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135 Chapter 5 Real Existing Socialism: Nature, Social Inequalities, and Environmental Consciousness In 2003, the movie Good Bye Lenin! highlighted the sudden and traumatic disappearance of an entire material culture and the equally overwhelming spread of West German consumer goods into every nook and cranny of East Berlin after 1989. The movie’s climactic scene unfolds, interestingly, at an East Berlin family’s bungalow retreat in the countryside. This choice of setting reflected the important role that bungalows came to play in the everyday life of many East Germans.1 The film presents the bungalow as an idyllic retreat where the family seems (at first, anyway) to escape their troubles in a niche untouched by the recent upheaval. This staging of the scene may not have been coincidental. Indeed, scholars concerned with bungalows, cottages, or dachas in Eastern Europe often orient their analysis around the so-called niche society of Eastern Europe. According to Lovell, Soviet authorities believed that “the dwellings that stood on dacha plots were profoundly alien to the Soviet communal ethos: they represented enclaves of unsocialized existence that were impervious to the penetrating collective gaze.”2 Lovell argues that dachas created relatively independent social niches within Soviet society: “[Dachas] infused people’s lives with new meanings, gave them new opportunities to pursue ‘private ’ activities, yet also enabled them to cultivate a sense of community that was largely independent of party-state institutions.”3 Paulina Bren, alternatively , argues that cottage vacations were “a decidedly state-endorsed escape, whereby a person in fact participated in ‘normalization’ and the government’s desire for ‘the quiet life.’”4 The bungalow retreat nostalgically remembered in Good Bye, Lenin! was, however, hardly idyllic in reality; instead, angry disputes, or “horizontal conflicts ,” between everyday Germans characterized everyday life at most vacation destinations as much or more as vertical conflicts between citizens and the 136 The People’s Own Landscape state. In an earlier chapter on camping culture, I shifted focus away from discussions of an East German niche society in which East Germans retreated from and struggled against government intrusion; this current chapter will go a step further and argue that vacationing just as often pitted East German against East German. A close look at bungalows and rural destinations reveals that these exurban retreats were more than escapes from socialist mobilization. They were also a space of noisy arguments and conflicts between neighboring vacationers. As Andrew Port has argued, these “horizontal conflicts” have not received enough attention from scholars of East German history. The political stability of the GDR hinged in important ways on the inability of many East Germans to focus their frustrations on the SED; instead, they turned to the regime to intervene in disputes with their neighbors and coworkers. 5 Erich Honecker’s “real existing socialism” in the 1970s and 1980s only exacerbated these disputes. The regime now ignored fundamental structural reforms that had preoccupied bureaucrats in the 1960s. Instead of utopian transformations, planners focused on immediate and tangible abundance. In practice, the regime’s corroding factories and inefficient supply networks could not provide that abundance, so it indebted itself at an epic scale to increase wages, subsidize low food and housing prices, and provide more consumer goods. As Jonathan Zatlin has written, “[T]he GDR was not simply living beyond its means, but consuming its future—eating oranges instead of buying capital equipment to boost exports and pay for the oranges.”6 Honecker’s wage increases also created inflationary pressures. With more money to spend but not enough commodities to purchase, the costs of those scarce goods began to rise.7 In this context, vacationing must have only increased its prestige in the eyes of the SED, as it could soak up excess currency without costing too much to the government. To compensate for its growing debt and to alleviate shortages , Honecker also worked diligently to bring hard currency (i.e., West German marks) into East Germany. To meet consumer demand, the regime created new special shops selling high-end consumer goods or luxury Western-made products. Intershops sold luxury Western goods to foreign visitors or East Germans with access to foreign currency, and Exquisit and Delikat shops sold expensive (and rare) consumer goods to East Germans who could afford it. While offering a possible solution to pent-up consumer demand, the expensive goods at these shops only highlighted social inequalities in a country ostensibly founded to eliminate class differences. Citizens with ties to West Germany (and thus to hard...

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