East Germany is the common English name for the historical German state known the German Democratic Republic (GDR) located in Central Europe from its formation on 7 October 1949 until its reunification with West Germany on 3 October 1990. Until 1989, it was generally viewed as a communist state and described itself as a socialist "workers' and peasants' state". The economy of this country was centrally planned and state-owned. Although the GDR had to pay substantial war reparations to the Soviets, it became the most successful economy in the Eastern Bloc.
German reunification was the process of re-establishing Germany as a single full sovereign state, which took place between 9 November 1989 and 15 March 1991. The "Unification Treaty" entered into force on 3 October 1990, dissolving the German Democratic Republic and integrating its recently re-established constituent federated states into the Federal Republic of Germany to form present-day Germany. This date has been chosen as the customary German Unity Day, and has thereafter been celebrated each year as a national holiday in Germany since 1991. As part of the reunification, East and West Berlin were also de facto united into a single city, which eventually became the capital of Germany.
The Reichstag, a historic legislative government building on Platz der Republik in Berlin, is the seat of the German Bundestag. It is also the meeting place of the Federal Convention, which elects the President of Germany.
The Communist Party of Germany was a major far-left political party in the Weimar Republic during the interwar period, an underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and a minor party in West Germany during the postwar period until it was banned by the Federal Constitutional Court in 1956.
Ernst Johannes Fritz Thälmann was a German communist politician, and leader of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) from 1925 to 1933.
Christa Wolf was a German novelist and essayist. She is considered one of the most important writers to emerge from the former East Germany.
Friedrichshain is a quarter (Ortsteil) of the borough of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg in Berlin, Germany. From its creation in 1920 until 2001, it was a freestanding city borough. Formerly part of East Berlin, it is adjacent to Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Kreuzberg and Lichtenberg.
After the Russian Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks took over parts of the collapsing Russian Empire in 1918, they faced enormous odds against the German Empire and eventually negotiated terms to pull out of World War I. They then went to war against the White movement, pro-independence movements, rebellious peasants, former supporters, anarchists and foreign interventionists in the bitter civil war. They set up the Soviet Union in 1922 with Vladimir Lenin in charge. At first, it was treated as an unrecognized pariah state because of its repudiating of tsarist debts and threats to destroy capitalism at home and around the world. By 1922, Moscow had repudiated the goal of world revolution, and sought diplomatic recognition and friendly trade relations with the capitalist world, starting with Britain and Germany. Finally, in 1933, the United States gave recognition. Trade and technical help from Germany and the United States arrived in the late 1920s. After Lenin died in 1924, Joseph Stalin, became leader. He transformed the country in the 1930s into an industrial and military power. It strongly opposed Nazi Germany until August 1939, when it suddenly came to friendly terms with Berlin in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. Moscow and Berlin by agreement invaded and partitioned Poland and the Baltic States. Stalin ignored repeated warnings that Hitler planned to invade. He was caught by surprise in June 1941 when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The Soviet forces nearly collapsed as the Germans reached the outskirts of Leningrad and Moscow. However, the Soviet Union proved strong enough to defeat Nazi Germany, with help from its key World War II allies, Britain and the United States. The Soviet army occupied most of Eastern Europe and increasingly controlled the governments.
Dr. David E. Barclay is an American historian and the author of several books on German history. He received his Ph.D. in history from Stanford University in 1975, where he studied under Gordon A. Craig. He taught at Kalamazoo College from 1974 to 2016, and presently is the Executive Director of the German Studies Association.
World War III is a 1998 German alternate history television pseudo-documentary, directed by Robert Stone and distributed by ZDF. An English version was also made, which aired on TLC in May 1999. It depicts what might have transpired if, following the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev, Soviet troops, under orders from a new hard-line regime, had opened fire on demonstrators in Berlin in the fall of 1989 and precipitated World War III. The film mixes real footage of world leaders and archive footage of combat exercises and news events, with newly shot footage of citizens, soldiers, and political staff.
