Description
Book SynopsisAlthough North Americans may not recognize it, Cuba has long shaped the German imaginary. Sun, Sex, and Socialism picks up this story from the early 1960s, detailing how the newly upstart island in the U.S. backyard inspired citizens on both sides of the Berlin Wall.
By the 1970s, international rapprochements and repressions on state levels were stirring citizen disenchantment, discontent, and grassroots solidarities in all three nations. The Cold War''s official end generated waves of politicised nostalgia and prescriptions for the newly configured Cuba and Germany, as exemplified in films like Buena Vista Social Club. Meanwhile, from the New Left movement to today, revolutionary compatriots Ché Guevara and Tamara Bunke continued to be icons of youth resistance, even while being commodified globally.
Sun, Sex, and Socialism illustrates how Germans identified with transnational communities beyond the East-West binary. Through analysis of
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'Well researched, theoretically sophisticated, and a welcome break from studies that focus on the Northern Hemisphere and its superpowers... Hosek's study can be strongly recommended to those with an interest in identity formation in the German states of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.' -- John D. Pizer German Studies Review; vol 36:03:2013
Table of Contents
List of FiguresList of AbbreviationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction 1 Contesting the New Berlin Republic through Germany's Cubas2 Extending Solidarian Heimat: Cuba and the 1960s Democratic Republic3 Translating Revolution: Cuba and the 1960s Federal Republic4 Siting Trials: Cuba as Cipher for German Governance around the 1970s 5 Touring Revolution and Resistance: Tamara Bunke and Che GuevaraEpilogueWorks CitedIndex
