Mobilisierung der Frauen: Technik, Geschlecht und Kalter Krieg in der DDR (review)

Karin Zachmann's new book is a tour de force, a large, comprehensive work that offers something for every scholar concerned with the development of the Soviet socialist states of East Central Europe: statistics and stories, big-picture context and individual case studies, exhaustively plumbed sources, and nuanced interpretation. It has benefited from the author's long scholarly engagement with the subject and her personal experience as a citizen of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR); it also demonstrates the qualities to which she owes her current position in the Institute for the History of Technology at the Technical University of Munich. Finally, it is part of a body of emerging studies of women engineers and of gender and technology more broadly. (For a chapter in English from Zachmann's work, see Annie Canel, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann, eds., Crossing Boundaries, Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s–1990s [2000].)

Zachmann argues that the East German socialist government mobilized women in its efforts to outdo West Germany in the competition for technological superiority. The GDR did win the quantitative prize: many more technical experts (in absolute numbers, not just per capita) were produced than in the Federal Republic of Germany. However, that victory did not translate into a superior ability to innovate, in part because the state did not leverage the abilities of its newly trained women. By the 1970s, women's technical competence was no longer in question, and yet the political decision-makers did not succeed in fundamentally changing the hierarchical structure of the gender order; indeed, "male coding" in certain branches remained impossible to break. Instead, a new gender-specific division of labor kept women in lower-status and lower-paid engineering fields (some of them newly emerging) such as information processing, materials science, architecture, cartography, and engineering economics.

Having traced the educational and career patterns of 158 women graduates of the Technical University of Dresden and the Technical University of Ilmenau, the author sets out to explain their trajectories. She does not limit her scope to women engineers, but investigates the fate of the whole profession during the existence of the GDR. She points out that the distance of engineering knowledge (as compared to law or humanities) from the central theory and ideology of Marxism-Leninism regarding the transformation of society did not shield the engineers from political intervention. This intervention at first occurred sporadically, confounded by brief periods of resistance by professional engineers, who in 1961–1962 managed to uphold the threefold character of traditional engineering: academic, practical, and managerial. By the end of the 1960s, however, they had been forced to acquiesce to the increasing centralization of all decisions regarding engineering's canon of knowledge, access to that knowledge, and how that knowledge was to be used.

After the political elites had completely transformed the engineering profession, Erich Honecker's government (1971–1989) sharply curtailed both jobs and educational opportunities in engineering, shifting the state's priority to the production of housing and consumer goods. Ironically, this occurred even as young women were well-prepared academically and socially to study the previously male-dominated engineering fields and enter the higher status careers they promised. After the fall of the GDR, the women engineers whom the socialist state had promoted suffered a high unemployment rate and further loss of status, in part because of the new social, cultural, and political milieu in the reunified Germany. Here, their West German sisters were nearly a half-century behind in their struggle for equal access to engineering education and career opportunities.

Zachmann's conclusion to this chapter in the history of the GDR is rather poignant. Having demonstrated her findings through solid quantitative analysis buttressed by myriad qualitative sources, including interviews, memoirs, and periodical literature, she writes: "The GDR, with the help of the mobilization of women, won the competition for numbers of technical experts that had been kindled by the cold...