576
Reviews of Books and Films
Ultimately, the expellees, despite their occasionally
extreme rhetoric, never became the threat to West
German democracy many feared. In part because of
their solicitous courting, the major parties gained the
loyalty of most of the expellee rank and file, hastening
the collapse of the expellee political party (the Union
of the Expelled and Disenfranchised, or BHE). Furthermore, federal social policies and increasing prosperity hastened the expellees' integration into West
German society by the 1960s. Ahonen concedes that,
from this perspective, the efforts to neutralize the
expellees were a success. Nonetheless, he argues that
West German leaders were unnecessarily timid, and he
concludes his discussion with the sobering assessment:
"Many subsequent problems at home and abroad
could have been avoided had the Federal Republic's
elites invested less time in nourishing illusionary hopes
and shown more courage in preparing the ground for
what they knew would be painful but necessary decisions" (p. 279).
Ahonen's conclusions are convincingly argued, and
his book on the whole offers a clear and compelling
narrative of the development of expellee organizations
and their influence on policy up to 1969, covering the
period after 1969 in a brief concluding chapter.
Ahonen's focus on the relationship between domestic
politics and foreign policy is especially admirable and
suggests potential comparisons with other pressure
groups both in Germany and elsewhere (such as Cuban
exiles in Florida). The only significant criticism, outside of a noticeable (if inevitable) tendency to cast
expellee leaders only as fools or knaves, is Ahonen's
almost reflexively negative view of Konrad Adenauer.
After criticizing Adenauer and others for catering to
expellee revanchism with promises of reunification,
Ahonen then castigates Adenauer when he urged
"patience" on Ostpolitik, claiming that this proves he
had little interest in unification (p. 126). Ahonen's
arguments place him within a rich and complex literature on Adenauer and unification but also risk holding Adenauer to a different standard than other
politicians.
That criticism aside, Ahonen's work will be essential
reading for all students and scholars of postwar West
German politics and diplomacy.
RONALD J. GRANIERI
University of Pennsylvania
JEANNETIE Z. MADARASZ. Conflict and Compromise in
East Germany, 1971-1989: A Precarious Stability. New
York: Palgrave MacmiIIan. 2003. Pp. xvi, 276. $69.95.
In this important monograph, Jeannette Z. Madarasz
provides an extremely illuminating, original, and sophisticated analysis of the complex relationship between state and society in East Germany (also known
as the German Democratic Republic or GDR) during
the period of Erich Honecker's rule. She takes as the
basis for her study four social groups: young people,
women, writers, and Christians. This combination of
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
age, gender, profession, and religious affiliation enables the reader to compare various sections of GDR
society. The book is based on a treasure trove of
material from the former East German archives.
Madarasz argues that East Germany did not remain
stable between 1971 and 1987 because of repression
alone. Acceptance of the Communist system by the
general population and integration of key social
groups through participation in official structures and
compromise with the authorities were also essential
factors. The author sheds new light on channels of
communication between state and society (such as the
petitions system) and the ability of certain groups to
negotiate with the regime for special privileges. GDR
society, according to Madarasz, was diverse, differentiated, and capable of articulating its own interests.
State officials often felt obliged to bargain with their
subjects for the sake of political and social stability. In
this way an uneasy equilibrium was achieved in East
Germany until Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, destabilized the situation after 1987. The book is therefore a much-needed corrective to accounts written in
the immediate aftermath of the Cold War that focused
disproportionately on state oppression as the reason
for the GDR's survival.
Despite its pioneering research, however, the book
does have significant shortcomings. For example, the
author launches an exaggerated attack on totalitarian
theory, which, whatever its faults, has stood the test of
time. Certainly, if one takes a simplistic definition of
this term, Madarasz has a point. But totalitarianism
does not necessarily entail the total repression of
society by the state but rather its enforced fusion with
state structures. Although totalitarianism might mean
slightly different things to different scholars, that is no
reason to jettison it altogether.
Perhaps it would have been better to take a more
nuanced view and characterize East Germany as an
"inefficient bureaucratic" as opposed to "charismatic
terrorist" totalitarian state. This would have clearly
distinguished the GDR from Adolf Hitler's Germany
and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, while simultaneously
making it plain that the central mission of the ruling
Socialist Unity Party (SED) was to control as much of
East German society as possible in the name of
communist ideology, regardless of its ultimate failure
to do so. If one takes totalitarianism as a relative
rather than an absolute concept, Honecker's GDR was
undoubtedly one of the most totalitarian states in the
Soviet bloc, even if it did not reach Orwellian standards of perfection. Of course, it is all too easy to find
fault with existing concepts and much more difficult to
come up with new ones. Since the author does not
attempt to do this, her book lacks a theoretical framework. To simply describe the GDR as a "dictatorship"
like any other is inadequate since it fails to acknowledge the unprecedented degree to which society was
supervised by the state in East Germany.
