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.
About the author
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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