Red Prometheus

Science and technology determined as decisive factors the progression of the Cold War and the formation of socialist societies. This has been emphasized by many scholars exploring the history of the Soviet Union and the development of its technological intelligentsia. The significance of science and technology has not been attested in the same way for East Germany though. There are in fact some excellent and detailed studies on industrial research, scientists and companies such as Zeiss Jena. But the works that provide an overview of the period tend to ignore this particular area, presumably because in most of the studies the history of technology does not sufficiently engage with East German social and cultural history. Here, Dolores L. Augustine's book fills in the blanks. Augustine regards technological development in the GDR as a process of continually renegotiated power relations. The industrial scientists on the one side and the party bureaucrats on the other struggled constantly to steer the course of the technology programmes. The two sides, however, were not internally homogenous: rivalry, opportunism and diverging interests were the order of the day. And there were other actors involved in the conflict: the Soviet Union and the West, especially West Germany. The importance of the latter is not emphasized by Augustine, though.

Ancient history · Cold war · Dictatorship · Economic history · Economics · German · History of technology · Intelligentsia · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rivalry · Sociology · Soviet union · European history and politics · German History and Society · German Social Sciences and History · History · Law

• Varieties of Popular Science and the Transformations of Public Knowledge

  Andreas W Daum•Isis•2009

  Add to list