A ritual middle ground? Personhood, ideology and resistance in East Germany

This quotation is taken from a book presented to young East Germans at the socialist coming-of-age ritual Jugendweihe [youth consecration]. They are only a few sentences out of an entire chapter, which deals with the so called ‘socialist personality’ [sozialistische Persönlichkeit]. The ritual Jugendweihe, which was attended by over ninety per cent of the East German fourteen-year-olds (Urban and Weinzen 1984: 28), was thought by its organisers, the Zentraler Ausschuß für Jugendweihe [Central Committee], to foster a very specific kind of personhood in young people. The preparatory sessions on ideology and history, the speech and vow during the ceremony thus embodied clear messages about a proper socialist sense of self. Participation in the ritual was supposedly voluntary. Hearsay, however, had it that a refusal to participate – in order to celebrate Evangelical or Catholic initiation rituals, for example – was likely to jeopardise a young person’s future career prospects (Griese 2001). When conducting my research in Saxony-Anhalt during the year 2000, I mentioned my interest in the socialist personality to some friends. They were immediately taken aback and declared, audibly, that I ‘must know that it had not been like that!’ This episode illustrates a feature of life under socialism which in its consequences extends into the present, and thereafter came up frequently during the research. While the state took great care clearly to express concepts, values and norms as part of its ideology, everyday life seemed to be governed by its own, often discrepant rules. Gauss accordingly described the GDR as a ‘niche society’ [Nischengesellschaft] (1986), where a separate culture develops in the privacy of back gardens and family homes. Wolle captures this discrepancy between ideology and oppression on the one hand and the social cosiness of everyday life on the other in his phrase ‘Die Heile Welt der Diktatur’: the cosy world of dictatorship (1999). This metaphor expresses a crucial point: official ideology and grassroots practices were not separated from each other. They rather seemed to exist next to one another, at times overlapping and at times diverging, but clearly reinforcing each other’s validity. In this article I will explore the relationship between official ideology and interpretations established in social interaction with regard to the notion of the person.