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Pleasures in Socialism
This volume shows how the rise of consumer culture took a unique form in Eastern Europe. It investigates the ways in which pleasurable activities were both a space in which these communist governments tried to insinuate themselves and thereby further expand the reach of their authority.
Into Russian Nature
National parks are perhaps the most recognized environmental protection institution in the world and have long attracted the interest of historians. This is the first academic work on Russian national parks. It spans from the years before the Great October Revolution to the present and examines movements to establish national parks from European Russia to Siberia and the Far East. It is a story of grandiose visions in which Russian environmentalists conceived of ways to alter the state's relationship to nature and of demoralizing disappointment when the lofty ambitions of different park visionaries fell far short of their hopes.
Amnesiopolis
Amnesiopolis explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It focuses particularly on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place - one defined by pure functionality and rationality - a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism. Eli Rubin employs methodologies from critical geography, urban history, architectural history, environmental history, and everyday life history to ask whether their experience was a ra...
The War in Their Minds
A pathbreaking study of the psychic afflictions of German soldiers returning from the Second World War
Mnemonic Ecologies
An exploration of the Green Belt conservation project between the former East and West Germanies and its relationship to emergent ecosystems, trauma, and memorialization. The first book-length scholarly treatment of Germany’s largest conservation project, the Green Belt, Mnemonic Ecologies by Sonja Pieck presents a new interdisciplinary approach: that effective restoration and conservation of wounded land must merge ecology with memory. Since the Cold War’s end in 1989, German conservationists have transformed the once-militarized border between East and West Germany into an extensive protected area. Yet as forests, meadows, and wetlands replace fences, minefields, and guard towers, ecol...
Saving Nature Under Socialism
When East Germany collapsed in 1989–1990, outside observers were shocked to learn the extent of environmental devastation that existed there. The communist dictatorship, however, had sought to confront environmental issues since at least the 1960s. Through an analysis of official and oppositional sources, Saving Nature Under Socialism complicates attitudes toward the environment in East Germany by tracing both domestic and transnational engagement with nature and pollution. The communist dictatorship limited opportunities for protest, so officials and activists looked abroad to countries such as Poland and West Germany for inspiration and support. Julia Ault outlines the evolution of environmental policy and protest in East Germany and shows how East Germans responded to local degradation as well as to an international moment of environmental reckoning in the 1970s and 1980s. The example of East Germany thus challenges and broadens our understanding of the 'greening' of post-war Europe, and illuminates a larger, central European understanding of connection across the Iron Curtain.
Antifascism After Hitler
Antifascism After Hitler investigates the antifascist stories, memory sites and youth reception that were critical to the success of political education in East German schools and extracurricular activities. As the German Democratic Republic (GDR) promoted national identity and socialist consciousness, two of the most potent historical narratives to permeate youth education became tales of communist resistors who fought against fascism and the heroic deeds of the Red Army in World War II. These stories and iconic images illustrate the message that was presented to school-age children and adolescents in stages as they advanced through school and participated in the official communist youth or...
Vacationing in Dictatorships
Vacationing in Dictatorships examines the political effects of international tourism in socialist Romania and Francoist Spain in the postwar era. Despite sharp economic and political differences between the two dictatorial regimes at the start of the Cold War, significant similarities existed as both states took advantage of international tourism to improve their image abroad and pursued processes of economic modernization to acquire hard currencies. By the end of the 1970s though, the two countries achieved rather different results in terms of tourism development, despite the fact that both shared many features in the 1940s and 1950s. By comparing the rise and evolution of international tourism on different sides of the Iron Curtain, Adelina Stefan provides a different assessment of the geopolitics of postwar Europe that further refines the Cold War's geographies separating Eastern and Western Europe. As a result, Vacationing in Dictatorships reveals a new perspective on the Cold War that reveals not only the developmental similarities between Eastern and Southern Europe but also the ideological struggle that pitted socialist East against capitalist West.
The German Forest
From the late eighteenth century, Germans increasingly identified the fate of their nation with that of their woodlands. A variety of groups soon mobilized the 'German forest' as a national symbol, though often in ways that suited their own social, economic, and political interests. The German Forest is the first book-length history of the development and contestation of the concept of 'German' woodlands. Jeffrey K. Wilson challenges the dominant interpretation that German connections to nature were based in agrarian romanticism rather than efforts at modernization. He explores a variety of conflicts over the symbol from demands on landowners for public access to woodlands, to state attempts to integrate ethnic Slavs into German culture through forestry, and radical nationalist visions of woodlands as a model for the German 'race'. Through impressive primary and archival research, Wilson demonstrates that in addition to uniting Germans, the forest as a national symbol could also serve as a vehicle for protest and strife.
Nature and the Iron Curtain
In Nature and the Iron Curtain, the authors contrast communist and capitalist countries with respect to their environmental politics in the context of the Cold War. Its chapters draw from archives across Europe and the U.S. to present new perspectives on the origins and evolution of modern environmentalism on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book explores similarities and differences among several nations with different economies and political systems, and highlights connections between environmental movements in Eastern and Western Europe.
