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The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker
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.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 2, 2006
About the author
Mary Fulbrook
41 books33 followers Mary Jean Alexandra Fulbrook (née Wilson) is a British academic, historian and author. Since 1995, she has been Professor of German History at University College London. She is a noted researcher in a wide range of fields, including religion and society in early modern Europe, the German dictatorships of the twentieth century, Europe after the Holocaust, and historiography and social theory.
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October 10, 2018I made slow progress reading this, maybe I've gone off literacy or perhaps it was pre-election tension, relived by election night pleasures , I think that will be my story.
The basic difficulty of a book about the East German state (1949-1989) is the implicit why and Fulbrook never offers a hint as to that other than that she finds it intrinsically of worth. This book is the polar opposite of her A Concise History of Germany, here we have a topic of narrow scope covered in depth but no sense of what readership she is addressing. She plants the book in the midst of a crowded bed of works on dictatorship, pointing out that a detailed look at a specimen in particular shows that a top down, pressure cooker government by repression model is too simplistic, so we can see her book as comfortably academic taking aim at more popular accounts of the cold war
and in places the comparison with Applebaum's Iron Curtain:the crushing of Eastern Europe was unavoidable. Applebaum's politics mean that she has to imply at least the normality of pre-Soviet dominated Eastern Europe. Fulbrook doesn't have the same constraint and so can acknowledge that the East German state was constructed from the ruins of the Nazi state and that Weimar and Imperial Second Empire Germany had not been so great either . One has to deal with people as they are, and for Fulbrook the reality was that the population had been socialised under regimes of varying degrees of oppressiveness and regulation, indeed one of the many, many immediate problems faced by the new regime were Nazi party members in key professions - over 70% of school teachers for instance, the only way to address this was to train up a new cadre of teachers - typically drawing upon demobilised soldiers (of whom there was no great shortage), training them for between two weeks to two months and then deploying them in the classroom. However one has to bear in mind the length of a human life, the new teachers had grown up during the Nazi era and many of its attitudes were simply accepted as normative. A similar situation as in teaching also prevailed in the legal profession and in medicine, while one can, arguably, rely in times of need upon on the job training for judges and teachers, this isn't generally considered advisable in medicine, so the state also drew back into service people untainted by fascism - ie the very elderly and those bumped out due to having been considered racially or politically unsuitable. At the same time until the erection of the Berlin Wall there was a draining away to the West in particular of professional and skilled workers, which meant that until the 1980s there was exceptional social mobility and opportunities particularly for women in working life and relativity rapid opportunities for career development and promotion, on the plus side Fulbrook points out the need for women's labour and pressure from below for adequate structures to support this led to all day schooling, state child care from early ages, and availability of contraception and abortion - which was not the case in the other Germany, however very familiar patterns of a gendered division of labour persisted, so over 80% of the health care workforce was female while senior doctors and surgeons were overwhelmingly male. And there was the familiar double burden on women - full time work followed by the expectation of managing the household, and if you imagine that the husbands would report that they regularly did at least half the housework while wives responded with "chance would be a fine thing" then you'd be right.
One of the curiosities and possibly disappointments of this book is that growing up during the latter stages of the cold war the absolute difference between life on either side of the iron curtain was a matter of faith yet reading Fulbrook, from the point of view of social history actually things look to be much of a muchness - so when Fulbrook points out the increase in per capita alcohol consumption in East Germany the only thing that stands out as different to the life in western Europe is that relatively less wine and more spirits were consumed. The trend was the same irrespective of political system - on average we all drank more. Absolutely the same trend occurred with smoking but at a slower pace - that it became increasingly the preserve of younger and less educated women. Indeed even the degree of social mobility was not so unusual across the continent when states were expanding their competencies, and economies were growing strongly. Fulbrook argues that social history is not history with politics removed but history with people added, and at the level of the people and popular experience then East Germany looks much like most other late twentieth century developed economies - increasing education, secularisation, more divorce and more remarriage, liberalising social attitudes, at this more fundamental level the higher level ideological differences seem to have had little impact on how people actually lived their lives in terms of having babies (or not) getting married and divorced, the kinds of jobs people had and how these didn't balance with family commitments for the care of children or the elderly.
