Cold War Identities: Citizenship, Constitutional Reform, and International Law between East and West Germany, 1967-75
Law became an important battleground in the Cold War between the two Germanys. In striving for international legitimacy, West Germany clung to ideas of legal continuity to the German Reich while the GDR bolstered the concept of an anti-fascist new beginning as its legal foundation. As national division continued, citizenship law became a tool for both German states in challenging the other Germany's authority over its respective citizenry. By the late 1960s, the GDR devised a citizenship law that effectively held East Germans hostage through the redefinition of citizenship. The GDR-citizenship law, moreover, repatriated former East Germans now living in the Federal Republic. The quest for legal supremacy thus profoundly affected ordinary Germans living east and west of the Iron Curtain. This article argues that the GDR government used citizenship and international law to its advantage in the attempt to pressure West Germany to recognize officially GDR sovereignty between 1967 and 1972. It demonstrates how the GDR forced the Federal Republic into action long before negotiations over Ostpolitik began in 1969. Citizenship law thus became a potent tool in the East German quest for international recognition and provoked intense responses in West German law-making.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/4/794?rss=1
After the Fall: Politics, the Public Use of History and the Historiography of the Italian Communist Party, 1991-2011
Traditionally, historians described the Italian Communist Party (PCI) as primarily a national party whose strategies had always been largely, if not exclusively, determined by the Italian socio-political environment. Scholars tended to emphasize the merits of the PCI in the construction of Italian democracy and its abiding commitment to the defence of the republican government throughout the postwar period. This view was seriously challenged after the fall of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the PCI (January 1991), when a strand of ‘revisionist’ literature questioned the PCI’s national character and its democratic credentials. At the same time, the polemical use of these new interpretations in the political arena, along with a new range of historical evidence from the Soviet archives, contributed to turn the debate about the role of the PCI in Italian democracy into a never-ending diatribe. This article is aimed at chronicling the politicization of PCI history and discussing how this affected historiography, in a period characterized, more than ever before, by the political and public use of history.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/4/815?rss=1
Spiel Appeal: Play, Drug Use and the Culture of 1968 in West Germany
‘Spiel Appeal’ offers a cultural reading of one important element of the youth consciousness which underpinned events in West Germany between 1967 and 1969 and which shaped the legacy of those years: drug consumption. Drugs were part and parcel of a new vision of leftism, primarily among the nation’s young adults, that helped enable West Germany’s 1968. Sixty-eighters did not use recreational drugs as a simple form of juvenile protest or as a pure escape, nor was drug use a regrettable excess, as some rueful sixty-eighters later argued. In the individual life stories of sixty-eighters, as reflected in both autobiographies and novels, the drugs’ primary roles were as facilitators of community and ‘awakening’. They were essential elements of the playful leftist counterculture which youth and leftists invented concretely throughout Germany at the onset of the 1970s in the form of urban sub-cultures and alternative ‘scenes’, the invention of which constitutes one of the most important social legacies of 1968.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/49/4/770?rss=1