BOOK REVIEW: EVERYDAY SUBVERSION - From Joking to Revolting in the German Democratic Republic

how the East German population subverted Communist totalitarian rule

EVERYDAY SUBVERSION - From Joking to Revolting in the German Democratic Republic by Kerry Kathleen Riley. Michigan State U. Press, East Lansing, MI; www.msupress.msu.edu. 2008. 375+xiii pages. $69.95 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-87013-801-0. notes, bibliography, index.

"This is a story of how average people, relying on their everyday symbolic resources, can counter repressive propaganda, harassment, unmitigated ideology, and existential deprivation." Riley's focus is East German society in the decades leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism throughout Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union itself.

The "symbolic resources" whose effects the author describes range from civic disobedience of individuals, jokes told between persons or to small groups, sit-ins and other public protests of church groups, to mass street demonstrations of tens of thousands of East Germans. In dealing with each type, the author always also relates how the Communist authorities reacted. This dynamic between natural and in many cases inventive resistance and attempts to repress it and often punish it to varying degrees of severity is the crux of the story.

Since political parties, most social groups such as clubs, and even public gatherings were forbidden in East Germany, the types of "oppositional strategies" treated were not coordinated; though taken together they had the single aim of undermining and thus changing the totalitarianism of the Communism state. The range of resistance was a social movement to bring about an ill-defined political change (often called democracy for lack of a better word) rather than a political movement since political activity as this is commonly understood in free societies was impossible in East Germany.

A part of the publisher's Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series, this work by an independent scholar who traveled to East Germany as well as the Soviet Union and other parts of Europe as part of her research not only relates the "oppositional strategies," but analyzes and evaluates them. Not all were effective in a pragmatic or tactical respect. But as Riley sees, even the apparently ineffective or self-destructive acts indicated a way of social life including hopes and visions beyond the official Communism repressive ideology and repression and had meaning because they took shape at all and made a statement if nothing else.

Moving from the dynamic of resistance and repression leading to the collapse of Communism in East Germany to evaluating the "everyday subversion" as a rhetoric, Riley cites its "additive-aggregative" nature. "Oral expression is aggregative rather than analytic," she explains. "Orality relies on formulas, clusters, parallel terms, phrases clauses, antitheses, and epithets--all devices that high literacy rejects as cumbersome...." Boldness alone would not have been enough to put an end to Communism. East Germans had to be nimble-witted as well in their resistance. As Riley elaborates with numerous instances from East Germany society and related skilled sociological, psychological, and historical analysis, Communism was eventually brought down by a kind of irrepressible folk wisdom.