The title of Gerd Horten's new book on Western culture and consumerism in the GDR comes from the chorus of “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 2)” from Pink Floyd's concept album The Wall (1979). In the song, when faced with an authoritarian schoolteacher, the pupils chant: “We don't need no education / We don't need no thought control.” While Horten never refers to the song in the text, presumably the title is meant to evoke a rejection of Eastern media and consumer products by East Germans who instead looked to the “Imaginary West” (8) to fulfill their material and experiential desires.

Of course, such longings came with a price. As Horten outlines in the introduction, he seeks to explain an East German “paradox” (1): SED efforts to exert totalitarian control over culture and consumerism in the GDR while simultaneously becoming ever more dependent on Western media and products over the 1970s and 1980s. Nor was it simply that the SED acquiesced to the intrusion of international media culture or popular demands: as Horten argues persuasively, SED officials actively embraced Western media and consumer products over socialist offerings, in a failed effort to stave off economic, social, and political crisis. Consequently, by the 1980s, the SED had lost control of cultural and consumer policy, and such “disempowering” contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall (1, 4).

The book opens with two GDR propaganda campaigns from the early 1970s: the international solidarity movement against the Vietnam War and East German participation in the 1972 and 1976 Olympics (chapter 1). Horten asserts that these successful initiatives illustrate the hopefulness which greeted the ascension of Erich Honecker to the SED leadership in 1971, through which the GDR accumulated considerable legitimacy at home and abroad. What follows are several case studies exploring how the GDR spent this capital when faced with the growing influence of Western culture and consumer products during the 1970s and 1980s. Horten analyzes the film industry (chapter 2), television programming (chapter 3), youth radio and popular music (chapter 4), and East German consumerism (chapter 5). Horten ends with an epilogue considering the difficult Wende years for former East Germans and how Ostalgie represents an effort by those dissatisfied with unification to find solace in the lifestyles and material culture which had been (ironically) ignored or rejected during the GDR.

In the middle chapters, Horten is at his best. In each, the author demonstrates how East German officials were caught in an insoluble dilemma: declining interest in GDR-produced cultural and consumer offerings, which led them to increasingly depend on Western products to make up the shortfall. Whether with regard to Hollywood blockbusters, Bruce Springsteen, or Levi's jeans, Eastern officials gradually relaxed or even jettisoned ideological considerations in favor of a quick buck. While certain products never made the cut (Rambo), by the 1980s, amidst growing economic pressure, citizen demand, and Western penetration of the East, SED officials embraced Western goods as a panacea. Especially compelling is Horten weaving economic and cultural policy together to demonstrate how Honecker's policy of social and economic unity—that is, subsidizing East Germans with extensive welfare provisioning at the cost of GDR indebtedness to the West—bankrupted the nation. Such economic irrationality, however, was deemed politically expedient to ensure East German acceptance of SED rule. However, dependence on the West undermined the SED: the Intershops, for example, a critical source of foreign currency for the regime, became a nexus for complaints about inequalities in a classless society. While this economic argument is not new, affixing cultural dimensions to the financial irresponsibility adds a welcome layer to the complex puzzle of East German deterioration. As these chapters show, by the 1980s, pushed by popular demand for and dependency on Western culture and consumer goods, East German policies had become a Gordian knot of contradictions which weakened the SED, destabilized the GDR, and contributed to the collapse of the state.

However, if these chapters are individually impressive, the work as a whole suffers from several conceptual flaws. First, the book's organization and points of comparison are frustrating. It is unclear why East German propaganda is relevant to the role of Western culture and consumer goods in the GDR. This chapter, placed alongside the others, seems like a comparison of apples to oranges. The choice to compare products (film, television, and radio) with practices (consumerism) likewise raises eyebrows: is watching television not a form of consumption? More wearisome is the repetition. Choosing to focus on the same process with a different product multiple times leads to unnecessary repetitions, whether the example is the 1973 decision to allow Easterners to watch Western television (featured in four places in the book) or the level of Eastern indebtedness (mentioned at least twice), which could have been avoided with a more chronological framework or more varied case studies.

Second, the overall argument remains speculative. While the discussions of GDR television and consumerism are sprinkled with comments by Easterners recording their frustrations with GDR cultural offerings and interest in Western goods, the chapters on propaganda, film, and—to a lesser extent—radio are almost bereft of ordinary voices. A dearth of evidence and the difficulty of gauging reception speaks to the challenges of doing East German cultural history, an issue the author acknowledges: even after speculating that Eastern audiences might have admired how Western films like All the President's Men could openly explore political corruption, he admits “clear documentary evidence about the precise impact of the film is lacking” (73). But if the author is arguing that the penetration of Western culture and goods in the GDR “disempowered” the SED and drove citizens toward opposition (“They felt demoralized and deprived, and many eagerly joined the peaceful demonstrations in the final years of the GDR regime” [202]), without showing one leading to another, how can we conclude this “paradox” contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall?

What we have here is an excellent study of how the SED wrestled with the ever-growing presence of Western culture and consumerism in East Germany. But we get little sense of how Easterners consumed these products and, especially, whether the demand for and influence of Western culture and consumer goods led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In other words, thanks to Gerd Horten, we know that SED officials thought Blade Runner was an excellent film, if inappropriate for the GDR, but we can only speculate as to what Easterners thought when they watched it on FRG television a few years later. And whether it inspired them to “tear down the wall,” as The Judge orders at the end of Pink Floyd's The Wall, that is another matter entirely.