Since the fall of communism, gender history has offered a powerful lens through which to examine the former people's republics of Eastern Europe. Histories of gender and sexuality in East Germany by Donna Harsch, Elizabeth Heineman, and Josie McLellan, to name just a few, have shed light on the systems of collaboration and compulsion on which state socialism rested. At the same time, historians have paid close attention to how East Germany, for all its rhetoric of gender equality, was a highly masculinized country, the propaganda of which often utilized archetypes of the father-worker-soldier to mobilize support.

Somewhat surprisingly, then, scholars have paid relatively little attention to the role of the military in East German history. Although the supposedly pacificist German Democratic Republic founded the National People's Army (NVA) in 1956 and introduced universal conscription in 1962, historians have largely passed over its place in East German society and, in particular, its role in the constitution of East German masculinity. Tom Smith addresses that gap with a detailed analysis of how German literature, film, and television portrayed masculinity in the NVA.

Such an analysis, Smith argues, allows scholars to understand how the military molded East German masculinity, while also making room for individual expressions of gender and sexuality. Smith's foundational contention is that “masculinities commonly considered to be marginalized – those marked by vulnerability or victimhood, theatricality, shame, same-sex intimacy or desire – are in fact central to military institutions and the wider gender order” (12). In making this argument, Smith ultimately contributes to the still-growing scholarship on East German government and society that seeks to temper Cold War-era understandings of state socialism by allowing for complex interplays of coercion and consent.

In highlighting the multiplicity of masculinities in literary depictions of the NVA, Smith engages a historiography that has sought to understand the nature of the East German state. Taking up Mary Fulbrook's concept of the “participatory dictatorship” (The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker [2005], 12), Smith argues that Cold War novels, for instance Härtetest (1978) by Wolfgang Held and Es gibt kein Niemandsland (1980) by Walter Flegel, “suggest that the socialist soldier personality is constructed through men's participation in the institution and their negotiations of gender ideals” (59). Because the military required participation, Smith contends, spaces opened up for “limited acts of conformity, refusal and failure” (62) that shaped masculinity in East Germany.

Smith also investigates literary and filmic representations of queerness in the NVA. A growing number of scholars (myself included) have interrogated how the East German regime regulated homosexuality and how, in the 1970s and 1980s, gay activists made increasingly robust demands on the socialist state. Smith's final chapter adds to this literature with careful analyses of Ingo Schulze's Neue Leben (2005) and Stefan Wolter's Hinterm Horizont allein (2005). Smith contends that “same-sex desire emerges through gaps” (201) in both works, that is, even in the officially heterosexual NVA, homosexuality could not be completely banished.

While the oscillation between works from before and after 1990 can at times be dizzying, it allows Smith to think creatively about the ways in which Germans today negotiate memory of the East German dictatorship. “Once former citizens were no longer required to negotiate GDR institutions in person,” Smith contends, “these negotiations did not cease, but continued in textualized and even fictionalized forms” (230). Indeed, one of Smith's most innovative arguments revolves around Ostalgie. Focusing on how film can poke fun at the NVA's masculine ideals, Smith contends that painting such depictions as “nostalgic too often closes down detailed analysis” (137). He proposes instead that scholars think of depictions of the GDR as “retro,” that is as something which combines “material from or symbols of the past” while maintaining “a detached and ironic approach” (138). In his analysis of the films Zum Teufel mit Harbolla (1989) and NVA (2005), the concept of retro creates space for Smith to think more carefully about how Germans today remember the GDR. It also allows him to reperiodize East German aesthetic history, focusing on ways in which trends we might today think of as Ostalgie actually originated in the 1980s.

One of the most intriguing elements of Smith's work, in fact, is his refusal to allow 1990 to become a second Stunde Null. In harmony with recent historiography that interrogates memory and memorialization of the GDR over the past thirty years, Smith insists on the significance of East German history and culture to understanding contemporary political, social, and cultural questions. The hit German miniseries Deutschland 83 (2015), which follows a young Stasi agent sent to spy on a West German general, becomes a sort of leitmotif for Smith's analysis. Though the show is a product of reunified German culture and largely unmoored from historical fact, Smith contends that it illustrates how conceptions of East German masculinity continue to shape our present.

Comrades in Arms is part of a broader scholarly interest in German military masculinities, including Friederike Brühöfener's work on masculinity in the West German Bundeswehr and Jason Crouthamel's on masculinity in the German army during World War I. Smith's literary approach adds a perceptive cultural analysis to this body of scholarship, while also pointing to unanswered questions that would require work with archival records, oral histories, or other sources to answer. How, for instance, did military regulations shape the emotional and even sexual relationships between recruits on the ground? How did successive generations of young East German men experience their military training, and how did it change over time? It would also be interesting to know more about the reception history of the works Smith analyzes: Did readers at the time pick up on how these novels and films spoke to (East) German masculine ideals in the ways Smith indicates? These are some of the questions that will hopefully guide future work in the field. In posing them, Smith's research not only augments our understanding of gender and sexuality in East Germany, but also opens a new field of research to historians and literary scholars alike.