Building Socialism

Download Building Socialism PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478012609
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Building Socialism by : Christina Schwenkel

Download or read book Building Socialism written by Christina Schwenkel and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-21 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

On Questions of Socialist Construction in the GDR.

Download On Questions of Socialist Construction in the GDR. PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 722 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis On Questions of Socialist Construction in the GDR. by : Walter Ulbricht

Download or read book On Questions of Socialist Construction in the GDR. written by Walter Ulbricht and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 722 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Becoming East German

Download Becoming East German PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 0857459759
Total Pages : 314 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (574 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Becoming East German by : Mary Fulbrook

Download or read book Becoming East German written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain – while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.

The Plans That Failed

Download The Plans That Failed PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Berghahn Books
ISBN 13 : 178238314X
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (823 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Plans That Failed by : André Steiner

Download or read book The Plans That Failed written by André Steiner and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-08-01 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The establishment of the Communist social model in one part of Germany was a result of international postwar developments, of the Cold War waged by East and West, and of the resultant partition of Germany. As the author argues, the GDR's 'new' society was deliberately conceived as a counter-model to the liberal and marketregulated system. Although the hopes connected with this alternative system turned out to be misplaced and the planned economy may be thoroughly discredited today, it is important to understand the context in which it developed and failed. This study, a bestseller in its German version, offers an in-depth exploration of the GDR economy's starting conditions and the obstacles to growth it confronted during the consolidation phase. These factors, however, were not decisive in the GDR's lack of growth compared to that of the Federal Republic. As this study convincingly shows, it was the economic model that led to failure.

Uprising in East Germany 1953

Download Uprising in East Germany 1953 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Central European University Press
ISBN 13 : 9789639241572
Total Pages : 496 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (415 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Uprising in East Germany 1953 by : Christian F. Ostermann

Download or read book Uprising in East Germany 1953 written by Christian F. Ostermann and published by Central European University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A detailed introductory essay to provide the necessary historical and political context precedes each part. The individual documents are introduced by short headnotes summarizing the contents and orienting the reader. A chronology, glossary and bibliography offer further background information."--BOOK JACKET.

Amnesiopolis

Download Amnesiopolis PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0198732260
Total Pages : 209 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (987 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Amnesiopolis by : Eli Rubin

Download or read book Amnesiopolis written by Eli Rubin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 focuses particularly 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. Eli Rubin employs methodologies from critical geography, urban history, architectural history, environmental history, and everyday life history to ask whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. Amnesiopolis asks: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no -- as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried -- literally -- in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a panopticon-like effect, giving the Stasi the possibility of more complete surveillance than they previously had.

The Official Concept of the Nation in the Former GDR

Download The Official Concept of the Nation in the Former GDR PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 0429806000
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (298 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Official Concept of the Nation in the Former GDR by : Joanna McKay

Download or read book The Official Concept of the Nation in the Former GDR written by Joanna McKay and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-04 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1998, this volume joined the effort to understand the former German Democratic Republic, with the aim of reaching a better understanding of the psychologically painful process of German reunification following the collapse of East-German communism in 1989. While born illegitimate and artificial, the country determined the lives of millions of people, despite having now disappeared from the map. This study from Joanna McKay incorporates previously unavailable archive material and focuses on some of the most challenging, ever-present tasks for the GDR leaders. In particular, she examines how they approached explaining the division with West Germany without undermining the legitimacy of the GDR.

The Alternative in Eastern Europe

Download The Alternative in Eastern Europe PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1789606810
Total Pages : 566 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (896 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Alternative in Eastern Europe by : Rudolf Bahro

Download or read book The Alternative in Eastern Europe written by Rudolf Bahro and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contemporary Marxist writer provides analyses of socialist theory, modern political struggle, and socialist societies in Eastern Europe.

