East German State Research Articles

Film Clubs and the Politics of Film Culture in Spain and the GDR around 1960

This study provides a contrastive analysis of the film cultures in Francoist Spain and the German Democratic Republic in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In the context of this period of classic cinephilia, the article focuses on the institutional position of film clubs and on their function as ‘places of negotiation’ in which different forces and interests collided: more or less independent film activists acted within, against, or parallel to state organizations trying to implement certain cultural activities and discourses. The arguments are based on broad archival material from Spain and Germany (Archivo General de la Administración, Bundesarchiv Berlin etc.) and, specifically, on the analysis of two of these institutions in Barcelona and Leipzig. The initial hypothesis holds that in their reactions to these institutions, the Spanish and East German states present two different conceptions of state cultural policies (authoritarian and totalitarian). At the same time, the activities of the clubs (screenings, discussions, edition of magazines) can also be read as part of a broader attempt to redefine the film-cultural field along three axes (time, place and status), connecting them to other European film cultures of the time and enabling us to widen and differentiate the analysis of classical cinephilia within a broader international context.

Manipulating Fiscal Forecasts: Evidence from the German States

We examine whether German state governments manipulated fiscal forecasts before elections. Our data set includes three fiscal measures over the period 1980-2014. The results do not show that electoral motives influenced fiscal forecasts in West German states. By contrast, East German state governments underestimated spending in preelection years (compared to other years) by about 0.20 percent of GDP, tax revenues by about 0.36 percent of GDP, and net lending by 0.30 percent of GDP. Predicting low levels of spending and tax revenues, East German state governments thus underestimated the size of government in preelection years.

The People’s Game: Football, State, and Society in East Germany by Alan McDougall

Reviewed by: The People’s Game: Football, State, and Society in East Germany by Alan McDougall László Kürti (bio) Alan McDougall. The People’s Game: Football, State, and Society in East Germany. 362pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ISBN 9781107052031. “Everyone is an expert about football,” popular parlance has it in Eastern Europe. Alan McDougall has produced an excellent monograph on a little known aspect of socialist sport, football (or soccer as it is known in much of the English-speaking world) in what was once called the GDR (or DDR), German Democratic Republic, a communist state that existed in 1949–90. McDougall is not unknown in the discipline of East German history; he produced a milestone book in 2004 on the Free German Youth Movement (FDJ). This time, however, he offers a wonderful antidote to general theories about sport reflecting social issues. The People’s Game does make it clear that football of the East German variety was not simply a favorite pastime for diehard fans and club managers but relates to larger issues of politics, identity, and economy. Methodologically the book rests on a solid foundation: McDougall researched regional archives, utilized printed primary sources, and in order to obtain data about personal experiences he conducted interviews with fans. The book is organized thematically and chronologically, starting with the early GDR years of 1945–49 (chapter 2), and ending with the years of its demise between 1989 and 1991. The focal aspect of McDougall’s study is organized into three parts. In Part I, the focus is on football as performance sport, as experienced by its central characters, the players, national teams, football clubs, and the role of the secret police, the Stasi. This latter point is especially fascinating as we learn how coaches, star players, and referees worked for the Stasi as informers. In Part II, McDougall switches to football as a spectator sport, tackling spectatorship in the Ulbricht era, the fan culture during the subsequent Honecker years, and the rise of hooliganism during the same period. We learn much about the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) and its stance on football as well as spectators. Here, chapter 9 is especially revealing of the ways in which the East German state failed to curb football unrest, a failure that paralleled similar global hooliganism. The subsequent chapter presents an even more interesting picture about football and corruption in the GDR. More than any other chapters, chapters 9 and 10 offer the most valuable data about the connection of politics and public sentiments about football and the rejection of the Honecker regime. Part III concentrates on football as a mass participatory activity as we learn a great deal about everyday life experiences of players and fans alike. Chapters detail topics such as women’s football, matches between East and West German amateur teams, and the nature of mass sport and the failing facilities and [End Page 161] infrastructural problems. McDougall is correct in emphasizing that football in East Germany was unique in the Eastern bloc, as it “tended to be more subversive than state-affirming” by “keeping alive expressions of Heimat, Resistenz, and individualism that stubbornly resisted the SED’s dictatorial goals” (336). As a final note: it is safe to say, as McDougall duly asserts in his concluding chapter, that football clubs from the former East Germany will exist outside the German premier league system and will remain second-class for many years to come. The two most successful ones, Dynamo Dresden and F. C. Hansa Rostock, have been relegated to the second and third divisions in the Bundesliga. Despite this status, Germans, both East and West, enjoy their game: after the English football league championship, the 2. Bundesliga is the second-most-watched secondary football league in the world. I congratulate McDougall for providing a succinct and heretofore unknown English-language analysis about the history of this fascinating world. His book can be highly recommended both to specialists of East Germany and its policies toward sport and to those concerned with politics and sport in general. Graduate students will, no doubt, find many challenging and exciting questions in McDougall’s book to utilize in their...

