Working the Passage: East German Border Checkpoints, 1961-90. The Case of GUSt Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, Berlin
In East Germany (GDR) the aim of total control of society occupied both: those on the ‘heights of command’ and the various ‘organs’ of the ruling party (SED) and state. In this pursuit efforts to strictly regulate any passage of the border of state (Staatsgrenze) had a very high priority. The formal closure of the border to the ‘West’ (on 13 August 1961) marked an ultimate step placing border control among the pivotal political necessities of the GDR. In this vein, the actual staffing of the remaining checkpoints by employees of the Ministry of State Security (MfS) underlined the dominant logic of encompassing surveillance and intervention, whether concealed or openly. This article focuses on one location at the centre of the ‘capital of the GDR’, the check point: Grenzübergangsstelle (GÜSt) Bahnhof Friedrichstraße. The goal is an inspection of the actual activities of the border guards: how did they ‘do it’? The spectrum ranges from the physical and architectural settings to the locks and the protocols of control to the practices of the guards who checked (and decided) on personal identities. To what extent were rank and file in the checking booths (and behind the scenes) in charge of opening or closing the door? Who, in the last instance, allowed or denied access or exit? Certainly, customs control and related checks of personal belongings of visitors or travellers were an integral part of the ‘Grenzregime’; yet they are not part of this investigation. More generally: does the analysis of the everyday of control as ‘work’ provide insights into both the intensities and the duration of domination in the GDR? Is GÜSt Bahnhof Friedrichstraße also a symbol of the limits if not the demise of (the work of) domination ‘in the colours of the GDR’?
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/3/680?rss=1
Attraction and Aversion in Germany’s ‚1968‘: Encountering the Western Revolt in East Berlin
This article uses oral history interviews and archival sources to investigate the entanglements between East and West German activists of 1968. Cold War Berlin remained an important zone of exchange between East and West after the border closure of 1961; the study focuses on what a particular group of young East Berliners with oppositional leanings, who engaged in different forms of political and cultural experimentation in the late 1960s, and who took their ideas from both Eastern Socialist reformers and Western New Leftists, made of their direct encounters with the Western revolt. The article shows that the connections between East and West around 1968 were indeed striking, but contends that these produced ambiguous results; both attraction and aversion marked the exchanges and personal interactions of Eastern and Western activists in this period. Engaging with the broader literatures on the ‘transnational 1960s’ and the ‘asymmetrical entanglement’ of the two Germanies after 1945, this research suggests that the two German states represent a fruitful case to study the meaning of transnationalism around 1968 for the opposite reason of what one may intuitively expect. Encounters between the Socialist East and liberal capitalist West could be facilitated with relative ease, because of the geographical proximity of the two states and the shared language, but, far from spelling ever-greater convergence, increasing connections and closeness could actually foster a greater sense of difference.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/3/536?rss=1
‚Do What the Afro-Americans Are Doing‘: Black Power and the Start of the Northern Ireland Troubles
This article challenges the local focus of much of the work on the Northern Ireland Troubles, by examining the importance of the impact that Black Power movements had on activists in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not, however, the story of the transnational diffusion of the ideas of a US movement to a nation-state on the periphery. Conceiving of the West in the ‘cycle of protest years’ as a networked space, this article argues that Northern Ireland during its Black Power moment was the unique and fleeting coming together of many different trajectories. The left-wing activists used Black Power to build transnational networks of revolt and to inspire local political struggles; the British authorities used the information that they collected from around the world on Black Power as a lens through which to view subversives and as a resource for making strategy. The start of the Troubles was interpreted by actors on both sides of the barricades as a forerunner of the class and race conflicts to come in the West, not as the latest small, local war in Britain's retreat from empire.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/50/3/516?rss=1