Las asociaciones de amistad constituyeron en su momento actores transnacionales relevantes en las relaciones Este-Oeste. En España, en 1979 nació la Asociación Guillermo Humboldt para el Conocimiento ...y la Amistad entre España y la República Democrática Alemana, que, en conexión con la Liga für Völkerfreundschaft de la RDA, estaba llamada a servir de instrumento de propaganda y diplomacia informal. El examen de la actuación propagandística de la Liga für Völkerfreundschaft en España, del papel desempeñado en la misma por la Asociación Guillermo Humboldt y de sus limitaciones constituye el objetivo esencial de este artículo, que utiliza fuentes españolas y alemanas y realiza un ejercicio comparativo con organizaciones similares vinculadas a la Unión Soviética.
Jürgen Fuchs (1950-99) fue uno de los escritores nacidos en la RDA, cuyas biografías no solo fueron moldeadas por el régimen del SED, sino también deformadas con eficacia. Asimismo, fue uno de los ...pocos que trató expresiva y abruptamente los tabúes y mecanismos de un Estado gobernado de manera totalitaria. La obra literaria de Fuchs es un testimonio de época, un desafío al régimen comunista y a su legado contenido en los archivos de la Stasi. Por un lado, su escritura, saturada de experiencia y teñida de autobiografía, lleva al lector a un impactante viaje a los tiempos de la segunda dictadura alemana y le permite echar un vistazo, entre bastidores, a la sociedad (post)socialista; por otro lado, se nos revela que Jürgen Fuchs, en su calidad de intelectual, se sintió obligado a intervenir allí donde había que prevenir la violencia, la mentira y el olvido. Este artículo examina el desarrollo literario de este autor, independiente en muchos aspectos, y examina las razones que le motivaron a romper el silencio y tender la mano hacia la verdad y la justicia e incluso, de ser necesario, a provocar un debate abierto.
Based on Spanish, German, Polish and Romanian archives, this article explores some aspects of the Cold War that have hardly been studied until now: the activities of the Eastern Bloc secret services ...in Spain; the surveillance of Spanish diplomats; and Eastern European spies in Spain. The article examines the history of East-West relationships but adds the perspective of everyday life, using oral history and the records of the security police. The focus is on the importance of the surveillance of Spain as a Cold War country, which has almost never been researched in its connection to the Eastern Bloc.
This article examines a little‐known chapter both in the history of socialist labor relations and the history of psychology: Social Psychological Training (SPT) for industrial leaders in the German ...Democratic Republic (GDR). Based on previously untapped archival sources, it uncovers the transnational genesis of SPT and its intricate relationships with Western “therapeutic culture” of the 1970s. Governmental perspectives are addressed, as well as the level of individual appropriation of SPT and possible unintended side effects of techniques that were drawn from the social psychological and therapeutical fields. This case study helps to explore the functions of psychological expertise in authoritarian political contexts, as well as the polyvalence of group methods of change, the effects of which could turn out repressive as well as liberating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The history of SPT solicits a polycentric view on therapeutic culture, capturing its diverse manifestations and interconnections between different societies and political economies.
In the 1980s, several unusual public interactions took place between West German rock star Udo Lindenberg and East German dictator Erich Honecker. On the surface, their exchanges concerned whether ...Lindenberg would be allowed to tour in East Germany. Beneath the surface, however, these interactions constituted a challenge to East German cultural policy and restrictions on freedom of expression. Despite this, Honecker sought to harness the musician's appeal in the German Democratic Republic's fight against North Atlantic Treaty Organization nuclear missiles. The story of the rock star and the dictator thus reveals the parameters and limits of East German soft power diplomacy.
This article discusses ambiguous tactics of German Communist resisters in the Third Reich. The official historiography of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) portrayed Communist resisters as ...unfaltering heroes. By contrast, revisionist studies published after 1990 presented Communists as traitors and renegades. This study transcends these approaches that revolve around legitimation or de-legitimation of the dictatorship, and examines the dubious manoeuvring of three German Communists who strategically collaborated with the Nazis, namely Theodor Bottländer, Friedrich Schlotterbeck and Wilhelm Knöchel. While Knöchel's attempts to outwit the Gestapo failed and could not prevent his execution, Schlotterbeck and Bottländer found ways to survive - largely without betraying their comrades. Even so, the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (KPD), as well as its successor in the GDR, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED), reprimanded venturesome, inventive and obstinate Communists, excluded them from the party and brought them to court. The harsh reactions are indicative of the inability of Communist historiography to acknowledge ‘Eigen-Sinn’, and highlight a central shortcoming of the antifascist doctrine. Likewise, more recent revisionist approaches have failed to recognise various attempts of Communists to minimise harm and survive in the grey zone between betrayal and loyalty.
In recent years, research found that populism employed a new strategy by using nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, as a communication tool to persuade citizens to support their political ...agendas. In populist campaigns, nostalgia is used to affectively link (alleged) crises with longing for a cherished past. In this article, we applied a mixed-methods approach to understand how populists exploit nostalgia in their communication and how nostalgic rhetoric has the potential to persuade people to support their claims. In Study 1, we conducted a case study based on a qualitative content analysis of Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) online election campaign in the 2019 Thuringia election in East Germany. The analysis revealed that the campaign was built around the nostalgic narrative of the 1989 peaceful revolution as a proud historical moment for former German Democratic Republic citizens while at the same time creating a sense of crisis supposedly caused by false post-reunification politics. To further investigate the persuasiveness of nostalgia, Study 2 used a statement from the campaign and found that participants tended to agree more with populist statements if they contained nostalgic rhetoric (compared to non-nostalgic populist and control rhetoric). These findings suggest that right-wing populists can effectively exploit nostalgia and that it may ‘sugarcoat’ populist messages.
This article traces the transnational circulation of socialist reforms in the field of sex education through the work of Monika Krause, a citizen of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) who migrated ...to Cuba and became the “Cuban Queen of Condoms.” For Krause, the overarching goal of sex education was to “teach tenderness” to the people. The socialist state’s mission to prepare the population for love, marriage, partnership, and family in Cuba and the GDR involved using complex measures. This paper describes these, contextualizes them in transnational debates, and explains some of the internal reasoning behind their institutionalization. It also explains why looking at state-level efforts to “teach tenderness to the people” matters for a transnational history of sex education.
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