Radio GDR Podcast: Attila the Stockbroker

In my latest contribution to the Radio GDR podcast, I had a chance to speak with Attila the Stockbroker, an English poet, musician and songwriter with roots in the punk movement and socialist politics. During his forty year career as independent artist, Attila has produced numerous albums and books and performed more than 3,800 shows including many in the GDR and, after unification, eastern Germany.

In this conversation, Attila vividly recalls his visits to the East, the people whom he met there and aspects of the Workers and Peasants State which were an inspiration and other which left him disgusted.

You can hear our chat via your preferred pod platform or by visiting the new Radio GDR website at: https://radiogdr.libsyn.com/attila-the-stockbroker.

Radio GDR Podcast: The Human Rights Dictatorship

© Estate Sibylle Bergemann, OSTKREUZ; Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin

From an outside perspective, it would seem that human rights would be an idea that the East German regime would have had great difficulty reconciling itself with. However, in a conversation I had with Dr. Ned Richardson-Little for the Radio GDR podcast, the author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity, and Revolution in East Germany explained how the ruling SED Party fostered the development of a concept of human rights which was compatible with the socialist regime’s domestic and international aims and rejected a liberal individualist understandings of such rights.

Hear how human rights evolved within SED from a subject the Party was uncomfortable with to one which, for an extended period of time, played a key role in helping secure support for the socialist project in the GDR. He also unpacks how human rights were understood within the population and the role human rights discourses played in bringing down ‘real existing socialism’ in 1989.

Check out the episode by clicking here.

Dr. Ned Richardson-Little is a Freigeist Fellow at Universität Erfurt, Germany, where he leads a project on international crime and globalization. Some of you may have encountered him on Twitter @HistoryNed handle or his blog “Superfluous Answers to Necessary Questions”

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Radio GDR Podcast: Victor Grossman on why the GDR failed

Victor Grossman and I on Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, April 2023

Here it is, the much delayed, long-anticipated second part of my interview with Victor Grossman for the Radio GDR podcast.

Victor is an American Communist who defected to the East Bloc at the height of the “Red Scare” in 1952. Once on the other side of the Iron Curtain, he found himself in the GDR, a country that would be his home until it ceased to exist in 1990. While a strong supporter of “the socialist project”, Grossman is clear-eyed about the GDR, its achievements and shortcomings.

In our first chat, Victor explored the achievements of the GDR.

This time, he turned his attentions to the failings of ‘real-existing socialism’ and it made for a fascinating conversation. You can listen to this episode, click here.

Victor is a truly interesting man and if you want to learn more about him and his remarkable life, I can heartily recommend both his books: A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee and Crossing The River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War and Life in East Germany.

Radio GDR Podcast: Victor Grossman on the GDR’s Achievements

I recently had the chance to speak with Victor Grossman, an American Communist who defected to the East Bloc at the height of the “Red Scare” in 1952, for the Radio GDR podcast. Once on the other side of the Iron Curtain, he found himself in the GDR, a country that would be his home until it ceased to exist in 1990. While a strong supporter of “the socialist project”, Grossman is clear-eyed about the GDR, its achievements and shortcomings.

Radio GDR Podcast: A Strange Exchange – Brown University Students On the Loose in East Germany

For this episode of the the Radio GDR podcast I sat down with Debby Pattiz to talk about the unusual semester she spent in the GDR back in 1988 as a Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island, USA) student on exchange to Wilhelm-Pieck Universität in Rostock.

Our episode begins with an exploration of the history of the GDR’s extensive “Ausländerstudium” (Foreign Students) program, which brought over 100,000 college students from close to 140 countries to universities in East Germany.

The second part of the episode focuses on Debby’s research into the unprecedented Brown-Rostock Program, which enabled dozens of Brown students to spend a semester in the GDR during the 1980’s. We examine the exchange’s Cold War geopolitical context and its impact on US-GDR bilateral relations in the 1970’s and 1980’s (including: the USA’s expanding war in Southeast Asia, recognition of the GDR by the United Nations, signing of the Helsinki Accords, the 1983 Able-Archer exercises, and CIA/MfS interest in the program).

