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Totalitarianism in Retreat: The Example of the DDR
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
Extract
On November 1, 1963, the Ordinary Professor for Physical Chemistry at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, Robert Havemann, included the following remarks in his lecture on conceptual thinking: “The vital source of our cultural development … is the many-sided, increasingly comprehensive information of all members of society concerning all knowledge, all problems and questions of our time. Every impediment to and limitation of information paralyzes the activity of the members of society and thereby the development of social conditions, and only puts a brake on development. At all times reactionary regimes have attempted to keep the people in ignorance. … A government can only succeed in its so very important tasks if it can rely on the active and energetic cooperation of all members of society.… Whoever is afraid of the consequences of general unlimited information and, on account of this fear, impedes it, creates thereby precisely the conditions for fateful development” (p. 52).
- Type
- Review Article
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- Copyright
- Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1965
References
1 This translation as well as all others here is by the author of this review article.
2 He remained, however, head of the research institute and neither he nor his family were physically harmed.
3 “A bolshevik system would tend under conditions of industrial society toward an authoritarian rather than a totalitarian structure” (p. 21). “Authoritarian” is defined as “mutual adjustment of Party and society” (p. 52, n. 30).
4 In her biography of Ulbricht, Carola Stern strengthens the belief that even for this outstanding example of a Party bureaucrat the ideological convictions gained in his youth—and now frozen into dogma—remain operative (Ulbricht: A Political Biography [New York 1965], 15–16Google Scholar).
5 “The most important task of the production councils is seen in their cooperation in the development and execution of plans for the plant and in the control of their fulfillment. … The intended cooperation in the development of the plans is not related—in distinction, e.g., to the Yugoslav system—to the broad outline of the plan but to the discovery of efficiency reserves within the enterprise and their consideration in the plan” (Becker, in Ludz, pp. 171–72).
6 Richert reports that, by 1961, 87.5 percent of all persons gainfully working in the DDR were employed in the “public sector.” “Private existence in its economic sense has become irrelevant” (p. 283).
7 Nomination for “representative” institutions or inclusion in “citizen councils” (“Actives”) remain, with some minor exceptions, devices to activate broader strata of the population as “exponents of organizations which, in turn, are subject to a central will” (Richert, p. 217).
8 See Stern, 157–74.
9 Cf. the perceptive article by Groth, Alexander J., “The ‘Isms’ in Totalitarianism,” American Political Science Review, LVIII (December 1964), 888–901CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 This definition is developed by Professor Martin Drath in his extensive theoretical introduction to Macht ohne Mandat. It is largely accepted by Ludz (pp. 18–19) but is criticized there as insufficiently heedful of the changing nature of Communist ideology.
11 “The picture of a relatively nonpolitical career-oriented youth whose striving is not as decisively affected by ‘social’ motivations as the authors would like to believe, is unmistakable” (Ludz, pp. 390–94).
12 Ludz provides several indications of the start of a “comprehensive intellectual reorientation” among some East German sociologists. Though the claim for Historical Materialism as a universal science has not been dropped and the Leninist demand that facts are to be placed in a frame of reference previously fixed by derivation from it is maintained (p. 341), some East German sociologists are questioning the traditional concepts and categories of “Histomat”: the category of “social existence” in its reductive economic interpretation is found too confining; the empirical investigation of “regularities” and “behavior patterns” is envisaged; and the categories “class” and “class struggle” are gradually replaced by concepts such as “group” and “authority structure” (pp. 362, 357, 344).
13 Die Zeit (Canadian edition), May 14, 1965, p. 2.
14 The contradictory interpretations of the relation between economic and political factors presently put forth by Western social scientists are clearly and succinctly reviewed by Olson, Mancur Jr., in “Some Social and Political Implications of Economic Development,” World Politics, XVII (April 1965), 525–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.