Vol. 19 · No. 4 · Issue 61 · Winter 2001 · pp. 115-126 (12)

Ordinary East Germans and the Peaceful Revolution

Christiane Olivo

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Abstract

Linda Fuller, Where Was the Working Class? Revolution in Eastern Germany (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1999)

Jonathan Grix, The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of GDR (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000)

Two recent studies of the "peaceful revolution" in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) examine the role of ordinary citizens in the political upheaval of 1989/90. Linda Fuller's Where Was the Working Class? and Jonathan Grix's The Role of the Masses in the Collapse of the GDR employ similar methodologies in focusing on the activities and perspectives of "ordinary" people. Fuller sets out to answer two questions: "To what degree and in what ways were workers, the overwhelming majority of GDR citizens, involved in the politics of the 1989/90 revolution, and how can their involvement best be explained?" She maintains that the peaceful revolution was a middle-class movement characterized by the absence of working-class activists. In explaining why this was the case, she draws on feminist standpoint theory to begin her inquiry from the perspective of one of the least powerful and privileged groups in GDR society, workers. Similarly, Grix employs a "bottom-up" approach to understanding the peaceful revolution by "examining the actions of ordinary citizens leading up to and during the Wende of 1989". He argues that the academic literature has placed too much emphasis on external factors contributing to the GDR's collapse as well as on the role of elites, in particular of oppositionist activists, and has also focused almost exclusively on East Berlin and the southern cities of Leipzig and Dresden, ignoring the northern regions. Grix hopes to rectify these gaps in the literature with a case study of the activities of ordinary citizens in the northern city of Schwerin.