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Technology and Culture 42.4 (2001) 832-833



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Book Review

Pkw-Bau in der DDR: Zur Innovationsschwäche von Zentralverwaltungswirtschaften


Pkw-Bau in der DDR: Zur Innovationsschwäche von Zentralverwaltungswirtschaften. By Reinhold Bauer. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1999. Pp. 361. $56.95.

The comparison between socialist and capitalist industrial nations shows the importance of technological innovation for economic and social development. This was evident long before the socialist countries collapsed, as it became more and more impossible to satisfy the popular desire for consumer goods and to develop trade with the West.

In Pkw-Bau in der DDR, Reinhold Bauer analyzes a failed attempt to innovate in East Germany--the GDR's automobile industry--and seeks to provide insight into its general problems with technological innovation. The GDR brought the Tabant 601 and the Wartburg 353 to market in the 1960s, and until 1989 those two cars remained the basis of the mass-motorization in East Germany. They also exemplify its feeble innovative power.

Although there had been a thriving automobile industry in Saschen and Thuringia before World War II, after 1945 it proved very difficult to obtain components, about 70 percent of which came from the western occupational zones of Germany. With the division of Germany, supply problems became chronic and remained so until the end of the GDR. Bauer focuses on the 1970s, the decisive period for the GDR's automobile industry, when its leaders made a concerted effort to catch up with manufacture in West Germany. They failed, and this book tells us why.

Bauer examines the production system, finance, research and development, and the workforce as well as the system of state planning, and shows that the fate of the automobile industry was above all a result of failed cooperation with other socialist countries. When East Germany tried to bring a new type of car to market in cooperation with Czechoslovakia and Hungary, there were difficulties from the beginning. The oil crisis of 1973 compounded problems, and cooperative efforts had ceased by the end of the decade, with East Germany still producing two antiquated automobiles in antiquated manufacturing plants. SED leaders then looked to the West German car industry--to Volkswagen in Wolfsburg--but the relationship with Volkswagen merely highlighted chronic East German shortcomings in design and production.

In summary, Pkw-Bau in der DDR is rich in archival material, very [End Page 832] readable, and clearly explains the failure of the East German automobile industry, if not so much the problems with innovation in broader context.

Burghard Ciesla

 

Dr. Ciesla is a research fellow at the University of Potsdam.

Permission to reprint a review published here may be obtained only from the reviewer.

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