According to a joke that made the rounds in the former Soviet Union, women from different countries held on to their husbands in different ways: the German by her skills as a housewife, the Spaniard by her passionate lovemaking, the Frenchwoman by her refined elegance—and the Russian by the party committee.Footnote ³ This sexist quip was a not so oblique reference to the ways in which the communist party intervened in the private domestic affairs of its members. But—even leaving aside the obviously offensive—it was not entirely accurate, for the practice was just as common in other communist countries as well. This included the eastern half of postwar Germany, where, as in the Soviet Union, the wives of adulterous members of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) sometimes appealed to local functionaries for assistance with their straying husbands.Footnote ⁴

Why they did so and how officials responded to their entreaties reveal a great deal about the character of the East German regime as well as about the relationship between state and society in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)—topics that have been a source of vigorous scholarly debate since the demise of state socialism in eastern Europe. This often acerbic discussion has largely focused on the nature of domination and authority in the GDR, as well as on the extent to which communist leaders were able to control the so-called masses and reshape society as they wished. The debate essentially pits those who argue that the party more or less managed to realize its total claims and achieve complete domination in almost all areas of society against those who emphasize the supposed “limits” of the dictatorship.Footnote ⁵ While the former group concentrates on the repressive aspects of state socialism, the latter tends to emphasize the everyday possibilities for autonomous action and agency on the part of ordinary citizens.

In essence, the dispute boils down to a deceptively simple question: was the regime totalitarian in reality as well as in theory?Footnote ⁶ Those who believe it was concentrate on the formal structures of socialist rule, on the various instruments of state repression, and on the general absence of political pluralism, free elections, independent representation, guaranteed civil rights, and the rule of law—in other words, on all of those features that clearly made the GDR a dictatorship. According to Klaus Schroeder, who has no qualms about characterizing East Germany as a totalitarian state, the central leadership enjoyed “all-embracing and unlimited, i.e., total, power.”Footnote ⁷ Without denying the basic autocratic attributes of the GDR, a number of scholars have increasingly cast doubt on such characterizations. They ground their criticism on archivally based investigations that look at life in East Germany at the grass roots and that, in so doing, supposedly get at the “reality” that existed behind the façade of dictatorship. What these investigations have in common are their attempts to demonstrate that the intentions and goals of the regime did not automatically translate into actual practice.Footnote ⁸ Just as important, critics of the “totalitarian” model highlight the everyday possibilities of autonomous action and agency on the part of ordinary East Germans, i.e., the ways in which their behavior militated against official demands and dictates as well as the ways in which they successfully looked out for their own interests and needs—what Alf Lüdtke has aptly described as Eigen-Sinn.Footnote ⁹ In short, this approach emphasizes the distinct limits to the SED's total claims in all areas of public and private life as well as its ability to direct and reshape society.

All of this relates to the thorny issue of conformity, opposition, and everyday behavior under modern autocracies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, investigations of the GDR—both the scholarly as well as the more popular—initially tended to focus on sensational stories about the infamous state security service, or Stasi. As shocking revelations emerged about its wide web of citizen spies, whose members numbered in the tens of thousands, East Germans increasingly came to be seen in black-and-white terms, i.e., either as guilty perpetrators or as passive victims. How ordinary East Germans and communist officials dealt with the phenomenon of adultery—not only the most common grounds cited for divorce in the GDR, but also a recurring theme in the literature of the Eastern bloc during the destalinization period—draws needed attention to the gray.Footnote ¹⁰

The following investigation complicates these debates by looking at how ordinary East Germans helped to contribute themselves to an attenuation of the public/private divide and the rule of law by voluntarily appealing to the regime for personal assistance. After describing a series of scandals that took place in the late 1950s at a single factory in Thalburg (not the town's real name), a small East German industrial town located in southeastern Thuringia not far from the Bavarian border, it discusses the manner in which adulterous party members were taken to task by officials approached by distraught wives, how the former responded to such intrusions, and why the SED was so concerned with the private affairs of its members. With an eye to this last issue, the article then looks at East German legal norms and prevailing moral attitudes in the party, placing them in the context of developments in modern Germany, the Soviet Union, and European socialism more generally. It also discusses why women sought the SED's assistance, focusing on changes in divorce law, sexual mores, and other factors, and explains why such appeals and party interventions petered out by the late 1960s. The concluding section examines the specific nature of privacy and the private sphere in East Germany, and embeds this in a more general discussion of the evolving relationship between the public and the private in modern Europe.

To get at these issues, the study draws on a variety of primary materials, including the archival records of meetings where adulterous party members were called to task by censorious colleagues and officials, as well as published materials such as East German legal codes and commentaries, sex and marriage manuals, and official proclamations. As rich as these documents are—especially the minutes of the party gatherings, which allow us to hear the voices of ordinary East Germans—the source base also imposes a number of frustrating limitations: for obvious reasons, there are no aggregate statistics on adultery in the GDR, on the number of cases in which women approached the SED for assistance with philandering husbands, or on the frequency with which such interventions occurred.Footnote ¹¹ There is also little biographical information in the extant records about the individuals involved in such affairs: the minutes of a single session are usually the only surviving evidence in a given case.Footnote ¹²

Such data would shed light, of course, on just how widespread this phenomenon was, on the types of persons involved, as well as on the representativeness of developments in Thalburg vis-à-vis the GDR as a whole.Footnote ¹³ But even if such cases were rare, what transpired at the ones that did take place in this town nevertheless reveals a great deal about a number of important issues: the nature of communist values regarding proper sexual behavior and marital relationships, and the extent to which such norms were internalized; gender relations under state socialism, especially with respect to the shifting situation and attitude of women toward marriage, divorce, and employment; the role of the party in everyday life; as well as the nature of privacy and the relationship between the public and private spheres. In short, as Dagmar Herzog has perceptively written, “sex can be the site for talking about very many other things besides sex.”Footnote ¹⁴

