“In 2015, a 3.5-ton granite head was excavated from a forest in the suburbs of reunified Berlin” (1). The head was Vladimir Lenin’s. It had been sculpted by a Soviet artist and put on display in East Berlin in 1970 to commemorate the birth of the Bolshevik revolutionary leader. After East Germany disappeared, so too, did Lenin’s head—buried and nearly forgotten under the earth. But then, decades later, it was dug up—only after much debate—and put on display as part of an exhibition of statues from Germany’s past.

So begins Ned Richardson-Little’s recently published book on the history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It is an interesting anecdote, but why start with Lenin? Lenin was a Soviet leader and political theorist of the early twentieth century who wedded Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel's notion of historical materialism to the idea that the state required the expediency of a ruling Party vanguard. This theory became the founding ideology of the GDR. As Richardson-Little explains, Lenin’s statue, much like East German history, has “remained politically contentious and just below the surface of the Berlin Republic” (1). And yet, more than this, by beginning with Lenin, the author also seems to be directing our gaze to “the East” for other reasons.

Richardson-Little is not presenting East Germany as a closed chapter in Germany’s longer history; nor is he offering a narrative of two intertwined German societies that eventually became reunified, as has become popular among scholars in recent years. Rather, his focus is entirely on the GDR, which had its own political, economic, and social system and mores that were, at least in theory, tied to Marxism-Leninism. As such, the ideology and its architects are important if we want to grasp the inner workings of the East German state, its shortcomings, and its continued cultural resonance. Richardson-Little thus makes the case that the GDR warrants its own treatment as a state shaped by ideologues who believed in the socialist project and its antifascist origins, as well as by the East German people, who grappled with the complexities of navigating the socialist system over its forty years and continue to feel the impact of its collapse.

This book is first and foremost accessible. It is arranged chronologically around the expected caesuras, beginning with the path to the GDR’s founding after the Second World War, through the constructions of the Berlin Wall, and ending with the collapse of the state, German reunification, and its aftermath. The narrative ebbs and flows between the local dynamics that marked East German socialism and the global forces that operated as both defining and limiting throughout the GDR’s history. While Richardson-Little notes that the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) controlled society through incentives, surveillance (the massive secret police apparatus), and punishment, he also points out that state control was not all-encompassing and that East Germans exercised varying degrees of dissent through formal mechanisms of complaint, informal forms of protest, and the forging of “limited spaces of pluralism” (99).

If the GDR was not a totalitarian state—as Richardson-Little argues along the lines of recent scholarship in the field—how did the Party manage to advance its goals and elicit citizen participation? Richardson-Little draws attention to the fact that East Germany was a worker’s state insofar as life revolved around the workplace. For the Party, the workplace served as a place to recruit members and organize citizens; participation in the SED and mass organizations was essential for career advancement. For East Germans, both male and female, the workplace was not only a site of labor but also a place to receive services, including health care and childcare. Leisure activities, social events, and even vacations often fell under the domain of the socialist workplace and the related state trade unions. If you wanted to go to the Baltic Sea, the Free German Trade Union Federation—which allocated state benefits—had lodges where you could stay.

Consumption remained for the most part “a matter of private expenditure” (76), which—more than work quotas, conditions, or norms—proved to be a litmus test for the SED when it came to delivering the “good life” under socialism. Consumer items, especially those that were widely available in the West and not the East, were highly coveted. In the 1960s, after the Berlin Wall brought increased stability for the regime, adjustments to the state economic policy made some goods more easily accessible. But imports such as coffee, cocoa, and tropical fruit required hard currency and purchase power that the GDR lacked. As the author notes, East German society developed a unique “culture of complaint” (80) as a result.

Richardson-Little places emphasis on how the GDR became enmeshed in the interdependent, globalizing world, often to its own detriment. We see this come through most clearly in the economic realm. In the early 1950s, East Germany developed trade relations with West Germany and the Soviet bloc countries that were necessary for its survival. By the 1960s and 1970s, it turned to the Global South to acquire hard currency by coupling ideological solidarity with economic exports, such as military aid. But the revenue generated was not enough, and weapon sales undermined the GDR’s peace politics at home. Crisis loomed by the 1980s, with the curtailment of Soviet cheap oil, the failure to turn a profit on key investments such as microchips, and the inability to pay off the mountainous debt owed to West Germany. All of this is presented by the author in a straightforward way, allowing the reader to grasp the functioning, and ill-functioning, of a socialist state in the global economic system.

Beyond the apt treatment of the GDR’s structural developments and economic relations, Richardson-Little is careful not to generalize about everyday life under socialism. As he notes, “there was no single experience of life in the GDR” (5). The author has included text boxes throughout the book that contain the biographies of roughly a dozen figures who lived very different lives under socialism, including Victor Klemperer, Markus Wolf, Margot Honecker, and Ulrike Poppe, among others. Yet the voices of East Germans, and their own stories of everyday life, are largely muted. Given that the author ends by reinforcing the idea that a “sense of a continued East German identity” (212) remains to this day, the book would have benefitted from the inclusion of socialist subjects’ perspectives, inclinations, and sentiments—offering a glimpse into how they define what it meant to be East German.

This book is welcome for its clear prose, careful synthesis of historical developments, and the author’s ability to weave in new threads of research that whet the appetite for more. It is well-organized with concise summaries at the end of each chapter, and there is a useful glossary of terms and comprehensive list of further reading by subject. Whether assigned for a course, picked up as an introduction to the GDR, or perused as a quick refresher, this book delivers an excellent synopsis of East German history informed by recent trajectories in the historiography.