Peter Alheit and Hanna Haack. Die vergessene "Autonomie" der Arbeiter: Eine Studie zum frühen Scheitern der DDR am Beispiel der Neptunwerft. Berlin: Karl Dietz, 2004. 472 pp. Bibliography. EUR 19.90 (cloth), ISBN 3-320-02051-X.
Reviewed by: Thilo Schimmel, Department of History, University of Illinois.
Published by: H-German (January, 2006)
Worker Autonomy and the Fall of the GDR
Historians and sociologists alike have proclaimed or lamented the end of the working class and the crisis of labor history.[1] In the burgeoning historiography on East Germany, however, working-class studies have blossomed and produced an abundance of nuanced scholarship, whose impact has gone far beyond this subfield.[2] Peter Alheit and Hanna Haack's insightful and provocative study of workers at Rostock's Neptunwerft during the early years of the German Democratic Republic is a great example of this renaissance. The authors argue that worker milieux persisted in the East after World War II in more pronounced fashion than in West Germany; in many ways, they were consolidated and revitalized. This persistence, however, according to the authors' second, more controversial claim, led to a highly ironic outcome. Alienated from the socialist project by the problems of everyday life, workers blocked necessary social modernization. Moreover, their wage autonomy eroded the GDR's economic base. Rather than becoming the gravediggers of capitalism, East German workers terminated the GDR's viability as early as the 1950s, presaging the state's ultimate doom.
This volume is divided into three parts. In the historical section, the authors reconstruct the worker milieu's structural dimensions at the Rostock shipyard and living quarters from its inception in the 1850s to the 1950s. In the second, sociologically based, part, the focus shifts to the subjective experience of that milieu. Here, the authors create a typology of four social-actor types. The findings are summarized in a third, concluding section of the book. Epistemologically, the analysis is held together by the authors' application of milieu theory, which aims at examining social groups by interrelating their objective position in society with subjective experiences. As a social space, the shipyard worker milieu both separated its members from other Rostockers and internally homogenized the group. As a subjective space of experience (in other words, the interior dimension of the milieu), it contained the lebensweltlichen Wissensvorrat of its members, which the team of authors analyzes through an examination of biographies. In addition to interviews of former shipyard workers and their families, the investigation is based on extensive readings of archival sources from company and state archives.
In their socio-historical reconstruction of the Neptunwerft's worker milieu, which corresponded largely to the classical, proletarian milieu of Weimar, Alheit and Haack argue that, despite the multiplicity of changes in the post-World War II era, the transformed milieu was consolidated, not destroyed. Neither the influx of German refugees nor of new residents from within the Soviet zone of occupation fundamentally altered the shipyard's work environment. A crucial segment of the former Stammbelegschaft, though small in number, remained present and functioned as cultural brokers, transmitting the original worker milieu's culture and facilitating the outsiders' integration into work and neighborhood. In a similar vein, the authors argue that Soviet occupation and the labor regime of the GDR did not undermine the original milieu. Soviet occupation of the yard left the essential organization of work intact. Newly available leadership positions in the shipyard, which were often filled with former workers, did not create a new internal hierarchy among laborers. Social risers continued to perceive themselves as workers by origin. In this way, the new availability of elevated positions extended, rather than fractured, the milieu. The increased number of female workers similarly helped to cement the status quo as the GDR's labor regime reestablished the pre-war gender-based hierarchy in the shipyard.
The crucial changes that took place within the milieu happened in the sphere of worker autonomy. Deprived of independent political representation through unions or political parties, workers gained relative wage autonomy, according to the authors, as the failings of an over-centralized economy made the company leadership dependent on the workers' goodwill. As a result, wages became subject to negotiation between company and worker through the brigade, a system which became fully institutionalized after the 1953 uprisings. Moreover, the shortcomings of the planned economy created enormous worker frustration on the job, which, in turn, limited workers' objectives in the shipyard to securing stable wages and thus reinforced their focus on their brigades, the smallest unit within the milieu. This fixation created a new, internal differentiation among workers. In addition, as the state set the framework for wage policies, workers turned "functionally"--i.e., for pragmatic, not political, reasons--against it, transforming the milieu into a "counter-milieu."
