East German Government Research Articles

Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic by Sean Eedy

Reviewed by: Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic by Sean Eedy Anna Horakova Four-Color Communism: Comic Books and Contested Power in the German Democratic Republic. By Sean Eedy. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2021. Pp. 218. Hardcover $135.00. ISBN 978-1800730007. Sean Eedy's monograph fills a gap in GDR, comics, media, and education studies by charting the ways in which the East German government sought to summon the popular appeal and educational powers of comics to instigate enthusiasm for socialism and the development of the socialist personality among the GDR's youths. Eedy's study focuses on the paradoxical efforts by the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) as the most representative state-mediating institution of the GDR's youths, to channel the semantically polyvalent and, as he suggests, potentially uncontrollable hybrid medium of the comics. Seeking to portray the interplay between dissent and state power in the culture of the GDR in nuanced and historically contingent ways, Four-Color [End Page 174] Communism constitutes an invaluable contribution to recent scholarship dedicated to dissident or marginalized cultures in the GDR, alongside Seth Howes's Moving Images on the Margins (2019), Sara Blaylock's Parallel Public (2022), and Sarah E. James's Paper Revolutions (2022). However, instead of documenting the critique of state power from within the ranks of East German avant-garde artists and filmmakers, Eedy's study locates this critique within its mass-produced but still relatively marginalized comic book print culture. In so doing, Eedy's monograph follows in the footsteps of Scott McCloud's classic study Understanding Comics (1993), as it maintains a dual focus on close reading and historical context, teasing out the formal qualities of GDR comics as well as their uneasy relation to state power and oblique practice of social and institutional critique. Eedy's study traces the origins of East German comic book production to larger postwar anxieties about the medium's rootedness in perceived "US cultural imperialism and the destruction of national and cultural identities" (21) that were likewise shared by, for instance, West Germany, France, and the UK. The first two chapters, "Comics and the Crisis of Kultur in the SED State" and "State Power and the East German Zeitgeist," offer a meticulously researched and historically grounded account of how the GDR's policies desired to create alternatives to American (and later West German) productions in order to encourage East German child-readers to perpetuate the East German socialist state. The chapters follow the evolution of the country's two major comics, Mosaik von Hannes Hegen and Atze (and to a lesser extent, Frösi), from their inception in the mid-1950s as a bulwark against the perceived capitalist-imperialist influence of Western comics that were feared to be deleterious to the fledgling socialist state, all the way to the surprisingly positive impact of the Berlin Wall's construction on the quality of East German comics that were now allowed to become "more than derivative clones of West German and American publications" (8). That even at their qualitative peak, however, East German comic books did not evolve in the supposed vacuum of the "walled-in state" is correctly maintained by Eedy, who demonstrates the formal influence on these comic books exerted by both their German precursors (such as nineteenth-century and Weimar-era comics and children's literature) and Disney studios productions. In terms of the latter, Eedy's study takes seriously the official demand to "create a socialist alternative to Mickey Mouse," demonstrating Disney's influence especially on Mosaik's creator and drafts-man Hannes Hegen, and discussing how Mosaik's subsequent popularity with East German children is attributable to the transnational influences it had been intended to countermand (a topic that is discussed in depth in chapter five, "Western Influence, Popular Taste, and the Limitations of the FDJ's Publishing Regime"). Crucial to Eedy's study is a theoretical model of the GDR society as Nischengesellschaft (first defined by Günter Gaus), where the population is thought of as having retreated into the private, domestic sphere to escape from the thorough politicization [End Page 175] of East German society by the...

Analysis of the economic problems after the unification of Germany

The fall of the Berlin Wall, one of the eight major political upheavals in Eastern Europe in 1989, fueled popular enthusiasm for reunification, directly undermined the East German government's plans for control and reform, and put the German question back on the international political agenda. The different economic paths and outcomes between the GDR and the Federal Republic of Germany led to different social outcomes, resulting in different social structures and social problems. In the end, the economic and social model of federal Germany came to the fore, but the after-effects of reunification and the new national environment forced Germany to embark on a different economic path after reunification. Such new changes in the economic sphere constantly triggered corresponding changes in the structure of German society. How to view these changes is a new problem facing contemporary German studies.