Manipulating Fiscal Forecasts: Evidence from the German States

We examine whether German state governments manipulated fiscal forecasts before elections. Our data set includes three fiscal measures over the period 1980-2014. The results do not show that electoral motives influenced fiscal forecasts in West German states. By contrast, East German state governments underestimated spending in pre-election years (compared to other years) by about 0.20 percent of GDP, tax revenues by about 0.36 percent of GDP, and net lending by 0.30 percent of GDP. Predicting low levels of spending and tax revenues, East German state governments thus underestimated the size of government in pre-election years.

Revolutionary Constitutional Lawmaking in Germany—Rediscovering the German 1989 Revolution

AbstractToday, the 1989 Revolution in East Germany is recognized and celebrated as the event that abolished the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and brought about German unification. What is mostly overlooked, however, is that these are not the Revolution's only and, from the perspective of constitutional law, not even its most important achievements. More important with respect to understanding constitutional lawmaking in Germany is that the 1989 Revolution did not lead to an unconditional adoption of West German constitutional law in the new East German states. Instead, the Revolution had its own constitutional agenda, which went beyond the West German Basic Law and was transferred to unified Germany where it then needed to be integrated into the existing West German constitutional order. The Article reinterprets the 1989 Revolution and shows how a revolutionary popular movement in the GDR developed its own constitutional agenda, which first found legal manifestation in GDR legislation, and then was transferred to unified Germany through the Unification Treaty and the new state constitutions.

ThePreußenrenaissanceRevisited: German–German Entanglements, the Media and the Politics of History in the late German Democratic Republic

The ‘Renaissance of Prussianism’ ( Preusenrenaissance ), which began in the late 1970s and continued throughout the 1980s in the German Democratic Republic, has received considerable scholarly attention. Discussions have focused on the involvement of academic historians in the revision of the official conception of history of the socialist East German state. This article offers new perspectives on hitherto neglected aspects of the Preusenrenaissance . It explores the German–German entanglements of this phenomenon by linking it with almost simultaneous events in West Germany. By the mid-1980s each German state had embraced Prussia as a part of its redefined collective identity and had entered into a competition for representing its historical heritage. Yet, this piece also looks at the ways in which the new conception of German national history was transmitted and popularized in the GDR media. From 1978, state television promoted a positive view of Prussian history with opulent productions such as Sachsens Glanz and Preusens Gloria . An analysis of viewers’ letters offers some insight into the popular perception of the new course. Against this backdrop, this article also highlights that the ideological volte-face regarding Prussia’s history was not unanimously supported within the rank and file of the ruling Socialist Unity Party. In fact, the Preusenrenaissance in the late GDR proved to be a chequered and often contradictory process, shaped by the many self-willed actors. The article concludes with a brief consideration of the interplay between these various actors involved in the Preusenrenaissance and their specific motivations.

