Chronology

A significant intervention of these books is to rethink the chronology of post-war communism. Kimberly Zarecor's work on the architecture that preceded the panelák leads her to make an argument challenging the salience of 1948 as a year of transition for Czechoslovakia, stating that rather than the communist takeover, 1950 marks instead the real shift for architects. In 1950, socialist realism became the dominant architectural style in Czechoslovakia, in part due to the style dictates of the Soviet Central Committee. However, this shift did not, as might be assumed, solely involve increased state repression; rather, it was a result of a generational conflict between older architects, educated in the inter-war period, and younger architects, who came of age after the Second World War, as well as the desires of bureaucrats to meet the housing goals set forth by centralised planning (Zarecor, 6). Socialist realist, or Sorela, architecture privileged classic forms and decorative elements that harkened back to older, even rural, styles and was largely reviled by the inter-war modernists who had so far dominated Czech architecture. The story does not end here, however. Experimentation with new industrial building technologies continued behind the scenes, even as Sorela remained the most visible aspect of the work of Stavoprojekt, the Czech national architectural and engineering services organisation. With Stalin's death in 1953, the influence of Sorela waned and both state priorities and architectural preference favoured modernism, and a continuation of architectural trends from the inter-war years and the period immediately after 1945. In other words, the story of the late 1940s and early 1950s was one in which style and state control waxed and waned, and were the subject of constant negotiation. The ultimate triumph of panelák architecture resulted from a variety of factors including the desire of the regime for the rapid building of new housing, but also the design decisions of architects themselves. It is therefore a shame that Zarecor's study ends in 1960, with just a coda hinting at how panelák architecture came to dominate the landscape of Czechoslovakia and the problems that bedevilled these developments in the latter years of the regime. Zarecor seems to believe that the delicate balancing act of the first fifteen years after the Second World War shifted decisively and negatively during normalisation ‘as the post-1968 regime attempted to placate its citizens’ (Zarecor, 293). But the dynamic of this shift and what it meant for architects, the state and the citizens who lived in these buildings remains an untold story.

That this story might be a fascinating one is hinted at by Betts, Bren, Glaeser and Palmowski's books, all of which complicate the stereotype of late communism as an era of dismal ‘nothingness’ (Bren, 4). In Czechoslovakia, the crushing of Prague Spring and the repression that followed under Gustáv Husák brought with it a new ideology of state power known as normalizace or ‘normalisation’, which was intended to be a step back from the political turmoil that had ended with Warsaw Pact troops on Prague's cobblestoned streets. The late 1960s/early 1970s marked a turning point in East Germany as well with Erich Honecker's ascent to power in 1971. In both cases, the state was said to abandon the social engineering projects of the first half of its existence in favour of providing consumer comforts and increased surveillance, a paradoxical combination of increased liberalisation and repression whose shared aspect was a rejection of the ideological mandates of the previous decades. Moreover, burdened by increasing economic problems, the socialist state was said to have sunk into an era of stagnation.Footnote ⁷ Scholarship on both countries has largely focused on the early years of the regimes. Bren suggests two reasons for this: first, historians are trained to look at events and not the ‘stagnation’ that marked the two decades between the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution; and second, the official archives are filled with ‘endless speeches with nothing but words piled on like verbal car wrecks’ (Bren, 6). Her work, along with that of Betts, Glaeser and Palmowski all suggest directions for the fruitful exploration of this later period.

In 1978, Václav Havel made his famous critique of the Czech greengrocer who put a ‘Workers of the World Unite!’ banner in his shop window and thus became complicit with the normalisation regime.Footnote ⁸ In contrast to Havel, Bren insists on seeing the shades of grey in the actions of this famous greengrocer and the millions of Czechs like him. To do so, she focuses on the wildly popular television serials by Jaroslav Dietl that populated state television in the 1970s and 1980s. What these TV shows tell us, Bren argues, is that the Czech state and Czech citizens both sought a ‘quiet life’. After 1968, the state found its role in safeguarding this quiet life for a people weary of political turmoil. Bren's concept of ‘privatised citizenship’ in the Czech 1970s and 1980s explores how the state's emphasis shifted to values such as intimacy and communication. This turn towards the family, the village and the circle of friends was not, Bren emphasises, a turn away from politics. As Dietl's serials made clear, the party was made up of good people who were part of the fabric of daily life. The protagonists of these serials were heroes of a different sort: you were supposed to identify with them, not look up to them—not a rejection of politics, but its internalisation.

