The notion of “East German justice” is, for many, an oxymoron. Communism made a mockery of judicial independence and twisted legal decisions toward unjust ends in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Therefore, it is argued, one cannot speak of socialist justice. Although morally sound, this conclusion is historically problematic. The critique of socialist law as systemically instrumentalized from above has discouraged empirical examination of the judiciary “from the bottom” and over time. Inga Markovits is the rare legal historian who has studied the East German judicial system's everyday functioning as opposed to its infamous political trials. The book under review adds to her record of pioneering research by analyzing the work of a local court across the life span of the GDR. Markovits aims “to reconstruct the rise and fall of a totalitarian legal system from the vantage point of ordinary citizens” (2). Her readable and illuminating study meets this ambitious goal. It follows an evolving cast of individual and institutional actors who participated in the civil and petty criminal cases that comprised the vast majority of legal proceedings in an East German town between 1949 and 1990. Socialist law, Markovits shows, was experienced by judicial personnel and ordinary people as contradictory and contested, rather than as consistently ideological or unchanging.

“Lüritz” is a pseudonym for a town of 55,000 residents in northeastern Germany. With its mixed economy, it encompassed GDR institutions and interests that generated typical varieties of litigation between citizens or between citizens and the state. People landed in court because of conflicts over personal and state-owned property; labor disputes about work rules, benefits, and wages; and family disagreements about marriage, parenting, and other personal disputes. Markovits's diverse source base consists, first and foremost, of an extraordinary cache of court records, personnel files, and correspondence that she discovered in the dusty cellar of the Lüritz courthouse. She conducted interviews with former judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, plaintiffs, defendants, officials of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), factory managers, union functionaries, and Stasi collaborators. Chronological chapters frame thematic ones that focus on a major category of litigation such as “property” or on a major institutional player such as the “Party.” This format allows her to delve into legal and political questions in some depth, while also portraying change over time. Chapters are rich in evidence drawn from individual court cases and include fascinating biographical information about judges, lawyers, and officials. The stories enhance analysis, rather than overshadowing it. Markovits writes not as the omniscient scholar but openly and charmingly in her own voice, reflecting, for example, on the ambiguity, partiality, and possible unreliability of her sources.

In the early years of the “construction of socialism,” Markovits explains, the GDR's Ministry of Justice and its courts implemented “class justice.” “People's judges,” many from proletarian backgrounds and many of them women, were quickly and rudimentarily trained to replace Nazi and “bourgeois” judges and lawyers who were fired and/or fled to the West. In this transitional era, property cases loomed large in the court docket in Lüritz. Rulings supported “proletarian” interests and often included charges motivated by Stalinist paranoia. Cases of money missing from a cash register or materials found ruined in a factory, for example, were prosecuted not only as property crimes but also as capitalist sabotage. The politicization of local justice ebbed after the SED had consolidated power and, even more, as de-Stalinization cooled the ideological temperature. Justice remained intertwined with politics, of course. Deeds, speech, or family relationships even remotely connected to “republic flight” from East to West Germany were ominously politicized, especially after construction of the Berlin wall in 1961. Yet the interaction between justice and ideology became more complicated. “Socialist ideology” could influence a ruling unpredictably, depending upon whether the judge privileged social order, social background, collective interest, or individual responsibility in deciding, for example, a labor dispute in a socialist factory or an argument between tenants of state-owned housing. Markovits cautions against assuming that the ideology in question was always “socialist,” highlighting, for example, cases in which children were taken from a mother because of the court's traditional interpretation of proper maternal behavior.

Justice in Lüritz was not only ideological and moralistic but, Markovits argues, “humanized,” if in paternalistic ways. Sympathetic judges often worked behind the scenes to help a defendant who, according to socialist law, was guilty. The practice of law gradually became, however, more legalistic, routine, and professionalized, in response to pressures from above and below. The standard of training for judges rose. The Supreme Court overturned local decisions less often because they were politically questionable and more often because they diverged from the letter of the law. It became more common for a defense attorney to use the law assertively to argue his or her client's case. In an ironic twist of cause and effect, Markovits suggests, judges, lawyers, and litigants took the written law more seriously in the 1980s, even as the Communist regime increasingly lost legitimacy not only among ordinary people but among Party/state officials.