Demolition On Karl Marx Square

Author : Andrew Demshuk
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190645121
Total Pages : 273 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Demolition on Karl Marx Square written by Andrew Demshuk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The 1968 demolition of Leipzig's medieval University Church represents an essential turning point in relations between Communist authorities and the people they claimed to serve. The largest East German protest between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution, this intimate story clarifies how the dictatorial system operated and lost public belief"--Provided by publisher.

Author : Andrew Demshuk
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019064513X
Total Pages : 248 pages
Book Rating : 4.37/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Demolition on Karl Marx Square written by Andrew Demshuk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-30 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Communist East Germany's demolition of Leipzig's perfectly intact medieval University Church in May 1968 was an act decried as "cultural barbarism" across the two Germanies and beyond. Although overshadowed by the crackdown on Prague Spring mere weeks later, the willful destruction of this historic landmark on a central site symbolically renamed Karl Marx Square represents an essential turning point in the relationship between the Communist authorities and the people they claimed to serve. As the largest case of public protest in East German history between the 1953 Uprising and 1989 Revolution, this intimate local trauma exhibits the inner workings of a "dictatorial" system and exposes the often gray and overlapping lines between state and citizenry, which included both quiet and open resistance, passive and active collaboration. Through deep analysis of untapped periodicals and archives (including once-classified State documents, Stasi, and police records, and extensive private protest letters), it introduces a broad cast of characters who helped make the inconceivable possible, and restores the voices of not a few ordinary citizens of all stripes who dared in the name of culture, humanism, and civic pride to protest what they saw as an inconceivable tragedy. In this city that later started the 1989 October Revolution which ultimately triggered the fall of the Berlin Wall, residents from every social background desperately hoped to convince their leaders to step back from the brink. But as the dust cleared in 1968, they saw with all finality that their voices meant nothing, that the DDR was a sham democracy awash with utopian rhetoric that had no connection with their everyday lives. If Communism died in Prague in 1968, it had already died in Leipzig just weeks before, with repercussions that still haunt today's politics of memory.

Author : Andrew Demshuk
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501751689
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bowling for Communism written by Andrew Demshuk and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

Author : Andrew Demshuk
Publisher : University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN 13 : 0822988577
Total Pages : 601 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Three Cities After Hitler written by Andrew Demshuk and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2021-09-21 with total page 601 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three Cities after Hitler compares how three prewar German cities shared decades of postwar development under three competing post-Nazi regimes: Frankfurt in capitalist West Germany, Leipzig in communist East Germany, and Wrocław (formerly Breslau) in communist Poland. Each city was rebuilt according to two intertwined modern trends. First, certain local edifices were chosen to be resurrected as “sacred sites” to redeem the national story after Nazism. Second, these tokens of a reimagined past were staged against the hegemony of modernist architecture and planning, which wiped out much of whatever was left of the urban landscape that had survived the war. All three cities thus emerged with simplified architectural narratives, whose historically layered complexities only survived in fragments where this twofold “redemptive reconstruction” after Nazism had proven less vigorous, sometimes because local citizens took action to save and appropriate them. Transcending both the Iron Curtain and freshly homogenized nation-states, three cities under three rival regimes shared a surprisingly common history before, during, and after Hitler—in terms of both top-down planning policies and residents’ spontaneous efforts to make home out of their city as its shape shifted around them.

Author : Andrew Demshuk
Publisher : Cornell University Press
ISBN 13 : 1501751670
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Bowling for Communism written by Andrew Demshuk and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bowling for Communism illuminates how civic life functioned in Leipzig, East Germany's second-largest city, on the eve of the 1989 revolution by exploring acts of "urban ingenuity" amid catastrophic urban decay. Andrew Demshuk profiles the creative activism of local communist officials who, with the help of scores of volunteers, constructed a palatial bowling alley without Berlin's knowledge or approval. In a city mired in disrepair, civic pride overcame resentment against a regime loathed for corruption, Stasi spies, and the Berlin Wall. Reconstructing such episodes through interviews and obscure archival materials, Demshuk shows how the public sphere functioned in Leipzig before the fall of communism. Hardly detached or inept, local officials worked around centralized failings to build a more humane city. And hardly disengaged, residents turned to black-market construction to patch up their surroundings. Because such "urban ingenuity" was premised on weakness in the centralized regime, the dystopian cityscape evolved from being merely a quotidian grievance to the backdrop for revolution. If, by their actions, officials were demonstrating that the regime was irrelevant, and if, in their own experiences, locals only attained basic repairs outside official channels, why should anyone have mourned the system when it was overthrown?

Author : Mary Fulbrook
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300176384
Total Pages : 470 pages
Book Rating : 4.84/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The People's State written by Mary Fulbrook and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-02 with total page 470 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.” Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives. Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.

Author : Karl Marx
Publisher : DigiCat
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 92 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Civil War in France written by Karl Marx and published by DigiCat. This book was released on 2022-05-29 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Civil War in France is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx. It presents a convincing declaration of the General Council of the International, pertaining to the character and importance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune at the time.

Author : Philipp Schorch
Publisher : transcript Verlag
ISBN 13 : 3839455901
Total Pages : 345 pages
Book Rating : 4.06/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Curating (Post-)Socialist Environments written by Philipp Schorch and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2021-06-30 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In which ways are environments (post-)socialist and how do they come about? How is the relationship between the built environment, memory, and debates on identity enacted? What are the spatial, material, visual, and aesthetic dimensions of these (post-)socialist enactments or interventions? And how do such (post-)socialist interventions in environments become (re)curated? By addressing these questions, this volume releases ›curation‹ from its usual museological framing and carries it into urban environments and private life-worlds, from predominantly state-sponsored institutional settings with often normative orientations into spheres of subjectification, social creativity, and material commemorative culture.

Author : Andrew Demshuk
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107020735
Total Pages : 325 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Lost German East written by Andrew Demshuk and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After 1945, Germany was inundated with ethnic German refugees expelled from Eastern Europe. Andrew Demshuk explores why they integrated into West German society.

Author : Alice Autumn Weinreb
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019060509X
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.94/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Modern Hungers written by Alice Autumn Weinreb and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores Germany's role in the two world wars and the Cold War to analyze the food economy of the twentieth century. It argues that controlling food supply and determining how and what people ate shaped the course of these three wars