Ernst Rudolf Johannes Reuter was the mayor of West Berlin from 1948 to 1953, during the time of the Cold War. He played a significant role in unifying the divided sectors of Berlin and publicly and politically took a stand against the totalitarianism of the Soviet Union.
The National Party of Europe (NPE) was an initiative undertaken by a number of far-right political parties in Europe during the 1960s to help increase cross-border co-operation and work towards European unity. Under the direction of Sir Oswald Mosley, a pre-war British fascist leader who returned to politics after the Second World War, the group aimed to bring together and merge a number of far-right groups from across the continent, all of which shared at least some commitment to a wider pan-European nationalism. The group failed to achieve its aims as most of its member groups preferred to maintain their independence.
The administrative divisions of the German Democratic Republic were constituted in two different forms during the country's history. The GDR first retained the traditional German division into federated states called Länder, but in 1952 they were replaced with districts called Bezirke. Immediately before German reunification in 1990, the Länder were restored, but they were not effectively reconstituted until after reunification had completed.
The removal of Hungary's border fence with Austria occurred in 1989 during the end of communism in Hungary, which was part of a broad wave of revolutions in various communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The border was still closely guarded and the Hungarian security forces tried to hold back refugees. The dismantling of the electric fence along Hungary's 240 kilometres (149 mi) long border with Austria was the first little fissure in the "Iron Curtain" that had divided Europe for more than 40 years, since the end of World War II. Then the Pan-European Picnic caused a chain reaction in East Germany that ultimately resulted in the demise of the Berlin Wall.
The football league system of the German Democratic Republic existed from 1949 until shortly after German reunification in 1991.
During the Cold War, the Iron Curtain was a political metaphor used to describe the political boundary dividing Europe into two separate areas from the end of World War II in 1945 until the end of the Cold War in 1991. The term symbolizes the efforts by the Soviet Union (USSR) to block itself and its satellite states from open contact with the West, its allies and neutral states. On the east side of the Iron Curtain were the countries that were connected to or influenced by the Soviet Union, while on the west side were the countries that were NATO members, or connected to or influenced by the United States; or nominally neutral. Separate international economic and military alliances were developed on each side of the Iron Curtain. It later became a term for the 7,000-kilometre-long (4,300 mi) physical barrier of fences, walls, minefields, and watchtowers that divided the "east" and "west". The Berlin Wall was also part of this physical barrier.
A Berlin Romance is a 1956 East German neo-realist romantic drama film about youth urban life in the divided city of Berlin, directed by Gerhard Klein. It was produced by the DEFA film company. It stars Annekathrin Bürger, Ulrich Thein and Uwe-Jens Pape. The script was written by Wolfgang Kohlhaase with a score composed by Günter Klück. The film was the second collaboration between Klein and Kohlhaase; the first was Alarm in the Circus, released in 1954 and third came in 1957 with Berlin - Ecke Schönhauser. These films were noted for their strong criticism of consumer culture in Berlin after World War II and the Americanization of the capital and are amongst DEFA's best known films.
Early elections to the Berlin House of Representatives were held on 3 December 1950. In October 1950 Germany's new constitution went into force in West Berlin which made the election required. This was the first election to the new Berlin House of Representatives as opposed to the City Council.
Peter Kurth is a German actor. He won the 2016 German Film Award for Best Actor for portraying a former boxer diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in the drama film A Heavy Heart.
Jean Kurt Forest was a German violinist and violist, Kapellmeister and composer. He began his career as concertmaster in film orchestras conducted by Paul Dessau, then played principal viola in Frankfurt and Hamburg. Drafted to the Wehrmacht in 1942, he defected to the Red Army in 1945 and remained a prisoner of war until 1948. Back in East Berlin, he shaped musical life in the GDR in several positions, before he focused on composition from 1954, composing political songs and operas raising social awareness.