The intertwining of private and public is something that both Betts and Palmowski also describe in their histories of East Germany. Betts's book traces the history of several sites of private life—from local courts to petitions (Eingaben) to religious culture—across the four decades of the GDR's existence. In case after case, the 1970s reflect a kind of turning point but not one that can be neatly summarised. For example, in Chapter 2, Betts examines the history of the Christian counter-culture in East Germany. For the first two decades of the GDR, the state became increasingly hostile towards Christian worship, subjecting even Christians who had withdrawn to worship at home to Stasi questioning. The state's antipathy towards the Church found one expression in the attempt to foster a socialist Jugendweihe ritual to replace Christian confirmation. The Jugendweihe became a test of the loyalty of parents, with the church and the state pulling parents in opposite directions. By the mid-1970s, the state appeared to have won this battle, with over 95% of children undergoing the Jugendweihe (Betts, 73). However, Betts also notes a curious thing. Just as the Jugendweihe became so pervasive, it appeared to lose its ideological meaning, becoming instead a ritual of familial bonding and consumption. Betts coyly suggests that the development was a marker of the ‘decline of the ascetic ethos’ that had been shared by both church and SED (Betts, 81). Meanwhile in these same decades, the organised church stepped out into public life, becoming both a partner of the state in organising welfare activities and also a key site for the development of the peace movement and other opposition forces. The story that Betts tells here and elsewhere is one of overlapping narratives of generational and ideological change.

While the 1971 divide is highlighted, if rethought, in Betts's book, for Palmowski, the importance of Honecker's ascension is often less important. To be sure, Palmowski makes it clear that the trope of the ‘socialist heimat’ became more important in the Honecker years. However, Palmowski attributes this less to its importance in its own right and more to its function as compensation for the failure of the regime to instil loyalty to socialist ideology itself. Furthermore, in Palmowski's explication of the dynamics of Heimat in the small towns of Holungen and Dabel, 1971 recedes in importance in comparison to the rhythms of local festivals and village politics. It is not that the state was irrelevant here. As Palmowski discusses, both villages were crawling with Stasi agents. It was rather that changes in the Politburo's party line did not seem to be relevant as such.

Part of the difference between Palmowski's and Betts's appreciation of the significance of 1971 can be attributed to differences in their sources. While Betts uses some interviews, these interviews are much less important to his conclusions than his deep research in state archives. This research naturally leads him to see the fingerprints of the state in more places than Palmowski, who relies much more heavily on interviews. Moreover, like his interviews, the Stasi files that Palmowski relies upon display the myopia typical of that organisation, focusing on the minutiae of village politics and not the transformations in the party line. Another possible source for this difference is that Betts’ research focuses more on Berlin and it is quite possible that people in the Republic's capital were more attuned to the significance of Honecker's ascension than those in the provinces.

Glaeser offers an even more radical rethinking of the chronology of the GDR. He makes the provocative claim that that the transformation of consciousness becomes more important over the lifetime of the GDR rather than less, as many historians have assumed. According to Glaeser, there were two reasons for this development. First, by the 1960s, structural transformation of East Germany's economy had failed to produce expected gains in productivity. As a result, the transformation of the ‘quality’ of workers took on a greater importance. And second, Western Ostpolitik brought with it an increased danger of contact with Western goods and propaganda. The state needed to counter-act this danger (Glaeser, 89–96). Unfortunately, Glaeser does not ground this argument in empirical research. Although he quotes Honecker on the importance of a ‘socialist consciousness . . . equipped with a Marxist–Leninist world-view’, he does not sufficiently contextualise this quote (Glaeser, 94). How do we know that this was a true priority on the part of the SED leadership, and not mere lip service? What mechanisms were in place to effectuate this transformation? Glaeser is silent on these points. However, his argument hints at something that the other historians mentioned in this review also note. It is not sufficient to say that ideology ceased to matter over the four decades of the period of state socialism in Eastern Europe. To understand the shifting significance of ideology, it is first important to understand the contribution these books make to our understanding of the relationship between the Socialist state and the population it governed.

