Frank Ebbinghaus. Ausnutzung und Verdrängung: Steuerungsprobleme der SED-Mittelstandspolitik 1955-1972. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2003. 366 S. EUR 48.00 (gebunden), ISBN 978-3-428-10866-4.

Reviewed by Andrew I. Port (Department of History, Wayne State University)
Published on H-German (January, 2006)

The Beginning of the End?

To what extent did the piecemeal elimination of the private sector in East Germany contribute to the collapse of the postwar socialist state? An answer to this question provides at least a partial response to what is perhaps the historiographical Gretchenfrage of the post-Wall period: what really led to the demise of the German Democratic Republic? These are not the primary questions addressed in Frank Ebbinghaus's study, but they arguably lie at the heart of this archivally based examination of SED policy toward the East German Mittelstand, i.e., toward those members of the industrial and commercial middle classes engaged in the private or semi-private sector. Its actual focus is on the underlying motives and evolution of that policy from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, and on the way in which high-level officials and low-level functionaries put that policy into practice--or failed to do so as originally intended. To be more exact, the study concentrates almost exclusively on the background and execution of two major campaigns--one in 1958-1960, the other in 1972--that aimed to "socialize" and then completely nationalize the private sector.

As the title of the book suggests, and as Ebbinghaus makes abundantly clear, official treatment of the East German Mittelstand wavered between exploitation (and thus acceptance) on the one hand, and suppression on the other. What that meant, in practice, was that the SED's ideologically driven efforts to stifle the private sector through a variety of discriminatory and periodically repressive practices were routinely offset by a grudging toleration--and deliberate exploitation--of that sector because of its undeniable economic value. This ambivalence, which runs like a red thread throughout the entire period investigated in this study, reflected a fundamental dilemma shared by all socialist regimes: how to square immutable ideological imperatives with everyday economic necessities. Ebbinghaus is especially interested in demonstrating the severe economic dislocations that resulted each time the scales tipped in favor of the former--which usually occurred, he argues, because of major international caesuras as well as political machinations taking place at the highest echelons of the SED. Does he succeed?

It would be hard to deny that political and ideological concerns played at least some role in the two major socialization campaigns discussed at length in this book. Whether or not they were paramount, as Ebbinghaus suggests, is another matter. He offers no real evidence, for example, to demonstrate that a major internal power struggle between SED General Secretary Walter Ulbricht and his rivals was the "most important impulse" for the socialization drive of the late 1950s (p. 66). Or that "ideology" was the "most powerful motivation" (p. 297) for the nationalization campaign launched by Ulbricht's successor, Erich Honecker, in 1972. It would seem that material considerations--namely the desire for a stronger and healthier economy that could produce more goods and better satisfy consumer demands--remained most decisive in both cases. To that end, and as Ebbinghaus demonstrates himself, the SED became much more interested in exploiting, rather than stifling, the productive capacity of the private sector following the statewide uprising of June 1953. The introduction in 1955 of so-called Betriebe mit staatlicher Beteiligung (BSB, or private enterprises with joint state ownership) and Produktionsgenossenschaften des Handwerks (PGH, or production cooperatives for craftsmen) marked the first major step in that direction.

Yet as Ebbinghaus makes clear, the regime's concerted efforts to socialize the private sector--above all during the accelerated campaigns of 1958-1960 and 1972--failed to deliver, so to speak, the desired goods. In fact, they tended to make a bad situation even worse. This is where the study is arguably at its strongest: at describing the chaotic nature of the campaigns and at showing how, as a result, the SED's policies toward the Mittelstand frequently had unintended and often economically undesirable consequences. The socialization drive of the late 1950s, for instance, led to an overall reduction in the volume of repairs and services, which only served to exacerbate the existing supply crisis that the regime was struggling to resolve. Along similar lines, Ebbinghaus shows how both campaigns eventually became victims of their own "success"--with success being defined simply as the rapid satisfaction of quotas set on high by officials who lacked accurate information and reliable statistics about the private sector: "Increasing pressure to socialize came more and more at the cost of a proper and economically constructive transformation" of the firms in question (p. 103). This characterization of the 1958-1960 campaign holds equally true for the more far-reaching nationalization that took place in the spring of 1972, when the last remnants of the private sector--which by the time only accounted for approximately 15 percent of all production in the GDR--finally disappeared.

Did this contribute significantly to the demise of the postwar socialist state? Or to put it somewhat differently: did Honecker's nationalization campaign "speed up the collapse of the GDR seventeen years later" (p. 310)? Ebbinghaus hints at this conclusion, but does not really say with any precision what the long-term economic effects were in the end. Given that his actual archival research was limited to a much shorter time span--and one even narrower than that suggested by the title of the book--such prudence was well advised. It would have been equally well advised in other areas as well.

Ebbinghaus is keenly intent on demonstrating, for example, that there was almost complete continuity between the Mittelstandspolitik pursued by Ulbricht and Honecker--and on taking to task those historians who have claimed otherwise.[1] Calling into question the widely accepted characterization of the 1960s as a "reform era favorable to the middle classes" (p. 129) and dismissing any evidence suggesting that Ulbricht had more or less made his peace with the Mittelstand, he claims that both leaders of the SED ultimately had one and the same goal: the eventual elimination of the private sector. That might be true, and Ebbinghaus does provide some evidence suggesting that the aging and increasingly irascible Saxon was contemplating a more aggressive stance toward the remaining Mittelstand during his waning months in power. But it still seems rather bold to make any claims about continuity between Ulbricht and Honecker in a study that devotes less than a dozen pages to the years between 1961 and 1969. The author's larger agenda nevertheless seems clear: to burst the bubble of those scholars who still tend to view the end of the Ulbricht reform era as a "missed opportunity" to carry out salutary modifications that might have ultimately salvaged the socialist project. In the end, the proffered material in this study contributes little to that important (if highly politicized) debate.

That said, Frank Ebbinghaus has produced what will certainly be considered a standard investigation of the 1972 nationalization campaign, to which he devotes almost half of the book. This "slightly shortened, slightly revised" (p. 28) version of the author's dissertation is not for the uninitiated, however: all but the most committed GDR-junkies will undoubtedly have a difficult time working their way through the intricacies of the GDR's socialist command economy and Byzantine bureaucratic structures. That very chaos, which Ebbinghaus captures so well, nevertheless gives an extremely good sense of one major reason why centralized planning usually produced such meager results.

Note

[1]. For a review of the book by one of the historians criticized at length, see Jörg Roesler, "Review of Frank Ebbinghaus, Ausnutzung und Verdrängung. Steuerungsprobleme der SED-Mittelstandspolitik 1955-1972, H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews, January 2004.

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Citation: Andrew I. Port. Review of Ebbinghaus, Frank, Ausnutzung und Verdrängung: Steuerungsprobleme der SED-Mittelstandspolitik 1955-1972. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11361

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