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Katherine Pence - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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showcasing cold war germany in cairo 1954 and 1957 industrial exhibitions and the competition for arab partners
Journal of Contemporary History, 2012Co-Authors: Katherine PenceAbstract:East Germany staged two successful industrial exhibitions in Cairo in 1954 and 1957 in an effort to gain Egypt as a trading and eventually diplomatic partner. These displays of East German products and political culture challenged West Germany, which similarly courted Egypt and presented a rival exhibition in Cairo in 1957. They showcased industrial goods from the Socialist ‘economic miracle,’ but also revealed German lack of understanding of the Egyptian market and its culture. These exhibitions also showed how Cold War competition between the two Germanys was intertwined with decolonization in Africa and the Arab world, especially when the 1954 show coincided with Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power. East Germany could circumvent West Germany’s Hallstein Doctrine’s goal of diplomatically isolating the Socialist State by fostering anti-imperialist solidarity with Arab nations.
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Socialist modern east german everyday culture and politics
2007Co-Authors: Katherine Pence, Paul BettsAbstract:This book explores the ways in which modernity shaped the relationship between Socialist State and society in East Germany. The reunification of Germany in 1989 may have put an end to the experiment in East German communism, but its historical assessment is far from over. Where most of the literature over the past two decades has been driven by the desire to uncover the relationship between power and resistance, complicity and consent, more recent scholarship has tended to concentrate on the everyday history of East German citizens. This volume builds on the latest literature by exploring the development and experience of life in East Germany, with a particular view toward addressing the question: what did modernity mean for East German State and society? As such, the collection moves beyond the conceptual divide between State-level politics and everyday life so as to bring into sharper focus the specific contours of the GDR's unique experiment in Cold War socialism. What unites all the essays is the question of how the very tensions around "Socialist modernity" shaped the views, memories and actions of East Germans over four decades. This book will appeal to those interested in German history and anthropology, the Cold War, Eastern Europe, the history of communism, European social history and the history of everyday life, gender history, as well as modernity and Socialist popular culture.
Ingeborg Walther - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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language and german disunity a sociolinguistic history of east and west germany 1945 2000
The German Quarterly, 2004Co-Authors: Ingeborg WaltherAbstract:Stevenson, Patrick. Language and German Disunity: A Sociolinguistic History of East and West Germany, 1945-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.275 pp. $24.95 paperback. Of the many problems that have come to the fore as a result of German unification in 1990, perhaps none has been so persistent as the common and much discussed perception that east and west Germans do not "speak the same language." The idea that had appeared in various guises at least since the early 19th century that all Germans were united by a common language proved elusive, as social differences and inequalities were increasingly projected onto linguistic differences and problems of communication. Patrick Stevenson's fascinating and highly readable study examines "the complex web of questions underlying the central problem: why, and in what ways, is language repeatedly (perceived as) a source of both unity and disunity in the German speech community?" (3). His emphasis is less on individual linguistic forms "than on linguistic practices and on the ways in which language is dragooned into political and social disputes over 'belonging'" (2). In the process, he makes an important contribution to the study of "how 'talk' (socially situated uses of language) contributes to the conflicting processes of developing and contesting social identities" (15). The value of Stevenson's book lies not only in the fact that it is one of the few comprehensive studies of language in Germany since 1945 written in English for a general readership (the author avoids transcription conventions of conversation analysis, and provides truly excellent English translations of all German texts and speech samples that effectively capture stylistic nuances), but also in the fact that it goes beyond most existing linguistic and sociolinguistic research by setting the contemporary situation in a broad historical context reaching back to the early 19th century, when questions of the relationship between language and national identity became particularly salient. Part I of the book begins with the "questione della lingua" as it was debated throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries to provide the context for the language debates which marked the political tensions between east and west Germany between 1945 and 1989. It then moves to a discussion of the particular linguistic strategies used by the GDR to reinforce the Socialist State, and the effects of this on the everyday linguistic practices and social experiences of its citizens. It concludes with a fascinating analysis of the polyphony of Wende discourses to which the official discourse, paradoxically, gave rise and that contributed to the GDR's ultimate demise. Part II focuses on the first decade following unification, describing in detail the various and multi-layered linguistic practices that contributed to the phenomena of communicative dissonance and identity construction in unified Germany. While the author draws on an extensive array of research on the sociolinguistic consequences of unification (empirical studies of lexical difference and speech behaviors, research on language attitudes, ethnographic interviews), he is careful to point out both the value and limitations of this research. For example, the many quantitative, descriptive studies of lexical developments, while important, often fail to account for the varying sociolinguistic "burden" of some words over others (e.g., the differences between the GDR and FRG terms for "supermarket," Kaufhalle and Supermarkt respectively, are relatively unimportant as compared to the differences between the respective terms for "worker," Werktatiger and Arbeitnehmer], and often fall short of accounting for how words are embedded in discursive contexts (47). …
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language and german disunity a sociolinguistic history of east and west germany 1945 2000
