Author : Jan Herman Brinks
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 51,7 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : UOM:39015054250785
Paradigms of Political Change, Luther, Frederick II, and Bismarck by Jan Herman Brinks Pdf
Written before 1989, when he was stationed in East Berlin with Dutch television and utilised his stay there to write this book as a dissertation for the University of Groningen, it showed how GDR party and historians had sought to reinterpret German history to legitimize their socialist dictatorship and in the process had manipulated history. Although the focus of the book is on the ways in which GDR historians have interpreted and reinterpreted three key figures, Luther, Frederick II (!), and Bismarck, from the perspective of their place in German nation building, the translation offers in fact the only up to date history of historiography in the GDR in English. It is preceded only by Andreas Dorpalen's German History from a Marxist Perspective, written in the 1970s with very different questions in mind. Dorpalen in an excellent study surveys work in the GDR on all phases of German history from the Middle Ages to the recent past and critically assesses the contributions which these writings have made to scholarship beyond ideological lines. Brinks concentrates specifically on the question which the tension between a German national identity and a distinct GDR socialist identity played in GDR historical literature, the former viewing Germany in ethnic terms, the latter defining it in class terms.