On the Campaign Trail
State Planning and Eigen-Sinn in a Communist Campaign to Transform the East German Countryside
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9645947 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gregory R Witkowski (0000-0002-4412-6188, Briar Cliff University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2004 |
| Volume | 37 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 400-422 |
| Publication date | 2004-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Central European History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1163/1569161041445643 |
| OpenAlex | W2153818761 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
Throughout its history, the East German Communist Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, hereafter SED) organized campaigns to overcome the economic and political challenges facing it and to launch new program initiatives. Whether the aim was to increase factory safety, beautify a village, or raise standards of living, the party and the East German government used mass mobilizations to shape society, or at least certain social groups. Communist campaigns were directed attempts to improve diverse sectors of society by concentrating resources on arenas marked as economically deficient and socially resistant. By directing their efforts at revolutionizing narrowly defined critical areas, Communist leaders felt that they could enact overarching societal changes. Campaigns thus served as a means to initiate new policies and to correct problems that developed later. They were an essential part both of the state planning so prevalent in Communist systems, and of the often hectic short-term initiatives endemic in such economies. These mobilization efforts were so critical to the regime that one scholar has declared that the German Democratic Republic (GDR) possessed a campaign, rather than a command economy
Communism · Communist state · Democracy · Economic growth · Economics · Geography · German · Government (linguistics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · German Social Sciences and History · Law · Public Administration
Discipline and Punish
Dictatorship As Experience
Outline of a Theory of Practice
The East German Dictatorship
You as a Woman Will Understand’
Building an East German Nation
Eigen-Sinn. Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus
Seeing Like a State
Seeing Like a StateHow Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |