Becoming East German Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler [Hardcover]

For roughly the first decade after the demise of the GDR, professional and popular interpretations of East German history concentrated primarily on forms of power and repression, as well as on dissent and resistance to communist rule. Socio-cultural approaches have increasingly shown that a single-minded emphasis on repression and coercion fails to address a number of important historical issues, including those related to the subjective experiences of those who lived under communist regimes. With that in mind, the essays in this volume explore significant physical and psychological aspects of life in the GDR, such as health and diet, leisure and dining, memories of the Nazi past, as well as identity, sports, and experiences of everyday humiliation. Situating the GDR within a broader historical context, they open up new ways of interpreting life behind the Iron Curtain  while providing a devastating critique of misleading mainstream scholarship, which continues to portray the GDR in the restrictive terms of totalitarian theory.
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List of Abbreviations
Preface

Introduction:The Banalities of East German Historiography
Andrew Port

Part I: Memory and Identity after Nazism

Chapter 1.East Germans in a Post-Nazi State: Communities of Experience, Connection, and Identification
Mary Fulbrook

Chapter 2.Divisive Unity: The Politics of Cultural Nationalism during the First German Writers Congress of October 1947
Andreas Agocs

Chapter 3.Communicating History: The Archived Letters and Memories of The Red Orchestra
Joanne Sayner

Chapter 4.Remembered Change and Changes of Remembrance: East German Narratives of Antifascistl£,