Explore the vast range of titles available.

This is the first book in English to survey the Eastern German literary trend of employing humor and satire to come to terms with experiences in the German Democratic Republic and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As sophisticated attempts to make sense of socialism's failure and a difficult unification process, these contemporary texts help define Germany today from a specific, Eastern German perspective. Grounded in politics and history, ten humorous and satirical novels are analyzed for their literary aesthetics and language, cultural critiques, and socio-political insights. The texts include popular novels such as Thomas Brussig's Helden wie wir, Ingo Schulze's Simple Storys, and Jens Sparschuh's Der Zimmerspringbrunnen, as well as lesser-known but equally relevant works like Schlehweins Giraffe by Bernd Schirmer and Katerfrühstück by Erich Loest. A broad spectrum of humor and satire theories is applied to probe texts from various angles and suggest multi-layered answers to the question of how these literary modes function in postwall Germany to construct a specifically Eastern German identity. Interviews the author conducted with five of the satirists are appended as primary sources and contribute to the interpretation of the texts.

This book details the Soviet Military Liaison Mission (SMLM) in West Germany and the U.S. Military Liaison Mission (USMLM) in East Germany as microcosms of the Cold War strategic intelligence and counterintelligence landscape. Thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet and U.S. Military Liaison Missions are all but forgotten. Their operation was established by a post-WWII Allied occupation forces' agreement, and missions had relative freedom to travel and collect intelligence throughout East and West Germany from 1947 until 1990.This book addresses Cold War intelligence and counterintelligence in a manner that provides a broad historical perspective and then brings the reader to a never-before documented artifact of Cold War history. The book details the intelligence/counterintelligence dynamic that was among the most emblematic of the Cold War. Ultimately, the book addresses a saga that remains one of the true Cold War enigmas.

Based on films produced in the East German company Defa, the author presents a hypothesis of regulated multiculturalism of the GDR cinema. He indicates multicultural discourses in historical films about distant and more recent history: the multicultural borderland of West Prussia in the late 19th century (Levins Mühle, dir. Horst Seemann, 1980) and the confrontation of Prussian and Uruguayan culture at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries (Die Besteigung des Chimborazo, dir. Rainer Simon, 1989). Then he deals with issues concerning the meeting of East German and Polish cultures (Die Schlüssel, dir. Egon Günther, 1972/1974; Über sieben Brücken mußt du gehn, dir. Hans Werner, 1978). The author also discusses the propagandist use of the images of Angela Davis and Dean Read in two films related to the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin in August 1973. However, the main emphasis is put on films thematizing political emigration from South America (Ein April hat 30 Tage, dir. Gunther Scholz, 1979; Isabel auf der Treppe, dir. Hannelore Unterberg, 1984; Blonder Tango, Lothar Warneke, 1986).

This collection of academic articles and personal reflections explores German reunification and the legacy of GDR literature and culture. It examines a broad range of genres and combines perspectives on both lesser-known and more established writers.

Founded as a counterweight to the Communist broadcasters in East Germany, Radio in the American Sector (RIAS) became one of the most successful public information operations conducted against the Soviet Bloc. Cold War on the Airwaves examines the Berlin-based organization's history and influence on the political worldview of the people--and government--on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Nicholas Schlosser draws on broadcast transcripts, internal memoranda, listener letters, and surveys by the U.S. Information Agency to profile RIAS. Its mission: to undermine the German Democratic Republic with propaganda that, ironically, gained in potency by obeying the rules of objective journalism. Throughout, Schlosser examines the friction inherent in such a contradictory project and propaganda's role in shaping political culture. He also portrays how RIAS's primarily German staff influenced its outlook and how the organization both competed against its rivals in the GDR and pushed communist officials to alter their methods in order to keep listeners. From the occupation of Berlin through the airlift to the construction of the Berlin Wall, Cold War on the Airwaves offers an absorbing view of how public diplomacy played out at a flashpoint of East-West tension.

More than twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, this book looks afresh at some of the lasting legacies of that period in history.It does so by focusing on individual life trajectories of a group of people whose adolescence was shaped by the politics of socialism and the transitions within it.

This is a major new account of the Soviet occupation of postwar Germany and the beginning of the Cold War. Dr Filip Slaveski shows how in the immediate aftermath of war the Red Army command struggled to contain the violence of soldiers against German civilians and, at the same time, feed and rebuild the country. This task was then assumed by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG) which was established to impose order on this chaos. Its attempt, however, intensified the battle for resources and power among competing occupation organs, especially SVAG and the army, which spilled over from threats and sabotage into fighting and shootouts in the streets. At times, such conflicts threatened to paralyse occupation governance, leaving armed troops, liberated POWs and slave labourers free to roam. SVAG's successes in reducing the violence and reconstructing eastern Germany were a remarkable achievement in the chaotic aftermath of war.

The article is devoted to the memory mechanisms ob-served in West German authors’ films on the subject of theGDR, especially the turn of 1989 and 1990. It mainly con-cerns prosthetic memory constructed on the basis of me-dia coverage, and not direct participation in the events (ep-isodic memory), which was typical for film representationsof the FRG authors (including Volker Schlöndorff, HelmaSanders-Brahms, Margarethe von Trotta). Focusing on thefirst decade after the unification also gives one a chance tocapture functional memory in its rudimentary phase, as itexploits selected and permanent motifs, facts and events(oppressive everyday life of the GDR, Stasi supervision,events from the breakthrough period, particularly the fallof the Wall, the beginning of united Germany) in order toshape and legitimize identity.

No country can rival the sheer diversity of intelligence organizations that Germany has experienced over the past 300 years. Given its pivotal geographical and political position in Europe, Germany was a magnet for foreign intelligence operatives, especially during the Cold War. As a result of this, it is no wonder that during certain periods of history Germany was probably busier spying on its own citizens than on its enemies. Because of the Gestapo and the SS of Nazi Germany to the Stasi of the German Democratic Republic, the fear of domestic abuse by security agencies with police powers runs far deeper in German society than elsewhere in the West. The Historical Dictionary of German Intelligence presents the turbulent history of German intelligence through a chronology, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on the agencies and agents, the operations and equipment, the tradecraft and jargon, and many of the countries involved. No military reference collection is complete without it.

In the aftermath of World War II, American policymakers turned to the task of rebuilding Europe while keeping communism at bay. In Germany, formally divided since 1949,the United States prioritized the political, economic, and, eventually, military integration of the fledgling Federal Republic with the West. The extraordinary success story of forging this alliance has dominated our historical under-standing of the American-German relationship. Largely left out of the grand narrative of American–German relations were most East Germans who found themselves caught under Soviet and then communist control by the post-1945 geo-political fallout of the war that Nazi Germany had launched. They were the ones who most dearly paid the price for the country's division. This book writes the East Germans—both leadership and general populace—back into that history as objects of American policy and as historical agents in their own right Based on recently declassified documents from American, Russian, and German archives, this book demonstrates that U.S. efforts from 1945 to 1953 went beyond building a prosperous democracy in western Germany and \"containing\" Soviet-Communist power to the east. Under the Truman and then the Eisenhower administrations, American policy also included efforts to undermine and \"roll back\" Soviet and German communist control in the eastern part of the country. This story sheds light on a dark-er side to the American Cold War in Germany: propaganda, covert operations, economic pressure, and psychological warfare. Christian F. Ostermann takes an international history approach, capturing Soviet and East German responses and actions, and drawing a rich and complex picture of the early East–West confrontation in the heart of Europe.