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“The Socialist Nation of the German Democratic Republic” or The Asymmetry in Nation and Ideology between the Two Germanies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

Carl Pletsch
Carl Pletsch
Affiliation:
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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Extract

This paper is a semiological attempt to derive meaning from the recent reconceptualization of the German nation: the thesis of the separate socialist nation as advanced by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Before entering upon the question of how the-socialist nation of the GDR is defined and what this definition means in contrast to the definition of the nation current in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), we may well ask whether it makes any difference. In spite of the furor aroused by this idea in the West German press, non-Germans may legitimately wonder whether it is not silly to quibble over whether to the GDR a separate state or a separate nation.

Type
Regionalism
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , July 1979 , pp. 323 - 345
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1979

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References

This paper, in a slightly different form, was presented at the Social Science Seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, December 14, 1977. Thanks are due to the members of the Seminar for their friendly comments.

1 How the citizens of the FRG came to this realization is an interesting question which has scarcely been asked. One thing is clear, however: journalists and writers of fiction have led the way in communicating a more realistic view of GDR society to the public, whereas most social scientists have still not come to terms with the way in which the GDR has changed since 1945. Why this should be so is another interesting question. How the citizens of the GDR see the FRG raises still other questions.

2 Much of this work is summarized by Krejci, Jaroslav in his Social Structure in Divided Germany (New York: St. Martins, 1976),Google Scholar which I reviewed along with several other things of a comparative sort in the American Journal of Sociology, 84 (1978), 244–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 I am preparing such a study.

4 The formal definition of the distinction marked unmarked is not crucial to my argument, and I trust that the sense in which I employ the distinction will be clear from the execution. Nevertheless, cf. Jakobson, Roman, “Signe zéro,” Melanges Bally (Geneva, 1939), pp. 143ff;Google ScholarGreenberg, J. H., Language Universals (The Hague: Mouton, 1966), esp. pp. 56–87;Google ScholarPubMed and Barthes, Roland, Elements of Semiology (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), esp. pp. 71–86.Google Scholar

5 Of course, the definition of the socialist nation of the GDR must be understood within the context of the East European Marxist definition of the nation generally. But since the peculiar German situation—an ethnic nation divided between the two worlds—is what makes the socialist nation of the GDR such an interesting case, it will be useful to concentrate upon the German versions of definition of the nation. This is consonant with current East European theory generally. Cf. Gleserman, G. J., Klassen und Nation (Berlin: Deitz, 1975; Russian original, 1974)Google Scholar and N. M., and Kaltachtschjan, S. T., Nation und Nationalitdt im Sozialismus (Berlin: Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1976; Russian original, 1973).Google Scholar

6 “Über das Problem der Nation,” Vorträge im Parteilehrjahr der SED 1971/72 (Berlin: Dietz, 1972);Google Scholar Also published in Deutschland Archiv, 5 (1972): 1223–25.Google Scholar

7 Cf. Spittmann, Ilse, “Nordens Absage an Nation und Verfassing,” Deutschland Archiv, 5 (1972): 1124–25.Google Scholar

8 “DDR und Kuba fest mit dem Land Lenins vereint,” Neues Deutschland, 20 June, 1972.Google Scholar

9 Zur Entwicklung der socialistischen Nation in der DDR (Berlin: Dietz, 1973).Google Scholar

10 The Constitution of the German Democratic Republic (Berlin: Staatsverlag der DDR, 1974).Google ScholarPubMed The alternations of the constitution—which go far beyond merely deleting the concept of the German nation—are discussed at length in the booklet, Honecker's neue Verfassung (Bonn: Verlag neue Gesellschaft, 1975).Google Scholar

11 Nation in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Studie zur historisch-materialistischen Theorie der Nation (Berlin: Dietz, 1976).Google Scholar See also the review of this book by Holzweissig, Gunter, “Der bestrittene Positionswechsel in der nationalen Frage,” Deutschland Archiv, 9 (1976): 1189–92.Google Scholar

12 In the body of this paper I shall restrict my attention to the domestic side of the definition but touch upon the international dimension in the conclusion.

13 Kleines politisches Wörterbuch (Berlin: Dietz, 1973), pp. 567–69.Google Scholar

14 This is what Meinecke referred to as the Kulturnation, as opposed to the Staatsnation, which only existed in Germany as of 1871. Cf. his Cosmopolitanism and the Nation State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).Google Scholar

15 Wahrig, Gerhard et al. , Deutsches Wörterbuch (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1970), col. 2543.Google Scholar “Nach Abstammung, Sprache, Sitte, Kultureller u. polit. Entwicklung zusammengehörige, innerhalb der gleichen Staatsgrenzen lebende, bewuβt u. gewollt geformte polit. Gemeinschaft.”

16 Cf. Politics and the Athenian Constitution (New York: Dutton, 1959), pp. 5–8.Google Scholar

17 Grundgesetz für die Bundesrepublik Deutschland, paragraph 116; “Reichs und Staatsangehörigkeitsgesetz vom 22. Juli 19 Binder Fassung vom 19.Dezember 1963,” and again “in der Fassung vom 20 Dezember 1974.” Also to be found in Munch, Ingo von, ed., Dokwnente des geteilten Deutschlands, 2 vol. (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1968, 1974), 1:122, 132–36;Google Scholar and 2:53–57. Münch also provides a bibliography of writings on the problems arising from disagreements about citizenship between the two German States in 2:635–36.

