PATHS TO DIGITAL MODERNITY 349
ernment agencies, computerization entered a new phase in the 1970s
as it reached a growing number of people in Western Europe and the
United States. The mass availability of computers in the 1980s and the
fi rm establishment of computer technology within the changing world
of work and in new modes of communication became some of the major
benchmarks of performance in rivalry between the opposing economic
and political systems of the Cold War.
Consequently, any attempt to write a history of computerization in
East and West Germany cannot ignore these comparative dimensions.
Yet it also has to look past the system rivalry with its lines of demarca-
tion and considerable asymmetries between the two countries to locate
direct relationships and detect elements of entanglement within divided
Germany. The reasons for adopting such a perspective are myriad. First,
the rivalry between the two systems played out on a fi eld where the dy-
namics were increasingly shaped by international connections. The use
of computer technology in fact fostered global ties and cross-border com-
munication. This created new problems for both systems within the po-
litical constellations of the Cold War. In Western industrialized societies,
for example, the sales interests of the booming computer and software
industry clashed with the politically mandated embargoes on advanced
technologies put in place by some countries, especially the United States.
The political strategies of “change through rapprochement” that sought
to boost the economic links between East and West, however, confl icted
with ideologically driven demarcation strategies, such as those forced
by the United States after 1980 in the wake of the Soviet march into
Afghanistan.
The diffi culties faced by the countries of the Eastern Bloc were even
larger. National models of self-suffi ciency, which were repeatedly intro-
duced vis-à-vis technology out of necessity, proved to be quite unprom-
ising.^1 When it came to computerization, the state socialist regime could
not get around the competition by off ering ideologically postulated al-
ternatives. Rather, all the Eastern Bloc countries followed the lead of the
Soviet Union and put the introduction of modern information technology
high up on their list of offi cial priorities from the early 1970s onward.
From the very beginning, however, the ailing and technologically back-
ward people’s economies of the COMECON states relied on ties to the
West in both a technological and fi nancial sense. They found themselves
unable to provide the funds necessary for the desired computerization of
industrial production, apart from a few isolated instances of political priv-
ilege. Consequently, they had to rely on the transfer of computer technol-
ogy, as well as imported production systems and loans from the West. It
had been intended and even concretely planned to develop collaborative