Agents of dissent: African student organizations in the German Democratic Republic

AbstractAfrican students in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) often belonged to national student clubs (NHG) that were arranged for them by the East German government. Many were also members of an umbrella organization for all African students and workers in the GDR (UASA). While the GDR authorities thought that the NHG and UASA would adopt political positions that reflected those of the GDR, this article demonstrates that the students instead used them to criticize both their own governments and their host country. It shows that the students often held positions contrary to the GDR's, and were not shy about expressing them. Although they were usually unable to organize as openly as students in the West, African students in the GDR held meetings and wrote letters to protest about a variety of issues, including Sékou Touré’s repression of a teachers’ strike in Guinea, the Biafran crisis in Nigeria and ethnic separatism in Kenya. They also took the GDR to task for the racist behaviour of East German citizens. The GDR's Socialist Unity Party claimed that the country was anti-racist and anti-imperialist, and that all vestiges of Nazism had been expunged; the students, however, were able to point out multiple racist incidents, and through the UASA demanded that the GDR address its racism problem.

Public Diplomacy and Personal Encounter: the Triangular Relations between East Germany, Scandinavia and the Soviet Union at the Baltic Sea Week (1958—1975)

The Baltic Sea Week in the German Democratic Republic was a tool of public diplomacy that principally sought to target Scandinavian tourists and opinion leaders. Backed by Soviet delegations, the East German government promoted its international recognition. While the response of the Nordic guests to the political program of the festival varied from affirmation to challenging (inter alia) the sincerity of the peace message, many of them brought along a genuine interest in socialist societies and what they were building. Moreover, they took the omnipresent friendship rhetoric literally and were eager for a genuine interpersonal encounter across the barrier of the “Iron Curtain”. Although the GDR finally gained international recognition by other means, the Baltic Sea Week appears to have contributed to a transnational Baltic Sea identity among segments of the civil society along its coasts.

Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960 by Ela Gezen

Reviewed by: Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960 by Ela Gezen Britta Kallin Ela Gezen. Brecht, Turkish Theater, and Turkish-German Literature: Reception, Adaptation, and Innovation after 1960. Camden House, 2018. 159 pp. Cloth, $85.00. This cohesive, well-written, and overdue analysis examines the interconnections and intersections of Brecht's political aesthetics, Turkish theater, and Turkish-German literature. Ela Gezen's methodological approach builds on intersectional scholarship in German studies such as Leslie Adelson's "Turkish turn" in German literature, B. Venkat Mani's "cos-mopolitical claims," and Fatima El-Tayeb's investigation into Germany's racist history that created "non-Germans/ Undeutsche" The first chapter covers the period after the military coup in Turkey in 1960 and explores how Turkish intellectuals were drawn to Brecht's approach to use theater as a political tool that supports working-class efforts to limit capitalist exploitation. The first translation of Brecht's works into Turkish was published in 1956. In 1964 the first theater department was established at a Turkish university. In the same year, the staging of Brecht's play The Good Person of Szechwan in a theater in Istanbul, Dram Tiyatro, was interrupted by protests. This was called the "Brecht Incident" and led to an investigation into the play's communist message. During that time Turkish theater practitioners started referring to plays as "ex-periments" and troupes as "ensembles" to underline the experimental aspects of theater. Brecht's epic theater and Verfremdung became part of many Turkish plays, such as Haldun Taner's The Ballad of Ali of Keshan. Taner uses culture as a weapon to counteract suppressive governmental strategies. In the 1960s, international theater festivals such as the one in Erlangen, Germany, allowed Turkish student groups to perform, interact, and exchange ideas about Brecht's aesthetics. This exchange was mediated through new Brecht translations and synopses of plays in Turkish, English, and German that were available at the festivals. In the second chapter, Gezen explores the writings and adaptations [End Page 141] of Brecht's works by Aras Ören, who has made use of Brecht's dialectical approach to support Turkish guest workers in Germany by providing them agency and opening up spaces for a political education for Turks and Germans who provide manual labor. Ören made a critical intervention into the reception of Brecht's oeuvre by changing some aspects to fit the needs of the new situation of Turkish workers in Germany. Similarly, other artists such as Wolf Biermann changed the official Brecht reception accepted by the East German government to an approach that was critical of the dictatorial aspects of that government. In the third and last chapter, Gezen examines Brecht's influence on some of Emine Sevgi Özdamar's novels. Özdamar came to Germany to work at the Volksbühne as a theater practitioner. She lived in West Berlin, worked in East Berlin, and crossed the German-German border on a daily basis. (Because of her Turkish passport, she had no problem crossing the border.) Özdamar compares Brecht's literary reaction to fascism with her own writings against suppressive political developments in Turkey in the 1960s and 1970s. Gezen's book also includes a number of rare photos of Ören and Özdamar as actors in Brecht's plays. Gezen makes a particularly interesting connection between Brecht's montage strategies of including music and visuals and Özdamar's novels. Özdamar makes use of montage when the narrator changes the temporality of the plot and superimposes images from her past in Istanbul onto her life in East and West Berlin. The often-used Brechtian theatrical technique of the revolving stage is mirrored in Özdamar's text when thought processes go in circles rather than following a linear path. Even though Gezen does not emphasize her feminist perspective, she draws on feminist scholarship such as Claudia Breger's work on montage, Monika Shafi's view of the female narrator, Yasemin Yildiz's argument about "translational exchange," and Sonja Klocke's research on the revolving stage. Gezen correctly points to connections between her research and that of Turkish-German scholarship on post-Wall literature, in particular the post-migrant theater of...