Inscription and rebellion: illness and the symptomatic body in East German literature

Klocke, Sonja E. Inscription and Rebellion: Illness and the Symptomatic Body in East German literature. rochester, Ny: Camden House, 2015. 248 pp. $80.00 (hardcover).Inscription and Rebellion represents a unique and provocative intervention in GDr literary studies. Noting a conspicuous proliferation of symptomatic bodies and GDr-specific medical discourses in east German literature written before and 1989 (11), klocke launches an interdisciplinary investigation in an attempt to diagnose the phenomenon, interweaving detailed close readings of prose literature with discussion of east German healthcare and medical discourse. in the first two chapters, klocke offers a tightly focused case study of texts by Christa Wolf that thematize the symptomatic body (chapter 1, Before 1989, places special emphasis on nachdenken uber Christa T.; chapter 2, after the fall of the Wall, focuses on readings of leibhaftig and Stadt der Engel). the two chapters expand the frame to consider Wolf 's influence on four last generation GDr authors, examining post-unification texts by kerstin Hensel, kathrin schmidt, thomas Brussig, and antje ravic strubel. in chapter 3, focusing on texts reflecting back on the east German experience, the diseased, damaged, or otherwise traumatized body offers a source of knowledge about legacies of oppression across regimes, in some cases reaching back in history to the third reich. Chapter 4 makes the case for structural similarities in the post-unification landscape as well, where the abjection of the east German subject via the logic of unification itself provides another surface for critique.At the core of klocke's project lies the proposition that literary texts issuing from the east German context, even as they demonstrate high levels of rhetorical, discursive, and aesthetic complexity, function at the same time as an invaluable record of lived realities that threaten to vanish from public view in the contemporary media consciousness of the Berlin republic. Presented in straightforward, laudably readable prose, klocke's argument achieves its clarity through a sophisticated historical awareness of the interdependence of author, reader, and text, on the one hand, and a political-ethical commitment to recognizing the complexities of historical subjects, on the other. asserting that literature serves as a unique repository for communal experiences, particularly in contexts where public discourse is constrained, klocke concludes that the alternative memory formations proffered by narrative fiction constitute a vital public service, stepping in where supposed instruments of general education-one thinks here of everything from school textbooks to weekly news magazines-reduce historical events to dots on a linear map charting inevitable progress toward a given end.Without its tightly focused frame, grounded concretely in a relatively small textual corpus, the large claims klocke puts forward might ring hollow. Delving archaeologically into the texts, each new dig brings different surfaces to light, revealing multivalent realities in the process. for example, the common (Western) claim that troubled figures in east German texts necessarily represent a critique, if not a wholesale condemnation, of socialism is soundly refuted in her reading of Wolf 's pivotal 1968 novel, nachdenken uber Christa T., in which the illness of the titular figure is traced to multiple sources, including some that pre-date the founding of the socialist state. the novel is read as a memory text that addresses the protagonist's Nazi childhood and sets that past against the multiple realities of the east German state and a society caught between new political structures, old habits of mind, and extreme pressures from without. Moving deliberately and transparently between metaphorical and literal levels of reading, klocke concludes that Christa t. …

Death in East Germany, 1945–1990 by Felix Robin Schulz (review)

