The Berlin Wall is arguably the most prominent symbol of the Cold War era. Its construction in 1961 and its dismantling in 1989 are broadly understood as pivotal moments in the history of the last ...century. InA Wall of Our Own, Paul M. Farber traces the Berlin Wall as a site of pilgrimage for American artists, writers, and activists. During the Cold War and in the shadow of the Wall, figures such as Leonard Freed, Angela Davis, Shinkichi Tajiri, and Audre Lorde weighed the possibilities and limits of American democracy. All were sparked by their first encounters with the Wall, incorporated their reflections in books and artworks directed toward the geopolitics of division in the United States, and considered divided Germany as a site of intersection between art and activism over the respective courses of their careers. Departing from the well-known stories of Americans seeking post-World War II Paris for their own self-imposed exile or traveling the open road of the domestic interstate highway system, Farber reveals the divided city of Berlin as another destination for Americans seeking a critical distance. By analyzing the experiences and cultural creations of "American Berliner" artists and activists, Farber offers a new way to view not only the Wall itself but also how the Cold War still structures our thinking about freedom, repression, and artistic resistance on a global scale.
1980 was a turning point in American history. When the year began, it was still very much the 1970s, with Jimmy Carter in the White House, a sluggish economy marked by high inflation, and the disco ...still riding the airwaves. When it ended, Ronald Reagan won the presidency in a landslide, inaugurating a rightward turn in American politics and culture. We still feel the effects of this tectonic shift today, as even subsequent Democratic administrations have offered neoliberal economic and social policies that owe more to Reagan than to FDR or LBJ. To understand what the American public was thinking during this pivotal year, we need to examine what they were reading, listening to, and watching.
1980: America's Pivotal Year puts the news events of the era—everything from the Iran hostage crisis to the rise of televangelism—into conversation with the year’s popular culture. Separate chapters focus on the movies, television shows, songs, and books that Americans were talking about that year, including both the biggest hits and some notable flops that failed to capture the shifting zeitgeist. As he looks at the events that had Americans glued to their screens, from the Miracle on Ice to the mystery of Who Shot J.R., cultural historian Jim Cullen garners surprising insights about how Americans’ attitudes were changing as they entered the 1980s.
Praise for Jim Cullen's previous Rutgers University Press books:
Informed and perceptive —Norman Lear on Those Were the Days: Why All in the Family Still Matters
Jim Cullen is one of the most acute cultural historians writing today. —Louis P. Masur, author of The Sum of Our Dreams on Martin Scorsese and the American Dream
This is a terrific book, fun and learned and provocative...Cullen provides an entertaining and thoughtful account of the ways that we remember and how this is influenced and directed by what we watch. —Jerome de Groot, author of Consuming History on From Memory to History
Rule of Law in the EU Antonina Bakardjieva Engelbrekt, Andreas Moberg, Joakim Nergelius / Antonina Bakardjieva Engelbrekt, Andreas Moberg, Joakim Nergelius
2021, 2021-12-02, 2021-10-28
eBook, Book
Odprti dostop
This open access book looks into the evolution and current state of the rule of law in the European Union (EU). The thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall is chosen as a natural moment ...of stocktaking; assessing the progress made since the beginning of the democratic reforms in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but also critically analysing recent tendencies of rule of law backsliding and open revolt against liberal-democratic values in individual EU Member States. The volume is partly retrospective in that it reflects on the challenges of the post-communist transition and the process of Eastward Enlargement of the Union. Yet it is also prospective, in so far as it reviews the variety of novel mechanisms for strengthening rule of law enforcement in the EU and gauges their potential for bringing sustainable, positive change in this regard. All chapters are written by experienced scholars and practitioners in the field of EU law and policy. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Swedish Studies Network.
Originally published in 1973. This book uses the Berlin Crisis of 1961 as a starting point to investigate Soviet-American relations in the Kruschev period. The book first chronicles the timeline of ...the succession of events during the Berlin Crisis and their interrelation. It then turns to the close interaction between Soviet and foreign policy before situating the event into the broader timeline of Soviet history.
