Thomas Großbölting, Hans-Ulrich Thamer. Die Errichtung der Diktatur: Transformationsprozesse in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in der frühen DDR. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2003. 268 S. EUR 35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-402-06613-3.

Hans Günter Hockerts. Koordinaten deutscher Geschichte in der Epoche des Ost-West-Konflikts. München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2004. 339 S. EUR 59.80 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-486-56768-7.

Schanett Riller. Funken für die Freiheit: Die U.S.-amerikanische Informationspolitik gegenüber der DDR von 1953 bis 1963. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2004. 316 S. EUR 28.50 (paper), ISBN 978-3-88476-646-0.

Reviewed by Jost Dülffer (Historisches Seminar, Universität zu Köln)
Published on H-German (November, 2005)

New Approaches and New Sources on Post-World War II Divided Germany

After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and unification followed, a rare opportunity for distance, a central category for historical analysis, arose. While the book edited by Hans Günter Hockerts tries to reflect this issue systematically, the other two volumes under review deal with aspects of development in the early Soviet zone and the relations between the United States and the German Democratic Republic.

Hockerts's volume is the product of a conference at the renowned "Historisches Kolleg" at Munich. The book is important in at least four senses. First, it reflects new possibilities for using the category of mental distance in regard to former politicized notions that prevailed in the social sciences. Second, it develops new categories and approaches in social sciences or tests older ones for relevance. Authors from various disciplines of the humanities and social sciences are involved in this interdisciplinary attempt. According to the editor these new views and methodological considerations had already emerged before the spread of questions on gender and generations, migration, consumerism, environment, media, and other matters. Third, most of the contributors take both German states into consideration and reflect upon the degree of their interdependence. Fourth, the volume reflects new developments on the history of the 1970s, a period of rapid change.

It is first and foremost Charles S. Maier who (to a certain extent following Eric Hobsbawm's diagnoses of the end of a golden age) locates a fundamental international crisis in this decade. It began with the oil (price) crisis in 1973, and touched upon the economy, productivity and morale. Maier underlines the idea of a worldwide interwoven crisis and suggests that the two German states reacted quite differently to this situation. Taking a longer view, Sandrine Kott reflects the interrelation between Sozialstaat (welfare state) and Nationalstaat (nation-state). She concludes that the GDR could never claim to stand in these traditions, while the FRG could derive a considerable part of its national legitimization simply from the continuity of being a Sozialstaat. The longest contribution is written by Hans Zacher, a well-known professor of law, who systematically compares features of inclusion and exclusion on the domestic as well as the international level in both German states. In particular, he deals with the problem of citizenship, placing it in a European and global context.

New fields of research are covered and expertly addressed by Johannes Paulmann and Margit Szöllösi-Janze. Paulmann deals with the foreign representation of the FRG, a state that for a long time considered itself a Provisorium. He discusses the ways this state was perceived abroad--up to the point that a German citizen complained about having seen a solitary German flag in front of the World Fair buildings at Montreal in 1967. This approach opens up a whole research program. The same can be said of Szöllösi-Janze's paradigm of the "knowledge society" as a new approach to contemporary history. To be sure, this idea is not completely novel. However, she applies the approach to the "scientification of social conditions" since the late nineteenth century and finds different approaches to the transfer of technology in the two German states, especially in big science. She suggests that social and cultural impediments to the utilization of science in both systems remained, and she shows how these were connected to long-term developments in German history. The third innovative approach in this volume can be found in Anselm Doering-Manteuffel's discussion of political language and semantics. He finds that the GDR relied heavily on "peace," while the FRG emphasized "freedom." Political ideology reached deep into social culture during the East-West Conflict (as I, like the contributors to this volume, would prefer to call the "Cold War").

Sociology is prominently represented in this volume. Karl Gabriel deals with the still-important question of religion for the two German societies and their everyday life. The GDR is expressly addressed by Detlef Pollack, who revitalizes the concept of modernity and discusses modernization theories for various sectors. He draws upon earlier contested notions about modernization criticized after 1989 that continue to be fruitful and constructive. He argues that the GDR followed strategies of modernization in many segments, achieved some successes, but eventually was slow and late in many regards in responding to modernizing principles. Martin Sabrow, on the other hand, demonstrates his superior knowledge of GDR history, a field of study whose practitioners often lack analytical rigor. He refuses clear-cut answers, but like Hockerts, he argues against a simple dictatorial explanation for the state's persistence. Sabrow offers an almost pyrotechnic display of explanations and divergent notions.