Eleven Nigerian Students in Cold War East Germany: Visions of Science, Modernity, and Decolonization

This article follows the story of the first African students in the German Democratic Republic, 11 Nigerians who arrived in 1951. Thousands of other African students followed them in the years leading up to the GDR's dissolution in 1990. My work is the first to chronicle the Nigerians' story, and how East Germans received and reacted to these Africans living among them. I focus on what each side hoped to gain from the exchange. East German government officials and university administrators were intent on using the Nigerian students to promote socialism as an alternative in a British colony quickly moving towards independence. Meanwhile, the students wanted scientific educations to help boost their economic standing and class status when they returned to Nigeria. Although Nigeria would never become aligned with the Soviet Bloc after decolonization, in the 1950s East Germans imagined that a socialist future was possible. Drawing on their country's sizable scientific expertise, officials argued that the GDR offered the ideal blend of technological and Marxist knowledge to attract exchange students like the Nigerians into the communist orbit.

Kennedy and Khrushchev

Despite his Cold War rhetoric, John F. Kennedy wanted to improve U.S.-Soviet relations after he took office in January 1961. In his inaugural address, Kennedy suggested that they “begin anew the quest for peace.” After only a month, Kennedy invited Nikita S. Khrushchev to an informal summit meeting, believing that the Soviet leader would appreciate this gesture of respect. Kennedy allowed wishful thinking to color his preparation for the summit, which was scheduled for June 3–4, 1961, in Vienna. Khrushchev was determined to obtain some form of recognition of the East German government and an end to West Berlin’s status as a Western enclave inside East Germany. He had given President Dwight D. Eisenhower a six-month ultimatum in November 1958, which he had withdrawn based on the promise of East-West negotiations. Kennedy should have anticipated that Khrushchev would bring up the difficult Berlin issue. Instead, Kennedy focused on achieving a test ban treaty and neutralizing Laos. These were secondary issues for Khrushchev whereas the survival of East Germany, its legitimacy, and closing off the flow of refugees through West Berlin were vital Soviet interests.

Trust Law in the Process of Reunifying East and West Germany<br>How a legal concept foreign to German law was the solution to merge a socialist and a capitalist economy between 1989 and the present

In the run-up to the Re-Unification of the East and West Germany in the 1990's the governments faced a problem, how do we integrate two political systems without causing a collapse of the economy and livelihoods. In order to counter the aforementioned the East-German government initiated the Treuhandanstalt, a piece of legislation that would govern over State Owned Enterprises in order to ready them for either investors to take over or for liquidation. In so doing the similarities between the Anglo-Saxon Trust and the Germanic Treuhand is of extreme interest, namely; in what manner did the German government design the Treuhandanstalt? Was it focussed on the Germanic tradition, of does it draw heavily from the common law trust? This paper focusses on the similarities and differences between the two concepts of ownership.

EAST GERMAN WRITERS, THE PUBLIC SPHERE, AND THE 1956 WRITERS' CONGRESS

ABSTRACTThis article examines the debates surrounding the 1956 Writers' Congress in East Germany as part of a complex and conflicted process of negotiation and contestation between writers, institutions, the East German government, and the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in a year that witnessed, initially, widespread efforts at liberalisation in much of the socialist world (the USSR, Poland, and Hungary, as well as the GDR) and, subsequently, a crackdown on dissent (especially in Hungary and the GDR). The article shows that there was considerable dispute in the run‐up to the congress, as well as during the congress itself and in its aftermath. The goal is to demonstrate that the 1956 Writers' Congress was more contested than is sometimes believed, and that, on a larger scale, East German literary life in the 1950s was less conformist than its critics have sometimes claimed.

