“When your great-grandparents grew up in Stalin’s terror-famine, your grandparents in the Holocaust, and your parents in a straddle between totalitarianism and democracy, you grew up confused about pain.”
communism
Posted inNonfiction
How Vladimir Putin Helped ‘Nazify’ Modern Germany
Rainer Sonntag was a far-right vigilante. He was also a Communist spy.
Posted inHighlight, Profiles & Interviews, Quote Posts, Quotes
Vivian Gornick on ‘Political Activism as a Path Toward a Coherent Self’
“But writing itself, living a life defined by work and intellect rather than love or marriage, became her primary feminist commitment.”
Posted inArts & Culture, Audio, Books, History, Nonfiction, Profiles & Interviews, Story
‘The Very Top Guy in the Stasi was Personally Involved in Figuring Out How to Destroy Punk.’
Author Tim Mohr talks about East Germany’s dissident punk rock scene, and its role in bringing down the Berlin Wall in 1989 — the story behind his remarkable new book, ‘Burning Down The Haus.’
Posted inBooks, Feature, Fiction, Story
My Brother Comes to Moscow
‘We had had many arguments, but he was my brother; he had always been my brother.’
Posted inNonfiction
Hello, Lenin? (Berlin, 1997)
When an American exchange student discovered that the Germans never lose anything.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
When Beauty Brings Dishonor: Beauty Shopping With My Mother, A Former Cultural Revolution Red Guard
In Racked, Noël Duan — A former beauty editor — reflects on the differences between the definition of beauty in America and in China during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, where an “unadorned woman was a symbol of liberation from a patriarchal capitalist system.”
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Quotes
When Your Grandparents Are Intellectuals: A Family’s History Through Books
All of that mid-century Marxist devotional intensity was concentrated in Mimi and Chimen’s bedroom. There were Socialist and Communist books in Russian, German, Yiddish, French, English, Hebrew. There were old pamphlets so yellowed by time that one risked their disintegration simply by touching them. When Chimen and his close friend Henry Collins, who had collaborated […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Hidden Truth About the Cold War Roomba
Over at Paleofuture, Matt Novak looks back at the 1959 Cold War cultural exhibitions hosted by both the United States and the Soviet Union. For the United States, the Moscow exhibition was a chance to show off the newest products and technology from companies like IBM, Sears and Kodak—and perhaps the most important innovation of […]