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Planners, Pillars, and Pretenders: Socialism between Enlightenment and Sovereignty

Benjamin Robinson

Modernism/modernity, Volume 11, Number 2, April 2004, pp. 341-346 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/mod.2004.0042

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341

Review Essay

Planners, Pillars, and Pretenders: Socialism between Enlightenment and Sovereignty

By Benjamin Robinson, Northern Illinois University Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic. Peter C. Caldwell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x + 220. $60.00 (cloth). The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Century. Catherine Epstein. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 322. $29.95 (cloth). Germanys Cold War:The Global Campaign to Isolate East Germany 19491969. William Glenn Gray. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003. Pp. xiii + 351. $49.95 (cloth).
Scholarship on the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has been taking off in the past several years, with especially stimulating impulses coming out of the Center for Contemporary Research in Potsdam and the pioneering cultural historical work of Alf Ldtke.1 Much of the intellectual excitement stems from detailed social histories conceptualizing and describing everyday mentality (Eigen-Sinn) under a dictatorship of the proletariat, rather than from large-scale systemic analyses or studies of elites. Not tendentious and relatively free from the cold war mindset of research based in totalitarianism and modernization studies that dominated the scholarship of previous generations, these new works, which make ample use of archives formerly inaccessible to scholars, often express humor and appreciation for the absurd, a tack that echoes a call by Richard Rorty to view the history of state communism in a comic frame.2 As welcome as this new scholarly direction is, the familiar polarization between social-cultural and traditional histori-

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342 ography does not serve the study of the GDR well since one of the hardest things to grasp about
the communist experience was its claim to have been making an epochal difference in history. Even Rortys call to use a comic historical frame reveals an underlying philosophical agenda to depotentialize any vocabulary of system antagonism in favor of an ontologically modest pragmatism. Thus, amidst the wealth of new East German social histories, it is rewardingand anything but retrogressiveto find excellent work still being done on systemic questions of socialism and socialist elites. The three books under consideration here, while they all focus on elites, are divergent in productive ways. Where Peter C. Caldwell focuses on the technical intelligentsia of the GDR, the scientists, jurists, economists and social theorists responsible for making socialism hang together as a rational technical system, Catherine Epstein examines the biographies of leading veteran communists, communists who joined the KPD (German Communist Party) in the Weimar Republic and stayed with it through the Hitler years to become leading figures of symbolic unity in the GDR. As both authors point out, there was little overlap between these two highly selfconscious groups, and the tensions that arose between the technical visions of the one and the ideological visions of the other illuminate some of the fundamental paradoxes of socialist governance. In contrast to these works focus on challenges internal to the East German socialist project, William Glenn Grays book views the GDR as a policy object rather than subject of history, framing it as the crude and amateurish target of West Germanys Hallstein Doctrine, the dogged campaign by the Adenauer and Erhard administrations to diplomatically isolate the FRGs rival representative of German nationhood. Grays foreign policy perspective demonstrates the exogenous limits that the GDRs technical and political intelligentsia either failed or refused to grasp from within the subjectivity of its decision-making. Of the three books, Caldwells dryly titled and densely presented Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic is the most surprising, identifying little-known actors in the scientific intelligentsia whose efforts on behalf of socialism in some ways come closest to the technical modernism familiar in the West. The very pragmatic familiarity of their thinking, in the service, however, of a globally antagonistic project, opens up exciting channels for understanding socialism as an uncanny alternative to liberal modernity, at one moment a kindred legacy of the Enlightenment and at the next a quasi-feudal form of hostile sovereignty. Writing against the dominant trend of Alltagsgeschichte, Caldwell seeks out the most systemic thinkers of East Germany, taking seriously their efforts to become conscious of the overall characteristics of the planned economy. Not letting himself be distracted by the pulped trees filed in the many newly available archives, he clearly demarcates an East German forest: Specific to state socialism was the quasi-metaphysical status of the plan, a symbol around which the entire political and economic structure of that world was built (1). The sociologist Niklas Luhmann has elaborated on modernitys characteristic inability to observe the whole of its present, thus forcing it to displace its self description into the future or pastor to forego cognitive unity altogether. East German economists like Fritz Behrens, Jrgen Kuczynski, and Gunther Kohlmey set themselves the taskparadoxical in Luhmanns view of modernityof theorizing and putting into practice an all-encompassing, visible hand to replace the blind, invisible hand they held responsible for capitalisms catastrophic turn to fascism in the Weimar years. These economists, like the legal theorists Karl Bnninger, Heinz Such and Uwe-Jens Heuer, and like such planners and cybernetic philosophers as Erich Apel and Georg Klaus, are the protagonists in Caldwells account of East Germanys attempt simultaneously to hold on to the grand pathos of socialisms total supercession of capitalism, and to translate that supercession into a pragmatic and non-heroic science of material accounting and administrative contracts. It is indeed a technical and difficult story that Caldwell tells, but he does not treat it as a specimen in the cabinet of antiquated communist oddities. Rather, he demonstrates in detail how the twentieth-century communist experience embodies an enduring tension of modernity: that between rational system and sovereign choice; between plan and man, as it were. An episode concerning rayon stockings in the early 1950s makes both the pettiness and grandeur of the tension clear. With the stodgy perspicacity of veterans of hyperinflation and war rationing, the new socialist planners called for the vast provision of rayon stockings to the now victorious masses. Unfortunately, the stockings were of such low quality they held little consumer appeal.

