New Histories of East Germany

The five books under review consider different social groups, milieus or individuals to investigate varieties of Eigensinn (one’s own sense, own meaning) in the East German communist dictatorship. By looking at individual or collective actions producing meanings for one’s own life within the dictatorship beyond simplistic notions of rulers and ruled,Footnote ¹² the books particularly emphasise how different people navigated through institutions and values of East Germany, how they made their own senses of them and, by doing so, how they shaped and changed socialism from below before, during and after its collapse. Though research on Eigensinn in East Germany has a long tradition since Alf Lüdtke introduced the concept in the late 1980s/early 1990s, these five books go beyond previous research by broadening the scope to marginalised and previously ignored groups and by addressing socialism as an institutionally, socially and culturally constructed reality that always existed in plurality. As a result, the seemingly critical mass that brought down the regime in 1989 becomes more clearly visible as a segmented society, whose members did not share a common mindset of socialism.Footnote ¹³ Though most of them increasingly lost faith in the communist regime dominated by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands; SED) during the 1980s, they still carried their subject positions shaped not exclusively or even less by the official communist ideology but by everyday knowledge of this regime. However, even those who fought for a democratic version of socialism during the revolution of 1989 did not share a common idea of what it should look like in the future. But East Germans also did not simply strip off their mindsets of socialism in the transition period, even if they saw the upcoming future of a (re)unified Germany as an individual chance or just as a moment of liberation.

In his prosopography, The Closed World of East German Economists: Hopes and Defeats of a Generation, economic and science historian Till Düppe explores the life-world and views of the ‘hope generation’ of East German economists, who were born in the 1930s, reached their career peaks in the 1970s and shared ‘a specific set of values, beliefs and actions’.Footnote ¹⁴ Another social group, whose members believed in the communist project and tried to shape it their way, is the subject of Alexandria N. Ruble’s book, Entangled Emancipation: Women’s Rights in Cold War Germany, which deals with the influence of female politicians and activists who made women’s emancipation a central topic of the socialist transformation (and the Western liberal) project after 1945. In contrast to this book, whose protagonists attained their main influences in the early years of East Germany and era of SED leader Walter Ulbricht (1945–71), Julia E. Ault’s and Jeff Hayton’s studies, Saving Nature under Socialism: Transnational Environmentalism in East Germany, 1968–1990 and Culture from the Slums: Punk Rock in East and West Germany, deal with environmental groups and punks, who rebelled against the constraints of the dictatorship in the era of Ulbricht’s successor Erich Honecker (1971–89). They were thus perceived as a threat by the communist regime that, again, reacted with a mixture of repression and integration. Finally, Socialist Subjectivities: Queering East Germany under Honecker complements the four intriguing studies by bringing together scholars who engage with different groups and individuals such as queer people, writers, dissidents, singer-songwriters, doctors and patients as well as specific arenas such as art or polling. They ask how people and groups defined themselves as socialist subjects by living ‘nonnormative possibilities in a normative world’,Footnote ¹⁵ and, vice versa, how socialist subjects were created through observing. The editors and authors employ the concept of ‘queer time’ to demonstrate how different people and groups contributed to make socialism more heterochronic and pluralistic in the Honecker era. As Eli Rubin adds in his summarising epilogue, the concept of ‘queer time’ brings us closer to the original meanings of Eigensinn, which was often misinterpreted in a state–society binary.

The studies draw on a wide range of media sources and collections from state, intelligence, university, church and movement archives. To name only two examples from Socialist Subjectivities, Tom Smith uses Stasi files to reconstruct ‘traces of community and intimacy’Footnote ¹⁶ that queer men developed within the East German army, while Mor Geller explores reception surveys as a tool for participants to shape socialism their way. Ault’s and Ruble’s studies instead demonstrate the impressive potential of movement and local state archives, many of which have often been ignored in the mainstream of East German historiography. As both authors make use of these archives to reconstruct how seemingly marginalised individuals participated in state institutions, they contribute to our understanding of everyday politics in East Germany, characterised even by fluid boundaries between state and non-state institutions. However, only one author makes use of oral history: Till Düppe emphasises the value of interviews to reconstruct ‘the language of the collective’ economists were part of and to analyse ‘tensions when trying to integrate their own biography into the social memory constructed by the party’.Footnote ¹⁷ In his cultural history of punk, Jeff Hayton explicitly avoids interviews, as to him they ‘would have only added to the cacophony rather than reworked the argument’.Footnote ¹⁸ This seems less convincing particularly since Hayton does not explain his scepticism in detail.

