Introduction 1
Notes Introduction 1. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973; New York, 2000), 107. 2. LAB (Landesarchiv Berlin), F Rep. 240 (Zeitgeschichtliche Sammlung), Acc. 2651, 5, 504/1. 3. Max Brinkmann, Kleiner Knigge für Schieber (Berlin, 1921), 85. 4. See, for example, Edgar Wolfrum, Die geglückte Demokratie: Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 2006), 33; and Manfred Görtemaker, Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Munich, 2003), 29. There is a more extensive treatment in Christoph Kleßmann, Die doppelte Staatsgründung: Deutsche Geschichte 1945–1955, 5th ed. (Göttingen, 1991), 46–50. For East Germany, see Ulrich Mählert, Kleine Geschichte der DDR (Munich, 1998), 27; and Dietrich Staritz, Geschichte der DDR, rev. ed. (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 55. There is no reference at all to the black market period in Hermann Weber, Die DDR 1945–1990, 3rd ed. (Munich, 2003). 5. Michael Wildt notes that the bartering and black markets belong to the “blind spots in our historical knowledge”; see Wildt, Am Beginn der Konsumgesellschaft: Mangelerfahrung, Lebenshaltung, Wohlstandshoffnung in Westdeutschland in den fünf- ziger Jahren, 2nd ed. (Hamburg, 1995), 278. This circumstance has begun to change as case studies emerge. For Berlin we now have Paul Steege, Black Market, Cold War: Everyday Life in Berlin, 1946–1949 (Cambridge, UK, 2007); however, this com- prehensive study is limited to the postwar years, and it analyzes the Berlin black markets as sites of the Cold War conflict. There is also Stefan Mörchen, Schwarzer Markt: Kriminalität, Ordnung und Moral in Bremen 1939–1949 (Frankfurt am Main, 2011), which reads the conflicts over the illegal markets first and foremost as indicators of changing concepts of crime and order.
[Show full text]