Opposition und SED in der Friedlichen Revolution: Organisationsgeschichte der alten und neuen politischen Gruppen 1989/90 ed. by Martin Gutzeit, Helge Heidemeyer, and Bettina Tüffers (review)

This edited collection is the fruit of a workshop whose aim was to reflect upon the East German revolution of 1989 twenty years after the event. It consists largely of papers by historians and political scientists from the East and West, as well as one by a founding member of East Germany’s Social Democratic Party. It also includes transcripts of the workshop discussions, whose main contributors were former members of the GDR opposition. The papers are organized chronologically in six major sections: the formation of political opposition in the 1980s, the revolution of autumn 1989 (in two parts), the Central Round Table, political party organization and the parliamentary elections of March 1990, and the construction of German unification.

As is commonly the case in workshop-based volumes, it is not easy to discern its purpose. Judging by the title, one might expect the coverage to be of the opposition groups and the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), or of the relationship between the two, but the SED is barely treated. The prospective audience is not clearly defined, and most of the papers cover familiar terrain. They chart the basic processes of opposition formation and development, and repeat well-known arguments: that 1989 was a peaceful, pragmatic, liberal revolution, for example, or that there were no real “SED reformers.” One or two papers could serve usefully as introductory texts for students, but most are pedestrian and evince a regrettable tendency to collate and communicate trivial information—such as the personnel shifts in the upper echelons of an obscure political party (the Democratic Farmers Party of Germany), or the time of day at which meetings of the East German parliament’s Presidium began and ended. Some of the papers, by contrast, are analytical, but these, too, tend to be dense and overly concerned with minutiae. The transcribed discussions will be of interest, at most, to specialists in the field of East German political opposition. A disturbing amount involves sniping and bickering among estranged former comrades, and too much has been transcribed verbatim. At one point, for example, a contributor discusses his difficulties pronouncing certain words. One might reasonably expect editors to have skimmed off this sort of froth.

This is not to suggest that the book contains nothing of interest. For instance, it is common knowledge that in the election campaign of early 1990, the Western sister parties of the East German political organizations provided important advice and material input. That this had extended to the disinterring of old West German election placards for plastering on East German walls is a little-known tidbit. Another example concerns the formation of the Alliance for Germany (AfG): a marriage of Helmut Kohl’s CDU (West) to the formerly SED-allied CDU (East), whose nuptials were sweetened by the inclusion of an opposition group, Democratic Awakening (DA). It is well known that the three major players with whom Kohl formed the AfG—Lothar de Maizière and Martin Kirchner of the CDU (East), and DA’s Wolfgang Schnur—had for many years served as Stasi informants, but not that Schnur had communicated the deal to the DA leadership as a fait accompli, with no democratic discussion either envisaged or demanded.

Little nuggets such as this nevertheless fail to lift this volume out of the humdrum. Too many of the theses advanced by its contributors are poorly thought through. According to Karsten Timmer, for example, the historical uniqueness of the autumn 1989 protest movement was that it was, “unlike all other previous social movements” (83), a movement of the entire citizenry, rather than of specific groups such as students, women, young people, or workers. But is this phenomenon not commonly found during the initial phases of all revolutions, during which lower and middle classes...