Suchergebnisse

Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It also focuses especially on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place, one defined by pure functionality and rationality; a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism

Through an examination of the individual life trajectories of youth who participated in an educational exchange project between Mozambique and East Germany, this book offers an alternative reading of Mozambique's socialist past and makes a significant contribution to studies of post-socialist transitions.

In 1990, a country disappeared. When the Iron Curtain fell, East Germany simply ceased to be. For over forty years, from the ruin of the Second World War to the cusp of a new millennium, the GDR presented a radically different German identity to anything that had come before, and anything that exists today. Socialist solidarity, secret police, central planning, barbed wire: this was a Germany forged on the fault lines of ideology and geopolitics.In Beyond the Wall, acclaimed historian Katja Hoyer offers a kaleidoscopic new vision of this vanished country. Beginning with the bitter experience of German Marxists exiled by Hitler, she traces the arc of the state they would go on to create, first under the watchful eye of Stalin, and then in an increasingly distinctive German fashion. From the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, to the relative prosperity of the 1970s, and on to the creaking foundations of socialism in the mid-1980s, Hoyer argues that amid oppression and frequent hardship, East Germany was yet home to a rich political, social and cultural landscape, a place far more dynamic than the Cold War caricature often painted in the West.Powerfully told, and drawing on a vast array of never-before-seen interviews, letters and records, this is the definitive history of the other Germany, the one beyond the Wall

General Conditions -- The GDR in Its International Context -- Symptoms of Crisis -- Nuances : Regional Variations and Subcultures -- Countermovements : The Pull of the West and the Churches -- Opposition in the SED State -- Germination Time : The Ossietzky Affair -- The Social Crisis Deepens -- Regime Collapse and Historic Days -- From Demonstrations to the Fall of the Wall -- The Fallout -- Forging a New Path : Elections and Reunification -- The Revolution : Or Otto Schily as a Symbol -- From the Revolution in the GDR in 1989 to Eastern Germany in the Twenty-First Century.

Main description: This year marks the 20th anniversary of German reunification. The events of autumn 1989 revealed that the GDR was not just politically but also economically bankrupt. Given the large-scale emigration to the West after the fall of the Wall, the D-Mark was introduced quickly, despite widespread rejection of this measure by the leading economist of the time. Rapid wage increases intensified the pressure on businesses, and the adjustment shock made it necessary to rebuild the foundations of the economy at a rapid pace and an extremely high cost. With the creation of the economic and currency union, a dynamic process of growth and development was launched in many areas of society.Twenty years later, the questions arise: Where do we stand today, what implications can be derived for the future, and what remains to be done in the policy realm? This AEQ Supplement addresses the following issues:- Structural convergence and regional development: Should policy makers really attempt to counteract convergence? How far is East Germany currently lagging behind? What strategic decisions do policy makers need to make?- Old-age poverty: Is there an increasing risk of old-age poverty in East Germany? What are the results of societal aging in East Germany?- Returns to education for full-time employees: The East has caught up- Dramatic demographic changes in Thuringia: Will Thuringia face a shortage of skilled labor up to 2015?

Everyday worlds of work and class -- Workers in the gallery : the single-class character of revolutionary politics -- The socialist labor process -- Workplace politics -- The class relationship revisited -- Workers on stage : activists in the revolution -- A second look at the labor process and workplace politics -- Workers in the wings : passive participants in revolutionary politics

The transformation of east Germany since unification has wrought vast changes in the economy and in society and left deep scars as the types of social protection offered by the centralised socialism of the previous regime gave way to uncertainties and individualised life chances. Social Transformation in Eastern Germany investigates the deep economic and social processes which east Germany has undergone, highlighting the restructuring, the social impacts and the stresses of adjustment experienced by key social groups whose workplace and social context has been recast almost out of recognition