ABSTRACT
The growing divergence between the regime’s assumptions and the outlook of a changing society deprived the German Democratic Republic (GDR) of political legitimacy, leaving it vulnerable to any sudden adverse. In addition to the increasingly problematical domestic situation, the regime faced new and difficult external challenges. The regime itself increasingly fostered comparisons with West Germany, and it sponsored an improved image of Germany’s national heritage. In the GDR, as in the rest of the European communist world, the legitimacy of the Leninist political and social order had been dissipated largely among the very groups and individuals whose task it was to elaborate and propagate the system’s values. One set of ideas that reformers sought to introduce into GDR political thinking concerned the notion of a political system. The demands for substantive participation and for social and political self-determination by the people of the GDR were a direct challenge to the Leninist system of party-state control.
