CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF DOMINATION CHAPTER 11
DICTATORSHIP AS DISCOURSE
CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES ON SED LEGITIMACY
Martin Sabrow
There is . . . a true lie.â Stephan Hermlin, 19961
The further the former East German state slips into the past, the more difficult it is to understand how the GDR system could function, noted one of Germanyâs leading weekly magazines seven years after German reunification.2 Paradoxically, the more information we have about the SED dictatorship â its techniques of power, its economic system, and social structure â the less we seem to understand how it could continue to exist for over forty years. The stateâs ideological rhetoric, its Manichean patterns of thought, and the ritual acts that shaped the daily lives of its citizens all appear hopelessly foreign to us, even incomprehensible.
Both critics and supporters of the past regime share this sense of incomprehension and are unable to explain the GDRâs sustained legitimacy. In 1998 a former Politburo member who has radically distanced himself from his prior policies spoke on TV with some astonishment about the barriers in his head, and was unable to justify why it had never occurred to him before 1989, not even when he was in the West, to read the books of communismâs critics such as Arthur Koestler or Wolfgang Leonhard.3 And the ex-pastor Joachim Gauck, who certainly cannot be accused of excessive loyalty to the state, has asked himself how he could have been unwilling for such a long time to confront the true nature of the East German state.4 Even Erich Mielke, head of the state security system and keeper of all state secrets, could provide no explanation for the sudden erosion of the chains that had tied the populace to the dictatorship, and asked, âHow could it happen that we simply gave up our GDR, just like that?â5
All these questions revolve around the same problem â how to explain the internal force that held communist regimes together in the twentieth century. Unlike the NS state, socialist rule in East Germany did not grow from within, but was imposed from without. It never enjoyed the support of the majority of the population, and at no time could the regime establish a substitute legitimacy through such incentives as social mobility, economic prosperity, or national identity. Indeed, unlike other states within the Eastern bloc, it faced a permanent rival in all of these areas in the Federal Republic, a state that claimed the same national identity and whose citizens spoke the same language. The political, social, and cultural influence of West Germany was undeniable and constant throughout the GDRâs entire existence. âWe are here, and over there at the Brandenburg Gate is the enemy,â warned Kurt Hager, responsible for ideological questions, in his attempt to dismiss academic resistance to a radical politicization of the historical profession in 1956.6
The GDR could never meet any of the requirements formulated by Max Weber in his ideal types of legitimate rule. Traditionalism or bureaucratic legality fit a dictatorship in a society that was experiencing rapid social change, a partially de-professionalized administration, and numerous novel and informal stabilizing mechanisms as little as the charisma of its leaders. In short, the âbuilders of socialismâ7 were no FĂŒhrer. And yet, the âmajority of East Germans did not question the legitimacy of their state,â as Jens Reich has rightly pointed out.8 It is possible that one of the main causes for the long-term stability of socialist regimes (which varied for different countries within the Soviet bloc) as well as one of the reasons for their sudden and unexpected collapse can be traced back to their inner binding force and its slow erosion. This form of compensatory legitimacy, not (or not solely) based on ideology and more than mere reluctant loyalty, has not yet been adequately addressed by scholars.9
Studies that examine the GDR in terms of the historical development of its dictatorship offer few starting points for considering the widespread social acceptance of the regime which granted it a more permanent quality and secured its daily existence. Those scholars who employ totalitarian theory to emphasize the repressive nature of the regime measure the GDR â either openly or not â against the backdrop of the achievements of liberal democracies. This approach reduces analysis of the GDR to assigning varying degrees of abnormality to the regime. Such analysts describe the SED dictatorship as trapped in a permanent state of emergency, and fail to analyze those elements in GDR society that at least internally, made SED rule less like a dictatorship, or not entirely a dictatorship. Because this approach sees the GDR âfrom above,â it concentrates on static and unchanging intentions or goals, rather than focusing on the actual practice of rule. This limits historiansâ ability to understand the regimeâs acceptance in society and the ways in which methods of rule were internalized by the populace. It also does little to explain the sudden, almost noiseless implosion of the regime that ended Germanyâs second dictatorship almost as dramatically as the first.