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Retail organizations thus refused to sign the delivery contracts that the plan, hardly fostering the autonomy of self-contracting entities, stipulated they sign. The factories, brimming with stockings, insisted in turn that all parties fulfill their plan mandates. The demand for plan discipline entered into conflict with the demand for goods that adequately reflected the needs of the retail firm and consumer demand (81). The State Court of Contracts had no consistent way to resolve the problem, which the party, in the aftermath of the 1953 workers uprising, pragmatically decided in favor of placating consumers. In the following years, attempts were made to work out a General System of Contracts, but systemic reform foundered on the apparent contradiction between the goal of provident pre-determination of the whole and the prudential desire to let individual system elements regulate themselves according to facts on the ground. Although the engaging story Catherine Epstein tells of German communist heroes in The Last Revolutionaries would seem far removed from Caldwells analytical story of technocrats, in fact they refer to two intimately related strategies for coordinating the socialist difference as a coherent difference from liberal capitalism. The noted Hungarian economist Janos Kornai has described the dual importance for socialism of what he calls bureaucratic coordination and ethical coordination.3 Focusing on the ethical symbolism of the unique, inimitable experiences of a group of communists who survived the unprecedented political upheaval of the past century (3), Epstein makes use of a fascinating trove of material in the archives of the SED (the East German communist party) to foreground the historically situated biographies of veteran communists, letting the abstract and intricate problems of social administration recede into the background. The biographical evidence is not, however, deployed navely as self-evident testimony to revolutionary resistance and concentration camp persecution. Rather, in an illuminating parallel to the way Holocaust testimonies can be constructed and deployed as a key discourse in the liberal West, Epstein calls upon the work of Foucault to show how carefully maintained personnel files were used to transform communist activists into archival writing to better subject them to political discipline (134); or, following Lutz Niethammer, to show how the administration of memory became an instrument of power for the party (194). Like Holocaust scholars, however, Epstein does not reduce biographical testimony to its systematic deployment, but evokes the pathos and complexity of individual German communist experiences and traumas. In a particularly fascinating pair of chapters, one on communists in Hitlers concentration camps, and the other on the partys later visitation of these camp experiences in the purges of the 1940s and early 1950s, Epstein evokes the powerful consequences of the communist insistence that all actions be taken consciously and in light of the collectivist perspective of the party. Thus, we learn how communists, serving as Kapos in concentration camps or Kalfaktors in Nazi penitentiaries, programmatically worked against the vagaries of camp existence in order both to preserve a sense of communist agency and concretely to support the lives of comrades. Regardless of the moral price of taking on Kapo positions, KPD networks were tremendously successful in preserving the lives of party members: German communists had significantly higher survival rates than other camp prisoners (75). Inevitably, this strategy of aggressively combating chanceto the extent that agency isnt merely an illusion under extermination conditionsled to potentially incriminating collaboration with camp authorities. Thus, in the Flossenbrg camp one particularly headstrong veteran communist, Fritz Selbmann, was witnessed by another leading veteran, Karl Schirdewan, beating two inmates in his capacity as Kapo, apparently for having stolen his shoes during a difficult winter. This episode became the chief exhibit against Selbmann in the partys 1945 investigation of him. Because the myth of personal agency on behalf of the collective was so central to these communists self-understandings, they became that much more susceptible to the pseudo-legality of show trials based on the juridical notion of conscious intent. Epstein thus finds the counterpart to communist resistance to the Nazi penal system in the resisters helpless submission to the East German penal system: within the communist belief system, there was little room for the contextual mitigation that was so relevant to individual action under conditions of bourgeois alienation. Epsteins eight protagonists, Franz Dahlelm, Walter Ulbricht, Gerhart Eisler, Fritz Selbmann, Emmy Koenen, Fred Oelner, Karl Schirdewan, and Erich Honecker, became symbols of ethi-

