HIST 312-05 Memory and Material Culture in Eastern Europe (Spring 2023)

With more than 1,100 entries written by an international group of over 150 contributors, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture brings together myriad strands of social, political and cultural life in the post-1945 German-speaking world. With a unique structure and format, an inclusive treatment of the concept of culture, and coverage of East, West and post-unification Germany, as well as Austria and Switzerland, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary German Culture is the first reference work of its kind.Containing longer overviews of up to 2,000 words, a

Across the Soviet Bloc, from the 1960's until the collapse of communism, the automobile exemplified the tension between the ideological imperatives of political authorities and the aspirations of ordinary citizens. For the latter, the automobile was the ticket to personal freedom and a piece of the imagined consumer paradise of the West. For the authorities, the personal car was a private, mobile space that challenged the most basic assumptions of the collectivity. The "socialist car"-and the car culture that built up around it-was the result of an always unstable compromise between official ideology, available resources, and the desires of an increasingly restless citizenry. In The Socialist Car, eleven scholars from Europe and North America explore in vivid detail the interface between the motorcar and the state socialist countries of Eastern Europe, including the USSR. In addition to the metal, glass, upholstery, and plastic from which the Ladas, Dacias, Trabants, and other still extant but aging models were fabricated, the socialist car embodied East Europeans' longings and compromises, hopes and disappointments. The socialist car represented both aspirations of overcoming the technological gap between the capitalist first and socialist second worlds and dreams of enhancing personal mobility and status. Certain features of automobility-shortages and privileges, waiting lists and lack of readily available credit, the inadequacy of streets and highways-prevailed across the Soviet Bloc. In this collective history, the authors put aside both ridicule and nostalgia in the interest of trying to understand the socialist car in its own context.

In “The Banana and the Trabant: Representations o f the ‘Other’ in a
United Germany” Mary Beth Stein explains how unification challenged the identities o f
both Ossis and Wessis, particularly in the close contact zone of Berlin. he culture o f joke telling, Stein explains, “served to
reconstruct the cognitive and symbolic distance between East and W est.”105 She argues
that the main symbols o f the East and W est were the Trabant and the banana
respectively.106 The Trabant was a poor quality car that nevertheless was a luxury item
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f th e copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout perm ission.
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because it took so long for a citizen o f the GDR to acquire one. Stein explains, “More
than any other object, [the Trabant or Trabi] facilitated and represented the arrival o f the
East German.”107 On the other hand, the banana was a symbol o f the richness o f the
West. Many East Germans bought bananas when they first ventured to the West because
“the vitamin-rich fruit represented a diet and standard o f living superior to that in the
East.”108 Many jokes about Ossis centred on either their love o f bananas or their inferior
Trabants, but these jokes also served the function o f re-building an imaginary wall.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, a small boxy car made of fiberglass and pressed cotton captured the imaginations of Germans East and West. Long the object of affection and frustration in East Germany, the Trabi quickly came to be a key symbol not only of the German Democratic Republic but also of socialist inefficiency and backwardness. In the mid 1990s, however, the Trabi reemerged as an evocative symbol of Eastern German distinctiveness and postsocialist nostalgia. A central figure in the "argument of images" surrounding the politics of German re-unification, then, the Trabi has moved from thejokebooks of 1989 to a new status as the "cult automobile" of the late 1990s. Drawing on James Fernandez's theory of images and symbolization over time, I trace the symbolic formation of the Trabi before, during, and after re-unification.

The introduction presents the standard theoretical models for understanding post-World War II consumption practices and the complex negotiating strategies used by Eastern Bloc citizens to improve their quality of life. By the time of the second master plan in 1972, an influx of automobiles and the rise of middle-class values undermined the government's intention to focus on public transportation.

American autotourism abroad during the middle of the twentieth century reveals the formative role of the automobile and the act of driving in constructing an understanding of the world and the United States’ place within it. In motoring abroad during the Cold War, American drivers transported domestic idealizations of the “freedom of the road” to foreign landscapes and, in so doing, used the automobile to mediate and frame their encounters in geographically and historically specific ways. Through a cultural history of American autotourism in the Soviet Union, Mexico, France, and the Alaska Territory in the first two decades after World War II, this dissertation takes a comparative approach to examine the ways in which American tourists used the automobile to construct, mediate, and give meaning to their encounter with these various “foreign” spaces and the ways in which these touristic encounters were also constructed, mediated, and made meaningful by the automobile. Popular sentiment in the United States cast the American relationship with the automobile as a “love affair,” but this dissertation argues that a coinciding Cold War sentiment informed the ways in which autotourists encountered, related to, and represented the foreign spaces they drove through. Drawing upon midcentury travelogues, travel guides, travel advertisements, newspaper reports, first-hand accounts, and other cultural ephemera produced for American audiences about motoring abroad in the 1950s and 1960s, this dissertation contends, that while automobility shaped the daily social interactions and cultural landscapes of the postwar American public at home, autotourism during the same period reflected and drew upon this extant lexicon of automobility and the act of driving to variously position, construct, and make sense of the world.

Investigates the present and past creative cultures of Europe by exploring its popular imagery, media, new media, film, music, art and design, architecture, drama and dance, fine art, literature and the writing arts.