Planners, Pillars, and Pretenders: Socialism between Enlightenment and Sovereignty

Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic. Peter C. Caldwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 220. $60.00 (cloth).

The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century. Catherine Epstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 322. $29.95 (cloth).

Germany's Cold War: The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany 1949-1969. William Glenn Gray. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 351. $49.95 (cloth).

Scholarship on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has been taking off in the past several years, with especially stimulating impulses coming out of the Center for Contemporary Research in Potsdam and the pioneering cultural historical work of Alf Lüdtke.¹ Much of the intellectual excitement stems from detailed social histories conceptualizing and describing everyday mentality (Eigen-Sinn) under a dictatorship of the proletariat, rather than from large-scale systemic analyses or studies of elites. Not tendentious and relatively free from the cold war mindset of research based in totalitarianism and modernization studies that dominated the scholarship of previous generations, these new works, which make ample use of archives formerly inaccessible to scholars, often express humor and appreciation for the absurd, a tack that echoes a call by Richard Rorty to view the history of state communism in a "comic frame."² As welcome as this new scholarly direction is, the familiar polarization between social-cultural and traditional historiography does not serve the study of the GDR well since one of the hardest things to grasp about the communist experience was its claim to have been making an epochal difference in history. Even Rorty's call to use a comic historical frame reveals an underlying philosophical agenda to depotentialize any vocabulary of system antagonism in favor of an ontologically modest pragmatism. Thus, amidst the wealth of new East German social histories, it is rewarding—and anything but retrogressive—to find excellent work still being done on systemic questions of socialism and socialist elites.

The three books under consideration here, while they all focus on elites, are divergent in productive ways. Where Peter C. Caldwell focuses on the technical intelligentsia of the GDR, the scientists, jurists, economists and social theorists responsible for making socialism hang together as a rational technical system, Catherine Epstein examines the biographies of leading veteran communists, communists who joined the KPD (German Communist Party) in the Weimar Republic and stayed with it through the Hitler years to become leading figures of symbolic unity in the GDR. As both authors point out, there was little overlap between these two highly self-conscious groups, and the tensions that arose between the technical visions of the one and the ideological visions of the other illuminate some of the fundamental paradoxes of socialist governance. In contrast to these works' focus on challenges internal to the East German socialist project, William Glenn Gray's book views the GDR as a policy object rather than subject of history, framing it as the crude and amateurish target of West Germany's Hallstein Doctrine, the dogged campaign by the Adenauer and Erhard administrations to diplomatically isolate the FRG's rival representative of German nationhood. Gray's foreign policy perspective demonstrates the exogenous limits that the GDR's technical and political intelligentsia either failed or refused to grasp from within the subjectivity of its decision-making.

Of the three books, Caldwell's dryly titled and densely presented Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic is the most surprising, identifying little-known actors in the scientific intelligentsia whose efforts on behalf of socialism in some ways come closest to the technical modernism familiar in the West. The very pragmatic familiarity of their thinking, in the service, however, of a globally antagonistic project, opens up exciting channels for understanding socialism as an uncanny alternative to liberal modernity, at one moment a kindred legacy of the Enlightenment and at the next a quasi-feudal form...