Collective Life and Social Change in The GDR

Abstract

Research into East Germany's 1989 collapse often uses models developed for Western social movements which emphasize social movement organizations and activists. This approach may neglect important aspects of the social organization of everyday life in repressive contexts and how these affect social movement processes. Unlike the West, East Germany built social life around state-sponsored groups, called collectives, and these had a marked effect on the development of the opposition. Research presented here, based on interviews and archival documents, shows how collective discussions, although never oppositional in the fullest sense, facilitated grievance construction and an awareness of common political exclusion. Over the course of time, especially after Gorbachev's reforms, these practices laid the groundwork for mobilization in the relative absence of an opposition movement. Without understanding the concealed social movement processes operating within collective groups, the state's sudden, and peaceful, collapse is not easily explained.