Sociability and Its Enemies: German Political Theory After 1945

Scandinavian-Canadian Studies, 2017

Central European History, 2014

Even more significant was the struggle over the interpretation of the National Socialist past. Bill Niven addresses this issue in one of the collection's standout chapters. This debate over the past was hardly an "academic" affair: at stake was the issue of the legitimacy of one regime and the illegitimacy of the other. Each side sought to associate itself with the antifascist traditions and actors of Germany's recent past. Each sought to "mire the other in allegations that it embodied the bad German traditions" (49-50) that had brought about the Nazi dictatorship, and was thus illegitimate. Niven speaks of the "sideways gaze" with which Germans on both sides of the divide looked at the Nazi past during the period he investigates. Looking "East or West respectively for the guilty party" (59) was much less difficult, he argues, than looking backward. If looking backward presented problems, looking forward was no less fraught with challenges, especially in the East. Patrick Major's fascinating chapter on the precensorship of science fiction literature in East Germany portrays a complicated relationship among official censors, writers, publishers, and an international community of science fiction authors and readers. Out of this came, over time, a surprising degree of latitude for sci-fi authors in the East. Also surprising was the extent to which West German film became a staple in the East German market, as demonstrated in Rosemary Stott's chapter on West German film import in the GDR. After all, as she notes, "at an official level, the FRG was (with the possible exception of the United States) the most mistrusted of all the western film-producing nations" (164). The West Germans did not, it seems, have the same appetite for film from the East-a clear instance of the symmetrical entanglement that is the main focus of most, if not all, of the contributions in this collection of essays that originated at a symposium.

Central European History, 2013

German metropolis had considerable resonance both within and outside Germany. Still, one wonders about other cases-Hamburg, for instance, or the badly bombed cities of the Ruhr, not to mention rural Germany, where sexuality might have been mapped out and imagined entirely differently.

GDR bulletin, 1990

International Labor and Working-class History, 1998

Cold Revolution. Central and Eastern Europe Societies in the Face of Socialist Realism, 1948–1959, eds. Joanna Kordjak, Jérôme Bazin, Mousse Publishing, 2020