“Keep the Home Fires Burning“: Fairy Tale Heroes and Heroines in an East German Heimat

2012 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Fritzsche
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Fairy Tales ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Black Forest ◽  
Harz Mountains ◽  
East German ◽  
Feature Adaptation ◽  
Live Action ◽  
The Devil

The article argues that the films Das kalte Herz (The Cold Heart, 1950) and Der Teufel von Mühlenberg (The Devil of Mill Mountain, 1955) functioned in two ways-as fairy tales and also as new Heimat or “homeland“ tale. Besides Wolfgang Staudte's The Story of Little Mook, these two films were the only two live action fairy tale films that appeared before East Germany's DEFA made its first Grimm feature adaptation in 1956, The Brave Little Tailor. Yet, unlike the Grimm-based films that take place in a generic “forest,“ these first two films take place explicitly in the Black Forest and the Harz Mountains, two locations synonymous with the beauty and timeless nature of past notions of German Heimat. The two films also engaged with the growing monetary and symbolic success of the West's postwar Heimatfilme or homeland films. The article focuses on how The Cold Heart and Mill Mountain contributed to the rearticulation of the emerging Heimat discourse in the early German Democratic Republic, with a particular focus on gender.

The Principles of State Governance of the German Democratic Republic

2020 ◽  
Vol 1(21) ◽  
pp. 37-51
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Kuźnik
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
German States ◽  
East German ◽  
State Governance ◽  
Council Of Ministers ◽  
National Defence

The aim of this article is to present the principles underlying the political system in force in the German Democratic Republic between 1949 and 1990, with a particular emphasis on the issue of the state of emergency law. The article describes the two Constitutions from 1949 and 1968 and the state institutions established under them, including the GDR People's Chamber, the Council of Ministers, the GDR State Council and the National Defence Council. It also discusses the constitutional solutions within the scope of the emergency law. The legal basis for the protection of the border between the two then existing German states was also considered. This article is based on the two East German Constitutions, other legal acts and on the principles of East German and Polish doctrine. The article consists of an introduction, three parts and a summary.

»die Träume gehören zweifellos zur Wirklichkeit«

2020 ◽  
pp. 11-24
Author(s):  
Caroline Roeder
Keyword(s):  
Young Adult ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Young Adult Literature ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Cultural Policies ◽  
Dream Narratives ◽  
Literary System

Artikelbeginn:[English title and abstract below] Theodor Storms Kindermärchen Der kleine Häwelmann, von dem Autor 1849 für seinen Sohn Hans verfasst und 1850 veröffentlicht, ist in seiner moralisch-komischen Form ein exemplarisches Exponat der Kinderliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Gemäß der biedermeierlich gestimmten, belehrenden Funktion des Textes steht kindliche Allmachtsfantasie im Mittelpunkt des Geschehens. Die Haltung des ›Mehr-mehr‹ überschreitet indes die Grenzen der Moralerzählung. Entgegen der abschreckenden Funktion scheint vielmehr der kleine Häwelmann in der Verschränkung von Norm-Übertritt und Eskapismus ein ›modernes‹ Kind seiner Entstehungszeit zu sein und durchaus mit den Figuren des Struwwelpeters vergleichbar, die der Arzt und Kinderpsychiater Heinrich Hoffmann 1845 entworfen hat.   »Dreams Undoubtedly Belong to Reality«Dream Narratives About Childhood and for Children The call for ›more!‹ is the force driving the protagonist of Theodor Storm’s literary fairy tale Der kleine Häwelmann (1850) on his imaginary journey through the night. This dream narrative is a combination of an exciting exploration of transcending borders with a hint of the moral tale, and can be seen as a model for the configuration of the dream motif in children’s and young adult literature. Although the dream narrative has a prominent place there, its investigation has hitherto almost exclusively taken place within the con­text of fantasy; the didactic functions of the dream, however, and the motif of the dream journey have largely been neglected. This article looks at how post­1945 children’s dream narratives explores representations of childhood. Benno Pludra’s Lütt Matten und die weiße Muschel (1963), a children’s story from the German Democratic Republic (GDR), is analysed and situated within the context of its literary system. Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) is next considered in relation to Pludra’s text in order to pro­vide a contrastive view to a key text from the Western literary system. Both texts were hugely innovative for their time and respective systems, both use Storm’s Häwelmann as an intertextual anchor, and both, as this analysis shows, reveal recognisable societal discourses about childhood and cultural policies for children.

