At first glance, Esther von Richthofen's argument that citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) cannot be classified as being either part of the state or not seems an easy statement to accept. It is not. Before turning to her study of the evolution of East German cultural policies and practices, she reminds us why: historical scholarship on the GDR continues to work in binary terms. The examples pervade the literature: the state vs. society, public vs. private, acquiescence vs. opposition, top-down vs. bottom-up approaches to the state. Von Richthofen does not stop there in her attempt to rethink life in the GDR, however. By combining institutional and social history, a much more complex picture emerges of how East Germans interacted with the state. Pointing to three groups of actors in the cultural life of the GDR—participants in cultural activities, local cultural functionaries accountable to both the participants and policy makers at the central level, and the SED policy makers at the national level responsible for cultural policy—von Richthofen demonstrates how these different groups influenced and were influenced by one another. Without negating or downplaying the repressive nature of the single-party state, von Richthofen makes a compelling argument for rejecting both assumptions of the state as omnipotent and of the people as niche-finders.

The term “culture” here is broadly defined, narrowed down only to the SED's perception of cultural activities being either high- or low-brow. Beyond those state categories, culture refers to those leisure-time activities that people pursued because they so desired, and this point is crucial to the book's argument. People belonged to stamp clubs because they enjoyed collecting stamps, just as they might join a factory choir or go bowling together. That is, the SED could not force participation in organized cultural activities aimed to educate socialist personalities if no one wanted to partake of the available opportunities. Moreover, throughout the course of the GDR's history, people's personal desires and interests regarding their leisure time changed, and the SED had to respond to these changing attitudes.

Von Richthofen observes that, as these personal attitudes toward leisure-time activity changed, the way in which individuals interacted with their local community and state also changed. She divides the cultural policy of the GDR into roughly three periodizations, each characterized by a different sort of dialogue among participants in cultural activities and local and national functionaries. In the 1950s, GDR citizens showed a marked skepticism toward the state and used the existing forms of cultural activity as a convenient means of pursuing their own interests. An example that von Richthofen returns to often is philatelist clubs, where stamp collectors recognized that the state's resources outweighed their own, and thus joined stamp-collecting clubs in order to have access to stamps and not out of a sense of responsibility toward the state. By the 1960s and early 1970s, East German citizens had moved to a position of accepting the general monopoly on cultural resources held by the state, but this recognition was not resignation. Instead, East Germans began to demand that the SED fulfill promises of making cultural resources available. Cultural theorists in the GDR thus began to acknowledge the importance of grassroots interests as a necessary factor in constructing cultural policy. By the late 1970s, the expansion of other opportunities for leisure-time activities that did not need state organization, centered especially on cars and television, forced SED policy makers to attend to individual interests more in order not to lose the attention of its citizens. In this process, however, the state stretched itself too thinly, so that previously established cultural organizations felt neglected by the state. By the 1980s, East Germans, like other members of postindustrial societies, turned increasingly toward an individualist stance that forced earlier ideas about community into the background. During this period, East Germans altered their strategies of having their cultural needs met, including expecting more from local functionaries and going straight to central authorities to make demands, instead of always using the local functionaries as an interface. Such new practices should not be confused with grumbling, and should absolutely not be viewed as a harbinger of the 1989 revolution, as von Richthofen states. Rather, this development of citizens' expectations reflected East Germans' evolving ideas about the self and the state, so that their understanding of how to achieve personal fulfillment in cultural arenas took on a new form. Ultimately, von Richthofen concludes, we must open up our examinations of the GDR to allow for the existence of areas of nonnegotiable policy (e.g., a single-party state) as well as areas open to negotiation, such as cultural policy.

In providing a multi-actor model for analyzing one area of policy and practice in the GDR, this book is a valuable contribution not only to the literature on that state but also to the methodological considerations of institutional and social history and organizational studies. As such, it has a wide audience. Von Richthofen's meticulous study will naturally find a place in academic libraries, both institutional and personal. Its accessibility in terms of excellent writing and clear argumentation would also make it an excellent text for both undergraduate and graduate classes in history and political science classes about models of communication and policy making. One serious editing flaw should be mentioned here—von Richthofen describes her book as consisting of eight chapters, with the first chapter beginning on page one. The table of contents, however, lists an introduction and then a prelude, followed by six chapters; therein “Chapter 1” begins on page 49, which is von Richthofen's “chapter three.” Thus, whenever she refers to a chapter, she is referring to her divisions and not that of the table of contents or even the actual chapter headings. It risks being a confusing distraction, but one easily overcome by marking through the printed table of contents and replacing those divisions with von Richthofen's.