Vol. 20 · No. 3 · Issue 64 · Fall 2002

Jeffrey Kopstein

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Abstract

Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR: From Anti-Fascism to Stalinism, 1945-1953 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000)

M.E. Sarotte, Dealing with the Devil: East Germany and Ostpolitik, 1969-1973 (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001)

If the Nazi state and the Communist East German state can be com-pared at all, one meaningful dimension of the comparison is the paradox of total power. Ironically, in both cases, the unprecedented scope of authority claimed by political rulers over the lives of ordinary people nurtured a relentless fear among both Nazi and Communist rulers that the whole edifice of state authority could come crashing down at a moment's notice. For this reason, in retrospect both states appear at once totalitarian in aspiration and brittle in self-perception. Enemies lurked everywhere, not only from without but also from within. The Nazi and Communist Party elites felt constrained and even threatened by their own populations. They feared them.

It is true that these parallels in the dynamics of political authority say very little about what are surely crucial differences between the Nazi and Communist regimes: one launched a global war and committed genocide and the other did not. Do these differences render the comparison trivial or immoral? I do not believe they do. In this essay I argue that the comparison is worth pursuing precisely because of these differences. In fact, it is by examining the points of divergence and convergence in the two German dictatorships that we stand to learn the most about authoritarian politics in the twentieth century.