Local Lives, Parallel Histories: Villagers and Everyday Life in Divided Germany. By Marcel Thomas

This innovative book is the first in-depth comparative study of the transformation of rural villages in Cold War divided Germany. The analysis centers on the communities of Neukirch in Saxony and Ebersbach in Baden-Württemberg, two localities with much in common even though they were separated by hundreds of miles. In 1945 they were large industrial villages of around 6,000 residents that were comparable both in their outward appearances and social structures. Both were situated about 40 miles from large cities (Dresden and Stuttgart respectively). In 1949, Neukirch came to be in the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) and Ebersbach in the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). In the book’s introduction, Thomas offers the central questions that guide his analysis of Neukirch and Ebersbach: “How did villagers experience the transformation of their rural localities? How did they respond to the implementation of two different social and political systems in the specific local settings of their village? And to what extent can we identify similarities as well as differences between their responses in East and West?” (7). Thomas convincingly argues that despite the different courses of the two Cold War Germanies, Ebersbach and Neukirch had “parallel histories” as “villagers in East and West experienced and responded to the transformations in their localities in remarkably similar ways” (7). In particular, Thomas carried out comprehensive oral histories in both villages and employs that source material brilliantly to complement archival sources.

The author shows in his first chapter that both villages “followed a similar chronology of a departure from, and subsequent return to, the rural” (36). Across the first two postwar decades, residents of both Ebersbach and Neukirch conflated rurality with backwardness, which needed to be overcome. All of this came to a head in the 1970s in a flurry of modernization. In Ebersbach, local authorities began attempting to redefine the village as urban to claim a more notable position in the modernizing West Germany while in Neukirch, efforts to remake the locality into a modern “socialist village” reached a climax. By the 1980s, however, as both the Federal Republic and the GDR struggled economically, modernization attempts on both sides of the Iron Curtain declined and both Ebersbachers and Neukirchers increasingly turned again to embrace the positive aspects of rurality.

Chapter two centers on privacy and village life. Thomas argues that Ebersbach’s growth and increasing affluence led residents to gradually abandon traditional village social spaces as they turned to more fully embrace private life while concurrently lamenting lost old ways. In Neukirch, locals longed for privacy too but economic shortages meant that they were forced to maintain complex support networks, networks which crumbled after reunification, and the loss of the old ways has since led to similar mourning of lost traditional village life. Thus, this chapter illustrates villagers in both communities “increasingly abandoned traditional social networks but instantly lamented their demise when they disappeared from their lives” (33).

Thomas’s third chapter focuses on influxes of non-locals into the villages, particularly focusing on three waves of migration: ethnic German refugees, foreign workers, and urban newcomers. The author argues that residents of each community “excluded newcomers from the local community by pushing them to marginalized spaces in the village” as they tried to claim ownership over “their” village (160). Thomas moreover shows that these Germans have not fully come to terms with diversity in their villages. The chapter concludes by describing migrant inflows to the two communities from the Middle East and North Africa since 2015 and the continuation of old patterns of marginalization and exclusion.

The following chapter looks at how each village engaged with the other Germany during the Cold War. Building especially on the scholarship on Germans along the inner-German border of Edith Sheffer, Sagi Schaefer, Jason Johnson, and Astrid M. Eckert and employing Christoph Kleßmann’s idea of “asymmetrical entanglement,” Thomas shows that these villagers far from the Iron Curtain “had very different perceptions of the other Germany, but they also shared a parallel history of estrangement and othering in their daily engagement with the society beyond the Iron Curtain” (194). Neukirchers came to yearn for the consumer affluence of the West but also distanced themselves from the Federal Republic to help feel pride in the modest happiness they had carved out while Ebersbachers used the GDR to convince themselves they were the more progressive Germans, seeing the East as defined by its absence from the Wirtschaftswunder. Ultimately Thomas emphasizes the lack of a shared feeling of German nationhood among Ebersbachers and Neukirchers and the importance of distance: the physical distance from the other Germany and, more importantly, the imagined distance which particularly exacerbated othering.

Chapter five uses local activism as a way to understand the (highly contested) citizen-state relationship in divided Germany, challenging “the dominant understanding of rural politics in East and West as mirror images” (33). Using examples such as citizen participation in the restoration of a lake resort in Neukirch and Ebersbachers painting their own crosswalk after local authorities had refused, Thomas argues “the remaking of the locality gave rise to a new kind of give-and-take between citizens and the state” (231). The author shows that residents of both villages actively took up opportunities to improve local conditions and worked with state authorities, though their political participation was fundamentally molded by the different systems of East and West. All told, the fifth chapter suggests activism in both Cold War Germanies was considerably more present than has been generally assumed.

Thomas’s final chapter turns to the increased popular engagement with local history which emerged in both Germanies from the 1970s on. The author shows that on both sides of the Iron Curtain, local histories became a way for locals to control and understand the changes in their communities. Ebersbachers used local histories “to attempt to moderate the rapid transformations of the village and provide guidance for locals in the years of uncertainty following the ‘economic miracle’” while Neukirchers used the official narrative of GDR Aufbau to emphasize collective identities and take pride in their successes in an economy plagued by shortages (272).

Overall, Thomas has produced an outstanding study. This book is an excellent contribution to the growing literature which uses bottom-up methods to find commonalties between the two Germanies, contributing to a broader trend in the historiography that emphasizes similarities alongside difference. His analysis is sharp, sophisticated, and extremely readable. Throughout this nuanced analysis, Thomas convincingly teases out an array of similarities between these two localities, successfully demonstrating parallel histories.