Breaking the five works down into interrelated sections, the following two sections highlight (1) the role of transnational entanglements in shifting socialist realities and life-worlds and (2) (local) forms of participation and their interrelations that made non-normativity in East Germany possible.

Entanglements

The popular picture of East Germany as a walled-in and closed society has been challenged for many years by showing how tourism, economic entanglements, travelling architecture, city partnerships, science exchange and other forms of encounters enabled personal contacts and the transfer of ideas across the Cold War divide. Although many works have portrayed East Germany as a globally entangled country, there is still a lack of studies that productively combine global and social history. As Christoph Lorke has argued in 2021, combined global and social histories of East Germany offer an ‘alternative approach to authoritarian and seemingly “closed” regimes’ to understand how the ‘own’ and the ‘foreign’ were constructed by contact and exchange.Footnote ¹⁹

Against this backdrop, the five studies under review can be read as pieces in the puzzle of such a revision of East Germany’s social history from a transnational perspective. They show that entanglements particularly with the so-called West depended on the political relevance the SED attributed to them. As Alexandria Ruble suggests even in the title of her book, progresses and limitations in women’s emancipation and their legal manifestations in both German states after 1945 can hardly be understood without considering the context of the Cold War as the driver of ‘gendered entanglements’. The Cold War, thereby, is not limited to an ideological battle but moreover means a border regime shaping mentalities and worldviews in both German societies. The ‘complicated relationship’ between distinction and observation, she argues, ‘alternately catalysed and halted efforts to reshape legal understandings of gender and the family’.Footnote ²⁰ In West and East Germany, separate models of the ideal family (male-breadwinner in the West, dual-earner family in the East) functioned as representations of the ‘seemingly antithetical economic, political and social system’.Footnote ²¹ The ‘gendered entanglements’, which were by no means a marginality but rather an integral part and driving force of self-perceptions on each side, were produced multidimensionally. Apart from state actors, this also included female activists (working in both state and non-state institutions), many of whom had known each other before 1933, and the churches, which had their own transnational networks. All these actors cooperated and competed over restrictions imposed on women by the Civil Code since the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, Ruble highlights the role of language surrounding notions of consumerism, stability and unity on each side.

Economists were of high political relevance to East Germany, too. As Till Düppe argues, political economy became the ‘number one’ academic discipline in East Germany during the early 1950s. However, as its primary tasks were to create the scientific fundament of SED politics and to produce management knowledge for economic planning, personal contacts to Western colleagues and even the reading of ‘bourgeois’ economic literature were undesirable. Yet, many East German economists of the 1950s still shared sympathies for ‘bourgeois’ businesses and professions and included them in their research on the transformation from capitalism to socialism. A case from 1956 demonstrates how much the SED and the Stasi invested to discredit those who tried to contribute research beyond the official party line. In the year of the Hungarian upheaval, Fritz Behrens criticised the bureaucracy of state planning by drawing on experiences of self-governance in Yugoslavia and data on reparation payments to the Soviet Union from the Western Kiel Institute for the World Economy. He subsequently lost his position and reputation after a massive party campaign against him. The possibilities to come together with Western colleagues only altered along with political changes in the early 1970s, when the two German states signed the basic treaty (Grundlagenvertrag) to normalise their relationship in the context of European détente. In this situation, East Germany joined the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Laxenburg (Austria), where researchers from all over the world came together to discuss global problems like acid rain or ageing societies.