Reviewed by: Death in East Germany, 1945–1990 by Felix Robin Schulz Erika Quinn Death in East Germany, 1945–1990. By Felix Robin Schulz. New York: Berghahn, 2013. Pp. xiv + 248. Cloth $95.00. ISBN 978-1782380139. Felix Schulz’s study of sepulchral culture belongs to a burgeoning body of cultural scholarship in the history of everyday life on the German Democratic Republic. Building on Monica Black’s excellent Death in Berlin (2010), Schulz investigates the role of state power in a fundamental cultural realm—how humans treat their dead. Often drawing comparisons to both capitalist and communist societies, the book [End Page 697] situates German sepulchral culture within broader Western processes of modernity: rationalization, centralization, secularization, professionalization, and the trend of growing distance from and repression of death itself. The study is concerned solely with “normal” deaths, excluding any political or violent deaths. Schulz argues that the uniqueness of the GDR’s sepulchral culture lay in its very high cremation rates and was shaped more by the desire for efficiency than by socialist ideology. Another striking aspect of East German death culture is the tenacity of rural customs and regional diversity. These characteristics serve to support Schultz’s larger argument about the relative weakness of the East German state in matters pertaining to death. The book is organized thematically with chapters addressing disposal, cemeteries, cremation, communal burials, and funerals. It also sketches out a rough three-part chronology beginning with the late 1940s to the early 1950s, a period of crisis with corpses of bombing victims piling up in cemeteries, scarce resources, and uncertain political relations. The second period, from 1952 to the early 1960s, saw growing centralization and state attempts to marginalize religion, which were expressed through the foundation of the Institut für Kommunalwirtschaft in 1962 and the municipalization of cemeteries. Despite the closing of the Democratic Republic to the Western world in 1961 and the Institut’s official mandate as shaper of socialist culture, Schulz argues that the state was not all that effective in exerting its will, particularly when compared to Czechoslovakia, which achieved a distinctively socialist death culture in the same period (143). The last period, from the 1960s until the end of the regime, was characterized by a real growth of socialist culture, as seen in the climbing rates of secular funerals, cremation, and collective, sometimes anonymous burials accompanied by declines in quality of service due to resource scarcity. This study provides raw data about death rates, burial rates, and types of funerals as well as many powerfully illustrative photographs of cemeteries and crematoria taken by the author. Schulz normalizes death culture in the GDR. He argues that much of its approach to death ritual was inherited from the reform period of the 1920s during which technocrats sought to secularize death rituals, demystify death itself, and rehabilitate it as a natural biological process. Overcrowding and the rapid turnover of burial spots fostered new cemetery construction in addition to the cremation movement. Reformers’ stripped-down sense of grave ornamentation is probably the most immediately visible influence to the casual observer. Ironically, Schulz claims that most elements of modern German sepulchral culture, both East and West, were in place by 1945 (35). While the two Germanies shared the reformist legacy, the GDR differed from the West in its lack of a private funeral industry as well as the notable and depressing lack of resources devoted to a respectful disposal and commemoration of the deceased. The author uses sepulchral culture as a strong example of “convergence theory” (65), which claims that rather than implementing orders passed down from the [End Page 698] Central Commitee, experts and technocrats utilized the Institut and other state organs to forward their own interests separate from those of the state. This theory serves to challenge the model of the GDR as an all-powerful and most repressive state in the Eastern bloc. Compelling support for this interpretation comes in the state’s failure to fully confront the Churches in the 1940s and 1950s over cemetery ownership; most cemeteries are still Church property. Another example of the state’s failure to completely dominate popular culture is mourners’ placement of flowers and name...

No Fixed Address, but currently in East Berlin

In his work on multidirectional memory, Michael Rothberg makes the point that “[a]lthough it is difficult to grasp today […] communism provided one of the discursive spheres […] in which the articulation of genocide and colonialism could first be attempted.” In this article, I explore the Indigenous reggae-rock band No Fixed Address’s performance, just after Australia Day 1988, at the East German Festival of Political Song, one of the surprisingly many venues where the East German State granted space for the articulation of genocide and colonialism and their legacies in the Australian context. On its face, this site offered a signal transnational location for Indigenous protest during the Bicentennial year. But I will demonstrate how the articulation of protest was undermined and skewed by partly competing, partly symbiotic intentions on the part of the East German and the Australian States. In this ambiguous context, musical protest unfolded in complex and sometimes unintended ways.

Book Reviews

Konrad H. Jarausch, United Germany: Debating Processes and Prospects Reviewed by Louise K. Davidson-Schmich Nick Hodgin and Caroline Pearce, ed. The GDR Remembered:Representations of the East German State since 1989 Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970 Reviewed by Friederike Eigler Peter H. Merkl, Small Town & Village in Bavaria: The Passing of a Way of Life Reviewed by Joyce M. Mushaben Barbara Thériault, The Cop and the Sociologist. Investigating Diversity in German Police Forces Reviewed by Alexandra Schwell Clare Bielby, Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Print Media of the 1960s and 1970s Reviewed by Katharina Karcher Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin, ed., Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945 Reviewed by Jennifer A. Yoder

The Maoist Enemy: China’s Challenge in 1960s East Germany

This article examines the challenge of Chinese communism in East Germany in the 1960s. It shows how the Sino–Soviet Split and the Chinese Cultural Revolution endangered the public transcripts of East German state socialism by undermining its organizing metaphors and principles. Chinese cadres used their East Berlin embassy as a stage, showcase and megaphone for their dissenting vision of communism throughout the decade, winning some support from elderly communists, young anti-authoritarians and students from the Global South. Studying the East German campaign against what was known as ‘Mao Zedong Thought' sheds light on the transnational traffic of actors and ideas within the Second World in the turbulent decade of the 1960s. The official and vernacular response to the Maoist challenge suggests that East German ideology was constituted by a double demarcation in the 1960s, against Western social democracy and capitalism to its right and Chinese communism to its left.

