380 JÜRGEN DANYEL AND ANNETTE SCHUHMANN
this technology that had resulted from the arms race. On the fl ip side,
this meant that the East was largely following the pattern of the West
in its eff orts to foster the computerization of the economy and society.
This also helps to explain why the collapse of Communism in 1989 and
the subsequent transformation of the former Eastern Bloc countries did
not represent a real break of any kind in the history of digital moder-
nity. Moreover, the huge extent to which these countries had to catch up
to the West in terms of their communications infrastructures as well as
computer and software development actually stimulated further advance-
ments in digitalization and global networks. The scientifi c potential and
technological expertise that had been cultivated in the Eastern Bloc be-
fore 1989 survived in those places and production facilities in which they
could be easily adapted to fi t the state of technology and development in
the West, such as in Dresden or Jena.
What role did computerization play in the “asymmetrically entwined
parallel history” of the two Germanys? The digital transformations that
occurred in East and West Germany were related to one another. This was
particularly true to the extent that the two Germanys permanently kept
tabs on one another as part of the rivalry between the systems, although
this mutual awareness was increasingly asymmetrical in nature. West
Germany become less preoccupied with technological developments in
the East, shifting its gaze more and more toward the United States and
Japan as time went on. The GDR, on the other hand, had its eyes fi rmly
fi xed on West Germany until the end. The history of computerization
therefore confi rms the trend that historians have already pointed out in
developments related to other aspects of society.^94
Alongside this mutual awareness of one another, there were also close
relationships between the two German states in terms of the economy,
scientifi c research, and technology development, whose eff ects on com-
puterization still need to be looked at in even more detail. Most likely,
such analyses will detect simultaneous trends toward entanglement and
disentanglement: by participating in the eff orts of the COMECON to de-
velop joint standards for electronic data processing, for example, the
GDR partially cut itself off from other international developments. Yet it
also kept ties to the developments in the West through its special eco-
nomic relationship with West Germany.
The drastic growth of the gap in computer technology between East
and West in the 1980s also led in part to a decoupling of the problems
and defi cits in the development of technology and the use of computers
in industry and administration. The practical problems of computeriza-
tion were therefore simply diff erent on each side of the wall. Although
West Germany had already turned toward the West when it came to tech-