252 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
highly dependent on external suppliers, but they had virtually no recourse
options in the event that suppliers did not properly fulfi ll the terms of
their contracts. Consequently, suppliers often missed the delivery dead-
lines that had been agreed to or failed to deliver the right quantities;
alternatively, the products they did supply were of substandard quality.^21
The larger and relatively autonomous combines in particular thus began
to manufacture the semifi nished products that they needed themselves.
This resulted in greater vertical integration, which leaned in the direction
of autarkic combines. At the same time in the West, however, numerous
large corporations were quite successful in doing the opposite—namely,
increasing their effi ciency by reducing vertical integration.
The trend towards autarky was even stronger in production technol-
ogy. Historical baggage left over from the division of Germany played
into this development. Until 1945, almost all carmakers, for instance,
depended on the West German mechanical engineering industry to pro-
duce the specialized and tailored machinery that they needed for highly
developed assembly-line production systems. For a long time, there was
not a single company in the GDR that was able to fi ll in this gap. Indeed,
at no point did a functional division of work that could have compensated
for this defi cit emerge within the COMECON.^22 As a result, only partially
suitable all-purpose machinery or outdated and unreliable specialized
machines were used on the automobile manufacturing assembly lines
in the GDR. However, in order to achieve a relatively effi cient assembly
line production system—after having narrowed production down to two
basic models, namely the “Trabant” and the “Wartburg” in 1959—both
car manufacturing plants began to produce their own machines in order
to construct a Fordist-style system. Apart from the fact that this absorbed
additional technical intelligence, neither of the publicly owned car-mak-
ing factories in Zwickau and Eisenach was ever able to even partially
fulfi ll its own demand for the right kind of specialized machinery; this
situation was further exacerbated by the insuffi cient resources that the
plants had been provided “from above.”
Moreover, the condition of the outdated machinery in the factories in
East Germany deteriorated even further in the 1970s and 1980s. Accord-
ing to Western standards, more than half of all the industrial production
apparatuses in the GDR were considered to be “ready for the scrap heap”
in 1989/90.^23 The lack of capital, as well as the priority that was given to
housing construction during the Honecker era, also stood in the way of
building new factory buildings that could properly accommodate modern
assembly lines; at best, only a stripped-down version of such assembly
lines could be installed in the old factory facilities. Thus, the Fordist pro-
duction lines that did exist—almost always in fragmented form—never