With German reunification and the demise of the German Democratic Republic in 1990, East German historians and their traditions of historiography were removed from mainstream discourse in Germany and relegated to the periphery. By the mid-1990s, few GDR-trained historians remained in academia. These developments led to a greater degree of intellectual pluralism, yet marginalized many accomplished scholars. East German Historians since Reunification assesses what was gained and lost in the process of dissolving and remaking GDR institutions of historical scholarship. The collection combines primary and secondary sources: younger scholars offer analyses of East German historiography, while senior scholars who lived through the dismantling process provide firsthand accounts. Contributors address broad trends in scholarship as well as particular subfields and institutions. What unites them is a willingness to think critically about the achievements and shortcomings of GDR historiography, and its fate after German reunification.

By and large, the histories of East and West Germany have been studied in relative isolation. And yet, for all their differences, the historical trajectories of both nations were interrelated in complex ways, shaped by economic crises, social and cultural changes, protest movements, and other phenomena so diffuse that they could hardly be contained by the Iron Curtain. Accordingly, A History Shared and Divided offers a collective portrait of the two Germanies that is both broad and deep. It brings together comprehensive thematic surveys by specialists in social history, media, education, the environment, and similar topics to assemble a monumental account of both nations from the crises of the 1970s to—and beyond—the reunification era.

Cooke maps out the problematic path of German national identity as it struggles to deal with the legacy of division. Drawing on postcolonial theory, he argues that the East has been defined as the West's exotic other and shows how this stereotype has been vigorously challenged.

Surveys how reunification in 1990 impacted historical scholarship in the former East Germany. With German reunification and the demise of the German Democratic Republic in 1990, East German historians and their traditions of historiography were removed from mainstream discourse in Germany and relegated to the periphery. By the mid-1990s, few GDR-trained historians remained in academia. These developments led to a greater degree of intellectual pluralism, yet marginalized many accomplished scholars. East German Historians since Reunification assesses what was gained and lost in the process of dissolving and remaking GDR institutions of historical scholarship. The collection combines primary and secondary sources: younger scholars offer analyses of East German historiography, while senior scholars who lived through the dismantling process provide firsthand accounts. Contributors address broad trends in scholarship as well as particular subfields and institutions. What unites them is a willingness to think critically about the achievements and shortcomings of GDR historiography, and its fate after German reunification.

The GDR Today promotes interdisciplinary approaches to East Germany by gathering articles from a new generation of scholars in a variety of fields. Exploring East German everyday life, cultural policies, memory and memorialisation, the volume aims to offer new impulses to the study of the GDR.

In today’s world, numbers are in the ascendancy. Societies dominated by star ratings, scores, likes and lists are rapidly emerging, as data are collected on virtually every aspect of our lives. From annual university rankings, ratings agencies and fitness tracking technologies to our credit score and health status, everything and everybody is measured and evaluated. In this important new book, Steffen Mau offers a critical analysis of this increasingly pervasive phenomenon. While the original intention behind the drive to quantify may have been to build trust and transparency, Mau shows how metrics have in fact become a form of social conditioning. The ubiquitous language of ranking and scoring has changed profoundly our perception of value and status. What is more, through quantification, our capacity for competition and comparison has expanded significantly – we can now measure ourselves against others in practically every area. The rise of quantification has created and strengthened social hierarchies, transforming qualitative differences into quantitative inequalities that play a decisive role in shaping the life chances of individuals. This timely analysis of the pernicious impact of quantification will appeal to students and scholars across the social sciences, as well as anyone concerned by the cult of numbers and its impact on our lives and societies today.

West Germany and the Iron Curtain takes a fresh look at the history of Cold War Germany and the German reunification process from the spatial perspective of the West German borderlands that emerged along the volatile inter-German border after 1945. These border regions constituted the Federal Republic's most sensitive geographical space where it had to confront partition and engage its socialist neighbor East Germany in concrete ways. Each issue that arose in these borderlands - from economic deficiencies, border tourism, environmental pollution, landscape change, and the siting decision for a major nuclear facility - was magnified and mediated by the presence of what became the most militarized border of its day, the Iron Curtain. In topical chapters, the book addresses the economic consequences of the border for West Germany, which defined the border regions as depressed areas, and examines the cultural practice of western tourism to the Iron Curtain. At the heart of this deeply-researched book stands an environmental history of the Iron Curtain that explores transboundary pollution, landscape change, and a planned nuclear industrial site at Gorleben that was meant to bring jobs into the depressed border regions. The book traces these subjects across the caesura of 1989/90, thereby integrating the "long" postwar era with the post-unification decades. As Eckert demonstrates, the borderlands that emerged with partition and disappeared with reunification did not merely mirror some larger developments in the Federal Republic's history but actually helped to shape them.

Richardson-Little exposes the forgotten history of human rights in the German Democratic Republic, placing the history of the Cold War, Eastern European dissidents and the revolutions of 1989 in a new light. By demonstrating how even a communist dictatorship could imagine itself to be a champion of human rights, this book challenges popular narratives on the fall of the Berlin Wall and illustrates how notions of human rights evolved in the Cold War as they were re-imagined in East Germany by both dissidents and state officials. Ultimately, the fight for human rights in East Germany was part of a global battle in the post-war era over competing conceptions of what human rights meant. Nonetheless, the collapse of dictatorship in East Germany did not end this conflict, as citizens had to choose for themselves what kind of human rights would follow in its wake.

The contributors to this volume consider the economic history of East Germany within its broader political, cultural and social contexts.

It also argues that authors and filmmakers at times undermined the state-sponsored orthodox discourse, and that they created some of the most important postwar German confrontations with the Holocaust."--BOOK JACKET.