East Germany and the Frontiers of Power

Introduction 5There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade,the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towardsnegative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At theother extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanismthat must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective,a design of subtle coercion for a society to come.²¹In the GDR both possibilities existed side by side. The Wall provided aliteral ‘discipline-blockade’, but other ‘discipline-mechanisms’ were available,both before and after 1961, not least of which was the all-seeing secret police orStasi, but also citizens’ own self-censorship.Ironically, the Wall did indeed permit the regime to refine its surveillancetechniques and achieve a lighter touch within its confines. As Hermann Weber,West Germany’s eminent GDR scholar, characterized the period immediatelyfollowing its building, ‘by adaptation to the constraints of a modern industrialsociety the methods of rule in the GDR altered considerably: they shifted moreand more from terror to neutralization and manipulation of the masses’.²²Within the closed societal laboratory, the regime engaged in ambitious socialengineering through positive discrimination towards certain groups and thewithering away of others. This socioeconomic leverage involved so-called ‘socialpower’, whereby an agency indirectly predisposes citizens through an incentivestructure to ‘choose’ to conform. The key levers of social power were the party,labour, and education. The GDR has consequently been labelled both a ‘welfaredictatorship’ (Fürsorgediktatur), dispensing social security in return for politicalobedience,²³ and a ‘didactic dictatorship’ (Erziehungsdiktatur), with the partyposing as ‘guardian’ to an immature citizenry.²⁴ If totalitarian is to mean anythingthen, it must signify greater sophistication of power, rather than the proverbialsecret police knock at the door.²⁵Closely scrutinized, totalitarian control is anything but total, generatingresistance by the very attempt to micromanage. Case studies suggest thatindividuals’ self-interest, their so-called Eigen-Sinn to borrow Alf Lüdtke’sphrase, can create autonomous spaces in defiance of the state, expressed throughritual and even body language.²⁶ One West German observer famously described²¹ Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1981), 209.²² Hermann Weber, Geschichte der DDR (Munich: dtv, 1985), 327.²³ Konrad H. Jarausch, ‘Care and Coercion: The GDR as Welfare Dictatorship’, in id. (ed.),Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford:Berghahn, 1999), 47–69.²⁴ Henrich, Der vormundschaftliche Staat.²⁵ Even Cold War broadcasters at the time realized that programmes where ‘loud knockingsat the door followed by everyone being afraid that the Secret Police have come at last’ werecounter-productive stereotypes: T. Peters, ‘Programme Content of BBC’s Soviet Zone GermanBroadcasts’, 3 June 1959, The National Archives (TNA), FO 1110/1240.²⁶ Alf Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in denFaschismus (Hamburg: Ergebnisse, 1993); Thomas Lindenberger (ed.), Herrschaft und Eigen-Sinn