A String of Salacious Scandals

The year 1959 was not a good year at the Wema machine-tool factory in Thalburg. Besides production problems that had seriously hampered the firm's economic performance, a series of “moral” infractions committed by leading SED and management functionaries preoccupied local officials throughout the year. In April, the director died of a heart attack while away from home and in the arms of his mistress. In response to comments made by nonmembers (“Those who preach about socialist morality should act accordingly themselves”), the factory party secretariat decided to cancel plans to hold an official funeral. Three months later in July, it issued an official reprimand to another high-level management official who had told off-color jokes and then bitten a female SED member at a party. “‘If you do that again,’” she threatened, “‘I'll pull out your private parts.’ She immediately made good on her threat after another bite.” This went unnoticed by the manager because of his inebriated condition.Footnote ¹⁵

Just one day after meeting to discuss this embarrassing episode, factory SED leaders summoned one of the departmental party secretaries because of a report that he had smashed in a window at the local Stasi headquarters the evening before while “in a state of total inebriation.” His alarmed wife, who went to the factory that morning to tell the party secretary that her husband had not returned home that night, was not an unfamiliar face at Wema: the two had already met several weeks earlier for the third time to discuss her marital difficulties. At an emergency session held later that day with fifteen party members, including two visitors from the party's district school in nearby Bad Blankenburg, the man apologized for his behavior and admitted that he had a serious drinking problem. He then went on to describe his domestic difficulties in vivid detail. Although the couple wanted to divorce soon after their marriage, they had remained together because of their young child: “I'm cursed at home for being a communist, and my wife often says, ‘You'll be one of the first to be hanged from the trees’” once the SED falls from power. He also noted that his wife had cheated on him two years earlier with another man.

Once he finished his confession, the other party members began to scold him unsparingly for his personal flaws, arguing that family problems were no excuse for his reprehensible behavior. “I cannot condone his behavior because he's the secretary of a factory party cell and a member of the party,” one of his friends commented after describing the man's drinking excesses. “Such things attract attention in the factory; besides, it's not appropriate for a comrade to stay away from home for two nights.” After the others in attendance posed a series of “pointed questions,” the man admitted that he had spent the night at his girlfriend's apartment; he then announced that he planned to separate from his wife. The party secretary responded by enjoining him to do all that he could to save his marriage of ten years, at least for the sake of their three children. One party member asked if this woman was worth “putting his marriage at risk,” while another chimed in, “I doubt you'll remain faithful to the other woman after your divorce. You'll abandon her as well.” The group decided to remove the man from the party secretariat, fire him as departmental secretary, and assign him to penitential manual labor on the production floor—a common penalty for white-collar workers.Footnote ¹⁶

Five months later in December, the party secretary himself was let go on orders by the SED district secretariat because of his “constant drinking.” He had, in a drunken stupor, slept through a paramilitary exercise one week earlier. In what was perhaps an oblique reference to the active role he had played in the inquisitorial session described above, one party member demanded that he provide a detailed explanation for his aberrant behavior similar to the ones he had required of others. “I can't explain the reasons for my behavior, either,” he replied, “I'm just a person who's at the end of his rope.”Footnote ¹⁷

Shaming Sessions and Damage Control

The string of scandals at this factory involving individuals in responsible positions may have been unusual, yet the SED officials' personal involvement in the private lives and intimate affairs of its members was not.Footnote ¹⁸ Local officials were usually alerted to instances of “moral infractions” by poor performance at the workplace, or by colleagues, denunciators, and Stasi informants. In cases involving adultery, it was often the wives themselves who approached the party secretary or other members of the factory secretariat for help with their wayward husbands. This usually prompted a meeting, very much like the ones just described, between the individual and leading party members at the factory—most of whom were men (more than eighty percent of all SED members in Thalburg were male in 1959); outside officials from the district secretariat or the Party Control Commission occasionally attended these trial-like sessions as well, depending on the individual's rank.Footnote ¹⁹ Often assuming an air of moral superiority, the interrogators posed surprisingly lurid and intrusive questions, delving into the most personal areas of the man's private life. “Tell the party instead why you feel so attracted to Colleague G.,” party members at another factory in Thalburg demanded of an adulterous colleague in 1958, for example.Footnote ²⁰ Such queries were generally accompanied by a lecture admonishing the profligate for not “finding his way” to the party for support, and, more seriously, for damaging the reputation of the SED in the eyes of the masses.

The “wrongdoer” usually responded to the interrogation in at least one of three ways: by categorically refusing to respond to the accusations, by blaming his wife or others for his behavior, or by expressing self-abasing remorse. In the adultery case discussed in detail earlier, the man characteristically defended himself by referring to his wife's hostile political views as well as her own marital infidelity. At the end of the shaming session, he nevertheless apologized for his mistakes and promised his colleagues that he would “prove on the assembly line that I'm completely loyal to the party.” Others admitted that they should have come to the SED in the first place, commonly employing formulaic phraseology familiar to party intimates. A few appear to have been well-versed in pop-psychology as well: “My family situation helps to account for my behavior,” one rank-and-file party member explained when called to task for his excessive drinking habits. “I grew up without parents and have never had much support.”Footnote ²¹

Despite these ritualistic acts of contrition, local SED functionaries usually dealt severely with men who had either gone sexually astray or indulged in “excessive drinking”—two offenses that often seemed to go hand in hand. An official party sanction, the cancellation of political or professional training, removal from positions of responsibility, and, in the case of white-collar workers, delegation to the shop floor were all customary. More serious cases would sometimes lead to expulsion from the SED; this usually involved individuals who either voiced no regrets for their behavior or who refused to comply with party demands and break off their illicit relationship.Footnote ²²