The term âmodern dictatorshipâ attempts to address these shortcomings, but it has not yet been able to remedy them effectively. In the context of modernization theory, the dictatorships of the twentieth century cannot seriously be considered in terms of their modernity. The relative modernity of the second German dictatorship is in any case highly contested, particularly in light of the fact that the regime collapsed precisely because of its modernizing deficits vis-ĂĄ-vis the West.10 The term âmodernâ is further problematic in and of itself, as long as it is seen not as a historical category but as a teleological end, meant to shape a particular present and form of its ruling values. One could also argue that describing the national socialist and communist dictatorships as modern follows the very definition of modernity forwarded by those regimes themselves, which robs the term of its analytical usefulness.11
Yet all dictatorships of the twentieth century are different from âpre-modernâ forms of dictatorial rule; they all attempt to drape their power in the cloak of legitimate, plebiscitary rule. They counter those problems associated with individualization in the democratic age with visions of communal utopias; they base their rule on mobilization and aim at mass participation. Nevertheless, they are not peopleâs democracies, but peopleâs dictatorships, based on a shared or forced identification between the rulers and the ruled. In concrete applications of the term âmodern dictatorship,â however, the instruments of this mobilizing form of legitimacy â such as âpropaganda, repression, seduction, and terrorâ â nevertheless mirror (or borrow from) classical totalitarian theory.12
A cultural historical approach seems to offer more promising avenues of analysis. It would examine the non-material structures of East German realities which shaped patterns of action and thought over a period of forty years. From such a perspective, the important question about the GDR becomes whether the dictatorship could create a form of normalcy that provided its citizens with a specific identity. This normality secured acceptance of the regime and was rooted in a particular discourse that dovetailed with the stateâs interests and methods of rule. No other field promises a more fruitful analysis of the methods of such a construction than the regimeâs relationship to the past, and the manner in which historians created a particular GDR history and defined historical truth.
Truth in Historical Scholarship
Judged by general professional norms, the standards of internal research organization, public exchange of information, and international prestige, the historical profession in the GDR only partly and incompletely resembled that ânormal scholarshipâ which many of its proponents after 198913 and a slowly growing number of West Germans claimed for it before 1989. If one looks more closely at the internal rules of the profession and East German professional discourse, one can see that ideological norms of âsocialist scienceâ not only influenced daily encounters with the past, but determined a level of thought beyond individual professional analysis. GDR history was, according to its own standards, a political history that saw its symbiotic relationship with the interests of the SED not as an enslavement of scholarship, but as a way of freeing history from the chains of bourgeois convention. Historians were not only aware of the political dimension of their work, they believed that the influence of party decisions, the pronouncement of significant historical âturning points,â and the shifts of political course were vital elements of their profession. In the theoretical reflections of the introductory textbook by Eckermann and Mohr, the party itself was portrayed as the ideal historian.14 The separation of politics and science very typical of the West, however much it may form the basis of a moral evaluation of GDR history, cannot provide an adequate explanation of this unique brand of politicized history.
Professionalism was not seen as opposed to partisanship, but it was rather the combination of both that was typical of history in East Germany. According to the internal logic of their profession, GDR historians believed that history did not have to lose in empirical veracity what it had gained in political significance. The unique blend of partisanship and objectivity appeared in practice, not as an ideological struggle with the truth or as a blatant manipulation of the facts, but seemed merely the result of a brand of inquiry structured along different lines. Professional historians and politicians agreed in their belief that empiricism and partisanship could be united. Kurt Hager was certainly not in danger of becoming a laughing stock when he commented to the âleading comrades of the historical professionâ in 1971: âHistory is an active factor in the realization of the partyâs politics. These politics are to learn from the past, and to act on these lessons. This has nothing to do with pragmatic simplification, but rather, it is objective truth.â15
To meet such demands, the discursive field of GDR historiography had to be quite different from that of the West. GDR historians worked within a scholarship that countered Western criteria such as plausibility, plurality, and skepticism with the âideal of the proper realization.â This was based on the belief that âhistorical science . . . [is able] to give an exact picture of the entire historical process.â16 The force of a partisan definition of the truth within socialist science allowed historians to do away with contradictory evidence or judgments, when necessary, and to deny potential detractors any basis of criticism, without injuring the scientific nature of their discourse. In the case of a conflict between partisanship and objectivity, the âveto power of the sourcesâ was only limited. Research results that met the standards of historical Quellenkritik could be dismissed in East German-speak as overly âobjectifiedâ or âfacticistâ whenever they contradicted party positions.
This combination of partisanship and objectivity which formed a new brand of historical truth extended far beyond the borders of history, replacing the categorical distinction between fact and fiction with a contrast between internal and external discourses, or GDR science and enemy science. The borders between fact and fiction became increasingly unclear over t...