For ecological groups in East Germany, which are at the centre of Ault’s study, Poland (beneath the West German media and the Green Party) became a junction for transnational entanglements in the mid-1980s for three reasons. First, thanks to the influx of knowledge from the West, environmental dilapidation was increasingly perceived as a transnational problem of Central Europe. Second, though East German activists depended on resources from the West, East–West entanglements were limited by travel restrictions. Third, Polish political culture instead included a ‘form of dual participation’Footnote ²² in (1) the Polish Ecological Club, which cooperated with state officials, and (2) oppositional groups, which gained support from Solidarity (Solidarność). In 1985, Polish and Hungarian activists additionally founded Greenway, an English-language forum, which connected environmental activists from the entire Soviet ‘bloc’. Hungary, especially Budapest, also plays a distinctive role in Hayton’s study on punk as a junction for East German youths to meet ‘authentic’ like-minded people. Unfortunately, these entanglements do not play a distinctive role in his study. However, Hayton’s and Ault’s studies demonstrate the importance of freer countries in the Soviet hemisphere in the mid-/late 1980s and their contribution to pluralise East Germany in this time.

The studies moreover show that transnational contacts and knowledge transfers not only made East Germany more global but also challenged expectations, perceptions and, in the end, the identities of those involved. Ruble shows how the debates among male and female politicians, (state and non-state) women’s organisations, women in parties, trade unions and professional associations, as well as media outlets over the role of women within the heteronormative family manifested in law. In doing so, the heteronormative model changed but also consolidated on each side of the iron curtain. Moreover, law and the practice of law shaped attitudes among women, especially, as Ruble argues, ‘among those of the older generation’.Footnote ²³ This became obvious in the moment of (re)unification. At this point, the analysis, the empirical fundament of which ends in the 1960s, could have been more nuanced by referring to the existing literature on feminism on both sides of the wall. While it remains unclear who concretely belongs to the older generation to which Ruble refers, she also leaves aside the conflicts among the younger generation of women, who felt more connected to feminist ideas. In the West, they initially competed with women who had influenced the debates on women’s rights in the 1950s and 1960s. Nevertheless, parts of the feminist movement successfully entered the political institutions in the 1980s, where they continued to fight for a more progressive law. In the East, autonomous women’s groups formed in the 1980s. Influenced by feminist ideas from the West, groups struggled with these influences and their socialist mindset of emancipation when it came to debates over the democratisation of socialism after the revolution of 1989. Moreover, though they succeeded in establishing institutions that helped women affected by violence in their relationships in the aftermath of the revolution,Footnote ²⁴ feminist approaches such as women’s quotas or a gender-sensitive language remained marginal within parties and politics in East Germany. Politically engaged women had adopted them only selectively as they experienced massive resistance in their eastern regions and low support from their Western ‘sisters’. These struggles and entanglements after 1989/90 could have been more nuancedly problematised by Ruble.

When a handful of East German economists entered IIASA in the 1970s, they found themselves, as Düppe argues, in a ‘paradoxical situation’ between ‘norms of cooperative research’ and ‘partisan scholarship’ that they had to manage.Footnote ²⁵ Düppe presents the case of Harry Maier, who managed to bridge this gap to enable a certain extent of knowledge transfer between East and West. However, the price Maier had to pay for this was low recognition of his work within East Germany. By this, Düppe highlights the limits of East–West entanglements, which were possible even in the field of economics but did not come without personal concessions. Two cases presented in Socialist Subjectivities show that dissidents in East Germany also had to manage such inner conflicts arising from entanglements with both the West and the East. By looking at how East German writer Gert Neumann read and responded to an open letter from Polish essayist Adam Mischnik in 1985, Kryrill Kunakhovich demonstrates that Neumann failed to anticipate the Polish discourse on solidarity and national identity and rather constructed similarities between Polish and East German socialism, which did not exist. This instructive article pleads for a more nuanced distinction between subjectivity (construction of the self in relation to the socialist reality) and subjecthood (external attribution of identity after the collapse of socialism) and opens the view for a revision of transnational dissident entanglements in the aftermath of the revolution of 1989. In a further article, Timothy Scott Brown demonstrates how dissident Rudolf Bahro renegotiated and stabilised his subjectivity between the publication of his famous book The Alterative (Die Alternative, 1977) and his activities in the West German Green Party, which he joined after leaving East Germany in 1979. To bridge the different experiences Bahro made, he called for systematic transformations and a ‘cultural revolution’ in both societies. Similar approaches were developed by Düppe’s East German economists during the transition period, where they claimed that the transformation of the socialist state in the East had to go hand in hand with the transformation of capitalism in the West. As Julia Ault shows, Poland not only became a central node to connect environmental groups within the Soviet hemisphere in the mid-1980s but also worked as a site that made misperceptions between activists and journalists from East and West obvious, which Ault attributes to the different systems in which the protagonists operated. This, she argues, created ‘cultural and political if not linguistic obstacles that succeeded in limiting the transnational collaboration’.Footnote ²⁶ In the advent of the revolution, East German activists then turned their focus to Western politicians as a response to German–German agreements on buying and selling trash.