East German publications from this period suggest that adultery, considered an undesirable vestige of the bourgeois past, was not uncommon. In fact, one of the most popular sex manuals at the time, Das Neue Ehebuch (The New Marriage Book) by physician Rudolf Neubert, devoted an entire section to this phenomenon: “Have people become worse? Is the west declining?,” he asked rhetorically. “Wherever we look we come across extramarital love affairs: in literature, in film, in theater, in our everyday surroundings, in the courtroom.”Footnote ²³Liebe und Ehe (Love and Marriage), another popular manual published in 1961 by a judge and a physician, similarly begins a section dealing primarily with adultery with a rhetorical question (“Are people more immoral today?”) and comes to the conclusion that Germans were not any more immoral than they had been twenty years earlier (i.e., in 1941 [sic]). Although they argue that more open discussion of these issues in the GDR merely gave the impression that people had become less moral, they do admit that the many strains created by the war (e.g., spousal separation and overcrowding due to housing shortages) had temporarily led to looser morals in the 1940s.Footnote ²⁴

Whatever the reasons for this behavior, why was the SED so concerned with the moral conduct and private affairs of its own members? In the first place, functionaries as well as the rank and file were expected to set an example for the so-called masses in all areas of personal conduct. According to the 1950 party statute, “The party member is required to be a model in his political, professional, and personal life.”Footnote ²⁵ By acting in an exemplary fashion that would provide a model for colleagues, friends, and neighbors, party members would, at least in theory, help the SED better achieve its political, economic, and social goals. Conversely, unacceptable or undesirable behavior would lead to charges of hypocrisy, reflect poorly on the party, and, as a result, harm its reputation in the eyes of the workers and farmers in whose name it claimed to rule. Officials were equally concerned that supposedly omnipresent “class enemies” would use moral infractions committed by party members in an effort to discredit the SED. This is why they were usually so interested in discovering the “causes” (Ursachen) of the man's behavior—with the implication usually being that enemy agents were somehow involved. There were sometimes more practical considerations as well: after a series of adulterous relations had taken place at one party school in the Potsdam district, for instance, officials feared that other wives would no longer allow their husbands to attend.Footnote ²⁶

The point is that damage control was an important consideration—especially when prominent individuals were involved. In winter 1955, the head of the SED district secretariat, the locus of party power in Thalburg, was removed from his position after having had an affair with and impregnating a much younger woman. He received a reprimand and was transferred to another district. When he was called back to Thalburg two years later and delegated to a so-called “Machine and Tractor Station” in the countryside, local officials noted with concern comments made by some workers who felt that morally deficient individuals should not be given positions of responsibility; this decision had, the workers claimed, “undermined” their belief in party officials.Footnote ²⁷ It is difficult to say whether this was meant sincerely and thus reflected an internalization of official values—or if it was merely an ironic instrumentalization of communist morals (i.e., another “weapon of the weak” meant to subvert authority).Footnote ²⁸

On a similar note twelve years later, state security officials reported critical discussions among workers at a local chemical fiber plant regarding the brief appointment of the district chairman of the National Democratic Party (NDPD) as interim mayor of Thalburg.Footnote ²⁹ They wanted to know how a man who had been in the SS and whose wife had allegedly shown pictures of him standing next to hanged prisoners in the Buchenwald concentration camp could hold such an important position. He was removed as mayor, but it was only after a distraught woman with whom he had had an extramarital affair poisoned herself and her young son three years later in 1970 that he was fired as chairman of the NDPD, removed from the city council, and then delegated as a white-collar worker to an optical firm in Thalburg.Footnote ³⁰

East German Legal Norms and Moral Attitudes in Historical Perspective

Political considerations alone did not account for the way in which the SED dealt with adulterers and other individuals who displayed “petty bourgeois,” “immoral,” “liberal,” “social democratic,” or “dissolute habits,” to quote only some of the epithets used to characterize such behavior.Footnote ³¹ The party's reaction to marital infidelity within its own ranks clearly reflected East German legal norms as well as prevailing moral attitudes. According to Article 30 of the 1949 East German constitution, “Marriage and family constitute the foundation of communal life. They are both protected by the state.” A 1955 Decree on Marriage and Divorce, which replaced an occupation statute on marriage from 1946 (which had, in turn, abrogated the racist Nazi marriage law of 1938), went a step further: “Marriage is considered a lifelong union in the German Democratic Republic … A frivolous approach to marriage is at variance with the moral views of the laboring classes.” In a similar vein, the ninth commandment of the so-called “Ten Commandments of Socialist Morality”—proclaimed with clear biblical overtones by General Secretary Walter Ulbricht at the SED's fifth Party Congress in 1958—instructed party members as follows: “You should live in a decent manner and honor your family.” Or, as the preamble of the 1965 Code of Family Law declared, “[T]he family is the smallest unit of society [and] has great social significance.”Footnote ³²

These legalistic principles and moral aphorisms reflected the moral universe in which the party leadership had been socialized, both as communists and as Germans living in a predominantly Christian society. A century earlier, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had condemned adultery as a product of the corrupt and oppressive nature of the patriarchal bourgeois family; the latter would wither away under socialism, they prophesied, and complete sexual liberation and freedom of choice would one day make adultery a thing of the past. In fact, sexual relations would become “a purely private affair” and officials would have “no call to interfere” in this realm.Footnote ³³ The GDR, where monogamous marriage remained the norm, had obviously not yet reached that hallowed stage of history. Yet, many of the younger and socially more progressive Bolsheviks active in the Russian Revolution had themselves embraced free unions and “free love,” and had even managed to push through a new and extremely liberal marriage and family code in October 1918, which, among other things, legalized abortion, permitted cohabitation, and made divorce much easier to obtain. Older, more puritanical Bolsheviks tended to hold more conservative views: Lenin himself was especially critical of sexual promiscuity, which, he believed, needlessly diverted valuable energy away from the main tasks at hand, namely devotion to the party and the construction of socialism.Footnote ³⁴

