Life Stories From The German Democratic Republic

More than thirty years after German reunification, Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic addresses how life in the GDR is remembered, thereby enriching and complexifying the narratives of East German life found in public history, museums, tourist venues, film, media and popular fiction. The frequent stress on material lack, social restrictions and the repressive state is expanded and reconfigured by interviewees who variously both challenge and confirm widespread assumptions about what it meant to live in the GDR. Aimed at a wide readership, this book gives English-speaking readers access to varied and detailed accounts of everyday life, individual engagement with state institutions and different views of GDR politics, society and culture.

The real life stories of eight East Germans caught up in the dramatic transition from Communism to Capitalism by the fall of the Berlin Wall - and what they feel about life after the Wall.

Life Stories from the German Democratic Republic offers detailed accounts of everyday life, state institutions, and different views of politics, society and culture across decades that challenge and complexify our understandings of what it meant to live in the GDR.

Stasiland tells true stories of people who heroically resisted the communist dictatorship of East Germany, and of people who worked for its secret police, the Stasi. Internationally hailed as a classic, it is ‘fascinating, entertaining, hilarious, horrifying and very important’ (Tom Hanks) and ‘a heartbreaking, beautifully written book.’ (Claire Tomalin). East Germany was one of the most intrusive surveillance states of all time. One in 7 people spied on their friends, family and colleagues. In ‘the most humane and sensitive way’ (J.M. Coetzee) Funder tells the true stories of four people who had the extraordinary courage to refuse to collaborate with the Stasi, and the price they paid. She meets Miriam Weber, who was imprisoned at 16 after scaling the Berlin Wall. She drinks with the legendary “Mik Jegger” of the Eastern Bloc who was ‘disappeared’. And she finds former Stasi men who defend their regime long past its demise, and yearn for the second coming of Communism. Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction published in English in 2004. It was a finalist for the Guardian First Book Award, the W.H. Heinemann Award, the Index Freedom of Expression Awards, The Age Book of the Year Awards, the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (Innovation in Writing). It is read in schools and universities in many countries, and has been adapted for CD and the stage by The National Theatre, London.

The appearance of a hastily-constructed barbed wire entanglement through the heart of Berlin during the night of 12-13 August 1961 was both dramatic and unexpected. Within days, it had started to metamorphose into a structure that would come to symbolise the brutal insanity of the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. A city of almost four million was cut ruthlessly in two, unleashing a potentially catastrophic East-West crisis and plunging the entire world for the first time into the fear of imminent missile-borne apocalypse. This threat would vanish only when the very people the Wall had been built to imprison, breached it on the historic night of 9 November 1989. Frederick Taylor's eagerly awaited new book reveals the strange and chilling story of how the initial barrier system was conceived, then systematically extended, adapted and strengthened over almost thirty years. Patrolled by vicious dogs and by guards on shoot-to-kill orders, the Wall, with its more than 300 towers, became a wired and lethally booby-trapped monument to a world torn apart by fiercely antagonistic ideologies. The Wall had tragic consequences in personal and political terms, affecting the lives of Germans and non-Germans alike in a myriad of cruel, inhuman and occasionally absurd ways. The Berlin Wall is the definitive account of a divided city and its people.

Born in 1920 into a communist family in Berlin, Helmuth Stoecker was forced to emigrate to Britain in 1933 after the arrest of his father by the Nazis. In 1947 he returned to what was now East Germany, and began an academic career as an historian at the Humboldt-University in East Berlin. Later he became one of the German Democratic Republic's foremost specialists in German colonial history and the history of Africa. After the collapse of the GDR, shortly before he died in 1994, Helmuth Stoecker wrote down these reflections on his life as an academic. He intended this book to explain, from his point of view, the rise and fall of the socialism in the GDR. to non-academic English-speaking readers. It contains some details of particular interest to those who are interested in scientific life in the GDR, as well as some personal reflections on the daily life conditions there.

Describes the lived experiences of African students in communist East Germany to shed new light on the history of Germany, Africa, and decolonization

Four East Germans corresponded for decades with an American teacher, openly sharing about their frustrations, joys, and challenges of living in a communist country. Author David F. Strack kept those personal letters and has now distilled them into a riveting memoir about what life was like behind the Iron Curtain. Read about the lives of Gerhard, Jutta, Jurgen, and Barbara in their own words, as they share about their jobs, families, and political opinions. Learn how the fall of the Wall and the reuniting of "Ost und West" affected their lives, bringing wonderful freedoms to all of them, yet also economic disappointment to one. LETTERS OVER THE WALL is an enthralling memoir, chronicling four lives over a span of forty years, during a time of political upheaval and great societal change."

An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, “exit,” is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, “voice,” is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change “from within.” The efficiency of the competitive mechanism, with its total reliance on exit, is questioned for certain important situations. As exit often undercuts voice while being unable to counteract decline, loyalty is seen in the function of retarding exit and of permitting voice to play its proper role. The interplay of the three concepts turns out to illuminate a wide range of economic, social, and political phenomena. As the author states in the preface, “having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of ‘unhappy’ top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little.”

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