One of the most common misconceptions about the GDR and other eastern bloc countries during the Cold-War period, gleaned in part from a reading of George Orwell's 1984, is that they sought to discourage all forms of human intimacy beyond the distinctly asexual love felt for the party and its leading representatives. In fact, as Josie McLellan illustrates in her superb new study, East Germany's leaders, at least from the late 1960s onward, went to great lengths to present their regime as “tolerant” and “progressive” when it came to relationships. Sex under communism, it was alleged, was divorced from money and commerce, meaning that it was not based on capitalist exploitation and the pursuit of profit. Rather, East Germans were free to exercise their libidos for healthier reasons—love, personal pleasure, and the desire to create a family.

Although it is possible to trace some lines of continuity back to the Weimar-era KPD and its interest in abortion and sex reform, in McLellan's view the greater liberalization in the GDR from the late 1960s had more immediate causes: competition with the west, combined with a new understanding that intimacy and private life might be beneficial to socialism, if they helped to arrest the gradual fall in birthrates while also allowing women to stay at work after having children. In addition there was a pragmatic acceptance that higher living standards, better housing, and the arrival of the contraceptive pill in 1965 had raised citizens' expectations regarding personal choice and freedoms. Indeed, as McLellan repeatedly shows, much of the pressure for change came “from below,” from society at large, rather than being imposed “top down” by the East German government (p. 208).

Among the main beneficiaries of this relaxation in official and societal attitudes were nudists, who were able to move from an outright ban on their activities in 1954 to near total acceptance by the 1970s. Indeed, the GDR was the only country in Europe where nudism became integrated into mainstream vacationing, rather than being confined to cordoned-off areas. One of the reasons for this is that the East German authorities refused to countenance the establishment of nudist clubs, seeing in them a hint of subversive political views; however, interestingly nude bathing and camping could also be presented in pro-communist terms as part of a conscious movement against the commercialization and excessive sexualization of the body in the capitalist west. Indeed, many party members and state employees were enthusiasts for the naked lifestyle, making the earlier bans of the 1950s “impossible to enforce,” but also ensuring that once repression had been replaced by toleration, nudist culture “lost any critical potential” (pp. 155, 172).

More generally, McLellan talks of a “sexual revolution” in East Germany from the late 1960s on (p. 9), removing much of the shame traditionally attached to cohabitation, illegitimacy, and single parenthood, and in many ways improving the quality of life of most citizens, especially women. In so doing, she also challenges some of the wider historical interpretations of the GDR. In her view, it was by no means a totalitarian state, or even an aspiring one after around 1965. With its acceptance of private choice in the sphere of relationships; its repeal of the laws banning homosexuality and abortion in 1968 and 1972, respectively; and its support for all families and working mothers, whether single, married, widowed, or divorced, it had little in common with either the Third Reich or with the Soviet Union in the worst days of Stalinism. Its “distinctively . . . heterosexual culture” was also deeply intermeshed with developments in the west, and especially in the Federal Republic. In this sense it offered a unique midway house between “East and West European trends” (p. 53).

Yet the regime's attitude toward sexuality was not always as benign as it liked to believe, and McLellan is right to be skeptical of “romantic narratives” of intimate life in the GDR. For instance, while much was done to highlight women's rights under socialism, including the right to a satisfying sex life and the right to divorce violent, alcoholic, or unloving husbands, far less was achieved in terms of challenging other gender-based prejudices, such as the notion that housework and child care were “female” tasks, or that marital infidelity was a “male privilege” (pp. 73, 94). Prostitution and other forms of sexual abuse were frequently used by the Stasi as a means of spying on or disrupting the private lives of supposed “enemies of socialism.” Homophobia and racism, while officially condemned, were rampant in both state and society. And in the 1980s the increased prevalence of pornography, whether imported from abroad or manufactured at home for sale on the hard-currency market, put a question mark over the GDR's claim to have abolished the western “disease” of commercialized sex. Indeed, with some notable exceptions, even East German nude photography lost its earlier emphasis on “naturalness” and “utopian aspirations” and now simply criticized or, worse still, reproduced “societal norms about consumption and gender,” to the extent that there was often little to distinguish it from “the softer side of ‘capitalist porn’” (pp. 189, 202–4).

Integration into the Federal Republic in the 1990s was, in this sense, not such a big leap as might be imagined. If I have one criticism to make of this excellent and nuanced study, however, it is that it could have placed more emphasis on the sheer complexity and variety of the interconnections between East and West German experiences of intimacy and sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s. To what extent and in what ways, for instance, did ordinary East Germans, and in particular women, buy into the official propaganda that suggested that they lived in a more equal, more loving, and less exploitative society than their West German opposites? And how far did they experience the revolution of 1989 as sexually as well as politically liberating? These are questions that might be pursued in more detail in a follow-up study.