Everyday Communism: New Social History of the German Democratic Republic

2004 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
SANDRINE KOTT
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
North Carolina ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social History ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Chapel Hill ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German

Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience. Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999), 388 pp., £14.00 (pb), ISBN 1-57181-182-6.Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und Eigensinn in der Diktatur (Cologne, Weimar and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1999) 367 pp., €39.90 (hb), ISBN 3-412-13598-4.Annegret Schüle, ‘Die Spinne’. Die Erfahrungsgeschichte weiblicher Industriearbeit im VEB Leipziger Baumwollspinnerei (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2001), 398 pp., €18.00 (pb), ISBN 3-934565-87-5.Patrick Major and Jonathan Osmond, eds., The Workers' and Peasants' State. Communism and Society in East Germany under Ulbricht 1945–71 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 272 pp., £15.99 (pb), ISBN 0-7190-6289-6.Joshua Feinstein, The Triumph of the Ordinary. Depictions of Daily Life in the East German Cinema 1949–1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 331 pp., £19.50 (pb), ISBN 0-8078-5385-2.

Occupation, Reparations, and Rebellion: The Soviets and the East German Uprising of 1953

2021 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-250
Author(s):  
Wayne Geerling ◽  
Gary B. Magee ◽  
Russell Smyth
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Internal Resistance ◽  
Military Bases ◽  
Local Production ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
East German ◽  
Regional Factors ◽  
Local Companies

Abstract Analysis of the link between the Soviet occupation of East Germany and internal resistance within the German Democratic Republic reveals that ongoing payment of reparations by East Germans out of local production—via the Soviet’s ownership of prominent local companies—affected both the incidence and the intensity of unrest at the precinct level during the uprising of June 17, 1953. This result is robust when controlling for variation in the presence of Soviet military bases and deaths in Soviet nkvd Special Camps, as well as a host of regional factors potentially correlated with differences in unrest.

Der Poet als unbeugsamer Dissident

Daphnis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 560-583
Author(s):  
Michael Hanstein
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Small Volume ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
West Germany ◽  
Totalitarian Regime ◽  
English Edition ◽  
Original Source ◽  
German Press ◽  
East German

In 1977 the East German author Hans Joachim Schädlich published Versuchte Nähe (English edition Approximation published in 1980), a small volume of short stories. While the Western German press praised Schädlich’s first work as a literary reflection of the society in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), Schädlich was marginalized as a dissident in the GDR and had to move to West Germany. One of the short stories in Versuchte Nähe is about the last days of the German renaissance author Nicodemus Frischlin, who, arrested by German authorities, died in prison. The story was appreciated for its style using a “Luther-like language”. Schädlich’s story is mainly based on a biography of Frischlin written by David Friedrich Strauss, a famous and prolific 19th century German author and theologian. Schädlich’s modification of the original source includes a description of the conditions of imprisonment and the heroification of Frischlin as an uncompromising critic of a totalitarian regime.

Sports, Politics, and “Wild Doping” in the East German Sporting “Miracle”

2019 ◽  
pp. 126-142
Author(s):  
Mike Dennis
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Internal Controls ◽  
Health Threats ◽  
East German ◽  
Elite Sports ◽  
Group Interests

Although the German Democratic Republic is well known for its highly centralized and clandestine doping program, the elite sports edifice was not the orderly mechanism associated with the Communist dictatorship. Recent research has uncovered intrinsic operational malfunctions, divergent group interests, and rivalries as clubs and national associations pursued status and material rewards. Despite elaborate internal controls, one of the outcomes was widespread “wild doping,” exceeding officially prescribed norms on the level and types of dosages administered to athletes who received unauthorized experimental steroid substances by coaches and physicians, posing potentially serious health threats to both youngsters and adults.

