“Loyalty trials” are common to a range of conflict settings, with consequences that range from harassment to imprisonment, torture, or death. Yet, they have received little if any attention as a ...general phenomenon in studies of state repression, civil war, or rebel governance, which focus on particular behaviors that authorities use to put people on trial, such as dissent, defection, and resistance. Using a computational model and data on the German Democratic Republic and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we focus on the dynamics of “loyalty trials” held to identify enemy collaborators—the interaction between expectations, perceptions, and behavior. We use our framework to explore the conditions under which trials result in widespread defection, as in the German Democratic Republic, or in conformity as illustrated by our study of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The polarizing nature of loyalty trials and the propensity to over- or under-identify threats to political order have notable implications for democratic and non-democratic societies alike.
Based on films produced in the East German company Defa, the author presents a hypothesis of regulated multiculturalism of the GDR cinema. He indicates multicultural discourses in historical films ...about distant and more recent history: the multicultural borderland of West Prussia in the late 19th century (Levins Mühle, dir. Horst Seemann, 1980) and the confrontation of Prussian and Uruguayan culture at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries (Die Besteigung des Chimborazo, dir. Rainer Simon, 1989). Then he deals with issues concerning the meeting of East German and Polish cultures (Die Schlüssel, dir. Egon Günther, 1972/1974; Über sieben Brücken mußt du gehn, dir. Hans Werner, 1978). The author also discusses the propagandist use of the images of Angela Davis and Dean Read in two films related to the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin in August 1973. However, the main emphasis is put on films thematizing political emigration from South America (Ein April hat 30 Tage, dir. Gunther Scholz, 1979; Isabel auf der Treppe, dir. Hannelore Unterberg, 1984; Blonder Tango, Lothar Warneke, 1986).
For over 30 years, Lieutenant General Markus Wolff headed the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of State Security of the German Democratic Republic. Today, there is neither that state nor ...that service, and Wolf died in 2006. However, Wolff is certainly the most impressive figure in the intelligence world, above all in the period from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War, and with his ability and results he established himself as the most capable Cold War head of the intelligence service. However, his fate is a tragic one, Wolff perished in the vortex of complex political-security relations between the East and the West, where the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact were decisive for his personal and professional fate. The article analyzes and sheds light on the causes and impacts of complex social phenomena that trace broader social relations, with an emphasis on how these relations can affect an individual who is in a responsible position. The life story of Marcus Wolff is not only a story about him, about two Germanys, about the Cold War, but also a story that has a much deeper background, it is a story about sacrifice, betrayal and suffering in intelligence world.
After the end of the World War II, the museums in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ) and the GDR were faced with the task of mastering the narrative turn from an ethnic-nationalist conception of ...prehistory to a Marxist one. Using an extensive body of exhibition photos, this volume analyses the depiction of prehistory in museums of the SBZ and the GDR as well as discourses that led to the alteration or persistence of conceptions of history.
We document the generation and the content of the Comprehensive Patent Database (CPDB) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (1949–1990), which is freely available at GESIS
. The database contains ...all patents granted in the GDR and published by the Office of Inventions and Patents (later: German Patent and Trade Mark Office/DPMA). The core database covers the years 1950–1990 and contains 24 variables with manually cleaned and processed information on a total of 261,822 unique patents of the GDR.
This article examines how the German radical-right populist party the Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland) and its politicians have engaged with the public memory of the East German ...past via Twitter and how this has impacted the use of social media as a tool of political commemoration in Germany. The article analyses the mnemonic wars over ‘anniversary tweets’ related to four events: the East German Uprising (1953); the construction (1961) and fall (1989) of the Berlin Wall; and German reunification (1990). The article surveys when and how Twitter became a platform for these events’ political commemoration and the role of the Alternative für Deutschland therein. It also outlines the mnemonic discourses that the Alternative für Deutschland has deployed on Twitter around these events’ anniversaries and explores the sorts of digital contestation and transnationalization evident at these times.
Does postmodern mean capitalist? This article aims at providing an answer to this question by comparing postmodernism in two socialist contexts: the People’s Republic of Poland, where in the 1980s ...the planned economy was progressively eroding and postmodern architecture was mostly sponsored by non-state clients (private individuals, small housing cooperatives and the Catholic Church), and the German Democratic Republic, where throughout the 1980s the institutions of the state-planned economy remained in power while commissioning prominent postmodern projects. The article argues that while the difference in economic regimes did not lead to prominent stylistic discrepancies, they strongly influenced the significance and perception of these projects in their specific national contexts.
As an avowed communist, Carl Coutelle was one of the few (future) pathologists persecuted for purely political reasons in the Third Reich. Despite this peculiarity, his life has received little ...attention. The present article takes the existing research desideratum as an opportunity to elaborate on Coutelle’s fate during the Nazi era, but also on his academic rise to the position of full professor at the University of Halle (GDR). The analysis is based on extensive files from various German archives. The article pursues a twofold question: On the one hand, it seems necessary to clarify how Coutelle’s life between 1933 and 1945 can be characterized and classified, and on the other hand, it is of interest whether he owed his career in the GDR primarily to scientific merit or to state support. It can be shown that Coutelle’s career path reflects the prevailing political power relations: With the beginning of the Third Reich, Coutelle was completely disenfranchised because of his political views; he was forced to emigrate, interrupted his nascent scientific career, and became actively involved in the international anti-fascist resistance. After the war, Coutelle became one of the protagonists of the socialist transformation and denazification of the health care system in the Soviet Occupation Zone. Now his career took the opposite course: Although his research performance was below average compared to other pathologists from the GDR, the avowed communist was appointed full professor – due to state intervention and against the declared will of the faculty in Halle.
