Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945-1990 (review)

Red Prometheus offers a fascinating look into the failed attempts of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to modernize via science and technology. Dolores Augustine's emphasis is not only on the poor performance of the planned economy but also on tracing how engineers and industrial scientists worked and lived within this dictatorial system. Her wealth of data comes from interviews, biographies, autobiographies, Stasi files, and other archival information.

One of the strengths of Augustine's opus is her delineation and charting of "constantly renegotiated power relations" (p. xv). A key event was the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. By eliminating this escape valve to the West—2 percent of the country's engineers fled in 1958-1959 as well as thousands of skilled workers, the GDR significantly reduced the negotiating position of engineers, scientists, and managers who lost their opportunity to vote with their feet. The engineers' decision to leave their country was not driven by the siren song of capitalism, but rather was a result of their professional frustrations, poor living conditions, low pay, and decreasing status.

Nonetheless, many older engineers, steeped in a German style of apolitical engineering that viewed itself as serving the nation and not necessarily the government (satirized by Tom Lehrer in the 1960s with "Once the rockets go up, who cares where they come down. That's not my department says Wernher von Braun"), served the GDR with the same spirit and dedication as they had served the Nazis.

GDR policy was not monolithic and unchanging; indeed, one of its flaws (one also attributed to democracies) was the short-term focus of political leaders in some of its major projects. Unlike the West, few alternative sources of support were available. Nor were the engineers static either. As part of an effort to reduce dependence on bourgeoisie engineers, the GDR rapidly expanded engineering education. In 1950, 60 percent of engineers were over fifty; by 1964, only 40 percent were. After 1968, women comprised a growing number of engineers, rising from 8 percent in 1964 to 31 percent in 1981.

The Soviet Union played a major negative role, stripping the country of factories in 1945-1947, imposing its centralized research and development structure, and shifting the GDR from a world to Soviet market, and stopping some lines of development. In the early 1960s, the USSR ordered the GDR to shut down its nuclear research infrastructure and vetoed a proposed fast breeder reactor. The USSR wanted to monopolize reactor production and feared a German capability to produce weapons-grade plutonium (a fear shared by some in the West with memories of World War II only two decades old: to quote Tom Lehrer about a proposed North Atlantic Treaty Organization nuclear weapons initiative, "and one of the fingers on the button will be German"). Similarly, the 1961 Soviet decision to stop importing GDR airliners decimated the country's aviation industry, which employed twenty-five thousand workers compared with fourteen thousand in West Germany.

More ambiguous in its influence was the West and particularly the Federal Republic of Germany. By the simple act of existing, the West posed a political challenge to the GDR. But the growing scientific and technological gap and the fear by the Stasi of Western aggression made the West an important actor. Furthermore, the CoCom embargo of advanced technology to socialist countries deprived them of easy (and legal) access to the latest advances.

As the GDR poured more resources into high technology like electronics, the shortcomings of socialist technology became increasingly apparent. As Christophe Lecuyer demonstrated in Making Silicon Valley. Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970 (2006), manufacturing electronics, especially semiconductors, demanded close links between researchers and the production line. Otherwise, quality, yields, and reliability all fell.

GDR technology had two growing disadvantages from the 1960s on. The first was the belief of the German Communist Party that it should...