Sidney Mintz: Work, Creolization, Atlanticization Zeuske, Michael
Review - Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems, and Civilizations,
01/2011, Letnik:
34, Številka:
4
Journal Article
This article deals with several important books of Sidney Mintz, and with the influence of their central topics, work and labor, not only on this author's scientific career as a Caribbeanist, but ...also against the background of his life experiences in Eastern Germany.
This study of the practices of local governance in eastern German rural areas focuses on the application of the 2007-2013 LEADER Program. The latter, now a part of European Union agricultural and ...rural policies, is intended to develop local initiatives in territorial development. Its application supposes that local stakeholders will enter into networks of cooperation for designing and implementing development projects. In the countryside of former East Germany, this process involves a mechanism of institutional transfers that require a genuine learning effort on the part of local populations. This case study borrows methods from the structuralist sociology to analyze how these networks of cooperation operate under the Leader Program. It is hypothesized that these systems of local action are part of a game involving "logics" of both institutional transfers and the geographical context, which post-Communism has marked. Adapted from the source document.
Three historians comment on the articles. John Connelly considers the moral and historiographical meanings of "collaboration" and "collaborationism" and suggests that even those cases that Friedrich ...documents do not make Poland into a collaborationist country. In fact, the Nazis were disappointed that Poles refused to collaborate. Connelly emphasizes the complicated choices and intentions among the Polish population and calls for bringing together both the heroic (and true) tale of Polish resistance with the disturbing (and true) tale of Polish accommodation to the slaughter of the Jews. Tanja Penter adds to the discussion the results of her own research in the records of military tribunals for trials of Soviet citizens accused of collaborating with the Germans. These data confirm the Soviet regime's extremely broad understanding of collaboration and provide in-sight into the collective biography of collaborators. They also suggest which crimes the regime believed most harmful to its integrity. While it is difficult to determine motives and even intentions from these trials, these data, like Jones's, indicate the immense loyalty problem that the Soviet government faced in its occupied territories. Martin Dean calls attention to the difficulties of weeding out collaborators in the postwar Soviet Union and agrees with Jones on the limits of representing the "reality" of collaboration. He notes the reluctance, raised by both Friedrich and Jones, of postwar communist governments and nationalists to deal publicly with the phenomenon. Contrasted to the desire in postwar Europe to deal quickly with war criminals, collaborators, and traitors so that people could move on with their lives, Dean emphasizes the necessity and possibility for historians to write a full history of wartime collaboration, one that recognizes multiple human motives and the responses of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had to take far-reaching decisions under swiftly changing circumstances.
Das Leben der Anderen garnered critical acclaim for its artisry and superb acting, but its greatest achievement is the creation of an ambiguously sympathetic protagonist, a victim-perpetrator who ...reflects the contradictions of life in the GDR as well as the limitations of public debates about the East German past mired in the fundamental oppositions of victim and perpetrator. The literature that transcends the dehumanizing effect of political repression is also the vehicle through which Dreyman and Wiesler are reconciled to one another and their separate pasts. The film's many references to the works of Bertolt Brecht introduce important ambiguities in the characters and their actions. Reprinted by permission of the German Studies Review
Since its release the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others has spawned much discussion among Germans whether the film represents fiction or history as actually experienced in communist East Germany. The ...author, an expert witness on the Bundestag committee investigating the nature and effects of the East German dictatorship and close historical consultant for the film, testifies here that the film director, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was determined to get the factual details right and that, in fact, the major actions and situations were patterned closely on actual events from the 1970s and 1980s. Reprinted by permission of the German Studies Review
The Stasi movie The Lives of Others has gained an immense influence over historical images of East Germany, due to the international public atention around the Academy Award in 2007. Author Florian ...Henckel von Donnersmarck built his story on a broad range of alleged facts, which do not, however, pass the test of historical authenticity. Like the recent films Sophie Scholl and Der Untergang with respect to Nazi Germany, The Lives of Others tells us more about recent discourses of coming to terms with the past than about living under the Stasi. Reprinted by permission of the German Studies Review
The Lives of Others can be seen as a classical case of an 'exploitation film', both artisticaly and commercially. While this does not mar its merits as a moving drama about lvoe, guilt, and ...redemption, it comes at the price of a historical 'creativity' of a peculiar kind, informed by unreconstructed masculinity and a proverbial German yearning for reconciliation. Reprinted by permission of the German Studies Review
Both communist party officials and western observers have typically interpreted the composition of modernist music in the Eastern Bloc as an act of dissidence. Yet in the German Democratic Republic ...(GDR), the most consequential arguments in favor of modernism came from socialists and party members. Their advocacy of modernism challenged official socialist realist doctrine, but they shared with party bureaucrats the conviction that music ought to contribute to the development of socialist society. Such efforts to reform musical life from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint were typical of the first generation of East Germany's intelligentsia, who saw socialist rule as the only guarantee against the reemergence of German fascism. Two of East Germany's most prominent composers, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, routinely used the twelve-tone method in works carrying an explicitly socialist text. During preparations for the 1964 Music Congress, aesthetician Günter Mayer drew from Eisler'sLenin Requiemand Dessau'sAppell der Arbeiterklasseto argue that modernist techniques were highly appropriate for giving expression to contemporary social conditions. The efforts of these socialists to reconcile modernist techniques with their understanding of socialism undermine basic divisions between communism and capitalism, complicity and dissent, and socialist realism and western modernism.
The novels of East German writers often offer the possibility to reflect upon the difficult sociocultural acknowledgment between East and West Germany after Reunification. While the official ...narratives symbolize the festive character of the inter-German 'meeting', most of the East German novels make visible the friction points of this meeting by narrating the everyday life in the urban space. By showing the urban transformations in East Germany the novels highlight how East Germans need a place to feel acknowledged and to tell their own story. Furthermore, the novels allow the memories and imageries entangled in the urban context to emerge, thus offering a peculiar point of view with which to look at the question of a shared belonging. Indeed we can argue that the novels constitute a terrain of mediation and exploration where both East and West Germans can image new forms and places of sociability and togetherness. Adapted from the source document.
Proceeding from Connell's concept of hegemonic masculinity, this article examines the effect of differing social structures and culturally dominant patterns on masculinities in the German states, ...separated until 1989, German Democratic Republic and Federal Republic of Germany. The article starts with interviews with East German men, who were questioned about their understanding of masculinity and their view of the differences compared with West German men. The results of the interviews are analyzed against the background of the differing social developments in both German countries. Two different hegemonic patterns are identified: the hegemonic masculinity in West Germany is described as a pattern oriented on the lifestyle and aesthetic standard of modern middle classes and transnational entrepreneurship, while the hegemonic masculinity in the former German Democratic Republic is shaped through a proletarian-petty bourgeois lifestyle and taste. The thesis is formulated that after the unification of the two countries, the proletarian-petty bourgeois pattern lost its hegemonic role and, compared with the West German pattern of masculinity, has become marginalized.
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