Located in the geographical center of Berlin, the neighboring
boroughs of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg shared a history and
identity until their fortunes diverged dramatically following the
...construction of the Berlin Wall, which placed them within opposing
political systems. This revealing account of the two municipal
districts before, during and after the Cold War takes a
microhistorical approach to investigate the broader historical
trajectories of East and West Berlin, with particular attention to
housing, religion, and leisure. Merged in 2001, they now comprise a
single neighborhood that bears the traces of these complex
histories and serves as an illuminating case study of urban
renewal, gentrification, and other social processes that continue
to reshape Berlin.
Gaining Freedoms reveals a new locus for global political change: everyday urban contestation. Cities are often assumed hotbeds of socio-economic division, but this assessment overlooks the ...importance of urban space and the everyday activities of urban life for empowerment, emancipation, and democratization. Through proximity, neighborhoods, streets, and squares can create unconventional power contestations over lifestyle and consumption. And through struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, competing claims across groups can become platforms to defend freedom and rights from government encroachments.Drawing on more than seven years of fieldwork in three contested urban sites—a downtown neighborhood and a university campus in Istanbul, and a Turkish neighborhood in Berlin—Berna Turam shows how democratic contestation echoes through urban space. Countering common assumptions that Turkey is strongly polarized between Islamists and secularists, she illustrates how contested urban space encourages creative politics, the kind of politics that advance rights, expression, and representation shared between pious and secular groups. Exceptional moments of protest, like the recent Gezi protests which bookend this study, offer clear external signs of upheaval and disruption, but it is the everyday contestation and interaction that forge alliances and inspire change. Ultimately, Turam argues that the process of democratization is not the reduction of conflict, but rather the capacity to form new alliances out of conflict.
Founded as a counterweight to the Communist broadcasters in East Germany, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) became one of the most successful public information operations conducted against the ...Soviet Bloc. Cold War on the Airwaves examines the Berlin-based organization's history and influence on the political worldview of the people--and government--on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Nicholas Schlosser draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, Schlosser examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. He also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners. From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, Cold War on the Airwaves offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East-West tension.
Disciplining the Holocaust examines critics' efforts to defend a rigorous and morally appropriate image of the Holocaust. Rather than limiting herself to polemics about the "proper" approach to ...traumatic history, Karyn Ball explores recent trends in intellectual history that govern a contemporary ethics of scholarship about the Holocaust. She examines the scholarly reception of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, the debates culminating in Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, Lyotard's response to negations of testimony about the gas chambers, psychoanalytically informed frameworks for the critical study of traumatic history, and a conference on feminist approaches to the Holocaust and genocide. Ball's book bridges the gap between psychoanalysis and Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power in order to highlight the social implications of traumatic history.
The Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 to end all traffic between the city's two halves: the democratic west and the communist east. The iconic symbol of a divided Europe, the Wall became a focus of ...western political pressure on East Germany; as Ronald Reagan's famously said in a 1987 speech in Berlin, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" But as award-winning historian Mary Sarotte shows in Title TK , the opening of the Wall on November 9, 1989 was not, as is commonly believed, the East German government's deliberate concession to outside influence. It was an accident. A carelessly worded memo written by mid-level bureaucrats, a bumbling press conference given by an inept member of the East German Politburo, the negligence of government leaders, the bravery of ordinary people in East and West Berlinthese combined to bring about the end of nearly forty years of oppression, fear, and enmity in divided Berlin. When the news broke, Washington and Moscow could only stand by and watch as Tom Brokaw and other journalists narrated the televised broadcast of this critical moment in the thawing of the cold war. Sarotte opens her story in the months leading up to that fateful day. Following East German dissidents, she shows how their efforts coalesced around opposition to the regime's restrictions on foreign travel. The city of Leipzig, close to the border with Czechoslovakia, became a hothouse of activism, and protests there quickly grew into massive demonstrations. The East German Politburo hoped to limit its citizens' knowledge of these marches, but two daring dissidents, East Berliners Aram Radomski and Siegbert Schefke, managed to evade the Stasi and film the largest of them from a church tower. They then smuggled their tape to West Germany; broadcast in both nations, the footage galvanized activists across East Germany, and precipitated the stunning
developments on November 9. Facing mounting pressure from its own citizens, the East German Politburo planned to put off enacting any meaningful change to its travel policy by issuing a deceptive ruling that would appear to offer more freedom, but which in fact would allow the state to maintain strict control over its citizen's movements. But the bureaucrats tasked with preparing the new" regulations misunderstood their task, and instead drafted a declaration that said East Germans could freely leave the country. This declaration ended up in the hands of regime spokesman Günter Schabowski, who announced the rules at a press conference without understanding their import. Stunned reporters were soon broadcasting the news around the world. Crowds of East Germans began streaming to the Wall, prompting a showdown with border guards, who received no support or direction from East German leadership as the throngs multiplied. By 11:30, Harald Jäger, a second-tier passport control officer, had had enough and finally opened the wall to the mob gathering outside his gate. Even though East German forces successfully regained control by the morning, it was too latefor the wall, for the regime, and for Communism in Eastern Europe. Drawing on evidence from archives in multiple countries and languages, along with dozens of interviews with key actors, including Harald Jäger, Title TK is the definitive account of the event that brought down the East German Politburo and came to represent the final collapse of the Cold War order.
