German Democratic Republic Citizens Research Articles

The Dark Side of Inspirational Pasts: An Investigation of Nostalgia in Right-Wing Populist Communication

In recent years, research found that populism employed a new strategy by using nostalgia, a sentimental longing for the past, as a communication tool to persuade citizens to support their political agendas. In populist campaigns, nostalgia is used to affectively link (alleged) crises with longing for a cherished past. In this article, we applied a mixed-methods approach to understand how populists exploit nostalgia in their communication and how nostalgic rhetoric has the potential to persuade people to support their claims. In Study 1, we conducted a case study based on a qualitative content analysis of Alternative for Germany’s (AfD) online election campaign in the 2019 Thuringia election in East Germany. The analysis revealed that the campaign was built around the nostalgic narrative of the 1989 peaceful revolution as a proud historical moment for former German Democratic Republic citizens while at the same time creating a sense of crisis supposedly caused by false post-reunification politics. To further investigate the persuasiveness of nostalgia, Study 2 used a statement from the campaign and found that participants tended to agree more with populist statements if they contained nostalgic rhetoric (compared to non-nostalgic populist and control rhetoric). These findings suggest that right-wing populists can effectively exploit nostalgia and that it may ‘sugarcoat’ populist messages.

State Power and ‘Everyday Criminality’ in the German Democratic Republic, 1961–1989

Abstract Friedrich Engels claimed that the removal of the perceived causes of crime in a society—capitalist economic and societal conditions—would automatically lead to the eradication of crime. This did not prove to be the case in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where instances of everyday criminality such as theft, robbery and assault never fell below 100,000 per annum throughout the period of the state’s existence, from 1949 to 1989. This article examines the ruling Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) perceptions of the causes of everyday criminality in the GDR. It shows that the SED concluded that crime persisted because citizens’ ‘socialist sense of legal right and wrong’ (sozialistisches Rechtsbewußtsein) was underdeveloped. The regime measured this by the extent to which citizens supported and participated in socialist society. Thus, crime could be eliminated by co-opting as many citizens as possible into the Party’s political project. The SED’s ideological tunnel vision on the causes of everyday criminality meant that it dismissed hints about the real causes of crime, such as poor supply and living conditions, identified by its analysts. Its failure to address these issues meant that citizens continued to break the law. Thus, the Party’s exercise of power contributed to the creation of limits to that power. Moreover, analysis of opinion polls on GDR citizens’ attitudes to criminality shows that they accepted crime as a part of everyday life.