City Plans

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stangl
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
City Center ◽  
German State ◽  
Design Competition ◽  
East German ◽  
Political Turmoil ◽  
The City

Between 1945 and 1949 a series of modernist plans were developed for Berlin. In this time of political turmoil, planners and politicians projected a broad range of meanings onto the plans. After the founding of the East German state, Lothar Bolz orchestrated the adoption of socialist realism as state policy, requiring a return to traditional urban design. This theory included a range of tenets guiding planning, but Walter Ulbricht intervened to assure that planning would be dominated by a concern for parade routes leading to an immense square in the city center. In response to West Berlin’s international building exhibition, the German Democratic Republic held their own design competition for a “socialist” city center in 1958. The recent introduction of industrialized building, along with uncertainty and debate over the nature of “socialist” architecture, was evident in designs with a range of influences, including international modernism, midcentury modernism, and socialist realism.

What Is and to What End Does One Study the History of East German Literature?

PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 594-609
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Emmerich ◽  
Nicole G. Burgoyne ◽  
Andrew B. B. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Critical Evaluation ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
East German ◽  
The Right

East german literary history is a case study of how political and cultural institutions interact. the state's cultural regime mo-nopolized the right to publish within its borders and demanded that the nation's new art describe contemporary life or its precedents. Even authors seen in the West as dissidents understood themselves, more often than not, as pursuing that goal and the broader aims of socialism with their work. During the lifespan of the German Democratic Republic, this political albatross weighed on all literary scholarship. Even now, whatever their feelings toward the socialist state, scholars, critics, and readers are bound to approach a text from East Germany as an artifact of its political culture—and rightly, because the political sphere encroached heavily on the artistic. But since German unification, the rise and fall in the stock of so many East German authors has directly resulted from political revelations, raising a number of troubling questions. Though historical distance seemed to have sprung up as abruptly as the Berlin Wall had come down, to what extent does scholarship from the German Democratic Republic represent only a heightened case of what is always true of literary history— namely, that political motivation colors critical evaluation? Is it possible to consider a work of literature with no recourse to the social and political circumstances under which it was written? And would it even be desirable to do so?

Popular Discontent and Political Activism in the GDR

1993 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 265-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Fulbrook
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Dissent ◽  
Peace Initiatives ◽  
East German ◽  
Apparent Stability

The German Democratic Republic was long noted for its apparent stability, efficiency and political quiescence, in contrast to the more turbulent domestic histories of neighbouring Poland and Czechoslovakia. In established narratives of East German history, the sole evidence of mass popular unrest before the autumn of 1989 was the June Uprising of 1953. After this, with a few isolated exceptions, East Germans simply kept their heads down. ‘Dissent’ was for the most part an activity associated with a few intellectuals–Harich, Havemann, Bahro–until the growth of oppositional movements associated with unofficial peace initiatives and environmentalist groups in the 1980s1. To all outward appearances, this sketch was correct. What now requires reconsideration, however, are the underlying reasons for these appearances, and the evaluation – indeed, the very characterisation – of patterns of popular political dissent in the GDR.

The Meanings of Labor: East German Women's Work in the Transition from Nazism to Communism

1995 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-342 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth H. Tobin ◽  
Jennifer Gibson
Keyword(s):  
German Democratic Republic ◽  
Rolling Mill ◽  
Democratic Republic ◽  
The Other ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Large Piece ◽  
Heavy Machinery ◽  
Paid Labor ◽  
East German ◽  
Ideological Commitment

In Christoph Wetzel's 1988 painting, An Everyday Story, the divided canvas proudly depicts women's accomplishments in the German Democratic Republic (Figure 1). On one side, a woman operates a large piece of heavy machinery in a rolling mill, cool and competent behind the enormous mass of metal and gears. On the other side, the same woman helps her two children prepare for school in the morning. In the act of combing her daughter's hair, she looks out directly at the viewer, her expression asking: “And what are you surprised at?” This painting, displayed as part of a 1995 exposition on art commissioned by government agencies in the GDR, graphically displays that government's ideological commitment to women's paid labor, especially in jobs that, in capitalist societies, are often thought to be inappropriate for women.

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