The Boundaries of Dictatorship

Abstract

The title of this concluding chapter alludes to a collection of essays which I first read more than ten years ago when I was working on the cultural politics not of the fascist dictatorships, but of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). By focusing attention on what they termed Die Grenzen der Diktatur — the ‘boundaries’ or ‘limits of dictatorship’ — Richard Bessel and Ralph Jessen (1996) were breaking new ground, not only in the social history of the recently defunct East German state but also in the study of dictatorships more generally. At that time, emphasis on the limits of the dictatorial power was unusual. The fall of the Soviet Bloc in 1989 had prompted a renaissance in totalitarian theory and a revival of the accompanying preoccupation with the mechanisms of dictatorial power and control. Above all, the astonishing revelations concerning the sheer extent of the GDR state security service, the Stasi, had rekindled superficial, top-down comparisons with the Hitler dictatorship and reinforced perceptions of two states fundamentally different from the western liberal democracies. The comparison is a highly instructive one. For all the very fine scholarship which has emerged on the cultural practices of dictatorial regimes, this inflationary usage of highly problematic labels remains commonplace, especially in more traditional strands of literary studies and art history.