In planned economies like that of the GDR, the allocation of resources and materials occupies much political and administrative attention. A great many agencies of the bureaucracy are devoted to securing the supply of resources and organizing a steady flow of materials to wherever they are deemed necessary. Uwe Tellkamp’s family novel Der Turm (2008), set in GDR Dresden, has recently shown how material knowledge and recycling matter to people who live in an “economy of scarcity” and face the gradual deterioration of their built environment. In the novel, old things even become the guardians of a prewar bourgeois culture. Here, in Synthetic Socialism: Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2008, $49.95), Eli Rubin makes skillful use of these insights and observations when he records the history of the East German “welfare dictatorship” (so named by Konrad H. Jarausch) by tracing the ascension of plastic.

Rubin argues that state coercion and Stasi surveillance cannot fully explain the GDR’s political and social cohesion. He suggests that, over the decades, East German society developed a genuine self-understanding whose nature can be grasped by analyzing its everyday material culture. Private life was not a “state-free” sphere. State provisions and socialist ideologies were put forward, questioned, adopted, and transformed through the artifacts with which East Germany decorated itself. In the production of synthetic materials and plastic goods, the state and party ultimately “found a central point of agreement between the needs of the political economy, the aesthetic ideology of modernist industrial designers, and the desires of the population for a modern yet efficient life” (p. 2).

Two concurring and inextricably linked events, discussed in chapter 1, made the year 1958 a watershed for the GDR: the Chemistry Program and a “consumer turn.” The Chemistry Program intended to use investment in the chemical industry as a stimulant to other industrial areas; chemical synthesis was to become the keystone of all economic planning. The stakes were high: economic success should earn the state the consent of its citizens. Rubin’s thesis is as follows: from the moment that “the main economic task of the GDR” was defined as “overtaking West Germany in per capita consumption” (p. 33) instead of excelling in the sector of heavy industry, plastics of all sorts became the material which, in the official rhetoric, embodied the envisioned authority of the state. The subsequent chapters explain how and why plastics linked mass consumption, the idea of individual prosperity in socialism, and political consent.

Chapter 2 proposes that the science-based synthetic materials enabled functionalist designers to present themselves as being guided by scientific principles, producing an aesthetic of objectivity and “truth.” In this reading, functionalist design was congruent with the ambitions of the state and party. Most important, plastics helped form a genuine GDR culture through the housing program started in 1957. The new living culture, pursued in chapter 3, was “aggressively advertised” in the late 1950s and 1960s (p. 89). The GDR diverted significant amounts of synthetics to prefabricated mass-housing construction, making plastics a salient feature of the new apartments. Drawing on interviews, Rubin convincingly suggests that, collectively, people experienced their move into modern suburbia as a major rupture with the individual past. Rather indirectly, therefore, plastics came to be associated with individual transitions and adjustments to the socialist present. Chapter 4 deals with plastics as the “fabric” of most consumer goods. Interpreting the wave of plastic guidebooks and explanatory exhibitions, Rubin argues that East Germans, after years of programmatic propaganda in favor of a functionalist or socialist aesthetics of plastics, not only approved the key position of synthetics in socialist economic planning but also shared the political and aesthetic values officially attached to them. Plastic rather improbably acquired the reputation of being a highly valuable material—even though, one might add, it was not necessarily molded into modernist forms (consider, for instance, the plastic eggcup in the shape of chickens on the book’s cover which, like many other products, was definitely at variance with what functionalist industrial design would demand).

The larger part of chapter 5 refocuses the book’s culturalist narrative by putting plastics into the broader picture of the GDR’s economy. It traces the history of how the planning, production, and distribution of plastic materials worked, failed, and improved in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s. Centralized coordination and efforts to standardize the quality and types of plastic allowed for an increased output with fewer rejections. Material testing and a standardized range of products eventually led to a homogeneity of plastic material culture. Until the early 1970s, however, Soviet oil was in short supply and modern thermoplastic production facilities were not yet online. That plastic became a hallmark of the GDR’s modernity even though the state frequently struggled with producing large amounts of high-quality synthetics fits into the larger picture: Political legitimization of socialism was generally based on its utopian dimension (see, for instance, Lucian Hölscher, Weltgericht oder Revolution: Protestantische und sozialistische Zukunftsvorstellungen im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 [1989]).

Historians of technology may feel that Rubin does not pay enough attention to the larger history of the materials he uses for exploring East Germany’s political culture. This is true both in terms of discourse and in terms of practices. When the Chemistry Program picked plastics for enhancing the output of consumer articles, the choice was a traditional one. Virtually all modern plastics, starting with celluloid in the 1870s and 1880s, were developed and discussed with a view toward mass consumption. Future prosperity through plastics had been prophesied many times, and in many places. The GDR was, as Rubin notes, a latecomer in this respect. In order to fully understand why the promise of plastics persisted as a powerful agent of social change, the historical and contemporary semantics evolving around this artifact could have been explored more systematically. A great source, for instance, is the bulk of petition letters citizens addressed to the organization of plastics processing facilities. I wish Rubin had provided the readers with a much closer reading of the 2,728 Eingaben concerning plastics, only selectively interpreted in the last part of chapter 5.

For some time now, focusing on material culture has implied advocating the practice turn in historical research. I would have liked Rubin to be more explicit about how he conceptualizes the relationship between dealing with plastic as a material and its shaping of collective experience and social cohesion. With regard to the centralizing of planning authorities around plastics, for instance, he suggests that synthetics reflected the “centripetal forces” of the plan (p. 176). It seems more convincing, though, and also more in line with Rubin’s overall approach, to argue just the other way around: New materials exert “centripetal forces”; they serve as a medium of social interaction and entail infrastructural and organizational adaptations—be it in market or planned economies. These points aside, Synthetic Socialism is an innovative contribution to the history of consumption in the GDR.

Dr. Westermann is a historian of technology at ETH Zürich.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 1 (January 2010)