(Extra)ordinary Life: The Rhetoric of Representing the Socialist Everyday After Unification

This article investigates the politics of representing everyday life (Alltag) in the German Democratic Republic in state-mandated museums and memorials in the contemporary Federal Republic. Through an analysis of advertising material, exhibits, and visitor surveys, it considers how managers of “auratic” sites have responded to the challenge posed by interpretations of the East German state that resist the focus on repression, as well as the impact of this response on different visitor groups. The discussion focuses on two established sites—Gedenkstätte Hohenschönhausen and Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte Normannenstraße—as well as the exhibition in the Tränenpalast in Berlin, opened in September 2011. It argues that state-supported sites frequently seek to contain memories of Alltag by reinterpreting the term to mean the extraordinary experiences of ordinary people. Nonetheless, overly didactic interpretations that leave little space for individual meaning-making risk disinheriting those whose memories are based on social and economic security, rather than state violence. The article argues that there is a tension in these museums and memorials between a desire to present a singular view of the East German state as the second German dictatorship and the recognition that the “active visitor” brings his or her own experiences, interests and memories to public history sites.

Case vignettes based on EQ-5D to elicit stated preferences for health services utilization from the insurees' perspective.

BackgroundThere is little evidence as to why or why not insurees decide to seek medical services. Steps prior to the entry of the insuree into the professional health care system have not been sufficiently examined and can only be partially described by secondary data of the statutory health insurance (SHI). We report the first investigation using case vignettes based on the generic health-related quality of life questionnaire EQ-5D as part of a choice study to assess insurees' stated preferences in health services utilization.MethodsWe invited 1500 randomly selected citizens (age 30 to 70 years) from the East German state of Saxony-Anhalt by postal mail to participate in the choice study. Attributes of the case vignettes involved in choice tasks were the five dimensions of the EQ-5D. We used multilevel mixed effects logit regression analysis with the dependent variables: preference to seek medical services (model 1) and preferred time until consultation (model 2) for the assessed case vignette. The EQ-5D attributes of the case vignettes and participant characteristics served as the independent variables. We also included the respondent's certainty of choosing from the choice set, and the order of questions of the questionnaire as control variables.ResultsOf the 1500 questionnaires 683 were evaluable (net response rate 48.0 %). On the level of the case vignettes, problems in all five dimensions of the EQ-5D were statistically significant factors of the estimated likelihood to seek medical services (model 1). On the respondent level, there was a significant relationship between the preference for medical consultation for the assessed case vignette and the respondent's gender, age, educational level, the existence of a regular doctor, and the certainty of choosing from the choice set.Problems in four of the five dimensions of the EQ-5D (except anxiety/depression) of the case vignettes were significantly associated with the preferred time until consultation (model 2). On the respondent level, gender, educational level, the certainty of choosing from the choice set, and the order of questions of the questionnaire were significant determinants of the time until consultation.ConclusionsOur study offers a promising new approach for the national and cross-national study of preferences in health services utilization from the insurees' perspective.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12913-015-1143-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Is the ‘Central German Metropolitan Region’ spatially integrated? An empirical assessment of commuting relations

The ‘Central German Metropolitan Region’ is a network of cities and their surroundings, located in the three East-German states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia. It was founded to bring the bundled strengths of these cities into an inter-municipal cooperation, for making use of the possible advantages of a polycentric region. As theory claims, a precondition for gains from polycentricity is spatial integration of the region. In particular, markets for high skilled labour should be integrated. To assess how this precondition is fulfilled in Central Germany, in the framework of a doubly constrained gravity model the commuting relations between the functional regions of the (until 2013) 11 core cities of the network are analysed. In particular for higher educated employees, the results display that commuting relations are determined not only by distance, but also by the state borders that cross the area.

