In the wake of Germany's military defeat in 1918, social and economic programs that previously could have been left to academicians or party theoreticians suddenly acquired a new urgency and immediacy. One of the more interesting—and controversial—of these was an ambitious proposal by the engineer Wichard von Moellendorff, who served in 1918 and 1919 as Under State Secretary in the Reich Economics Office (later the Economics Ministry), to redesign the entire edifice of the German economy through the implementation of a system of economic “collectivism” or “planning” (Gemeinwirtschaft or Planwirtschaft). With the assistance of his superiors, the right-wing Social Democrats August Müller and Rudolf Wissell, Moellendorff endeavored to institutionalize his plans in the months after the November Revolution, until a negative cabinet decision in July 1919 precipitated his resignation.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the significance of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and all that it purported to stand for has been largely cast aside. Other than as a cautionary tale, the GDR has been widely seen as offering little to contemporary political discourse. By contrast, in recent years, its experience, especially in its early formative period, has attracted a lot of attention from historians. In part this burst of activity can be attributed to the opening of closed archives in eastern Europe, but it is also related to the desire to understand better how a flawed system could maintain such seeming stability for so long, and then, how all that could collapse so suddenly and ignobly in 1989. Was its demise inevitable, rooted, as it were, in the DNA of the system, or were there alternative paths that could have been taken? Much of the recent research is founded on the premise that insights and answers to such questions can be uncovered by going back to the origins of the system. This article is written in the same vein. Its aim is to shed light on how aspects of the East German workplace evolved in the period between the beginnings of Soviet occupation and the establishment of a Soviet-style planned economy by 1949–50.

After reading the “Jewish News Bulletin” (Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt) in early 1939, the Romance language scholar Victor Klemperer wrote: “Until 1933 and for at least a good century before that, the German Jews were entirely German and nothing else … They were and remain (even if now they no longer wish to remain so) Germans …” Klemperer, a convert to Protestantism, but a “full Jew” by Nazi decree, continued, “It is part of the Lingua tertii imperii [LTI, language of the Third Reich] that the expression ‘Jewish people’ [Volk] appears repeatedly in the ‘Jewish News'…”

To what extent was liberalism a resurgent force in the last decade of the German Empire? Considerable debate has materialized around this question. After he became chair of the National Liberal caucus in the Reichstag, the Badenese attorney Ernst Bassermann gathered around himself a coterie of young reformers (the most notable of whom was Gustav Stresemann) who were eager to rejuvenate German liberalism. While opening themselves to alliances with social democracy and the working class, these self-consciously proud members of the business and educated middle classes vigorously asserted an aggressive liberal profile and busied themselves with the creation of new organizational structures to undergird a revivified liberal movement. We know a great deal about some of these political-organizational projects, most notably the Young Liberal movement and the Hansabund. Historians have, however, neglected the rural component of this revival—the German Peasant League (Deutscher Bauernbund, or DBB)—which Bassermann recognized as equally important to the National Liberal party's future as the Hansabund.

The Treaty of Rapallo, concluded between Soviet Russia and the Weimar Republic on April 16, 1922, has been interpreted by Western historians as a logical result of the process of the reestablishment of the close economic ties which Germany and Russia had shared before the First World War. “A long tradition built on a solid foundation of common interest,” writes Edward Hallett Carr, “favoured the rapid development of commercial relations. … Links so strong and so profitable to both parties were not easily broken.” Strengthened by the limitations imposed on German exports by the Allies after the war, this natural tendency “impelled the whole of German industry to face east.” The revival of a substantial commerce between the two countries was forestalled, however, by the Allied blockade, until it was lifted in January 1920, and by German hopes for the collapse of the Soviet regime and fears of Bolshevism. These last two obstacles, it is claimed, disappeared in early 1921, at the same time that the introduction of the New Economic Policy in Russia was stimulating even greater German interest in the restoration of trade with her. “During the rest of 1921 there took place a steady thickening of the Russo-German link. … At first this took a predominantly economic form,” in which “rapid strides” were made. Opening up “the Russian market became a major preoccupation of German policy” in the latter half of that year. Thus economic goals were an important reason —one historian calls them “the real inducement”—for the Rapallo Treaty.

Virtually all studies of the rise of nationalism in modern Germany relate their subject in some way to the history of the state. There was, for example, a profusion of national feeling in German society in the later nineteenth century, and it has been seen as an outgrowth of the aggrandizement of state power in Prussia. German nationalism in the Age of Napoleon has been viewed as the nation's response to her subjugation by France, which in turn the Revolution made possible by enlarging the social base of French rule. So-called high politics—these central relations of power in or among particular states—indeed produced stimuli for the growth of German national sentiment. However, due in part to modernization theory, the connection between nationalism and the state now appears in another light. Interest in the state has come to include the administration, a less exalted form of politics but no less crucial to the process of nation-building.

Responding to a lawyer's impassioned plea for “justice” for his client, a great judge supposedly remarked, “We deal with the law here, not with justice.” This apocryphal comment sums up a fundamental dilemma: should courts simply apply the law as written or seek out “justice” in every case? Before World War I, German jurists chose the former approach. For them the Rechtsstaat (variously, the just state or state rooted in law) was to be secured by establishing a legal code covering all contingencies and then applying this code exactly to each case. Only thus could individuals and their rights be protected from caprice or arbitrariness. Yet between 1914 and 1924 the German judiciary jettisoned this concept and tacitly redefined the Rechtsstaat to make the judges' conception of equity, rather than statutes, the ultimate guarantee of justice.

