Resistance and Daily Life in East Germany: District Gransee as ‘Place’

Abstract

Abstract This article employs the ‘second chapter’ of the history of daily life (Alltagsgeschichte) to examine grass-roots resistance to the communist system in the former East German district of Gransee. It has two primary goals. First, it posits a bridge between the two solitudes of ‘resistance’ history and ‘daily life’ history. Typically, historians of daily life have not examined resistance in East Germany, nor have historians of resistance used the methodology of the history of everyday life to investigate their subject. ‘Dictatorship’ and ‘daily life’ are not, however, mutually exclusive terms. Second, the article centres ‘place’ as an organizational concept for both resistance and daily life. What was idiosyncratic to a locality informed the limits and potential of resistance. Place also becomes a useful concept for distinguishing between resistance and opposition. Colonizing a public space in order to transmit one’s oppositional views immediately conveys an act into the resistance realm. This article therefore explores the key socio-economic factors in District Gransee from which resistance could arise and the many ways that East Germans used the spaces of everyday life, such as schools, train stations and pubs, to communicate their opposition to the East German system.