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344 cal integrity for the GDR, practical role models of sacrifice, heroism and humility to serve younger
generations in orienting themselves toward the communist collective. That their antifascist heroism came fraught with extra vulnerability to postfascisms political discipline hardly recommended them as reassuring models. Nonetheless, especially in crises, the symbolic pathos of veteran communists lent them considerable legitimating authority for the GDR state. Such ethical coordination of individuals around the iconic veteran willing to sacrifice for the party and its class helped compensate for the systemic contradictions that Caldwell diagnoses as foiling the socialist plan. Thus, Epstein observes how biographical reminiscence was frowned upon as egoistic through the early 1960s. While Epstein does not particularly develop the argument, it seems that as the systemic reforms of the New Economic System were initiated in 1963, memoir writing became encouraged as an important didactic tool for raising new generations of committed communists (194); that is, it became important for ethically coordinating collective behavior in the very moment that centrally planned coordination was being loosened. By the early 1970s, after Honecker replaced Ulbricht as head of state and abandoned Ulbrichts technical reform efforts in favor of stronger central control, coupled with more consumer-oriented production, the golden age of communist memory and biography had passed. In 1974 the SED restricted high functionaries from writing memoirs, and the East German socialist project, bereft of technical and ethical ambition, moved into a cozy period of morbidity. The efficacy of ethical iconography for guiding socialist behavior reached one set of limits in the technical constraints of implementing a coherent five-year plan, but system constraints were not the only ones relevant to socialisms predicament. In Germanys Cold War, William Glenn Gray delves into an impressive mass of declassified archival documents to give a blow-by-blow account of how the FRG executed its will to stymie any effort to recognize the GDR as a sovereign state in international law and politics. As an extraterritorial instrument of state, diplomacy fits into no neat functional system, sitting uneasily between politics, law, economics and showmanship. The fundamental diplomatic issue of recognition or non-recognition of a state, or government, is a deeply subjective one, as reminiscent of the intricate sensitivities bound up with feudal honor codes as it is of modern legal universalism. Do private trade arrangements, bilateral cultural legations or even personal contacts count as recognition in the jealous eyes of geopolitical rivals? If drawing the border of recognition seems an arcane matter, the means for enforcing that border are anything but. Gray describes in gripping detail the tactical scheming, the propaganda staging, the legal, bureaucratic and even military posturing that went into West Germanys efforts to diplomatically isolate its eastern rival in the period from 1949 to 1969. On the one hand, the chronicle style of Grays narrative allows one to see how fortuitous and lacking in principled goals diplomatic activity is. The books story unfolds with the breathless chronology of ambassadorial dmarches, confidential exchanges of notes and tactical newspaper leaks. On the other hand, by giving clear precedence to narrative vividness over conceptual reflection and historical synthesis, Gray makes a reasonable, but at times frustrating choice. Adhering to a West German standpoint down to a fidelity to the official nomenclature for designating the GDR by acronym while avoiding abbreviation for the West, the narrative evokes the related genre of cold war espionage literature. Ideological convictions, biographical experiences, and moral considerations beyond professional ethics, are set aside; what remains is the pragmatics of an elaborate, high-stakes chess game. The suspense and intricacy of diplomatic action and reaction are skillfully recounted by Gray, especially in his chapter Scrambling for Africa on the two Germanies (vastly unequal) angling for geopolitical advantage in the decolonizing world. For example, when in 1958 East Germany sees in Guineas revolutionary break from French colonial dominion a chance to establish its first diplomatic beachhead in a non-communist country, it hustles off to the coastal capital of Conakry a delegation which agrees on the spot to buy the entire banana harvest. The gesture is in vain, however, since West Germany responds by sending the noble diplomat Hasso von Etzdorf on a chase, a political safari, after Guinean leader Skou Tour into the remote interior city of Kankan, a likewise impressive gesture backed up with a great deal more political and economic capital. The range and suggestiveness of the themes that come up in discussions such as this one, touching on the way nations relate to each other across differentials of global power, might have been supplemented by a more theoretical conceptualization in the literature on sovereignty, postcolonialism, and international order.

