According to a joke that made the rounds in the former Soviet Union, women from different countries held on to their husbands in different ways: the German by her skills as a housewife, the Spaniard by her passionate lovemaking, the Frenchwoman by her refined elegance—and the Russian by the party committee. This sexist quip was a not so oblique reference to the ways in which the communist party intervened in the private domestic affairs of its members. But—even leaving aside the obviously offensive—it was not entirely accurate, for the practice was just as common in other communist countries as well. This included the eastern half of postwar Germany, where, as in the Soviet Union, the wives of adulterous members of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) sometimes appealed to local functionaries for assistance with their straying husbands.
In the early 1950s, East German officials at the storied Maxhütte steel mill in Thuringia collected short CVs or “life stories” (Lebensläufe) written by approximately 370 blue- and white-collar workers who had recently become Stakhanovite “activists”. These documents, which all contain the same basic biographical information about the authors – from their socioeconomic background to their political activities – shed light on a group that has received little systematic scholarly attention, namely, ostensibly loyal and ordinary East Germans at the grass roots. Their early support of the SED state and its economic goals ensured the longer-term stability of a largely unloved regime. These valuable documents thus provide important clues for understanding the puzzling political and economic viability of the German Democratic Republic.
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