State and society

One of the key contributions of the history of everyday life has been to rethink how people relate to the state. The manifold needs and desires of individuals affect the relationship of people to the states that govern them and complicate any top-down analysis of power relations. The books under review here are not the first or the only books to make this argument with respect to the state in Eastern Europe.Footnote ⁹ However, they do add significantly to our understanding of how and why the state succeeded and failed in the eyes of its citizens.

Bren comes to the conclusion that the focus of Czech historians on the rise of dissidence in the 1970s and 1980s obscures the fact that normalisation was largely successful because it reflected the shared desire on the part of the Czechoslovak state and its citizens for a ‘quiet life’ after the turmoil of 1968. Her discussion of this turn inward is thought-provoking. Her study of the dramatic serials produced by Czechoslovak state television, particularly those by Jaroslav Dietl, produces a fascinating history of how the state imagined normalisation society. However, the success or failure of her argument about normalisation's success relies upon an issue that has long bedevilled cultural historians: reception. Bren provides impressive viewing statistics, in which shows such as The Youngest of the Hamr Dynasty (1975) were watched by upwards of 90% of Czechoslovak citizens and generated hundreds of enthusiastic letters from viewers (Bren, 136–140). She even has the results of the interactive Kinoautomat technology, in which viewers of Chef Svatopluk's Quandaries (1985) were able to vote on how the fictional Svatopluk should respond to the dilemmas he faced in his workplace (Bren, 195). But what she does not do is show us what these viewers actually thought about the television shows they watched. It may well be that these television shows were as successful as they were popular, but Bren does not have the sources to do much more than speculate on if or how they worked. As Bren is aware, letters to state television and the Central Committee were not necessarily representative of the thoughts of the broader population of viewers. Her comments on the state's shifting priorities are much sharper than her understanding of the relationship between the regime, the greengrocer and his TV. Moreover, while Bren wants to challenge Havel's charge that the Czech people were engaged in complicity, Bren struggles to explain what their behaviour signifies instead. A more differentiated source base (interviews, memoirs, information about other leisure activities?) and a greater attempt to theorise the relationship of state and society might have helped support her claim that Dietl's serials were representative of more than just the state's desires.

In contrast, Steege's book thematises the conflicted relationship between the state and the people it ruled. Black Market, Cold War narrates the growing conflict in Berlin between the erstwhile Allies in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War from the perspective of both high and low politics. Steege describes unruly Berliners who frustrated and confounded the authorities at every turn. He evocatively describes a post-war environment in which ‘the black market was an interstitial space, a place of ambiguity and messiness, of movement and constant change in which individual Berliners’ participation also changed regularly’ (Steege, 56). This is an admirable and well-researched attempt to think through what the everyday lives of Berlin's residents and their struggle for survival amidst the wreckage of the Third Reich's former capital means for larger-scale historical narratives.

At nearly every point, the Soviets and the SED misjudged the mood of the Berlin population. For example, a campaign to blanket the Eastern half of the city with election posters on the eve of the elections in October 1946 only succeeded in reminding Berliners of their own relative poverty and incurred resentment for the waste of scarce paper (Steege, 78–9). One comes away from this book with a sense that the SED was flat-footed from the very beginning, foreshadowing the tone-deaf party featured in the other books in this study. But is the Berliners’ rejection of the Soviets and the SED really to be understood primarily as a consequence of their failure to meet ‘Berliners’ basic material needs’, as Steege contends (Steege, 6, 70 and passim)? Or is it more the consequence of long-standing prejudices against Russians combined with resentments of a more recent vintage related to the Soviet's brutal offensive and the rapes of hundreds of thousands of German women (Steege, 89–92)? The relationship between material circumstance and pre-existing stereotypes might have been clarified by a greater attention to the Western authorities, who confronted similar destruction but managed to respond more successfully.

