Eastern German Studies Association

Eastern German Studies Association(Now Defunct)

The Eastern German Studies Association was an association of scholars interested in that part of Germany once known as the German Democratic Republic. It disbanded in 2002.

This page will remain on the Internet for the foreseeable future, but will not be regularly maintained.

The ESGA newsletter was published twice a year. Its past newsletters will remain available on this site.

The following issues are available:

October 2002: The latest and last news

Past issues:

April 1994 April 1994 Supplement October 1994 May 1995 October 1995 April 1996

October 1996 April 1997 October 1997 April 1998 November 1998 April 1999

November 1999 April 2000 October 2000 April 2001 April 2002

Other information on Eastern Germany is available at the following places:

Research News:

• Ulrich Mählert’s Aktuelles aus der DDR-Forschung: The best source for news on current research on the GDR. It appears several times annually in Deutschland Archiv.

Mostly Academic Sites Relevant to Eastern Germany:

• American Institute for Contemporary German Studies: Often shows an interest in the GDR
• Bibliography on German Unification: Over 36,000 entries.
• Centre for East German Studies (University of Reading).
• Cold War International History Project: Has been publishing interesting GDR documents
• Debatte: A great collection of German links.
• The DEFA Film Library at the University of Massachusetts
• German Historical Institute: Useful material, including a brief guide to German archives.
• The German Propaganda Archive: English translations of propaganda materials from the GDR.
• German Unification Case Study: Designed for classroom use. EGSA member Meredith Heiser is involved in the project.
• The H-German page is a good source for professional information on German history as a whole.
• The Hannah Arendt Institut: At the Technische Universität Dresden.
• Index to German Historical Journals: A searchable collection of tables of contents.
• Stanford University: Cultural History of the German Democratic Republic
• Stanford University: A collection of GDR posters.
• Stiftung Aufarbeitung: The GDR archives.
• Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (Potsdam).

Miscellaneous Sites Relevant to Eastern Germany:

• Akademie der Künste: Some material on the GDR. This link is to the English version.
• The Bundesarchiv: The German federal archives.
• East Side Gallery: Art and the Berlin Wall
• The Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Files (Gauck Commission)
• The GDR Web Ring: All sorts of sites, from useful to useless.
• Heuersdorf Online: The site of a group working to save a GDR town in the path of brown coal mining.
• Pictures of the GDR: An interesting collection from the Berliner Landesbeauftragter für die Stasi-Unterlagen.
• Stasiopfer: An interesting web site on various aspects of GDR State Security.

Useful Documents:

• Guide to the McAdams Collection: A list of tapes of interviews by A. James McAdams with GDR leaders (in Adobe Acrobat format). The material is at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
• GDR Abbreviations: Brian Zdan kindly provided me with a copy of the Kleines Abkürzungsbuch, a 1986 GDR publication that translates 6500 abbreviations. If you come across one that puzzles you, drop me a note and I’ll look it up for you. My email address is bytw2calvin.edu [Replace the “2” with an “@”].
• Die Wunderbare Jahre: An essay in Dutch, with a bibliography.

Useful Commercial Sites:

• Zentrales Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Bücher: A unified catalog of used books available from many dealers in Germany. This is a remarkably easy way to find if an out-of-print book is available. The database currently has over 4,500,000 books.
• ABE Books: Another good place to find German used books.