Dictatorship and Demand: The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany (Harvard Historical Studies)

311 Pages·2005·0.86 MB·English

by  Mark Landsman

HARVARD HISTORICAL STUDIES • 147
Published under the auspices
of the Department of History
from the income of the
Paul Revere Frothingham Bequest
Robert Louis Stroock Fund
Henry Warren Torrey Fund

MARK LANDSMAN
Dictatorship and
Demand
The Politics of Consumerism
in East Germany
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
2005
Copyright © 2005 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Landsman, Mark, 1966–
Dictatorship and demand:the politics of consumerism in East Germany/Mark Landsman.
p. cm.—(Harvard historical studies;147)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-01698-X (alk. paper)
1. Consumption (Economics)—Germany (East). 2. Socialism—Germany (East).
3. Germany (East)—Economic conditions. 4. Germany (East)—Politics and government.
I. Title. II. Series.
HC290.795.C6L36 2005 2004054334
To Jenny

Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Abbreviations xi
Introduction 1
1 Production and Consumption: Establishing Priorities 16
2 The Contest Begins: The Currency Reform, the Berlin
Blockade,and the Introduction of the HO 38
3 The Planned and the Unplanned: Consumer Supply
and Provisioning Crisis 74
4 The Rise, Decline, and Afterlife of the New Course 115
5 Demand Research and the Relations between
Trade and Industry 149
6 Crisis Revisited: The Main Economic Task
and the Building of the Berlin Wall 173
Epilogue 208
Notes 223
Index 289

Acknowledgments
In the course of writing this book, I have incurred many debts of grati-
tude. It is a great pleasure to acknowledge them here. To begin with—
the money. I would like to thank Columbia University for a President’s
Fellowship in 1996–97, which enabled me to get started on the re-
search. Most of the research, however, was funded by the Social Sci-
ence Research Council’s Berlin Program for Advanced German and
European Studies in 1997–98. The Berlin Program was a unique ex-
perience, offering a stimulating intellectual environment and oppor-
tunities for making contacts at Berlin’s Freie Universität, the Zentrum
für Zeithistorische Forschung in Potsdam, and the Berlin branch of
the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte. For their scholarly rigor and
comradery, I would like to thank my fellow Berlin fellows; for their
indispensable administrative assistance, I am indebted to Ingeborg
Mehser and Dagmar Klenke. I would also like to thank Professor Peter
Steinbach for allowing me to present some of my early findings to his
seminar on East Germany at the Freie Universität.
Anyone who has done archival research knows how difficult the expe-
rience can be. Without the help of patient archivists the task would be
impossible. I am deeply grateful to the staffs of the Bundesarchiv in
Lichterfelde, the Landesarchiv Berlin (Breite Straße), and the Bundes-
archiv Außenstelle in Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten. While in Berlin, I also
benefited from countless discussions with several scholars—German and
American, professors and doctoral candidates. For their advice, sugges-
tions, and criticisms, I would like to thank Richard Bessel, Dierk Hoff-
mann, Patrice Poutrus, Judd Stitziel, Corey Ross, Paul Steege, and Peter