The foreseeable but unintended and undesired consequences of this and other similarly libertarian legislation in the 1920s—namely lower birthrates, a so-called divorce “epidemic,” as well as a significant increase in extramarital affairs—produced a backlash later that decade, which culminated in a June 1936 law that reversed many of the previous measures by banning abortion and making it much more difficult to obtain a divorce. Greeted by those women who felt highly ambivalent about the effect that sexual liberalization had had on their own lives, this was part and parcel of Joseph Stalin's pro-family and pronatalist policies, a response to the decreasing birthrates thought—not only in the Soviet Union, but also in Germany and elsewhere in Europe at this time—to pose a potential military threat. Whether this policy about-face represented a “great retreat” from socialist values has been a source of some disagreement among scholars.Footnote ³⁵ But it was nevertheless the strict moral environment that many of the future leaders of the SED were exposed to during their interwar exile in the Soviet Union; in fact, not long before their return to Germany in 1944, a new Family Edict eliminated the last vestiges of the earlier, more progressive legislation.

During the Weimar Republic, the German Communist Party (KPD) had taken reformist positions on divorce, abortion, and contraception not unlike those adopted in the Soviet Union at the time. There was much discussion across the political spectrum in Germany about the need to strengthen the family and thus the nation. But no substantive reforms were introduced in the end, largely because of political deadlock and conservative resistance. A number of sociocultural changes similar to those in the Soviet Union nevertheless took place following World War I, including greater female emancipation, declining birthrates, as well as a surge in the number of divorces and abortions—all of which prompted a conservative backlash reminiscent of the one in the U.S.S.R. This alleged “crisis of the family” became political fodder for the National Socialists, who promised to restore traditional mores. To that end, they introduced a series of pronatalist measures after coming to power, including a decree issued during World War II that made abortion a capital offense.Footnote ³⁶

Though purportedly pro-family, the Nazis paradoxically introduced a new, racially motivated marriage law in 1938 that actually eased restrictions on divorce to allow Aryans to get out of unions with “unworthy” individuals and instead marry racially superior ones; this would help to fortify the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community) by producing “healthy” offspring. Adolf Hitler personally approved a section of this document that made it possible for adulterers to marry their lovers—something that had long been expressly forbidden by German law—if the latter were racially suitable. The National Socialists nevertheless had a complicated relationship with the practice of adultery.Footnote ³⁷ On the one hand, the adulterous dalliances of prominent figures such as Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Esser, one of Hitler's earliest supporters and closest confidantes, were an open secret. And Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, advocated in no uncertain terms the practice of polygamy to ensure high birthrates of the racially fit. Yet, as Lisa Pine has pointed out, most Nazi leaders “favoured a more traditional concept of family.” Adultery remained morally and legally taboo, especially during the war when many husbands were off fighting, but it was no longer considered an automatic ground for divorce.Footnote ³⁸

It was primarily developments in the U.S.S.R., however, that determined what would later transpire in the GDR, where the leadership displayed a decidedly “ascetic” sexual conservatism during the early decades of the new regime: bodies were for production and reproduction, not pleasure.Footnote ³⁹ Not surprisingly, they attached great importance to marital stability and, consequently, marital fidelity—not only in the interest of the couple and their children but also in the interest of society as a whole. Marriage was not, in other words, a purely private affair. On the contrary, it was highly politicized: the party and state had both the right and responsibility to act as moral watchdogs, to do all that they could to assure “healthy” and stable relationships within the family, between the marriage partners themselves, as well as between parents and children, even if that meant actively interfering in the private affairs of East German citizens. To that end, Article 8 of the 1955 marriage ordinance, which stipulated legal grounds for divorce, underscored the intimate connection between the “public” and the “private”: “A marriage can only be terminated … if the courts have determined after a comprehensive investigation that the marriage has lost all meaning for the couple, for the children, and for society.”Footnote ⁴⁰

This provision, which reversed previous German marriage law by abandoning the “guilt principle” (Schuldprinzip) in favor of the “principle of matrimonial breakdown” (Zerrüttungsprinzip)—a reform that German communists and women's groups had demanded in vain during the Weimar period—could potentially ease divorce by eliminating the need to demonstrate fault.Footnote ⁴¹ East German authorities argued, in fact, that this was a liberating measure that reversed bourgeois practices of keeping couples trapped in unhappy marriages. At the same time, however, the reform made the termination of marriage theoretically more difficult by eliminating any absolute grounds for divorce.Footnote ⁴² This was especially true of adultery, which, until 1955, had still been punishable by up to six months of imprisonment in cases where it had led to divorce. Henceforth, a marriage could not be dissolved as long as it still had “meaning” for society as a whole, a matter to be decided by the courts after prolonged investigation and an earnest attempt to bring about reconciliation.

