The Politics of Culture in Soviet-Occupied Germany, 1945-1949

This book examines the political, ideological, and cultural policies pursued by the German Communist or Socialist Unity party, acting upon the instructions of Stalin and his military administration, in Soviet-occupied Germany from 1945 through 1949. During these years, the Communists, in close collaboration with leading officers or diplomats of the Soviet occupation regime, developed a constricting system of organization that guaranteed their control over political as well as cultural processes and allowed both to be used in furthering the specific interests of Soviet foreign policy.
The party's public rhetoric - its shifting ideological presuppositions and cultural corollaries - is an especially important aspect of the author's inquiry into German Communist and Soviet objectives; and he bases his analysis of these and other matters upon extensive documentation enriched by a wealth of unpublished material only recently available to scholars since the opening of East German archives.
Notes of consultations with Stalin himself, politically sensitive instructions from the Soviet occupation authorities, records of party structure and administration, secretariat or politburo decisions, central-committee discussions, confidential memoranda concerning the actual aims of "non-partisan" mass organizations and burgeoning cultural bureaucracies - these kinds of secret materials capture a sense of the internal mechanisms and doctrinal reflexes of a postwar Marxist-Leninist party in the making. They allow for a painstaking analysis of the political and "aesthetic" priorities of a developing Stalinist culture while raising intriguing questions about the early stages of the Cold War and the subsequent division of Germany.
In particular, the gradual introduction of Zhdanovist or socialist-realist political norms and aesthetic forms into Soviet-occupied Germany closely paralleled developments in the Soviet Union during the infamous zhdanovshchina (1946-1948). Smear campaigns against "formalism," "decadence," and "cosmopolitanism," carefully tailored to local circumstances, were the natural consequence. Simultaneously, the German Communists worked behind the scenes with the Soviet occupation regime to establish the administrative apparatus for the enforcement of these standards, imported from the Soviet Union and calculated to infuse German art and literature with the proper political priorities. For example, the author draws upon an abundance of archival material to trace the beginnings and later institutionalization of censorship and other methods of cultural regimentation.
These and related discussions establish the basis for a much better understanding of political and cultural life in the post-1949 German Democratic Republic and represent an opening contribution to a necessary reexamination of Eastern Europe in the immediate postwar period.