| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

Alan McDougall. Youth Politics in East Germany: The Free German Youth Movement 1946–1968. (Oxford Historical Monographs.) New York: Oxford University Press for Clarendon Press. 2004. Pp. xiv, 261. $99.00.

In writing the history of East Germany (GDR), scholars are often split between conveying the perspective of the political leadership and its totalitarian intentions on the one hand, and the history of GDR society, everyday life, and ordinary people on the other. In his study of youth politics in East Germany during the regime of Walter Ulbricht, Alan McDougall aims to combine both perspectives. He analyzes Herrschaft as a relationship shaped by actors on both sides, who communicate both directly and indirectly. The debate about how to write the history of the GDR, highly politicized, has recently been rekindled over the question of how to present GDR history in museums and in monuments. McDougall takes a clear stand: he criticizes totalitarian theory for confusing political intentions with practices and results, and, by focusing heavily on the state and its apparatus of repression, for ignoring society and its resistant and stubborn tendencies and the instrumental use that ordinary people make of politics. Political power was much more chaotic in practice than in theory, he argues, and repression less effective than the political leadership hoped for and than some historians still tend to believe.

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