Widerständiges Verhalten und Herrschaftspraxis in der DDR: Vom Mauerbau bis zum Ende der Ulbricht-Ära (review)

This work, a revised dissertation completed at the Freie Universität in 2007, examines a variety of oppositional behavior in 1960s East Germany, a topic that has received relatively little attention in the scholarly literature. When one hears of resistance in East Germany, one does not immediately think of the 1960s, but rather of the underground resistance groups of the 1950s, such as the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit or the Ostbüros of the West German political parties, the revolutionary uprising of 1953, and, of course, the sweeping revolution of 1989. Whatever resistance existed in the 1960s and 1970s, then, was of a different order from that which occurred in the first and last decades of the GDR.

Stadelmann-Wenz is interested in opposition during this “transition phase” between periods of fundamental political resistance. Like other noted scholars of resistance in East Germany, such as Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk and Ehrhardt Neubert, Stadelmann-Wenz recognizes that the street protests of 1989 had deeper roots than just the months immediately preceding them, and that a strong potential for popular resistance had been in development for some time. This potential came bubbling to the surface in myriad, albeit less dramatic, ways in the 1960s, e.g., brief work stoppages, slogans painted in public places, refusal to perform military service, and the distribution of pamphlets. Cognizant of current debates about the extent to which the SED regime could exert complete control over East Germans, Stadelmann-Wenz views the SED’s political power (Herrschaft) not in totalitarian terms, but rather as a “multidimensional shifting relationship between rulers and ruled” (19).

The first section of her work deals with four events that mobilized opposition in East Germany during the 1960s—the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the tightening of the German-German border, the introduction of compulsory military service in 1962 (a measure intimately tied to the building of the Wall), and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Stadelmann-Wenz uncovers a number of oppositional acts that undercut the suggestion that the East German population simply resigned itself to its lot in the immediate aftermath of the Wall. Indeed, approximately 6,000 East Germans were sent to prison in the first few weeks after its construction (179), and the rejection of military service became so strong at the time that the SED was forced to introduce an alternative—so-called Baubattalionen. These were military units without weapons that constructed airfields, shooting ranges, and other military installations.

In section two, Wenz moves away from the specific events discussed in the first part to examine social “areas of conflict” (Konfliktfelder) that produced opposition. Changes in agricultural, industrial, and youth policies frequently caused a backlash that ranged from minor strikes, to farmers’ withdrawing from agricultural collectives, to the Leipzig Beat demonstration of 1965. These “areas of conflict” produced a hostile response among youth in particular, a point underscored in the third part by statistical analysis of the sentences meted out for political crimes. As Stadelmann- Wenz demonstrates, East German resisters in the 1960s were overwhelmingly male and under the age of twenty-five. For example, over 70 percent of those sentenced for “resistance to state measures” (Widerstand gegen staatliche Maßnahmen) were under twenty-five (236).

Although this is an impressive work, on the whole, the author’s tendency to group all manner of opposition under the banner of “widerständiges Verhalten”—be it nonconformity, social protest, resistance, opposition, or a refusal to participate—does tend to conflate such behavior. Historians of resistance during the Nazi period, like Peter Hoffmann and Peter Steinbach, to whom many historians of East Germany have turned for a theoretical grounding, would cringe at the lack of distinction made here among the various acts. An investigation of motive may have fallen out of fashion, but it still provides a reasonable way to distinguish acts along a...