Punctually at 8:00 A.M. on 26 November 1895, teams of police officers in Berlin began to search the homes of nearly eighty members of the Social Democratic Party, and the city offices of their organizations. These surprise raids, over by 10:00 a.m., were ordered by the Prussian Minister of Interior, Ernst Köller, to obtain evidence that the Socialist organizations had been working with one another to promote their political goals. In 1895 it was illegal in Prussia, and in most of the other states of the German Empire, for political associations of any kind to work together. Yet the evidence so efficiently confiscated on that gray November morning ultimately put not only the Socialists on trial, but government policy and the fundamental political rights of German citizens as well. Neither the national constitution nor the federal law codes provided protection for the rights of association or assembly at that time. In the absence of such guarantees, the political organizations had to cope with the particularities of the various state laws.

Fully five decades before Olympe de Gouges, Mary Woll–stonecraft, and Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel spoke out for the equality of men and women, Dorothea Christiane Leporin, Germany's first female medical doctor, challenged the readers of her Thorough Investigation of the Causes which Prevent the Female Sex from Studying to free themselves from the idea that all women are destined to serve husband, house, and children. As she put it: “If one admits that the female sex is capable of learning, then one must also admit that it has received a calling to go with it.” She reached this conclusion by accepting the assumption that men and women are equally suited for intellectual endeavors and then questioning all real and fictitious obstacles that were placed in the way of female study. Like all her known contemporaries, Leporin did not want to press all women into advanced study, which according to her would cause disorder, but she pleaded eloquently for the removal of prejudices and obstacles to talent.

In his The Man Without Qualities the Austrian writer Robert Musil examines the declining state patriotism of the Austro-Germans in 1913–1914. He describes a fictional Patriotic Campaign (Parallelaktion) in a land he calls Kakania because the Habsburg ruler was Kaiser (emperor) in Austria and König (king) in Hungary and the state's joint institutions were labeled “k. u. k.” The organizers of this Campaign hoped ostensibly to discover a Kakanian idea or mission for the upcoming celebration of the ruler's seventy-year reign in 1918, but in fact their real objective was to put a stop to the growing enthusiasm of the Austro-Germans for the German Reich. As the head of the Campaign, His Highness the Imperial Liege-Count Leinsdorf put it, he hoped “to win over precisely that section of Kakanians of German descent who felt less allegiance to their country than to the German nation.” This was no easy task as the Austro-Germans were even less loyal to their government than the other peoples of Austria-Hungary. As a result Leinsdorf planned first to gain the support of the other nationalities, “for only when one had been successful in this would all the German circles see themselves compelled to join in, since, it is, of course, much more difficult to hold aloof from something that everyone else is doing than to refuse to be the first to begin.

The tribute given to Saul Alinsky on his death in 1972 indicates the attention paid in our age to the problems of community organizing. Most citizen groups formed in response to such threats as urban renewal, danger to the environment, or mandatory busing face problems of factionalism, inefficiency, lack of money, and even conflicting loyalties of their members, unless they have the direction of someone like Alinsky, who earned his reputation as a professional organizer. The alternative is to found a group imbued with an ideology which can be characterized as radical (“as a kind of mental and moral discipline”) and an organization which consequently reflects this discipline. The existence of such political organizations, “specially designated and organized bands of men [who] might play a creative part in the political world,” of individuals motivated to join forces “with any man who might help them without regard to the older bonds of family and neighborhood” have a historical origin: they were the contribution of the religious wars in sixteenth-century Europe. The Calvinists were the ancestors of the Bolsheviks.

In 1776, Moses Isaacs died in Berlin. Along with Isaac Daniel Itzig and Veitel Heine Ephraim, Isaacs had made a fortune during the Seven Years' War minting coins and supplying the army. Isaacs left behind an estate of three-quarters of a million talers in gold, most of which was organized into a family trust extending to the life of the grandchildren. The only stipulation Isaacs placed on his will was that should any of his five surviving children convert to Christianity, they would forego their share of the inheritance. The first of Isaacs's children to convert were his two daughters, Rebecca and Blümchen, who both proceeded to marry noblemen. In 1780, their two unconverted brothers appealed to King Frederick the Great to uphold their father's will and exclude the two defecting sisters from the inheritance. The king ruled in agreement with the brothers more out of loyalty to the deceased Isaacs than out of an aversion to Jewish conversion to Christianity. Whatever his motives, the sisters felt they had been treated unfairly, and so in 1786 they sued in the civil courts to have the anti-conversion clause of the will declared invalid. The first court's decision was in their favor. This court ruled that the anti-conversion clause was inappropriate in a Christian state, insofar as the clause interfered with the inheritance rights of Christian subjects, in this case the two newly Protestant Isaacs daughters. But later that year a higher court reversed this decision, judging from the viewpoint of the Jewish parents, not the Christian children.

Perhaps one of Europe's more remarkable achievements has been the creation of a flourishing bourgeois civilization that has never been free from the most penetrating bourgeois criticism. “Épater le bourgeois” was a great pastime of the last century and the sport still seems to be alive. Ibsen's Pillars of Society, published in 1877, was a radical analysis of the moral pretensions and the moral burden of bourgeois society. The pillars of that society were rotten; the life of the protagonist was a lie violating his own nature and that of his fellowmen. It is as if Ibsen had written a dramatic commentary on the Communist Manifesto without indulging in the comforting hope that a social revolution would create a new man in a newly virtuous society. In the play, salvation came through an improbable act of contrition and self-purgation; at his most revolutionary, Ibsen thought that the feminine slamming of doors sufficed for human improvement.