POLITICAL TRANSFORMATIONS 47
of social confl icts in which power and rules are negotiated.^1 Furthermore,
by directing its gaze toward political culture, it outlines subjective politi-
cal opinions and values that existed among the general population, which
were well-documented by opinion polls in the West. As such an obser-
vation technique was rarely used in the East, reports on popular moods
and microhistory studies help fi ll in the gaps.^2 The intent here is not to
write a “political history with the politics left out” as many have cautioned
against.^3 Rather, even if politics is narrowly defi ned as the establishment
of collectively binding rules, its scope certainly extends beyond the level
of legislation and state power to include broader public discourses and
the legitimization of rule. Up until the very end, the Socialist Unity Party
of Germany (SED) apparently saw “the people” as a homogeneous mass
that shared the party’s views. This identity had to be reinforced through
the regular, choice-less “elections” or parades on holidays, and it shaped
all political communication in the public sphere.^4 The regime rationalized
the appearance of diff erences between the intended and actual attitudes
of the populace by assigning the party propaganda machine the task of
eliminating any such so-called ambiguities related to such obviously ob-
jective matters of fact.
Political Dialogues in
the Age of International Communication
The political systems in East and West changed very little before the fall
of the Berlin Wall. That said, however, the stronger political exchange
between East and West Germany that took place at the government level
beginning in 1970 cannot be overlooked. Merely the numerous offi cial
talks between government leaders attest to this intensifi ed relationship,
whether it be the meetings between Brandt and Stoph in Erfurt and Kas-
sel in 1970 or Schmidt’s GDR tour in 1981 and Honecker’s visit to the
FRG in 1987. These offi cial German-German summits were accompanied
by many other cross-border talks. As the West had hoped, economic re-
lations between the two Germanys fostered a certain loosening of the
political sphere in the GDR over time, although Stasi surveillance also
increased accordingly. Especially the so-called billion-mark loans initi-
ated by Franz Josef Strauß led to a few concessions on the side of the
SED in 1983 that made it easier for families to be reunited, for pensioners
to leave the GDR, and for travelers to cross the border.^5 Due to the wide
reach of West German television, the GDR was also forced to consider
popular opinion in both Germanys when it came to its foreign aff airs pol-
icies.^6 The Basic Treaty of 1972 further intensifi ed German-German in-