ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the social and political differences that characterize East German society in the 1980s. It deals with the three main Marxist-Leninist categories: cooperative farmers, laborers and employees, and intelligentsia. The first cooperative farms were formed in the land reform of 1945–1949, when many farmers acquired “ownership” for the first time. Since the category of “laborers” includes both skilled and unskilled manual workers and “employees” is essentially a residual category of many disparate occupations, this convention obscures interesting social divisions. Functionaries are found in virtually every sort of institution. The Central Committee always includes at least nominal representation from each of the other elites. Religious communities do not represent the same sort of social differentiation as the classes and strata discussed so far. East German’s political dissidents cannot be identified as a distinctive social category for several reasons. The Socialist Unity party leaders were unwilling to suffer the embarrassing loss of an entire generation of prominent intellectuals.