The effective exclusion of adultery as an absolute legal ground for divorce may come as some surprise, given the severity with which party officials looked upon this moral infraction. In fact, the decision prompted a great deal of criticism, especially on the part of church authorities and older housewives, who insisted on retaining the guilt principle as well as punishment for adultery—which, notwithstanding the reform, remained a social taboo as well as the most common cause of divorce in the GDR. In 1959, adultery accounted for more than forty percent of all divorces; by 1972, that figure had dropped to approximately one third (the number of marriages that ended in divorce rose from sixty percent in 1958 to sixty-eight percent a decade later).Footnote ⁴³ East German jurists defended the reform in a variety of ways. They argued, for instance, that some spouses purposefully committed adultery to end an undesired marriage simply because it constituted an absolute ground for divorce; it was now the duty of the judge to determine whether the adulterous act had actually destroyed the marriage or whether the couple could still be reconciled.Footnote ⁴⁴ Along similar lines, one justice official dismissed criticisms voiced by divorced women who had demanded that their former husbands be imprisoned in accordance with the old criminal law. This was not the answer, he argued, because it would have no “educational effect” on marriages that were already “wrecked”; besides, such demands were primarily motivated by “hate and a desire for revenge.” A better solution, he suggested, was “the education of our population to a higher socialist moral consciousness.” Only this would help to eradicate the “bourgeois views” about marital infidelity that still plagued East German society.Footnote ⁴⁵

Reminiscent of the National Socialists, communist authorities even considered adultery to be justified in some instances. In the early 1950s, for example, one court decided a case in favor of a high-level justice official whose wife had supposedly impeded his “sociopolitical” activities because of her religious convictions. She was declared guilty of destroying the marriage herself because of her “poor political behavior,” which had supposedly given her husband a reason for turning to another woman.Footnote ⁴⁶ This type of reasoning might help to explain why some adulterers in Thalburg, such as the manager at Wema, emphasized their wives' “hostile” political beliefs when confronted by their colleagues. Whatever the reasons, the 1955 reform underscored the fact that political considerations, coupled with a purported concern for the effects of divorce on society as a whole, took clear precedence over the individual concerns of those involved, just as they had under National Socialism.

The Ebb and Flow of Private Appeals and Public Interventions

The diminished role that marital infidelity played in divorce proceedings was, in all likelihood, one important reason that the wives of party members increasingly turned to local SED officials for help with their domestic problems. New stipulations regarding alimony awards provided another possible explanation: the 1955 marriage ordinance significantly curtailed such payments, limiting them to one or two years at most, which was not surprising, given the effective elimination of “guilt” from divorce proceedings. But even more important, this decision reflected official expectations that women could, would, and should earn their own keep and not remain “mere” housewives. Ideological as well as material considerations underlay official encouragement of female employment: it would not only free women from their traditional economic dependence on men, but also help to alleviate the severe labor shortages that seriously hampered the East German economy. In any event, the courts had more or less done away with alimony payments by the close of the decade, a development that hurt most older women without any job skills or experience outside the home.Footnote ⁴⁷ These important reforms must have made many women believe they might be better served outside the courts in cases involving adultery, a consideration further reinforced by Walter Ulbricht's proclamation of the Ten Socialist Commandments in 1958. Many women apparently took advantage of the fact that party members were now to be strictly held to account for their personal behavior. Just as important, the 1955 marriage ordinance encouraged East German divorce courts to bring about reconciliation and “look for reasons to keep couples together,” and available evidence suggests that they obediently complied.Footnote ⁴⁸

There were also a number of structural reasons that many women probably thought twice before leaving their husbands. In the first place, the war had produced a “surplus of women” that made their marriage prospects, including their ability to remarry, decidedly dismal (there were approximately five million more women than men in East Germany in 1950). But there were other considerations as well. In the first place, their income tended to be significantly lower than that of men. In 1959, almost seventy-one percent of all divorced women earned less than their former husbands, and approximately one quarter of these had no income whatsoever. In addition, chronic day-care shortages prevented many women with children from entering the labor force.Footnote ⁴⁹ The fact that married couples received privileged access to housing—also scarce during the two decades following the war—might have played a role as well. As Elizabeth Heineman has noted with respect to the 1950s, “single women had a hard time getting by while most married women put the struggles of the crisis years behind them.” In short, a husband apparently did make a difference, especially for older women with no work experience outside the home. That is why so many of them were not only wary of seeking divorce, but even fought against the petitions of husbands who tried to leave them.Footnote ⁵⁰

There is another important reason that the wives of party members may have looked to local SED officials for support. An earlier generation of women would have, in all likelihood, turned to the local pastor, parish priest, or, under the National Socialists, family physician. Secular trends in East Germany as well as official hostility toward the established churches would not have made this a viable option for many wives, especially for those who were themselves in the SED or whose husbands were active party members.Footnote ⁵¹ More important, an appeal to the party secretariat would have been much more effective, given its powerful hold over the rank and file, at least in theory if not always in practice. Acting, in effect, as ersatz marriage counselors or social workers who sometimes met one or more times with either the couple or just the wife alone, many low-level SED functionaries appear to have played a pastoral role of sorts. The clerical comparison can be taken a step further: as the earlier examples make clear, subsequent meetings with the straying husband often assumed a confessional character. These intrusive sessions—where displays of contrition were followed by acts of penitence, where erstwhile friends and colleagues pried, castigated, and lectured with apparent gustoFootnote ⁵²—were not unlike the ones that, in an earlier period, had led to growing alienation from, and antipathy toward, the medieval church.Footnote ⁵³

