John Rodden. Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent: Stories from East German Victims of Human Rights Abuse. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 184 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-271-03736-3.
Reviewed by Ned Richardson-Little (University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill & Freie Universität Berlin)
Published on H-Human-Rights (June, 2011)
Commissioned by Rebecca K. Root (Ramapo College of New Jersey)
Champions and Violators of Human Rights in the GDR
From the beginning of Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent, John Rodden is very open about the politics and purpose of his work. On the first page, he states that he is seeking to “advance a critique of communism on the grounds that the East German regime fundamentally violated human rights.” As Rodden interprets it, his book “exposes the double standard” propagated by “past and current advocates of human rights [who have] ignored communist abuses and demonized the West and capitalism as evil” (p. 1). As a remedy, Rodden presents testimony of East Germans who suffered under the rule of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and highlights the extraordinary efforts of citizens who resisted and opposed the dictatorial regime. Ultimately, Rodden attempts to use these experiences to place the moral depravity of the crimes of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) within the same category as those of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler’s Germany.
In his analysis of GDR history, Rodden consistently deploys George Orwell, and particularly the novel 1984 (published in 1949), as a rhetorical and conceptual guide in his own work, for example, in his three previous monographs on East Germany. As such, the book is structured into three parts, the first two serving to demonstrate the variety of horrors that befell East German equivalents of “Winston Smith” in “Orwell’s Reich.” Rodden concludes with a third section devoted to profiling the heroes of the GDR who spoke out against abuses or took part in the peaceful revolution of 1989 that ended SED rule and engendered the reunification of Germany.
The interview subjects and their stories of persecution are indeed compelling, and Rodden should be commended for having gathered them into a single volume in such detail. Rodden’s “profiles in suffering” provide intimate portraits of those who were betrayed to the police by those they thought were friends, as well as the horrors of arbitrary arrest, imprisonment, and torture--very often through verbatim interview transcripts. One subject, Bernd Lippmann, was arrested as a student for distributing copies of Orwell’s anti-Soviet allegory Animal Farm (1946) and subjected to three-months imprisonment alone in a windowless cell until he confessed. One of two female interviewees, Marina, was arrested by the East German Secret Police (the infamous Stasi) for the sole purpose of extorting a substantial payment from her West German uncle.
The final section of the book shifts from victims of human rights abuses to two beacons of hope in Rodden’s depressingly bleak version of East Germany. He begins with Annaliese Saupe, locally know as the “Grandmother of the Revolution” who smuggled information of the domestic unrest in the industrial town of Plauen during the fall of 1989 to Western media providers at great personal risk. Rodden’s other figure of praise is Robert Havemann, a prominent physicist first imprisoned by the Nazis who transitioned from a devoted SED supporter to one of its most vociferous critics. Unlike Saupe, Havemann did not live to see the triumph of the dissident movement he helped to inspire, having died under house arrest in 1983.
Although the interviews provide compelling testimony about the arbitrariness and cruelty of the methods deployed by the Stasi, Rodden awkwardly seeks to press individual stories into a narrative of heroic struggle of ordinary people against the overwhelming depredations of an oppressive totalitarian regime. Orwell’s 1984 often serves as a template for the experiences of all East Germans: a heroic conflict between a citizen seeking truth and the evil communist state that persistently denies him that right. The life story of Erhard Naake is a case in point. As an academic who was refused employment at top institutions (but was still allowed to work at lesser ones) after being deemed “ideologically suspect” by the SED due to his decision to study Friedrich Nietzsche for his dissertation, Naake is held up as a victim of an inhumane regime that chose to stymie a man’s career for thinking forbidden thoughts. Yet Naake himself directs most of his indignation at the West German authorities who, after reunification, fired him from an even lower position in education for his purported loyalty to the SED.
Similarly unexplored are the contradictions between Saupe’s dedication to the revolution of 1989, her professed belief in the “dream of a socialist Germany,” and her sadness at the establishment of consumer capitalism following reunification. Why some citizens of the GDR chose to inform on their friends and families while others decided to speak out is not analyzed further, nor is the continuing loyalty of many of the subjects to the ideals of socialism despite having witnessed the brutalities of its “real existing” form. Even as his subjects reveal a more differentiated and ambiguous understanding of their conflicting hopes, fears, and opportunities for change, Rodden all too often writes of East Germany as a clear-cut morality tale.
Given the strong criticisms of the GDR since its inception, the scope of human rights abuses in Rodden’s account is remarkably narrow, focusing on problems of freedom of thought and expression. Half of the profiles concern intellectual freedom, and of the six East Germans profiled, five were well educated and comparatively privileged. Only one (Marina, a waitress) can be considered working class. Further, all interviewees were residents of major urban centers, with the exception of Saupe who lived in a small industrial town. The human rights abuses suffered by workers and farmers, the vast majority of the East German population, are neither represented nor acknowledged. Although shop-floor activism against SED-imposed working norms and resistance against the forced collectivization of farms represented the most commonplace and sustained form of day-to-day oppositional activity in the GDR, the working population of East Germany is almost totally absent.
Most of these shortcomings stem from Rodden’s fervent belief that the real history of GDR human rights abuses has somehow been covered up and willfully suppressed by left-wing intellectuals and those East Germans who view the past through rose-tinted glasses. He claims that the indifference of the reunified German government and media has allowed apologists to hide the true face of East German communism, and thus helped to silence its many victims. While Rodden is correct that the crimes of the Stasi have not received nearly the attention given to those of the Nazis, the city of Berlin alone is home to two separate museums on the Stasi (one a former detention center and the other the former headquarters), multiple monuments to the Berlin Wall and its victims, and numerous museums that depict the darker sides of the socialist past through both permanent and rolling exhibits. While research on the history of the GDR clearly pales in comparison to the extensive library of works on the Third Reich, the published texts of the two federal government inquiries on SED rule, focusing in large part on the abuses of power by the state, run to more than two-dozen volumes. Numerous studies on the activities of the Stasi are produced every year with the support of the Stiftung Aufarbeitung, a federal agency dedicated to studying the history of the GDR as well as the Birthler Behörde, the institution in charge of the secret files of the Stasi. In his battle against his imagined legions of SED apologists, Rodden has cleansed his own portrayal of the GDR of subtlety or nuance, and thus omitted the experiences of many East Germans in the process.
The ultimate purpose of the book is not so much to explain the GDR by means of comparison with Nazi-era Germany and other totalitarian systems but to assert an (im)moral equivalence. The interviewees themselves, who stray from the narrative frameworks that have been predetermined for them, reveal the weakness of the approach. Even as Rodden equates the crimes of the Stasi and the SED with those of Hitler’s Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union, his subjects seek to dispel any such notion. Saupe recoils at the idea: “Bad as this state [the GDR] was ... there were no ‘Final Solutions.’ You could only equate the SED and the Nazis if you had no knowledge of the Holocaust or of the grand Nazi schemes for world conquest” (p. 28). Clearly, both Nazi Germany and the GDR violated human rights on a large scale, but as equivalents to Nazi genocide and warfare, Rodden offers stories of East German censorship, arbitrary imprisonment, and psychological torture through isolation. To propose a differentiated moral judgment of the two German dictatorships on such evidence is not the result of a pernicious double standard that forgives the crimes of the Left (Rodden’s main accusation), but the simple acknowledgment that the GDR did not engage in genocide or aggressive war.
In spite of the moving firsthand accounts of abuses by the SED’s state security apparatus, this work treads a familiar path in focusing primarily on the plight of oppressed intellectuals and in seeking to evoke the outrage of the reader over a greater understanding of how the GDR functioned. While such an effort is clearly important and worthwhile, Rodden’s tenacious and tendentious use of Orwellian imagery as an explanatory mechanism for forty years of socialist rule dilutes his final product to an assemblage of worthwhile interviews and shallow analysis. It is a worthy task to listen to those who actually experienced the SED dictatorship. It is also a shame that the author did not listen more closely.
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Citation:
Ned Richardson-Little. Review of Rodden, John, Dialectics, Dogmas, and Dissent: Stories from East German Victims of Human Rights Abuse.
H-Human-Rights, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2011.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32371
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