Daily life, politics and victimization in Eastern Germany, 1933-1993 : remembering the Third Reich and the GDR after the Wende / by Bryan William Machin.

Publication | Digitized | Library Call Number: DD287.6 .M33 1994

Overview

Summary: This is an oral history of a group of elderly Germans I interviewed in the former GDR (East Germany) in mid-1993: men and women who had lived through the Nazi era, the Communist era, and the years since reunification into the capitalist West. My study considers how attention to daily life forces a rethinking of historians' traditional periodizations of the Third Reich and the postwar period. I also analyzed what "politics" means to these individuals who have lived through three regimes, as well as their attitudes about economics and ethnicity. Most importantly, I analyzed the paradoxical legacy of Nazism--the ways in which its reputation for terror provides individuals with an explanation for their own learned helplessness and retreatism and, contradictorily, how they remember it as the only happy and stable time in their lives. I thereby offer insights into the workings of memory and modern forms of depoliticization more generally.
Format: Book
Author/Creator: Machin, Bryan William.
Published: 1994
Locale: Germany (East)
Notes: Thesis (M.A.)--Michigan State University, 1994.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 121-126).

Photocopy. Ann Arbor, Mich. : UMI Dissertation Services, 1997. 22 cm.

Dissertations and Theses

Subjects: Germans--Interviews. Germans--Attitudes. National socialism. Communism--Germany (East) Germany (East)

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