"What was life really like for East Germans, effectively imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain? The headline stories of Cold War spies and surveillance by the secret police, of political repression and corruption, do not tell the whole story. After the unification of Germany in 1990 many East Germans remembered their lives as interesting, varied and full of educational, career and leisure opportunities: in many ways 'perfectly ordinary lives'." "Using the rich resources of the newly opened GDR archives, Mary Fulbrook investigates these conflicting narratives. She explores the transformation of East German society from the ruins of Hitler's Third Reich to a modernising industrial state, analysing changing social conditions and providing extraordinary insights into the ways in which individuals actively sought to shape their own lives."--BOOK JACKET.

1. Introduction : the people's paradox -- I: Visions of the good society (and how they were not realised in practice) -- 2. The East German social revolutions : violence, utopia and consumer socialism -- 3. Citizens at home -- 4. Citizens at play : leisure -- 5. Matters of life and death -- 6. Youth -- 7. Gender -- II: Class in a classless society: power, work and social inequality -- 8. The withering away of the state? Ruling elites -- 9. Cultural capital : from bourgeoisie to socialist intelligentsia -- 10. The un-making of the German working class (and peasantry) -- III: the participatory dictatorship -- 11. The honeycomb state : the benign and malign diffusion of power -- 12. In place of a public sphere? 'Discussion', cultures and subcultures -- 13. The people's own voices? The culture of complaint and the privatisation of protest.