Comparative International History of Dock Labour, c. 1790–1970

Abstract

some presenters had described it, was really only a relative strength. High lighting the freedom of action or lack thereof may reveal the inner dynam ics of a dictorial regime, he argued, but this emphasis must be placed in direct relation to the distinct tendency toward intellectual and social immo bility. Historians should now turn to the techniques of oral history and the history of mentalit?s to uncover patterns of behavior, adjustment by de fense, unwilling loyalty, resignation, improvisation, and Dacha-culture. Despite substantive, methodical, and theoretical differences, virtually all conference participants agreed that the GDR should be understood as a society with its own structure and history of the social. This perspective gains in importance in comparison to standard political histories of the period, which tend to depict GDR society as primarily an orchestration on behalf of the party. These interpretations are not value-neutral: There is a hotly contested political dimension to the debate over the history of the GDR. Understanding the GDR as its own independent society with its own history rejects efforts to record it as a chapter of dictatorship in a national history of the Federal Republic and thus resists conservative ef forts to recreate a German national history detached from the context of European integration. The techniques of social history may well give social-democratically oriented historians the weapons they need to recon quer terrain in the field of GDR research?now that, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, their colleagues in the social sciences who set the tone in the 1970s and 1980s with their convergence theories have been denounced as academic helpers for SFD-Ostpolitik or as secret SED collaborators.