Suchergebnisse

"West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space, in which it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor, East Germany, in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands—from economic deficiencies to border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility—was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book traces each of these issues across the caesura of 1989–1990, thereby integrating the "long" postwar era with the postunification decades. At the heart of this deeply-researched study stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror larger developments in the Federal Republic's history but actually helped shape them." (Verlagsinformation)

"When American and British troops swept through the German Reich in the spring of 1945, they confiscated a broad range of government papers and archives. These records were subsequently used in war crimes trials and published under Allied auspices to document the German road to war. In 1949, the West Germans asked for the documents' return, considering the request one of the benchmarks of their new state sovereignty. This book traces the tangled history of the captured German records and the extended negotiations for their return to German custody. Based on meticulous research in British, American, and German archives, The Struggle for the Files highlights an overlooked aspect of early West German diplomacy and international relations. All participants were aware that the files constituted historical material essential to write German history, and at stake was nothing less than the power to interpret the recent German past"--Provided by publisher

On a rainy day in November 2004, William Jefferson Clinton, convalescing from heart surgery, assembled two former presidents, the current incumbent, and several foreign statesmen and celebrities to inaugurate the twelfth presidential library, his library in Little Rock, Arkansas. It is yet another library that aspires to superlatives, certainly in regard to the quantity of its holdings, as an architectural statement, and soon, perhaps, in terms of the number of visitors.1 The opening of a new presidential library has become a showy event of major news value akin to presidential inaugurations and state funerals. It constitutes a display of power, prestige, and pride in the most visible of American political institutions but also another step in the former chief executive's battle to actively shape his presidential legacy. Yet the clamor surrounding new presidential libraries today (soon to be repeated with an edifice for George W. Bush in Texas)the fund-raising efforts, the refusal of some universities to host a library on their campus, or, conversely, the competition among communities to become presidential library sites in the hope of development fees and tourist dollars spurring economic growthhas little to do with the comparatively modest origins of the presidential library idea ...

Abstract
This article focuses on one of the most persistent regional aid programmes in West German history, the so-called "zonal borderland aid" (Zonenrandförderung). The programme supported regions along the 1,393-kilometer long inter-German border that divided West and East Germany during the Cold War. The article seeks to explain the increasingly fraught relationship between borderland aid and European state aid control in the 1970s and 1980s. The intervention of the Directorate for Competition (DG IV) against borderland aid begs an explanation since the Treaty of Rome (1957) had granted a specific exemption for aid to these regions from the competition policies of the Common Market. The article makes the general case that regional state aid is a key component of structural policy alongside sectoral aid. It argues that interest politics prevented a sober needs assessment of the West German border regions, turning Zonenrandförderung into funding by habit, not by need. This left the European Commission as the only institution that could mount a credible challenge to an ossified sense of entitlement in the affected regions.

Saskia Richter, the author of the first scholarly biography of the Green politician Petra Kelly, died in August 2015, age 37, after a four-year battle with cancer.

Vorspann
Wie regelt ein geteiltes Land gemeinsame Probleme, die sich aus naturräumlichen und geographischen Zusammenhängen ergeben? Dieser Frage geht Astrid M. Eckert am Beispiel des durch Abwässer der ostdeutschen Kaliindustrie besonders belasteten Grenzflusses Werra nach. Die Verbindung von politik-, wirtschafts- und umwelthistorischen Aspekten wirft ein Schlaglicht auf bislang weitgehend unbekannte Seiten der deutsch-deutschen Geschichte. Dabei kann die Autorin zeigen, dass insbesondere in den 1980er Jahren ein "anrüchiges" Geschäftsmodell immer mehr an Bedeutung gewann: Devisen aus dem Westen für Umweltschutz im Osten.

Deutsche EinleitungWie regelt ein geteiltes Land gemeinsame Probleme, die sich aus naturräumlichen und geographischen Zusammenhängen ergeben? Dieser Frage geht Astrid M. Eckert am Beispiel des durch Abwässer der ostdeutschen Kaliindustrie besonders belasteten Grenzflusses Werra nach. Die Verbindung von politik-, wirtschafts- und umwelthistorischen Aspekten wirft ein Schlaglicht auf bislang weitgehend unbekannte Seiten der deutsch-deutschen Geschichte. Dabei kann die Autorin zeigen, dass insbesondere in den 1980er Jahren ein "anrüchiges" Geschäftsmodell immer mehr an Bedeutung gewann: Devisen aus dem Westen für Umweltschutz im Osten.

"Wie regelt ein geteiltes Land gemeinsame Probleme, die sich aus naturräumlichen und geographischen Zusammenhängen ergeben? Dieser Frage geht Astrid M. Eckert am Beispiel des durch Abwässer der ostdeutschen Kaliindustrie besonders belasteten Grenzflusses Werra nach. Die Verbindung von politik-, wirtschafts- und umwelthistorischen Aspekten wirft ein Schlaglicht auf bislang weitgehend unbekannte Seiten der deutsch-deutschen Geschichte. Dabei kann die Autorin zeigen, dass insbesondere in den 1980er Jahren ein "anrüchiges" Geschäftsmodell immer mehr an Bedeutung gewann: Devisen aus dem Westen für Umweltschutz im Osten" (Autorenreferat)

This article investigates the little known phenomenon of tourism to the Iron Curtain, using the example of the inter-German border. The practice of traveling to the demarcation line to see where Germany and Europe were divided peaked during the mid-1960s but was already in full swing by the mid-1950s and lasted until the fall of the border in 1989. Based on archival documents, postcards and tourist guidebooks, the article analyses the growth of a tourist infrastructure on the western side of the inter-German border and situates this travel as a form of 'dark tourism'. It argues that seeing the border and visualising the partition of the country did little for overcoming it but rather tended to underwrite the political and territorial status quo. In the Cold War battle for public opinion, seeing the border allowed West Germans and their visitors from abroad to juxtapose freedom and prosperity with captivity and decay, thus advertising the superiority of the capitalist model over its socialist other. ; Der Aufsatz untersucht die bisher wenig beachtete Rolle der innerdeutschen Grenze als einer touristischen Sehenswürdigkeit. Grenztourismus begann Mitte der 1950er-Jahre, intensivierte sich durch den Bau der Berliner Mauer im August 1961 und setzte sich bis zum Fall der Mauer 1989 fort. Auf der Basis von schriftlichem Archivmaterial, aber auch von Postkarten und Reiseführern beschreibt der Artikel die Infrastruktur und die Erscheinungsformen dieser Art von Tourismus und ordnet sie dem "dark tourism" zu. Eine Grenzfahrt führte den Besuchern zwar drastisch die Teilung des Landes vor Augen, trug de facto aber nicht zur Überwindung derselben bei, sondern – so die These des Aufsatzes – eher zur weiteren Gewöhnung an die territorialen und politischen Realitäten der Nachkriegszeit. Im propagandistischen Wettstreit um das "bessere Deutschland" waren Reisen an die innerdeutsche Grenze für die Bundesbürger und ihre ausländischen Gäste zudem eine ideale Aktivität, um die Überlegenheit des kapitalistischen Systems und die Schwächen des sozialistischen Modells hervorzuheben.