Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics. Ed. Katherine Pence and Paul Betts. Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008. vi, 378 pp. Notes. Index. Photographs. $70.00, hard bound.
The purpose of this fine multidisciplinary anthology is to move away from an interpretation of the East German regime that sees it, not just as Germany's "second dictatorship" equating it with Nazism, but also as a highly centralized, homogenous society. To rescue the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from this "dustbin of history," the editors turn to everyday life a move clearly indebted to the ethnographic and microhistorical research on state socialism hallmarked by Sheila Fitzpatrick's revisionist account of Stalinism. What is novel here is the effort to combine this revisionism with a reclassification of East German society as modern. That state socialism was a certain incarnation of modernity is not a new proposition in itself either, and the editors provide a sketchy survey of that theoretical tradition in their introduction. What is true, however, though this is not a critique made by the contributors, is that this ethnographic, from below sensibility often implied that beneath the Kafkaesque party state, social relationships were more traditional than modern. For example, many scholars pointed to the enduring significance of personalized economic transactions, of kin networks and barter, to the relative lack of social and cultural differentiation, and to the entanglement of the public and private realms all elements of premodern social formations. Demonstrating that not just the state but society and individuals themselves were modern is therefore a welcome correction, and I see this as the main theoretical contribution of the volume.
Slavic Review