Some of the problems were also of the same kind although different in extent, for instance in housing were precisely the same political debate occurred in Britain and East Germany between whether the state ought to aim for quality or quantity of housing provision with exactly the same outcome - quantity won. Fulbrook points out that in East Germany plattenbau estates both had higher crime rates and higher rates of divorce - easier I suppose to change who you spend your free time with than where you spend it.
Fulbrook argues that the East German regime aimed to take on the Capitalist West by competing on its terms through developing consumer socialism the problem was that in a country heavily damaged through warfare and reparations to the Soviets, tied into trade with fairly poor and mostly under developed economies, facing a drain of skilled workers this couldn't be achieved, indeed the more the state aimed to provide, housing, a car, television, holidays, and coffee, the greater the apparent gap between the state's pretensions and popular experience appeared to be, which fostered a culture of grumbling. Fulbrook argues that the ambition of the state obliged it in effect to be responsive to consumer demands - or at least attempt to do so within its limited field of manoeuvre. Coffee provided one such crisis point as imported coffee was bulked up with rye and chicory, protest in the form of polite letters of complaint which in particular touched upon the abysmal taste and the shocking effect on the digestion obliged the government to begin selling arms to coffee producing states in order to buy in sufficient quantities of arabica beans to provide for satisfactory breakfasts. The downside of believing one's own ideology of acting for the good of the people as a paternalistic provider is the obligation of having to deliver on such expectations. Since the economic base of the country was too limited to meet state ambitions the gap was plugged by borrowing money from the capitalist West, state functionaries pointed out that this could only end in economic collapse but were ignored, indeed the economic situation worsened as this problem was universal behind the iron curtain and the Soviet Union responded by reducing the amount of oil it provided. This worsened the crisis since East Germany responded by mining its Brown Coal reserves causing additional pollution and environmental damage which further dragged on the economy (and health of citizens).
A problem here was in leadership. One might expect a dictatorship to have clear, clean lines of authority and control, indeed that is meant to be the very attraction of of having a dictatorship, in the East German case Fulbrook argues, the situation was very messy as membership in the party or honorary positions for example in the youth movement or even as unofficial stasi informants blurred the lines between state and non-state, also while on paper the politburo could provide a co-ordinating government function in practise it was a rubber stamp with senior politicians organising their own areas of competence in ways which could conflict or contradict those of other senior figures - ie ignoring environmental protections enabled production targets to be meet but caused additional problems in providing adequate health care - so that local efficiencies caused inefficiency on a system scale.
Over time the state responded to this by increasing its competencies, taking over private businesses, non-state provision to my surprise survived to some extent in health care with some coming from the churches, naturally this tended over time to increase dissatisfaction as it increased the scale of what the government couldn't deliver on so increasing discontent or confirming negative expectations.
What one is left with is the sad picture of a state still struggling forty years on, to rebuild after world war two, capable of being rocked by the threat of men growing their hair long.