To hear my chat with Debby, please click here.

Radio GDR Podcast: East German Football’s Last Year

In this episode of the Radio GDR podcast, I take part in a group conversation with Michael Wagg about his book The Turning Season: DDR-Oberliga Revisted.

In his book, Michael brings readers on his extended road trip to the former-East during which he revisits the 14 clubs that made up the 1989 DDR-Oberliga, GDR soccer’s top flight. In our talk with Michael, we explore his experiences on the road and hear about a variety of fates that met these teams and their supporters in newly unified Germany.

To listen to this podcast, please click here.

Radio GDR Podcast: Pop & Politics in the GDR, Part 3

For part three of my Radio GDR podcast series with Dr. Ed Larkey. we continue our discussion on the broad theme of how popular music and politics intersected in the GDR, this time in the 1970s and 1980s.

In this episode, we touch on how youth culture evolved in these decades and how the Party did, or didn’t, respond. We look at the cultural touchstone that was 1973’s World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, an event that has come to be known by some as “The Red Woodstock”. Other topics discussed will include the Festival of Political Song, an annual event which Ed attended while living in the East and we even get a first person account on the festival from Chris Tait, the singer/guitarist of Chalk Circle, a Canadian alternative band that performed at it in 1989.

You can find this episode online here: https://radiogdr.com/the-red-woodstock-politics-and-pop-music-in-east-germany-part-3/

For a Spotify playlist of songs mentioned in this episode, click here.

Radio GDR Podcast: Pop & Politics in the GDR, Part 2

I’m pleased to be contributing another episode to the Radio GDR podcast, again with Dr. Edward Larkey, a Professor Emeritus in German and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. In this second of three episodes looking at aspects of popular music in the GDR, Ed and I look at the relationship between popular music and politics in the first two decades of East Germany’s existence, the 1950s and 1960s. We discuss the ways in which the ruling SED Party and East German authorities tried to create a distinctly socialist youth culture that was appealing and delivered the desired ideological content

You can find the episode here: https://radiogdr.com/politics-and-pop-music-of-east-germany-part-2/.

Here is a Spotify playlist that accompanies Politics and Pop Music in the GDR Part 2.

Episode one provides an overview of pop and rock music from the GDR, again with Ed at the other mic. Find this show at: https://radiogdr.com/musik-in-der-ddr-rock-and-pop-music-of-east-germany-127/

A “Schur” Thing: The GDR’s First Homegrown Hero

Had Täve Schur not existed, the GDR would have had to have invented him. In fact, one might argue that it did.

Gustav-Adolf Schur, or Täve as he is known to all East Germans of a certain age, was a road racing cyclist whose fame grew throughout the course of the 1950s as he moved from one sporting success to the next.

Täve Schur celebrates winning the Karl-Marx-Stadt to Leipzig leg of the 1955 Peace Race
(photo: Bundesarchiv Bild 183-30443-0001)

His evolution into becoming an East German sporting icon was not, however, simply the result of his remarkable career, but also a reflection of his having been embraced by the nascent Workers and Peasants’ State. Indeed, Schur emerged onto the scene at a time when the GDR leadership was searching for ways to raise the country reputation both at home and abroad. In Schur, the regime found a homegrown hero who was demonstrating to the world – and his fellow East Germans – the heights which they – and, implicitly, their political / social system – could reach.

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Leuna and Buna Pt. III: Environmental Disturbances

The Leuna Works, 1980 (Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Leuna, Leuna-Werke — 1980 — 21” / CC BY-SA 4.0).

While East German planners placed great hopes in Leuna and Buna as drivers for the GDR’s economy, developing these sites came at a considerable cost to the environment. Both facilities caused significant damage to air, soil and water in the immediate vicinity and beyond. In fact, some have argued that the catastrophic state of the East German environment was a key factor in bringing people to the protests in Leipzig, a city badly impacted by the effects of the country’s chemical industry and home to the demonstrations which ultimately helped drive the SED from power..

In this last post on Leuna and Buna, we’ll look at the environmental damage which emanated from these two sites.