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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by Akademie Verlag December 15, 2017

Rethinking Regime Stability: The Life Stories of “Loyal” East German Activists in the Early German Democratic Republic

  • Andrew I. Port

    is Professor of History at Wayne State University and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Central European History. He is the author of Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which appeared in German translation as Die rätselhafte Stabilität der DDR (Ch. Links, 2010; Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2010). He is also the co-editor, with Mary Fulbrook, of Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (Berghahn, 2013). Port is a recent recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, and was a Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS). His current project looks at German reactions to post-Holocaust genocide in other countries.

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Abstract

In the early 1950s, East German officials at the storied Maxhütte steel mill in Thuringia collected short CVs or “life stories” (Lebensläufe) written by approximately 370 blue- and white-collar workers who had recently become Stakhanovite “activists”. These documents, which all contain the same basic biographical information about the authors – from their socioeconomic background to their political activities – shed light on a group that has received little systematic scholarly attention, namely, ostensibly loyal and ordinary East Germans at the grass roots. Their early support of the SED state and its economic goals ensured the longer-term stability of a largely unloved regime. These valuable documents thus provide important clues for understanding the puzzling political and economic viability of the German Democratic Republic.

JEL Classification: J 11; J 16; J 21; J 24; J 53; J 61; L 61; N 14; N 34; N 64; N 84; N 94; Y 10; Z 13

About the author

Andrew I. Port

is Professor of History at Wayne State University and Editor-in-Chief of the journal Central European History. He is the author of Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2007), which appeared in German translation as Die rätselhafte Stabilität der DDR (Ch. Links, 2010; Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2010). He is also the co-editor, with Mary Fulbrook, of Becoming East German: Socialist Structures and Sensibilities after Hitler (Berghahn, 2013). Port is a recent recipient of the DAAD Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in German and European Studies, and was a Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS). His current project looks at German reactions to post-Holocaust genocide in other countries.

Published Online: 2017-12-15
Published in Print: 2017-11-27

© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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