The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History ed. by Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History ed. by Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann Teresa Walch The Ethics of Seeing: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History. Edited by Jennifer Evans, Paul Betts, and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. New York: Berghahn, 2018. Pp. 306. Cloth $149.00. ISBN 978-1785337284. Practitioners of visual history have shown that photographs can do much more than illustrate previously formulated arguments. An outpouring of recent monographs, collected volumes, and public exhibitions have begun exploring photography's agency in modern history, particularly during World War II and the Holocaust. The collection of essays in The Ethics of Seeing moves beyond war and dictatorship to probe not only how documentary photography recorded German history throughout the twentieth century, but also how it engendered new modes of seeing, thus actively shaping history as well. Introductory chapters by Jennifer Evans and Elizabeth Edwards provide critical historiographical, theoretical, and methodological anchors for the volume. When viewed not as mere evidence but as a multilayered medium, they argue, photography has the potential to illuminate multiple renderings of the past and radically reshape the discipline of history. The subsequent case studies investigate photography as an ethical practice in twentieth-century Germany. They reveal how the selective decisions [End Page 413] of photographers and publishers—from subject choice, to staging and composition, presentation (scale, cropping, montaging, omission), and contextualization (especially via captioning)—consciously or unconsciously fostered conventional or alternative "ways of seeing." These contributions underscore the inherent fluidity of photography and its amenability to myriad interpretations across time and space. Germany's authoritarian regimes often deliberately employed amateur and professional photography to bolster official narratives. Claudia Siebrecht examines how Else Sonnenberg's personal photographs reinforced imperial Germany's claims of a civilizing mission in South West Africa. Elizabeth Harvey illustrates how photos invoking themes of Heimat, community, and a shared racial lineage helped justify the resettlement of more than half a million ethnic Germans during World War II. Julia Torrie describes how photos taken by German soldiers stationed in France blended out the violent aspects of German occupation and helped the men view themselves as harmless guests or tourists rather than aggressors. The authors are careful to note that, despite their ostensible alignment with state policies, these photos were open to alternative readings that might have provoked critical, even humanitarian responses. At other times, photography advanced subversive agendas that challenged official visual practices. The German Democratic Republic (GDR) aimed to harness photography to train a new "socialist self," and yet Sarah E. James demonstrates how it accommodated Edmund Kesting's 1950s abstract portraits. Inconsistencies in the GDR's photographic policies endured into the 1970s and 1980s, as evidenced by Candice M. Hamelin's discussion of Gundula Schulze Eldowy's photos of buildings in disrepair and the elderly and infirm. The camera also became a weapon in the hands of oppressed GDR citizens. Analyzing photographs published in Wolfgang Schneider's Leipziger Demontagebuch, Paul Betts explains how photos taken by protestors in autumn 1989 documented police aggression in Leipzig and recorded the increasing confidence and growing strength of the mass demonstrations. West German citizens also used subversive photography for personal and political ends. Jennifer Evans examines the subjectivities of Herbert Tobias's erotic photographs of rent boys, noting that they constituted a bold act of self-expression in the morally normative postwar era. Anna Ross shows how photographs taken by residents and activists in Berlin-Kreuzberg helped strengthen a collective Kiez identity and forge a collective response to the municipality's disruptive practices of reurbanization in the 1970s and 1980s. Concerted efforts to harness photography for humanitarian purposes featured in each of Germany's postwar eras. Annelie Ramsbrock shows how Ernst Friedrich's 1924 book Krieg dem Kriege! successfully recontextualized portraits of "facially wounded" World War I veterans, initially published in scientific journals to showcase advancements in reconstructive surgery, to posit a searing, pacifist message that resonates even today. Photos played an equally important role in the post-1945 era, argues [End Page 414] Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann. Abandoning initial triumphalist and vengeful images, British and American photographers began capturing scenes of German suffering and resilience that helped cultivate...

‘It is a Shame We Are Not Neighbours’: GDR Tourist Cruises to Cuba, 1961–89

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) is typically portrayed as only allowing its citizens to travel within the ‘Eastern bloc’. It has passed largely unremarked upon that from 1961 to 1989, however, tens of thousands of GDR citizens travelled to Cuba, with thousands of these journeys taking place on trade union-owned cruise ships. This article investigates the implications of this largely ignored phenomenon. Accompanying these cruises was wealth of symbolism, and the tensions within this symbolism allow us to explore the peculiar global vision constructed by GDR elites, which has hitherto been largely obscured by the depiction of the GDR as a parochial, autarchic state. Cuba was part of what was known as the “socialist world system”, the collection of socialist states across the world who shared the same, socialist, societal structures. Communist theorists supposed that these societies were on a path of objective convergence, and that tourism would further this process. At the same time, Cuba was exoticized as a site of radical, southern difference and consumerist pleasure. These conflicting visions were ever present in the literature surrounding cruises to Cuba, but as time went on, the latter vision gained prominence.

The ambivalence of detail – documenting wiretapped phone conversations by the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) State Security Service (Stasi) had to archive vast amounts of data about the everyday lives of GDR citizens. Simplifications and reductions are common features of record-keeping in every institution and there was considerable variation in how detailed the Stasi records of wiretapped phone conversations were. The special focus of this study is the detail that shapes phone records into powerful objects of knowledge among other documentary genres of the Stasi archive. The article describes, in the context of suspicion, how decisions were made about the level of detail in the records given the information overflow, and which communicative and institutional tasks were solved using the different levels of detail in the textualization. Records fulfilled the function of (subjective) information selection for the creation of such categories as ‘strange’, ‘dangerous’, ‘suspicious’ and ‘guilty’. Objectifying practices were necessary to legitimize the records as objective proof of suspicion. The ‘subjective–objective’ relationship turns from a dichotomy to a co-presence within one record and serves to legitimize the record as evidence.

