Apart from important exceptions, historiography in the GDR seemed to me to be very provincial. Although with Kossok there were important approaches to a theoretically sound comparative study of social and political processes, much of the historiography in the GDR was either propagandistic or positivistic, or both together. In contrast to West Germany, where at least many young historians had spent some time abroad and were familiar with foreign or at least English-language literature, historians in the GDR were cut off from foreign countries and foreign scholarship, even that of the Eastern Bloc countries. Much energy was sacrificed to the political and historiographical debate with the Federal Republic, and despite the commitment to Marxism-Leninism, there was much less liberation from the traditions of so-called “bourgeois” historiography than many were aware of. The twelve-volume “Textbook of German History”, for example, was tailored purely to political history, in which only the workers’ movement now played an independent role. The party-supported preoccupation with the “heritage” and “tradition” of a socialist GDR led to a greater open-mindedness towards the lines of development of German and especially Prussian history from the early 1980s onwards. Unlike critical social history in the Federal Republic, however, this did not lead to a critical examination of the authoritarian traditions of German history, but rather to a rapprochement with neoconservative historiography in the Federal Republic.
With the new “heritage and tradition” orientation, aspects of German and Prussian history that had previously been considered reactionary were recognized. Luther was thus stylized as a progressive thinker without sufficient consideration being given to the pre-modern features of his thought - and also his vehement hatred of the Jews. The celebrations for the 500th anniversary of Luther’s birth in 1983 surpassed those for the 100th anniversary of Karl Marx’s death. As a symbolic sign of agreement with the national “tradition”, the statue of Frederick “the Great” was re-erected at its former location on Unter den Linden. The shrill chauvinist and racist tones as well as the Germanism of Jahn, Arndt and Fichte and the fraternities were regarded as marginal phenomena of a basically progressive movement. Bismarck’s solution to the German question was seen by Ernst Engelberg as a “victory of historical progress”. His biography of Bismarck was published simultaneously by Akademie-Verlag in East Berlin and the conservative Siedler-Verlag in West Berlin.
However, there was also a second important line of development in the historical sciences in the GDR, the emergence of social history research which, although based on Marxist questions, was relatively free of dogmatic and schematic guidelines. The term social history was long rejected as “bourgeois” in the GDR. The claim was that historical materialism as a general social theory of historical development made sociology - and thus also social history - superfluous as a special science or discipline.
In 1980, the first volume of Jürgen Kuczynski’s “Geschichte des Alltags des deutschen Volkes” was published. Like many of Kuczynski’s works, such as the 38-volume “History of the Working Class under Capitalism” (1960-1972), it was in many respects a collage of quotations and not a self-contained work. Nevertheless, the volume contains suggestions for a new Marxist historiography by going beyond the depiction of the “great class struggles” and taking into account the everyday life of the working people. Kuczynski believed that he could find an example of how this history should be written in the works of the French “Annales” school, such as Fernand Braudel, by historians who were “really concerned with the everyday lives of people”. “Some connections,” wrote Kuczynski, “we will see differently as Marxists, but not many.” It must be a goal of everyday history, including a Marxist history of everyday life, “to grasp: What people ate, how they dressed, how they lived, when they rested and slept, what it was like when they fell ill, what circles they married into, whether they wandered from place to place or remained permanently resident, what the relationship of children to parents was like, what happened to old people.”
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 213ff (translation)