The Communist ruling parties of East Central and Eastern Europe in the post-1956 era developed ‘softer’ methods of staying in power, both vis-a-vis the societies they ruled as well as within the Party itself, methods which proved more effective than ‘purges’ and ‘party discipline’. This article investigates these methods, taking the East German ‘Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands’ (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) or SED as a case study and focusing on one specific control procedure in particular: the ‘brigade deployments’ of the Central Committee apparatus of the SED, that is ‘on the job inspections’ of subordinate party organs. A systematic analysis of Central Committee brigade deployments shows that, rather than serving to punish these organs, the inspections were primarily a means of consensus creation in which brigade members effectively used staged performances and a ‘language of intimacy’ to keep their comrades ‘in line’. Though ultimately still a form of repression, this ‘performative’ style of party rule was much more subtle than the common conception of monolithic power machines would suggest.
The impact of the Reichswehr's program of clandestine armament on Weimar Germany's civil society is a phenomenon largely overlooked by post-war historiography. Not only did it fail to identify the wide support enjoyed by the illegal preparations for a general mobilization on the national and local levels, but it also failed to address the question why the officials collaborated with the Reichswehr under the aegis of “national defense” at all. The reasons for both omissions are easy to find. While the role played by civilians within the militarization of society has been largely ignored (due to the historiographical dominance of the interpretation model of the army as an autonomous “state within the state”), the few authors who recognized its importance considered a more detailed analysis of civilian dispositions to be dispensable in view of the well-known nationwide anti-Versailles sentiment.
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