TRANSFORMATIONS IN WORK 257
carry out welding or assembly tasks autonomously, were very few and far
between. Similarly, the spectrum of available uses for robots was mostly
smaller than in the West, and the corresponding technology was often
outdated in the East. Whereas GDR robots were still controlled through
hydraulic systems, for example, most of their West German counterparts
ran on microelectronic control systems. Moreover, many of the East Ger-
man robots did not meet the demands and standards of the factories in
which they were supposed to be put to use. The managers of the machine
tool combinate Fritz-Hecker in Chemnitz (known as Karl-Marx-Stadt at
the time), the most important IR manufacturer in the GDR, had to con-
cede that “the functional reliability of the IR could not be guaranteed in
the majority of the factories for which they had been intended” due to
poorly conceived designs and constructions. Likewise, the calls to “de-
velop, manufacture, and use simpler IR devices that would be more reli-
able and more readily available,” rather than concentrating on complex
high-tech robots, were often dismissed.^39 As a result, robotization only
came to play a marginal role in industries that were otherwise well suited
to this kind of technology, such as the automobile industry.
But, above all, the robot off ensive resembled a “Potemkin village proj-
ect,” as Hübner put it, because the defi nition of a “robot” was stretched
beyond recognition under the motto “more is better” for the production
of industrial robots.^40 At the end of the fi ve-year plan that ran from 1981
to 1985, offi cial fi gures cited a grand total of sixty thousand industrial
robots, which clearly exceeded the planned goal of forty-fi ve thousand.
According to these statistics, moreover, over seventeen thousand robots
were already in use in the GDR by the end of 1982. These numbers, how-
ever, were nothing but exaggerated. In a memo addressed to the head of
the public statistics offi ce, the Staatliche Zentralverwaltung für Statistik,
dated 6 December 1982, it was noted that the impressive fi gure of almost
twenty thousand IR would be reduced down to just over one thousand
if the offi cial defi nition of a robot according to the International Orga-
nization for Standardization (ISO) was used.^41 The last annual statistical
report (Statistische Jahrbuch) for the GDR in 1990, which contained more
realistic data, lists the rather modest sum of 1,760 “industrial robots for
fl exible processes” that had been manufactured in the previous year in
accordance with the corresponding ISO standards.^42
Although the economic cadres of the SED regime constantly kept an
eye on the state of aff airs in the West, they were not in a position to turn
what they saw into something that could benefi t their own industries.
This was especially true for many aspects of production organization and
manufacturing technology. Experts from the Amt für Standardisierung,
Messwesen und Warenprüfung (Bureau for Standardization, Metrology