The Campaign State

Download The Campaign State PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1609092295
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (9 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Campaign State by : Gregory Witkowski

Download or read book The Campaign State written by Gregory Witkowski and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2017-12-15 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communist regimes are defined by dictatorial power, state planning, and active propaganda machines. In The Campaign State, Gregory Witkowski explores the intersection of these three elements in East Germany by focusing on mass mobilizations. He dissects the anatomy of campaigns and argues that while mass mobilizations are often perceived as symbols of strength, they also indicate underlying systemic weaknesses. By focusing on the ability of regimes to mobilize individuals to transform society, he explains both the durability and the ultimate demise of the German Democratic Republic. This study seamlessly blends an analysis of top-down campaign initiatives with the influence of such mobilizations on the grassroots level. For more than thirty years, East German leaders doggedly extended such mobilization efforts, yet complete success remained elusive. Witkowski reveals how local leaders, campaign participants, and peasants acted in ways both compliant and noncompliant with party goals to create societal change. Campaigns became a ubiquitous part of life under communist rule. Witkowski shows that such mobilizations were initially an integral part of state-planning efforts and only later became ritualized, as party portrayals of goals and accomplishments diverged from East Germans' lived experience. He argues that incessant campaigns exposed a substantial gap between rhetoric and reality in the German Democratic Republic that undermined the regime's legitimacy. This valuable and original study will appeal to scholars and students of German history, Communism, and state planning.

A Socialist Defector

Download A Socialist Defector PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Monthly Review Press
ISBN 13 : 1583677380
Total Pages : 352 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (836 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Socialist Defector by : Victor Grossman

Download or read book A Socialist Defector written by Victor Grossman and published by Monthly Review Press. This book was released on 2019-02-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The circumstances that impelled Victor Grossman, a U.S. Army draftee stationed in Europe, to flee a military prison sentence were the icy pressures of the McCarthy Era. Grossman – a.k.a. Steve Wechsler, a committed leftist since his years at Harvard and, briefly, as a factory worker – left his barracks in Bavaria one August day in 1952, and, in a panic, swam across the Danube River from the Austrian U.S. Zone to the Soviet Zone. Fate – i.e., the Soviets – landed him in East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic. There he remained, observer and participant, husband and father, as he watched the rise and successes, the travails, and the eventual demise of the GDR socialist experiment. A Socialist Defector is the story, told in rare, personal detail, of an activist and writer who grew up in the U.S. free-market economy; spent thirty-eight years in the GDR’s nationally owned, centrally administered economy; and continues to survive, given whatever the market can bear in today’s united Germany. Having been a freelance journalist and traveling lecturer – and the only person in the world to hold diplomas from both Harvard and the Karl Marx University – Grossman is able to offer insightful, often ironic, reflections and reminiscences, comparing the good and bad sides of life in all three of the societies he has known. His account focuses especially on the socialism he saw and lived – the GDR’s goals and achievements, its repressive measures and stupidities – which, he argues, offers lessons now in our search for solutions to the grave problems facing our world. This is a fascinating and unique historical narrative; political analysis told with jokes, personal anecdotes, and without bombast.

Dissolution

Download Dissolution PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 0691007462
Total Pages : 460 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (91 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Dissolution by : Charles S. Maier

Download or read book Dissolution written by Charles S. Maier and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1999-03-21 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Against the backdrop of the sudden and unexpected fall of communism, Harvard history teacher Charles Maier traces the demise of East Germany". . . . an historian whose writing talks both to political scientists and to lay readers . . . combines probing historical examination with disciplined and informed political analysis".Richard H. Ullman, Princeton Universtiy.

World Communism, 1964-1969, a Selected Bibliography

Download World Communism, 1964-1969, a Selected Bibliography PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis World Communism, 1964-1969, a Selected Bibliography by : United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary

Download or read book World Communism, 1964-1969, a Selected Bibliography written by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary and published by . This book was released on 1971 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Iron Curtain

Download Iron Curtain PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0385536437
Total Pages : 803 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (855 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Iron Curtain by : Anne Applebaum

Download or read book Iron Curtain written by Anne Applebaum and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2012-10-30 with total page 803 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the long-awaited follow-up to her Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag, acclaimed journalist Anne Applebaum delivers a groundbreaking history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union to its surprise and delight found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In Iron Curtain, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Applebaum describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in devastating detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics Applebaum captures in the electrifying pages of Iron Curtain.

