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Heiner Timmermann.
Deutsche Fragen: Von der Teilung zur Einheit.
Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2001.685 S. (broschiert), ISBN 978-3-428-10715-5.
Reviewed by
Johanna Granville (Hoover Institution, Stanford University)
Published on
H-German (December, 2003)
Foreign Policy of the GDR Reexamined
Foreign Policy of the GDR Reexamined
Deutsche Fragen 
is a collection of thirty-three es-says that were originally presented by scholars ata conference (“German Questions: From Participa-tion to Unification”) held in 2000 at the EuropeanAcademy at Otzenhausen, Germany. The Academyhas hosted numerous conferences since 1988 on theGDR’s social and political history, attracting schol-ars from all over Europe and North America to Saar-land, a German
Land 
bordered by France on thesouth, Luxemburg on the west, and the Rhineland-Palatinate on the north and east. The editor isHeiner Timmermann, director of the Academy’s So-cial Science Research Institute, professor of Euro-pean history at the University of Jena, and authorof 
Die DDR in Deutschland: ein R¨ uckblick auf 50 Jahre
(2001);
Die DDR: Analysen eines aufgegebe-nen Staates
(2001);
Die DDR: Erinnerung an einen untergegangenen Staat 
(1999) and others. Selecting just thirty-three of the total sixty-eight papers pre-sented, Timmermann divides the volume into fourparts: foreign relations, power, society, and aspectsof unification. In the introduction Timmermann pro-vides short synopses of the Academy’s fifteen collo-quia and conferences in recent years. Even before theautumn of 1989 four colloquia were held on social andeconomic change in the GDR in which social scien-tists from both the FRG and GDR took part. Eachconference resulted in a publication by Dadder Verlagof Saarbruecken. Timmermann described the confer-ence in 2000 as the most memorable, due in part tothe participation of Dr. Wolfgang Schaeuble, the for-mer Minister of the Interior, who played a key role inthe German reunification process.One cannot, of course, assess all the essays in just a brief review. Four essays in the foreign pol-icy section strike this reader as especially interest-ing. In his contribution, “Modern Weapon Systemsfor the Soviet Union: The SED Caught Between Eco-nomic and Ideological Pressures,” Gerhard Barkleitargues–despite what the title of his essay suggests–that ideological pressures dominated the relationshipbetween the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and theUSSR, not economic reality, since true economic com-petition could not exist in a command economy ap-ing the Soviet model (p. 51). In the second es-say, “Brezhnev’s Long-Term Strategy as Reflected inSED Documentation,” Michael Ploetz draws on ex-tensive interviews with witnesses and internal SEDdocuments to demonstrate that the ultimate goal of Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev’s foreignpolicy was to crush the West. The Brezhnev leader-ship engineered a “peace campaign” against NATO’smilitary policies, but despite its initial success, thecampaign failed to reduce NATO’s military and po-litical influence, nor did Soviet-initiated arms controlpolicies. Ploetz argues–a bit one-sidedly–that it wasthe arsenal of weapons that the Brezhnev leadershipassembled with manic obsession that caused the So-viet collapse. It became a “leaden vest which in thecourse of the 1980s caused the over-extended Sovietempire to drown helplessly” (p. 77). Unfortunately,Ploetz seems to ignore other causal factors, such asthe change in leadership, ideological disillusionment,dissatisfaction of the masses, and the overall effectsof globalization. In the third essay, “Problems of the GDR’s Indebtedness to the West and Its ForeignTrade Statistics,”Armin Volze argues controversiallythat the GDR could have muddled along for severalmore years, since its foreign trade statistics were dis-torted. He cites a report on the discrepancies betweenreal and perceived indebtedness (p. 91).The final essay particularly worth noting, by Do-erte Putensen, shows how the GDR’s foreign policytoward the Nordic countries developed after diplo-matic recognition was established. As the years1
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