Public R&D support for newly founded firms – effects on patent activity and employment growth

By addressing the effectiveness of entrepreneurship policy this paper attempts to fill a gap in the literature. By using a dataset of highly innovative start-ups in the East German state of Thuringia the impact of R&D subsidies on start-ups’ employment growth and their patent output is analyzed. Presumed selection biases between subsidized and non-subsidized start-ups are accounted for by conducting propensity score matching. We find that R&D subsidies lead to an increase in employment growth of about 66%. Furthermore, subsidized start-ups show a 2.8 times higher patent output. These estimates provide evidence for the additionality of R&D subsidies within the first three business years. Moreover, our analysis points to a successful policy targeting of academic spin-offs.JEL Codes: O38, H59, C14

W poszukiwaniu zaginionego państwa. Na marginesie powieści "Wieża" Uwe Tellkampa

The article presents the German literary reactions to the German unification in 1990and dissolution of the East German state. It is focused on the novel Der Turm. Geschichte auseinem versunkenen Land (2008) by Uwe Tellkamp, his dealing with literary traditions (amongothers with utopia) and with narrative patterns.

Cannibals, carnival and clowns: the grotesque in German unification films

Film scholars interested in the responses to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic and subsequent unification have tended to focus on the comic and/or tragic narratives which reflect the challenges facing the population of the New Federal States, whether as citizens struggling to adjust to the new post-unification order or as citizens of an economically deprived region and all the attendant social and psychological problems. But a number of important films produced during the Wende have largely been neglected. Formally experimental, occasionally cryptic, and sometimes disturbing, these films demand reviewing not only because of their unconventional aesthetic, which distinguishes them from the other better-known films of the time and since, but because with hindsight, as this article makes clear, we recognise that they offer a critical index of the doubts and frustrations resulting from the East German state's collapse and its subsequent union with the Federal Republic. This article focuses on three films in particular (Letztes aus der DaDaeR/Latest from the DaDaeR, Das Deutsche Kettensägenmassaker/The German Chainsaw Massacre and Deutschfieber/German Fever) and considers filmmakers’ recourse to aesthetic forms, namely the carnivalesque and the grotesque.

The German Democratic Republic by Peter Grieder (review)

Reviewed by: The German Democratic Republic by Peter Grieder Andreas Agocs The German Democratic Republic. By Peter Grieder. New York: Palgrave, 2012. Pp. xviii + 155. Paper $26.00. ISBN 978-0230579378. Peter Grieder’s small volume gives a concise overview of the main developments in the GDR’s forty years of existence. In little more than 150 pages, the book introduces and discusses the wide range of themes, arguments, and interpretive challenges that recent research into the “Workers’ and Peasants’ State” has yielded. Because the GDR’s human rights abuses were dwarfed by the much larger crimes of the Third Reich, historians have been struggling to define the nature of the East German state while taking into account its repressive nature, as well as popular participation and consensus. Grieder’s definition of the GDR adopts Konrad Jarausch’s concept of a “welfare dictatorship” and combines it with classical totalitarianism theory, a concept that is, for Grieder, “flexible enough to encompass softer, subtler forms of power” (4). The GDR was thus a “totalitarian welfare dictatorship guaranteed by the Kremlin” (130). This interpretive framework allows him, he claims, to “explain as well as describe East German reality” (2)—including the many inefficiencies of the GDR’s political system, the complex and often contradictory reactions and allegiances of its population, as well as its often rocky relationship with its Soviet patrons. Grieder then traces the development of a society that was ruled through a combination of “care and coercion” (6) from its conception in the 1940s to its collapse in 1989–1990. The book’s chapters break down the GDR’s history into six phases: conception (1945–1949), construction (1949–1960), consolidation (1961–1971), conservatism (1971–1977), crisis (1977–1989), and collapse (1989–1990). Grieder uses Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s description of East Germany as a Soviet “satrapy” (Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 1949–1990 [Munich, 2008], 424–25), but he prefers the term “Bolshevization” to “Stalinization” because the SED ruled without the type of large-scale violence that characterized Stalin’s reign. During its period of construction, the party’s leadership successfully established the pillars of its rule, which included the Ministry of State Security (MfS), as well as generous state price subsidies for food, housing, and utilities. Amidst the turbulences of the 1950s, “welfare-totalitarianism was taking root in the GDR” (44). In an effort to stave off the “pull of the increasingly magnetic Federal Republic” (50), the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 enabled the [End Page 241] SED to consolidate its control. But communist party chief Walter Ulbricht’s limited market-oriented reforms in the 1960s were bogged down by the SED’s bureaucratic insistence on the primacy of politics over the economy—a self-inflicted problem that would define and plague the GDR’s “real existing socialism” until its collapse. Grieder’s periodization deliberately avoids the common division of the GDR’s history into a “Stalinist” Ulbricht era and an ostensibly post-totalitarian stage under Erich Honecker, who became party chief in 1971. Even though the Workers’ and Peasants’ state loosened its repressive rule over time, Grieder contends that “in some respects, East Germany became more totalitarian during the final two decades of its existence” (8)—as evidenced by the increased economic centralization and hypertrophy of the Stasi. Still, by the end of the 1970s the GDR had entered a destabilizing crisis that lasted until 1989. Grieder argues that the underlying “main cause for the gathering crisis was the totalitarian welfare state itself” (89). The GDR suffered from “systemic sclerosis,” brought about by the SED’s “obsessive-compulsive urge to direct an increasingly complex society, eventually leading to ‘bureaucratic overstretch’” (85). In this situation, Mikhail Gorbachev’s call for reforms in the Soviet Union became an existential threat to the East German client state. Because the SED leadership was unable and unwilling to liberalize the system that had assured its power for forty years, “totalitarianism was both the lifeblood and the wasting disease of the GDR” (93). Along with his analysis of SED policies, Grieder pays attention to popular attitudes among East Germans, even though the absence of real democratic elections and reliable polls makes the extent of popular identification...

