Kommunistische Identitäten im Streit Politisierung und Herrschaftslegitimation in den kommunistischen Parteien in Ostmitteleuropa nach dem Stalinismus
Conflicting Communist Identities: Politicization and Legitimation of Power in the Communist Parties in East Central Europe after Stalinism

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to tease out the transformation of communist identity and the sense of legitimacy within the ruling parties of the Eastern Bloc (particularly Poland, Czechoslovakia and the GDR) in 1956. It explores how communist identity was negotiated and reshaped beyond the highest level of party leadership and prominent communist intellectuals and how ordinary party members perceived this ideological turnabout. It seeks to demonstrate how the sense of belonging was articulated in the reflection of the parties’ recent past by ordinary party members on a local level: functionaries, apparatchiks, propagandists and local party historians. In the aftermath of 1956, communist and working class identities were seriously challenged by renewed national, ethnic, confessional or regional identities in a steady process of exclusion and inclusion. Examining the de-Stalinization “from below”, the study concludes that despite the earthquake-like ideological upheavals a new form of identity emerged among the parties’ rank-and-file that, centered around the parties as an imperfect yet heroic collective, secured the sense of legitimacy for the decades to come.

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