This book brings the Turkish writer Bilge Karasu (1930-1995) into a new critical spotlight by examining the author's poetics of memory, as laid out in his narratives on Istanbul's Beyoğlu. Gökberk ...contextualizes these posthumously published pieces in an approach informed by studies on memory, identity, place, and remembering as literary representation.
"Between 1941 and 1945, some 6,500 Berlin Jews, in fear for their lives, made the choice to flee their impending deportations and live submerged in the shadows of the capital of Nazi Germany. The ...experience was brutally difficult, and most did not survive. Yet the experiences of 1,700 who did demonstrate a remarkable and hitherto unconsidered level of agency among the survivors. This book sheds light on the daily life of those who hid and on the city that was both the source of their persecution and the site of their survival. "
Am 15. August 1935 kaufte das Land Preußen zugunsten der Berliner Museen für die enorme Summe von 7,5 Millionen Reichsmark mehr als 4.000 Kunstwerke von der Dresdner Bank. Dieses in seiner ...Konstellation und Dimension einmalige Geschäft ist kaum bekannt und wird hier zum ersten Mal aus kunst- und bankhistorischer Sicht erforscht. Bis heute befinden sich zahlreiche Kunstwerke mit der Provenienz »Dresdner Bank« in öffentlichen und privaten Sammlungen; sie zirkulieren wissentlich oder unwissentlich im Kunstmarkt. Dieses Buch ist grundlegend für die historische Aufarbeitung von Kunstwerken im Zusammenhang mit Kreditgeschäften. Die erstmalige Veröffentlichung der Herkunft der Kunstwerke ist Voraussetzung für die Provenienzforschung heutiger Eigentümer.
A benchmark study in the changing field of urban anthropology, Berlin, Alexanderplatz is an ethnographic examination of the rapid transformation of the unified Berlin. Through a captivating account ...of the controversy around this symbolic public square in East Berlin, the book raises acute questions about expertise, citizenship, government and belonging. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the city administration bureaus, developers’ offices, citizen groups and in Alexanderplatz itself, the author advances a richly innovative analysis of the multiplicity of place. She reveals how Alexanderplatz is assembled through the encounters between planners, citizen activists, social workers, artists and ordinary Berliners, in processes of popular participation and personal narratives, in plans, timetables, documents and files, and in the distribution of pipes, tram tracks and street lights. Alexanderplatz emerges as a socialist spatial exemplar, a ‘future’ under construction, an object of grievance, and a vision of robust public space. This book is both a critical contribution to the anthropology of contemporary modernity and a radical intervention in current cross-disciplinary debates on the city.
Wie hat sich die Berliner Stadtlandschaft im Laufe der Verwandlung von einer geteilten Stadt zur Kreativmetropole verandert? Trotz des gewaltigen Erbes und groer Entwicklungsprojekte ruft Berlin ...immer noch Bilder von Lucken und innerstadtischer Brachen hervor. Das Buch macht die leicht veranderlichen und komplexen politischen Zusammenhange dieser unbestimmten Orte deutlich. Fotografien von Orten aus den Jahren 2001 und 2016 zeigen, wie aus Niemandsland neue Wohnbauten und wie aus Untergrundtreffpunkten Geschaftszentren geworden sind. Sie zeigen aber auch verbliebene Nischen unerwarteter Wildnis und Freiheit. Die begleitenden Texte renommierter Urbanisten untersuchen diese wichtigen und oft stillen Reserven und fordern dazu auf unseren Einsatz fur die Zukunft der Stadt zu hinterfragen.
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