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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published H-German@h-net.msu.edu (October 2007)
Andrew Port. _Conflict and Stability in the German
Democratic Republic_. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2007. 303 pp. Table of contents. $75.00 (cloth),
ISBN 978-0-521-86651-4.
Reviewed for H-German by Gary Bruce, Department of History,
University of Waterloo
The GDR as a Responsive Dictatorship
Andrew Port's exquisitely written history of the East German
southern industrial town of Saalfeld in the Ulbricht era,
based on a dizzying array of sources from fifteen German
archives, is the latest in a series of books on the German
Democratic Republic that seek to explain the relative
stability of the regime.[1] As he asks: "What ... despite
overwhelming evidence of widespread discontent held East
Germany together and accounted for so many years of domestic
stability?" (p. 2). Port finds an explanation that relies
exclusively on repression to be insufficient. The Stasi,
the rightly infamous East German secret police, takes
backstage in this book to the myriad interactions between
state and society in which repression did not play a role.
Time and again, Port contends, communist officials offered
an olive branch to the population through conciliation and
compromise.
This work is divided into two sections, the first dealing
with the turbulent era from 1945 to 1953, which witnessed
two major upheavals in Saalfeld, the June 1953 uprising,
which swept through East Germany, and the lesser-known
disturbances initiated by Wismut workers in 1951, an event
that Port first explored in 1997 in a path-breaking article
in _Social History_. In the second section, Port discusses
the history of Saalfeld from 1953 to 1971 with an emphasis
on the various ways that the regime accommodated, in
particular, workers' and farmers' demands. Port's concerns
that a focus on the demise of the regime in 1989 leads to
a teleological approach causes him to end his study in 1971,
when the regime was still decades away from collapse. The
end, so Port, is not necessarily in the beginning.
Port rejects the image of a cowering East German society
fearful of speaking out against the all-powerful Socialist
Unity Party (SED) and its lurking Stasi. Rather, he finds
that East Germany was a "grumble society," one where
workers and farmers regularly made known to authorities
their discontent and one where--perhaps surprisingly for
proponents of the "civil war" model of East German
history--the regime sought to placate discontented elements
of society.[2] In Port's words, "[r]epression was not the
only--or even the principal--way in which socialist
functionaries responded to protest or open conflict" (p.
69). Port in many ways echoes Mary Fulbrook, who has
recently argued by examination of _Eingaben_ that East
Germans were far from a complacent lot.[3] If, then, East
Germany was seething for the twenty or so years after the
shocking June uprising, why did it not explode? Port argues
that any answer must take into account the regime's attempts
to appease the working classes (vertical relationships), the
fact that the East German working class itself was divided
(horizontal relationships), and, to a far lesser extent,
repression. In short, Port emphasizes that East Germans were
actors with agency, not SED puppets. He thus fundamentally
supports Alf Lüdtke's concept of _Eigen-Sinn_, or
self-awareness, which suggests that society is comprised of
individuals who make decisions about how they participate in
that society (including in the regime's apparatus), and as
such it can never be completely malleable.[4]
Port's main concern with this work is to demonstrate that
the East German regime did try to accommodate worker and
farmer interests, and that this strategy accounted in large
part for regime stability. Such a contention leads directly
to the robust discussion on "totalitarianism" that has
lurked behind almost every recent work on East German
history. Port wisely shies away from applying a descriptor to
the regime--terms such as "welfare dictatorship,"
"thoroughly-ruled society," and "forced-through society'"
are at best cumbersome and at worst pointless--instead
providing a balanced account of the merits and pitfalls of
the term "totalitarianism" in the East German case. He
agrees with the idea that society was "atomized" by the form
of rule, but believes that the concept does not sufficiently
account for agency on the part of East German society.
Port's sophisticated argument raises a number of key points
about East German history that historians are likely to
debate at length. One underlying issue in this work as in
others of late is the supposed longevity of the East German
regime--but was it really that long? Outside observers to
this debate would be forgiven for thinking that the East
German regime lasted several hundreds of years given the
laudatory vocabulary used to describe the regime's longevity.
True, it lasted longer than Nazi Germany, but it was shorter
lived than Wilhelmine Germany, and both of those states were
involved in cataclysmic wars that led directly to their
demise. The GDR, which lasted but forty years, barely
survived the mass unrest of 1953 and collapsed within months
of the appearance of the first fissures in the communist bloc
in Poland and Hungary in 1989. Clearly, whatever explanations
historians offer for regime stability must also take into
account the reality that the East German regime was swept
aside with haste by its own people less than two generations
after its birth. In other words, is East Germany's brevity
not the more pressing historical issue?
