Suchergebnisse

This essay attempts to undertake a comparative study of the Shakespearean appropriations in late 19th century India under colonial rule on one hand, and in mid-20th century (East) Germany on the other. While 19th century Indian responses to Shakespeare carried a covert nationalist agenda against the British rulers who had made him complicit in the colonial project, the mid-20th century German adaptations found in him, a potent site for voicing their opposition against the governments, which had imposed censorship regulations upon newspapers, books and television. Within this framework and making use of the textual, performative and audience sensibility components, the paper would endeavor to: a) explore the nuances in the performance strategies of selected playwrights from both the countries, and understand the extent of divergences and departures from the English text; and b) scrutinise the location of these performances respectively within the overlapping currents of colonial modernity, nationality and regional identity in the 19th and 20th century India, and the post-war communist regimes operating in (East) Germany.

A People's Music presents the first full history of jazz in East Germany, drawing on new and previously unexamined sources and vivid eyewitness accounts. Helma Kaldewey chronicles the experiences of jazz musicians, fans, and advocates, and charts the numerous policies state socialism issued to manage this dynamic art form. Offering a radical revision of scholarly views of jazz as a musical genre of dissent, this vivid and authoritative study marks developments in the production, performance, and reception of jazz decade by decade, from the GDR's beginning in the 1940s to its end in 1990, examining how members of the jazz scene were engaged with (and were sometimes complicit with) state officials and agencies throughout the Cold War. From postwar rebuilding, to Stalinism and partition, to détente, Ostpolitik, and glasnost, and finally to its acceptance as a national art form, Kaldewey reveals just how many lives jazz has lived.

"This paper provides a brief overview of elite change and continuity in East Germany as a post-socialist society. To do so, at first, some peculiarities of the former cadre system and elites in socialist East Germany, i.e. the late German Democratic Republic, are addressed with regard to social structure development and the arrangement of generations. Selected empirical evidence is based on cross-sectoral, longitudinal and cohort analyses and the inspection of prosopographic elite data compiled until the end of the 1980s which deconstruct the myth of a levelled egalitarian socialist society. In the second part of the paper, elite change and continuity after the political change of 1989/90 is discussed in the context of the transformation of institutions. Inspired by Bourdieu's analytic paradigm, one central thesis on the career survivals, take-offs, and breakdowns of East German elites is the continued validity and efficacy of social and cultural capital obtained before the fall of the wall, most of all formal qualification. Dimension of vertical social inequality under socialist rule, such as gender and class background, remain to be decisive until today." (author's abstract)

The following interview is with a retired eastern German professor whose career constitutes a case history in the comparative politics of "academic unfreedom". Professor Erhard Naake was the only Ph.D. student in the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to write his dissertation on Friedrich Nietzsche, whose work was considered "anti-socialist" throughout the history of the GDR regime. Because Herr Naake had the temerity to select Nietzsche as his thesis topic - a philosopher whose work was banned from GDR bookstores and never taught in GDR schools or even universities - he never received an appointment as a professor in a GDR university. Ironically, however, even after the collapse of the GDR in 1989-1990, Herr Naake was penalized by the new powers-that-be in reunited Germany. He once again suffered a violation of his academic freedom when the university evaluation boards, which were composed of western German scholars, refused to let him keep his recently acquired position as a professor and instead summarily fired him, thus leading to his enforced retirement. As we shall see, the dramatic life story of Herr Naake reflects not only complicated issues of academic freedom and communist versus capitalist political values, but also the rich and complex history of eastern Germany both under the Nazis and GDR Communists and within reunited Germany since 1990. Adapted from the source document.

In postwar East Germany, dealing with the history of Prussia was problematic. While 'Prussianism' or the 'Spirit of Prussia' was widely perceived as a central cause of Nazism, it also could not be ignored when developing 'progressive' narratives of German history. This article investigates the political, intellectual and symbolic construction of a 'Prussia-myth' in the early postwar years. In particular, it investigates how the 'Prussia-myth' was adapted to changing political conditions, the theoretical contradictions this engendered, and the manner in which historians and cultural figures dealt with these problems when educating the East German population at large.

This article examines the challenge of Chinese communism in East Germany in the 1960s. It shows how the Sino–Soviet Split and the Chinese Cultural Revolution endangered the public transcripts of East German state socialism by undermining its organizing metaphors and principles. Chinese cadres used their East Berlin embassy as a stage, showcase and megaphone for their dissenting vision of communism throughout the decade, winning some support from elderly communists, young anti-authoritarians and students from the Global South. Studying the East German campaign against what was known as 'Mao Zedong Thought' sheds light on the transnational traffic of actors and ideas within the Second World in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. The official and vernacular response to the Maoist challenge suggests that East German ideology was constituted by a double demarcation in the 1960s, against Western social democracy and capitalism to its right and Chinese communism to its left.

