| Everyday culture in the German Democratic Republic looked little like the web of voluntary associations that mark out liberal-democratic civil society. The framework within which the East German on the street experienced his lot in the system of state socialism struck even enthusiastic contemporary participants as stylized, if not contrived, given the pervasive top-down direction of the most innocuous-seeming moments of sociability and creative expression. One experienced activist aptly summed up the party-state leadership's program of politically correct supervised leisure as "organized cheerfulness.".;On the other hand, this program of state-prescribed and proscribed leisure and expression also accommodated a semblance of privatized human interrelations. Through the institutions of "organized cheerfulness," ordinary citizens could affirm the socialist order and use it to their advantage. At the level of popular practice, participation in state-sponsored recreation represented an intermediate stance struck between outright resistance and total subservience. This compromise arrangement amused, sustained, integrated and stabilized East German society for the better part of the country's 40 years.;To demonstrate this intricate dynamic of control, subordination and slight subversions, this study takes the form of a local study informed by national history. It examines everyday life and culture, particularly officially sanctioned leisure activity, in a particular town--Wittenberg--at the zenith and in the declining years of the German socialist state from 1971 to 1989. It relies on archival research as well as private sources and some three dozen interviews with participants--organizers and organizees--to produce a composite portrait of everyday life in an East German town. It offers insight into the significance that Wittenbergers, like their compatriots elsewhere in the GDR, found in their experience and in the political and social circumstances. In the end, the examination of "organized cheerfulness" proves that East Germans derived sufficient human satisfaction from their day-to-day lives, even in increasingly restrictive conditions, that they considered themselves members of a functioning community until the state itself belied that balance. |
