Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 2 (2021), p. 321

Marcel Thomas’ fascinating comparison of two villages illustrates the similarities and differences in rural life in West Germany (FRG) and East Germany (GDR). In so doing, Thomas successfully challenges the traditional approach of treating the rural as backward and villagers as passive in the context of wider social change.

The book takes the West German village of Ebersbach in Baden-Württemberg, and the East German village of Neukirch in Saxony, to explore how local residents experienced and navigated social change in their localities in the post-war era. Thomas chooses these two villages because they shared similar characteristics in 1939, such as population size, types of employment and relative cultural heritage. What makes the book so interesting is its examination of two similar villages from a similar starting point. This allows for an effective exploration of the commonalities and divergences of how villagers were affected by, and negotiated their lives within, the two opposing systems of capitalism and socialism. In this way, it provides a useful contribution to debates around the relationship between state and society in the two post-war Germanies.

Previous work in this area has used Berlin or border towns as case studies; in contrast Thomas uses a comparative approach firmly focused on the local in two unrelated towns not close to the physical divide. A wide range of documents are used, such as local histories, transcripts of local political debates, newspaper articles, Stasi files, combined with interviews with 20 people who lived in each village. The use of oral history is a particular strength of the book, offering a window into how citizens perceived the world around them. Citizens’ petition letters (Eingaben) are used to bring to life the views of citizens in Neukirch regarding the state, particularly in discussions of local activism in chapter 5. A combination of these sources allow Thomas to use Geertz-style ‘thick description’ and Alltagsgeschichte to develop a bottom-up approach to successfully uncover how individuals responded to and negotiated the larger changes going on around them.

The book comprises six well-structured chapters, first setting out the argument, then treating both villages separately before bringing them together to highlight similarities and differences. The first two chapters show how the residents of both villages followed a similar theme of departing from, and then seeking to return to, the rural and village community, initially not wishing to protect this form of community but then missing it when it was gone. Chapter 3 explores the influence of foreigners on each society and concludes that locals in both villages marginalised foreign workers or ethnic German refugees coming into the community in order to claim ownership over their own local identity.

The main argument of the book is that ‘villagers on both sides of the Iron Curtain gave local meaning to the Cold War and strove for the same goals’ (p. 276) in using pragmatism to improve their lot within their respective political systems. This is seen most clearly in chapters 4 and 5. The fifth chapter provides examples of local activism within the political system such as the restoration of a tower and restaurant in Neukirch and the opening of a youth centre in Ebersbach. Chapter 4 is the strongest and most interesting chapter of the book; it considers how citizens located themselves within the context of the Cold War and in relation to the other German state. Here, it would be beneficial for the author to call upon works such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined communities to provide a framework for how citizens in each state imagined people in the other. Nonetheless, Thomas’ conclusions that Ebersbachers gradually lost interest in the GDR and claimed German identity for themselves whilst Neukirchers placed importance on the FRG as a barometer for life in the GDR, are strong and convincing.

Moreover, Thomas demonstrates how villagers considered themselves at the mercy of external changes. An example of this is in Chapter 6 where Thomas notes that in local histories, Nazism was briefly referenced as an event that happened to citizens of each village, constructing a zero-hour narrative of the post-war era. This final chapter almost provides short literature reviews of local histories written of the two villages, an area of history the author laments as often being dismissed by academics as biased or inaccurate. It is here that Thomas makes one of the most interesting conclusions of the book, arguing that from the 1970s onwards, people in both villages used local histories to understand and control the past in order to shape the present and their future locally during times of uncertainty of the end of the economic miracle in the FRG, the shortage economy in the GDR, and the impact of reunification on people in Neukirch.

One aspect that remains underdeveloped at various points in the book is the concept of identity and in particular how local identity in this context relates to national identity. It would also have been pleasing to see more of an exploration of transnational influences from both Germanies on each society to complement the comparative approach. This is however only a minor point to enhance the study rather than pointing to a hole in the approach.

Altogether, the book is fantastically well signposted and structured, making several clear arguments in each individual chapter that serve as building blocks for the central argument that individuals negotiated their lives in a specifically local way within the wider Cold War context. As a result, Thomas fully immerses the reader in all things Ebersbach and Neukirch in a highly engaging way that allows him to succeed in his stated aim of bringing the local more into the academic.