4 - A Complimentary and Overlapping Web: The OKV as a Social and Political Milieu
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
Summary
Abstract
Chapter 4 presents the OKV as a social environment, with specific customs, activities, and terminologies shaped by GDR practices. In the OKV network, smaller clubs focus on “soft” issues of the GDR image (e.g., initiatives for the preservation of political monuments, or for the memory of the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin), in addition to culture and leisure (e.g., exhibitions of GDR art) as well as specific historical traditions (including the legacy of the GDR army). These groups provide an important social glue for the OKV. Groups are particularly successful when they manage to present themselves as neighborhood initiatives (e.g., in parts of Berlin) fighting for broader goals of social justice. Also, the many smaller organizations allow the OKV to project itself as a large and broad association.
Keywords: social environment, interest representation, traditional organizations, organization structure
While GBM, GRH and ISOR, as the larger member organizations, represent the core of the OKV network, many smaller groups venture into a host of other activities. In what follows, a discussion of these organizations will shed light on their main concerns, and how these themes connect them to the overall structure of the OKV. These themes include advocacy for antifascism and peace, GDR art and sciences, the preservation of historical memory (including socialist lieux de mémoire), traditions of former GDR state organs as well as the promotion of social justice. The present chapter will pay special attention to the question of how far these and other GDR-related topics can provide the OKV with opportunities for linkage with outside groups and parties, and at the same time, in how far such groups might be restrained in their linkage precisely because of their association with the OKV. From this angle, the OKV appears as a social and political environment that offers its members much more than just GDR elite interest representation.
Antifascism and peace advocacy
A topic that is current in all OKV organizations is antifascism, which was also the central legitimating ideology of the GDR. OKV members generally consider the GDR to have been a real antifascist state, and see this confirmed by current German involvement in military missions. Consequently, the GBM asserts its antifascist peace agenda through protest against Western, and especially German, military interventions.
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- German Post-Socialist Memory CultureEpistemic Nostalgia, pp. 163 - 200Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2019