The socialist German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the east part of former divided Germany, which existed between 1949 and 1990, saw the emancipation of women as a national objective. In this paper we ...examine the gender ideologies of young people in the GDR in relation to state socialist ideas of gender equality. First, we outline the GDR's socialist state policy in favour of maternal full-time employment, even with young children, between the 1950s and the 1980s. We then present the results of our analysis of gender ideologies using survey data collected by the GDR's Central Institute of Youth Research in 1984. By applying latent class analysis, we identify two patterns of egalitarianism in the analytic sample, which we term 'all-inclusive-egalitarians' and 'not-in-my-backyard-egalitarians' ('nimby-egalitarians'). The former supported gender equality in both the public and familial spheres. The nimby-egalitarians, by contrast, had ambivalent attitudes, as they supported gender equality in the public sphere and at the same time held more traditional attitudes towards the private sphere. Our study demonstrates that after almost 40 years of propagating gender equality, state socialism in the GDR had some success in shaping societal gender ideologies. However, we reveal ambivalences which researchers have previously often overseen, especially in contrast to the Western part of Germany. The top-down shaped GDR patterns of egalitarianism also bear similarities to the stalled gender revolution in contemporary Western democratic societies. Beyond the results, the paper proves the richness and principle usability of hitherto rarely used data sets preserved from the GDR.
This book details the Soviet Military Liaison Mission (SMLM) in West Germany and the U.S. Military Liaison Mission (USMLM) in East Germany as microcosms of the Cold War strategic intelligence and ...counterintelligence landscape. Thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet and U.S. Military Liaison Missions are all but forgotten. Their operation was established by a post-WWII Allied occupation forces' agreement, and missions had relative freedom to travel and collect intelligence throughout East and West Germany from 1947 until 1990.This book addresses Cold War intelligence and counterintelligence in a manner that provides a broad historical perspective and then brings the reader to a never-before documented artifact of Cold War history. The book details the intelligence/counterintelligence dynamic that was among the most emblematic of the Cold War. Ultimately, the book addresses a saga that remains one of the true Cold War enigmas.
This book examines competition and collaboration among Western powers, the socialist bloc, and the Third World for control over humanitarian aid programs during the Cold War. Young-sun Hong's ...analysis reevaluates the established parameters of German history. On the one hand, global humanitarian efforts functioned as an arena for a three-way political power struggle. On the other, they gave rise to transnational spaces that allowed for multidimensional social and cultural encounters. Hong paints an unexpected view of the global humanitarian regime: Algerian insurgents flown to East Germany for medical care, barefoot Chinese doctors in Tanzania, and West and East German doctors working together in the Congo. She also provides a rich analysis of the experiences of African trainees and Asian nurses in the two Germanys. This book brings an urgently needed historical perspective to contemporary debates on global governance, which largely concern humanitarianism, global health, south-north relationships, and global migration.
This paper looks at an ungulate irruption of wild boars that occurred in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1970s and 1980s. It argues that this hybrid phenomenon resulted from the ...confluence of three historically specific, intertwined factors in late 20th century Europe: first, East Germany's embrace of development ideology to remake their farms and forests; second, the simultaneous introduction of a specifically East German conservation program; and third, a new era in the longue durée of human–pig relationships. This ungulate irruption was particular to the GDR and the central European landscape of the Cold War, and only becomes visible through careful attention to the historical context and the materiality of pigs (Sus scrofa). For this reason it is possible to call these pigs new creatures of development. More broadly this paper asks both historians and social scientists to account for the temporal and spatial context when analyzing hybrid phenomena, while also raising important questions about the meaning and application of the neologism Anthropocene.
This book examines the increasing body of research dedicated to the lasting differences between the former separate states of the Federal German Republic (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic ...(GDR). Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it takes a broad view on German unification and transformation research.
Transformation and unification processes in East and West Germany are still ongoing, and they may serve as a model for social change and its political, economic, and psychological consequences. Using advanced statistical methods of analysis, this edited volume provides insights into the valuable contextualization of individual and social phenomena that current research on German unification and transformation is producing.
Following the open science mindset using code and data, the authors investigate temporal trends in (1) mental health, (2) political attitudes, and (3) work and family life. It explores changes in mental health and political attitudes, as well as continued differences in work and family arrangements, that may stem from heterogeneous experiences within the systems and during the transformation process. This book will appeal to scholars and students from the disciplines of sociology, political science, public health, social psychology, psychology, and communication science interested in postsocialist transition processes and temporal changes in individuals and societies.
This essay applies the lens of myth to convey new insight in the well-documented historical context of the National United Campaign to Free Angela Davis (NUFCAD) in the German Democratic Republic ...(GDR). It seeks to interpret and offer meaning to the thousands of letters and postcards written in support of Angela Davis while she was on trial in the US between 1971-1972. A reading with Roland Barthes's theory of myth as an operative form of power uncovers the ways in which the NUFCAD turned "Angela Davis" into a metadiscourse to discipline representations of racial politics as well as stymy radical politics in the GDR. But once the letter campaign reaches the US, it indeed becomes valuable in the fight to secure Davis's freedom. Often perceived as universal, myth is shown here to be audience-specific. Presented in this essay is the urgency to both scrutinize and ultimately understand this campaign and its convoluted trajectory, as they are shaped by myth.
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.
Framing Political Change Ramos Arenas, Fernando; Martín Jiménez, Virginia
Media history,
20/4/2/, Letnik:
26, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This article chooses a comparative approach in order to analyze the role played by mass media during the attempted coup d'état in Spain starting on 23 February 1981 and the opening of the Berlin Wall ...in November 1989. Both episodes demonstrate the media's capacity to articulate political change through their contextualization of particular events. The text focuses on the capacity of the media to frame political episodes, to generate interpretations and thus provide the basis for specific reactions in different audience groups or political instances. For a short period of time (limited to just some hours), the radio and the press in Spain as well as television in East Germany assumed a 'para-political' role and set certain events in motion that led to the end of the coup and the fall of the Wall respectively.
Conventional wisdom holds that the Stasi policed East German artists because of their potential dissident and ideological production. In contrast, Cornelia Schleime's Stasi Series (1993) reveals the ...secret police's preoccupation with her domesticity as a sign of her rebellion. For the photo-text series, the artist assigns fourteen excerpts of her Stasi file to as many self-portrait photographs. The images and texts inform each other, providing a biographical sketch of Schleime's life in two temporalities (the 1980s and 1993) and from two seemingly incommensurate perspectives (the Stasi and her own). The Stasi files document in careful detail Schleime's private life in the years that immediately preceded her 1984 emigration. Although the truth of these texts is suspect, the artist does not completely discredit them. Rather, she unites her file to her 1993 present by performing its contents in photographs that exhibit both mockery and resignation. This article considers how the artist's use of her archive reveals as much about the limitations of her Stasi source as it does about her unique perspective as both subject and interpreter. It examines Schleime's project in relation to contemporary archival and surveillance-oriented art practices to demonstrate how the Stasi Series adds to their concerns over information and power, memory and document, observation and self-representation.
