Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent

Contents

List of Illustrations

Abbreviations

Prologue

Introduction

Part 1 Orwellian Dialectics, or the Stasi’s Psychoterror

1. Of Pigs and Poison Shelves

2. “Big Brother Was Watching Me”

Part 2 Rosy Dogmas, or Barbarism with a Human Face

3. Innocents Abroad

4. Dictatorship of the Professoriat?

Part 3 Courageous Dissent, or the Grit and Grace of Public Heroics

5. Revolutionary in Love with the Past

6. The Galileo of the GDR

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

“John Rodden is turning into the Studs Terkel of the GDR, a patient interlocutor who gets people talking and asks the probing question when it is needed. As time goes on, and both lives and memories fade, this kind of oral history record becomes increasingly valuable.”

—Randall Bytwerk, Calvin College