Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

Paul Betts has written a study of everyday life in the GDR. I am not a historian of the GDR. My expertise is confined to the history of German everyday life from 1700 to 1914. Yet Betts’s book has ramifications on the ways the history of everyday life in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany can be written. This review has been written mainly in view of those wider ramifications. Betts contests the traditional division of the history of the GDR into two separate eras of Ulbricht (1950–1971) and Hoenecker (1971–1989) and points out how the creation of the ‘niche society’ of privacy, characteristic of the GDR in the 1970s and 1980s, can be traced back to the 1950s. His main argument is that ‘the GDR’s real age of social reconstruction’ and also the reconstruction of its patterns of everyday life and privacy, happened during the 1960s (p. 12). More importantly, Betts argues that the GDR did possess its private and public spheres in a peculiar dialectics in which ‘the socialist state paradoxically acted as both the foe and guardian of the private sphere’ (pp. 14–15). Here are also the beginnings of civil society shaped through the assertions of private citizens (p. 170).