Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945–1990 by Dolores L. Augustine (review)

Dolores Augustine’s study of the scientific community in the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ, 1945–1949) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is a significant and much-needed contribution to the historical literature about the role of science in a socialist country. To say that Augustine has left no stone unturned in this tour de force is no exaggeration. Red Prometheus is more than an exhaustive history based on several years of research using multiple methodologies; it is and will remain an authoritative work on a complex tale of political intrigue, human ethical dilemmas, and romantic fantasies of a utopian, modern world. Augustine’s point of departure is the question of how dictatorship and science interacted in East Germany (p. xi). The journey this investigation takes her on uncovers a socialist world, incredible in its attempts to use science as the vehicle to trump the West in creating the better modern society. It is easy to forget that one is reading history and not a page-turning, nail-biting genre of novel about outlandish Cold War schemes. Therein lies the strength of this book: Augustine balances her rich narrative with a sharp analysis that is as accessible for a general public as it is revealing for a highly specialized, scholarly audience—whether students, scientists, or historians.

Augustine begins the study with the immediate post–World War II period of the SBZ, the four years before the official founding of the GDR that historians are realizing as more than an unimportant preview of what was to come. In the case of scientists who had been employed during the Nazi regime, the end of the war marked a scramble to turn themselves in to the occupying powers—hoping, correctly, that this voluntary surrender would allow for a more lenient treatment by the military administrations. These former Nazi scientists, whether employed in the United States, the Soviet zone/GDR, or in the Soviet Union, became a cohort of Cold War intellectual soldiers racing against time and one another to develop military technology and to complete research on the Nazi nuclear program. Less well-known is that a site parallel to the secret Anglo-American “Alsos” program existed in the Soviet Union. Whether part of a voluntary group of German scientists who emigrated to the USSR as part of the labor-as-reparations policy or part of the 1946 “Osoaviakhim” program of enforced deportation of German scientists to the USSR, thousands of scientists and their families (along with factories, laboratories, pets, and house plants) became part of a secret community whose tasks ranged from beating the West at nuclear technology to improving the lives of Soviet citizens through scientific progress.

These scientists eventually returned to the GDR. There the Soviets and the Socialist Unity Party (SED) leaders ensured privileges in the professional and private realms that allowed former employees in the Nazi system to erase their pasts. By offering them a new status as heroes who had helped the Soviet Union, rather than ex-Nazis who had once been enemies of their new protectors, the SED easily convinced these scientists that their knowledge could help foster “socialist modernity” (p. 39). The idea of a society that could be literally engineered to attain state goals held much promise in theory for a unique cooperation between intellectuals and politicians. But such a utopia, as Augustine demonstrates, depends on individuals and groups who are not always ready to abandon previous attitudes. To cite one example of the persistence of tradition, engineers and scientists were unwilling to abandon their professional habitus of a close alliance with the bourgeoisie instead of seeing themselves as linked to the proletariat. Thus, even after the construction of the Berlin Wall and the suddenly restricted movement of scientists, the SED never succeeded in entirely eliminating a strong professional sensibility and structure among scientists and engineers. Still, in a conscious program of gaining the loyalty of the intelligentsia to socialist ideals, a...