Black Market, Cold War is reminiscent of urban studies of Berlin and Vienna during the First World War that connected food politics to the dissolution of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg Empires.Footnote ¹⁰ Those studies ably describe how conflicts in the streets spilled over into the realm of high politics, undermining state power and culminating in revolution. But there is a key difference between those stories and this one. These books are about the collapse of a state, but the story Steege tells is one of state consolidation. No matter how little legitimacy the SED may have had, their hold on power only increased over this period. Street politics therefore become less relevant for the manoeuvrings of the occupation authorities, not more so. This is mirrored in Steege's text itself, as his own narrative increasingly separates the level of ‘street politics’ and ‘high politics’, with long stretches that impressively navigate through the thicket of urban administration and great power negotiations without touching ground on the level of street politics that he considers so indispensable to the study of the field. If his own work cannot bring these two levels together, how can the reader be convinced that they are so necessarily intertwined? By the time Steege gets to the 1948 blockade of the Western sector by the Soviets, which is the culmination of his story, he is reduced to arguing that the blockade needs to be understood in the context of a broader set of attempts by the occupation authorities to control the movement of goods and people in Berlin and that ultimately the blockade was more porous than historians have assumed (Steege, 221). This is all well and good, but it hardly lives up to his earlier claim that the book ‘relocates the narrative landmarks that generally demarcate Berlin's emergence as a Cold War flashpoint’ (Steege, 4).

Steege's book is primarily invested in one model of citizen–state interaction—the unruly citizen who exceeds the state's attempt to control his or her behaviour and loyalties. Yet citizens were not just undermining state power but using it for their own purposes. Palmowski uses James Scott's concept of ‘public transcripts’ to offer insight into this relationship. In Scott's work, the ‘public transcript’ refers to the open negotiation between the dominated and the oppressed; however, between villagers, among friends, or anywhere else outside of the public eye, there is also a ‘hidden transcript’ in which the dominated critique and resist. The actions of subordinates simultaneously contribute to the hegemony of dominant discourse in public life and also its constant subversion behind the scenes. Palmowski finds the notion of a ‘public transcript’ useful for explaining how villagers might speak fluent ‘SED-speak’ but also appropriate this public discourse for their own local concerns that might (or might not) align with party interests. Palmowski's book also contributes to the understanding of the relationship between soft and hard power in the maintenance of the SED's control, stressing how the SED's repressive organs, and in particular the Stasi, represented a kind of ‘latent’ power (Palmowski, 12–13). Palmowski argues that the history of the Stasi demonstrates the imbrication of the ‘hard’ power of coercion and the ‘soft’ power of consent: Stasi power could remain latent because people believed it could be actualised. However, in 1989, ‘once the party had lost its “soft” power, that is, the citizens’ acceptance of everyday power relations’, its instruments of hard power (i.e., the Stasi) became ineffective as well (Palmowski, 310).

These concepts of the public transcript of socialism and the latent power of the Stasi really come alive when Palmowski moves to an intimate history of two villages. In his chapter on the apparently compliant village Dabel, he focuses on Horst Roggenbau. It is hardly surprising that this enthusiastic communist, philatelist, and village leader was also a Stasi informant. But Palmowski suggests that Roggenbau's activities cannot be understood solely as a result of ideological commitment. Rather, he suggests that both Roggenbau's cultural leadership and his career as an ‘informal informant’ (inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, IM) were motivated by a personal need to be in the middle of the action, a need that sometimes even placed him at odds with the state, such as when he opposed the establishment of the socialist youth organisation (Freie Deutsche Jugend, or FDJ) in Dabel (Palmowski, 289). In a fascinating discussion, Palmowski explores how the Stasi's presence in Dabel was simultaneously acknowledged and dismissed by its residents. By focusing on the levels of discourse and the complexity of consent, accommodation and refusal, Palmowski's model of the relationship between the state and its citizenry is considerably more complex than what Steege presents. He also offers an important corrective to Bren's limited discussion of reception when he discusses television, stressing that ‘the messages which television producers “encoded” were [not necessarily] “decoded” by viewers in the same ways. Viewers could enjoy the socialist messages of community, but they could also watch ‘Songs’ simply because it was well made and featured good music’ (Palmowski, 88–9).

