Manfred Wilke’s Wide-Ranging Contributions to Scholarship

By then, I had read many of Manfred’s other books and articles, finding them an extraordinary guide to the history of East Germany (the society as well as the Communist-ruled state), the history and sociology of German Communism, the history of the Soviet bloc, and the evolution of the international Communist movement under Soviet domination both before and after the Second World War. [...] Among the important publications he produced in the 1970s were items tracing the impact of de-Stalinization at the Twentieth Soviet Party Congress in 1956 and the repercussions in the Soviet bloc – a topic he returned to numerous times in his scholar- ship in the 1990s and 2000s after archival collections became available. [...] In the mid-1970s, Manfred co-edited a first-rate volume on the global impact of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s works, especially the impact on Western leftist intellectuals and political parties, and a carefully documented book tracing the repressive “normalization” that had been imposed in Czechoslovak society under Gustáv Husák’s leadership in the wake of the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in A. [...] His meticulous exploration of the large-scale uprising in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in June 1953 and his wider discussion of opposition movements in East Germany and other Soviet-bloc countries from the 1950s through the 1980s are of particular value, laying the groundwork for his analyses of the role of popular Manfred Wilke’s Wide-Ranging Contributions to Scholarship 239 unrest in bri. [...] The book highlights the domestic and international events stretching from the Second World War to the occupation and division of Germany at the end of the war, the emergence of two German states in 1949, the Berlin Blockade of 1948– 1949, the East German uprising in 1953, the crises over Berlin from 1958 to 1960, the re- surgence of tensions in 1961 that peaked on 13 August when the Wall was put u.