Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany, 1945-1990 (review)

Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany, 1945-1990. By Raymond G. Stokes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xi+260. $42.50.

After the Berlin Wall came down, a great deal of source material became available as East German archives opened their doors. Historians began digging into these new sources for knowledge on the rise and fall of state socialism, and a number of studies on the political, social, economic, and cultural history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) have been published during the last ten years. Histories of technology remained rare, however. Thus Raymond Stokes's book addresses a new and important topic within the emerging historiography on state socialism.

Stokes's investigation concentrates on the East German system of technological innovation. He seeks to explain how the GDR managed to achieve remarkable successes with some technologies and how the system could survive so many crises and internal contradictions. His book is neither accusatory nor apologetic, but rather has a mediating tone. He writes that "the development of technology in the GDR was contingent, shaping and being shaped by particular and ever changing political, social, and economic configurations in the country's forty-year existence" (p. 6).

The narrative is divided into three parts, the first of which seeks to define "a socialist system of innovation" and explain how it was changed by World War II, the Soviet occupation, and the consequent restructuring of East German society. He identifies the universities and the German Academy of Science, large-scale industry, and various state bureaucracies as the basic elements of the East German system. As the main factors in innovation, he specifies state ownership of the means of production accompanied by an intense intervention in all aspects of economic development, shared responsibility between bureaucrats and the intelligentsia for planning and implementing science and technology policy, cooperation with the Soviet Union and other Eastern-bloc countries, and, above all, an emphasis on the development of high technology.

This analysis might have profited from a look at the rich literature on systems of innovation in other countries as well as the characteristics of the German system during the first half of the twentieth century. Stokes could have delineated the interaction between national traditions and the socialist restructuring of society more convincingly, which in turn would have strengthened his main thesis--namely, that German technological traditions were a pillar of the GDR's style of innovation and that they constituted a major foundation for its technological achievements.

The second part of the book covers the years from 1958 to 1961, during which, according to Stokes, the course was set for future technological development and for failure, too. In 1958, GDR functionaries still sought orientation toward the West as well as toward the East; by 1961 the drive toward Sovietization dominated. In investigating opportunities for alternative outcomes, Stokes considers the beginnings of the semiconductor industry, the chemicalization program, and attempts to transfer a Soviet version of group technology into such industries as machine building and instrument making. He analyzes the "hardware and software of socialism" and the emergence of an Eastern-bloc technological style denoted by central planning of the economy, an absence of cost consciousness, an exaggerated interest in mass production owing both to egalitarian ideology and resource scarcities, and "gigantomania" (p. 127 ff.). This analysis provides a good starting point for further research into how a new technological style prevailed against or even partly converged with German technological traditions.

In the third part of his book Stokes looks at innovation in the walled-in GDR from 1961 until the end in 1989. He asks how the quest for economic reforms during the 1960s changed the context for innovation and marked the beginning of the GDR's decline. A growing internationalization of technology clashed with the GDR's isolation, and technologically induced changes in the industrial organization stood in contradiction to the emerging shape of...