Real existing ideals: East Germany and the socialist imaginary 1945-1991

This dissertation examines how socialist ideals, drawn from a broader socialist imaginary, guided activist practices in the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany). The GDR was expressly founded as a socialist society constantly transforming itself for the better, ultimately to reach a utopian state of being, or communism. Activists within, outside of, and opposed to the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) all sought to practice ambitious ideals to continually transform society for the better. Activists developed and understood these ideal practice through a distinctly socialist imaginary, encompassing social-historical understandings, or “background,” that provided the GDR with its discourses, epistemologies, and habitus. This socialist imaginary also determined what was considered normal or normative, as well as prohibited, fantastical, or impossible. The socialist imaginary was thus the source of a East Germans’ sense of reality and its ideals, and guided those activists seeking to preserve or change the status quo. Ultimately this work challenges existing scholarship that sees socialism as an illegitimate and imposed ideology, finding instead that socialist ideal practices were a key driver of social transformation in East German history. This work focuses on five specific case studies of ideal practice in this broader development of East German and socialist history. The first three chapters trace party and party-affiliated activists’ attempts to build socialism in the GDR from 1945 until the early 1970s. They examine ideals of antifascist democracy, socialist consciousness, and socialism itself as a self-regulating metasystem through their contingent and contested practice. The latter two chapters trace a gradual shift of ideal authority from the party-state to an emerging civil movement. This movement, beginning with environmental activists active in the semi-autonomous Protestant Church in the late 1970s, eventually expanded their criticisms of a static and repressive party-state into ideals of, and demands for, a sustainable, direct democratic, and for many, still socialist GDR. This movement then sought to practice these ideals during the revolution of 1989, and enshrine them in a new constitution for the GDR and, possibly, a unified Germany.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference