Training Socialist Citizens is a welcome addition to the historical literature on the GDR—not only because it focuses on the understudied area of 1950s East German sports history but also because Molly Wilkinson Johnson very successfully situates early socialist sports within the overall parameters of what may now well be called a new orthodoxy of historical research on the East German dictatorship. She smartly connects the realm of sports with Mary Fulbrook's concept of the “participatory dictatorship” and shows yet again the usefulness of Alf Lüdtke's notions of Eigen-Sinn (self-will or self-interest) and Alltagsgeschichte for understanding the insidious pervasiveness of SED rule in the everyday life of GDR citizens on the one hand, but equally the limits of dictatorship on the other. While the regime's sports policy was geared toward creating the elusive “socialist personality” by enhancing citizens' work productivity, paramilitary skills, and ideological reliability through sports, sports equally served participants' as well as spectators' individualist desires for fitness and fulfillment, joy, and sociability. Wilkinson Johnson thus demonstrates that an analysis of East German sports can indeed generate many important insights into the contradictions and ambiguities that shaped the everyday life of GDR citizens.

Arguably, much of this is due to the slippery nature of the subject. First, sports are always dependent upon the state and society in which they are practiced or watched (i.e., as a rule in modern dictatorships it has to serve the interests of the regime). Rather than focusing on the cynicism of medically facilitated East German medal successes at elite competitions from the late 1960s onward, Wilkinson Johnson looks at the 1950s, an optimistic and dynamic period, during which the socialist state's mass mobilization for sports encountered citizens' genuine enthusiasm for athleticism. Prominent examples in Wilkinson Johnson's lucid analysis are the first three Gymnastics and Sports Festivals in Leipzig and the Course de la Paix, a multistage cycle race through eastern Europe under the aegis of the International Cycling Union which in 1952 literally put the GDR onto the international sports map. Second, as Wilkinson Johnson is fully aware, sports also inhabit a world of their own which allows both participants and spectators to appropriate them according to their own needs and desires independent of social context. Finally, and hardest to grapple with in terms of historical interpretation, there are the complicated and messy ways in which both spheres intersect and overlap and where the interests of the state and citizens meet. As Wilkinson Johnson puts it, “East German sports suggests that citizens could be heavily engaged in state activities, even learning to use state terminology to think about and understand their daily experiences as part of the project of ‘building socialism,’ while simultaneously deriving individual and communal meaning from their participation” (p. 12).

Good examples of this shady area are the Massenwaldlauf in which over half a million medals were awarded year in and year out and the Prepared to Work and Defend Sports Medal, the centerpiece of East Germany's massed sports program, which rewarded all-around physical fitness and which virtually every citizen beginning with the state's number one “workers' athlete” Walter Ulbricht gained at some point throughout the history of the GDR. Wilkinson Johnson's sources make it abundantly clear that while the state did its utmost to cajole citizens into playing sports, these often shrewdly played along being more often than not motivated by personal and community-based rather than political reasons.

Other than her clear and crisp use of concepts and analytical framework, the main strength of this book lies in Wilkinson Johnson's convincing interpretations of primary sources. The combination of materials from the German federal archives and local archives on the one hand and published propaganda materials and selected oral history interviews on the other is very fruitful in capturing both the tensions and ambiguities between state strategies and their reception by GDR citizens. That said, a cursory look at early GDR television might have provided extra material to substantiate and perhaps extend the many insights of this book further. For example, there is well-known footage that shows Ulbricht practicing downhill skiing in the Erz Mountains and thereby serving as a role model for all GDR citizens. As Ulbricht was a fan of all winter sports, these, especially bobsled and ski-jumping, and the regime's plans to turn Oberhof into a “St. Moritz of the East” might have also been worthy of some attention. A further quality of this book are the comparisons with other political regimes which Wilkinson Johnson convincingly draws at various points throughout the book. For example, she rightly points out that the belief in the usefulness of sports for the fitness of the workforce was equally common in capitalist West Germany.

Wilkinson Johnson expended much energy into integrating her findings with what has by now become a mountain of historical scholarship on the GDR. In this reader's opinion she occasionally is too cautious about matching her findings against those of others. One is used to footnotes of half a page or more from German medievalists, but not from American modern history Ph.D.s. Finally, while this should not detract from the many qualities of this book, one also wonders whether Wilkinson Johnson's results would have been similar had she extended her analysis into the 1960s and the Honecker era, when high-performance sports increasingly took center stage and massed sports were pushed to the margins to the anger and chagrin of many hobby athletes.