The basic difficulty of a book about the East German state (1949-1989) is the implicit why and Fulbrook never offers a hint as to that other than that she finds it intrinsically of worth. This book is the polar opposite of her A Concise History of Germany, here we have a topic of narrow scope covered in depth but no sense of what readership she is addressing. She plants the book in the midst of a crowded bed of works on dictatorship, pointing out that a detailed look at a specimen in particular shows that a top down, pressure cooker government by repression model is too simplistic, so we can see her book as comfortably academic taking aim at more popular accounts of the cold war
and in places the comparison with Applebaum's Iron Curtain:the crushing of Eastern Europe was unavoidable. Applebaum's politics mean that she has to imply at least the normality of pre-Soviet dominated Eastern Europe. Fulbrook doesn't have the same constraint and so can acknowledge that the East German state was constructed from the ruins of the Nazi state and that Weimar and Imperial Second Empire Germany had not been so great either . One has to deal with people as they are, and for Fulbrook the reality was that the population had been socialised under regimes of varying degrees of oppressiveness and regulation, indeed one of the many, many immediate problems faced by the new regime were Nazi party members in key professions - over 70% of school teachers for instance, the only way to address this was to train up a new cadre of teachers - typically drawing upon demobilised soldiers (of whom there was no great shortage), training them for between two weeks to two months and then deploying them in the classroom. However one has to bear in mind the length of a human life, the new teachers had grown up during the Nazi era and many of its attitudes were simply accepted as normative. A similar situation as in teaching also prevailed in the legal profession and in medicine, while one can, arguably, rely in times of need upon on the job training for judges and teachers, this isn't generally considered advisable in medicine, so the state also drew back into service people untainted by fascism - ie the very elderly and those bumped out due to having been considered racially or politically unsuitable. At the same time until the erection of the Berlin Wall there was a draining away to the West in particular of professional and skilled workers, which meant that until the 1980s there was exceptional social mobility and opportunities particularly for women in working life and relativity rapid opportunities for career development and promotion, on the plus side Fulbrook points out the need for women's labour and pressure from below for adequate structures to support this led to all day schooling, state child care from early ages, and availability of contraception and abortion - which was not the case in the other Germany, however very familiar patterns of a gendered division of labour persisted, so over 80% of the health care workforce was female while senior doctors and surgeons were overwhelmingly male. And there was the familiar double burden on women - full time work followed by the expectation of managing the household, and if you imagine that the husbands would report that they regularly did at least half the housework while wives responded with "chance would be a fine thing" then you'd be right.
One of the curiosities and possibly disappointments of this book is that growing up during the latter stages of the cold war the absolute difference between life on either side of the iron curtain was a matter of faith yet reading Fulbrook, from the point of view of social history actually things look to be much of a muchness - so when Fulbrook points out the increase in per capita alcohol consumption in East Germany the only thing that stands out as different to the life in western Europe is that relatively less wine and more spirits were consumed. The trend was the same irrespective of political system - on average we all drank more. Absolutely the same trend occurred with smoking but at a slower pace - that it became increasingly the preserve of younger and less educated women. Indeed even the degree of social mobility was not so unusual across the continent when states were expanding their competencies, and economies were growing strongly. Fulbrook argues that social history is not history with politics removed but history with people added, and at the level of the people and popular experience then East Germany looks much like most other late twentieth century developed economies - increasing education, secularisation, more divorce and more remarriage, liberalising social attitudes, at this more fundamental level the higher level ideological differences seem to have had little impact on how people actually lived their lives in terms of having babies (or not) getting married and divorced, the kinds of jobs people had and how these didn't balance with family commitments for the care of children or the elderly.
Some of the problems were also of the same kind although different in extent, for instance in housing were precisely the same political debate occurred in Britain and East Germany between whether the state ought to aim for quality or quantity of housing provision with exactly the same outcome - quantity won. Fulbrook points out that in East Germany plattenbau estates both had higher crime rates and higher rates of divorce - easier I suppose to change who you spend your free time with than where you spend it.
Fulbrook argues that the East German regime aimed to take on the Capitalist West by competing on its terms through developing consumer socialism the problem was that in a country heavily damaged through warfare and reparations to the Soviets, tied into trade with fairly poor and mostly under developed economies, facing a drain of skilled workers this couldn't be achieved, indeed the more the state aimed to provide, housing, a car, television, holidays, and coffee, the greater the apparent gap between the state's pretensions and popular experience appeared to be, which fostered a culture of grumbling. Fulbrook argues that the ambition of the state obliged it in effect to be responsive to consumer demands - or at least attempt to do so within its limited field of manoeuvre. Coffee provided one such crisis point as imported coffee was bulked up with rye and chicory, protest in the form of polite letters of complaint which in particular touched upon the abysmal taste and the shocking effect on the digestion obliged the government to begin selling arms to coffee producing states in order to buy in sufficient quantities of arabica beans to provide for satisfactory breakfasts. The downside of believing one's own ideology of acting for the good of the people as a paternalistic provider is the obligation of having to deliver on such expectations. Since the economic base of the country was too limited to meet state ambitions the gap was plugged by borrowing money from the capitalist West, state functionaries pointed out that this could only end in economic collapse but were ignored, indeed the economic situation worsened as this problem was universal behind the iron curtain and the Soviet Union responded by reducing the amount of oil it provided. This worsened the crisis since East Germany responded by mining its Brown Coal reserves causing additional pollution and environmental damage which further dragged on the economy (and health of citizens).