Power and Society in the GDR Reconsidered: Involuntary Psychiatric Commitment, 1949–1963

AbstractThis article focuses on compulsory psychiatric admissions in the early German Democratic Republic (GDR). Until 1968 there were no East German laws regulating such hospitalizations, a regulatory vaccuum filled by neither the police nor the judicial system. Instead, families made decisions in conjunction with medical personnel about sometimes unlimited stays in psychiatric institutions and clinics—a practice that calls into question popular scholarly characterizations of the relationship between state and society in the GDR. Previous research has explicitly argued that GDR citizens had agency and acted in a so-called eigensinnige manner in many areas, but has not examined this issue with regard to the sensitive practice of forced psychiatric admissions: where there was no state interest, no Eigensinn vis-à-vis authorities was necessary. This was an especially curious constellation given that psychiatric institutions were run by the East German state and that state interventions in this area had been well established under the Third Reich, as well as in the Soviet Union, which served in many areas as a model for the GDR. One might well have expected that continuing state intervention would have thus been path-dependent. This article suggests resurrecting the term Vergesellschaftung (socialization), only shortly discussed in the 1990s, as a way in which to understand the way in which agency on the part of patient families compensated for the absence of formal state regulations regarding such admissions. The term nicely captures such routine forms of compensation by East German society in areas where the state abdicated its responsibility—as was the case in the early GDR when it came to forced psychiatric hospitalizations.

On Hidden Trails – Mountaineers and Adventurers in Communist Germany (GDR)

As mountaineering was a non-Olympic sport and of no military relevance, it did not obtain any support of the socialist state. Consequently, it was very difficult for the mountaineers to obtain visas and financial or material resources. Invitations from the Soviet Union (SU), well-paid side jobs and self-made equipment were just some of the things necessary to be able to get into the highlands. From the end of the 1970s the emerging ‘hippie-generation’ brought new life into the scene of traditional alpinists. These young people travelled into the Soviet Union with the help of a so-called ‘Transitvisum’. They stayed in the SU illegally for several weeks or even months, always being weary of the police. Not having much financial possibilities, they travelled mostly by train or by hitchhiking and thus got into close contact with the Soviet people. Due to their experiences the alpinists were able to distance themselves from the official socialist discourse in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and to realise the possibility of liberty. They can be considered as an avant-garde of the massive exoduses or escapes of thousands of GDR citizens in 1989 through one or more eastern countries which initiated the collapse of the GDR.

Coming to Terms with the Stasi: History and Memory in the Bautzen Memorial

This paper examines the role played by the encounter of history and personal memories in the difficult process of coming to terms with the Stasi in present-day eastern Germany. While historians have made substantial progress over the last two decades in accounting for the wide range of ways in which the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is remembered by East Germans, the memorials and museums of the reunified Germany remain unable to integrate memories of dictatorial oppression and happiness in everyday life. Sites commemorating state repression are thus often assumed to lack impact on former GDR citizens whose memories differ from official versions of history. These assumptions are tested for the Bautzen Memorial, formerly known as the ‘celebrities’ prison' of the East German Ministry of State Security. Focusing on the differing receptions of GDR memorial sites, this article draws on interviews with two former political prisoners and with visitors to the Memorial who grew up in socialist East Germany. It argues that the open approach of the Memorial, which leaves visitors to draw their own conclusions from the exhibition, allows different stakeholders to find ways of personal engagement with the past at the site despite the disparities with their own memories.

State and Minorities in Communist East Germany by Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte (review)

