State and Minorities in Communist East Germany by Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte (review)

For a relatively small country that existed for just forty years, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has generated a vast amount of scholarship since its collapse in 1989–1990. Branching out from an initial focus on the mechanisms of dictatorship—as represented in particular by the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and its “sword and shield,” the Ministry of State Security (MfS, better known as the Stasi)—historians of the GDR have constructed a diverse and nuanced picture of both the East German state and the people over which it ruled. Amid sophisticated theoretical debates about the nature of, and constraints upon, the SED dictatorship, scholars now emphasize the intermittently disjointed workings of state power and the agency of GDR citizens, who influenced socialist policies while retaining individual or collective identities that were anathema to socialist thinking.

The latest work from Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte very much reflects current research trends. State and Minorities in Communist East Germany offers six case studies of the interaction between the SED regime and groups that, in different ways, formed marginalized subcultures in East Germany: religious minorities (Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses); foreign workers from Vietnam and Mozambique; and various strands of what the Communists termed “negative-decadent youth,” most notably football hooligans, punks, and skinheads. Focusing primarily on the period from the mid-1960s to 1989, the book reinforces the argument that the GDR was not a totalitarian monolith and that the society it aimed to educate and control was neither “shut down” nor absorbed by the state. Instead, informal networks based on “status, gender, ethnicity, age and other lines” (26) survived and, in some cases, even prospered—despite the purportedly all-seeing presence of the Stasi. The secret police remains a dominant force in the book, not least because much of the archival material consulted by the authors comes from its voluminous central and regional holdings. Interviews are deployed, regrettably, only in the chapter on “guest workers” from Vietnam and Mozambique. Perhaps because of these choices or constraints, State and Minorities reveals more about the state’s dealings with minorities than it does about the minorities themselves.

There is much to admire in Dennis and LaPorte’s study. Fascinating comparative perspectives emerge from its surveys of groups which, for one reason or another, did not fit into the SED’s worldview. The tiny community of East German Jews, for example, worked far more readily with the state, and was subject to less blatant state repression, than the Jehovah’s Witnesses—a particularly robust and self-sustaining minority that the Stasi found very difficult to penetrate. Both Jews and football hooligans who worked with the MfS had a variety of reasons for doing so—and not infrequently proved unreliable or offered operationally useless information to their officers. The chapters examining hooligans, punks, and skinheads illuminate both the difficulties that attended the SED’s carrot-and-stick approach to youth policy, as well as the emergence of overlapping youth subcultures in the 1970s and 1980s that were disrespectful of Communist authority and united in their rejection of its institutions and modes of behavior. The attractiveness of western alternatives, be it Bayern München for football fans or the Sex Pistols for punks, played a major role here; but Dennis and LaPorte rightly emphasize as well the home-grown characteristics of youth subcultures. Neither the football nor the punk scene slavishly imitated what was happening in West Germany and Britain. The authors also note that SED policy toward minorities was not static: the 1980s, for example, saw a philosemitic turn in official attitudes to the GDR’s Jewish communities, motivated by the need to improve trade relations with the United States and to bolster the regime’s antifascist credibility. Later in the same decade, there was a rapid increase in the numbers of Vietnamese and Mozambican workers arriving in the GDR and a subsequent rise...