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State and Minorities in Communist East Germany. By Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte. New York: Berghahn Books, 2011. Pp. xvii + 236. Cloth $100.00. ISBN 978-0857451958.
For a relatively small country that existed for just forty years, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) has generated a vast amount of scholarship since its collapse in 1989-1990. Branching out from an initial focus on the mechanisms of dictatorship- as represented in particular by the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and its "sword and shield," the Ministry of State Security (MfS, better known as the Stasi)-historians of the GDR have constructed a diverse and nuanced picture of both the East German state and the people over which it ruled. Amid sophisticated theoretical debates about the nature of, and constraints upon, the SED dictatorship, scholars now emphasize the intermittently disjointed workings of state power and the agency of GDR citizens, who influenced socialist policies while retaining individual or collective identities that were anathema to socialist thinking.
The latest work from Mike Dennis and Norman LaPorte very much reflects current research trends. State and Minorities in Communist East Germany offers six case studies of the interaction between the SED regime and groups that, in different ways, formed marginalized subcultures in East Germany: religious minorities (Jews and Jehovah's Witnesses); foreign workers from Vietnam and Mozambique; and various strands of what the Communists termed "negative-decadent youth," most notably football hooligans, punks, and skinheads. Focusing primarily on the period from the mid-1960s to 1989, the book reinforces the argument that the GDR was not a totalitarian monolith and that...