The Cold War over Germany was central to the history of the Cold War—its beginnings, its prolongation, and its end. One of the central elements in America's success in fighting the Cold War was its approach towards Germany: the creation of an economically prosperous, politically stable democracy in Western Germany that was closely integrated with the West. To the Americans involved, the success of this project was far less certain as it may seem in hindsight: West Germany's economic prosperity and political stability had humble beginnings. The Soviet threat exerted pressure that aggravated and distorted the problems of developing a viable democracy. Most importantly, the division of the country and of the former capital Berlin meant that the forces of German nationalism, while temporarily tamed, created an undercurrent of unease and unrest, a latent threat to the very foundations of the Federal Republic and the European settlement that the USSR could exploit. As a result, the United States developed a major psychological and economic warfare program to contain Soviet influence in Germany and combat Communist forces in the German Democratic Republic.

AbstractPower in the workplace is almost always conceptualized in terms of the line-management hierarchy. Managers are said to sit at the "top" of the pyramid, whilst shop-floor workers are located at the "bottom." The language that we use to describe the social organization of the workplace is saturated with words that assign people to ranks within hierarchies. Scholarly analysis of the sociology of the workplace takes the pyramidality of power as a given. This article, by contrast, argues that it is more useful to see power in the workplace as a dynamic but horizontal matrix within which the distribution of power is continually in flux. If we are to understand the workplace experiences of any specific social group, it is necessary to reconstruct the position of that group relative to the overall system of power relations within the matrix, and not just to individual kinds of power relationship. To demonstrate the point, this article explores the case study of female workers in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany. Between 1945 and 1948, the experiences of women on the shop floor in East Germany were shaped by wider trends in the distribution of power. These included the transfer of power from German nationals to Soviet occupiers, the devolution of power from the center to the periphery and from the manager's office to workers on the shop floor, and the shift of relative power from wage earners to black marketeers. To make sense of the contradictory experiences of female workers, we must situate them in the context of wider shifts in, and conflicts over, the distribution of power within a matrix.

Abstract

A common ideology of consumption is that more things translate to a higher quality of life. This paper challenges this ideology. We explore the consumption resistance (anti‐consumption) of "cheap and low‐quality" goods experienced by consumers living in former East Germany. We interviewed men and women who lived in East Germany about their consumption experiences before, during, and after Reunification. We present three emergent themes: "consumer resistance – emergence of anti‐consumption," "continued frugality – resistance to contemporary throwawayism?," and "Western Brand Resistance."


Our research reveals a deep aversion among East Germans to the modern, bureaucratic and obligatory practice of throwawayism and hyperconsumption. We find feelings of resentment and betrayal and discover a much deeper issue with consumption: the fact that consumption is often a disillusioning experience and that material possessions and abundance are actually driving East Germans apart – making them feel less socially connected. As East Germans are swept up in the global economic juggernaut of capitalism, they find that their collective identity and sense of community is also swallowed up. Upon this realization, dialogism appears, and we uncover this as resistance to Western practices of hyperconsumption, frugality‐as‐an‐ethic and an aversion to low quality throwaway‐type products. Based on our findings, we make suggestions for marketing practice and for future research.

Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Offering a comparative analysis of feminist social movements in the aftermath of the collapse of state socialism, this book offers a unique opportunity to examine how shifting gender relations interact with local identities to create new understandings of gender, the state, and strategies for resistance

How is the protest behavior of citizens in new democracies influenced by their experience of the past? Certain theories of political socialization hold that cohorts reaching political maturity under dictatorship are subject to apathy. Yet, it remains unclear whether mobilization during the transition can counterbalance this effect. This article examines the protest behavior of citizens socialized in Eastern Germany, a region marked by two legacies: a legacy of autocracy and, following the 1989-90 revolution, a legacy of transitional mobilization. Using age-period-cohort models with data from the European Social Survey, the analysis assesses the evolution of gaps in protest across generations and time between East and West Germans. The results demonstrate that participation in demonstrations, petitions, and boycotts is lower for East Germans socialized under communism in comparison with West Germans from the same cohorts. This participation deficit remains stable over time and even increases for certain protest activities.