Seminar Questions:

• How should we characterise the political system that emerged in East Germany after 1949?

• What was everyday life like in the GDR?

• How antifascist was East Germany? What role did antifascism play in the legitimization of the state?

• How serious a challenge to the East German regime was the 1953 uprising?

Reading List:

Required Reading:

• Konrad H. Jarausch, 'The Failure of East German Antifascism: Some Ironies of History as Politics', German Studies Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb., 1991), pp. 85-102

Primary Sources:

• Constitution of the German Democratic Republic (October 7, 1949)
• "That Was When I Knew: I Had to Become a Refugee" (March 19, 1953)
• Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, "Stones against Red Tanks" (June 25, 1953)
• Christa Wolf, One Day a Year, 1960-1964.

Further Reading: General Accounts:

• Mary Fulbrook, A concise history of Germany (2004), Chapter 7
• Andrew I. Port, 'Democracy and Dictatorship in the Cold War: the Two Germanies, 1949–1961' in Helmut Walser Smith (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern German History (OUP, 2012)
• Mary Fulbrook, A History of Germany, 1918-2008: The Divided Nation (Oxford UP, 2009), pp. 113-267
• Mary Fulbrook, Anatomy of a dictatorship: Inside the GDR, 1949-1989 (Oxford UP, 1995).
• Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State. East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (Yale UP, 2005), pp. 23-88; 115-140.
• Hope Harrison, Driving the Soviets up the Wall: Soviet-East German Relations, 1953-1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
• Dietrich Orlow, 'The GDR's Failed Search for a National Identity, 1945-1989', German Studies Review Vol. 29, No. 3 (Oct., 2006), pp. 537-558
• Dolores L. Augustine, 'The Power Question in GDR History', German Studies Review Vol. 34, No. 3 (October 2011), pp. 633-652
• Manfred Wilke, The Path to the Berlin EWall: ritical Stages in the History of Divided Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2014).
• Justinian Jampol, The East German Handbook (Taschen, 2019)

Antifsacism and the Relationship with the Nazi Past:

• Heinrich Best and Axel Salheiser, 'Shadows of the Past: National Socialist Backgrounds of the GDR's Functional Elites', German Studies Review Vol. 29, No. 3 (Oct., 2006), pp. 589-602
• Alan McDougall, "A Duty to Forget: The 'Hitler Youth Generation' and the Transition from Nazism to Communism in Postwar East Germany, c.1945-49", German History, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2008), pp. 24-46
• Josie McLellan, Anti-Fascism and Memory in East Germany: Remembering the International Brigades 1945-1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004)
• Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
• Clara Oberle, "Reconfiguring Postwar Antifascism: Reflections on the History of Ideology," New German Critique 39 (3, 2012)
• Hugo García; Mercedes Yusta Rodrigo; Xavier Tabet; Cristina Clímaco (eds.), Rethinking Antifascism (Berghahn, 2016)
• Corey Ross, The East German dictatorship : problems and perspectives in the interpretation of the GDR (Arnold, 2002)
• William Glenn Gray, Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany, 1949-1969 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003)
• Peter Monteath, "A Day to Remember: East Germany's Day of Rememberance for the Victims of Fascism", German History, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2008), pp. 195-218
• special issue on Legacies of Antifascism of the New German Critique (2, 1996)

The Police State and Dissent:

• Gary Bruce, The Firm: The Inside Story of the Stasi (2012)
• Anna Funder, Stasiland : stories from behind the Berlin Wall (2004)
• Jens Gieseke, The history of the Stasi : East Germany's secret police, 1945-1990 (Berghahn Books, 2014)
• Richard Millington, State, society and memories of the uprising of 17 June 1953 in the GDR (Palgrave, 2014)
• Gareth Dale, Popular Protest in East Germany (Routledge, 2005), Chapter 1
• Martin Sabrow, "Consensus and Coercion: The Third Reich and the German Democratic Republic in Comparative Perspective" in Jorn Leonhard & Lothar Funk (eds.), Ten Years of German Unification: Transfer, Transformation, Incorporation (2002), pp. 69-80
• John C. Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism and Dissent: The East German Opposition and its Legacy (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

Everyday Life and Culture in the GDR:

• Mary Fulbrook, Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities After Hitler (Berghahn Books, 2013)
• Ralf Ahrens, 'Planning Priorities, Managing Shortages: Industrial Policy in the German Democratic Republic, from Stalinism to Welfare Dictatorship' in Christian Grabas and Alexander Nützenadel (eds.), Industrial Policy in Europe after 1945 (Palgrave, 2014)
• Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (Oxford University Press, 2010)
• Barbara Einhorn, Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender, and Women’s Movements in East Central Europe (Verso, 1993).
• Jonathan Grix, "Revolution and Transformation in East Germany: Revisiting the Dominant Paradigms" in Jorn Leonhard & Lothar Funk (eds.), Ten Years of German Unification: Transfer, Transformation, Incorporation (2002), pp. 56-68
• Donna Harsch, ‘Society, the State, and Abortion in East Germany 1950-1972,’ American Historical Review (1997), Vol. 102, No. 1, pp. 53-84.
• Dagmar Herzog, ‘East Germany’s Sexual Evolution’, in Pence and Betts (eds.), Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics (Univ. of Michigan Press, 2008): 71-95
• Young-Sun Hong, ‘Cigarette Butts and the Building of Socialism in East Germany’, Central European History (2003), Vol. 35, No. 3, pp. 327-344.
• Konrad Jarausch (ed), Dictatorship as experience: Towards a Socio-cultural History of the GDR, trans. Duffy (Berghahn Books, 1999).
• Jeffrey Kopstein, ‘Reform Abandoned: The Elusive Search for Socialist Modernity, 1962-1970’, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945-1989 (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1997): 41-72.
• Josie McLellan, Love in the Time of Communism (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
• Maxim Leo, Red Love: The Story of an East German Family (London: Pushkin Press, 2013) -- memoir of a prominent East German family
• Ina Merkel, ‘From a Socialist Society of Labor into a Consumer Society? The Transformation of East German Identities and Systems,’ in Kennedy (ed.), Envisioning Eastern Europe: Postcommunist Cultural Studies (Univ. of Michigan Press, 1994), pp. 55-65.
• Robert Moeller, "The Third Reich in Post-War German Memory" in Jane Caplan (ed.), Nazi Germany (OUP, 2008), pp. 246-266
• David Tomkins, "Orchestrating Identity: Concerts for the Masses and the Shaping of East German Society", German History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2012), pp. 412-428