The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (review)

This work, by the professor of German History at University College, London, is of the greatest importance and value to students and others interested in twentieth-century German history or in the style of life under Communism—an excellent answer to the traditional German historian's cry "Wie war es eigentlich? What was it really like?" And Fulbrook's account, meticulously researched, collated and analysed, presents a different view to the generally held but simplistic view of repression.

Fulbrook's main theme, running through the work, is that of the paradox of a people trying to lead normal family lives of work, home and family under a top-down imported ideology, a system of government that really believed it was achieving a socialist utopia. People had to acquiesce in the system, but sought to accommodate themselves within it, taking anything that the regime offered and steering clear of features that might incur risk or danger. In its first twenty years people supported the state in its vision but, as time and the generation that had had to survive Hitler passed, popular support fell away and the East German state followed its Nazi predecessor, placing repression increasingly before vision. Dissent replaced support. In the West we have always known about the repression, the STASI providing the world's largest recorded security and secret police service in proportion to population in recorded history. We have been disparaging about some results of the vision, dreary new towns, little box blocks of flats, pollution, the dreadful Trabant motor car. But Fullbrook brings out the many positive features of the regime, job security, social and health services and the vastly improved life opportunities for the working class. She shows how under a pattern of controlled participation thousands of ordinary people were able to participate in public debate and decision making in the lower levels of government and state institutions. There was even the curious eingaben system of citizens communication in which grievance and protest could, with circumspection, be aired.

Fullbrook does not seek to whitewash the GDR; she does not minimize the repression. The value of her work is that it offers a wider view, but she has correctly seen the overall failure of the vision and its replacement by repression as the cause of the internal collapse of the state in 1989.

She might perhaps have made a little more of the role of the Christian churches, interestingly in Leipzig and Dresden rather than Berlin, in securing the peaceful collapse of so severely repressive a regime. A more serious criticism is her failure to stress the militarization of the GDR, how so much of the daily education and youth movements' activities were essentially militaristic; how they and the period of compulsory military service were used to inculcate a perspective of German history (early protest rebellions and movements, mutinous High Seas Fleet sailors, leftist Spanish Civil War veterans, and anyone, including the 1812–13 Count Yorck von Wartenburg, friendly towards Russia), and also how the young should comport themselves as good young socialists. The NVA's monthly magazine Armee Rundschau published "Gerd und Gerda," a fascinating serial about a boy and girl as role models. Hitler had Generalfeldmarschall, the GDR's Honecker had a Marschall der DDR, Hoffman, a Spanish Civil War veteran whose doctrine was that divided Germany represented the world-wide class conflict and war with NATO Western Germany, even if it involved killing other Germans, was not only justifiable but a social duty.

Many readers of this journal will have served in West Germany during the Cold War and formed their opinion of the GDR from intelligence reports. They will not need to revise their military assessments but they will learn much about the society whose young men, with increasing reluctance, were compelled to form part of the threat.