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The University of North Carolina Press
304 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 16 illus., 13 tables, notes, bibl., index
Plastics and Dictatorship in the German Democratic Republic
Eli Rubin takes an innovative approach to consumer culture to explore questions of political consensus and consent and the impact of ideology on everyday life in the former East Germany. Synthetic Socialism explores the history of East Germany through the production and use of a deceptively simple material: plastic. Rubin investigates the connections between the communist government, its Bauhaus-influenced designers, its retooled postwar chemical industry, and its general consumer population. He argues that East Germany was neither a totalitarian state nor a niche society but rather a society shaped by the confluence of unique economic and political circumstances interacting with the concerns of ordinary citizens.
To East Germans, Rubin says, plastic was a high-technology material, a symbol of socialism's scientific and economic superiority over capitalism. Most of all, the state and its designers argued, plastic goods were of a particularly special quality, not to be thrown away like products of the wasteful West. Rubin demonstrates that this argument was accepted by the mainstream of East German society, for whom the modern, socialist dimension of a plastics-based everyday life had a deep resonance.
"Rubin makes a major contribution to the historiography of communism through an innovative approach to consumer culture. His breezy writing style makes the subject come alive. A very fine book."
--Konrad H. Jarausch, author of The Rush to Unite Germany
"Well researched and well organized, Synthetic Socialism explores important aspects of the history of the German Democratic Republic from a novel and very fruitful perspective. It complements a number of other studies on GDR politics, economy, technology, and culture by integrating the history of high politics and culture with analysis of social change at the grassroots level."
--Ray Stokes, director of the Centre for Business History, University of Glasgow, and author of Constructing Socialism: Technology and Change in East Germany, 1945-1990
Cloth: $49.95
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