Socialist Subjectivities

Queering East Germany under Honecker

Edited by Katharine White, Scott Harrison, and Jeff Hayton

Subjects: German Studies, History, German History, Gender Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies
Open Access : 9780472904969, 362 pages, 16 images, 6 x 9, May 2025
Paperback : 9780472057368, 362 pages, 16 images, 6 x 9, May 2025
Hardcover : 9780472077366, 362 pages, 16 images, 6 x 9, May 2025
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.14406207
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Table of Contents

Reexamining how East Germans constructed their present and future subjectivities

Table of contents

Acknowledgments
List of Figures
Introduction – Scott Harrison, Jeff Hayton, and Katharine White, “Beyond the Black Hole: 1989 and the Narration of East German History”
Section 1 – Blurred Lines: Locating Subjectivities between Ideology, Practice, and Everyday Life

Chapter 1 – Mary Fulbrook, “The GDR as a ‘Post-Nazi society’: Preliminary Reflections” 
Chapter 2 – Markus Wahl, “Treating East German Subjects: Doctors and Patients with Alcohol Addiction in Late Socialism”
Chapter 3 – Katharine White, “Producing Culture, Producing Socialism: An Apparatchik and a Singer-Songwriter in the Haus der jungen Talente”
Chapter 4 – Tom Smith, “Desire, Sex, and Surveillance: Queer Methods and the Stasi’s Files on the East German Military”

Section 2 – Interpreting Socialist Realities: Knowledge, Navigation, and Subject Formation

Chapter 5 – Catrina de Rivera, “A ‘Third Way’ of Living: Christa Wolf’s Cassandra (1983)” 
Chapter 6 – Kyrill Kunakhovich, “‘What German Thought Cannot Express’: Gert Neumann Reads Adam Michnik”
Chapter 7– Scott Harrison, “‘Expulsion from Paradise’: East German Lesbian Subjectivities in the 1980s”
Chapter 8 – Larissa R. Stiglich, “Showing up for Socialism: Eingaben in Eisenhüttenstadt during Late-Stage Socialism”
Chapter 9 – Mor Geller, “Research, Subjects: Reception Polling and ‘Multiple Socialisms’ in Honecker’s East Germany”

Section 3 – Fashioning Socialist Selves: Activism, Subversion, and Public Engagement

Chapter 10 – Briana J. Smith, “Art, Participation, and Play in 1980s East Berlin”
Chapter 11 – Jeff Hayton, “Making Punks: Subculture and Engagement in Late Socialist East Germany”
Chapter 12 – Julia E. Ault, “Envisioning a Better Future: Church-Based Environmentalism in the GDR”
Chapter 13 – Timothy Scott Brown, “Dissonances: Rudolf Bahro Between Red and Green”

Epilogue – Eli Rubin, “Doing Straight Time in the GDR”
Bibliography
Contributors
Index

Description

Socialist Subjectivities works within the logics of queer time to reanimate East German subjectivities in the 1970s and 1980s beyond the narrative of the German Democratic Republic’s long march towards demise. While East Germany certainly ended in dissolution, not all East Germans experienced late socialism in a singular manner. Rather, even after a generation of building socialism, East Germans under Honecker continued to pursue a range of socialist presents and a multiplicity of socialist futures up to and beyond 1989. This edited volume utilizes queer temporalities to interrogate how individuals lived non-normative possibilities in a highly normative world.

Whether one was an apparatchik, artist, or alcoholic, the everyday interactions, experiences, and rituals of late socialism proved crucial to establishing the conditions around which subjecthood was constructed. Despite stereotypes of apathy and inertia, East Germans lent a considerable dynamism to their society, and by generating a cacophony of opinions and a heterogeneity of ideas, they constantly transformed state socialism. By foregrounding socialist subjects and the iterative nature of socialism during these decades, this volume paints a richer portrait of East Germany—one that illuminates how East Germans imagined their futures in a society whose collapse they could not foresee.
 

Scott Harrison is Faculty in Liberal Studies at Boston Architectural College. 
Jeff Hayton is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wichita State University. 
Katharine White is Campus Outreach Program Officer at The Mandel Center in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“The chapters in this volume highlight the diverse ways that individuals and groups constituted ‘socialist subjectivities’ in the GDR, particularly in the Honecker era between 1971 and 1989. The volume employs a queer temporalities approach that fits comfortably with dynamic and growing revisionist scholarship on the GDR, while offering a unique methodological perspective, and is extraordinarily successful in its argumentative and methodological aim of ‘queering East Germany.’ This volume marks a major intervention in the field of East German historiography.”

- Samuel Clowes Huneke, George Mason University

“This book is warmly recommended to anyone interested in East Germany or the writing of history in general, to new scholars and to those established in the field.”

- Melissa Sheedy, Monatshefte

“Socialist Subjectivities: Queering East Germany under Honecker complements [other recent] intriguing studies by bringing together scholars who engage with different groups and individuals such as queer people, writers, dissidents, singer-songwriters, doctors and patients as well as specific arenas such as art or polling.”

- Christian Rau, Contemporary European History

"A risk with an edited volume drawing upon subjectivity theory is to present a social system as a mosaic of individualities that coalesce into definitive shape only at a distance, if at all. This volume’s approach avoids this in emphasizing subjective relation, both to oneself and one’s wider social-political system, as a coterminous phenomenon across time. The end result is a work that explores, and respects, East Germany’s contingency and diversity."

- Alexander Petrusek, Central European History
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