Zarecor's model of the relationship between architects and the state resonates with Palmowski's discussion of agency. While similar work has been done in other realms of cultural production, the centrality of architecture to the goals of the Czech state—at the crux of industrial and artistic policy—makes Zarecor's study especially significant.Footnote ¹¹ The architects that Zarecor profiles were left-wing from the start and generally interested in making a career for themselves in the communist state. We therefore see how they use the state as much as the state uses them. As the mandate for socialist realism waned, architects quickly returned to the modernist forms that had interested them for the previous thirty years and more. The marriage of modernist form and industrial building technology followed a different trajectory here than in Western Europe, but panelák technology was neither a Soviet import nor entirely unwelcome.Footnote ¹² Indeed, one of the most important contributions on the part of the state was the growth in importance of housing. ‘By the mid-1950s, the production of housing units was by far the most important work architects could undertake. The means and methods used to produce housing were left up to them’ (Zarecor, 227). While this is not exactly a public versus hidden transcript model, Zarecor depicts a state administration whose priorities aligned in complex ways with the architectural establishment.

If Bren understands Czech state television and its viewers to have embarked on a shared project of securing a ‘quiet life’, and if Palmowski and Zarecor focus on how the state created frameworks for action while describing how citizens could simultaneously use the state for purposes that exceeded these frameworks, Betts stresses how East Germans politicised the private sphere as an arena where they could claim rights through and against the power of the state. This is at its clearest when Betts discusses dispute commissions (Schiedskommissionen) in Berlin. These commissions handled local disputes that did not rise to the level of the formal state justice system—issues such as vandalism, petty theft and disturbances of the peace. Betts notes several trends over the forty-year history of the GDR. First, there is a decline in the language of reform on the part of the courts. This fits into the narrative espoused by Palmowski among others that the state became less invested in ideology over time. Second, there is a growing refusal on the part of citizens to respect the state over this period. This, too, reflects a historiographical consensus that East Germans grew increasingly disillusioned with the state and authority in general. Finally, and perhaps more surprisingly, there is a growth of a language of civil rights, for example the right to live without noise disturbances from one's neighbours, that was respected and defended by the state. One could argue that this final trend was a growing acceptance of bourgeois values in the absence of Socialist transformation; however, Betts stresses that the growth of civil rights here was one that ‘did not develop . . . against the state but rather very much within it’ (Betts, 170). This nuanced view of the relationship of state and society resonates with Palmowski's understanding of the public versus hidden transcript model, but Betts sees the state as more flexible and proactive in the evolving dynamics of power than the state as Palmowski sees it.

Ideology

The books reviewed here come to diverse conclusions about the role of socialist ideology in the everyday life of citizens living in Eastern Europe. For Palmowski, the very popularity of the ‘socialist heimat’ itself was a function of the state's attempt to co-opt traditional identifications to shore up loyalty to the state. Behind this move on the part of the Honecker regime was a recognition that their attempts to ‘fit local popular practices into its ideological mould’ had failed (Palmowski, 147). This is perhaps clearest in his chapter on the GDR's Join in! (Mach mit!) initiatives. The annual Join in! campaign was founded by the National Front in 1967. Every year, collectives across the state committed to ‘voluntary’ activities such as building playgrounds or planting gardens in order to improve their homeland. These initiatives were to be completed by 7 October and were a kind of birthday present from citizens to the state. According to Walter Ulbricht and other SED officials, Join in! was a demonstration of socialist democracy and an active citizenry, in which participation was intended to secure a sense of belonging to the GDR. Palmowski demonstrates how important the Join in! campaign became for everyday life, but also how it failed to encourage an ideological identification with the state. Even when they could compel participation, the SED failed manifestly to change hearts and minds, and Join in! ‘worked because it reinforced existing traditions and mentalities’ (Palmowski, 270). This interpretation of Join in! is typical of Palmowski's dismissal of the ideological ambitions of the Communist party. The image of the state that emerges is one that is increasingly less able and less interested in transforming the consciousness of its citizens.