It is striking that most of the cases involving distraught wives who approached party officials in Thalburg about their husbands' philandering occurred in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In addition to the reasons just discussed regarding changes in divorce law, developments at the time in the Soviet Union help to explain this conjuncture as well. The destalinization campaign launched by Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in the mid-1950s signaled a shift away from the use of harsh repressive methods to more nuanced efforts at social control. As a result, communist authorities—in the U.S.S.R. and subsequently in the satellite states of eastern Europe—now placed greater emphasis on peer surveillance and communal discipline to control individual conduct, including that of rank-and-file party members. This meant that officials now expected “collective” bodies, such as factory brigades, tenant organizations, and individual party cells, to play a more active, “educational” role in conflicts involving “improper” or “immoral” conduct. They were, in other words, responsible for instilling communist morality, which was set forth in a steady stream of government pamphlets published in the 1950s, as well as in the twelve tenets of the “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism” proclaimed by Khrushchev at the twenty-second Communist Party Congress in 1961. With respect to marital stability in particular, collectives were called upon to intervene in cases of alcoholism, physical abuse, and, last but not least, infidelity—all in the belief, as East German officials later observed, that “condemnation of one's behavior by one's own brigade or village is much more disagreeable for the individual than a judicial decision.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Ironically, as Edward Cohn has pointed out, this move away from outright repression led to greater—even more insidious, a Foucauldian might suggest—intrusion into family life.Footnote ⁵⁵

But why did most wives apparently stop turning to local party officials for assistance by the late 1960s?Footnote ⁵⁶ There are a number of likely explanations why this practice petered out. Sections of the 1965 Code of Family Law, which represented a major revamping of domestic legislation, signaled a partial return to the “guilt” principle, which meant that “immoral behavior” could once again have consequences for the parties involved in a divorce (e.g., in the determination of alimony rights). Just as important, the new code made it easier to end a marriage, for a troubled one could now be terminated if it had “lost all meaning for the couple, for the children, and therefore for society”—a small but highly significant semantic modification of the 1955 marriage ordinance.Footnote ⁵⁷ Evolving practices on the part of the East German divorce courts were important in other ways as well. According to Paul Betts, they “redoubled” their efforts to hinder break-ups and bring about reconciliation following passage of the 1965 Code, above all by encouraging neighbors and colleagues to intervene in troubled marriages. Given that “social shaming” was nothing new, it is unclear that such practices marked a significant departure from those of the previous decade or that the 1960s were qualitatively more “interventionist,” as Betts suggests.Footnote ⁵⁸ But if an intensification of such efforts did take place in the late 1960s, this might have indeed led women to place greater faith in the court system as a viable alternative to the local party secretary. The Code's creation of new family, marriage, and sex counseling centers, which first opened in 1966, offered women a similar substitute.Footnote ⁵⁹ The same was true of new organs—so-called Eheaktivs—set up at the time in larger factories to provide counseling to staff members experiencing domestic conflict.Footnote ⁶⁰

Another juridical development at this time provides a more likely reason that many wives began to turn more willingly to the courts: unlike the 1950s, when patriarchal male judges tended to find in favor of men who filed for divorce because of purportedly “asocial” behavior on the part of their wives (such as “poor housekeeping”), the courts increasingly scolded “recalcitrant husbands for their outdated and ‘unsocialist’ sexist attitudes” in the 1960s. The growing percentage of female judges that decade transformed the gender composition of the courts and undoubtedly helped to account in part for this development.Footnote ⁶¹ This “feminization” of the bench reminds us, in fact, of another important reason that East German wives may have increasingly turned to the courts: the steady increase that decade in the number of women who worked. A result of heightened pressure from the highest echelons of the SED to expand the professional training of women, something vigorously opposed by many East German men, this development not only brought with it growing financial independence but also created greater strains within the marriage. The upshot was a greater willingness to seek divorce. The GDR's divorce rate, which eventually became one of the highest in the world, first started to climb in the mid-1960s, increasing almost fifty-seven percent between 1965 and 1975 alone.Footnote ⁶² For all of these reasons, then, many wives apparently thought they would now be better served in the courts. In fact, beginning in 1958, women became more likely to initiate divorce proceedings: fifty-three percent were filed by women that year, a number that would increase to sixty-four percent by 1972.Footnote ⁶³

There might have been yet another reason that appeals to the local party apparatus became more uncommon, and one that had less to do with choices made by the wives themselves. According to Josie McLellan, “moral interventions became a thing of the past” in the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ⁶⁴ If that is true, and the example of how the party reacted to adultery within its ranks seems to support this assertion, why might that have been the case? The liberalization of sexual mores during this period provides one clue. Though difficult to make sweeping claims in the absence of aggregate figures, there are some indications that adultery became more common during the 1970s and 1980s, as East German society became less “prudish” (i.e., more permissive about sexual matters).Footnote ⁶⁵ Even if its top leadership remained “deeply socially conservative,” the SED may have grudgingly embraced this trend in its attempt to present the GDR as a “modern, progressive state” and, as a result, become less likely to intervene in matters of the heart.Footnote ⁶⁶

Given that increasing sexual permissiveness reflected larger global trends at the time, it is worth speculating about another reason that the East German regime in particular may have become less willing to engage in such moral intrusions—one directly related to specific developments in the GDR. According to some scholars, Walter Ulbricht hoped to introduce a more liberal social policy after the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, and this new hands-off approach may have been part and parcel of the SED's efforts to “pacify a population that had no choice but to stay.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Whether the wives of straying husbands welcomed that change remains uncertain, of course. What is certain, however, is the gender-specific nature of the earlier appeals to the party for assistance. These were invariably made by women and, as Vandana Joshi has written about wives who denounced their husbands during the Third Reich, this was a way in which the “weaker sex” could “subvert gender and power hierarchies at home[,] tilt the scale of power in their favor,” and use the regime “quite effectively for their own agendas.”Footnote ⁶⁸