Dietmar Willoweit, a professor of law, in a sharp-sighted argument similar to those of Sabrow and Pollack, argues against one popular characterization, defining the GDR as an lawless state (Unrechtsstaat), in opposition to a constitutional state (Rechtsstaat). The former term, originally coined with regard to National Socialist Germany, is, in Willoweit's view, not helpful. Following up on Ernst Fraenkel, who argued as early as 1941 that Nazi Germany was best considered to be a "dual State," Willoweit shows that some parts of society always functioned according to orderly legal procedures. Finally, Hans-Peter Schwarz looks at the GDR's foreign relations and global aspects, Horst Möller at the common national ground in the interrelationship between the two states, and Etienne François at the cultural dimension of German partition. In sum, Hockerts has produced an innovative and in some aspects path-breaking volume that gives us much to think about.

The approach of the collection of essays edited by Thomas Grossbölting and Hans-Ulrich Thamer about the Soviet Zone of Occupation and the early GDR is more circumscribed. It goes back to a Münster research project headed by Hans-Ulrich Thamer, one of the best-known historians of the National Socialist period. In his introduction Thamer transcends the common totalitarian interpretation of two dictatorships in Germany. He asks about continuities in basic mentalities in the rebuilding of society after 1945. He writes, "Mental continuities and the reference to traditional patterns and dispositions based the GDR closer to the NS period than the actors and posterity assumed" (p. 4). That assertion is demonstrated in nine sometimes methodically innovative contributions, all of which are based on new archival evidence. Especially the restructuring of agriculture via land reform (Sabine Marquart and Jens Murken) is viewed here through an interpretation of an agricultural pressure group (the Vereinigung gegenseitiger Bauernhilfe), through artisanry, small production (Rüdiger Schmidt; Thomas Grossbölting) and the role of industrial producers (Armin Ozwar). These contributions shed new light on early GDR history.

The other major theme in the Thamer-Grossbölting volume is the previously neglected question of mobility in the Soviet Zone: "resettlers" (Umsiedeler) was the neutral label for many refugees and displaced persons from the East who--under Soviet control and Polish authority--had to be characterized in neutral ways that were not politically charged. They thus received no special official treatment and had many reasons to complain, as shown by Michael Grottendiek and Michael Schwartz. Especially revealing is Heike van Hoorn's contribution on the small village of Zinna. Antifascist "resettlers" (Antifa Umsiedler) from the Sudetenland were recognized as such in the newly created Czech Republic, but nevertheless were transferred to this village in Brandenburg. The population of Zinna rose to more than 600, including the 285 approved antifascists. This expansion caused massive social conflicts. The notion of a mobilizing effect by the socially conscious new settlers was mostly lost. Taken together, the collection of essays by Grossbölting and Thamer provides us with an innovative approach to one dominant question--the transformation processes which, in their social and cultural aspects, bore more continuities with the former period than was often assumed.

The only monograph discussed here is a Hamburg Ph.D. dissertation by Schanett Riller. She criticises the traditional notion of "Diplomacy"--using Henry Kissinger's book title--and argues that her exploration of foreign information policy is a new approach. However, as her introduction shows, it is not really new. She refers to a dozen studies from Volker Berghahn, Frank Schumacher, and Bernd Stöver, just to mention some authors. Indeed, this innovative approach cannot replace more or less traditional diplomatic history, but it underlines that even in Kissinger's times there were more features to diplomacy than the traditional "what one clerk said to another" dimension that is typically portrayed. Having widely researched in U.S. archives, Riller underlines that information politics was a kind of fourth dimension of foreign policy. She traces its beginnings to World War II and takes the story up to the growing refinement of "total diplomacy" during the Kennedy era. This narrative is also not really new. Innovative, however, are her 167 pages on the RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) in Berlin. Arguably, RIAS was the most important single broadcasting station for the USIA. Riller has analyzed more than 500 broadcasts and convincingly demonstrates that the contents were indeed in line with U.S. information policies. That is only surprising when juxtaposed with eyewitness interviews (among them Egon Bahr and Klaus Bölling--who are mentioned in the foreword but not in the sources) who all give testimony that no one felt pressured by content guidelines. Maybe the Cold War atmosphere, especially in Berlin (which included kidnapping and personal threats), contributed decisively to this mood. Historians and contemporary witnesses have concluded that the ideology program conducted by the USIA and the RIAS were not perceived as propaganda all along. Up to 1953, the RIAS directly addressed GDR citizens and was thus inadvertently, as she correctly describes, instrumental in that year's uprising. This direct approach came to an end in the mid-fifties and was followed up by an emphasis on cultural matters. RIAS (the only broadcasting station in West Berlin at that time) thus became an important information medium in the east and west. It is to Riller's merit that she has shown this in detail in a differentiated way.

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Citation: Jost Dülffer. Review of Großbölting, Thomas; Thamer, Hans-Ulrich, Die Errichtung der Diktatur: Transformationsprozesse in der Sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in der frühen DDR and Hockerts, Hans Günter, Koordinaten deutscher Geschichte in der Epoche des Ost-West-Konflikts and Riller, Schanett, Funken für die Freiheit: Die U.S.-amerikanische Informationspolitik gegenüber der DDR von 1953 bis 1963. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11230

Copyright © 2005 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.