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This article will argue that the popularization of the amateur genre 'family film' in guides, manuals and a leisure film festival became a paternalistic strategy to regulate individual moviemakers in state socialism. It reveals the benefits of historical research on guiding literature and guidelines at an amateur festival in East Germany. Analyzing promoted norms diachronically points to a changing understanding of leisure in socialism. Additionally, it reveals a complex media history that is not reduced to top-down orders. On the contrary, guides display constant negotiations between state regulation and individualism. Thus, this paper questions a perspective on private media production in the GDR that is often politicized by categories such as propaganda or subversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the ideological co-option of German folk music by the Nazi regime during the Third Reich (1933-1945), the genre’s performative practice was highly marginalized. Revivalists in both German post-war states initially recast German folk music in a recourse to the soundscape and song themes of Irish vernacular music, before reconnecting with a 19th century oppositional German folk song repertoire. In the GDR, songs of the 1848 Revolution were curated as the state’s ‘democratic’ cultural heritage and could not be readily censored. This allowed artists to perform historical folk songs to metaphorically critique circumstances existing in East Germany. Drawing upon fieldwork conducted among former GDR folk musicians, this paper explores their encounters in relation to established post-war German folk music discourses on the relationship between artists and state authorities. Concrete analysis of a 19th century emigration song uncovers how folk musicians could subversively pass comment on state-imposed travel restrictions to the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do individuals make sense of events that are associated with major social‐systemic changes? The paper explores the relationship between “German reunification” and processes of meaning making and identity formation by former citizens of the German Democratic Republic. Analyzing twenty‐six in‐depth, life‐history interviews of East Germans born in two different generational cohorts, I examine the various narrative strategies employed that allow these East Germans to embed the experience of the German reunification through means of narrative emplotment. Diverting from a notion that it is historical events that shape our autobiographical memories, I argue that historical events are selected from a historical tool kit which provides individuals with narrative resources from which narrative identity can be formulated. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/d69JXE0Ryqw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Egon Hartmann (1919-2009) was a prominent East German planner and a rising star of the architectural scene in the early years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). A graduate from the College for Architecture and Fine Arts, he became Chief Architect of Thuringia in 1951 and built such remarkable architectures like the government high-rise in Erfurt. Nevertheless, he left the GDR in 1954, settled in West Germany where he first worked in Mainz and then moved to Munich and thereby became a 'crosser', one of the few planners who successfully worked on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This paper traces Egon Hartmann's private--professional ties based on the letters sent to/ from him across the inner-German border that have been archived in his estate. It aims to show that integrating a personal dimension and very specific patterns of communication into the analysis of transnational connections, transfers, exchanges, and cooperation of planners reveals rather informal ties that created unexpected relations across the Iron Curtain. Nevertheless, those were a crucial resource for the planners' career and private life, when formal bonds were destabilized due to large-scale political tensions and the division of the two worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under state socialist economic policy, the concept of large-scale factories played an important role. The assumption was that large productivity gains would result from large-scale organisation and so large-scale concepts were also applied to the transport sector. Thirty years before Western management started outsourcing truck transportation from their factories, from 1957 state socialist traffic policy in the German Democratic Republic pulled truck fleets out of nationally owned enterprises, concentrating them into large and dedicated transport service enterprises. As this policy did not increase productivity, it was partly revised in the 1960s. The centralization policy was unsuccessful because state-owned enterprises struggled against the state socialist transport department to keep the fleets they needed to conduct business. Conflicts between the state socialist ideology of centralization and the operational needs of transportation within commerce, construction and industry took on many forms. For example the enterprises transferred only old trucks to the service companies. The paper shows that the theorem of the ‘economies of scale' that was derived in the process industries does not apply in the transportation trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the position of the Eastern Bloc countries in the economic globalisation which spread in the last third of the twentieth century. The main emphasis is on the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Therefore two significant dimensions of economic globalisation have been selected: trade and capital-market transactions. The first part of this paper provides an outline of globalisation processes and their causes during the 1970s and 1980s. The second part deals with the role of Eastern bloc countries in globalisation trends, including an examination of the motivations and intentions behind their foreign-trade operations. This becomes the basis to explore the attitude of Eastern bloc countries to the institutions of globalisation (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT], the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the World Bank). As it turns out, it seems questionable whether the Eastern bloc countries had ever been able actively to determine the conditions of globalisation. They probably only had an influence as their very existence presented a line of demarcation to the global world: because of their own policies and because of the defence reactions of the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economic restructuring since German unification has produced gender-differentiated patterns in the rural workplace. Most studies of East German labour market changes have illustrated the nature of such patterns in quantitative terms whilst neglecting their impact on everyday life. The relationship between the significance of work for women's quality of life and self-identification, and women's withdrawal from the public has, however, remained under-explored. Based on data obtained through correspondence and in-depth interviews in Mecklenburg-Westpommerania, this paper aims to address this relationship by discussing women's work-related experiences before and since unification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]