The Public/Private Divide under State Socialism

Regardless of why the wives of adulterous husbands approached (and eventually stopped approaching) the SED for assistance, their entreaties—and the party's subsequent interference in the most intimate spheres of its members' lives—helped to attenuate the line between the “public” and “private.” This binary distinction has existed in western thought since at least classical antiquity, but its terms remain notoriously difficult to define.Footnote ⁶⁹ Regardless of that ambiguity, the dichotomy has long been a central concept of feminist scholars, who initially invoked the notion of “separate spheres” to chart the oppression and subjection of women. According to this paradigm, each gender was gradually and arbitrarily assigned to one of two realms: women to the private and men to the public. The twin transformations of the late eighteenth century—the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution—accelerated this process in Europe, where men came to dominate the extra-familial public domain of civil society, the market, and politics, while women were relegated to the private domestic life of family and the home.Footnote ⁷⁰

The two spheres are social constructs that have taken shape and changed over time, feminist scholars argue. But, as some have emphasized more recently, the supposedly strict boundary between these two spheres was always more porous than the ideal embraced by middle-class European liberals in the nineteenth century, largely in response to developments that followed in the wake of the French Revolution.Footnote ⁷¹ According to Lynn Hunt, the revolutionary belief in an intimate link between “private character” and “public virtue” effaced traditional boundaries between the two spheres and led to a public invasion of “spheres of life that were normally private … As a consequence, private life was intensely politicized.” This eventually produced a backlash that later led to “a more sharply differentiated private space.” In fact, Michelle Perrot argues, the nineteenth century became the “golden age of private life,” as liberals launched “a desperate effort to stabilize the boundary between public and private by mooring it to the family, with the father as sovereign.”Footnote ⁷²

Public interference in the private sphere did not begin with the French Revolution, of course. Under the ancien régime, for example, individuals involved in domestic disputes frequently submitted petitions to the king and police. Reminiscent of similar practices later in the GDR, these included requests by wives who asked authorities to incarcerate their husbands because of heavy drinking, physical abuse, economic irresponsibility, and—last but not least—adultery. According to Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, who published a sampling of these letters from the eighteenth century, the so-called lettres de cachet led to increasingly arbitrary and intrusive state interference in the private lives of its citizens. The growing discomfort that this engendered—particularly on the part of men, and especially with the rise of the market economy—eventually prompted calls for written civil codes that would set limits to the arbitrary powers of the state and its agents. The codes adopted throughout Europe in the nineteenth century may have remedied many of the abuses, but, at the same time, they formally instituted and abetted patriarchal authority within the family. In other words, Farge and Foucault argue, male despotism gradually came to replace that of the state in domestic matters.Footnote ⁷³ Similar developments took place over the course of the long nineteenth century in Germany, where the adoption of civil codes helped to establish the rule of law while the Hausvater, or pater familias, enjoyed absolute legal, economic, and disciplinarian rights and control over the members of his household.Footnote ⁷⁴

This should not suggest that the family became entirely off-limits to the state, which continued to intervene in cases of domestic violence, for example, or child abuse, especially when this involved the poorer segments of society. The secularization of marriage also led, of course, to a variety of intrusive laws governing matrimony and divorce, as well as childbirth and child-rearing practices. Even many liberals themselves believed that the state had a right to intervene when private actions posed a real or potential threat to others or to society as a whole.Footnote ⁷⁵ Both the postwar communist dictatorships of eastern Europe, as well as the democratic welfare states of western Europe, shared this “modern ethos of social interventionism” by state officials and private professionals who endeavored to maintain or reshape society in accordance with certain norms. This is a point that deserves emphasis.Footnote ⁷⁶

Did such interventionism nevertheless reach its pinnacle under the supposedly “totalitarian” regimes of the twentieth century?Footnote ⁷⁷ With respect to those in the Soviet bloc, Marc Garcelon has spoken of the “hypertrophied public realm in the sense of state sovereignty and officialdom.” He nevertheless correctly noted that “quasi-autonomous forms of social and familial life persisted in the interstices of the Leviathan-state,” even if they were highly circumscribed. In a similar vein, Oleg Kharkhordin has claimed that the Bolsheviks, like the Puritans (and, one might add, the revolutionaries in France in the late eighteenth century), hoped to do away with private space completely, especially for the true believers (i.e., the party members) themselves. Private life was “subject to constant public gaze,” he has observed in Foucauldian terms, and the Bolsheviks hoped to place it “under constant surveillance.”Footnote ⁷⁸

That was the aspiration, at any rate. “In a totalitarian regime,” Gérard Vincent has suggested, “all barriers between private life and public life seem to be broken down. Mail is opened, the police may knock at the door at any hour of the day or night, family members are encouraged to denounce one another.” So much for the clichés. He then made a more nuanced point:

Kharkhordin has aptly referred to this concealment of certain private activities from the party and public as “dissimulation,” a response to the official linking of supposedly improper sexual behavior with political corruption. In fact, he argues, this was exactly what helped to establish a “private” sphere in the U.S.S.R.Footnote ⁸⁰ The communist adulterer's return to party and wife after his ritualistic recanting and public embrace of socialist morality was a prime example of such “dissimulation” because it often smacked of little more than lip service. It is unclear whether such values were truly internalized. But they were certainly used in an instrumental fashion by wayward party members hoping to earn forgiveness, communist officials eager to impose discipline on the rank and file, as well as desperate wives wishing to salvage troubled relationships.

Where does the GDR fit into all of this? Paul Betts has argued that the private sphere was so crucial in the GDR—and, from the perspective of communist authorities, so potentially “politically dangerous”—because of the absence of a genuine public sphere. Controlled by the party and state, the latter was decidedly non-Habermasian in character and scope, clearly not a place where members of civil society could freely discuss and articulate their interests.Footnote ⁸¹ But that was true of many authoritarian regimes. What was the nature of the private sphere specifically in East Germany, how did it differ from that of other states, and what was its relationship to its officially controlled public counterpart?