It is here that Glaeser makes a counter-argument, claiming that communist ideology is absolutely crucial for understanding the regime and its collapse. The empirical heart of his study is a series of interviews with both Stasi officers and members of the opposition peace movement. Despite a wide range of initial motivations to join the Stasi, once in the organisation, officers came to accept a Manichean world-view that was inherited from Soviet Bolshevism. This Manichean world-view was epitomised in the PID/PUT/‘opposition’ theory, in which all opposition was a function of outside ‘capitalist’ agents.Footnote ¹³ Furthermore, the Stasi was caught in a spiral of its own making. Insisting on outward evidence of loyalty to the socialist cause, Stasi officers were nonetheless aware that public (or even private) behaviour might mask an inner rejection of the party. So they required constant and ever escalating signs of allegiance, even, perhaps especially, from their own members. This constant hunt for deviance left the Stasi paranoid, and their Manichean world-view, which attributed all dissonance to outside forces bent on destroying the state, left them continually searching for traitors and spies and unable to understand the true motivations or demands of the opposition and its sympathisers.

More than economic ossification or even the lack of resonance of communist ideology outside the party, it was an ideological rigidity, which Glaeser argues was part of the DNA of the SED itself, that was the cause of the end of communism in Germany. The social isolation of Stasi officers and their reliance on PID/PUT/‘opposition’ theory created an echo chamber that reality could not penetrate. In this sense, Glaeser's perspective on the importance of ideology is different from the perspective of these other authors because he is less interested in the meaning of communism from the perspective of ordinary citizens and more interested in what it meant for those who identified and worked for the state itself.

Glaeser's insistence on taking the self-representation of former Stasi officers seriously is both the important contribution and problem with his study. Glaeser's perspective from within the state itself is absolutely vital to complicating any other model of the relationship between state and society. Glaeser makes it clear that whatever communist ideology may have come to mean for how society viewed the state, it remained crucial to the way the state viewed society. Given that between 3% and 5% of all East German citizens worked for the Stasi (most as IMs) at some point in their lives, and thus were exposed to, even if they did not necessarily entirely share, the Stasi's ideological investments, the role of ideology in the regime needs to be taken seriously (Glaeser, 149). The problem here is that this fascinating evidence and important argument is hidden in nearly 600 pages of turgid prose, repetition, and often unnecessary theory, while all of this exegesis on phenomenology, speech act theory, and so on does not lead him to problematise the words of his interview subjects. The officers he interviews over ten years after the fall of communism may have had a variety of motives for talking to him and representing their participation in the state, and Glaeser is insufficiently attentive to what this might mean for his findings.

Betts and Bren's understanding of the ideological content of the late socialist regime threads a path between arguing that socialist ideology had become less relevant by the later decades of state socialism and arguing that ideology was all-important for understanding the state's actions in this later period. For Bren, the communist emphasis on ‘the quiet life’ was a recoding of ideology within the private sphere. The honest workers and upstanding officials of Dietl's television serials offered a vision of a life where the Communist Party created the space for individual self-realisation. While this failed ultimately to stave off revolutionary collapse, she also claims that normalisation's leaders ‘[did not fail] to imprint new and competing priorities on late Communist culture’ (Bren, 199). Exactly what these new and competing priorities were remain a bit fuzzy in Bren's analysis. By linking ‘privatised citizenship’ with Lauren Berlant's diagnosis of ‘infantile citizenship’ in the contemporaneous United States, Bren implies that the imbrication of the private and public spheres was nothing specific to socialism.

Betts agrees with Bren that there was a ‘dilation of the state into family and private life’ in the later decades of the regime; however, his discussion is considerably sharper on what this meant for citizens, exploring both its insidious and liberating consequences (Betts, 145). In example after example, the state's antagonism to the private lives of its citizens fades away by the 1970s. It was allowed or even expected that citizens had private lives. However, along with the expectation that citizens had private lives came a belief that these private lives should bear witness to the achievement of socialist goals—the arrival of atheism, the equality of the sexes, and even a kind of personal freedom. Furthermore, the appropriation of the nascent discourse of private rights in the GDR by ordinary people could indicate either (or both) the shared goals between the state and its citizenry that Bren emphasises and the appropriation of public transcripts of power that Palmowski discusses.