Comrades in Arms: Military Masculinities in East German Culture by Tom Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Comrades in Arms: Military Masculinities in East German Culture by Tom Smith Kyle Frackman Comrades in Arms: Military Masculinities in East German Culture. By Tom Smith. New York: Berghahn, 2020. Pp. x + 269. Cloth $135.00. ISBN 978-1789205558. Open Access https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/SmithComrades. Although the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has been an object of study for decades, the past ten to fifteen years have seen some of the most innovative and revealing research on the GDR to date. The interdisciplinary work comes from scholars working in cultural, literary, and film studies, history, art history, musicology, and beyond. Benefitting from increased access to archival materials and the wealth of other research studying the GDR's legacy since 1989/1990, scholars have applied new methods to a wide range of topics that provide a fuller, more multifaceted retrospective view of the GDR. Tom Smith analyzes depictions of East German military masculinity in literature and film after the beginning of conscription in 1962. Taking a cue from Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), Smith argues that these depictions of gender are not merely echoes of gender; rather, they are situated within the process of negotiating gender itself, "as an attempt to find a path for ourselves among competing gender ideals and, simultaneously, as a means of rearticulating and recasting those ideals" (4). Thus, Smith makes clear the importance of examining cultural and social renderings of gender, as these articulations portray but also create versions of what they illustrate; evoking Judith Butler's performativity and borrowing from Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique (2015), cultural products provide "frameworks" for their own deciphering (5). Smith's theoretical intervention is indebted to R.W. Connell's foundational work on "gender order" and "hegemonic masculinity" (Gender and Power, 1987; Masculinities, 1995) and also extends to Butler's Gender Trouble (1990). Much of the book's analysis focuses on the East German National People's Army (Nationale Volksarmee, NVA) and representations of the NVA and soldierly masculinities in cultural products of and about the GDR, concentrating especially on "masculinities that come into conflict with the NVA's military ideals" (24). Comrades in Arms adds to a modest body of anglophone scholarship on the NVA. This book explores conflicted emotional responses to gender and sexual expectations, showing how those struggles can have profound effects on both individuals and institutions. Understandings of masculinity affect other socially determined discourses, rendering some inequities and the workings of society more visible (3). Some of the book's analyses demonstrate that depictions of the NVA and East German military masculinities continue to have relevance long after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the GDR. More than thirty years later, "the GDR clearly speaks to our contemporary concerns, but how and why?" (3). Representations of masculinity are ubiquitous, from images of the well-groomed athletic body [End Page 425] to the "spornosexual," the body type coined by Mark Simpson in the Daily Telegraph ("The Metrosexual is Dead …," 2014) to describe the amalgamation of sports and pornographic ideals (2). Such depictions doubtless have influence on their consumers across the gender spectrum; this makes the necessity for scrutiny of such portrayals obvious. In his introduction, Smith examines the recent television series Deutschland 83 (2015) and Deutschland 86 (2018) and uses them as examples for and steppingstones toward his overall argument about portrayals of GDR military masculinities. Previous scholarship on masculinity and men's gender in the GDR has often maintained that these constructs remained mostly unchanged or that there was little room for negotiation of men's interpretations and enactment of these gender roles. However, Smith shows that, contrary to the belief that GDR masculinity was uniform or homogeneous, discourses of masculinity were indeed plural and continually renegotiating themselves, especially in the military context. Chapter 1, for example, explores depictions of masculinity and the "socialist soldier personality" in works such as novels by Wolfgang Held (1930–2014) and Walter Flegel (1934–2012) and manuals for NVA conscripts. The novels, Smith argues, deliver their portrayals of military masculinity by honoring the multiplicity of personalities that come together in the conscripted military force—in other...