Perestroika or Umgestaltung?East Germany and the Gorbachev revolution

Abstract

The East German response to the Soviet reform process introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev has been ambiguous. On the one hand, the Honecker regime has declared that Soviet perestroika, glasnost and demokratizatsiya are not relevant to the specific national circumstances of the GDR, and particularly iconoclastic Soviet journals and films have been banned from the GDR. On the other, the SED has wholeheartedly endorsed the ‘new political thinking’ of the CPSU, and has actively supported recent Soviet security and foreign policy initiatives. However, in the 1990s, it is unlikely that the GDR will be able to resist deep‐seated pressures for structural economic and political change, although the nature of such change will undoubtedly reflect the specifically German character of the GDR state.