A problem here was in leadership. One might expect a dictatorship to have clear, clean lines of authority and control, indeed that is meant to be the very attraction of of having a dictatorship, in the East German case Fulbrook argues, the situation was very messy as membership in the party or honorary positions for example in the youth movement or even as unofficial stasi informants blurred the lines between state and non-state, also while on paper the politburo could provide a co-ordinating government function in practise it was a rubber stamp with senior politicians organising their own areas of competence in ways which could conflict or contradict those of other senior figures - ie ignoring environmental protections enabled production targets to be meet but caused additional problems in providing adequate health care - so that local efficiencies caused inefficiency on a system scale.
Over time the state responded to this by increasing its competencies, taking over private businesses, non-state provision to my surprise survived to some extent in health care with some coming from the churches, naturally this tended over time to increase dissatisfaction as it increased the scale of what the government couldn't deliver on so increasing discontent or confirming negative expectations.
What one is left with is the sad picture of a state still struggling forty years on, to rebuild after world war two, capable of being rocked by the threat of men growing their hair long.
December 9, 2015
Mmmm. Mixed feelings on this. I was disappointed there wasn't even a real introduction to how the DDR came about and key features of the regime. She expects you to have read widely on the subject beforehand. I think all her points are no doubt valid but they need to be in context. I shall now search for a more comprehensive history of the DDR.
August 24, 2019
Not bad, but the bias was definitely over the top at some points despite the rave reviews about this book being "neutral." It also works off of the premise that capitalism is good. Points for discussing de-nazification, women's rights, and the eingaben, though.
July 31, 2020
This book is more intended towards academic audiences, or those who are mainly interested in the affairs of East Germany (DDR). Unfamiliar readers will surely find it hard to catch up with the terms, political events mentioned in this book, as well as the sporadical topics contained in this work by Mary Fulbrook. The writing of social history in this book concerns more about encompassing the accounts of everyday life of the people as opposed to the repressive institutional structure, central policy formation and the effects of resistance to politically driven policies as having been outlined in many literatures (read Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall by Anna Funder for example, for some accounts about how the East German state security apparatus -the Stasi- worked on surveillance).
For readers who are still unfamiliar with chronological timeline of the DDR, I would recommend watching a TV mini-series called Das war die DDR: Eine Geschichte des anderen Deutschlands (That was the GDR: A History of the other Germany) which was released in 1993 (It’s available on YouTube). The 7 episodes of this TV mini-series which is brought in the forms of documentary, interviews and archival footage brings an interesting introduction to the East German regime. Actually there are much information which has been mentioned in Fulbrook’s book is covered in the TV series such as the matters of life and death (health condition and environmental concern), development of economic policy throughout 40 years history of the DDR, and a number of other issues. The main difference would be that Fulbrook’s book draws a huge chunk of its analysis on statistical data and archives, mainly from DDR official archives and second-hand data from previously-done research.
And not to mention that the main interesting point of Fulbrook’s research in East Germany would be the idea of ‘participatory dictatorship’. Many historians in the past have attributed communist regimes in Eastern Europe the label of ‘totalitarianism’ with characterisations such as restrictions on freedom of travel, suppression on freedom of thoughts and expression, as well as low treatment of the basic human rights. However, Fulbrook’s research actually began in the mid-1990s with the question in mind about some former East German citizens with whom she happened to be acquainted who gave different viewpoint of their lives in the former DDR. They described their experiences and lives before 1989 as ‘a perfectly normal life’ or in German would be ‘ein ganz normales Leben’.
