Many Jews coming from various parts of Eastern Europe found refuge in Germany, of all places, in huge “displaced-persons camps.” They made up as many Jews as had lived in the country before the war, only they were younger and unexpectedly active. While few German Jews returned to the “land of the murderers,” the new migrants took their place. This chapter tells the tale of their settlement in Germany, parallel to the building up the Federal Republic, especially under the the US military occupation. They could only observe with unease the signs of antisemitism in the new German state, and support the early acts of restitution as well as the financial agreement with Israel signed in 1952. They were also the first to demand some sort of confrontation with the Nazi past. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish jurist who fled to Denmark and later to Sweden during the war and finally returned to Germany afterwards, took it upon himself, as the Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, to organize and then serve as prosecutor in the so-called Auschwitz trials. The chapter ends with his life-story.

Chapter 6 is the third of three chapters laying a basic foundation in German law and politics. The chapter describes the system of German legal education, which aims to develop Einheitsjuristen (a complete of full jurist). The chapter then presents the basics of German (private law) legal methodology. Finally, the chapter considers the expectations and mythology of German legal actors (judges and lawyers) by considering the standards used to exclude some former East German judges and lawyers from the legal profession (in a lustration process) after reunification.

This chapter introduces the research design and comparative case studies in Part II of the book. In this part of the book, I present historical case studies of Poland and East Germany. This is the qualitative component of the integrated, multimethod difference-in-difference research design with which I test the theoretical propositions laid out in Chapter 2. The first case experienced a post-Stalinist transition, while the second did not. By carefully tracing developments in elite cohesion and coercive capacity across the two otherwise very similar cases, I demonstrate that post-Stalinist transitions caused reductions in coercive capacity. I do so by showing that trends in capacity were similar across the Polish and East German regimes before 1953; that post-Stalinist transitions occurred randomly and were not themselves a function of coercive capacity; and by tracing the causal mechanisms that linked transitions to declines in capacity.

In this chapter, I explain why the Stasi became the largest and most capable secret police force in Cold War Central and Eastern Europe. The shock of Stalin’s death did not cause a leadership transition and wholesale repudiation of Stalinism in the GDR. Instead, the ruling coalition persisted and purged their rivals after 1953. Walter Ulbricht and his fellow elites survived and persisted in their strong commitment to a harsh, Stalinist regime of repression. This persistence had profound consequences for the security apparatus, repression, and social order. The Stasi continued its growth in capacity to become an all-present repressive force. The story of elite cohesion and coercive capacity in East Germany is one of continuity and growth – unlike that of disruption, collapse, and stagnation in Poland. And as the commitment to surveillance and repression continued unabated in the GDR, the fortunes of regime opponents waned. With a few notable exceptions, dissidents and opponents were isolated and neutralized in East Germany.

The Epilogue examines the failure of red secularism to reassert itself after 1945 due to the political climate in East and West Germany. It examines the further decline of Freethought as a consequence of lessening of confessional tensions in German society and the secularization and de-churching of German society in the 1960s.

Unlike the Western Gastarbeiter, the GDR labor migrants were recruited later (the 1980s), fewer (no more than 200,000), from other countries (Vietnam, Mozambique, Poland), objects of secret service surveillance (by the Stasi), and portrayed not as labor migrants, but recipients of “brotherly” socialist solidarity. Yet the motivation for recruiting them (labor shortages) and their experience of living among Germans were similar: segregated from the general population; objects of paternalism, exoticization, hypersexualization, dehumanization, racist violence; and enticed to leave with – modest – financial bonuses when no longer needed (1983 in Western, 1990 in Eastern Germany). What was fundamentally different was that the GDR portrayed itself as an anti-racist internationalist society; that the countries of origin of the labor migrants deducted a large portion of their earnings and never returned it when the “contract workers” (Vertragsarbeiter) were forced out after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall; and that, consequently, the deported labor migrants often ended up living in poverty at the margins of their societies rather than reaping the benefits of their hard work in the GDR.