Crosstown Traffic: Punk Rock, Space and the Porosity of the Berlin Wall in the 1980s

This paper argues that crosstown traffic in the East and West German punk subculture was an essential aspect of how popular music helped to challenge the political legitimacy of the East German government. West German punks frequently crossed the border to attend Eastern punk concerts, meet with friends and trade stories and experiences, connections that helped to foster a transnational community of alternative youths. These interactions denied official claims that punk was the result of capitalist decadence while undermining the East German government's efforts at cultivating a distinctive socialist identity. Nor were border crossings unidirectional, as Eastern punks made daring attempts to connect with their Western cousins. Writing for West German fanzines, appearing in the Western press and even managing to release Eastern recordings smuggled westwards, Eastern punks crossed the Iron Curtain and in so doing, worked to present an alternative vision of Eastern youth to the world and join the global punk scene.

Missing Paul Robeson in East Berlin: The Spirituals and the Empty Archive

Missing Paul Robeson in East BerlinThe Spirituals and the Empty Archive Todd Carmody (bio) You may well ask why Paul Robeson means so much to our people. Why do we have a Paul Robeson committee or a Paul Robeson Archive? Why do our school children learn about him and why is he an inspiration to us on our road to communism? I am not sure that I have the whole answer to these questions. But surely one reason is what we learned from the terrible experiences under fascism. —Frank Loeser, President of East Germany’s Paul Robeson Committee, Ansprache zur Veranstaltung “What Is America To Me,” August 2, 1973, 19:30, Kosmos Theater In 1965 East Berlin’s Academy of the Arts established the Paul Robeson Archive, honoring a prominent African American singer and activist who visited the German Democratic Republic on but three occasions. Robeson traveled to the GDR twice for state ceremonies in 1960 and again for medical convalescence a few years later. Each of these trips was brief, and during his final stay Robeson saw no visitors and made no public appearances. East Berlin may thus seem an unlikely site for the Robeson Archive; Robeson’s ties to the socialist German state were not especially strong and never as well established as his links to Britain or the Soviet Union, or even to other Soviet satellite states. But surprising though its location may be, the collection amassed by the East German Academy of the Arts is extensive. Among the academy’s holdings are a handful of private letters and candid photographs, audio outtakes and reading notes—ephemeral traces of an everyday life shaded from the glare of international celebrity. Personal artifacts like these, comparatively rare in the Robeson collection, lend the past a comforting sense of familiarity. They encourage us to imagine the archive qua cultural institution as a space in which distant histories are rendered immediate and where we might, taking the singular object in hand, better grasp the lived experiences of those who have [End Page 1] come before us. The romance of the archive is this promise of proximity. As Carolyn Steedman writes, “You think, in the delirium: it was their dust that I breathed in” (19). Most of the academy’s holdings, however, offer no such intimacy. The archive in Berlin might best be described, in fact, as a transatlantic paper trail. More bibliography than reliquary, it contains thousands of photocopied newspaper articles, scholarly essays, and popular books. These documents are generally about rather than by Robeson, and most duplicate materials readily accessible elsewhere. While a few of Robeson’s personal papers and belongings made their way to East Berlin, most of the materials were obtained by diligent archivists and administrators tasked with tracking down anything and everything written about Robeson.1 Founded not by bequest but by request, the Robeson Archive is thus awash in photocopies and offprints, desk copies and microfilms. The sheer volume of secondary materials gives pause. Why would the cultural arm of the East German government go to such lengths to commemorate an American dissident who was often invited but rarely visited? What purpose could an archive of photocopies serve? Internal memos suggest that preservation and pedagogy were guiding concerns from the start. Claiming in the mid-1950s that “reactionary imperialist forces” were endangering Robeson’s legacy, for example, the board charged with “Founding a Committee to Create a Paul Robeson Archive” declared the urgency of “collecting and evaluating the entire documentary record of his achievement” before it was too late (Konzeption).2 As Victor Grossman, director of the archive from 1965 to 1968, would later recount: “The Robesons had been targeted by cold war hatred and racism in the United States, and this archive was meant as a rejoinder” (2003, 176). Initial proposals also called for materials in the archive to be made widely available. Citizens of East Berlin and the environs could visit the collections in person; school field trips were an especially high priority. Genossen in other parts of the country were to be reached with traveling exhibitions and museum loans. In each of these instantiations, the archive would seek to “objectively document” the...

