In his study of the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ), Alan McDougall manages to cut an admirably concise path through the swathes of resolutions and Richtlinien, plenums and committees that litter the archives left behind after its demise. For him, “youth politics” means youth policy, on the one hand, and youthful dissent, on the other. His ten oral history interviews with former (male) functionaries are particularly good at dissecting youth policy by providing insider impressions. But it proved “impossible to develop any sort of oral history project involving those who experienced the GDR as young people in the fifties and sixties” (p. viii). As a result there remains a deficit in terms of literature that actually deals with the activities and experiences of ordinary FDJler. McDougall argues that his sources capture the voices of young East Germans (p. 14). But he does not consider the degree to which such voices were distorted or obscured by SED/FDJ reporting.

The book identifies four major “crisis points” between 1946 and 1968. These were the June 1953 uprising; the crises in Poland and Hungary in late autumn 1956; the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961; and the Prague Spring in 1968. It also explores three important periods of reform: the first following Honecker's dismissal as head of the FDJ in May 1955; the second coinciding with the issue of a Politburo communiqué to youth in February 1961; and the third resulting from a second Politburo communiqué in September 1963. “In both the mid-fifties and the mid-sixties, youth policy reform was abandoned when it was perceived by party hard-liners to be spiralling out of control and before it had made any real impact on the lives of young East Germans” (p. 11).

McDougall is strongly critical of totalitarian theories, arguing that among the youth population of the GDR there was both coercion and consent (p. 13). But what such consent entailed is less clear. He identifies certain aspects of the FDJ experience—the “happy youth life,” such as dances, concerts, and “social evenings”—that were genuinely popular (p. 39). But he argues that these were increasingly overwhelmed by bureaucratic inertia. As a result, the FDJ's policies “were unpopular, unevenly implemented, and betrayed a striking inability to connect with the real interests of young East Germans” (p. 46). Critical of “top-down” history, McDougall seeks to develop a history of the organization at the grass roots. This largely concerns instances of immunity and dissent. This allows, he suggests, “for a detailed investigation of the attitude of ‘ordinary’ young East Germans to communist rule and, in particular, into the issue of how widespread youth ‘resistance’ to the SED dictatorship actually was (p. 14).”

This is less a critique of McDougall than of the sources he uses, but Youth Politics in East Germany has very little to say about young women (whether inside or outside the FDJ). For an organization that could boast millions of female members, the FDJ was remarkably blind to the possibility that girls might have different interests from boys. McDougall argues, “Dissent was usually (though not always) more common among young men than young women, whose scope for escaping the clutches of parental or state control was—despite the GDR's commitment to sexual equality—more limited and whose tendencies towards rebelliousness were consequently more muted” (p. 17). But there is not much evidence of female FDJler concretely conforming, either. McDougall's focus on the inner-FDJ wranglings during the first major reform period (1955-56) leads him to ignore the highly public debates that were going on in Junge Welt, the FDJ's main publication. This is an obvious problem because the newspaper was the organization's main means of reaching out to and trying to influence ordinary members. Ordinary FDJler may have dismissed the first anti-bureaucracy article in Junge Welt as a “carnival joke” (p. 76). But more than a month of such coverage must have made the message clear even to irregular readers. Another, longer-lasting debate concerned the position of women and sexuality in socialism. Spurred on by Walter Ulbricht's comments at the Fifth Parliament of the FDJ in May 1955, Junge Welt sought to address not only “issues of production,” but also topics such as music, fashion, and sexual relations. In May 1956, Junge Welt reached the novel, and for the time remarkable, view that a solution to the national tent shortage could be found by mixed groups sharing the same tents. Albeit self-censored, letters to the newspaper from this period reveal some of the everyday interests and opinions of ordinary, young, female FDJler.

McDougall is particularly critical of Peter Skyba's argument that Karl Schirdewan was more liberal in terms of youth policy than Ulbricht. He argues that Schirdewan's youth policy ideas differed little from Ulbricht's (p. 74). “Schirdewan was hardly the ‘liberal’ or ‘revisionist’ of SED historiographical legend” (p. 75). But Schirdewan's real contribution to reforming the FDJ was in helping to get rid of Honecker (albeit temporarily) and opening up Junge Welt for more critical debate. In many ways, Albert Norden was a far more radical critic of the youth organization's failings. “He instructed FDJ officials to begin organizing discussions under the slogan ‘everyone should give his opinion’ and to create ‘advice centres’ where young people could discuss a wide variety of practical topics ranging from fashion to marriage” (p. 72). Unfortunately, as McDougall makes clear, the FDJ proved repeatedly unable to reform itself. The Hungarian Uprising marked the end of self-criticism and the return to favor of Honecker. His view was summed up in the phrase delivered at the 11th Plenum (December 1965): “Our German Democratic Republic is a clean state” (p. 197). Such a vision, dominated by images of heroic, but chaste male veterans, had no place for honest debates (whether they were about youth policy's failings or about sexuality).