The rivalry between the two states of divided Germany played out on a global scale across the Third World. The chain of upheavals in East Africa in 1964-65 led to Dar es Salaam becoming the first African capital south of the Sahara in which the German Democratic Republic maintained a diplomatic mission. This turned the city into a propaganda battlefield. East Berlin strove for full recognition from Tanzania, while Bonn tried to prevent such a development from coming to pass. In the face of this rivalry, Julius Nyerere’s government sought to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy and broker aid agreements to further its socialist project. Adopting a triangular approach, this chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s relationship with the two German states turned on developments in Central Europe, especially West Germany’s Ostpolitik. It reveals the challenges of upholding non-alignment in a Cold War world which did not revolve around simple binaries and was complicated by politics ‘on the ground’ in Dar es Salaam.

This chapter explores the multi-decade career of Tangerine Dream and their founder, Edgar Froese, with an equal emphasis on the band’s practices during the 1970s and 1980s. We situate Tangerine Dream’s prolific discography within multiple styles such as kosmische Musik, ambient, techno/trance, and synthwave, while highlighting the band’s influences and legacies in live music and Hollywood film scores. First, Tangerine Dream’s evolution during the 1970s is traced, involving the group’s central role in the ‘Berlin School‘ of electronic music. Classic albums on Ohr, from Electronic Meditation to Atem, led to success particularly in Britain and France. With the signing of the band to Virgin Records, the subsequent sections explore landmark albums such as Phaedra and Rubycon, and the important roles of Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann in the group’s classic configuration. We then highlight Tangerine Dream’s iconic live tours, stretching from Australia to America, as well as influential concerts in Eastern Europe. The band’s extraordinary career in film music, especially in 1980s Hollywood, forms the focus of our conclusion, where the mark of Tangerine Dream’s major influence can be seen in media as diverse as the bestselling video game Grand Theft Auto 5 and the Netlix hit series Stranger Things.

After 1945, Romanian Germans explored multiple possibilities in their search to define a Heimat, taking us beyond the known narrative of the ‘other homeland’ in Germany. Their most hotly contested issue – where did they belong? – turned particularly acute during the Cold War, as the Romanian German community became more fractured and physically separated. Romanian German identity in this period, this chapter argues, was flexible and far more transnationally defined than often assumed. At its heart were opposing views of ‘regionalism’, nationalism, and belonging. Romanian German identity debates during this period operated on different scales in the community, which made identity contestation particularly messy. If the Landsmannschaften (homeland societies) in Germany encouraged greater emigration from Romania, other Romanian Germans, especially those close to the Lutheran Church, pushed back. Meanwhile, as this chapter demonstrates, the realities ‘on the ground’ reveal a rich cultural history of transnational Romanian Germans communicating across numerous borders, constantly rethinking their own roles in an uncertain Cold War.

The rivalry between the two states of divided Germany played out on a global scale across the Third World. The chain of upheavals in East Africa in 1964-65 led to Dar es Salaam becoming the first African capital south of the Sahara in which the German Democratic Republic maintained a diplomatic mission. This turned the city into a propaganda battlefield. East Berlin strove for full recognition from Tanzania, while Bonn tried to prevent such a development from coming to pass. In the face of this rivalry, Julius Nyerere’s government sought to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy and broker aid agreements to further its socialist project. Adopting a triangular approach, this chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s relationship with the two German states turned on developments in Central Europe, especially West Germany’s Ostpolitik. It reveals the challenges of upholding non-alignment in a Cold War world which did not revolve around simple binaries and was complicated by politics ‘on the ground’ in Dar es Salaam.

Chapter one investigates how the SED used nature conservation and environmental protection to strengthen its socialist state, domestically and internationally. The chapter traces communist economic and nature conservation practices after the Second World War and the problems they generated. The GDR claimed science and technology would forge a rational, technocratic future that both employed and protected nature in the service of socialism and the East Germans. This chapter situates the SED’s actions in the context of an environmental awareness emerging on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The SED harnessed the popular topic of the environment to leverage its position at a moment when questions about consumption and the future gripped leaders and citizens around the world. The GDR merged German traditions and Soviet-style communism in an attempt to balance the needs of the economy with a deepening commitment to environment protection.

