The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker

The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker

Mary Fulbrook

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0300144245

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied, and full of educational, career, and leisure opportunities: in many ways “perfectly ordinary lives.”

Using the rich resources of the newly-opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler’s Third Reich to a modernizing industrial state. She examines changing conceptions of normality within an authoritarian political system, and provides extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals perceived their rights and actively sought to shape their own lives.

Replacing the simplistic black-and-white concept of “totalitarianism” by the notion of a “participatory dictatorship,” this book seeks to reinstate the East German people as actors in their own history.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

played at times a genuinely representative role. Popular pressures, whether collective or individual, also, very importantly, had a significant impact on the responses of those in positions of genuine power. So although real power remained concentrated in a few hands at the top, and there were certain issues that were totally beyond negotiation, there still remained large areas in which people's input could make a practical difference to their lives. ‘Top-down’ accounts thus need to be

ZIJ, F84/16, ‘Jugend in der Stadt Leipzig (III)’, Oct. 1984, p. 8. 17 Autorenkollektiv unter der Leitung von Kurt Krambach (ed.), Wie lebt man auf dem Dorf? Soziologische Aspekte der Entwicklung des Dorfes in der DDR (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1985); on youth and leisure in particular, pp. 141–7. 18 BArch Bibliothek, FDJ/6058, H. Süe, ‘Zur Entwicklung der Landjugend in der DDR’, Nov. 1979, ff. 21–3, f. 24. 19 BArch Bibliothek, FDJ/6059, Werner Holzweissig, ‘Jugendliche Arbeitspendler und ihre

September 1957. 20 Ibid., p. 83, entry of 25 January 1958. 21 See, for example, the contributions to Hans Joachim Schädlich (ed.), Aktenkundig (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1992). The literature in this area is by now very extensive, and it would be inappropriate to try to give full bibliographical references here. 22 A somewhat sensationalist account of particular cases can be found in John O. Koehler, Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). 23

unemployment of the Weimar years – sought in some respects to set right the wrongs of their own childhoods, combating unemployment and the lack of adequate food and housing as the greatest evils. But in the meantime, new generations came to maturity, those more interested in comparisons with the prosperity and mass culture of the post-war West, not merely taking for granted but actively critiquing the modest achievements of the repressive if paternalistic state. Utopian dreams thus faded into

legal framework of gender in the GDR There were two main priorities underlying SED policies with respect to women: first, the undoubted economic need for women's labour in the light of the circumstances just outlined, and therefore the need to ensure that the demands of production and reproduction were not mutually incompatible; and secondly, a principled belief in the need for the ‘emancipation’ of women arising from the Marxist philosophical tradition. While the first priority was largely met

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