Despite its title, Socialist Modern is less a book about “broadening the idea and understanding of modernity” (p. 8) than it is about the quotidian and the ways in which studying the everyday throws into question many dominant arguments about the character of life in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In part, this book is a response to the “feelings of profound displacement and disillusionment” (p. 360) that Daphne Berdahl identifies among many former East Germans in the wake of reunification and the “victor's history” (p. 353) that quickly took shape in the popular press and scholarly journals after 1989. More pointedly, it is a refutation of the notion that a liberal, capitalist West Germany may be set up as a norm against which to judge the GDR any more than a liberal, capitalist Great Britain could provide that standard for Imperial Germany. Both entail grievous reification. And thus the editors take a strong stance against the “crude moralizing ‘Checkpoint Charlie’ version of GDR history” that they and others have found proliferating in the years following reunification. Indeed, they are particularly concerned with the tendency to extend “a cold war logic” of “backwardness” onto historical analyses of the GDR, and because that effort has so often entailed a “tendency to equate modernity with triumphant liberal capitalism” (p. 7), they have set out to argue, much like many post-colonial theorists, for yet another alternative modernity.

As they posit their “socialist modernity,” however, and attempt to identify the ways in which it “shaped the relationship between socialist state and society” (p. 8), they run up against “thorny problems of definition,” as Katherine Pence puts it in her own essay (p. 292). These problems are never resolved. Instead, what the editors inadvertently demonstrate about “modernity” is its deficiency as an analytical term. It simply does not do much intellectual work for them.

Perhaps that is because the point they and their contributors work hardest to make is rather straightforward: people in the GDR had legitimate lives and shared an important cultural, social, as well as political history that should not be studied through ideological blinders. Instead, the GDR must be analyzed “on its own terms” (p. 17) and incorporated into our more general understanding of Germans' many roads to the present. On this level, they are quite successful, providing readers with a series of case studies of GDR social and cultural history that do indeed “shed new light on the relationship between state-level politics and the culture of everyday life” (p. 10) and further upset the normative position West Germany has assumed in the historiography.

First and foremost, these essays demonstrate a striking number of commonalities between East and West Germany that are too often overlooked by historians seeking to identify telling differences. For example, as Greg Eghigian explains, East and West Germans shared a classic belief in the possibility of social progress and the “reformable human being.” And if the parameters that channeled and shaped those beliefs in the GDR ultimately created a notion of East Germans as passive objects that has been eagerly embraced by psychologists and laymen alike, agency abounds in these essays. Just as in the west, East Germans carved out their own personal freedoms, developed their own styles, set up their own networks of communication and exchange, and produced, in short, a vibrant social and cultural sphere despite the powerful auspices of the state. Indeed, sometimes they did it together with the state. Paul Betts, for instance, explains that the “cult of the private” played important political and cultural roles on both sides of the Wall. The GDR's leaders recognized its importance early on and exerted tremendous energy to transform housing into political capital—much like their counterparts in the west.

That leadership also went to pains to position the GDR internationally, engaging, as Young-Sun Hong details, in humanitarian efforts and medical training of foreigners in the hope of building political capital abroad. The unique international position that the Hallstein Doctrine forced on the GDR hindered those efforts. But so, too, did the common history it shared with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG)—the lack of colonial contexts that would allow them to provide ample training in tropical medicine, and a history of racism that played out in disturbingly similar ways through the medical faculties' treatment of foreigners on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The attitude toward “asocials” in the east, Thomas Lindenberger tells us, was not unlike that toward “the underclass” in the west. Moreover, such concerns with the “negative milieu” had a rather long history, one that preceded the creation of these states and persisted through them. So, too, did the cultural importance of “quality work” Alf Lüdtke identifies among German men in both countries.

These and the many other commonalities that emerge in this volume between the GDR and the FRG should be enough to undermine seriously any future efforts to draw impenetrable lines between these states' cultures, societies, and politics. They might even manage to help to topple West Germany's normative position. If not, there are several epiphanies in this volume that may. To take just the most striking example, if one accepts the degree of female emancipation in a state as indicative of the level of its sophistication, civilization, modernity, or anything else we might code as “good,” then the GDR appears to have carried the day. Pence and Judd Stitziel demonstrate a striking degree of agency among East German women who helped to transform spheres of consumption and living standards in the GDR, and through those efforts some of these women became involved in the political machinery of the state in ways that were almost unheard of in the West. Moreover, Dagmar Herzog demonstrates that the social and cultural transformations of the private sphere that most directly affected women as women were nothing short of remarkable: institutional structures and strong rhetorical support from the state “made women's work for wages not only possible but also much less guilt inducing” (p. 71); East German men were encouraged to take part in childrearing, and they actually did; they also learned a greater acceptance for women in leading professional and political positions than their counterparts in the FRG did; the East German state defended premarital sex, undercut the stigma around illegitimate birth, and opened up a range of possibilities for female sexuality while their counterparts in the west pursued a policy of forced conformity.

Members of the GDR leadership were generally conventional in their sexual ideals and conservative in their personal outlooks. Nevertheless, and much to the surprise of researchers who began pursuing comparative studies of Germans' sexuality, they helped to create the conditions that allowed women in the east to claim a markedly greater level of sexual satisfaction, to find their men more sexually mature than the Wessies, and ultimately, when it came to their sex lives, to have “more fun.” It is unclear if East German men had “more fun” as well, but Herzog demonstrates quite convincingly that they, too, enjoyed much greater sexual freedom. As a result, in this area of the cultural sphere, reunification was less a boon than a bust for Ossies, initiating a decline in some of those freedoms among East Germans even as it energized debates on some women's issues (e.g., abortion) in the west.

In short, in many overlooked aspects, the east remained similar to the west, and in some ways it was more progressive. The failure to recognize such facts, as Berdhahl and Ina Merkel explain in their essays, is part of what drove the emergence of Ostalgie and the protest against “dominant interpretations of GDR history that have robbed the GDR past of its subversive potential” (p. 324). The editors' effort to regain some of that potential makes this volume a welcome addition to the ongoing struggle to rethink German history through the postwar era.