Abstract

The communist German Democratic Republic, founded in 1949 in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany is, for many people, epitomized by the Berlin Wall; Soviet tanks and surveillance by the secret security police, the Stasi, appear to be central. But is this really all there is to the GDR¹s history? How did people come to terms with their situation and make new lives behind the Wall? When the social history of the GDR in the 1960s and 1970s is explored, new patterns become evident. A fragile stability emerged in a period characterized by 'consumer socialism', international recognition and détente. Growing participation in the micro-structures of power, and conformity to the unwritten rules of an increasingly predictable system, suggest increasing accommodation to dominant norms and conceptions of socialist 'normality'. By exploring the ways in which lower-level functionaries and people at the grass roots contributed to the formation and transformation of the GDR ­ from industry and agriculture, through popular sport and cultural life, to the passage of generations and varieties of social experience ­ the contributors collectively develop a more complex approach to the history of East Germany.

Educated at Cambridge and Harvard, Professor Mary Fulbrook is Dean of the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences at UCL (University College London) and a Fellow of the British Academy.She is the author of numerous books, including: overviews such as A Concise History of Germany and A History of Germany 1918–2008: The Divided Nation; as well as seminal works on the GDR, such as Anatomy of a Dictatorship: Inside the GDR and The People’s State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker, as well as Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships; and works on Historical Theory and German National Identity after the Holocaust. Her most recent book is the prize-winning A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust.

“Mary Fulbrook produces high-quality works, and Power and Society in the GDRis no exception. She has assembled a strong collection of essays that examine the concept of normalization in East Germany during the stable middle decades…Altogether, [this] is an excellent book, one that has two major strengths. The first strength is the writing; every piece is very well-written. The second strength is how well the authors utilized their sources. They conscientiously engaged existing secondary scholarship in the text of their contributions.”  ·  German Studies Review

“The volume makes an interesting and valuable contribution to the historiography of East Germany in the English language...The research presented in the volume is new, original, well-documented, and methodologically sound. It enjoys coherence thanks to the authors' application of the ‘normalization’ concept.”  ·  Laurence McFalls, Université de Montréal