Kumpel, Kader und Genossen

As Europe’s largest producer of uranium during the Cold War, the East German Wismut mining company has garnered a great deal of scholarly attention since the fall of the Berlin Wall. To that extent, the publisher’s claim on the back cover that Juliane Schütterle’s dissertation is the ‘first detailed analysis’ of this top-secret enterprise is misleading. That said, it is the most in-depth investigation of the social history of that organisation. Based on extensive archival research and more than a dozen oral interviews, the study focuses on the everyday lives of the German men and women who supplied the Soviet Union with much of the raw material for its atomic bombs. Its five substantive chapters look at the role of the union, the official distribution of social and cultural benefits, the (poor) position of women, popular portrayals of Wismut workers, developments in wages and working conditions (including a lengthy discussion of accident and sickness rates), as well as everyday conflicts at the workplace. Schütterle seeks to cover the entire forty-year history of Wismut, but, because of archival constraints (the records becoming increasingly opaque by the 1960s), focuses primarily on the first two post-war decades

Art · Humanities · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · European history and politics · Medical History and Research