Socialist Subjectivities: Queering East Germany under Honecker

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Socialist Subjectivities: Queering East Germany under Honecker

edited by Katharine White, Scott Harrison and Jeff Hayton

University of Michigan Press, 2025

ISBNs

Cloth: 978-0-472-07736-6

Paper: 978-0-472-05736-8

eISBN: 978-0-472-90496-9 (OA)

About the Book

Socialist Subjectivities works within the logics of queer time to reanimate East German subjectivities in the 1970s and 1980s beyond the narrative of the German Democratic Republic’s long march towards demise. While East Germany certainly ended in dissolution, not all East Germans experienced late socialism in a singular manner. Rather, even after a generation of building socialism, East Germans under Honecker continued to pursue a range of socialist presents and a multiplicity of socialist futures up to and beyond 1989. This edited volume utilizes queer temporalities to interrogate how individuals lived non-normative possibilities in a highly normative world.

Whether one was an apparatchik, artist, or alcoholic, the everyday interactions, experiences, and rituals of late socialism proved crucial to establishing the conditions around which subjecthood was constructed. Despite stereotypes of apathy and inertia, East Germans lent a considerable dynamism to their society, and by generating a cacophony of opinions and a heterogeneity of ideas, they constantly transformed state socialism. By foregrounding socialist subjects and the iterative nature of socialism during these decades, this volume paints a richer portrait of East Germany—one that illuminates how East Germans imagined their futures in a society whose collapse they could not foresee.

About the Author

Scott Harrison is Faculty in Liberal Studies at Boston Architectural College.
Jeff Hayton is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Wichita State University.
Katharine White is Campus Outreach Program Officer at The Mandel Center in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Reviews

"A risk with an edited volume drawing upon subjectivity theory is to present a social system as a mosaic of individualities that coalesce into definitive shape only at a distance, if at all. This volume’s approach avoids this in emphasizing subjective relation, both to oneself and one’s wider social-political system, as a coterminous phenomenon across time. The end result is a work that explores, and respects, East Germany’s contingency and diversity."

— Alexander Petrusek, Central European History

“This book is warmly recommended to anyone interested in East Germany or the writing of history in general, to new scholars and to those established in the field.”

— Melissa Sheedy, Monatshefte

“The chapters in this volume highlight the diverse ways that individuals and groups constituted ‘socialist subjectivities’ in the GDR, particularly in the Honecker era between 1971 and 1989. The volume employs a queer temporalities approach that fits comfortably with dynamic and growing revisionist scholarship on the GDR, while offering a unique methodological perspective, and is extraordinarily successful in its argumentative and methodological aim of ‘queering East Germany.’ This volume marks a major intervention in the field of East German historiography.”— Samuel Clowes Huneke, George Mason University

“Socialist Subjectivities: Queering East Germany under Honecker complements [other recent] intriguing studies by bringing together scholars who engage with different groups and individuals such as queer people, writers, dissidents, singer-songwriters, doctors and patients as well as specific arenas such as art or polling.”

— Christian Rau, Contemporary European History