Sailing in the Shadow of the Vietnam War: The GDR Government and the "Vietnam Bonus" of the Early 1970s

In concert with the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact countries, the East German government vigorously opposed the Vietnam War in the 1960s and early 1970s and supported North Vietnam politically and economically. Concurrently, it sponsored ongoing solidarity campaigns in support of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) against the US-led coalition. As the American war effort deteriorated, the East German government reaped a significant boost both internationally and domestically as a result of these campaigns. This "Vietnam Bonus" helped to enhance the international stature of the GDR and increased the domestic stability of the SED government in the early 1970s.

The Spies Dilemma: A Cold War Case Study on East German Espionage

Set during the immediate years after the creation of the Berlin Wall, this case study focuses on the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS) and its secret police force known as the Stasi. Students, acting as West German spies working in East Berlin, recover secret documents used by the East German government in its efforts to maintain power, control, and stability over both its citizens and Western Europe. This activity uses higher-level Bloom's taxonomy as students evaluate, compare, and contrast documents for importance and relevance. Each document represents measures commonly used by Eastern Bloc nations throughout the Cold War, providing students with creative insight on how domestic and foreign espionage played a vital role in the struggle between Soviet communism and American democracy. This lesson is an example of how to use the case study approach.

The Historical Development of Helicopter Emergency Medical Services in the German Democratic Republic

The eastern part of Germany, formerly the German Democratic Republic (GDR), existed as a sovereign country from 1949 to 1990. During that time, the emergency medical service (EMS) was developed as a system of ground ambulances. It was called the SMH system (abbreviation of the German phrase Schnelle Medizinische Hilfe for “fast medical aid”).1,2 Although the use of helicopter EMS (HEMS) in the GDR had been demonstrated to improve prehospital care since the late 1950s, the East German government did not support systematic helicopter use for medical purposes until the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989.

Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World (review)

Reviewed by: Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World John Laprise (bio) Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi’s Spy-Tech World. By Kristie Macrakis. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xix+37. $28. Because technological innovation was a primary sphere of conflict between the superpowers during the cold war, the defense, consumer, and industrial technologies of the “other side” were highly prized commodities. Histories of cold war intelligence are uncommon due to their political sensitivity and the general shortage of information. Frequently, historians are compelled to approach their object of inquiry obliquely, as does James Bamford in his histories of the National Security Agency over the past quarter-century and William E. Burroughs in his 1988 history of U.S. photo reconnaissance satellites. Yet others such as preeminent cryptological historian David Kahn [End Page 723] have been able to examine information from the records of the losing side, as is the case in his Hitler’s Spies (1978). Now, Kristie Macrakis has successfully followed this latter pattern in examining East German intelligence by looking at the records of the Stasi, the intelligence arm of the East German government. She makes the case that the Stasi aggressively sought to acquire technology from the West and employ it to solve its own technological problems. Her extensive archival research reveals that the East’s economic and industrial weakness as well as the East German government’s own bureaucratic problems hampered its mission to acquire Western technology and undermined its ability to employ information and technology it did acquire. The first half of the book follows the actions of various Stasi officers as they desperately sought to insinuate themselves into West German industry, and the actions of the Stasi bureaucracy as it sought to manage its intelligence gathering and state security missions. They communicated their intelligence acquisitions back to East Germany through a variety of means, including special inks and microfilm. One of Macrakis’s most striking findings is the breadth of the technologies sought by the Stasi—chemical processes, computer specifications, and telecommunications technologies—and the relative ease with which it acquired sensitive information from the West. While the Stasi proved adept at the acquisition of Western technologies, however, it proved to be largely unable to make use of the acquired information. Microcircuitry design was of limited value because the East lacked the prowess to apply the information to its own industrial processes. The West also limited the East’s industrial effectiveness by means of trade restrictions on high-tech exports, restrictions it continued to tighten even as the cold war drew to a close. Some Stasi officers were left behind as the iron curtain fell, while others were persuaded to cooperate for romantic, economic, or ideological reasons. In the second half of the book, Macrakis provides a fascinating view inside the spy technology of the Stasi: concealed minicameras, invisible ink, radioactive tracking systems. In one chapter she explores the Stasi’s use of olfactory tracking and the creation of “smell jars” containing olfactory samples that allowed specially trained dogs to track down individuals from whom samples had been previously obtained, even after a period of years. Macrakis based her research on numerous interviews with former Stasi officers—some living as private citizens and others who were captured and imprisoned for espionage—and she also made effective use of archival materials. Taken together, these sources have allowed her to paint a rich picture of the Stasi’s quest for Western technologies and its struggles to make use of acquired information. Seduced by Secrets offers a revealing look at the difficult-to-observe history of a modern intelligence agency. It provides scholars with an insightful analysis and a new perspective for thinking [End Page 724] about the relationship of technology and the cold war by demonstrating the rich possibilities available to scholars exploring Eastern Bloc resources. John Laprise John Laprise will be a visiting associate professor at Northwestern University’s Doha, Qatar, campus. His dissertation examines the interrelationship between the adoption of information policy in the White House during the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. Copyright © 2009 The Society for the History of Technology