A Path through the Woods: Remediating Affective Landscapes in Documentary Asylum Worlds

Author(s): Stoetzer, Bettina | Abstract: In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that an engagement with the legacies of German nationalism requires a track through the woods: throughout German history, forests have played a key role as origin myth to found a national identity (Schama 1995). In today’s forests, these entanglements between the forest landscape and the nation acquire a strange and unhomely twist: in former East German states, such as Brandenburg and Thuringia, asylum seekers—many of them from Africa—find themselves living on the ruins of abandoned military barracks in the forest. Their isolation in the forest is the outcome of post-unification asylum policies that responded to a heated nation-wide asylum debate and xenophobic attacks against urban refugee shelters in the 1990s, by relocating refugees to remote new ‘homes’ in rural East Germany—often on former military barracks in the forest.Engaging with Forst, a documentary film produced in collaboration between refugees and European film-makers, this article asks about the possibilities of a mode of analysis that follows Schama’s call to embark on a track through the woods and shed light on contemporary entanglements between landscape, race and nationalism. Forst breaks with documentary—and ethnographic—conventions of creating empathy via the portrayal of individual life stories, or “cases”. Instead, the film situates its story almost entirely in the claustrophobic environment of a gloomy forest in which refugees live. Doing so, it provokes affects and environments in order to invoke the visceral dimensions of borders and nationalism—a method, I argue, that can be mobilized for social inquiry of both the mediation of racialized exclusions in contemporary asylum worlds in Germany—as well as their material and visceral effects.

Explaining institutional persistence, adaptation, and transformation in East German recreational-fisheries governance after the German reunification in 1990

We investigated the capacity of a natural resource governance system to absorb a disturbance while maintaining its major structures and functions (defined as institutional resilience). Exemplified by East German recreational fisheries governance being disturbed by the German reunification, we studied why in five out of six East German states the former centralized governance system persisted while in one state a decentralized governance system was implemented. Based on resilience thinking and new institutional economics, three analytical steps were developed to assess: (1) the structure and function of the governance system, (2) the attributes of the disturbance and the reorganization process, and (3) human motivations. The centralized system persisted because leading managers wanted to preserve customary structures and functions, minimize transaction costs of change, and maintain powerful positions. This was possible because of their influential positions in the reorganization process. Our results suggest that in externally induced, fundamental, and rapid disturbances decision-makers tend to prevent transformations in their governance system. However, key managers in the sixth state faced the same disturbance but their lack of leadership and an emerging rivalry for fishing rights facilitated a transformation to decentralized governance. Thus, attributes of disturbances can be leveraged by actors' motivations in the reorganization process.