Reviewed by: State and Minorities in Communist East Germany by Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte Alan McDougall State and Minorities in Communist East Germany. By Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Pp. xvii + 236. Cloth $100.00. ISBN 978-0857451958. For a relatively small country that existed for just forty years, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has generated a vast amount of scholarship since its collapse in 1989–1990. Branching out from an initial focus on the mechanisms of dictatorship—as represented in particular by the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and its “sword and shield,” the Ministry of State Security (MfS, better known as the Stasi)—historians of the GDR have constructed a diverse and nuanced picture of both the East German state and the people over which it ruled. Amid sophisticated theoretical debates about the nature of, and constraints upon, the SED dictatorship, scholars now emphasize the intermittently disjointed workings of state power and the agency of GDR citizens, who influenced socialist policies while retaining individual or collective identities that were anathema to socialist thinking. The latest work from Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte very much reflects current research trends. State and Minorities in Communist East Germany offers six case studies of the interaction between the SED regime and groups that, in different ways, formed marginalized subcultures in East Germany: religious minorities (Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses); foreign workers from Vietnam and Mozambique; and [End Page 226] various strands of what the Communists termed “negative-decadent youth,” most notably football hooligans, punks, and skinheads. Focusing primarily on the period from the mid-1960s to 1989, the book reinforces the argument that the GDR was not a totalitarian monolith and that the society it aimed to educate and control was neither “shut down” nor absorbed by the state. Instead, informal networks based on “status, gender, ethnicity, age and other lines” (26) survived and, in some cases, even prospered—despite the purportedly all-seeing presence of the Stasi. The secret police remains a dominant force in the book, not least because much of the archival material consulted by the authors comes from its voluminous central and regional holdings. Interviews are deployed, regrettably, only in the chapter on “guest workers” from Vietnam and Mozambique. Perhaps because of these choices or constraints, State and Minorities reveals more about the state’s dealings with minorities than it does about the minorities themselves. There is much to admire in Dennis and LaPorte’s study. Fascinating comparative perspectives emerge from its surveys of groups which, for one reason or another, did not fit into the SED’s worldview. The tiny community of East German Jews, for example, worked far more readily with the state, and was subject to less blatant state repression, than the Jehovah’s Witnesses—a particularly robust and self-sustaining minority that the Stasi found very difficult to penetrate. Both Jews and football hooligans who worked with the MfS had a variety of reasons for doing so—and not infrequently proved unreliable or offered operationally useless information to their officers. The chapters examining hooligans, punks, and skinheads illuminate both the difficulties that attended the SED’s carrot-and-stick approach to youth policy, as well as the emergence of overlapping youth subcultures in the 1970s and 1980s that were disrespectful of Communist authority and united in their rejection of its institutions and modes of behavior. The attractiveness of western alternatives, be it Bayern München for football fans or the Sex Pistols for punks, played a major role here; but Dennis and LaPorte rightly emphasize as well the home-grown characteristics of youth subcultures. Neither the football nor the punk scene slavishly imitated what was happening in West Germany and Britain. The authors also note that SED policy toward minorities was not static: the 1980s, for example, saw a philosemitic turn in official attitudes to the GDR’s Jewish communities, motivated by the need to improve trade relations with the United States and to bolster the regime’s antifascist credibility. Later in the same decade, there was a rapid increase in the numbers of Vietnamese and Mozambican workers arriving in the GDR and a subsequent rise...

Jan Palmowski. Inventing a Socialist Nation: Heimat and the Politics of Everyday Life in the GDR, 1945–1990.

In this powerfully argued and elegantly written book Jan Palmowski puts forward the idea that as the ruling party of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Socialist Unity Party (SED) attempted to construct a sense of nationhood through the idiom of Heimat, thereby stabilizing its power over East German society. The Heimat idiom allowed the SED to highlight the GDR's differences with capitalist West Germany without endorsing ethnic constructions of nationhood that remained popular in other communist East European countries. Building on the work of Celia Applegate, Alon Confino, and others who have explored the role of Heimat in nineteenth-century German nation-building, Palmowski brings the story of Heimat firmly into the second half of the twentieth century. In this cultural history he uncovers the everyday practices of GDR citizens and relates those practices to high politics. Employing James C. Scott's concept of the “public transcript,” he describes the official pronouncements on Heimat as part and parcel of an official public transcript. However, rather than endorsing Scott's binary opposition between the public transcript and opposition to it, Palmowski's analysis skillfully highlights the manifold ways in which citizens engaged with public transcripts. They ranged from acceptance and compliance to rejection and opposition. Most common were subtle forms of adaptation and subversion. The public transcript of Heimat could be given other, alternative meanings and it was invested with different interpretations.