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Scholarship on West German foreign policy generally recognizes Adenauers dilemma of pursuing Western integration through deference while simultaneously seeking nationalist authority by taking aggressive initiatives to thwart East German claims to be a distinct, sovereign German state. Gray does not revise this view, but elaborates it close to diplomatic sources, successfully conveying the personalities and brinkmanship as well as the massive inertia of raison dtat driving West Germanys cold war strategy. Gray demonstrates how diplomacy avails itself of both the narrow institutional means of law and administration, and also the broad public means of press and culture. Where East Germany sees itself as struggling heroically for its right to exist, for cultural and ideological recognition in the international public sphere, West Germany initially holds to a strategy of insisting that third parties who recognize the GDRs existence thereby forfeit their own diplomatic recognition by the FRG. A suggestive existentialist rhetoric looms behind Adenauers view that East Berlin was no legitimate government and the GDR was not even a genuine state (11). The devastating implications of such ontological contempt for the GDR become increasingly clear in the mid-1950s as somewhat less hard-line officials like Wilhelm Grewe concede a degree of contact with the GDR since, as Grewe notes with fine diplomatic metaphysics, a state-like territory with a population of seventeen million cannot be treated as nonexistent by the rest of the world (46). As decolonization struggles heat up in the 1960s, Gray observes how the FRG seizes the rhetoric of self-determination for its own ends, asserting that like newly independent states, it too is struggling for the self-determination of all Germans, including those behind the iron curtain. Hallsteins legalism, where exchange of diplomatic relations with the FRG was interpreted as a contractual obligation not to recognize the GDR (23), is thus abandoned in favor of ethical authority rooted in the revolutionary legitimacy of 1960s insurgencies: subjective perception takes priority over legal status in the informal court of international opinion. The main opportunity Gray misses is to consider the question of diplomatic recognition from the side of the polity to be recognized, especially since the GDRs case for recognition was pervaded by such existential anxiety. As Gray notes, the GDRs amateurish, careworn ambassadors inevitably cut a sorry figure beside the polished elan of the FRGs representatives. Comparing the FRGs aristocratic von Etzdorf with the GDRs special emissary to Guinea, the socialist aesthetic theorist Alfred Kurella, one did not have to be deeply schooled in German affairs to realize that the two represented radically different, deeply antagonistic social and political orders (1). Kurella and GDR Trade Minister Heinrich Rau, both old communists who would fit easily into Epsteins narrative, were respectively veterans of Hitlers camps and Soviet exile. The brazen demeanor (102) of GDR Foreign Minister Lothar Bolz could not be softened by the kindly demeanor (93) of Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl, whose nave goodwill tour of leading capitals of the developing world set off an angry diplomatic panic in West Germany early in 1959. The breeding, worldliness and ease of the FRGs public face inevitably complicated popular recognition of the ideologically freighted, working-class East. In a rather more Hegelian sense than Grays, the issue of recognition is the central preoccupation of the three sets, technical, political and diplomatic, of elites discussed here. From within the GDR the inescapable feeling of existential jeopardythe ubiquitous cultural pressure on individuals to consciously choose sides and thereby recognize recursively the GDRs claim to be an alternative to capitalismwas more profound than is suggested by Grays description of the blustery attempts of GDR diplomats to assert the countrys legitimacy on the world stage. The recent reception in Germany of Die Intellektuellen: Literatur und Politik in Ostdeutschland von 1945 bis 2000, a study by Werner Mittenzwei (the doyen of East German literary scholars) of a fourth set of intellectuals (the GDR literary intelligentsia) indicates how nagging the problem of recognizing East Germany continues to be. Unlike the western authors discussed here, Mittenzwei wrote an otherwise traditional intellectual history from the standpoint of the loyal oppositions commitment to the feasibility of socialism. This self-qualifying pathos of socialist identification demands a cathartic and redemptive understanding of modern history in the same gesture as it rules out the pragmatic ontology and emotional attenuation that, by contrast, qualifies the legitimacy of liberal scholarship on socialism. Such pathos is not a matter of what Christa Wolf famously called subjective authenticity, but refers rather to the mutual exteriority of consciousness that so haunted the East German intelligentsia.4 By mutual exteriority of con-

