This really is a very important book. Despite more differentiated approaches to German Democratic Republic (GDR) studies in recent years, a tendency to apply a totalitarian interpretative model still predominates. In other words, historians seek to explain developments in the GDR on the basis of the assumption that all was controlled from above. Not that Port rejects the totalitarian model outright, indeed he integrates it into his analysis. But in doing so, he shows not what this model explains, but what it overlooks: namely the importance of developments at grass-roots levels far away from Berlin. And you could not, in the GDR, get much further away from Berlin than Saalfeld on the Thuringian-Bavarian border. It is Saalfeld, or more specifically its key industries—the Maxhütte (steel), Zeiss (optical instruments), and Wismut (uranium)—and agricultural production, that forms the focus of Port's study.

Port sets out to answer the much-vexed question as to why the GDR lasted so long, given all the problems attendant on its existence. How could it have been apparently so stable? He rehearses all the traditional scholarly arguments such as the importance of repression and obedience, of legitimacy and loyalty, of apathy and withdrawal, and of conciliation and compromise (see, for instance, his conclusion). He finds much that is of value in these arguments; thus he shows how foremen, union and industrial functionaries, and even district SED representatives sought to accommodate the wishes of the factory workforce, at least to a degree. But he also astutely points to their overall inadequacy as explanations. He argues, for instance, that disobedience in the GDR was very high at the time of greatest repression, namely the early 1950s; he demonstrates this point with reference not just to the June 1953 uprising, but also to a little-known protest in Saalfeld in 1951, when between 50 and 150 miners stormed a police precinct to demand the release of a colleague. Disobedience was also rife under that softer variant of repression, namely coercion. Attempts to coerce farmers into joining agricultural collectives (LPGs) did not necessarily succeed, and indeed the mid-1950s saw a forty-percent decrease in membership of the LPGs. Even the renewed coercion in the late 1950s did not meet with the greatest success, as farmers found ways of continuing to seek to feather their own nests.

Nor does Port find much sign of apathy or withdrawal. Rather workers were constantly complaining to their foremen and union representatives about poor working conditions, the iniquities of piecework and production quotas, and diverse other problems. This may not have been political protest, but it was often interpreted as such by the neurotic SED, and Port provides enough examples of workers not mincing their words about their disdain for the bigwigs in Berlin. That such moaning was tolerated, and that concessions were made to workers is surely a sign of conciliation and compromise—and this is the one branch of traditional explanations for GDR stability that Port's study would appear to confirm. Yet concessions were not always made, and what appears to be conciliation is actually, according to Port, turning a blind eye to constant noncompliance, griping, and even insubordination on the shop-floor.

Having generally taken issue with traditional explanations, Port offers his own: social fragmentation. Far from being a classless society, the GDR was rife with social tensions between workers and intelligentsia, the latter enjoying a whole range of privileges as an enticement to stay in the GDR. Vertical tensions were complemented by horizontal ones. Some workers, such as those in the uranium industry, were more privileged than other workers. Workers in the same firms were divided by means of organized productivity competitions, and the activist movement. The scramble for a limited number of consumer goods could reduce all workers and farmers to crass egoism. Sexist discrimination of women created gender tensions, too. In the end, then, it was the atomization of GDR society, the lack of any true group identity or cross-group solidarity that led to the GDR's long-term stability: no cohesive social force emerged capable of bringing it to its knees—until, perhaps, 1989, a fact that Port could have explored (although his book focuses largely on the 1945–1971 period).

Port's book is not without aspects one could criticize. How typical was Saalfeld really, given its position at such a sensitive location near the West German border? The monograph would have profited from the inclusion of one or two case studies of other GDR towns. Were workers in borderlands such as Saalfeld allowed to moan more than others living further inland? Were they, conversely, under greater ideological pressure to conform? Many of their complaints were noted down by functionaries to put pressures on those above: to what extent were these magnified or manipulated? While the extensive evidence of archive work is impressive throughout the book, the argument, moreover, is sometimes swamped by it. But overall Port's book makes a vital, original, and possibly even pathbreaking contribution to GDR scholarship. It deserves a wide readership.