Publisher Description

This extensively researched empirical analysis of the GDR in the years 1971-1989 challenges current historical interpretations of GDR history. It focuses on four social groups - youth, women, writers and Christians - to highlight the stability of this socialist society until 1987. The strength of the regime is shown to have been based on a continuously negotiated process of give-and-take involving major parts of the population.

"Based in part on documents seldom used by previous historians, this history of the Third Reich shows how the dramatic, improbable rise of the Nazis happened because of tragic miscalculations and blunders, then documents what life was like for ordinary Germans as the Nazis precipitated the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust"--

This book addresses major theoretical issues in the fields of public administration and comparative politics. It discusses the role which ideology played as a unifying force for at least parts of the German state bureaucracy in Wilhelmine Germany . The examination of a modernizing ideology in the German case is useful for an understanding of the political dynamics of state-led modernization and industrial strategy in many contemporary societies and the author explains political behaviour and relations in Germany in general terms that are universally relevant.