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"In the aftermath of the reunification of Germany one former dissident recalled nostalgically that under the East German regime 'we had more sex and we had more to laugh about'. Love in the Time of Communism is a fascinating history of the GDR's forgotten sexual revolution and its limits. Josie McLellan shows that under communism divorce rates soared, abortion become commonplace and the rate of births outside marriage was amongst the highest in Europe. Nudism went from ban to state-sponsored boom, and erotica became common currency in both the official economy and the black market. Public discussion of sexuality was, however, tightly controlled and there were few opportunities to challenge traditional gender roles or sexual norms. Josie McLellan's pioneering account questions some of our basic assumptions about the relationship between sexuality, politics and society and is a major contribution to our understanding of the everyday emotional lives of postwar Europeans"--

AntiFascism and Memory in East Germany sheds new light on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, the way in which societies remember, and the nature of state socialism. It combines cultural, social, and political history to examine the ways in which the legacy of the International Brigades was commemorated in the German Democratic Republic. - ;AntiFascism and Memory in East Germany is a book about remembering and about forgetting, about war, and about the peace which eventually followed.

How did British feminist art of the 1970s represent work and class, and what light does this shed on the women's movement more generally? This article discusses the work of artists, including Bobby Baker, the Feministo and Fenix collectives, the Hackney Flashers, and Mary Kelly. These artists were eager to connect feminist activism to other struggles on the Left and were thus initially drawn to document working-class women's paid work. Their political commitment to represent 'ordinary' working lives often led to lengthy periods of research, as well as attempts to make both the creative process and the finished product accessible to new participants and audiences. However, across this period, two changes took place. First, artists began to focus on women's unpaid work, drawing attention to the tension between domestic work and paid employment, and the lack of easy solutions to this problem. Secondly, most lost faith in art's power to represent the experience of work beyond the individual and the personal. Early political idealism gave way to sustained soul-searching about the intellectual, moral, and aesthetic difficulties of representing the experience of others, particularly those of a different class background. This article, then, shows that the early British women's movement was keen to engage with working-class experience and that it did so in a way that was self-reflective. In the end, it was this self-reflection, and the questions that it generated about the morality, politics, and aesthetics of representing others, that led to the personal and psychological turn of the later 1970s.

This article uses the concept of 'scale' to analyse the relative importance of local, national and global places, events, and explanatory frameworks in everyday lives in late communism. It uses a case study of lesbians and gay men living in East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and asks how these groups negotiated the restrictions of life under state socialism. It argues that both individuals and groups used scale in two ways: as an imaginative tool for making sense of the world, and as a political strategy for dealing with the state. In both cases, 'scaling', or choosing the scale at which one located oneself and one's actions, was a means of disrupting and even contesting the rigid hierarchies of state socialist rule.

AbstractThis article describes how a particular kind of queer figure moved from private photography into the mainstream of East German visual culture. It begins with a set of private photographs from the late 1960s from the collection of Heino Hilger, a regular, with his friends, at the East Berlin bar Burgfrieden. The photographs show how dressing in drag and the act of photography were important ways of constituting a gay male subculture. After the decriminalization of sex between men in 1968, the gay scene became bolder and more political in East Germany. The subversion of gender norms was central to the activism of groups such as the Homosexual Interest Group Berlin (HIB) and Gays in the Church. The visibility of the queer figure culminated in the late 1980s, when parts of the film Coming Out were filmed in Burgfrieden and when the popular monthly Das Magazin published a three-part feature on male homosexuality. What all these cultural artifacts and events had in common was not just a critique of the heterosexual norm, but also a queering of the boundaries between masculinity and femininity.

Around 2800 Germans joined the International Brigades and fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Many had suffered political persecution in Germany, and the majority were already in exile when war broke out in Spain. This article asks what role ideology played in their decision to volunteer, and traces their changing motivation as they arrived in Spain, experienced combat for the first time, and eventually waited for the war to play itself out. Even amongst such politically committed soldiers, motivation was neither homogeneous nor stable. The wish to defeat fascism and return to Germany was one shared by almost all volunteers, but boredom, desire for adventure and ties to their fellow soldiers all played an important part in motivating men to fight and keeping them in the field.

Acknowledgments -- Introduction: to drop or not to drop? / Juliane Fürst -- Dropping out in spirit -- The biography of a scandal : experimenting with yoga during Romanian late socialism / Irina Costache -- The imaginary elsewhere of the hippies in soviet Estonia / Terje Toomistu -- Art and "madness" : weapons of the marginal during socialism in Eastern Europe / Maria-Alina Asavei -- Student activists and Yugoslavia's Islamic revival : Sarajevo, 1970-1975 / Madigan Andrea Fichter -- Intellectual dropping out -- Reader questionnaires in Samizdat journals : who owns Aleksandr Blok? / Josephine von Zitzewitz -- The spirit of pacifism : social and cultural origins of the grassroots peace movement in the late soviet period / Irina Gordeeva -- Dropping out of socialism with the commodore 64 : Polish youth, home computers, and social identities / Patryk Wasiak -- Dropping out in style -- "We all live in a yellow submarine" : dropping out in a Leningrad commune / Juliane Fürst -- Ignoring dictatorship? : punk rock, subculture, and entanglement in the GDR / Jeff Hayton -- "Under any form of government, I am partisan" : the Siberian underground from anti-soviet to national-bolshevist provocation / Ewgeniy Kasakow -- Dropping out economics -- Living in the material world : money in the soviet rock underground / Anna Kan -- Socialism's empty promise : housing vacancy and squatting in the German Democratic Republic / Peter Angus Mitchell -- Conclusion: dropping out of socialism? : a Western perspective / Joachim Häberlen -- Bibliography -- About the contributors

This article introduces an experiment in collaborative historical practice. It describes how six historians visited the East Devon village of Branscombe, with the aim of creatively engaging with the present and past of the village. This was a collaborative and collective act of what we term here 'creative dislocation'. By dislocating from our usual routines, subjects, places, methods, and styles, and adopting creative methods and constraints, we aimed to shed light on the role of creativity in the historical research process. Our experiment resulted in six pieces of writing – three of which are presented here. However, a key argument of this article is that creativity lies in process as much as in the finished product. Creative work happened at each stage of the research process, in ways that were not always immediately visible in the final written pieces. The creativity in historical research and writing does not necessarily lie in opposition to archival explorations and fact-driven narratives, but can also lie within them. Creativity informs the questions we ask, our ways of working with the archive and our approach to writing.