Innocents Abroad, or What I Didn’t Do on My Summer Vacation

I The following tale is both unique and ordinary: singular in its mind-boggling outlandishness and typical in its petty arbitrariness. It is the story of an apolitical East German woman’s victimization by the Stasi (secret police) spy network in the 1980s. What distinguishes this account from other cases of human rights violations in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) is the senseless, farcical pseudojustification advanced by official authorities for this woman’s persecution. Most examples of Stasi harassment targeted individuals who had abrogated some law or policy; however inhumane it was, however reprehensible it was, retaliatory government action in response to such cases was quite explicable. By contrast, the case of Marina involves no criminal act or seditious conduct. As she told me repeatedly, Marina was an apolitical person during her GDR youth, and she remains so today. Why did the GDR government pursue her? Was it for the sole purpose of obtaining a “ransom” from her wealthy West German uncle? The prospect is both squalid and chilling. As we shall see, Marina was arrested, prosecuted, and sentenced to 18 months in jail, apparently for the primary purpose of extorting money from her uncle. Of course, Marina was just one of tens of thousands of GDR citizens victimized by the East German government’s surveillance of its citizenry. She herself strives to relate her experience within a broader context of East German violations of human rights standards. Although I believe she downplays the injustice of her own victimization and the degree of her own personal sufferings, her modesty does furnish us with both a valuable reminder of the pervasive terror regime over which the Stasi presided and a renewed appreciation of her bizarre and tawdry ordeal. Both East Germans and foreign visitors to the GDR have devoted extensive attention in recent years to the Stasi terror regime’s domestic surveillance program. For example, Timothy Garten Ash’s The File (1998) recounts his Hum Rights Rev (2009) 10:605–614 DOI 10.1007/s12142-008-0088-9

On the Campaign Trail: State Planning and Eigen-Sinn in a Communist Campaign to Transform the East German Countryside

Throughout its history, the East German Communist Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, hereafter SED) organized campaigns to overcome the economic and political challenges facing it and to launch new program initiatives. Whether the aim was to increase factory safety, beautify a village, or raise standards of living, the party and the East German government used mass mobilizations to shape society, or at least certain social groups. Communist campaigns were directed attempts to improve diverse sectors of society by concentrating resources on arenas marked as economically deficient and socially resistant. By directing their efforts at revolutionizing narrowly defined critical areas, Communist leaders felt that they could enact overarching societal changes. Campaigns thus served as a means to initiate new policies and to correct problems that developed later. They were an essential part both of the state planning so prevalent in Communist systems, and of the often hectic short-term initiatives endemic in such economies. These mobilization efforts were so critical to the regime that one scholar has declared that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) possessed a campaign, rather than a command economy.

Social status and adult heights in the two Germanies

Background : Lack of evidence prevented hitherto the systematic comparison of physical stature across East and West Germany. Aim : The aim of this study is to compare heights by social status in the two Germanies with very different socio-economic and political systems prior to unification. Data : The German Federal Health Survey of 1998 (Public Use File BGS98), a cross-sectional random sample of 7124 adult males and females between ages 18 and 79 (birth cohorts of 1919-1980) is used in the analysis. Results : There are considerable and persistent differences by social status in both East and West Germany over time. The West German height advantage among men increases with social status, whereas among women the opposite is the case. East German men born after the Berlin Wall was built became significantly shorter, but East Germans regained equality with West Germans after unification. In contrast, East German females were markedly shorter than their West German counterparts throughout the period considered. Conclusions : The West German capitalistic welfare state provided a more propitious environment for the physical growth of the human organism than did the socialist East German government. There were substantial social differences in height in the officially classless German Democratic Republic.

Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (review)

Book Reviews 151 recalcitrant reality of enduring disagreement ... over how broadly the lessons of the country's recent horrors should be interpreted" (p. 164). Courts can also help a society work through their shame and subsequent repression ofhorrific events, "stimulating debate about the morality ofthe defendants' conduct and the nature of the institutions they controlled" (p. 175). He contrasts the different situations in postwar Germany and Japan in this regard. Osiel thinks that the "narrative frame" of trials, usually hidden in prosecutorial choices made behind the scenes, can be part of public awareness of the workings of legal memory. Courtrooms are places where one story must become "authoritative," but in the telling of this story, the trial can also "authorize" the telling of other related stories in different settings. In the past decade, there has emerged a tremendous amount of literature examining various battlefields ofmemory. Osiel has added an important and revealing work to this field. Edward T. Linenthal Department of Religious Studies University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys, by Jeffrey Herf. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. 527 pp. $29.95. Jeffrey Herr's new book explores that fascinating place where the politics of memory converged with the memory ofpolitics in postwar Germany. One ofhis main concerns, then, is to identify the political pressures which shaped official political memory, the strategies for remembering the Nazi past mapped out by political leaders. As elsewhere, Herr's research here is careful, and his argument is at once balanced and critically pointed. Rather than leveling a blanket indictment against postwar German political leaders for their reticence with regard to the Holocaust, Herf asks: "Given the Nazis' broad base ofsupport among the German populace, why did German politicians raise the issue of the Holocaust at all?" Now Herf condemns the politicians' taciturnity as well as their lenient treatment of Nazi criminals as an egregious breach of justice. However, his very formulation of the question bespeaks a refreshing openness in a debate that has, for obvious reasons, been largely shrill and tendentious. For in asking why (West) German politicians did remember, Herfpushes past the standard question of why didn't they remember more often and openly, a question which, again, has yielded many condemnations but few serious attempts to understand. Much of Herf's answer has to do with the interplay of international politics, especially the cold war, and the politics ofnational memory. For example, Herfshows very compellingly how West 152 SHOFAR Winter 1999 Vol. 17, No.2 Germany's alliance with the United States made some acknowledgment of the Holocaust (like restitution payments to Israel) a political exigency. And he also demonstrates how the geo-political situation actively discouraged East Germany from commemorating the Holocaust. East Germany's major "ally," the Soviet Union, had its own difficulties confronting the memory of the Second World War, particularly its alliance with the West, and pursued a policy offorgetting. Herf is not one to leave bold strokes umefined. After elucidating basic trends, he takes pains to point out complexities, countervailing tendencies, exceptions, and microfactors such as individual wills and personalities. Even as he argues that restitution payments to Israel were brought about largely by postwar geo-political matrices, Herf maintains that they were also made possible by Adenauer's deft negotiation of intransigent anti-Israel resistance from within his own party. Herf similarly contends that postwar politicians-especially East German political leaders-failed even to begin to take up the challenge ofremembering while emphasizing that there were important exceptions, like Kurt Schumacher in West Germany and Paul Merker in East Germany. Indeed, an entire chapter of the book is dedicated to Merker's story. Merker, a high ranking communist official who spent the war years among Jewish exiles in Mexico city, was jailed for demanding that the East German government pay restitution to Holocaust survivors living in East Germany. Herfunderlines the cases of Schumacher and Merker to show that notwithstanding the pull of geopolitical forces, politicians still had enough freedom to pursue remembrance if they believed it was important. (Contingency is the historiographic principle that governs Herf's study. As he puts it, "History is the realm of choice...

Hanns Eisler and “Interventive Thought”

Although Hanns Eisler's work is increasingly studied and appreciated, his relation to the East German government has been misunderstood. The misunderstanding arises in part from genuine complications in the political and cultural circumstances surrounding Eisler's output; complications which this essay describes in some detail. But it also arises from the widely-held notion that communism and fascism are to equal degrees “totalitarian,” and thus have the same stifling effect upon art. This essay argues against that position. Eisler's successes in the last phase of his life are described, and his position as a notable composer and great humanitarian is asserted.