Life in the former DDR turns out to have more complexities rather than the black-and-white viewpoint of totalitarianism as offered by many historians. History often highlighted several dark instances of the Cold War history, such as the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Prague Spring in 1968, and many historical failings of the experiments of the ‘actually existing socialism’. However, there are many individual stories that could be told, which do not exist inside history textbooks. Stories of love, stories of pain and struggle, stories of happiness and achievement, stories of boredom and gloom. And in her attempt to explain the notion of ‘participatory dictatorship’ in this book, Fulbrook has successfully outlined the unique circumstance of relations between the state and the people in former East Germany, and how the construction of ‘vision of a good society’ was implemented in a nation built over the ruins of Nazi Germany.
For readers who are still unfamiliar with chronological timeline of the DDR, I would recommend watching a TV mini-series called Das war die DDR: Eine Geschichte des anderen Deutschlands (That was the GDR: A History of the other Germany) which was released in 1993 (It’s available on YouTube). The 7 episodes of this TV mini-series which is brought in the forms of documentary, interviews and archival footage brings an interesting introduction to the East German regime. Actually there are much information which has been mentioned in Fulbrook’s book is covered in the TV series such as the matters of life and death (health condition and environmental concern), development of economic policy throughout 40 years history of the DDR, and a number of other issues. The main difference would be that Fulbrook’s book draws a huge chunk of its analysis on statistical data and archives, mainly from DDR official archives and second-hand data from previously-done research.
And not to mention that the main interesting point of Fulbrook’s research in East Germany would be the idea of ‘participatory dictatorship’. Many historians in the past have attributed communist regimes in Eastern Europe the label of ‘totalitarianism’ with characterisations such as restrictions on freedom of travel, suppression on freedom of thoughts and expression, as well as low treatment of the basic human rights. However, Fulbrook’s research actually began in the mid-1990s with the question in mind about some former East German citizens with whom she happened to be acquainted who gave different viewpoint of their lives in the former DDR. They described their experiences and lives before 1989 as ‘a perfectly normal life’ or in German would be ‘ein ganz normales Leben’.
Life in the former DDR turns out to have more complexities rather than the black-and-white viewpoint of totalitarianism as offered by many historians. History often highlighted several dark instances of the Cold War history, such as the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the Prague Spring in 1968, and many historical failings of the experiments of the ‘actually existing socialism’. However, there are many individual stories that could be told, which do not exist inside history textbooks. Stories of love, stories of pain and struggle, stories of happiness and achievement, stories of boredom and gloom. And in her attempt to explain the notion of ‘participatory dictatorship’ in this book, Fulbrook has successfully outlined the unique circumstance of relations between the state and the people in former East Germany, and how the construction of ‘vision of a good society’ was implemented in a nation built over the ruins of Nazi Germany.
January 29, 2013
I really do love Fulbrook for her insights into the lives of those living in the GDR post WWII. I'm pretty sure this love is well developed from my history teacher's historian crush on the woman. :-)
October 25, 2021
I gotta say, I am not too happy with the non-chronological approach that this book uses. It very much is a book meant for university students, and the chapters are self-contained in a way that they can be read as is for specific courses, but I think that severely degrades the books ability to convey its message about East German society. It often harkens back to points it has made before, and it often talks about events repeatedly, without ever really diving into them, for an example the 1953 workers strike in Berlin. Did not enjoy the book, and I was very let down, I had been looking forward to reading it for a while.
December 4, 2014
This book is one of the few studies, which shows both the achievements and historical failings of socialist experiment in East Germany. It provides good emprical information on the social history of the DDR and non-pretentious analysis on the subject.
July 15, 2022
In the blurb for this book, the phrase "perfectly ordinary lives" drew me in immediately. I have enjoyed several books on the GDR, such as Stasiland by Anna Funder which I enjoyed immensely, all of which painted a clear picture of a repressive, evil, and incompetent regime that caused untold suffering. Having been fascinated by the Iron Curtain since the 1980s, I wanted to see if it were indeed possible to find stories from a swath of the population that truly attested to normalcy and happiness during that time. I have always wondered if a normal life in the Soviet Bloc were even possible. Unfortunately, this book did not deliver on such a hope, though at times it tried. Pages upon pages of statistics from different areas of life and a decidedly negative overall picture of the regime were what I came away with. I will admit there were small, scattered sections comprised of first-hand accounts written by the people who were there, that really gave me what I was wanting. And I will give kudos to the author for bringing up something I had never thought of before (to my chagrin). I had always thought of the Soviet Bloc as a monolith, as its own entity that began in 1944 and ended in 1989. I never gave a thought to how the German people had JUST come out from under Nazi rule and were deep affected by the resulting moral and cultural devastation that was its legacy. Those who were complicit, those who were tortured....everyone had to be a complete wreck. The East German people went straight from the vile Nazi ideology right into another vile and oppressive ideology of a different type, and this time not at all by choice. It's a miracle we enjoy a strong and united Germany today. Thanks to the East Germans' strength and resiliency, they were somehow able to weather the storm for decades, live their lives (many of which may have actually been "normal"?), and come out the other side intact.
