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  • The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker
  • Gary Bruce
Mary Fulbrook , The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. 350 pp.

Mary Fulbrook is not fond of totalitarianism. In a 2006 review article in German History, she went so far as to call for its "terminal burial." In this book, she puts forth an alternative concept that, in her view, captures the "perfectly normal lives" of many East Germans and the "vast tracts that lay behind [and] beyond" (p. xi) the oppressive features of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Fittingly, the title of the German edition of her book is Das ganz normale Leben (Perfectly Normal Life). Fulbrook urges scholars to reconceptualize the GDR not as a menacing dictatorship but as both a modern industrial society facing typical issues of the modern state (including health care, demographic changes, and housing) and a dictatorship that had a certain amount of popular buy-in. Because of the participation of East Germans in all levels and branches of the state (albeit with many more participating at the lower levels than at the higher echelons) and a certain commonality of goals between state and society, Fulbrook coins the term "participatory dictatorship" to describe the GDR.

Part one of Fulbrook's three-part work deals with what might be deemed "private life." She outlines leisure pursuits of East Germans, engagement of youth and women with the regime, and areas of public policy that affected private life but where state and society shared common aims such as housing and health. Fulbrook explores how East Germans took steps to "make their life" (p. 57) in the GDR and aims to illustrate how a good deal of an East German's life was led beyond the realm of state institutions (p. 66). Part two analyzes the persistence of class (based on political power rather than [End Page 137] capital) in a supposed classless society and argues that a certain degree of "carrying" of the regime by the intelligentsia, the working class, and ruling elites took place at all levels including the often-overlooked grassroots regime representatives such as mayors, whom Fulbrook dubs "genuine[ly] representative" of the people (p. 192). Part three outlines the involvement of ordinary people in the regime, in particular their role in the repression apparatus and their penchant for submitting complaints to the regime in the form of Eingaben (petitions), all of which underlies her notion of the GDR as a "participatory dictatorship."

Although there is merit in examining the motives of those who involve themselves in dictatorship, this work suffers from the major conceptual hurdle that it is impossible to reconcile a concept such as "participatory dictatorship" (or similar iterations by other historians; e.g., "consensual dictatorship" and "welfare dictatorship") with a state that witnessed millions of people take to the streets to demand its end, not once but twice, and with a state that built a wall because one in six of its alleged "participants" were fleeing to West Germany. If the term applies primarily to the post-Berlin Wall era (and that in itself is rather dissatisfying), then it is worth recalling that that era lasted less than one generation before ending in the resounding removal of the regime amid some of the largest street demonstrations in European history. What is striking during the period is not the participation in the regime but the participation against it. Given what transpired in 1989 and 1990, it is also difficult to accept Fulbrook's argument that by the 1970s "significant numbers of people" were committed to "many of [the regime's] ideals" (p. 291). Because the wall, the world's largest secret police force per capita, and two revolutionary uprisings are irreconcilable with the concept Fulbrook puts forward, she is forced to offer such tepid conclusions as, "Over time, people came not exactly to accept but rather (most of the time) to bracket out the Wall or 'the system' as a whole from daily consciousness, and were able to have (at least a sense of ) some input into (at least some of ) the domestic matters that affected their...

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