In the sociologically based component of their study, Alheit and Haack distill four representative worker types out of their biographical interviews, an approach which might be more attractive to sociologists than historians used to thinking in terms of multiple negotiated identities. The milieu crystallized around the types of: (1) the new protagonist--SED cadres who gained social capital but needed to subvert their own position in the milieu constantly to be accepted; (2) the newly integrated--brigadiers and members of their collectives who enjoyed social recognition in the milieu due their egalitarian stance and were the center of the counter-milieu; (3) the female "double worker"--whose doubled burden in the family and at work had not changed significantly from the Weimar period; and (4) the new outsiders--workers who did not become connected to the brigade networks or openly joined sides with the company leadership and thus remained loosely connected to the milieu. In the authors' view, it was Type 2 around which the shipyard's counter-milieu crystallized.
Surprisingly, however, it is precisely this predominant type of social actor that remains underrepresented in the interview sample. This fact might account for a curious oversight in a study aiming to highlight worker agency. Linda Fuller, in a study similarly based on interviews, has demonstrated that the failings of an over-centralized economy had a dialectical effect on workers. In addition to consternation, malfunctioning of production also generated increased worker control on the shop floor. Workers needed to employ their ingenuity in overcoming production failings, took on various tasks in a shortage economy resulting in a more varied work experience, and acquired an increased understanding of the overall production process. Indeed, to a considerable degree, workers were able to self-manage production.[3] The authors are not blind to this phenomenon, characterizing it as increased self-esteem, which was, however, ultimately overshadowed by frustration. Pursuing the positive aspects of the work experience might have enabled a reconstruction of workers' countervision of what constituted meaningful labor, a crucial component of any worker milieu.
In the concluding chapter, Alheit and Haack summarize their findings, arguing that the persistence of the worker milieu in the GDR had two major consequences. The relative autonomy of this social group, especially among the newly integrated, caused them to resist modernization--that is, not to seek further qualifications, thus retarding necessary social modernization processes in East Germany. Coupled with their wage autonomy, the GDR's privileged class thus undercut company's profitability, destabilized the entire economy, and thus acted as the causal agent of the GDR's eventual demise.[4] But was the popular mobilization of the late 1980s indeed the result of economic failings alone, and not also motivated by the political decay of East Germany?
Alheit and Haack's study deserves a wide readership for its insights into the resilience of postwar working-class culture in East Germany, especially for its interrelation of societal changes and worker adaptations to them. Moreover, the sheer scope of the study, entailing examinations of shop floor dynamics, gender hierarchies, housing, and family life, and more that this review could not detail, is highly impressive. Therefore, weaknesses of the study, such as the use of the hibernation model, according to which the working-class milieu reemerged after the Third Reich largely untouched by Nazism, as well as the failure to analyze the meaning of masculinity for the milieu, do not hinder its importance. Whether the authors' meta-thesis, according to which the East German working class was responsible for the decay of East Germany, will find widespread acceptance among historians, however, seems doubtful.
Notes
[1]. For an overview of these issues, see Lenard Berlanstein, ed., Rethinking Labor History: Essays on Discourse and Class Analysis (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 1993); Laura Frader and Sonya Rose, eds., Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996); Patrick Joyce, ed., Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and, for a more optimistic analysis of the future, the introduction to Beverly Silver, Forces of Labor: Arbeiterbewegungen und Globalisierung seit 1870 (Berlin: Assoziation A, 2005).
[2]. For a concise overview of the historiography on East German workers, see Arnd Bauernkämper, Die Sozialgeschichte der DDR (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2005). Especially the term "Arbeitsgesellschaft," as a concept to characterize East Germany's society, has found wide, though far from universal, currency (p. 60).
[3]. Linda Fuller, Where was the Working Class? Revolution in Eastern Germany (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), pp. 123-125.
[4]. The claim that East German workers' wage autonomy contributed to the decline of the GDR, in itself, is not new. Jeffrey Kopstein had previously advanced that "otherwise powerless workers could wear down a despotic state over four decades" (p. 393) as the "implicit social contract between state and society" (p. 421) "weakened the regime by eliminating the possibility of meaningful economic reform" (p. 416); see his "Chipping Away at the State: Workers' Resistance and the Demise of East Germany," World Politics 48 (1996): pp. 391-423. Crucially, in contrast to Alheit and Haack, however, he stressed that despite workers' "virtual veto power over wages, prices, and work norms" they "did not possess an outright stranglehold on the East German economy" (idem, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945-1989 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 1997), p. 11.
Citation: Thilo Schimmel. "Review of Peter Alheit and Hanna Haack, Die vergessene "Autonomie" der Arbeiter: Eine Studie zum frühen Scheitern der DDR am Beispiel der Neptunwerft," H-German, H-Net Reviews, January, 2006. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=41601145897258.
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