At the borders of Saxony-Anhalt, large signs inform drivers on the Autobahn that they are now entering or leaving the “federal state of early risers.” Whatever this might inadvertently suggest about the slothful practices of other Germans (or about Saxony-Anhalt as a state without qualities), one suspects that this motto has had about as much success endearing those who live in Saxony-Anhalt to their state as earlier efforts by East German leaders had had promoting patriotism through the concept of the “socialist Heimat.” I draw that conclusion based on the findings of Jan Palmowski's entertaining new monograph, which looks at the evolution of official efforts to “invent” a “socialist nation” to win the hearts and minds of ordinary East Germans and thus secure mass allegiance to the GDR. Palmowski concludes that the success of such attempts was modest at best, but that they nevertheless helped to contribute to the stability of a largely unpopular regime.

Drawing heavily (and sometimes heavy handedly) on the theoretical insights of political scientist James Scott, anthropologist Victor Turner, and historian Alf Lüdtke, the study is a regional investigation of several locales in Thuringia and Mecklenburg that relies on unpublished sources from eleven archives, a variety of contemporary newspapers and journals, as well as an impressive number of oral interviews. In the first of three parts, Palmowski shows how party and state officials—after initially failing in the 1950s to create much popular interest in new cultural practices imbued with a supposedly “socialist” content—gradually turned in the 1960s to the idea of a “socialist Heimat” (despite the völkisch taint of this term) to construct a bond between East Germans and their state and create a new national identity for the citizens of a place that, for obvious reasons, had only a tenuous claim to nationhood.

The term Heimat is notoriously ambiguous, which make it doubly difficult to define with any precision the concept of “socialist Heimat”—notwithstanding the author's suggestion that the ruling SED provided “possibly the clearest definition of heimat in German history” (p. 303). Propagated through local festivals, folksy television shows, and the popular press, the concept became closely associated with anticonsumerism and anti-Americanism. More important, Palmowski suggests (with a nod to the important work on Heimat by Celia Applegate and Alon Confino), it attempted to create an emotional attachment between individual East Germans and their state by making their very own locality a metaphor for the GDR; to that end, officials emphasized the positive changes that supposedly took place there under—and thanks to—state socialism.

The more interesting aspect of this monograph is its anthropological treatment of popular responses to these official endeavors. Palmowski argues that although the emotional and sensual appeal of Heimat resonated strongly with East Germans, just as it had before 1945, the SED's syncretic twist on this concept failed to forge a genuine bond with the GDR or socialism; rather, it only served to strengthen preexisting regional ties and local traditions. Moreover, Palmowski carefully shows how popular participation in Heimat activities did not conform to official expectations: instead, many East Germans imposed their own nonsocialist meanings on such pursuits, often to advance their own interests and agendas—a prime example of what Lüdtke has famously referred to as Eigensinn.

East Germans may have contested the symbols, practices, and meanings of Heimat, but they nevertheless continued to adhere to the “public transcript” (Scott) of the “socialist Heimat ideal” (i.e., they continued to act and “express their concerns through the official language” of the regime to gain personal room for maneuver). This contributed to regime stability, Palmowski contends, by its implicit acknowledgment that “the party's domination was unavoidable” (p. 110). It was only when the “public transcript” was openly challenged in the late 1980s that the regime quickly crumbled.

This is where the argument becomes more original but also more tenuous: Palmowski rightfully emphasizes the complexity of human behavior and the practices of power. East Germans “played the system,” but they also played according to the rules set by the system. Yet, like James Scott, he underestimates the extent to which the “public transcript” was openly contested at the grass roots on an everyday basis long before 1989—without the regime falling apart. A number of studies that have appeared since the demise of the GDR clearly show that to have been the case. In fact, Palmowski's findings are largely in tune with those of many of these studies, which have demonstrated the everyday “agency” of ordinary East Germans, as well as the tendency of officials to capitulate to the masses when their own policies proved unpopular (e.g., the pragmatic decision in this case to stop pushing “socialist” cultural practices in favor of truly popular Heimat activities frequently devoid of socialist content).

All of this once again casts doubt on the supposedly totalitarian nature of the East German regime—an increasingly hackneyed debate that Palmowski wisely avoids. He opts, instead, to criticize Mary Fulbrook's controversial notion of “normalization,” as well as to call to task (unfairly, I think) “social historians” for supposedly neglecting just how “enmeshed” state and society really were in the GDR (p. 289). There are other misleading claims as well: it is simply not true, for example, that Scott's work has “barely featured in studies of everyday life in the GDR” (p. 12). And because Palmowski focuses primarily on the Heimat activities of the Cultural League and their local functionaries, one gets little sense of high-level internal debates about the concept of the “socialist Heimat” and what SED leaders actually thought themselves about how it could be used to foster a sense of socialist citizenship. Such records may not exist, of course, but if they do, they might help better explain the policy transformation that Palmowski identifies in the 1960s.

There are other interesting themes that this rich study touches on, but might have addressed even more fully: how expellees from the former east related to the idea of a “socialist Heimat,” for example, or the obvious tension between the regime's concerted efforts, on the one hand, to foster a sense of nationhood through the concept of Heimat and, on the other, official professions of socialist internationalism. Palmowski is not unaware of the underlying ironies: as he wryly observes, “in constructing national identity, the most centralized state in German history turned out to be the most reliant on local identity and regional diversity” (p. 306). The SED ultimately failed in that endeavor. In fact, if a specific East German identity ever did come into being, it was only after the GDR no longer existed.