While the studies succeed in showing the ambivalent, precarious and fluid nature of transnational entanglements and their impact on subjectivities within the socialist sphere, they leave some blind spots, which can be starting points for future research. One of these is the role played by specific localities in Eastern Europe as contact zones. While they are described mainly as sites in the ‘East’, conceptualising them as global junctions or as ‘glocal’ nodes, which contributed to the formation of new milieus, would allow more comprehensive analyses. A second criticism refers to the period of revolution and transition, which remains methodologically underdeveloped. As the studies address this period only as a story of loss and Western dominance but not as a story of Eastern actors, they exclusively focus on the exclusion and marginalisation of East German experts. Ault depicts the marginalisation of Green Parties as a phenomenon of the post-socialist transition in the entire Eastern ‘bloc’, and Düppe outlines how the former institutions of East German economists were dismantled after 1989. However, he also emphasises that the economists did not ‘fall into melancholia’.Footnote ²⁷ Finally, the former transnational entanglements are suddenly absent in the outlooks, which at least implicitly confirms the established narrative that East Germany became a global region only after 1990. Nevertheless, a few studies have shown that transnational entanglements established in East Germany prior to the revolution did not automatically end in 1989/90 but rather altered or were re-actualised during the transition period.Footnote ²⁸ Against the background of these works, it would be worthwhile to learn more about the Eigensinn of transnational entanglements across the iron curtain, within the Eastern ‘bloc’ and their genesis across the caesura of 1989: did they really disappear after 1989/90? Did they continue? Or did they (and if yes, how did they) translate into new political contexts and were filled with new meaning?

Participations

In her groundbreaking and controversial book The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker, Mary Fulbrook introduced the concept of the ‘participatory dictatorship’ as a hermeneutical tool to explore how East Germans were able to influence and shape their own lives by making use of various form of participation within the dictatorial regime.Footnote ²⁹ The books under review (except Ruble’s study) not only contribute to this perspective but also go beyond the level of the individual by asking how participation contributed to change socialism from below.

One of the major findings, which Ault’s book contributes to this discussion, is that a broader perspective on different forms of participation and their interrelations under dictatorial rule is necessary to explain social change. The ‘distinct form of environmentalism in East Germany’Footnote ³⁰ included different forms of participation such as church-based activism, activism under the umbrella of mass organisations and autonomous activism, whereby many of the participants also worked within state institutions and universities. The relations between these forms built the foundation for the circulation of knowledge but also changed over time. Ault emphasises the importance of the local level as activist groups (especially those in rural regions and middle towns) developed their protest as response to local ramifications of the environmental disaster. In a similar way, many chapters in Socialist Subjectivities conceptualise this local level as the main ground to negotiate socialism in plural. Markus Wahl demonstrates how state officials, doctors and patients worked hard on the integration of people with alcohol addiction into the socialist society by developing informal networks that included patients as active supporters of socialist improvements. Co-editor Katharine White explores the subject positions of two singer-songwriters in East Germany and shows that simplistic notions of ‘party apparatchiks’ and ‘repressed dissidents’ hardly display the reality in the socialist society as both negotiated their subjectivities at the House of Young Talents (Haus der jungen Talente) in relation to each other. Larissa R. Stiglich argues that there was more than one possible imagination of East Germany’s future beyond the revolution by investigating petitions (Eingaben) from Eisenhüttenstadt written by ‘ordinaries’ in autumn 1989. Yet, Stiglich portrays them as ‘first impulses of democratic renewal’ without employing an analytical concept of democracy.Footnote ³¹ Thus, these interventions from below, which built on a long-standing tradition of writing petitions to state officials, could also be interpreted as a way to stabilise the authoritarian regime by calling for taking existing participatory elements more seriously, while the future or the transformation of the state remained particularly absent in the petitions. However, her analysis intriguingly demonstrates the plurality of presents even in the moment when everything seemed to change rapidly into one direction. From the perspective of the inhabitants of Eisenhüttenstadt, it seems that rather the reference for what was perceived as non-normative changed in this situation. Finally, Brianna J. Smith focuses back on East Berlin in the 1980s and shows how art was used to encourage locals to become more actively engaged in shaping the urban landscape. The artists thereby gained support from state officials and neighbours.

