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This volume is the first to address the culture of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a historical entity, but also to trace the afterlife of East Germany in the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. An international team of outstanding scholars offers essential and thought-provoking essays, combining a chronological and genre-based overview from the beginning of the GDR in 1949 to the unification in 1990 and beyond, with in-depth analysis of individual works. A final chapter traces the resonance of the GDR in the years since its demise and analyses the fascination it engenders. The volume provides a 'rereading' of East Germany and its legacy as a cultural phenomenon free from the prejudices that prevailed while it existed, offering English translations throughout, a guide to further reading and a chronology.
The first volume in English about the German Democratic Republic (GDR) as a cultural phenomenon, with essays by leading scholars providing a chronological and genre-based overview along with close readings of individual works. It addresses the history and context of GDR culture, including the two decades since its decline.
In Rereading German History, first published in 1997, Richard J. Evans draws together his seminal review essays on the political, economic, cultural and social history of Germany through war and reunification. This book provides a study of how and why historians – mainly German, American, British and French – have provided a series of differing and often conflicting readings of the German past. It also presents a reconsideration of German history in the light of the recent decline of the German Democratic Republic, collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany. Rereading German History re-examines major controversies in modern German history, such as the debate over Germany’s ‘special path’ to modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the discussions in the 1980s on the uniqueness or otherwise of Auschwitz. Evans also analyses the arguments over the nature of German national identity. The book offers trenchant and important analytical insights into the history of Germany in the last two centuries, and is ideal reading material for students of modern history and German studies.
For many artists and intellectuals in East Germany, daily life had an undeniably surreal aspect, from the numbing repetition of Communist Party jargon to the fear and paranoia engendered by the Stasi. Echoes of Surrealism surveys the ways in which a sense of the surreal infused literature and art across the lifespan of the GDR, focusing on individual authors, visual artists, directors, musicians, and other figures who have employed surrealist techniques in their work. It provides a new framework for understanding East German culture, exploring aesthetic practices that offered an alternative to rigid government policies and questioned and confronted the status quo.
Since the tumultuous events of 1989/1990, writers, cultural practitioners and academics have responded to, reconstructed and reflected upon the process and enduring impact of German reunification. This bilingual volume provides a nuanced understanding of the literature and culture of the GDR and its legacy today. It explores a broad range of genres, combines perspectives on both lesser-known and more established writers, and juxtaposes academic articles with the personal reflections of those who directly experienced and engaged with the GDR from within or beyond its borders. Whether creative practitioners or academics, contributors consider the broader literary and intellectual contexts and traditions shaping GDR literature and culture in a way that enriches our understanding of reunification and its legacy. Contributors are: Deirdre Byrnes, Anna Chiarloni, Jean E. Conacher, Sabine Egger, Robert Gillett, Frank Thomas Grub, Jochen Hennig, Nick Hodgin, Frank Hörnigk, Therese Hörnigk, Gisela Holfter, Jeannine Jud, Astrid Köhler, Marieke Krajenbrink, Hannes Krauss, Reinhard Kuhnert, Katja Lange-Müller, Corina Löwe, Hugh Ridley, Kathrin Schmidt.
Why were Hollywood producers eager to film on the other side of the Iron Curtain? How did Western computer games become popular in socialist Czechoslovakia's youth paramilitary clubs? What did Finnish commercial television hope to gain from broadcasting Soviet drama? Cold War media cultures are typically remembered in terms of an East-West binary, emphasizing conflict and propaganda. Remapping Cold War Media, however, offers a different perspective on the period, illuminating the extensive connections between media industries and cultures in Europe's Cold War East and their counterparts in the West and Global South. These connections were forged by pragmatic, technological, economic, political, and aesthetic forces; they had multiple, at times conflicting, functions and meanings. And they helped shape the ways in which media circulates today—from film festivals, to satellite networks, to coproductions. Considering film, literature, radio, photography, computer games, and television, Remapping Cold War Media offers a transnational history of postwar media that spans Eastern and Western Europe, the Nordic countries, Cuba, the United States, and beyond. Contributors draw on extensive archival research to reveal how media traveled across geopolitical boundaries; the processes of translation, interpretation, and reception on which these travels depended; and the significance of media form, content, industries, and infrastructures then and now.
The fall of the Berlin Wall is typically understood as the culmination of political-economic trends that fatally weakened the East German state. Meanwhile, comparatively little attention has been paid to the cultural dimension of these dramatic events, particularly the role played by Western mass media and consumer culture. With a focus on the 1970s and 1980s, Don’t Need No Thought Control explores the dynamic interplay of popular unrest, intensifying economic crises, and cultural policies under Erich Honecker. It shows how the widespread influence of (and public demands for) Western cultural products forced GDR leaders into a series of grudging accommodations that undermined state power to a hitherto underappreciated extent.
Since the 1990s, the short story has re-emerged in the German-speaking world as a vibrant literary genre, serving as a medium for both literary experimentation and popular forms. Authors like Judith Hermann and Peter Stamm have had a significant impact on German-language literary culture and, in translation, on literary culture in the UK and USA. This volume analyzes German-language short-story writing in the twenty-first century, aiming to establish a framework for further research into individual authors as well as key themes and formal concerns. An introduction discusses theories of the short-story form and literary-aesthetic questions. A combination of thematic and author-focused chapters then discuss key developments in the contemporary German-language context, examining performance and performativity, Berlin and crime stories, and the openendness, fragmentation, liminality, and formal experimentations that characterize short stories in the twenty-first century. Together the chapters present the rich field of short-story writing in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, offering a variety of theoretical approaches to individual stories and collections, as well as exploring connections with storytelling, modernist short prose, and the novella. The volume concludes with a survey of broad trends, and three original translations exemplifying the breadth of contemporary German-language short-story writing.
Secret police agencies such as the East German Ministry for State Security kept enormous quantities of secrets about their own citizens, relying heavily on human modes of data collection in the form of informants. To date little is known about the complicated and conflicted lives of informers, who often lived in a perpetual state of secrecy. This is the first study of its kind to explore this secret surveillance society, its arcane rituals, and the secret lives it fostered. Through a series of interlocking, in-depth case studies of informers in literature and the arts, A State of Secrecy seeks answers to the question of how the collusion of the East German intelligentsia with the Stasi was possible and sustainable. It draws on extensive original archive research conducted in the BStU (Stasi Records Agency), as well as eyewitness testimony, literature, and film, and uses a broad array of methods from biography, sociology, cultural studies, and literary history to political science and surveillance and intelligence studies. In teasing out the various kinds of entanglements of intellectuals with power during the Cold War, Lewis presents a microhistory of the covert activities of those writers who colluded with the secret police.
Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World is the first volume dedicated to exploring the interface of medicine, the human and the humane in the German-speaking lands. The volume tracks the designation and making through medicine of the human and inhuman, and the humane and inhumane, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Eight individual chapters undertake explorations into ways in which theories and practices of medicine in the German-speaking world have come to define the human, and highlight how such theories and practices have consolidated, or undermined, notions of humane behaviour. Cultural analysis is central to this investigation, foregrounding the reflection, refraction and indeed creation of these theories and practices in literature, life-writing and other discourses and media. Contributors bring to bear perspectives from literary studies, film studies, critical theory, cultural studies, history, and the history of medicine and psychiatry. Thus, this collection is historical in the most expansive sense, for it debates not only what historical accounts bring to our understanding of this topic. It encompasses too investigation of life-writing, documentary, and theory and literary works to bring to light elusive, paradoxical, underexplored – yet vital – issues in history and culture.