Thanks to Gary Bruce for such an articulate and thoughtful review on
Andrew Port's work - which I agree is a key work in the field and one
that pushes scholars to think in new categories and periodizations.

Still, I must respectfully disagree with Bruce that:
> The pendulum, which has swung far away from the very real, very
> harmful, very controlling aspects of
> the regime, must start its swing back.

(Nor do I mean to imply that Bruce is accusing Port in this vein.)

I see little evidence of serious scholarship on the GDR that, via
certain modes of explanation, "exonerates." Rather, I continue to see
serious scholarship that is investigating the many levels of SBZ/GDR
society. It is possible and admirable to analyze the almost infinite
aspects of a state's people, their habits, their beliefs, their
lives, in a framework that best reflects the evidence an author has.
It is not "Ostalgie" - a word and concept I am increasingly seeing
employed as short-hand for "Don't you know the regime shot its own
people?" - but rather good research that asks how best to understand
an era. I know of no serious scholar who mourns the demise of the GDR
or is ignorant of the very real repression and violence that were
part of the GDR.

I do see the beginnings of a recognizable vein of scholarship that,
in moving beyond a dictatorship model that initially helped frame our
first questions about what the GDR was, has begun to ask new
questions, is looking to sources beyond the first documents we even
had (primarily political documents in federal archives) since these
sources are increasingly available, and is helping broaden the field.
Such an attempt to add to our knowledge of a state and its people is
laudatory, and I would be dismayed to see these scholars have to add
a footnote to all their articles stating that they are in no way
endorsing state repression by (for example) writing biographies of
individual citizens, looking at design trends in consumer products,
or re-considering previous assumptions about the role of literature
in certain circles of GDR society.

Bruce himself contributes to this broadening of the field by asking
if it is not more important to ask why the GDR did not last longer
than it did. Although I do not think it is a "more important"
question, I do think it is a reframing worthy of further analysis by
someone. Will we all agree on that scholar's conclusions? Of course
not. But I look forward to debating that and other new works on the
GDR, all of which will broaden the field in necessary ways. In that
sense, the metaphor of a "pendulum" is ineffective, since it implies
a limiting, two-dimensional spectrum of historiographical approaches.

Thanks again to Bruce and Port for their contributions to analyses of
a society for which we are only beginning to uncover the questions we
have of it.

Benita Blessing
Ohio University

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