For the Soul of Mankind

Download For the Soul of Mankind PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 142996409X
Total Pages : 1030 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis For the Soul of Mankind by : Melvyn P. Leffler

Download or read book For the Soul of Mankind written by Melvyn P. Leffler and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 1030 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To the amazement of the public, pundits, and even the policymakers themselves, the ideological and political conflict that had endangered the world for half a century came to an end in 1990. How did that happen? What caused the cold war in the first place, and why did it last as long as it did? The distinguished historian Melvyn P. Leffler homes in on four crucial episodes when American and Soviet leaders considered modulating, avoiding, or ending hostilities and asks why they failed: Stalin and Truman devising new policies after 1945; Malenkov and Eisenhower exploring the chance for peace after Stalin's death in 1953; Kennedy, Khrushchev, and LBJ trying to reduce tensions after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and Brezhnev and Carter aiming to sustain détente after the Helsinki Conference of 1975. All these leaders glimpsed possibilities for peace, yet they allowed ideologies, political pressures, the expectations of allies and clients, the dynamics of the international system, and their own fearful memories to trap them in a cycle of hostility that seemed to have no end. For the Soul of Mankind illuminates how Reagan, Bush, and, above all, Gorbachev finally extricated themselves from the policies and mind-sets that had imprisoned their predecessors, and were able to reconfigure Soviet-American relations after decades of confrontation.

Constructing Socialism at the Grass-Roots

Download Constructing Socialism at the Grass-Roots PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 13 : 9780333789803
Total Pages : 262 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (898 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Constructing Socialism at the Grass-Roots by : C. Ross

Download or read book Constructing Socialism at the Grass-Roots written by C. Ross and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2000-03-23 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the two decades following the defeat of the Third Reich, East Germany was transformed from a war-ravaged occupation zone into an apparent model of Soviet style socialism. Based on extensive archival research, this book explores the building of socialism in East Germany not from the standard perspective of the party and state authorities. It also examines the effect this had at the grassroots level, where patterns of popular opinion, social and cultural continuities from the pre-communist past and the divided loyalties of local functionaries played a crucial role in shaping the face of real existing socialism.

Paper Revolutions

Download Paper Revolutions PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262046563
Total Pages : 397 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (62 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Paper Revolutions by : Sarah E. James

Download or read book Paper Revolutions written by Sarah E. James and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The experimental practices of a group of artists in the former East Germany upends assumptions underpinning Western art’s postwar histories. In Paper Revolutions, Sarah James offers a radical rethinking of experimental art in the former East Germany (the GDR). Countering conventional accounts that claim artistic practices in the GDR were isolated and conservative, James introduces a new narrative of neo-avantgarde practice in the Eastern Bloc that subverts many of the assumptions underpinning Western art’s postwar histories. She grounds her argument in the practice of four artists who, uniquely positioned outside academies, museums, and the art market, as these functioned in the West, created art in the blind spots of state censorship. They championed ephemeral practices often marginalized by art history: postcards and letters, maquettes and models, portfolios and artists’ books. Through their “lived modernism,” they produced bodies of work animated by the radical legacies of the interwar avant-garde. James examines the work and daily practices of the constructivist graphic artist, painter, and sculptor Hermann Glöckner; the experimental graphic artist and concrete and sound poet Carlfriedrich Claus; the mail artist, concrete poet, and conceptual artist Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt; and the mail artist, “visual poet,” and installation artist Karla Sachse. She shows that all of these artists rejected the idea of art as a commodity or a rarefied object, and instead believed in the potential of art to create collectivized experiences and change the world. James argues that these artists, entirely neglected by Western art history, produced some of the most significant experimental art to emerge from Germany during the Cold War.

The Human Rights Dictatorship

Download The Human Rights Dictatorship PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1108564267
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (85 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Human Rights Dictatorship by : Ned Richardson-Little

Download or read book The Human Rights Dictatorship written by Ned Richardson-Little and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-23 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.