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We Are The State We Seek: Everyday Life in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, 1945–89

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2012

ANNEMARIE SAMMARTINO
ANNEMARIE SAMMARTINO*
Affiliation:
Oberlin College, 197 W. Lorain St., Oberlin, OH 44074; [email protected]
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Extract

The study of everyday life has had a particular resonance for historians of state socialism for a variety of reasons. First, the study of everyday life promises to get beyond the notorious doublespeak and rosy scenarios of official discourse. Second, the history of everyday life makes use of the great boon of recent history: the availability of interview subjects. Historians of earlier periods can only look longingly at the surfeit of interview subjects available to those who work on more recent decades. While oral history can have its own problems, the works under consideration in this review largely use them to good effect to get at the lacunae and misrepresentations in official discourse. Third, the study of everyday life offers an important vantage point for understanding the vast majority of citizens who were not resistors and yet challenged the state in important ways. As Sandrine Kott has noted, ‘individual preference . . . constituted a third brake on the “perfect” working of the system’. Finally, the ‘interesting’ events in East European socialism are ones that are people powered, most famously the 1989 revolutions that spanned the region. The history of everyday life offers the promise of explaining the paradox of how supposedly stable regimes which experienced comparatively little open resistance in forty years of existence collapsed in a matter of weeks or even days.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 21 , Issue 3: Towards a New History of European Law , August 2012 , pp. 477 - 491
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012

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References

1 A few examples: Fitzpatrick, Sheila, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Hellbeck, Jochen, Revolution On My Mind: Writing A Diary Under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kotkin, Stephen, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar. In Poland: Lebow, Katherine, ‘Public Works, Private Lives: Youth Brigades in Nowa Huta in the 1950s’, Contemporary European History, 10, 2 (2001), 199–219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Kott, Sandrine, ‘Everyday Communism: New Social History of the German Democratic Republic’, Contemporary European History, 13, 2 (2004), 239CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 In English, see: Lüdtke, Alf, ed., The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995)Google Scholar. On the influence of Lüdtke's work, see Steege, Paul, Bergerson, Andrew, Healy, Maureen and Swett, Pamela, ‘The History of Everyday Life: A Second Chapter’, Journal of Modern History, 80, 2 (2008), 358–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Lüdtke, Everyday Life, 313–4.

5 Steege et al., ‘Second Chapter’, 361.

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9 For a few works explicitly written from the perspective of the history of everyday life, see Black, Monica, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)Google Scholar; Kott, Sandrine, Le Communisme au quotidien: Les Enterprises d'Etat dans la société est-allemande (1949–1989) (Paris: Belin, 2001)Google Scholar; Rubin, Eli, Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)Google Scholar; and Wierling, Dorothee, Geboren im Jahr Eins: Der Geburtsjahrgang 1949 in der DDR (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2002)Google Scholar.

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12 On the different trajectories of post-war modernism, see: Henket, Hubert-Jan and Heynen, Hilde, eds., Back From Utopia: The Challenge of the Modern Movement (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij, 2002)Google Scholar.

13 PID (politisch-ideologische-Diversion—or political-ideological Diversion) /PUT (politische Untergrundtätigkeit—or political underground action). Defined in Glaeser, 466.

14 On cynicism in modern German life: Sebald, W. G., On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Bell, Anthea (New York: Modern Library, 2004)Google Scholar; Sloterdijk, Peter, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988)Google Scholar. On cyncism and life in communism, see Zizek, Slavoj, ‘Cyncism as a Form of Ideology’, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 28–30Google Scholar.

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