This article examines the key biographies of Bertolt Brecht that have appeared since Brecht’s death in 1956, exploring the way that Cold War politics helped to determine how Brecht was seen in Germany and the English-speaking world.Whereas left-leaning and socialist biographers tended to admire and praise Brecht, anti-communist and anti-socialist biographers condemned him for his revolutionary politics and leftist commitments.The 1970s and 1980s witnessed renewed interest and admiration for Brecht even in the capitalist West; however, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990, renewed recriminations against communism and socialism led to further attacks on Brecht and his legacy, culminating in John Fuegi’s 1994 biography Brecht and Company: Sex, Politics, and the Making of the Modern Drama. In more recent times, however, ongoing problems with globalization and capitalism have led to a renewed appreciation for and heightened interest in Brecht, his life, and his works.

This article provides an introduction to the volume, briefly relating the primary aspects of Bertolt Brecht’s life and writing and exploring particularly his importance as a writer for the German language.Brecht was the most influential playwright of the twentieth-century worldwide, and modern theater would be unthinkable without his plays and theoretical concepts such as estrangement/distanciation.Brecht was also one of Germany’s greatest poets and a distinguished writer of prose. As a prime example of Brecht’s cultural influence, the article explores the impact that Brecht and his use of language had on Bob Dylan, the Nobel Prize-winning singer-songwriter from the US, who testifies eloquently in his memoirs to the extraordinary effect that Brecht had on him as a young man. The introduction also examines some of the key controversies involving Brecht, including above all controversies about his revolutionary politics and his approach to collaboration and sexual morality. Brecht was not a hero but a flawed human being, and he himself was well aware of his own imperfections. He wanted to use his art and his work in order to create a world in which flawed human beings, in spite of their imperfections, could still lead decent lives of dignity and humanity.

This chapter argues that that Nazi trials in eastern Germany helped legitimate the emerging Stalinist dictatorship while remaining reasonably fair down until 1950. In forging their new dictatorship, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) relied on a nominal alliance with bourgeois and Social Democratic politicians. This alliance was based in part on a shared interest in punishing Nazi crimnals. Nazi trials in the East helped the SED identify and eliminate unreliable personnel among prosecutors and judges. More importantly, it helped craft and cement the justification for the new police state, by rationalizing denunciations to the new secret police (the Stasi) while criminalizing denunciations to the former secret police (the Gestapo). At the same time, these trials retained important due process protections for defendants. And, if Soviet complaints are to be believed, there were far more acquittals and modest punishments than the communists wanted. After the founding of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, though, this changed. In the so-called Waldheim trials of 1950, the prosecution of Nazi criminals became a classic example of authoritarian justice, with pre-determined outcomes and no due process. But this was a result of the new dictatorship, not its cause.

With the founding of the two German states in 1949, the period of political transition in postwar Germany came to an end. Nazi trials, however, continued in both West and East Germany. The Epilogue examines how policy toward Nazi prosecutions changed with independence in both the Federal Republic and German Democratic Republic. West Germany pursued a policy of rehabilitation for most former Nazis, coupled with the further prosecution of small numbers of ‘intolerable” Nazi atrocities. This was part of a strategy of “democratization via integration.” Meanwhile, East German continued a more robust prosecution program, even if the number of trials was still substantially smaller than during the occupation period. The epilogue also recapitulates the argument of the book. Worse trials in the West helped inadvertently to democratize the emerging Federal Republic of Germany, while better trials in the East contributed to the consolidation of a new, Stalinist dictatorship. Transitional justice in Germany thus produced counter-intuitive results at odds with the prevailing wisdom among scholars and activists.

Chapter 3 examines how the SED leadership used “socialist human rights” in international relations. Seeking to break its diplomatic isolation outside of the socialist bloc, the SED decided to use the UN International Year for Human Rights in 1968 to launch a propaganda campaign aimed at the Third World to demonstrate East German solidarity against Western imperialism. Although this effort failed, the bureaucratic machinations surrounding the campaign cemented for SED officials that socialism and human rights were one and the same and that the GDR was on the right side of this global struggle. This paved the way for a series of treaties and agreements, including recognition from West Germany and entry into the United Nations, that included public commitments to international rights treaties and culminated in the GDR’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which finally led to universal diplomatic recognition of East German sovereignty.