Abstract
From the beginning, a science-based approach to questions of the future and – more precisely – thinking in alternative futures was in latent conflict with the official ideology of the German Democratic Republic, according to which East German society (and indeed, the whole humankind) was heading towards a communist future. During the 1960s, however, prognostics – the socialist type of futures studies – fitted well into the ambition of political leaders to foster economic development by promoting scientific-technological progress and adopting new management systems of the national economy. Prognostics was to a certain extent institutionalized and obtained in parts a cybernetic underpinning, but ideological constraints on knowledge never vanished. Moreover, prognostics had to distinguish itself clearly from “late-capitalist” futurology. With the reorientation of politics after Walter Ulbricht lost power, prognostics was cut back as was its cybernetic underpinning. As the official belief in the communist future eroded during the 1980s, there was no longer any room for governmental foresight. Futures thinking was taken up by the dissident movement.
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Notes
Despite the fact that the GDR had formally adopted a kind of multi-party system, we will throughout this paper use the word “party” only with reference to the SED – Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (United Socialist Party of Germany).
Walter Ulbricht, General Secretary of the SED, was at that time the undisputed leader of party and state and had the final say in all political, economic, societal and even cultural matters.
If not indicated otherwise, all translations from German sources are done by the author.
During the 1960s, “futurology” was the most common and most popular term for the field of futures studies in West Germany (Eberspächer, 2019, p. 7f). We use it in the following.
For the early development of futures research mainly in the USA and its close relation to cybernetics, operations research and systems theory see e.g., Dayé (2020).
The “leading role of the party” was a principle that even went into the East German Constitution. It implied not, as the term could suggest, engagement and empowerment of party members. Quite on the contrary, it meant centralistic top-down control of all societal and economic processes by the leaders of the party, the ZK (central committee), the politburo and in final consequence by the general secretary.
Also, Klaus had to abandon his earlier position and to apologize: Cybernetics could never provide a universal theory of society (Kybernetik – eine neue Universalphilosophie der Gesellschaft?. Cybernetics – a new universal philosophy of society, 1973). – Cybernetics underwent a similar fate in the Soviet Union, see e.g. Gerovitch (2002) who describes the career of cybernetics from a bourgeois pseudo-science to a new guiding paradigm and finally to another empty phraseology.
The Council of Ministers was formally the government of the GDR, but actually all executive powers were concentrated in the hands of the politburo of the SED.
One has to bear in mind, that funding bodies and addressees of prognostics belonged exclusively to party and state administration, including the top management of large companies. (All large companies were VEBs, Volkseigene Betriebe, nominally owned by the people, in fact by the state.)
In 1970 e.g., Junge Welt, the newspaper of the communist youth organization FDJ, organized a competition among its readers to the question “What will you do on Thursday, January 6, 2000?” Famous scientists contributed materials on technological and social prospects. Readers submitted visions of everyday life: high technology combined with at that time present models of work and leisure. The winners were invited to participate in a banquet on January 8, 2000 – which really took place. Cf. Steinmüller & Steinmüller, 1999, p. 201 ff.
Game theory itself had a difficult standing within the debates about cybernetics.
The first-hand experiences of Liebscher, a philosopher and assistant to Klaus, specialized in cybernetics, are telling (Liebscher, 1995, p. 75ff). Called to give advice to “gods” from the politburo, he soon was cut short.
During the reform debates that lead to the Prague Spring, Radovan Richta, a philosopher, had devised an alternative developmental concept for a socialist society in the age of the scientific-technological revolution. In the perception of the East German politburo, all Czech reformers and their thought leaders were covert counterrevolutionaries, at best revisionists. West German futurists, in contrast, regarded the so-called Richta-Report (Richta et al., 1971) as a valuable contribution to conceptualize a “Third Way” beyond capitalism and oppressive Soviet bloc socialism. – Even more reason for East German ideologists to stigmatise such conceptions as counterrevolutionary.
Funny to see, that even with a cautious (and of course hypothetical) Mark to DM to Euro conversion assumption, the new German “citizen’s income” surpasses this income level.
When the Brundtland Report Our Common Future appeared in 1988, it was highly discussed in the Academy of Sciences, in the East German Writers’ Union as well as on conferences under the roof of churches – and last not least in the oppositional Umweltbibliothek (Library for Environmental Problems – that was in fact a meeting place for dissidents).
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Steinmüller, K. The Rise and Decline of Prognostics. Futures Studies, Ideology and the Sociology of Knowledge in the German Democratic Republic. Am Soc (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09570-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-023-09570-7