The German Quarterly, 2004Co-Authors: Ingeborg WaltherAbstract:Stevenson, Patrick. Language and German Disunity: A Sociolinguistic History of East and West Germany, 1945-2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.275 pp. $24.95 paperback. Of the many problems that have come to the fore as a result of German unification in 1990, perhaps none has been so persistent as the common and much discussed perception that east and west Germans do not "speak the same language." The idea that had appeared in various guises at least since the early 19th century that all Germans were united by a common language proved elusive, as social differences and inequalities were increasingly projected onto linguistic differences and problems of communication. Patrick Stevenson's fascinating and highly readable study examines "the complex web of questions underlying the central problem: why, and in what ways, is language repeatedly (perceived as) a source of both unity and disunity in the German speech community?" (3). His emphasis is less on individual linguistic forms "than on linguistic practices and on the ways in which language is dragooned into political and social disputes over 'belonging'" (2). In the process, he makes an important contribution to the study of "how 'talk' (socially situated uses of language) contributes to the conflicting processes of developing and contesting social identities" (15). The value of Stevenson's book lies not only in the fact that it is one of the few comprehensive studies of language in Germany since 1945 written in English for a general readership (the author avoids transcription conventions of conversation analysis, and provides truly excellent English translations of all German texts and speech samples that effectively capture stylistic nuances), but also in the fact that it goes beyond most existing linguistic and sociolinguistic research by setting the contemporary situation in a broad historical context reaching back to the early 19th century, when questions of the relationship between language and national identity became particularly salient. Part I of the book begins with the "questione della lingua" as it was debated throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries to provide the context for the language debates which marked the political tensions between east and west Germany between 1945 and 1989. It then moves to a discussion of the particular linguistic strategies used by the GDR to reinforce the Socialist State, and the effects of this on the everyday linguistic practices and social experiences of its citizens. It concludes with a fascinating analysis of the polyphony of Wende discourses to which the official discourse, paradoxically, gave rise and that contributed to the GDR's ultimate demise. Part II focuses on the first decade following unification, describing in detail the various and multi-layered linguistic practices that contributed to the phenomena of communicative dissonance and identity construction in unified Germany. While the author draws on an extensive array of research on the sociolinguistic consequences of unification (empirical studies of lexical difference and speech behaviors, research on language attitudes, ethnographic interviews), he is careful to point out both the value and limitations of this research. For example, the many quantitative, descriptive studies of lexical developments, while important, often fail to account for the varying sociolinguistic "burden" of some words over others (e.g., the differences between the GDR and FRG terms for "supermarket," Kaufhalle and Supermarkt respectively, are relatively unimportant as compared to the differences between the respective terms for "worker," Werktatiger and Arbeitnehmer], and often fall short of accounting for how words are embedded in discursive contexts (47). …
Liviu Chelcea - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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ancestors domestic groups and the Socialist State housing nationalization and restitution in romania
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2003Co-Authors: Liviu ChelceaAbstract:As in the vast majority of Socialist States that arose with the Soviet Union's postWorld War II hegemony over Eastern Europe, People's Republic of Romania nationalized (confiscated) a large number of privately owned houses. The de.clared intention of the State was to eliminate housing inequality and the private rental sector in urban areas. In 1950, the State appropriated both leased and family homes that were considered to have too much domestic space. The inhabitants of confiscated houses became tenants instead of owners. Tenants were made to live with the former owners in such expropriated domestic space. With the collapse of State socialism in 1989, former owners and their descendants began seeking to regain the property rights for these confiscated houses. In a limited number of cases they succeeded, although the majority of houses had been sold by the State to the sitting tenants at very low prices. Studying nationalization and restitution one may ask the following questions: What role does the home play in the reproduction and breakdown of kinship relations? What happens to kinship when property transmission is denied? Do the perceived feelings of closeness between ancestors and living kin vary when property is lost or reclaimed? Does the authority of the head of the household decrease with State intervention? What kind of social relations are established with tenant families placed into households by the State, with those that they
Goran Therborn - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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what does the ruling class do when it rules State apparatuses and State power under feudalism capitalism and socialism
2016Co-Authors: Goran TherbornAbstract:In his new book, Goran Therborn - author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, "Science, Class and Society" - looks at successive State structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis - input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows - to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of State power and State apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most far-reaching historical sense: its object is nothing less than the construction of systematic typology of the differences between the feudal State, the capitalist State and the Socialist State. Therborn ranges from the monarchies of mediaeval Europe through the bourgeois democracies of the west in the 20th century to the contemporary regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. The book ends with a major analytic survey of the strategies of working class parties for socialism, from the Second International to the Comintern to Eurocommunism, that applies the structural findings of Therborn's enquiry in the 'Future as History'. Written with lucidity and economy, "What Does the Ruling Class Do when it Rules?" represents a remarkable sociological and political synthesis.
