Philipp Heldmann. Herrschaft, Wirtschaft, Anoraks: Konsumpolitik in der DDR der Sechzigerjahre. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. 336 S. EUR 39.90 (paper), ISBN 978-3-525-35144-4.

Reviewed by Scott Moranda (Department of History, SUNY-Cortland)
Published on H-German (September, 2005)

Consent or Contempt?

Anoraks matter. Or, at least, getting anoraks or nylon stockings onto store shelves mattered to citizens of the German Democratic Republic. As a growing number of cultural and social historians tell us, the experience of scarcity generated incredible resentment toward the ruling SED. Philipp Heldmann confirms this thesis and contributes a much-needed blow-by-blow analysis of the economic planning within the SED and the State Planning Commission that determined the availability of consumer goods. Heldmann focuses in particular on the 1960s and loosely concentrates his research on the clothing industry and asks whether or not the regime ruled the economy through and through. He argues that the SED feared dissatisfied consumers, but incoherent planning prevented the regime from rationally regulating the production, distribution, and use of consumer goods.

Heldmann divides his work into three substantive chapters. In the first, he demonstrates the insignificance of consumption in long-term economic planning. Here, a powerful SED invested in primary products (foodstuffs, coal, steel) at the expense of domestic consumer goods. Certain planners warned (in convoluted ways) against ignoring consumer desires, but Walter Ulbricht felt the Berlin Wall lessened the need to bribe workers with material pleasures. Annual planning, the subject of chapter 2, proved less controllable. Planners shaped policy much more than the regime ever did. The practical problems of production meant that assorted planners dealt with inflation and the related shortages of basic consumer goods in a very unorganized fashion. In a third chapter, Heldmann demonstrates the regime's fear of popular resistance to high prices. The regime, in a clear example of the limits of dictatorship, routinely blocked needed economic reform if it threatened to raise prices. The SED, Heldmann concludes, had four main weaknesses: consumption policies ignorant of consumer desires, a pronounced need to generate enthusiasm among technocrats, a limited ability to influence economic decisions outside of heavy industry, and an incredible fear of popular revolts.

This work's greatest contribution is its attention to the complicated political and economic decision-making only touched on previously by cultural historians exploring the social and cultural consequences of scarcity. While illustrated overviews of GDR material culture often depict the 1960s as a golden age when the regime sought to create a unique, utopian consumer culture, Heldmann forcefully argues for an alternative view.[1] Ulbricht avoided reforms that would make everyday life more enjoyable and made politically motivated decisions that actually made fewer consumer goods available. Only after Erich Honecker came to power did the SED's elites feel any urgency to fill store shelves. Ulbricht and Honecker imagined legitimacy coming from two very different sources. The former hoped to attract bureaucrats to the regime with the promise of rational decision-making and revolutionary dynamism (think Max Weber), and the latter proposed providing material pleasures and winning popular consent, if not enthusiasm (think Victoria de Grazia).

While the title of this book insists that anoraks matter, they (and other material objects) seldom appear in the actual text. We learn little about how objects are received, used, manipulated, or imagined. In the author's defense, he warns readers that the popular uses of consumer goods were not his concern. At times, though, the members of the East German public depicted in this book come across as mindless consuming machines constantly prodding the SED for more food, cheaper baubles, and better gadgets--and becoming eerily silent when prices fell.

His analysis could have benefited from a consideration of the meaning of certain consumer goods for planners. Heldmann strongly disputes Konrad Jarausch's claims about the "emancipatory" welfare dictatorship (p. 16) and Ina Merkel's thesis about a socialist consumer utopia (p. 23). When it comes to consumer goods, he insists that planners practiced mere crisis management, had no coherent vision for the role of consumer goods in a socialist future, and made pragmatic, if chaotic, choices about prices, advertising, or product design (pp. 211, 234). Yet, to cite one example, his discussion of clothes made of synthetic fibers remains wanting without a consideration of the meanings that product designers or economic planners attached to plastics and the chemical industry (pp. 259 ff).[2] Moreover, was it really the case that planners only cared about creating healthier economic policy?

What about the less "rational" motivations of planners? The Planning Commission's living standards experts (as described by Heldmann) understood little about consumer economics and often, as he suggests, imagined vacations and longer weekends as a mere means to securing SED power. These planners, however, also had high hopes for improving public health, enlightening the average citizen, and improving productivity.[3] They did not just provide vacations as mindless pleasures to distract citizens from the realities of dictatorship; rather, planners wanted to integrate vacations into the planning of a healthier, more rational modernity. Heldmann's black and white depiction of a regime seeking popular consent being challenged by comparatively rational, if directionless, economic policymakers ignores the motivations of living standards experts (landscape architects, doctors, and leisure planners) hoping to shape (and control) personal behavior, not just economies.

In the end, however, the author never promised more than a thorough analysis of the inconsistencies of SED policy on consumer goods, and in accomplishing that goal, he paints a convincing portrait of a regime reluctantly forced to provide consumer goods, but utterly incapable of distributing those provisions.

Notes

[1]. For example, see Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, ed., Wunderwirtschaft: DDR-Konsumkultur in den 60er Jahren (Cologne: Böhlau, 1996); Annette Kaminsky, Kaufrausch: die Geschichte der ostdeutschen Versandhäuser (Berlin: Links Verlag, 1998); Annette Kaminsky, Illustrierte Konsumgeschichte der DDR (Erfurt: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Thüringen, 1999).

[2]. See Eli Rubin, "The Order of Substitutes: Plastic Consumer Goods in the Volkswirtschaft and Everyday Domestic Life in the GDR," in Consuming Germany in the Cold War (Oxford: Berg, 2004), pp. 87-120--see H-German review at <http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=226281117223304 >.

[3]. In the fourth chapter of my recently completed dissertation, I describe the role of tourism planners in this working group on living standards. Scott Moranda, "The Dream of a Therapeutic Regime: Nature Tourism in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1978" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005).

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Citation: Scott Moranda. Review of Heldmann, Philipp, Herrschaft, Wirtschaft, Anoraks: Konsumpolitik in der DDR der Sechzigerjahre. H-German, H-Net Reviews. September, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11122

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