18 Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik vom 17 Oktober 1949 in der Fassung vom 12 September 1960, Art. 1. Also in Münch, , Dokumente 1:301.Google Scholar

19 E.g., Ludz, Christian Peter, “Zum Begriff der ‘Nation’ in der Sicht der SED: Wandlungen und politische Bedeutung,” Deutschland Archiv, 5 (1972): 17–27.Google Scholar

20 “Gesetz iiber die Staatsbürgerschaft der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz) vom 20 Februar 1967;” also in Münch, , Dokumente (1) 369–73.Google Scholar

21 “Gesetz sur Regelung von Fragen der Staatsbürgerschaft (der DDR) vom 16, Oktober 1972:” also in Münch, , Dokumente 2:514.Google Scholar

22 Art. 1, a.; Münch, , Dokumente 1:370.Google Scholar

23 This is not to say, of course, that the individualist ideology of political democracy and private property is not implicit in this conception of the German nation.

24 Cf. the preamble to the “Staatsbürgerschaftsgesetz vom 20 Februar 1967;” also to be found in Münch, , Dokumente, 1: 370.Google Scholar

25 In addition to these very thoroughly economic features of currency and trade, which I will discuss, there is a strictly symbolic aspect of money which may seem superficial: the symbols with which the coins and bills are adorned. I will only mention that in addition to a whole new system of symbols of working class orientation for G D R money which were introduced starting in 1949, the o ak leaves which have been characteristic of German coins since the time of the Sachsenspiegel were dropped from the currency of the GDR in 1967. The congruence of this gesture with the laws on separate citizenship and the somewhat later introduction of the doctrine of the separate nation is obvious.

26 E.g., Gottlieb, Manuel, The German Peace Settlement and the Berlin Crisis (New York: Paine-Whitman, 1960).Google Scholar

27 For a summary of the reparations exacted from the GDR, cf. DDR Handbuch, pp. 725–26.Google Scholar

28 For a more extended summary of this, cf. DDR Handbuch, pp. 917–23, 420–28, 300–02, 77–85.Google Scholar

29 National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945). Another contrast between the kind of protectionism and trade monopoly practiced by the GDR and that which was the object of Hirschman's study is that the advantage in the latter seemed to lie with the larger and more diversified trading nations who were more independent of their partners; the GDR is obviously the smaller partner of the FRG and far less diversified than any Western industrial nation. This is further evidence of the fact that the GDR is protecting a whole society, rather than trying to derive international power from her policies.Google Scholar

30 Obviously this is not the same sort of thing described by Emmanuel, Arghiri, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), for Emmanuel is concerned with the asymmetry of trade which exists between nations of the first and third worlds. A similar but significantly different asymmetry of trade and currency generally seems to obtain between the first and second worlds, of which the German case is a microcosm.Google Scholar

31 This assumes that the FRG could lay its hands on its revolutionary clique, which it can't seem to do.

32 I plan to do so in an ethnographic chapter of my projected monograph. The basic idea of the comparison of socialist and corporate society is this: in stark contrast with the radically individualized society of the contemporary capitalist world, first described theoretically in the nascent bourgeois ideology of the 18th century (Rousseau et al.) and now so familiar as to be functionally unconscious in the West, the strange kind of social solidarity once common in the corporate society of prerevolutionary Europe (articulated by such writers as Charles Loyseau, whose Traité sur les Ordres et simples Dignitez is marvelously explicated by Sewell, William H. in his “Etat, Corps, and Ordre: some Notes on the Social Vocabulary of the French Old Regime,” Sozialgeschichte Heute: Festschrift für Hans Rosenberg [Gottingen: Vandenhoeck, 1974]) with its guilds, “bodies,” orders and estates may be remarkably similar to that current in the socialist societies composed of collectivities like “brigades,” “peoples own enterprises,” communist party organizations, etc. To the best of my knowledge, this comparison between prerevolutionary and socialist societies has not been made except in the snide journalistic way of trying to show that “the Russians are still the same old Russians” and that communism has not made much difference in Eastern Europe (e.g. Hedrick Smith, The Russians), which is of course to argue from ethnicity, rather than from social structure.Google Scholar

33 And only incidentally because in this investigation social semantics is the closest relevant domain to language itself, upon which all semiology is modelled. For the linguistic sources, of semiology, cf. Barthes, , The Elements of Semiology, and Culler, Jonathan, Structuralist Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 1–109.Google Scholar

34 The symbolism of left and right is much too complicated to deal with in this paper.

35 Formulated at the Peace of Augsburg, 1555, and confirmed at the Peace of Westphalia, 1648.

36 Cf. Dumont, Louis, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), and earlier essays.Google Scholar

37 Cf. the autobiographical interviews in Grunert-Bronnen, Barbara, ed., Ich bin Burger der DDR und lebe in der Bundesrepublik (Munich: Piper, 1970).Google Scholar

38 See the contributions of Hans Ulrich Rentsch and Hantsch, Hugo in Europa und die Einheit Deutschlands, eine Bilanz nach 100 Jahren, Hofer, Walther, ed. (Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 1970).Google Scholar

39 The only possible exception is the period of National Socialism, perhaps from 1938 to 1945. Obviously a footnote cannot do justice to the kind of symbols and solidarity in play then, but it may suffice to say that the symbols were military ones, that the solidarity was exceptional by any standards, even hysterical, and that it was sustained by war. Given the rest of German history before and after, a semiological analysis of the Nazi period, its symbolic constitution, etc., would necessarily be one of an abnormal but particularly revealing (because exaggerated) social condition. For the idea of a cultural or symbolic constitution, I am indebted to my friend Ron Inden—e.g. his unpublished paper, “Cultural-Symbolic Constitutions in Ancient India,” discussed at the Institute for Advanced Study, January 19, 1978.

40 Thus the greater political maturity of the population of the GDR.