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what does the ruling class do when it rules State apparatuses and State power under feudalism capitalism and socialism
2016Co-Authors: Goran TherbornAbstract:In his new book, Goran Therborn - author of the now standard comparative work on classical sociology and historical materialism, "Science, Class and Society" - looks at successive State structures in an arrestingly fresh perspective. Therborn uses the formal categories of modern system analysis - input mechanisms, processes of transformation, output flows - to advance a substantive Marxist analysis of State power and State apparatuses. His account of these is comparative in the most far-reaching historical sense: its object is nothing less than the construction of systematic typology of the differences between the feudal State, the capitalist State and the Socialist State. Therborn ranges from the monarchies of mediaeval Europe through the bourgeois democracies of the west in the 20th century to the contemporary regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. The book ends with a major analytic survey of the strategies of working class parties for socialism, from the Second International to the Comintern to Eurocommunism, that applies the structural findings of Therborn's enquiry in the 'Future as History'. Written with lucidity and economy, "What Does the Ruling Class Do when it Rules?" represents a remarkable sociological and political synthesis.
Roland Boer - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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after october towards a theory of the Socialist State
International Critical Thought, 2017Co-Authors: Roland BoerAbstract:ABSTRACTA consequence of the Russian Revolution was the emergence of the theory and practice of a new type of State. While the Soviet Union was not a federation, nation-State, empire or colonising power, it remains somewhat difficult to determine what type of State it was. This article offers a theoretical (rather than practical) analysis of the way the theoretical possibility of a new State, a Socialist State, could emerge. The first step of the argument deals with broader theories of the State, although the vast majority focus on the European situation, variously calling it a nation-State, liberal State, capitalist State or bourgeois State. One searches in vain for detailed theoretical studies of the Socialist State. The second step, therefore, concerns the first seeds of such a theory, which are found—perhaps surprisingly—in the works of Stalin.
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towards a theory of the Socialist State
2017Co-Authors: Roland BoerAbstract:In many respects, the arguments of much of the book lead to the final chapter on the State. It begins with the intriguing observation that the State which began to develop in the Soviet Union was not a federation, not a nation-State, not an empire, not a colonising power, whether externally or internally, but an entirely new State formation. In a European and West-Asian context, each form of the State mentioned trails theological assumptions and associations. But if the Soviet Union was not such a State, then what form of the State was it? How one understands the State turns on a dialectic of the universal and particular, manifested in terms of nationality, class, affirmative action, anti-colonialism, the definition of ‘people’ and the role of a Socialist State. The steps in the argument may be summarised as follows. First, a totalising unity produces hitherto unknown forms of diversity, as is manifested in the focus on class as a way to rethink the ‘national question’ (meaning here nationalities and not the bourgeois nation-State) and in the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Second, this dialectic provides the basis for the theoretical elaboration of the world’s first ‘affirmative action’ program. According to this program, nationalities were fostered, languages encouraged (to the point where new literate languages were created), and culture, education and political leadership actively nourished. Third, arising from the affirmative action program was the theoretical justification and practice of the international anti-colonial struggle. Fourth, within that international context we see the beginning of a new understanding of the State. This State is not comprised of a nation, since the term ‘nation’ was studiously avoided. Instead, it entailed a redefinition of the term ‘people’ (narod), in which the ‘Soviet people’, made up of all nationalities, was constituted by workers, collective farmers and intellectuals. But what did Stalin mean when he used the term ‘Socialist State’? He faced an initial problem, deriving from Lenin’s definition of the State as a manifestation of class struggle, and the latter’s prevarication over whether the State was an instrument or tool to be used by one class against another or whether it was indelibly shaped by the class in power. Stalin’s attempted solution is to argue that Lenin wrote only the first volume of The State and Revolution, having been unable to complete the work due to the outbreak of the October revolution. So Stalin proposes stages in the development of the Socialist State, in which the first stage accords with Lenin’s view, but the second stage moves beyond: internal class enemies have been destroyed, so one keeps a watch on external enemies; the classes of workers, farmers and intellectuals now work together in non-antagonistic ways (contradiction remains under socialism); and a strong State is required to enact the social and economic transformations characteristic of socialism. To these should be added the resolute focus on class, the affirmative action program, anti-colonialism, and the development of a new identity, ‘being Soviet’. Of course, this is only a beginning to analysis of the Socialist State, so one must analyse other Socialist States – especially China – to ascertain more mature practices.