Through the lens of six minority groups—Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, Asian and African workers, Hooligans, Skinheads, and Punks and Goths—Mike Dennis and Norman Laporte explore the German Democratic Republic as a “post-totalitarian dictatorship.” They argue that this conceptualization of the GDR encapsulates both the repressive nature of the regime and the many ways that East Germans exhibited agency, at least for the period from the mid-1960s until the end of the regime, which is the focus of the work. In line with works on the GDR such as Mary Fulbrook's The People's State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005) and those of her students, such as Esther von Richthofen's Bringing Culture to the Masses (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), and Jeannette Madarasz's Conflict and Compromise in East Germany 1971–1989: A Precarious Stability (New York: Palgrave, 2003), the work under review emphasizes the influence of ordinary people on state policies, the state's inability to ensure conformity, and the frequent congruence of interest between rulers and ruled.

The first group considered by the authors is Jews, who, at only 350 registered community members in 1987 (p. 38), formed a tiny minority. Following the antisemitic wave that caused the fall of East German Jewish Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) functionaries such as Lex Ende and Leo Bauer in the mid-1950s, state attacks on the Jewish community ceased and were replaced by a policy of tolerance. The SED did, nevertheless, harbor suspicions of Jews, not on racial grounds as the Nazis had, but on their potential as agents of western subversion. Accordingly, the Stasi infiltrated Jewish communities. Given the size of the Jewish community, and the fact that espionage connections to the west existed only in the minds of paranoid functionaries, the penetration of Jewish communities in the GDR reveals much about the state's obsession with control.

Unlike Jews who enjoyed some limited recognition toward the end of the regime, notably in initial steps to restore the Neue Synagogue on Oranienburgerstrasse in Berlin and in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Night of the Broken Glass in 1988, the 20,000 Jehovah's Witnesses in the GDR were persecuted over the course of East Germany's history. The state's instruments of repression thoroughly penetrated the organization primarily because of its members' conscientious objection to military service and their notion of political neutrality. For their beliefs, many of them went to jail, and here Dennis is forthright: “The suffering of Witnesses in prison is one of the darkest chapters in the history of the GDR” (p. 78). Nonetheless, to reinforce his point about agency of ordinary Germans, he emphasizes that the Stasi was never really able to destroy the organization.

Of the 191,000 foreign nationals who lived in the GDR in 1989, the Vietnamese and the Mozambicans were two of the largest groups, and thus the focus of the authors' investigations. Despite Stasi surveillance and the state's strong discouragement of integration, relationships nevertheless developed between East Germans and foreign workers. These workers also proved themselves adept at filling consumer voids in East Germany by, for example, making clothes to sell at market. For Dennis, these examples suggest agency on the part of these workers, and the existence of niches beyond the regime's instruments of control.

Similarly, the Stasi seemed helpless to curb football hooliganism, a phenomenon that irked the authorities since they believed it to be an “English disease.” As Dennis writes, “[F]ootball hooliganism managed to survive—even thrive—in a system which, so the regime's sports scientists and ideologues asserted, had removed its basic socio-economic and political preconditions” (p. 146). The Stasi was particularly attentive to games between Berlin Football Club Dynamo and FC Union, the underdog beloved by regime opponents, and used its network of informants to head off altercations with the authorities, albeit to limited effect.

Punks, goths, and skinheads round out the minority groups investigated by the authors. The crackdown on the Leipzig beat demonstration of 1965 launched a multifaceted Stasi attack on the alternative music scene, involving elaborate operations, informants, and Zersetzen, the “breaking down” of an opponent which became the preferred method of Stasi control in the latter half of the regime. Skinheads, primarily a 1980s phenomenon, managed to increase in numbers despite penetration by Stasi informants. The authors suggest that the party had no one to blame but itself for creating the preconditions for the far right movement, not the least of which was preventing contact between foreigners and East Germans, downplaying the suffering of Jews and homosexuals in the Third Reich, and establishing a regime that “served to reinforce the authoritarianism and aggressive masculinity which were central to the skinhead culture” (p. 188).

Although they are empirically interesting, the findings presented here are not surprising. No serious scholar would dispute that East Germans had agency, nor that the regime's instruments of control were imperfect. What is striking is the degree to which the GDR aspired for control. A tiny group of Jews, harmless foreign workers, youth interested in alternative music, and a pacifist religious group were all subject to thorough state surveillance. If one subscribes to Martin Malia's approach that “totalitarianism does not mean that such regimes in fact exercise total control over the population; it means rather that such control is their aspiration,” then this book does not negate the totalitarian concept for the GDR. It reinforces it in spades.