Düppe, Ault and Hayton touch on another aspect of participation in state socialism by showing how it affected the anatomy of milieus. The ‘institutionally closed’ world of East German economists, Düppe argues, encouraged them to build ‘their own hierarchies’ and develop an ‘ethos of small collectives with distinct and limited responsibilities’.Footnote ³² Ault and Hayton highlight conflicts within alternative milieus, which arose when new forms of participation became an option for individuals. The environmental milieu in East Germany was split between the state official, church-based and autonomous forms of participation. Similarly, the small East German punk milieu (approximately 0.035 per cent of the population in 1983)Footnote ³³ lost cohesion after having experienced massive state repression in the mid-1980s. Some of them retreated into the Protestant Church, where they regrouped by encountering dissident milieus and, as a result, became more politicised. As a reaction, East German officials switched from mere repression to forms of integration by supporting the other bands (die anderen Bands) such as Feeling B or Sandow. These bands represented a deradicalised version of punk as part of the socialist society. Yet, they enjoyed low support within the scene. One point, however, is missing in Hayton’s analysis: some punks entered the neo-Nazi scene, whose members (though even more radical and violent than punks) experienced less repression by the regime since officials certainly valued their ‘sense of order’ as compatible with socialist norms, while at the same time local societies did not sanction the violence neo-Nazis exerted on migrant workers in the late 1980s. Sometimes they even welcomed the violence.Footnote ³⁴ Such a broader view on fluidities between different youth subcultures in East Germany also challenges one of Hayton’s main assumptions that punk was a project of social and cultural emancipation in both German states since the 1970s. For the West German scene, which was much larger than the small punk scene in East Germany, this framework may function, but for the East German subculture it seems barely convincing. ‘Radicality’ seemed to have been the much more convincing reference for parts of the East German punk scene and other youths. Moreover, the small East German punk scene barely emancipated the East German society than their role models did in the West.

Against this background, it is striking that far-right extremism is absent from Socialist Subjectivities, though neo-Nazis also gained state support – for example, they participated in security brigades (Ordnungsgruppen) under the umbrella of SED’s youth organisation Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend; FDJ). Thus, they can be seen as an example for socialist subjectivities. This side of pluralisation in the late East German society should be given more attention in future research. More attention should also be given to the role of the Stasi. While in Düppe’s, Ault’s and Hayton’s studies the Stasi appears merely as the representative of the repressive regime, Tom Smith’s and Brianna Smith’s articles in Socialist Subjectivities show that the Stasi was anything but a closed homogenous institution. Rather, its protagonists were able to include non-normativity in their imaginations of socialism to a certain extent.

Finally, three further articles from Socialist Subjectivities point to the dimensions of gender and sexuality inscribed into participation. While Tom Smith investigates subjectivities of homosexual men established within the army, Catrina de Rivera and co-editor Scott Harrison explore the role of literature as the main tool for women to negotiate gendered subjectivities. De Rivera analyses Christa Wolf’s Cassandra (1983) to demonstrate how the author used ancient themes to express discontent with disadvantaged female subjectivities and to envision a ‘third way’ of gender equity in socialism. By contrast, Harrison explores the underground zine woman differently (frau anders) as a site to negotiate how lesbian women could belong to the socialist society. Although the anthology does not draw such a comparison, the three contributions provide material for future research on whether all forms of socialist participation were accessible for everyone or whether restricted access along categories of race, class and gender contributed to the establishment of informal hierarchies of non-normativity.