This volume, edited by Scott Harrison, Jeff Hayton, and Katharine White, offers a valuable contribution to the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany) studies by examining a range of interrelated subjectivities through a broad interpretation and application of queer theory. Focusing on the 1970s and 1980s—the “real existing socialism” of Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) General Secretary Erich Honecker—the contributing authors present case studies spanning alcoholism treatment clinics, folk music and punk, gay and lesbian experiences, and subversive art practices, as well as dissident alternatives and environmental activism in the Protestant Church. These contributions uncover socialist subjects acting relationally within state and society, but not solely defined by either—an approach the editors argue can “recover how East German subjects imagined varying potentialities for the present … as they pursued a range of subject positions in a state whose collapse was impossible to predict” (6).
Harrison, Hayton, and White seek to challenge normative understandings of the GDR’s collapse in 1989 to “make room for the varied perspectives and praxes that shaped the GDR until it was no more” (4). To do so, they draw upon subjectivity and queer theory, understanding the former as a contingent and flexible self-fashioning in a socialist context that requires interrogating subject positions of both author and historical subject. In “wedding” subjectivity to queer theory, the editors mobilize the latter to broadly examine “the unconventional paths our subjects walked as they went about their daily lives” (9). The volume thus seeks to historicize East German subjectivities in moments of reshaping, knocking down, or passing on cultural inheritances that “create new regimes of time with unpredictable subject possibilities” (10). Rather than reading the 1970s and 1980s as a path of inevitable decline, the editors and contributors explore a heterogeneity of queer subjectivities opened by Honecker’s call for East Germans to “imagine new socialisms, and even to pursue them” (12). Queering socialist subjectivities thus seeks to uncover how East Germans made sense of and changed their own lives through “nonnormative possibilities in a normative world” (5).
The volume is divided into three sections of thematically grouped studies drawing upon, and in key cases advancing, the work’s broader methodology. The first section situates subjectivities between ideology, practice, and everyday life. Mary Fulbrook’s examination of former Nazis brought to trial in the GDR in the 1980s argues for a wider conceptualization of East Germany as a post-Nazi society, where the Nazi past developed diachronically with socialism. Key to this is Fulbrook’s application of queering East German history through the relational engagement of “non-normative subject formation” in a regime that restricted “the range of the permissible” (26). In this, Nazi perpetrators fashioned themselves as model socialist citizens, concealing their pasts even from their children, who nevertheless developed a “greater understanding … of living under dictatorial conditions”—a practice at great variance from socialist normativity and West German experiences (37). Tom Smith then examines relational subject formation through Stasi reports of suspected gay men in the East German military. These reports, often written collectively and anonymously, exhibit anxieties about proof of homosexual relationships alongside an assumption of “the existence of queer soldiers” in the military. Smith thus finds that “individual queer life trajectories” in turn “included and influenced institutions charged with delineating straight socialist masculinities” (89).
The second section traces how East Germans produced knowledge through relational subjective experiences, within and beyond the GDR. Kyrill Kunakhovich analyzes East German dissident Gert Neumann’s 1985 public response to Polish anticommunist Adam Michnik, finding striking differences between their subjectivities. Although both men agreed that socialist regimes repressed body and mind, Neumann felt his subjectivity had been “perverted” by the East German state (140). Kunakhovich argues that this was due to the East German state being “more powerful, more present, and more pervasive” than that of Poland, as it was constructed with and through socialism, like the USSR (141). Still, others produced more relational alternatives: Scott Harrison illustrates how lesbian-only groups reveled in “the queer here and now,” sharing experiences and connection through the underground journal frau anders. Harrison finds that the coterminous temporalities of heterosexual and queer time in the Honecker era, and the diverse ways women who love women navigated this, point to pluralized “subjectivities” that challenge the assumption of queer uniformity in the GDR (163). Indeed, Harrison’s concluding reminder that “none of us behave in ways that are prefigured or predictable when presented with new opportunities” offers a concise intervention for the volume overall (163).
The final section analyzes subjectivity formation through activism, subversion, and public engagement. Briana J. Smith analyzes the public work of artists Manfred Butzmann, Karla Sachse, and Reinhard Zabka, whose interactive practices and ephemeral gatherings illustrate a “socialist public life in which participation … was not a threat to socialism and instead could fortify and enliven socialist society” (210). Through neighborhood gatherings, often including children and families, small gallery exhibitions, and public art, Smith find that by the 1980s, these artists “modeled a mode of socialist public life centered around collaboration and creativity rather than coercion and control” (226). Yet Jeff Hayton’s analysis of the GDR punk scene of the 1980s integrates that coercion and control into a wider relational subject formation, tracing how punks successfully survived Stasi persecution to normalize their place within socialism by the end of the decade. Rather than characterize this process as a punk victory, Hayton argues that “punk subjectivities” were constituted “through state socialism and, consequently, were a part of state socialism” until the end of the GDR (245).
Eli Rubin’s epilogue situates the volume in the wider development of GDR historiography, as well as new paths opened by queering East German subjectivities and history. Rubin observes that the “vast new toolbox of methodologies” of recent GDR scholarship, including queer studies and queer history, has opened the possibility to think beyond (hetero-) normative time, space, and telos to discover the diverse, relational subjectivities that might desire to both self-actualize and participate in socialism (300). In this, Rubin argues that studying the “alternative modernity” of the GDR “helps us to queer our own histories, temporalities, and subjectivities”—not least that of contemporary capitalism (303–304).
Although some contributions are more successful than others in applying subjectivity and queer theory, this volume presents an engaging methodological approach that historians of the GDR and other regions or countries (including those of the capitalist West) should find useful. Yet there are notable omissions: Although some committed party members feature throughout the work, socialism, at least as determined by the SED, seems remarkably static. In this, it might have been fruitful to also “queer” the party through members’ subjectivities, especially in moments of dissonance in the 1970s and 1980s. This applies all the more to 1989–1990, which is largely absent from the volume. Certainly, this can be understood through the editors’ intent of moving away from 1989 as a foregone conclusion. Yet a contribution or two examining the potentialities and alternatives proposed by myriad activist groups, round tables, or workers’ councils would highlight the richness of East Germany’s queer subjectivities as explicitly visionary activism during a momentous transformation.
These omissions do not, however, detract from the overall work. A risk with an edited volume drawing upon subjectivity theory is to present a social system as a mosaic of individualities that coalesce into definitive shape only at a distance, if at all. This volume’s approach avoids this in emphasizing subjective relation, both to oneself and one’s wider social-political system, as a coterminous phenomenon across time. The end result is a work that explores, and respects, East Germany’s contingency and diversity.
