Dietrich Orlow Book order

Focusing on the Parteihochschule Karl Marx, this book explores its role as a training institute for Communist officials in East Germany from its founding in 1946. It highlights the implementation of Stalinist policies under leaders Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, while examining the influence of key figures like Hanna Wolf and Kurt Tiedke. The analysis reveals the rigid and dogmatic nature of the East German regime, making it a crucial resource for understanding the intersection of German history and East European Communism.

Socialist Reformers and the Collapse of the German Democratic Republic explores a neglected aspect of the collapse of Communism in the former East Germany. It focuses on the East Germans' enthusiastic support for re-unification and the transfer of West Germany's political and economic institutions to the East, ignoring those in the German Democratic Republic who wanted to 'reform' socialism within, not destroy it. Their aim was to preserve an independent German Democratic Republic that would pursue an alternative 'third way' between Western capitalism and Stalinist repression. Their vision was a 'better, more beautiful' socialism instead of the 'push and shove society' that they associated with Western capitalism. In their view the 'better, more beautiful' socialism would combine the Western ideals of individual freedom with Marxist concept of collective decision-making and shared wealth. The reformers failed, of course, but their ideas and activities in the fall of 1989 are an essential part of the story that led to present-day Germany.

Although the Socialist or Social Democractic parties played a key role in West European politics during the quarter century after the Second World War, they have been studied far less than their political rivals, the Christian Democrats. The story of West European Social Democracy after 1945 begins with a dilemma: Democratic marxism, which had been the parties' ideological and organizational principle until the Second World War, was becoming politically irrelevant. The three parties analyzed here represent the spectrum of reactions among Social Democratic parties to this realization. The debate over the parties' programs and ideologies did not, of course, take place in a vacuum: the author devotes considerable space to a comparative analysis of the parties' leaders and organizational structures as well as the evolution of Social Democratic domestic and foreign policies. Immensely readable, this book not only offers an in-depth analysis of the postwar period crucial for the history of Social Democracy but also, because of its cross-national treatment of these three major parties, adds significantly to our understanding of the processes of European integration and the evolution of the Atlantic Alliance.

A general survey of the political, social, economic, intellectual and cultural history of Germany from national unification in 1871 to political division in 1945 and reunification in 1990. A new chapter on Germany since 1990 has been added.

Rejecting the view that the period after 1925 was little more than a prelude to the Papen coup, the author shows how close Prussia came to realizing its goal of paving the way for a lasting democracy in the Reich as a whole.

First installment in a two volume history of the Nazi party based on unpublished German archival material. A valuable study of the first phase of national socialism. Covers the period from the party's origins as a debating club in Muncih to its Berlin triumphs in early 1933.