According to Betts, the subject of privacy in the GDR has received little scholarly attention.Footnote ⁸² This reflects, in all likelihood, the widely held assumption that a genuine “private sphere,” a term normally associated with the type of liberal social order that emerged in Europe in the nineteenth century, simply did not exist east of the Elbe River. The editors of a Kleines Politisches Wörterbuch helped to sustain this fiction, in fact, by excluding the term Privatheit from this major reference work, the East German holy book of conceptual definitions.Footnote ⁸³ The idea of a private sphere was nevertheless popularized in the early 1980s by Günter Gaus, the Federal Republic's first “permanent representative” in East Berlin following the signing of the Ostpolitik treaties the previous decade. Gaus coined the term “niche society” (Nischengesellschaft) to describe what he saw as a widespread “withdrawal into the private sphere” by East Germans single-mindedly preoccupied with satisfying their personal needs. These domestic spaces offered refuge, he argued, from the intrusive demands of the party and state and the tentacles of the “all-knowing” Stasi, and thus served as an escape function of sorts that ostensibly contributed to regime stability.Footnote ⁸⁴

If such a private sphere existed in East Germany, it was never truly private, of course (i.e., entirely off-limits to interference from without). That is something that holds true for nonauthoritarian states in the west as well.Footnote ⁸⁵ But a lack of respect for the inviolability of the domestic space—broadly defined as that which took place within the family, behind closed doors in the house, bedroom, or place of worship, as well as in private among friends, neighbors, and coreligionists—was especially pronounced in socialist states such as the GDR, where such sites were considered a potential haven for oppositional activities as well as for other types of behavior considered undesirable or somehow destabilizing; this included adultery as well as socially “deviant” lifestyles (e.g., homosexuality).Footnote ⁸⁶ The SED's direct interference in the most intimate affairs of its own members clearly epitomized such invasiveness. So, too, did the similarly intrusive questions posed by divorce courts about the intimate lives and sexual practices of East German plaintiffs.Footnote ⁸⁷

Yet, the fact that many women approached local party officials for assistance should give us pause when trying to characterize the relationship between the public and private spheres, as well as the nature of the SED's authority and its position in East German society. Most studies have rightly emphasized the party's repressive role and tyrannical rule, which often implicitly posited passivity on the part of the general populace. Here is a case, however, in which ordinary East Germans used the party to their own advantage to advance their personal interests: not to denounce their enemies per se, but rather in an effort to save their marriage.

Those who have investigated East German petitions (Eingaben) have made a similar point about this ambivalent relationship and especially the way in which many in the GDR actively sought out intervention “from above” to advance their own (mainly material) interests. By the late 1980s, officials annually received more than a million of these written complaints. “Nowhere else has the world seen such an elaborate and institutionalized complaint culture.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Not unlike the lettres de cachet of the ancien régime, the written complaints generally involved requests for assistance with issues of a highly personal nature, from the difficulty of finding suitable housing to problems with deadbeat dads. These petitions spanned the public/private divide and thus demonstrated the extremely complex relationship between those two spheres in the GDR: for one, they reflected a widely held sense of entitlement regarding social care and an assumption that authorities were responsible for personal well-being. More to the point, ordinary East Germans were not merely victims: “People were good at exploiting the system,” “speaking Bolshevik,” and adopting “socialist” arguments to that end.Footnote ⁸⁹ This was certainly true of many East German women, who turned to officials for various forms of assistance and support with their everyday personal affairs, and not just with respect to philandering husbands. And it made perfect sense, not only because of the complete control that the regime exercised in areas regulated elsewhere by other forces such as the market, but also because of its very claims about the right to rule totally. In short, the regime was held responsible for—and inadvertently made itself responsible for—“protecting and providing” for an adequate private existence. It was, Betts has concluded, “paradoxically both enemy and protector of the private sphere.”Footnote ⁹⁰

*  *  *

All of this clearly suggests the need for a more nuanced understanding of state-society relations under such regimes—more nuanced, that is, than the one suggested by extreme proponents of totalitarian theory, who portray the regime and its servants as an all-knowing, all-present, all-powerful behemoth.Footnote ⁹¹ The relationship between the SED and the masses—between the so-called “rulers” and “ruled”—was far more complex than often assumed, as a number of recent studies have pointed out. The family was, in short, neither a pure “locus of privacy,” as some have argued, nor an abject object of “state control.”Footnote ⁹² In fact, the party could, at least from the perspective of those who turned to it for help, play a salutary and constructive role. But at what cost?

The SED regime has been characterized as a “modern dictatorship” because of the strides it supposedly made in terms of greater social mobility and heightened gender equality.Footnote ⁹³ But, as the foregoing discussion of the party and state's active involvement in the private domestic affairs of its citizens during the early decades of the GDR clearly suggests, it also marked a return to an intrusive form of government despotism associated more closely with the absolutist states and theocracies of the early modern period.Footnote ⁹⁴ But were East Germans merely passive victims in this process? By asking local officials to intervene in their private affairs, an understandable course of action given the options available to them at the time, it could be argued that the wives of wayward husbands unwittingly helped to pave the way for greater (and unwelcome) state intervention in other areas of their lives.Footnote ⁹⁵

These women were certainly not responsible for the repressive or intrusive nature of the East German regime.Footnote ⁹⁶ In fact, it is likely that many of these women approached the party for assistance at the time that they did (i.e., following Stalin's death) because they knew that the chances that denunciation would lead to harsh reprisals against their husbands had significantly diminished with the onset of destalinization.Footnote ⁹⁷ Their entreaties nevertheless helped to weaken further that fragile barrier between the “public” and the “private” that had been at least partially erected—in perception if not entirely in reality—in the nineteenth century with the advent of the rule of law.Footnote ⁹⁸