Microkhan by Brendan I. Koerner

Entries Tagged as 'East Germany'

Alien in Alabama

November 22nd, 2011 · Comments Off on Alien in Alabama

The deeper I get into my latest book project—just crossed the 30,000-word mark—the more I keep digging into memories of my formative reading experiences. Doing so goes a long way toward helping me understand why I’m attracted to certain stories, and that self-awareness helps me separate the narrative wheat from the narrative chaff. Loyal followers […]

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The Other Direction

October 4th, 2011 · 4 Comments

Pesky facts keep getting in the way of my book’s smooth narrative. Take the lovely paragraph I crafted yesterday, in which I argued that no one in the West believed that Cold War refugees could possibly flow toward the Soviet Bloc. An earlier experiment with such migration had ended tragically, after all, and that was […]

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The System

September 22nd, 2011 · Comments Off on The System

Taking a sick kid to the doctor this morning—an hour-plus on the subway, followed by a sure-to-be interminable wait for gruff service. Should be fun.

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Everything’s Better with Disco

September 14th, 2011 · Comments Off on Everything’s Better with Disco

Invoking khan’s prerogative to steal a day for book writing. Because if I don’t finish this chapter by week’s end, I fear the worst for the family’s future over the long winter. Even in Queens, keeping a yurt heated ain’t cheap.

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“Success in Work, Comrade”

July 18th, 2011 · 1 Comment

Searching for motivation to once again get cracking on my book for an eight-hour stretch, I stumbled across this excellent trove of East German labor propaganda. These particular images were produced at the tail end of Communist Era, and they reflect the nation’s struggles to keep pace with the West. There are plenty of mentions […]

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Sportverbot

May 19th, 2011 · Comments Off on Sportverbot

Writing about the hammer throw has got me thinking a lot about Soviet Bloc athletics, and in turn one of the phenomena that fascinated me during my youth: East-to-West defectors. I was always drawn to tales of sportsmen from the other side of the Iron Curtain who decided to chuck it all and start anew […]

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The Revolution Will Not be Besotted

May 11th, 2011 · 2 Comments

Did East Germany contribute to its own demise by launching an official program to combat alcoholism? New research, packaged under the ominous title The Blue Strangler (a nickname for cheap vodka), makes the case: Despite the steep prices, high proof alcohol was popular and the average GDR citizen drank 23 bottles of liquor a year […]

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The Throw-In

July 9th, 2010 · Comments Off on The Throw-In

Today’s expedited spy swap in Vienna brought to mind an even more dramatic trade: the 1962 exchange that brought downed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers back home, and sent “Rudolf Abel” back to Moscow to live out his days as a KGB trainer. Yet there was a third person involved in that sensational Berlin swap: […]

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Sci-Fi in the DDR

May 14th, 2010 · Comments Off on Sci-Fi in the DDR

The Stasi was hardly the only important East German institution to leave behind a wealth of archival material. Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft, better known to Western film buffs as DEFA Studios, also preserved its documentary heritage upon Communism’s collapse. The state-run movie producer has since bequeathed much of its vast archives to the University of Massachusetts, […]

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Ransom as Lifeblood

March 10th, 2010 · 7 Comments

For fairly obvious reasons, we find it unable to resist scholarly examinations of North Korea’s currency weirdness. Why would Dear Leader’s regime see fit to instantly vaporize what little wealth the Hermit Kingdom’s poor citizens have managed to scrape together? (We suspect the answer has something to do with the abuse of Hennessy, which has […]

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