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East German History and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2022

Samuel Clowes Huneke
Samuel Clowes Huneke*
Affiliation:
George Mason University
*
Email: [email protected]
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Extract

On September 25, 2017, Germany awoke to the horrifying reality that the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party founded in 2013, had romped to third place in the previous day's federal election. With 12.6% of the vote, the party became not only the official face of the opposition to Angela Merkel's not-so-grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), but also the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since the 1950s. Election watchers soon noticed that the AfD had racked up stunning margins in the states that once made up the German Democratic Republic (GDR), coming in first on the second ballot (Zweitstimme) in Saxony and second in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. That the AfD, a racist and xenophobic party that campaigns against European integration and immigration, should do so well in once-socialist states bespoke East Germany's strange resonances in German culture and memory nearly thirty years after its dissolution.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Central European History , Volume 55 , Issue 4 , December 2022 , pp. 576 - 586
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Central European History Society of the American Historical Association

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References

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2 In the 2021 federal elections, the AfD lost about two percent in the national vote (from 12.6% to 10.3%), making it only the fifth-strongest party in parliament and no longer the official face of the opposition. Nonetheless, the party placed first in the eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia and came in second in two other former East German states. Thus, although the AfD does not appear poised for rapid growth, it remains a threat from the far right and has continued to enjoy outsized success in what used to be East Germany. “Der Bundeswahlleiter,” accessed November 19, 2021, https://www.bundeswahlleiter.de.

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12 Mary Fulbrook, The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1.

13 Fulbrook, The People’s State, 10.

14 Eli Rubin, Amnesiopolis: Modernity, Space, and Memory in East Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 20.

15 Paul Stangl, Risen from the Ruins: The Cultural Politics of Rebuilding East Berlin (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018), 192.

16 As noted above, “normality” and “normalization,” which are most closely associated with Mary Fulbrook's work, have become signal concepts through which historians view East German society. Some scholars, such as Paul Betts, refer to how ordinary East Germans experienced a certain “normalization” of their daily lives under state socialism. Fulbrook defines normalization as a useful descriptor “to explore questions concerning the relative stabilisation of domestic political structures and processes [and] the degrees of routinisation and predictability of everyday practices.” However used, the term contains an implicit rebuke of the totalitarian model, implying both restraint on state power and individual agency within the confines of certain norms. Betts, Within Walls, 38; Mary Fulbrook, “The Concept of ‘Normalisation’ and the GDR in Comparative Perspective,” in Power and Society in the GDR, 1961–1979: The ‘Normalisation of Rule’?, ed. Mary Fulbrook (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009), 13.

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25 Port, “Introduction,” 23–24.