Given that Port argues for the primacy of compromise and
horizontal divisions over repression as the source of
regime stability, it is regrettable that the Stasi fades so
far into the background of his account. Granted, the Stasi
was a very small outfit when it was first established, but
its founding in 1950 nevertheless merits mention. In
emphasizing the secondary role of repression, Port states
that "only a handful of Stasi personnel [were present]
in the district through the 1960s" (p. 107). Apart from
the fact that Port does not cite a source for this statement,
the numbers of official secret police personnel certainly
cannot be a criterion for whether or not the regime acted
repressively in Saalfeld. As Robert Gellately's works on
the Gestapo have demonstrated, a small secret police
apparatus can carry out widespread repression with the help
of informers. Statistics on, for example, the number of index
cards, surveillance operations, conspiratorial dwellings, and
informer recruitment would have rounded out this picture. Port
cites a mere five arrests as a result of Stasi operations in
Saalfeld between 1963 and 1965 (p. 106), yet there were many
desirable outcomes for the Stasi apart from arrest--including
recruiting the target as an informer, intimidating the target
into ending oppositional activity, or an orchestrated demotion
at work. Port also takes issue with the notion that Saalfeld
was crawling with Stasi informers (_inoffizielle Mitarbeiter_,
or IMs) stating categorically that East Germany under Ulbricht
was "not a nation of spies" (p. 108). It is true that the
number of informers rose significantly from 1971 onward, but
it is nonetheless noteworthy that there were still 100,000
informers under Ulbricht, a higher number per capita than
anywhere else in eastern Europe. In contrast, Czechoslovakia
at the time had a paltry 11,300 informers, and Bulgaria,
Poland, and Czechoslovakia _never_ reached the number of
informers East Germany had in 1971. Similarly, the number of
full-time Stasi employees rose from 10,700 in 1952 to 45,580
by the time Ulbricht left office--an increase of over 300
percent.
Port's work is the most even-handed of recent accounts of state-
society relations in the GDR, but nevertheless finds itself part
of a trend in the historiography which moves away from the
repressive nature of the regime and focuses instead on the more
positive aspects of the dictatorship and the fact that the SED
did not exercise "totalitarian" control over society. Victims of
the Stasi may rightly be insulted by the fact that these works
almost always contain a clause like "not discounting the suffering
of those affected by the Stasi" before commenting on some other
aspect of the regime. In this work, Port writes, "At the same
time, and without minimizing the undeniable misfortune of those
who suffered at the hands of the Stasi, most Saalfelders clearly
had little to fear from security officials (pp. 106-107).[5]] The
underlying argument here is that the East German regime ruled not
as much by carrot and stick as it did by carrot and _then_ stick.
It sought compromise, responded to concerns of its citizens, and
yes, also used its instruments of repression--and generally in that
order. Ultimately then, a school of thought on East German history
that downplays the role of repression in the regime has now become
firmly established. The Stasi has become a topic _non grata_, a
lamentable turn of events given that the Stasi was the largest
secret police per capita in world history.
Port's nuanced argument on the nature of rule in East Germany
presented in this meticulous, elegant work should be taken into
account in all future work on the GDR. Still, we must not ignore
that the trend of downplaying repressive measures in the GDR has
established itself just at the same time as German television
variety shows applaud many leisure aspects of the regime (a
"Deutschland sucht den Superstar" winner gave an emotional
rendition of the hit "Am Fenster" by the East German rock band,
City), as Stasi officers mock their former victims at public
forums (in particular in March 2006 in the former Stasi prison
Hohenschönhausen), and as _Ostalgie_ embeds itself in the East.
There have been, and continue to be, efforts in the political and
cultural fields that range from simply downplaying the negative
aspects of the East German dictatorship, to--much more
troubling--justifying and legitimating it. Scholars are well
aware that to explain is not to exonerate, yet the explanations
of the GDR dictatorship in the spate of English-language
monographs that have appeared in the last few years nevertheless
flirt with exoneration. The pendulum, which has swung far away
from the very real, very harmful, very controlling aspects of
the regime, must start its swing back.
Notes
[1]. See, for example, Mary Fulbrook, _The People's State: East
German Society from Hitler to Honecker_ (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2006) and Jeannette Madarasz, _Conflict and
Compromise in East Germany 1971-1989_ (New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2003).
[2]. Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, _Untergang auf Raten_
(Munich: Bertelsmann Verlag, 1993) was the first account to
suggest East Germany was characterized by a continuous
latent civil war.
[3]. Fulbrook.
[4]. Thomas Lindenberger's excellent work on the history of the
GDR has largely been informed by the concept of _Eigen-Sinn_.
See his _Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur
Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR_ (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999).
[5] A similar refrain is found in Fulbrook: "For those active
opponents of repression who fought and suffered, and for those who
lived in fear or whose lives were deformed by the constraints of the
system, the repressive aspects of the regime were terrifyingly
obvious; but it is important also to notice just how many people
never had occasion to hit against these boundaries, and genuinely
felt that they were able to lead 'perfectly ordinary lives" (p.
297).
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