ABSTRACT
In an oft-quoted passage from the Kleines politisches Wörterbuch opposition to the East German regime is dismissed as irrational. To oppose the regime was, so to speak, the political equivalent of pointing a loaded rifle at your own foot. ‘In socialist states,’ its readers were admonished,
there exists no objective political or social basis for opposition to the prevailing societal and political order. Because the socialist state serves as both the embodiment of the people’s interests and the executor of its will, and because the power of the state derives from the people, because it serves the maintenance of peace, the construction of socialism and thereby the continuous development of both a comprehensive form of democracy as well as the perpetually improving fulfilment of the material and spiritual needs of all working people – because of this, any opposition against the socialist order would be directed against the working people themselves.1
