TRANSFORMATIONS IN WORK 251
mid-1980s thus kept the lid on any overt protests, yet it did not herald a
return to the primitive “old” kind of factory Fordism.
Patchwork Solutions and Improvisation instead of
Production Flow—Industry in the GDRThe discourse and praxis of Fordism took a diff erent course in the GDR.
The production principles espoused by Taylor and especially Ford had
been heartily embraced in the Soviet Union since the 1920s,^18 and the
SED state followed in the footsteps of its “big brother.” Notwithstanding,
however, the SED basically failed in its attempts to introduce such a pro-
duction regime even just in the core manufacturing sectors in East Ger-
many. A whole slew of reasons blocked its eff orts, cumulatively putting
the brakes on production in general.
First, the centrally planned economy, by its very nature, did not allow
the individual plants to introduce and implement fundamental innovations
in production technology; this was not an issue for industrial corpora-
tions in a capitalist market-based economy. While West German compa-
nies found themselves facing global economic competition that forced
them to invest in often quite expensive new technologies, East German
companies were not subject to such capitalist stimulation. Any extensive
rationalization projects always had to be “politically sanctioned,” which
meant that they had to be aff orded political legitimacy by the respective
supervisory body or the SED politburo as the fi nal authority. This was
even true for measures that had been instigated from “above.” As Claus
Krömke, the personal secretary of Günter Mittag from 1962 to 1989,
commented in retrospect, “it wasn’t possible to just say, now you should
all do this and that.” Furthermore, the fact that supervisory authorities
always had to sanction any new measures considerably increased the
level of bureaucratic red tape. It was therefore virtually impossible for the
dynamism that made Fordism the industrial production regime that it was
to develop in the GDR. Second, notwithstanding the static nature of GDR
industry, the chronic lack of capital made the implementation of “at least
somewhat modern means of production” one of the “major weaknesses
of the combines.” As the long-time general manager of Carl Zeiss Jena,
Wolfgang Biermann, noted laconically, “You can’t build modern assem-
bly lines with old lathe machines.”^19
A third, no-less-important factor was that modernization of any kind
was “never achieved along the entire chain, but rather only in certain
links” within the overly political and heavily bureaucratic economic sys-
tem of the GDR.^20 The publicly owned operations (referred to as VEB,
which stood for Volkseigener Betrieb) that produced end goods were