Welcome to our book review site www.go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Dropping out of Socialism
The essays in this collection make up the first study of “dropping out” of late state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. From Leningrad intellectuals and Berlin squatters to Bosnian Muslim madrassa students and Romanian yogis, groups and individuals across the Eastern Bloc rejected mainstream socialist culture. In the process, multiple drop-out cultures were created, with their own spaces, music, values, style, slang, ideology and networks. Under socialism, this phenomenon was little-known outside the socialist sphere. Only very recently has it been possible to reconstruct it through archival work, oral histories and memoirs. Such a diverse set of subcultures demands a multi-disciplinary approach: the essays in this volume are written by historians, anthropologists and scholars of literature, cultural and gender studies. The history of these movements not only shows us a side of state socialist life that was barely known in the west. It also sheds new light on the demise and eventual collapse of late socialism, and raises important questions about the similarities and differences between Eastern and Western subcultures.
Suicide in East German Literature
The many fictional suicides in the literature of the German Democratic Republic have been greatly misunderstood. The common assumption is that authoritarian oppression in East Germany led to an anomalous abundance of real suicides, so that fictional suicides in GDR literature constitute a simple, realistic reflection of East German society. Robert Blankenship challenges this assumption by providing both a history of suicide in GDR literature and close readings of individual texts, revealing that suicides in GDR literature, rather than simply reflecting historical suicides, contain rich literary attributes such as intertextuality, haunting, epistolarity, and unorthodox narrative strategies. S...
Ideocracies in Comparison
Ideocracies, or ideological dictatorships, such as the "Third Reich", the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China have, much more than any other kinds of autocracy, characterized the history of the 20th century. Despite their undeniable loss of significance, ideocracies have not disappeared from the world in the 21st century. This book explores the functioning of ideocracies and analyses the typical interplay of legitimation, co-optation and repression which autocratic elites use in an attempt to stabilize their rule. In the first part of the book, the contributors discuss the conceptual history of the ideocracy notion. The second part offers case studies pertaining to the Soviet S...
After Auschwitz
From the moment of its inception, the East German state sought to cast itself as a clean break from the horrors of National Socialism. Nonetheless, the precipitous rise of xenophobic, far-right parties across the present-day German East is only the latest evidence that the GDR’s legacy cannot be understood in isolation from the Nazi era nor the political upheavals of today. This provocative collection reflects on the heretofore ignored or repressed aspects of German mainstream society—including right-wing extremism, anti-Semitism and racism—to call for an ambitious renewal of historical research and political education to place East Germany in its proper historical context.
At the Edge of the Wall
Located in the geographical center of Berlin, the neighboring boroughs of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg shared a history and identity until their fortunes diverged dramatically following the construction of the Berlin Wall, which placed them within opposing political systems. This revealing account of the two municipal districts before, during and after the Cold War takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the broader historical trajectories of East and West Berlin, with particular attention to housing, religion, and leisure. Merged in 2001, they now comprise a single neighborhood that bears the traces of these complex histories and serves as an illuminating case study of urban renewal, gentrification, and other social processes that continue to reshape Berlin.
Counterpreservation
COUNTERPRESERVATION -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Counterpreservation as a Concept -- 2. Living Projects: Collective Housing, Alternative Culture, and Spaces of Resistance -- 3. Cultural Centers: History, Architecture, and Public Space -- 4. Decrepitude and Memory in the Landscape -- 5. Counterpreservation in Reverse -- 6. Destruction and Disappearance: East German Ruins -- Conclusion: Toward an Architecture of Change -- Index
Let Me Finish
Suicide has been part of human life since the dawn of time, but has never been so widely and openly discussed as it is today. With the ongoing debate about the rights of the terminally ill to end their own lives, the phenomenon of Internet sites dedicated to advice on how to end your life, and the craze for mass suicides among the Japanese, suicide is rarely out of the news in the 21st century. Udo Grashoff has discovered 45 suicide notes that help us to better understand why despairing people commit the ultimate taboo. In this fascinating collection those reasons are remarkably universal, from unrequited love, to loss of a spouse, to simple frustration with a domestic situation. Despite the universality of its subject matter, this book is unique.
New Statesman
None
The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides
Writers have been killing themselves for centuries. From Petronius in ancient Rome to the 20th Century Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima, writers, more than any other kind of artist, have taken their own lives in an extraordinary number of ways. With bullets, poison, drugs and swords, poets, playwrights, novelists and philosophers have sent themselves off into the big sleep. Others, one step shy of that last exit, have made great literature about the urge to self-destruction. For the first time, Gary Lachman investigates the many links between self-death and the written word, bringing together an unusual gallery of literary greats and a host of other fatal characters. Typically for Dedalus, the covers gorgeous. Sasha Selavie in QX International Dead Letters ultimately proves to be at once stimulating and thought-provoking and the section devoted to various suicidal writings is most diverting. Peter Burton in One80 Reviews
