Introduction: Privacy in an Enclosed State
Section I: Secret Societies, Public Institutions, Private Lives
1: Tyranny of Intimacy: The Stasi and East German Society
2: East of Eden: Christian Subculture in State Socialism
3: Intimacy on Display: Getting Divorced in East Berlin
Section II: Domestic Ideals, Social Rights, Lived Experiences
4: Building Socialism at Home: Remaking Interiors and Citizens
5: Property, Noise, and Honor: Neighborhood Justice in East
Berlin
6: Socialism's Social Contract: Citizen Complaints
7: Picturing Privacy: Photography and Domesticity
Epilogue: The House of Spirits: 1989, Civil Rights, and the
Reclamation of Private Life
Bibliography
Index
Paul Betts joined St Anthony's College Oxford as Professor of
Modern European History in October 2012. Prior to this, he taught
at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, 1996-1999, and at
the University of Sussex, 2000-2012. He has published numerous
works on post-war German history, including The Authority of
Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial
Design (2004), and was the joint editor of the journal German
History from 2003-2009.
`Review from previous edition Within Walls is an outstanding and
timely study...an eye-opening book that will be a necessary
companion to any study concerned with the reality of socialist life
in East Germany.'
Ulrike Zitzlsperger, Times Higher Education
`this is a work of the highest level, crucial to the field, and a
model of scholarship to be followed by historians of the GDR,
Germany, and beyond for years to come.'
Eli Rubin, Central European History
`... a great contribution to our knowledge of private life in the
GDR. Yet for a historian of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Germany his contribution and especially his methodological approach
are even more stimulating ... it will set higher standards for any
work on the history of everyday life in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.'
Heikki Lempa, German History
`highly illuminating'
Dorothee Wierling, German Historical Institute London Bulletin
`Betts provides not just a thought-provoking account of the nature
of GDR society through the interaction between socialism and the
private sphere; he also helps us understand better the nature of
the GDRs collapse, and the continued significance of the GDRs
semi-private social world ... Paul Betts has written a book that is
central to a new understanding of the GDR, providing a
sophisticated perspective on why the unloved state lasted for as
long as it
did'
Jan Polmowski, Journal of Contemporary History
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