Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte, Vol. 69, Die Aussenpolitik der DDR (review)

This exceptionally useful book is one of the projected 100 volumes of the Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte (Encyclopedia of German History), edited by the eminent scholar Lothar Gall. The purpose of the series, which deals with many aspects of German history from the Middle Ages to the present, is to provide readers with a concise survey of the literature and key debates in the field, including comprehensive, up-to-date bibliographies. Joachim Scholtyseck's volume is therefore not an academic monograph but an eloquent summary of the historiography on the foreign policy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Scholtyseck has divided his book into three sections. The first provides a chronological overview of East German foreign policy from 1945 to 1990, based on a standard periodization that includes turning points such as 1953 and the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. In the first section, Scholtyseck refrains from dealing at length with key debates in the field and instead simply provides an overview of GDR foreign policy. His summary is competent and clearly presented, although it is devoid of personalities. One gets little sense of the individuals who influenced GDR foreign policy, whether in Moscow or East Berlin.

The impressive second section of the book contains the key part of the text and fully lives up to the raison d'être of the series. Scholtyseck provides a thorough overview of every debate of consequence about East German foreign policy, probing widely through the literature from East and West Germany, from the Soviet Union, and from the English-speaking world, both pre- and post-1989. Scholtyseck begins with a review of the documentary situation, concluding that although the files of the Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR (SAPMO) and documents from the former East German Ministry for Foreign Affairs (which, unlike materials in SAPMO, are subject to the thirty-year declassification rule) are rich, ultimately the history of the GDR's foreign policy will remain incomplete until fuller access to the Soviet archives is available. Scholtyseck then offers a nuanced summary of the positions of the key historians who write about the GDR's foreign policy, starting with a basic question that sets the agenda for further investigation: Was the GDR simply a dependent satellite, and therefore incapable of a "foreign policy," or was it a sovereign state? Scholtyseck notes that historians have reached a certain consensus that periods of complete dependence were interspersed with periods of greater autonomy (p. 62). Debates about the extent to which Iosif Stalin was prepared to bargain away the GDR (including the March 1952 note controversy), whether Lavrentii Beria had similar intentions after Stalin's death, the extent to which the GDR forced the Soviet Union's hand during the 1958–1961 Berlin Crisis, how Ulbricht's foreign policy contributed to his downfall, and the extent to which foreign policy helped bring about the final collapse of the regime are well-presented and cogent. In certain cases, Scholtyseck offers his own judgment about these debates. For example, he believes that the debate about Stalin's "unwanted" GDR should be wrapped up, insofar as the evidence that has emerged since 1989 simply does not bear out such an assertion. He also argues for a more nuanced approach to determining the GDR's room to maneuver and casts doubt on the stark "tail wagged the dog" approach that has recently been championed in reference to the Berlin crisis.

The third section of the book offers a comprehensive bibliography of German and English sources, including a list of published primary sources. Missing, however, is any reference to the primary sources published in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin and to the important book by Armin Mitter, Stefan Wolle, and Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Der Tag X: Die "Innere Staatsgründung" der DDR als Ergebnis der Krise 1952/1954 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1995), which, although not about foreign policy per se, introduced the Staatsgründung theory that Scholtyseck himself...