Andre Steiner (ed.), Uberholen ohne einzuholen : die DDR-Wirtschaft als Fussnote der deutschen Geschichte? [review]

The front cover of this book has a picture of the famous Trabant saloon car on top of a municipal skip for excessively large rubbish. It is an image that attempts to reflect the book’s questioning subtitle: ‘the GDR economy as a footnote of German history?’ The image, however, clearly represents a prejudice that Steiner’s excellent edited volume is intended in part to qualify; accordingly, one of the book’s key objectives is to consider the economic development of the GDR in its very specific context: that of a German economic culture, over-determined by the systemic divide, by the demands of bloc membership and by the pressures of technological and organizational change. The eight authors are thus established economic historians of Germany and are not drawn from the ranks of established GDR specialists. Their compass is therefore wider, covering continuities from, and similarities to, older traditions of industrial and commercial organization as well as the marked contrasts between ordo-liberal market mechanisms in the West and centrally planned state socialism in the East.