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346 sciousness I mean the paradox that the socialist aspiration to comprehensive consciousness
both the ethical self-transcendence of Epsteins party icons and the providential rationality of Caldwells cybernetic plannersobscured the systematic qualities of an environment in which the capitalist West could marshal its overwhelming advantages against any viable socialism. Not surprisingly, Mittenzweis book was received in unified Germany with the sort of passion usually reserved for testimony rather than history. In the most ironic commentary, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht saw the merit of Mittenzweis odyssey of socialist consciousness precisely in its unconscious account of the love between intellectuals and totalitarianism.5 This reception of the GDR legacy is emblematic of a modern clash of mutually external metaphysics. Luckily, such antagonistic exteriority is not so hermetic as to exclude all rational understanding, and that understanding is precisely the value of Caldwell, Epstein and Grays studies of East German elites. Without adopting the metaphysics of utopian humanism, Caldwell and Epstein nonetheless avoid condescending to the objects of their study, striking a delicate balance between critical realism and appreciation for the rationally transcendent and historically situated motivations of the socialist project. While Gray does not explore the internal logic of the socialist project, his work describes what for socialism was an environment of irrational hostilityand reveals it as a rational West German strategy to use every advantage to isolate what for it was a brazen pretender to the status of alternative order.

Notes
1. Konrad H. Jarausch, Dictatorship as Experience: Toward a Socio-Cultural History of the GDR, transl. Eve Duffy (New York: Berghahn, 1999); Thomas Lindenberger, ed., Herrschaft und EigenSinn in der Diktatur: Studien zur Gesellschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Cologne: Bhlau, 1999); Alf Ldtke and Peter Becker, Akten. Eingaben. Schaufenster: Die DDR und ihre Texte: Erkundungen zu Herrschaft und Alltag (Berlin: Akademie, 1997). 2. Richard Rorty, The End of Leninism and History as Comic Frame, History and the Idea of Progress, ed. Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger and M. Richard Zinman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 2116. 3. Janos Kornai, The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 4. Christa Wolf, Subjektive Authentizitt: Gesprch mit Hans Kaufmann, Die Dimension des Autors: Essays und Aufstze, Reden und Gesprche 19591985 (Darmstadt and Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1987), 773805, 802. 5. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Die Trnen auf Lschpapier. Selbstkritisch ist der Mann: Werner Mittenzweis Studie ber die Intellektuellen der DDR. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 258 (6 November 2001), L14.