Ned Richardson-Little. The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity and Revolution in East Germany.

Extract

Prominent East German legal scholar Karl Polak maintained that there were “no human rights without socialism” (16). This mantra came to serve as the cornerstone of the Socialist Unity Party’s (SED) human rights framework over the next four decades. During the Berlin elections held on October 20, 1946, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) unveiled a slogan that reversed the SED’s: “No Socialism without Human Rights” (31), insinuating a stark choice between a socialist dictatorship and a social democracy. Indeed, by 1950, the political system of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had become a dictatorship, albeit one “in the name of human rights” (17). Over the course of the GDRs forty-year history, citizens had no legal way to claim rights against the state. Undaunted, the SED conceptualized human rights as integral to a socialist future. It founded the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights (KSM) in 1959, the first human rights organization in the Eastern bloc, through which it continued to lead the discourse on human rights and invested in conceptualizing “socialist human rights” not least through the work of legal scholar Hermann Klenner. After the Wende, the GDR’s alternative narrative of human rights was largely forgotten. The Human Rights Dictatorship unearths this history and tells it from new perspectives, drawing on a rich array of primary and secondary sources in both English and German.