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What kind of society was the Deutsche Demokratische Republik? Mary Fulbrook in The People's State believes that the DDR was in some sense normal, whereas Arvid Nelson, writing about its approach to Nature in Cold War Ecology, and Eli Rubin, writing about its approach to artifacts in Synthetic Socialism, disagree. Nelson and Rubin provide a lens for thinking about the DDR in terms that are wider than what we conventionally label as religion but nevertheless bound up with fundamental attitudes to the world—above all to Nature and the nature of the human artifact. Furthermore those who postulate a religious instinct, whether existentially or biologically based, or who regard religion as a functional requirement of society, are prone to regard Communism as sharing key characteristics with religion. Indeed Nelson uses the word "religion" both with reference to some purist forms of Marxism and to the German reverence for Natur. Marxism picks up the religious idea of human dominion over Nature through the exploitation for human purposes of the powers of production, while being less sympathetic toward the equally religious or, at any rate, religiously romantic reverence for Nature, in Caspar David Friedrich, for example. For Germans the landscape, whether of the Rhineland or the Brocken, is iconic, just as the English landscape is iconic for English people. Music and literature are both accorded a quasi-religious respect in Germany, and Marxist ideology consistently attempted to harness the great names of the East of Germany, Goethe and Schiller, Bach and Handel, even Luther and Schleiermacher, to its own genealogy of progress. Ironically it was the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra which, with the church, played a major role in the fall of the regime in 1989.
What exactly is Mary Fulbrook's case for the normality of the DDR, or rather for the widespread existence of normal life? She admits, of course that a society based on surveillance and manipulative intervention, one that hems its citizens in behind a wall lest they flee conditions social scientifically designed to release their human potential, was far from normal. All the same she emphasizes the mundane ordinariness of life in the DDR, particularly as people grew up who knew nothing different. That, after all, is what socialization means and what it does under almost any regime that is not undergoing chronic collapse, whether it is Soviet Russia as recounted in Orlando Figes' The Whisperers or Danzig under the Nazis in Günter Grass' Peeling the Onion. The young Grass thought Nazi Germany sufficiently "ordinary" to join the Waffen SS. Fulbrook refers to the DDR variously as a "participatory dictatorship" and (with an odd echo of The Fable of the Bees) as a "honeycomb state." She describes how East Germans became "used to a society in which they were assured of child-care places and cheap holidays; of education, training and guaranteed employment; of a degree of comradeship among workplace colleagues, and relaxation in work-based sporting and social activities, on outings and anniversaries," and contrasts this with the more individualistic and competitive society of the Federal Republic in order to claim a real basis for Ostalgie. Her conclusion is almost elegiac: "In the end, in the context of a collapsing economy that precipitated the end of the Cold War, the individual search for material well-being and personal freedom won over the utopian dreams born in the violence of the Second World War."
Of course, when you switch the criteria of power and privilege from economic entrepreneurship to political rectitude, you are bound to rely on lies, on corruption and privilege, on the basis of personal connections to the power élite. At the same time, though the power élite in the DDR was tiny, the wider state involved millions in mass organizations and the party, and some areas were open to negotiation provided limits were strictly observed. East Germans did not necessarily see themselves as dupes or willing tools of totalitarianism. In any case it wasn't possible to cut off the population of the DDR from wider currents of change in modernizing societies, including youth culture and increasing individualization. What perhaps does not come across in Fulbrook's account is the degree to which people became passive, perhaps because they regarded initiative as dangerous. The health service, for example, was bedevilled by bureaucracy and the total inadequacy of supplies and investment, as well as by the interference of political priorities and—something ubiquitous in the Eastern bloc—"health rationing by power, privilege and (re)productivity." Pro-natalist policies, in some ways shared with the previous regime though not on a racist basis, contributed to an increased birth rate and much lower infant mortality. The dying fared less well.
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