German History Society, Term Paper Example

The vehicle of desire: the Trabant, the Wartburg and the end of the GDR

Jonathan R. Zatlin’s text “The Vehicle of Desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg, and the End of the GDR” provides a thorough analysis of the correlation between the eventual collapse of the German Democratic Republic and the citizens’ individual desire for consumer goods. In particular, Zatlin identifies an “epistemological blunder” (379) that the GDR government performed in not realizing the significance of consumer goods to the population, which contributed to the diminishment of government support. Particularly, Zatlin suggests that a lack of quality automobile construction was central to the failed GDR economic policy. In the following essay, we shall summarize Zatlin’s arguments in the article and provide a critical response to them with particular references to the greater Cold War, political ideology and the conflict between capitalism and socialism.

In the article, Zatlin’s general intent is to provide an account of reasons for the downfall of the GDR. Central to this downfall was the GDR’s failure to create an economic system that satisfied its citizens. Zatlin notes that, “the growth of popular discontent with the regime’s economic failings through the 1980s was fuelled by the politicization of the economic sphere.” (359) Hence, the insufficiency of the economic sphere was a result of the latter being informed by a particular political world-view of Marxist-Leninist socialism. This “politicization” of the economic sphere thus entails, for Zatlin, the reduction of the economic sphere to the political ideology of the GDR. Such a reduction of the economics to the political is described by Zatlin as follows: “the relative squalor of that socialist present…was derived directly from the SED’s subordination of the economy to the moral objective of social equity.” (360) According to the GDR’s grounding political policy of the promotion of social equity between citizens, various consumer goods were realized as symbolizing inequality, and thus were deemed unnecessary to the regime. As Zatlin notes regarding the East German desire for automobiles, the government of the GDR interpreted this desire in terms of the Marxist concept of “commodity fetishism”, which Zatlin defines as “the false attribution to products of the power to gratify human needs.” (363) Thus, when the East German populace began to demand automobiles, this was not interpreted by the GDR as a genuine human need: this was rather interpreted as symptomatic of the capitalist generated illusion that material goods can satisfy individuals. Ideologically, therefore, there was no need to produce quality automobiles for a populace that was essentially fetishizing expensive automobiles that existed in Western Germany. According to Zatlin, the GDR’s understanding of this desire in terms of commodity fetishism – or as Zatlin writes a “theory of ‘real’ and ‘false’ needs” (379) – was a crucial political error, which contributed to the collapse of the GDR. This error was primarily indicative of the party’s “aversion to permitting individual agents to interact without government mediation in the economic sphere” (380), or in other words, a prohibition of autonomy. This suggests, for Zatlin, that “the ineffectivness of the planned economy lies in its understanding of desire in terms of need.” (380) In other words, planned economies have a weak concept of desire, which fails to recognize desire in itself, and moreover, that such desire is central to the notion of human autonomy.

Zatlin’s account relies on a liberal-capitalist ideological approach to the problematic of the GDR’s collapse. Zatlin’s word choice, for example, of “morality” to describe the ideology of “social equity” intimates a certain subjectivity to social equity, as morality is often defined in the academic literature as a relative concept. In other words, “the morality of social equity” means that the GDR’s decision to make social equity central to their political programme was not indicative of a greater ethical world-view, but was rather symptomatic of a particular ideological horizon. Moreover, Zatlin, by criticizing the GDR’s failure to produce automobiles for consumers, suggests that they failed to understand economic policy. However, with these two arguments, Zatlin overlooks the fundamental ideological and theoretical commitment at the heart of the GDR and the greater socialist project in general: their entire commitment is to social equity. Accordingly, a concept such as “commodity fetishism” is intrinsic to this particular world-view and the production of more automobiles to satisfy an illusory desire would only be a betrayal of everything the party believed in. Zatlin uses typical liberal-capitalist language such as “autonomy” to describe the economy, stressing that it must be allowed to grow independently without any planning or non-economic intervention. Nowhere does Zatlin offer a thorough reading of the meaning of something like “commodity fetishism”; rather he equates it with individual autonomy. Whereas Zatlin concedes that there is an illusion at the heart of capitalism, insofar as “the effectivness of capitalism lies in its ability to manufacture desire and sell it as need” (380), Zatlin sees nothing wrong with this position: As long as this mystification is effective, i.e., that the economy continues to function, he is supportive of such an approach.

In a broader historical context, Zatlin’s text reflects the prominence of ideology. It demonstrates that in Germany after the Second World War, there were two dominant ideologies: that of socialism and capitalism. Zatlin’s text is no less free of this ideological perspective, as he clearly takes a capitalist reading of the GDR economy. Zatlin thus provides a biased historiographical account of economic phenomena during the Cold War, by presenting a capitalist reading of the GDR economic situation. He does not take seriously the communist commitment to “social equity”, essentially equating it with bad “theory.” This overlooks the crucial ideological and theoretical confrontation that underlined the twentieth century, and was epitomized in the split Germany of this same century. This confrontation essentially entailed two opposing hierarchies of value: one hierarchy, in which economy played the most important role in society, or the opposing hierarchy, in which a social equality was to be created, irrespective of the exploitive apparatus of capital. Moreover, the theoretical objective to not subordinate human existence to economy was not merely a communist idea: in Germany itself, the Nazi regime had the same antipathy towards capital and the reduction of life to economy that the communist party possessed. The issue that Zatlin quickly dismisses, that of commodity fetishism, was central to the GDR’s approach to its economy, while also being central to many other ideologies. Capitalism itself, as Zatlin himself notes, has done nothing to prove commodity fetishism false. Rather, capitalism perpetuates this commodity fetishism as its very essence, which is symptomatic of a decision to confer an importance to the rights of the economy over the construction of a greater, humanist ethical project.

Works Cited

Zatlin, Jonathan R. “The Vehicle of Desire: The Trabant, the Wartburg, and the End of the GDR.” German History: The Journal of the German History Society: 358-380.