Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk. Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit: Politischer Samisdat in der DDR 1985-1989. Berlin: Robert Havemann Gesellschaft, 2002. 597 S. EUR 25.00 (broschiert), ISBN 978-3-9804920-6-5.

Reviewed by Timothy Dowling (Department of History, Virginia Military Institute)
Published on H-German (November, 2004)

(Belated) Notes from the Underground

Fifteen years down the road, scholars have done a pretty good job of dispelling the popular myth that the East German Revolution of 1989 sprang full-formed from the head of Zeus (or Gorbachev, take your pick). Christian Joppke and Dirk Phillipsen rapidly provided a perspective on the development of democratic movements in the GDR prior to the Wende.[1] Lutz Niethammer, Konrad Jarausch, Ralph Jessen, and Christopher Klessmann, among others, then led the way to a re-evaluation of the "totalitarian" rubric as it applied to East Germany.[2] Now, in a large and wide-ranging tome, Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk provides a body of documentary evidence to substantiate both positions. His work proves that democratic movements not only existed, but were also active and important in generating the movement toward democracy and unification in 1989.

By and large, the volume is exactly what it says it is--a documentation--and no more (which is a positive thing). Readers can decide for themselves what the precise nature of the opposition was. The selections are divided into six sections that represent the discussions that went on in the burgeoning opposition movements: Politics from below; the Dictatorship of the GDR; Opposition Activities; the Communal Situation in the GDR; German Questions; and the "Communal House of Europe." The texts illuminate the nature of the movements and will prove invaluable to professors teaching upper-division and graduate courses dealing with East Germany.

They are not exactly fodder for American undergraduates. Most of the essays are fairly dry, academic explications of complex positions. It is difficult to imagine stirring a seminar (much less a revolution) to life with Dorothea Höck's "'Sprache, die für Dich dichtet und denkt.' Zum Verhältnis von Propagandasprache und Herrschaft," for instance. For those familiar with or studying the nuances of the later German Democratic Republic though, artifacts like the "Offene Eingabe an die Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" from April 1986 and Uwe Kolbe's "Erklärung" of February 1988 are valuable resources. Kowalczuk has provided the documents, and in sufficient number that instructors can pick and choose in order to best illuminate a particular theme.

This is entirely in keeping with the basic tone of the work. The opening essay on samisdat in the GDR presents the simple argument that there was opposition prior to 1989, and it was important. The fact that Kowalczuk chooses and uses samizdat (literally, "self-publishing" in Russian, and rendered samisdat in German) to prove this point is surprising and enlightening, because that term is usually associated with the Soviet Union and very much not so with the German Democratic Republic. Indeed, as Karl Wilhelm Fricke points out in the foreword, the GDR did not really have samisdat for most of its history. First, the term itself was simply not used (p. 15). Second, and more importantly, the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany offered writers, whose offerings might not have been acceptable in the GDR, a relatively easy option for publication. On other occasions, dissidents simply found themselves exiled to the opposite side of the Wall instead of imprisoned. Tamisdat ("publishing over there") thus supplanted samisdat to a large degree (p. 36). What "self-publishing" existed in East Germany, moreover, was artistic in nature and not political until the 1980s (p. 41).

Kowalczuk, however, never really seeks to explain why political samisdat began to appear at that time. Instead, he allows Gerd Poppe, Roland Jahn, and other leading figures to explain how they became involved in samisdat in two oral history pieces that bridge the essay and the documents. Kowalczuk simply presents the evidence--over four hundred pages of it, and that is only, apparently, a small sampling of the most important texts. Starting with the first "nicht staatliche gesellschaftskritische" periodical in 1980, Kowalczuk reels off an impressive twenty-four-page listing of only some of the underground periodicals put out in the GDR between 1984 and 1989 (pp. 50-75). Most of these samisdat newsletters were published in connection with the churches, which afforded them enough protection to grow and gain significance. By 1989, in fact, Kowalczuk argues that "the opposition and their samisdat publications had prepared the ground on which a revolution could take place" (p. 103). Given the number of editions and the circulation of the various publications provided in Kowalczuk's list, this conclusion remains debatable. Perhaps the next step is for an enterprising scholar to take the documents Kowalczuk presents and put them into a larger analytical framework. It would make fascinating reading.

Notes

[1]. Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime (New York: New York University Press, 1995); and Dirk Phillipsen, We Were the People: Voices from East Germany's Revolutionary Autumn of 1989 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992).

[2]. See, for instance, Lutz Niethammer, Die Volkseigene Erfahrung. Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR. 30 biographische Eröffnungen (Berlin: Rohwohlt, 1991); and Konrad Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghan Books, 1999).

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Citation: Timothy Dowling. Review of Kowalczuk, Ilko-Sascha, Freiheit und Öffentlichkeit: Politischer Samisdat in der DDR 1985-1989. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9973

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