1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910807802903321

Autore

Markovits Inga

Titolo

Justice in Luritz : experiencing socialist law in East Germany / / Inga Markovits

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, : Princeton University Press, c2010

ISBN

1-282-72195-X

9786612721953

1-4008-3659-X

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (257 p.)

Disciplina

349. 43/1

Soggetti

Law - Germany (East) - History

Justice, Administration of - Germany (East) - History

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter 1. The Files -- Chapter 2. The Beginning -- Chapter 3. People -- Chapter 4. Property -- Chapter 5. Work -- Chapter 6. Families -- Chapter 7. Punishments -- Chapter 8. The Party -- Chapter 9. Hopes And Lies -- Chapter 10. The End -- Notes

Sommario/riassunto

As a child, Inga Markovits dreamt of stealing and reading every letter contained in a mailbox at a busy intersection of her town in order to learn what life is all about. When, decades later, working as a legal historian, she tracked down the almost complete archive of a former East German trial court, she knew that she had finally found her mailbox. Combining her work in this extraordinary archive with interviews of former plaintiffs and defendants, judges and prosecutors, government and party functionaries, and Stasi collaborators, all in the little town she calls "Lüritz," Markovits has written a remarkable grassroots history of a legal system that set out with the utopian hopes of a few and ended in the anger and disappointment of the many. This is a story of ordinary men and women who experienced Socialist law firsthand--people who applied and used the law, trusted and resented it, manipulated and broke it, and feared and opposed it, but who all dealt with it in ways that help us understand what it meant to be a



citizen in a twentieth-century Socialist state, what "Socialist justice" aimed to do, and how, in the end, it failed. Brimming with human stories of obedience and resistance, endurance and cunning, and cruelty and grief, Justice in Lüritz is ultimately a book about much more than the law, or Socialism, or East Germany.