Nonconformity, Dissent, Opposition and Resistance in Germany, 1933–1990: The Freedom to Conform, by Sabrina P. Ramet

Sabrina P. Ramet is well known for wide-ranging geopolitical surveys of Eastern Europe, with added cultural and societal context. For her comparative history of dissent in three twentieth-century German political regimes, she has opted for a chronological structure. Another option would have been to focus on the main topics—Germanness, religion (especially religious instruction in schools), gender, sexuality and the arts—across all of the political regimes. However, as it is, the political far outweighs the economic, social and cultural. As a consequence of the format adopted, the text jumps around somewhat: for example, from Red Army Faction terrorism to abstract artists (p. 253). One thread could have been the persistence of patriarchal attitudes and values in German society. But instead of standing out, it is tangled up in the other threads. Beginning research on the GDR in the 1980s, when access to untainted primary sources was difficult, Ramet never really caught the ‘archive bug’. As a consequence, most of her primary sources come from edited collections. A more subjective feeling could have come from exploring memoirs or diaries. Only Goebbels gets this indulgence. Sometimes the secondary literature used is less comprehensive than it could be. Ramet’s discussion of sexuality, for example, does not include Dagmar Herzog’s major contribution to the debate. She goes for dictionary definitions of her key concepts—nonconformity, dissent, opposition and resistance—rather than situating them within key historiographical debates. Although she points to changing definitions of what constitutes nonconformity or dissent, especially in terms of how such behaviour can threaten a given regime’s identity-forming project, Ramet does not reference Detlev Peukert’s sliding scale or pyramid arguments. Peukert was interested in locating ‘precisely where a particular act or form of activity’ existed on what he termed ‘the scale of dissident behaviour’ (D. Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany [1993], p. 83). Sketching a pyramidal model, at its base he saw a broad range of ‘nonconformities’ rising to a much more tightly limited stratum of resisters at the apex. In the middle, there was ‘refusal of co-operation’ and protest (I. Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship [1993], p. 169). Ignoring, mocking or critiquing are markedly different forms of dissent from fighting or seeking to overthrow a regime. Nevertheless, Peukert emphasised that small acts of defiance could lead to more deliberate acts of protest and even resistance: in some cases, we can even ‘trace an entire “career”’, graduating from the mere assertion of a dissident style, via refusal and protest, to outright resistance (Peukert, Inside Nazi Germany, p. 246). Likewise, Arno Klönne’s contribution to changing how we conceptualise dissent and opposition in the Third Reich goes unmentioned (A. Klönne, ‘Jugendprotest und Jugendopposition: Von der HJ-Erziehung zum Cliquenwesen der Kriegszeit’, in M. Broszat, E. Fröhlich and A. Grossmann, eds, Bayern in der NS-Zeit, IV [1981], pp. 527–620). There are no references to immunity in the form of Resistenz (Martin Broszat) or Eigensinn (Alf Lüdtke). This leaves the topic somewhat abstract and disconnected from recent debate.