December 2, 2023
Three stars sounds a bit underwhelming but overall this is a pretty decent account of the GDR, free of the usual propagandist, triumphalist western narrative of life in East Germany.
The title is really a bit misleading "from Hitler to Honecker" because there is very little about the period from 1945 to 1949 when the GDR was formalised and this is probably a very crucial and historically interestding time. Maybe Mary Fulbrook had already written about that and didn't want to repeat it but a short summary would have been useful. Aside from her rather difficult writing style - frequent use of a dash to introduce a related yet different topic which goes on for quite a while and then you forget what the original sentence was about and have to read from the start again - it does give an alternative account of life behind the iron curtain!
As someone who grew up with western propaganda about thousands of Soviet tanks being poised to invade any minute, backed up by millions of fanatical reds, it's good to read that the people of East Germany were pretty much like us; fed as many lies and bull and facing many of the same daily problems.
Definitely a more "academic" read than a lot of the history books these days but still worth a go as it doesn't concentrate on the Stasi and gives us a different perspective from the usual grey, drab image served up by the west.
The title is really a bit misleading "from Hitler to Honecker" because there is very little about the period from 1945 to 1949 when the GDR was formalised and this is probably a very crucial and historically interestding time. Maybe Mary Fulbrook had already written about that and didn't want to repeat it but a short summary would have been useful. Aside from her rather difficult writing style - frequent use of a dash to introduce a related yet different topic which goes on for quite a while and then you forget what the original sentence was about and have to read from the start again - it does give an alternative account of life behind the iron curtain!
As someone who grew up with western propaganda about thousands of Soviet tanks being poised to invade any minute, backed up by millions of fanatical reds, it's good to read that the people of East Germany were pretty much like us; fed as many lies and bull and facing many of the same daily problems.
Definitely a more "academic" read than a lot of the history books these days but still worth a go as it doesn't concentrate on the Stasi and gives us a different perspective from the usual grey, drab image served up by the west.
May 16, 2019
Some interesting work here about the gray areas of life under the GDR, how it both facilitated social society while also being run as a paranoid and increasingly decrepit garrison state. Could have used a historical narrative structure to put all the different topic chapters in context though.
Anyway, here is something Honecker probably rocked out to in his Trabant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Dyp...
Anyway, here is something Honecker probably rocked out to in his Trabant:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10Dyp...
March 17, 2022
I can’t recommend this to anyone, it expects you to be way to widely read in existing East German history to remotely work.
April 6, 2024
There's a quote in here about domesticating blue jeans and idk why but it was so funny to me
February 2, 2024
It is full of facts of statistics that can give a good view of what life in East Germany was like, it also contains a lot of anecdotes and quotes. Overall a good source but it can get tedious to read as it's very academic with how it is written. Also, there are some passages where the author just trashes American and British healthcare shortcomings, and it is a funny change of pace.
March 4, 2022
Departing from the “Stasicentric” (as Paul Betts has called it) totalitarian model of GDR scholarship, this revisionist social history of East Germany doesn’t excuse the regime’s many calamitous failures, but neither does it engage in pointless sermonizing. Rather, it attempts to explore the paradox that while East German society was undoubtedly repressive in the extreme (the GDR’s citizens were quite literally caged, subject to surveillance and numerous intrusions on their personal liberty), many former citizens recall living “perfectly ordinary lives” there, a sentiment that can’t be chalked up to simple Ostalgie or to a kind of false consciousness in reverse. Combing through archival evidence and interview transcripts, Fulbrook looks at women’s rights, labor, childcare, recreation and leisure, and other facets of life in East Germany and concludes that the GDR was not a monolithic tyranny in which citizens cowered, silent and passive, under despotic rule, but an evolving, changing, albeit extraordinarily repressive society in which ordinary people shaped the culture around them as much as they were shaped by it.
What Fulbrook makes clear is that it was Honecker’s decision to attempt the beat the West on its own terms through a “consumer socialist” model that ultimately led to East Germany’s demise. Plausible perhaps in the early 1970s, when East Germany might be said to have been at its zenith, the regime’s aspiration to provide material plenty for its people in any way comparable to that enjoyed in the West became less and less viable in the 1980s, when shortages of food and other basic supplies, together with increasing repression by state security services and ongoing environmental collapse, sounded the death knell for the GDR.
What Fulbrook makes clear is that it was Honecker’s decision to attempt the beat the West on its own terms through a “consumer socialist” model that ultimately led to East Germany’s demise. Plausible perhaps in the early 1970s, when East Germany might be said to have been at its zenith, the regime’s aspiration to provide material plenty for its people in any way comparable to that enjoyed in the West became less and less viable in the 1980s, when shortages of food and other basic supplies, together with increasing repression by state security services and ongoing environmental collapse, sounded the death knell for the GDR.
August 10, 2015
By far the most intriguing aspect of this work for me was the vast amount of "public attitudes" data the DDR amassed both via official surveys and the semi-freedom that DDR citizens had to write to various levels of government requesting/suggesting aid to social ills (as memorably illustrated in "Goodbye Lenin!" with the mother's letter writing on behalf of residents of her tower block) which did, to an extent, effect the focus of DDR-Government programmes, creating a kind of almost-there 'democratic' response system to social ills (that didn't transgress the official desires).
Overall, the impression this book gave me, if one holds one's nose as to the well-documented crimes of the regime, is that the DDR's communist leadership, while trying to maintain their own control, did seem to have a genuine desire to look after their people, but the "lag" effect of so unevolving a system as a one party gerontocracy meant that at any one time, the state was busily dealing with "the last generation's" problems, and so unable to prevent disquiet from growing in the current.
Overall, the impression this book gave me, if one holds one's nose as to the well-documented crimes of the regime, is that the DDR's communist leadership, while trying to maintain their own control, did seem to have a genuine desire to look after their people, but the "lag" effect of so unevolving a system as a one party gerontocracy meant that at any one time, the state was busily dealing with "the last generation's" problems, and so unable to prevent disquiet from growing in the current.
October 20, 2016
An interesting book, in that it focuses not only on the coercion that existed in the GDR but also on the fact that people were able to lead "perfectly ordinary lives." Ordinary within the context of the Wall, and the Stasi, that is. Fulbrook calls it a participatory dictatorship. As long as you stayed away from certain taboo topics (freedom to travel to the West, freedom of expression), you were fine.
I would have rated this book higher, but for some reason the writing acted like a sleeping pill on me and I had to struggle to make it through to the end. Still, I think it recognizes the complexities of the GDR and is an even-handed view of what life was actually like for the majority of the people who lived there.
I would have rated this book higher, but for some reason the writing acted like a sleeping pill on me and I had to struggle to make it through to the end. Still, I think it recognizes the complexities of the GDR and is an even-handed view of what life was actually like for the majority of the people who lived there.
September 30, 2012
Interesting, enjoyable social history for the DDR (GDR).
Fulbrook does an admirable job analyzing life in East Germany without falling into apologia or the totalitarian thesis.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the 40 year East German state.
Fulbrook does an admirable job analyzing life in East Germany without falling into apologia or the totalitarian thesis.
Highly recommended for anyone interested in the 40 year East German state.
May 31, 2014
This is a VERY detailed book about the DDR. I found it interesting to read but it is not for the casual reader. One must be very interested in the topic. I filled in many gaps to my research.
March 27, 2015
Really enjoyed reading this book. I have always been interested in DDR/East Germany and this book gave great insight into what live was actually like there.
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