The Cold War Politics of Cultural Minorities: Jews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic, 1976-1989

This article compares cultural identity politics relating to Jews and Sorbs in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from 1976 to the collapse of communism in 1989. Drawing on state and party sources, oral histories, literature and documents from the Ministry for State Security (Stasi), it juxtaposes state constructions of minority identities with the views and actions of Jewish and Sorbian students, writers and intellectuals. In its first three decades, the East German Communist party (SED) generally treated Jewish culture with suspicion or indifference and often conflated Jewishness with the capitalist West. In contrast, the party celebrated a folkloric vision of Sorbian culture that linked Germany with the Slavic East. By the mid-1980s, the SED altered its posture towards Jews and Sorbs. In the GDR's final decade, SED officials attempted to cultivate Jewish culture while viewing Sorbs with increased suspicion. The main reason for this shift was that SED officials placed Cold War foreign policy concerns over Marxist-Leninist ideological consistency. Treatment of Sorbs worsened as Sorbs forged ties with dissidents in other Eastern Bloc nations. Meanwhile, celebrations of Jewish culture aimed to improve the GDR's ties with Western Europe by embracing Western Holocaust memory. The article also shows that SED efforts to cultivate minority cultural identities often backfired at the grassroots level. The minority cultural images promoted by the state often had little resonance outside leadership circles. Average GDR citizens frequently grew disenchanted with SED cultural minority policies, ultimately helping by the 1980s to destabilize the regime.

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

Ordinary East Germans and the Peaceful Revolution

Linda Fuller, Where Was the Working Class? Revolution in Eastern Germany (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999)Jonathan Grix, The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000)

WEAK TIES AS A LIABILITY

Every institutional system ïnduces specific problems that have no standardized solutions for the people living in it. In this paper it is argued that people invest in relationships with certain others partly in order to solve these problems. Hence, the personal networks that result provide solutions to system-induced problems and they reflect the institutional environment. Personal networks of people living in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) during communism are examined, and social capital theory is used to explain why communism did not produce social integration. In a communist society like that of the former GDR, weak ties are a liability, not an asset. Therefore, GDR citizens trusted only people whom they knew well. Since people in the former GDR were acutely aware of political control and the damage potential of weak ties, they invested only cautiously in others. They kept their distance from strangers and all others whose trustworthiness was uncertain and discussed politics only with people whom they truly trusted (the `niche'). Yet the shortages of the command economy forced people to rely on weak informal ties to secure necessary goods and services. Personal networks in East Germany had two specialized parts each kept separate from the other, a division of labor that vanished after the fall of the Wall. Our hypotheses are tested using multilevel models and triad analyses with data collected in 1992 and 1994 from two random samples in Leipzig and Dresden ( n = 489). The first measurement focuses on the situation before the upheaval, the other the situation in 1994. Results show that during communism people indeed created `niches' consisting of dense, small networks of close relations with similar and trust-worthy others. Provision networks were maintained that were small, heterogeneous, and consisted of weak and uniplex ties. Furthermore, there was a relational `gap' between the niche and the provision network. These differences have gradually been vanishing since the fall of the Wall and with the political and economic unification of the former GDR and the former FRG.

After the Gulf War

The former German Democratic Republic (GDR) was generally regarded as the most economically developed and politically stable country of Eastern Europe. While I was often struck by the tragedies of the GDR during my Fulbright Lectureship at Humboldt University in 1988-1989, I also felt that it had a tremendous potential if it could somehow achieve a genuine socialist democracy. Despite the enthusiasm of many GDR citizens for developments in the Soviet Union, particularly glasnost, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) elites systematically tried to suppress their impact. Many East Germans asked, "Where is our Gorbachev?" and looked forward to the day when a more youthful, reform-minded leadership would work for socialism with a human face. While many GDR citizens expressed their dissent by retreating into a private world, others whom I met hoped for and struggled to create a socialist society. None of them expected that the GDR would move toward reunification with the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) about a year later, although many hoped the Wall would be dismantled.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Out of the Closet behind the Wall: Sexual Politics and Social Change in the GDR

The search for avenues to express changing cultural values has shaped recent politics in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). During the past decade tens of thousands of GDR citizens became involved in new social movements that included issueoriented groups within both the Protestant church and such mass organizations as the Kulturbund (League of Culture) and the Freie Deutsche Jungend (Free German Youth, FDJ). The rise of these issue-oriented movements evoked reactions from the former government ranging from repression to accommodation. Perhaps the most striking example of the old regime's response to social change can be seen in the emergence of a very visible gay and lesbian movement. Beginning with a handful of activists within the Evangelical church, the East German gay and lesbian movement expanded into state and party institutions throughout the republic. In 1985, partially in response to the growing movement, the state began a campaign to end discrimination on the basis of sexual and emotional orientation.