Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (review)

In Within Walls, Paul Betts tackles the vexing questions that have become increasingly important to the maturing scholarship on the German Democratic Republic (GDR). How do we best describe the relationship between state and society? Did some form of a civil society or common civil discourse ever emerge in a state known for surveillance by the Ministry of State Security (Stasi)? Did East Germans simply retreat into private social worlds largely untouched by socialist engineering or collective concerns? An array of intriguing answers to these questions has appeared recently, from Jan Palmowski’s discussion of public and private transcripts (Inventing a Socialist Nation [Cambridge: 2009]) to Mary Fulbrook’s “honeycomb” state (The People’s State [New Haven: 2005]). Betts approaches these questions by revisiting Günter Gaus’s Cold War commentary on East Germany’s private niches (Wo Deutschland liegt [Hamburg: 1983]).

Betts insists here that an East German retreat into privacy must be historicized. He argues that the private sphere was a consequence—often inadvertent, but not always—of decisions by the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) in the 1950s and 1960s. The importance East Germans placed on private life was not, in other words, just a relic of a bourgeois past. In addition, Betts argues that the East German insistence on privacy was not passive or apolitical, but actually a social practice and a political claim. Here, he means that citizens openly and loudly wrangled with the SED (often citing official speeches and policies) to protect private pleasures and property. In fact, the right to private comforts became part of the “social contract” with the SED; prodded from below, the state acknowledged that it had a duty to defend the private worlds of its citizens. East Germans after 1989 did not suddenly discover the pleasures of privacy; they instead created and defended those private rights during the lifetime of the GDR—often, ironically, with the aid of the both local and central authorities. The central paradox thus revealed by Within Walls is this: the SED state was both the foe and the guardian of the private sphere.

The first chapters highlight intrusions into private lives that inadvertently heightened the importance of privacy. The book opens, logically, with that organization that did the most to destroy privacy in the GDR, often by sabotaging personal relations among suspect groups: Stasi concern for domestic life was fueled, in part, by the postwar social-science belief that social reform must begin at home. As Betts writes, the private was remade and distorted by Cold War authoritarian conditions; it was not a refuge or a holdover from the past. Betts’s subsequent discussion of the Church focuses on the SED’s highjacking of confirmation ceremonies (Jugendweihe) to attack private conscience and celebrate socialist modernism. Even as families compromised their personal beliefs and participated in these secular rituals for the sake of their children’s future careers, practicing Christians retreated into a private practice of their beliefs, and the family home, not the Church, became the center of religion. This private world, Betts shows, was thus an inadvertent creation of SED policy. Even the Jugendweihe became “private” over time, as it became a family event centered on individual consumer pleasures.

Other chapters allow Betts to argue that privacy became a political claim and a social assertion. Betts’s chapter on marriage uses divorce court records to show that the state made a priority of promoting “healthy” marriages that required oversight by judges, neighbors, and coworkers. By the 1970s, however, divorce courts increasingly allowed individuals to end marriages, as East Germans (especially women) pressed courts to recognize their right to personal happiness when they petitioned for divorce. The subsequent chapters on neighborhood justice and petitioning, when read together, are the most intriguing in the book. In a chapter on neighborhood dispute commissions, Betts shows that plaintiffs turned to these courts to demand protection of their privacy and their property. While the commissions...