[lbo-talk] Re: GDR Agit-Prop

[Michael Pugliese]

Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life  
in East Germany
by Victor Grossman
Alan Wald, University of Michigan
"...unique and important...one of the very few autobiographies by a  
Communist activist of the generation of the 1940s."
The Last Revolutionaries:
German Communists and Their Century by Catherine Epstein.
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/EPSLAS.html
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/contents/EPSLAS_toc.html
Epstein takes a biographical approach in this fascinating study of  
communism in Germany. After interviewing and researching hundreds of "Old  
Communists," she chose eight representatives of the long-term Communist  
experience and intertwines their stories...Their lives make for compelling  
reading...This collective biography offers a revealing and readable  
account of an important aspect of modern European history. A worthy  
complement to scholarly studies of East Germany...Highly recommended.

    --Thomas A. Karel, Library Journal

Catherine Epstein has written a lively and engaging study 0f a remarkable  
generation 0f German leftists who entered radical politics in the Weimar  
period, fought fascism, and ended up ruling one of the most bureaucratic  
and stultifying political entities on earth, the German Democratic  
Republic. Anyone who wants to understand the rise and fall of the  
communist movement in the twentieth century should read this important and  
original comparative biography.

    --Norman M. Naimark, author 0f The Russians in Germany: A History of  
the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949 ,

Catherine Epstein's The Last Revolutionaries is the most comprehensive,  
deeply researched, and nuanced history 0f the leading German communists in  
English, and perhaps in German as well. Her use of the East German  
archives opened in the early 1990s expands our understanding of German  
communism from the 1920s to 1989, and makes for grim but essential  
reading. She has captured the illusions but also the engagement and  
tragedy of the veteran German communists with the balance, thoroughness,  
and fairness we expect from our best historians.

    --Jeffrey Herf, author of Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two  
Germanys

(Jeffrey Herf, SDS'er here in the 60's. Author of another book on the  
Euromissile/SS-20 debate during Reagan era, "War by Other Means: Soviet  
Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles."  
"Divided Memory, " focuses on Paul Merkur of the KPD/SED.)

[PDF] WHAT REMAINS? EAST GERMAN CULTURE AND THE POSTWAR REPUBLIC
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Page 1. American Institute for Contemporary German Studies The Johns
Hopkins University Harry & Helen Gray Humanities Program Series ...
http://www.aicgs.org/publications/PDF/silberman.pdf

-- 
Michael Pugliese