Patrick Major
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199243280
- eISBN:
- 9780191714061
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199243280.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on 13 August 1961 18 million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the ...
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Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on 13 August 1961 18 million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. This new history rejects traditional, top‐down approaches to Cold War politics, exploring instead how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, ‘caught out’ by Sunday the Thirteenth. Party, police, and Stasi reports reveal why one in six East Germans fled the country during the 1950s, undermining communist rule and forcing the eleventh‐hour decision by Khrushchev and Ulbricht to build a wall along the Cold War's frontline. Did East Germans resist or come to terms with immurement? Did the communist regime become more or less dictatorial within the confines of the so‐called ‘Antifascist Defence Rampart’? Using film and literature, but also the GDR's losing battle against Beatlemania, Patrick Major's cross‐disciplinary study suggests that popular culture both reinforced and undermined the closed society. Linking external and internal developments, Major argues that the GDR's official quest for international recognition, culminating in Ostpolitik and United Nations membership in the early 1970s, became its undoing, unleashing a human rights movement which fed into, but then broke with, the protests of 1989. After exploring the reasons for the fall of the Wall and reconstructing the heady days of the autumn revolution, the author reflects on the fate of the Wall after 1989, as it moved from demolition into the realm of memory.Less
Few historical changes occur literally overnight, but on 13 August 1961 18 million East Germans awoke to find themselves walled in by an edifice which was to become synonymous with the Cold War: the Berlin Wall. This new history rejects traditional, top‐down approaches to Cold War politics, exploring instead how the border closure affected ordinary East Germans, from workers and farmers to teenagers and even party members, ‘caught out’ by Sunday the Thirteenth. Party, police, and Stasi reports reveal why one in six East Germans fled the country during the 1950s, undermining communist rule and forcing the eleventh‐hour decision by Khrushchev and Ulbricht to build a wall along the Cold War's frontline. Did East Germans resist or come to terms with immurement? Did the communist regime become more or less dictatorial within the confines of the so‐called ‘Antifascist Defence Rampart’? Using film and literature, but also the GDR's losing battle against Beatlemania, Patrick Major's cross‐disciplinary study suggests that popular culture both reinforced and undermined the closed society. Linking external and internal developments, Major argues that the GDR's official quest for international recognition, culminating in Ostpolitik and United Nations membership in the early 1970s, became its undoing, unleashing a human rights movement which fed into, but then broke with, the protests of 1989. After exploring the reasons for the fall of the Wall and reconstructing the heady days of the autumn revolution, the author reflects on the fate of the Wall after 1989, as it moved from demolition into the realm of memory.
ALAN McDOUGALL
- Published in print:
- 2004
- Published Online:
- January 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199276271
- eISBN:
- 9780191706028
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199276271.003.0005
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
The construction of the Berlin Wall provided the SED leadership with much-needed breathing space to continue the project of building socialism in the GDR. But the improved living standards that now ...
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The construction of the Berlin Wall provided the SED leadership with much-needed breathing space to continue the project of building socialism in the GDR. But the improved living standards that now seemed feasible without the threat of Republikflucht required greater productivity, which in turn required not only economic reforms but also a more widespread relaxation of the SED dictatorship. Reforming the party's youth policy, and particularly the FDJ's role in it, constituted an integral part of this process. This chapter focuses on the period 1963-1965, when Walter Ulbricht initiated a reform programme for the FDJ.Less
The construction of the Berlin Wall provided the SED leadership with much-needed breathing space to continue the project of building socialism in the GDR. But the improved living standards that now seemed feasible without the threat of Republikflucht required greater productivity, which in turn required not only economic reforms but also a more widespread relaxation of the SED dictatorship. Reforming the party's youth policy, and particularly the FDJ's role in it, constituted an integral part of this process. This chapter focuses on the period 1963-1965, when Walter Ulbricht initiated a reform programme for the FDJ.
Patrick Major
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- February 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199243280
- eISBN:
- 9780191714061
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199243280.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History
Examines the motives for Republikflucht or ‘flight from the Republic’, the GDR's term for defection to the West. After a brief discussion of the merits of political and economic explanations for the ...
More
Examines the motives for Republikflucht or ‘flight from the Republic’, the GDR's term for defection to the West. After a brief discussion of the merits of political and economic explanations for the exodus, which accounted for one in six East Germans, the chapter charts the flights using the detailed statistics compiled by the GDR's Volkspolizei. The impact is explored of political campaigns, for instance ahead of the insurrection of 1953 or accompanying the 1958 economic campaigns outlined above. Particular weight is given to economic motivations, especially from the mid‐1950s. Finally, the author suggests that ‘situational factors', regarding an individual's fortunes during and after the Second World War, one's subsequent political exposure within the party and state apparatus, and one's personal psychology, were an often ignored trigger for the final decision to leave. The chapter uses a mixture of official GDR police and Stasi reports, as well as letters from leavers and West German interviews. Collectively, East Germans were able to blackmail the system with the threat of flight, even if they did not choose to leave.Less
Examines the motives for Republikflucht or ‘flight from the Republic’, the GDR's term for defection to the West. After a brief discussion of the merits of political and economic explanations for the exodus, which accounted for one in six East Germans, the chapter charts the flights using the detailed statistics compiled by the GDR's Volkspolizei. The impact is explored of political campaigns, for instance ahead of the insurrection of 1953 or accompanying the 1958 economic campaigns outlined above. Particular weight is given to economic motivations, especially from the mid‐1950s. Finally, the author suggests that ‘situational factors', regarding an individual's fortunes during and after the Second World War, one's subsequent political exposure within the party and state apparatus, and one's personal psychology, were an often ignored trigger for the final decision to leave. The chapter uses a mixture of official GDR police and Stasi reports, as well as letters from leavers and West German interviews. Collectively, East Germans were able to blackmail the system with the threat of flight, even if they did not choose to leave.
