Since before the fall of the Wall, one of the recurring debates about the German Democratic Republic has been the extent to which a private life, autonomous from the reach of the state, was possible there. At stake is, among many things, the ability of former East Germans to maintain a sense of continuity within their own personal histories and narratives—one reason that so many former GDR citizens are so emotionally invested in maintaining that they had a private life and that their lives were “completely normal, of course” (doch ganz normal), as Mary Fulbrook is fond of reciting. Of course, a broader historiographical and ideological argument is also at stake, sometimes cast as the “totalitarianism” vs. “bottom-up” debate. At stake in this debate is the legacy of the GDR as either a “second German dictatorship” that imprisoned and enslaved its citizens or a progressive society that formed an “alternative modernity” to the west.

Paul Betts's second monograph, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic, steps directly into this debate by arguing that there was a kind of private life under state socialism in the GDR that mirrored notions of the private life in the west, but that it was far more complex in the ways it interacted with the mechanisms of state power. Betts is charting a course between Günter Gaus's “Niche Society” concept, and the totalitarian and “Stasi-centric” interpretations of the GDR represented among other things by the film The Lives of Others. What makes Betts's work important here is, in particular, the level of nuance and attention to detail he brings to bear in his study of “private life.” His sources are broad and eclectic, ranging from surveys, diaries, and amateur photography to local dispute resolution records. His book is ambitious, and the thoughtfulness and effort he has put into carefully mining everyday life history sources match the ambition of the venture.

The structure of his book in many ways is determined by the sources he uses, and because of that, the structure and narrative of the book is, as he acknowledges, “experimental.” It is divided into two parts, totaling seven chapters each. The first chapter directly takes on the Stasi, the most controversial subject of the former GDR. He wants to “reread” the Stasi as “embedded” in society, rather than “hovering above it.” This chapter is both an excellent short history of the Stasi and a nuanced description of a secret police network that indeed penetrated into the innermost spaces of East Germans, including their dreams, yet Betts also demonstrates how East Germans learned to cope and redefine what the private was in such a world.

Christians in the GDR also learned carefully to negotiate and redefine what it meant to be a Christian, in that they wanted to stay true to their faith, to render unto the SED what was the SED's, and still minimize the damage to their careers and their family. And while the state was very adept at marginalizing Christian rituals such as confirmation with the socialist coming of age Jugendweihe, East Germans remained religious when it came to death and funerals. Moreover, the Church simply adapted to the avenues open to it in a socialist state, such as public welfare activities, culminating in more autonomy for churches, which became the loci of the 1989 revolutionaries. Here, too, Betts effectively problematizes the overly simple dichotomy between “civil society” and the “niche society.”

Betts finds other ways into the “inner life” of East Germans. He examines decades of divorce court records to chart the ways in which the attitudes of the state evolved in relation to the need to show cause in divorce cases. Aside from the vignettes included in this chapter, many of which are simply priceless, it is clear that although the state always saw marriage as part of the socialist utopia, the definition of that relationship changed over the decades. Building upon his first book, The Authority of Everyday Objects, Betts then approaches interiority from another angle, the aesthetics and material culture of socialist domestic style, referred to often as Wohnkultur. Here, too, the state always showed a keen interest in how East Germans decorated and furnished their domiciles, but the nature of this interest changed from an initial rejection of modernism and functionalism to an embrace of synthetics and mass-produced furniture (though Betts notes earlier that Christians often consciously rejected this Wohnkultur, and one wishes he would draw more connections between the various angles he takes in his book).

His analysis then moves to the GDR's version of small claims courts, and specifically the kinds of disputes that East Germans struggled to resolve involving, in many cases, issues of private or personal property and propriety—a fascinating topic within a socialist system, especially from the ground-level view afforded by Betts's research. Betts then examines the culture of official complaints and petitions, a key area in which the private was linked to the state in ways that both affirmed a kind of autonomy of the little person but also demonstrated the degree to which citizens were dependent upon the state for so many commonplace things in life. This is territory that has been trodden before, but Betts does a wonderful job placing it in a longue durée German historical context, as well as the context of his broader discussion of private life. Finally, Betts's chapter on amateur and maverick photography of domestic interiors and the private moments of GDR citizens—often the scenes that the state did not want photographed—is a fascinating, thoughtful, and indeed quite poignant exposé, one that could potentially stand alone as its own project.

Indeed, if there is any weakness of Betts's original, detailed, and very thoughtful work, it is that most of the chapters are, in a way, too short. He has approached the notion of privacy in socialism like a cut diamond, rotating it to look into the center from different sides. In cases such as the photography or the divorce records, it seems as if so much more could be added to the narrative. This is of course a testament to Betts's ability to hold the interest of the reader, but it is a bit frustrating—and it would have helped had he built more cross linkages between each of the chapters to weave them together better, such as the example of Christians and furniture mentioned above.

In all, this is a work of the highest level, crucial to the field, and a model of scholarship to be followed by historians of the GDR, Germany, and beyond for years to come.