“Crime Has No Chance”: The Discourse of Everyday Criminality in the East German Press, 1961–1989

This document is the Accepted Manuscript version of a published work that will appear in final form in Central European History. To access the final edited and published work see https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938917000036This article examines how the East German regime communicated and explained the existence and persistence of everyday criminality to its citizens. According to the tenets of the Party, crime should have ceased to exist after the construction of a socialist society in East Germany. It did not. The article analyses the regime’s account of everyday criminality as it appeared in reports and commentaries in the pages of the NBI, 1961-1989. First published in 1945, the NBI quickly became the most popular weekly magazine in the GDR