Madarasz also understates the importance of the
repressive context within which the compromises she
APRIL 2005
Europe: Early Modern and Modern
elucidates were made. Moreover, her claim that East
German society was "viable" and "supported by the
majority of the population" (p. 192) is highly contentious. Vicissitudes in the fortunes of the system notwithstanding, it is safe to say that the GDR would have
collapsed at any time in its history had the Soviet
Union withdrawn its support. The Berlin Wall was in
place to stop the state from bleeding to death. Although the author is not seeking to explain why East
Germany imploded but why it remained stable for
most of the Honecker era, her short section on its
demise makes no mention of long-term systemic defects which militated against the state's longevity.
Without wishing to downplay the impact of Gorbachev
(who was absolutely crucial to the system's destabilization), other factors also deserve a mention. Finally,
the writing style is a little monotonous, and the book
sometimes repeats itself. Despite these flaws,
Madarasz has made an important contribution to the
growing secondary literature on the GDR.
PETER GRIEDER
University of Hull
IAN REIFOWITZ. Imagining an Austrian Nation: Joseph
Samuel Bloch and the Search for a Multiethnic Austrian
Identity, 1846-1919. Boulder, Colo.: East European
Monographs. 2003. Pp. vi, 251. $42.00.
Ian Reifowitz's book examines the "nationality problem" of the Habsburg monarchy through the eyes of
Joseph Samuel Bloch and others and summarizes in
passing some of the most recent literature on nationalism in general and on the role of the Jews in
Austria-Hungary. Bloch emerges from this study as a
man of great humanity and vision, someone who,
unlike his mentor Adolf Fischhof, for example, did not
wish Jews to regard themselves as part of a superior
German culture. This may be why some scholars have
viewed Bloch as representing a transitional stage in the
development of Austrian Jewry between assimilation
and Zionism.
According to Bloch, Austrian Jews were to see
themselves as politically Austrian, ethnically (he did
not believe in the concept of "race") as Jewish, and
culturally as whatever they chose. Politically "the
mission of Israel" (p. 132) was to fight ethnic prejudice
and to promote "the consanguinity of one single family
of peoples to which we all belong-the Slav, the
Teuton, the Roman, the man of brown or red or yellow
complexion" (p. 132). Jews in fighting for the rights of
Jews would be fighting for human rights, democracy,
and an Austrian Rechtstaat (constitutional state).
Bloch vigorously defended the monarchy ("for Jews
the happiest Fatherland," p. 134) but as late as October 4, 1918, he still hoped to see a decentralized and
democratic Habsburg Empire emerge from World War
1. Only on November 5, 1918 did he declare (p. 158)
that "the past is over."
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
577
Bloch always condemned the idea of the nationstate: "The nationality principle has, so far as it has
been carried out to this point in Europe, brought
nothing other than severe calamity" (p. 141). He
demanded an "Austrian state patriotism ... completely without regard to nationality or confession" (p.
143).
Reifowitz compares Bloch's ideas with those of
several other commentators on the nationality problem: Fischhof, Iakiv Holovatskyj, Frantisek Palacky,
Joseph Eotvos, Aurel Popovici, Karl Renner, and Otto
Bauer. None of this leads to any new conclusions, but
reinforces the now established view that reformers
simply wanted to reform the monarchy, not to overthrow it: there was a significant consensus, in other
words, across political and ethnic lines on the need to
preserve a multi-ethnic Austrian state and create some
form of common supra-ethnic identity, a consensus
that suggests that the people of the monarchy might
have been able to resolve their differences and reform
the Austrian state, if only their ruler had given them
the opportunity and the authority to do so. In the end
it was not the Habsburg monarchy but the Habsburgs
(particularly Franz Joseph) who failed.
I reached the same conclusion several years ago in
my Decline and Fall ofthe Habsburg Empire, 1815-1918
(1989) and defended it in the second edition of that
book (2001). In an attempt to boost his own originality,
however, Reifowitz attacks me for somehow failing to
recognize the corrosive strength of the nationality
problem: "[Sked] ignored the fact that military defeat
alone does not explain why peoples rejected the multiethnic state along with the dynasty. For example,
although the German and Russian monarchies also fell
as a result of defeat in the First World War, Germany
and Russia continued to exist, albeit in different
forms" (p. 12). In fact, all the empires had the same
experience. Germany lost its French, Danish, and
Polish subjects, while Russia lost its Polish, Moldavian,
Finnish, and Baltic subjects (not to mention the messy
situation elsewhere). The real difference was that
whereas the Germans and Russians made up the
majority of their empires' populations, Austria's Germans constituted a mere twenty-five percent of the
population of Austria-Hungary. However, the nationality principle deprived them all of their multinational
character as well as their dynasties.
Reifowitz makes two other significant errors. He
explains "k.k." as "kaiserlich und koniglich" ("imperial
and royal"), thus displaying an uncommon ignorance
of Hungarian history (p.153, fn. 531). Then he statesquite falsely-that it was the Ukrainian peasantry that
frustrated the Polish revolt of 1846 (p. 171, fn. 575). In
fact, the peasantry involved were Poles. Overall, however, the book's exposition of Bloch's ideas is to be
welcomed.
ALAN SKED
London School of Economics and Political Science
APRIL 2005