In this innovative and well-structured study, Rubin uses the prism of plastic to explore the history of East Germany, officially known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR). From the late 1950s, the self-proclaimed “Workers' and Peasants' State” wholeheartedly embraced plastics technology to synthesize a modern socialist alternative to western consumer culture. This was done for a variety of reasons: to compensate for a lack of raw materials; to benefit the GDR's Volkswirtschaft (“People's Economy”) and those of its Soviet Bloc allies; to dovetail with the Soviet leadership's shift of emphasis from heavy industry to cutting-edge technology; to fulfill the new admiration for technology shared by planners, politicians, and the general public in the age of Soviet space and atomic programs; to provide the population with more consumer goods in the wake of the popular uprising of June 17, 1953; and to reduce household chores, particularly for women, through the production of electronic appliances, cleaners, and no-iron clothing. East Germany's great chemical factories were retooled to mass-produce the polythene, polyester, and polystyrene necessary for the plastics revolution. The regime insisted that the resulting products were cheaper, more functional, less wasteful, and more durable than those they were intended to replace. Most GDR citizens agreed, and a new socialist consumer culture was born. Although some work has already been done on the industrial, technological, design, and cultural side of East German plastics, Rubin aims “to tie these elements together, to show their interconnectedness … which has not yet been done” (p. 13). The book is based on a wide range of archival and secondary sources as well as some interviews. Furthermore, it makes excellent use of tables and illustrations.

Rubin argues convincingly “that plastic represented an undeniable material presence of the power of the regime to express its ideological goals in everyday ways” (p. 220). He also establishes that “East German plastic represents an alternative modernity, one that did not end in 1989, but lives on in its uniqueness” (p. 226). In the process, he undermines the view of Mary Fulbrook and her acolytes that the GDR was a “normalized,” autonomous society. That said, we must be careful not to extrapolate too much from a study of synthetics, essential though this material was to East Germans. There was more to everyday life in the GDR than a popular appreciation of plastics.

The author is less persuasive when using his paradigm to disprove totalitarianism theory. It is not always true that “the totalitarian school sees only state power and only in hard forms” (p. 9). Such simplistic and stereotypical applications of totalitarianism theory do not necessarily follow from the theorem itself, which is flexible enough to encompass softer, more subtle forms of power. Policies pursued by totalitarian states can sometimes be popular with their citizens, either because the regime propagates them successfully or because they fulfill a genuine popular need. Often it is a combination of both. The production of plastic goods in the GDR illustrates this well. Despite distancing himself from the “totalitarian school,” Rubin “demonstrates a general point about the nature of the totalitarian regime in East Germany, mainly, that it was influenced by cultural and economic trends not of its own doing” (p. 28). Yet these trends were supposed to be part of the unique mix that rendered the totalitarian label inappropriate. After 1953, the author believes, the GDR increasingly became a “welfare dictatorship,” a concept conceived by Konrad Jarausch as an alternative to totalitarianism theory.

Rubin uses plastics to demonstrate the failure of the East German dictator Walter Ulbricht's economic reform program, the New Economic System (NES), launched in 1963. The main idea behind the reforms was to introduce certain market mechanisms to the command economy and decentralize various decision-making powers to the industries themselves. The author's claim that “the reforms managed mostly to mix the worst of both systems” (p. 174) will be contested by some historians. But it is his failure to consider the impact of Ulbricht's unrealistic targets that invites most criticism. These caused stresses in the Volkswirtschaft and discredited the NES. Given the multiplier effect of plastics and synthetic fibers on the rest of the economy, this is a surprising omission.

Moreover, the author misses the tension between fulfilling the demands of the “scientific-technological revolution” and those of the consumer. Ulbricht's tendency to prioritize the former over the latter facilitated his fall from power. It is therefore odd that Rubin should identify 1958 as the decisive turning point “when East German socialism was launched onto the path of a full-fledged consumer society” (p. 33). Such a policy was only really adopted when Erich Honecker became dictator of the GDR. As Charles S. Maier points out in his seminal work, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany, Ulbricht's goal of catching up to West German living standards by 1961 was never taken seriously by the GDR's own planning agencies (p. 87).

Rubin argues that economic recentralization toward the end of the 1960s boosted the production of plastic consumer products; however, he does not discuss Honecker's decision to nationalize the remaining private and semi-state-owned businesses in 1972. The unintended consequence was to exacerbate shortages of the “1,000 small things” dear to the East German consumer, many of which were presumably made from plastic.

One of the most informative aspects of the book is the role played by Bauhaus-inspired designers in forging this plastics consensus. They gained considerable influence as the economy was recentralized. Rubin could have added that their successful co-option by the regime confirms the defectiveness of the theory advanced by Peter Christian Ludz in the late 1960s that GDR technocrats constituted an “institutionalized counter-elite.”

Unfortunately, Rubin makes a few factual errors. The name of the East German Prime Minister, Otto Grotewohl, is misspelled as Otto Grötewald (p. 32); the liberalizing New Course is said to have started in 1952 instead of 1953 (p. 37); Stalin is stated as dying in May 1953 rather than in March of that year (p. 38); and the year of Ulbricht's overthrow is twice given as 1972 when the correct date is May 1971 (pp. 163, 204). The historian Alan McDougall is listed as a “Fulbrookian” on the grounds that he was a student of Fulbrook (p. 6). Actually, he was a student of mine, and I am no “Fulbrookian” (Fulbrook externally examined his D.Phil.). In Youth Politics in East Germany, McDougall endorses the concept of “welfare dictatorship” (p. 13), just as Rubin does. But these mistakes do not detract significantly from Rubin's analysis. Overall, Synthetic Socialism is an original, well-written, and pleasingly presented book that makes an important contribution to the secondary literature on the GDR.