The German Democratic Republic existed long enough for there to be some sense in understanding its history in several phases. One such is a middle period associated with a degree of stabilization, from the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 to roughly the end of the 1970s. This period is the subject of Jeannette Z. Madarász's investigation of the dynamics between state economic planning and the realities of life on the factory floor. Her main contention is that after the Wall closed off certain options for most of the population of the GDR, normalization and routinization of life, centered on the workplace, led to an uneasy and contested peace between the authorities and the people. Particularly when Erich Honecker took over from Walter Ulbricht as party first secretary in 1971 and propounded the “unity of social and economic policy,” greater emphasis was placed upon the improvement of living and working conditions. This was no easy matter and—as Madarász demonstrates—all the provision by state-owned factories of canteens, libraries, shops, child care, health care, and so forth could not fully compensate for fundamental shortages and inefficiencies, let alone for lack of democratic freedoms. The protective role of the state and its “debt-funded consumerism” (p. 5) nonetheless led to a certain normality, appreciated at least in retrospect by many residents of the former GDR.

Madarász begins with a discussion of the thematic and theoretical trends of recent research and a short introduction to the main features of economic politics and company culture in the mid-period GDR. With constant reference back to the notions of normalization and routinization, the following five chapters then delve more deeply into how economic planning was experienced in five sample factories. These were a transformer works and a lighting factory in Berlin; an oil-processing plant and a semi-conductor works on the Polish border (in Schwedt and Frankfurt an der Oder, respectively); and a synthetic fiber factory in Premnitz, not far due west of Berlin. The geographical spread is not great, but nonetheless there were significant differences between the prehistories of these factories, their fortunes during the GDR, and indeed their fates after 1990. This indeed is one of the core themes of Madarász's work: that centralized planning and the creation of huge industrial Kombinate (combines) of factories could not overcome specific local circumstances. She stresses the importance of local managers and of the extent to which they were connected into central and regional political networks. The Berlin factories tended to get more attention, though a high-priority development such as Schwedt also sucked in more investment. Her focus is primarily on the experience of the workers, however, and the tensions that arose when there were serious problems with living and working conditions. Madarász goes so far as to say that “It can be argued that the East German working population significantly influenced central policy” (p. 144). Certainly, there was a dynamic between workers, managers, and the ruling party that benefits from the kind of local coverage that Madarász provides. She makes good use of archival material and her own questionnaires and interviews.

One is struck, if not surprised, by some of the descriptions of the poor state of the workplaces and the appalling inefficiencies. When Director Hermann Danz arrived at Premnitz—formerly part of I. G. Farben—in 1967, he commented, “I am fully prepared to recognize everything that's good but, on the other hand, I cannot help thinking that, in some sections of the plant, the Second World War ended only two weeks ago” (p. 128). It is also clear that all these industrial concerns were hopelessly overstaffed; raising productivity—though often spoken about—was effectively impossible. Particularly outside Berlin, the factories dominated not only all local employment, but also accommodation and social and cultural facilities. The Premnitz works in 1964 had a garden center and also raised pigs for the factory butcher. No wonder towns and villages across the GDR were devastated from 1990 onward when this highly subsidized, all-encompassing, inefficient system collapsed. Nevertheless, the voices that Madarász quotes contain many positive statements about life in the GDR, particularly about security and social solidarity. One group of workers had an especially rosy view. A Polish woman, one of many who arrived in Frankfurt an der Oder in 1971, said, “The first impressions . . . were simply marvellous. The town was clean and smart. Large shop windows, different shops caught our eyes. The area around the [factory] was interesting, modern buildings, large spaces, everywhere light and air, the huge car parks full with cars. We were impressed” (p. 120).

This is a useful study by Madarász, but it does have its weaknesses. There is inexcusably lax use throughout of the term “Communist Party” for the SED, despite the fact that the prose is otherwise thick with German terms and acronyms. For a short book, it is very repetitive—“as has been pointed out repeatedly” (p. 108)—and this is partly down to the rather mechanical structure of the successive chapters on the factories. It is surprising that there is no mention of the extraordinary post-1989 BBC documentary on the Narva light-bulb factory featured by Madarász, which also included official footage from the heyday of the works near Warschauer Strasse. The vividness of the personal accounts that are included compensates, though: a female worker at Premnitz describes how a political session on “Soviet working methods” in fact comprised the reading out of the title and then a slide show of a journey along the Black Sea coast.