The division of Germany into two opposing political camps during the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 created an unprecedented opportunity for historians of science and technology. Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), left behind forty years of fascinating archival material that promised to illuminate the way in which opposing political regimes shape science and technology. During the first decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, several books appeared arguing that despite the GDR's techno-friendly attitude, its dream-like aspirations met frustrating political, social, and economic realities. Augustine picks up the threads of this theme and extends it by writing a detailed social history of technology featuring the way in which engineers dealt with dictatorship. In this way she contributes to a more nuanced portrait of the challenges industrial scientists faced under extreme political conditions.

The book is organized chronologically for the first five chapters, thematically for the next two chapters, and then returns to the chronology in the last chapter. During the early postwar and Soviet-occupied period German scientists and engineers emerge as apolitical scientists, and this posture seemed to continue up until 1989; during the later period they also had to grapple with the new politics of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and the ever increasing power and encroachment of the Ministry for State Security (MfS, or Stasi). During the early years of the republic until 1971, the Walter Ulbricht regime tolerated the old bourgeois intelligentsia because it needed them. Conflict, however, began to emerge in the next period under Erich Honecker between the party-state and the professional ethos of the scientists and engineers.

A major portion of the book is devoted to “high-tech” scientists and engineers who worked on developing East Germany's semiconductor, microelectronic, computer, lasers, and atomic power capabilities. Many of the five experts featured (Matthias Falter, Werner Hartmann, Paul Görlich, Herbert Kortum, and Heinz Barwich) seemed to be ready to serve any regime as they undertook military research under the Nazis and Soviet Russia. Augustine argues that their Nazi-era “allegiance to a technology-promoting state” survived into the postwar period.

Despite her earlier disdain (she disliked the “lurid sensationalism of the revelations” involving public figures, p. xxii) of covering the topic of the East German secret police and intelligence agency, the Ministry for State Security, Augustine makes good use of the files to chart the careers of several key industrial scientists and managers, primarily at the prestigious Carl Zeiss Jena company. Although she does not make the distinction between informant and foreign intelligence activities clear [she usually refers to the MfS as the “secret police” and never refers to the Hauptverwaltung Aufklärung (HVA, the foreign intelligence unit)], the material adds to her differentiated account by showing that scientists often rebuffed initial recruitment attempts by the MfS only to succumb later on, often to further their careers.

Two of the most original chapters—one on technological fantasies in popular culture (“Red Prometheus”) and the other on an analysis of her oral history database—depart from the chronological narrative and thus do not quite fit into the organic structure of the rest of the book. These research reports are nonetheless perhaps the most important and interesting contributions to the subject. It is not clear, however, why her oral history database was predominantly made up of women—one research assistant interviewed eighteen female engineers and the other one ten female and fifteen male software engineers for a total of twenty-eight female engineers and fifteen males. The theme of gender runs through the whole volume, though even with this data, Augustine does not choose to devote a separate chapter to women. Some of the facts and figures are eye-openers. For example, an astounding 31.1 percent of all engineers were women in 1981, a figure never matched in the west. Rather than interview the engineers themselves, she asked the two research assistants to question the participants based on a standard questionnaire.

In addition to the oral history database, the book is thoroughly researched in the GDR party and state archives and draws extensively on the recent German literature on the subject, which is generously referred to sometimes at the expense of the recent American and British literature. Sumptuously illustrated with color photographs and handsomely produced, Red Prometheus is a valuable addition to the literature on science and technology in East Germany, and will appeal to specialists on the social history of Germany and the communist East Bloc.