The communists of East Central Europe came to power promising to bring about genuine equality, paying special attention to achieving gender equality, to build up industry and create prosperous ...societies, and to use music, art, and literature to promote socialist ideals. Instead, they never succeeded in filling more than a third of their legislatures with women and were unable to make significant headway against entrenched patriarchal views; they considered it necessary (with the sole exception of Albania) to rely heavily on credits to build up their economies, eventually driving them into bankruptcy; and the effort to instrumentalize the arts ran aground in most of the region already by 1956, and, in Yugoslavia, by 1949. Communism was all about planning, control, and politicization. Except for Yugoslavia after 1949, the communists sought to plan and control not only politics and the economy, but also the media and information, religious organizations, culture, and the promotion of women, which they understood in the first place as involving putting women to work. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of Robert K. Merton on functionalist theory, this book shows how communist policies were repeatedly undermined by unintended consequences and outright dysfunctions.
On August 13, 1961, under the cover of darkness, East German authorities sealed the border between East and West Berlin using a hastily constructed barbed wire fence. Over the next twenty-eight years ...of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall grew to become an ever-present physical and psychological divider in this capital city and a powerful symbol of Cold War tensions. Similarly, stark polarities arose in nearly every aspect of public and private life, including the built environment.InArchitecture, Politics, and Identity in Divided BerlinEmily Pugh provides an original comparative analysis of selected works of architecture and urban planning in both halves of Berlin during the Wall era, revealing the importance of these structures to the formation of political, cultural, and social identities. Pugh uncovers the roles played by organizations such as the Foundation for Prussian Cultural Heritage and the Building Academy in conveying the political narrative of their respective states through constructed spaces. She also provides an overview of earlier notable architectural works, to show the precursors for design aesthetics in Berlin at large, and considers projects in the post-Wall period, to demonstrate the ongoing effects of the Cold War.Overall, Pugh offers a compelling case study of a divided city poised between powerful contending political and ideological forces, and she highlights the effort expended by each side to influence public opinion in Europe and around the World through the manipulation of the built environment.
The noncognitive skill of conscientiousness has been linked to favourable labour market and health outcomes. But how is conscientiousness affected by events that happen in childhood? We investigate ...the effects of negative parental selection and economic and social upheaval on conscientiousness in adulthood using data from the German Socioeconomic Panel (SOEP). Our identification strategy exploits the steep drop in fertility that occurred in the former East Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the socialist regime. Using an event study analysis and a difference-in-differences estimator with the former West Germany as a control group, we find that women conceived in East Germany in the three-year period following the fall the Berlin Wall are less conscientious as adults than women born after this period and before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We interpret our findings as evidence of a detrimental effect of negative parental selection on women's conscientiousness. In contrast, we find no effects of negative parental selection on the conscientiousness of men.
Historically, researchers have studied commemorative events primarily for their political role in the (re)construction of contested national collective memories and identities, but globalisation, ...social justice movements, multiculturalism and regionalism forces are further transforming commemorative practices in the 21
st
century. This study adopts the semiotic paradigm to deconstruct commemorative narratives communicated during major anniversary celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In doing so, this paper evidences how interwoven signs in these commemorative events construct multi-layered narratives of transnational collective memory and identity based on shared values that transcend the political boundaries of the nation. The study further showcases how shifting political contexts influence commemorative narratives, whilst at the same time commemorative events may increasingly be designed to appeal to a broader, global audience as leisure phenomena of transnational significance.
In this paper I seek to develop a larger argument from a small place that no longer exists. Since 2004 I regularly visited a wasteland or Brache, located on the site of the former Berlin Wall, before ...a process of enclosure and erasure that culminated in the construction of luxury apartments. I draw on my engagement with this temporary space, as a source of reverie and also as a site for ecological fieldwork, in order to reflect on the meaning of urban nature under the speculative dynamics of capitalist urbanisation. I consider the intersections between memory, place, and ecology as part of a wider engagement with ‘spectral ecologies’ in the urban realm. I suggest that affective interpretations of urban nature should seek to develop a conceptual dialogue between ethnographic insights and structural analysis of urban environmental change.
I build on a series of ethnographic insights from a wasteland or Brache in Berlin in order to reflect on the meaning of urban nature under the speculative dynamics of capitalist urbanization. I consider the intersections between memory, place, and ecology as part of a wider engagement with “spectral ecologies” in the urban realm. I suggest that affective interpretations of urban nature should seek to develop a conceptual dialogue between ethnographic insights and structural analysis of urban environmental change.
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