europe. Alexey Ilyich Lepeshkin who was a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Science and a specialist in the field of soviet public law was presented with two commemorative albums of the Higher Communist Schools of the GDR (1952). As of today, these albums are part of A. I. Lepeshkin’s personal fund, and are stored in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Science (f.No.2004). This article gives the first scientific account of these items. The complex study of commemorative albums is topical due to the lack of research in the very area of handwritten commemorative albums of that period. A comprehensive analysis of the historical and cultural context of the interaction among the socialist countries after the end of the Second World War exemplified by the relations between Russia and Germany in the example of two commemorative albums of German communist institutions of higher education gives researchers an opportunity to bring these manuscripts into a wider cultural and political context. The genre of hand-made folklore albums has a number of distinctive features in both their form and content. The article is devoted to a formal and meaningful description and analysis of these memorial artifacts both in terms of the texts contained in them, and in terms of visual anthropological analysis of photographs, drawings, and calligraphy features. Based on the presented material, we can draw conclusions about the preservation of folklore pragmatics and forms of existence by such albums, regardless of the change in the social structure in Russian and German culture.

The attempt to characterize the process of “building of friendship” within the socialist bloc on the example of relations between the USSR and the GDR is made in the article. The leadership of these countries sought to establish the most friendly relations, the basis for which was a memorial consensus based on the unconditional acceptance by the official German side of the Soviet view of the events of World War II. However, at the level of interpersonal contacts, the “negative tail” of the communicative memory of the events of 1941—1945 persisted (moving into the “zone of silence”), even despite the widespread introduction of institutions, practices and rituals of friendship into relations between citizens of the two countries, a vivid example of which was regularly mass festivals of friendship between the youth of the USSR and the GDR, held in the 1970s and 1980s. In general, the author of the article concludes that the project of constructing the Soviet-German friendship was not effective enough not only because of the hidden memorial contradictions, but also because of the lack of a promising picture of a common future. By the 1970s and 1980s, citizens of the two countries, especially young people, had not received a clear, realistic idea of the future joint development of their countries within the framework of the common project of socialist integration, which contributed to the growth of skepticism in this direction and, as a result, became one of the reasons for the collapse of the socialist bloc in the late 1980s.