Chapter 3 examines how the SED leadership used “socialist human rights” in international relations. Seeking to break its diplomatic isolation outside of the socialist bloc, the SED decided to use the UN International Year for Human Rights in 1968 to launch a propaganda campaign aimed at the Third World to demonstrate East German solidarity against Western imperialism. Although this effort failed, the bureaucratic machinations surrounding the campaign cemented for SED officials that socialism and human rights were one and the same and that the GDR was on the right side of this global struggle. This paved the way for a series of treaties and agreements, including recognition from West Germany and entry into the United Nations, that included public commitments to international rights treaties and culminated in the GDR’s signing of the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which finally led to universal diplomatic recognition of East German sovereignty.

In 1989, those demanding human rights to reform the system versus those who fought to leave it combined to create an explosive crisis for the SED. Human rights served not just to rally a heterogeneous coalition of dissidents, but also provided an ideological justification for SED officials to dismantle their own power structure and abolish the party’s monopoly on power in the face of mass demonstrations and mass emigration. In planning for a new East Germany, former SED officials worked with dissidents to draft a constitution that would secure liberal democratic rights and freedoms alongside rights that would preserve the ideals of the socialist project. In 1990, however, the joint hopes of dissident activists and reform communists were dashed as the realities of East German economic collapse turned the population away from new utopian ideas towards realising human rights through reunification with the Federal Republic. The idealistic anti-capitalism of the dissident elite alienated a population that wanted both democracy and prosperity through human rights. While the dissidents were successful in ending state-socialist dictatorship through their campaign for human rights, they ultimately failed to expand upon the narrow and unsatisfactory human rights system of the capitalist West.

Chapter 4 looks at the beginnings of human rights dissent in East Germany, starting with the Christian churches in 1968 as part of a plebiscite on a new socialist constitution during the International Year for Human Rights. Although Christians were among the loudest voices calling for the entrenchment of human rights during the discussions surrounding the constitution, Protestant church leaders decided, in the wake of the Helsinki Accords, to endorse the SED’s claims to realise human rights. In so doing, they hoped to gain recognition from the state and more effectively facilitate private protests against state abuses of their congregants. Many seeking to leave the GDR turned to human rights provisions in the Helsinki Accords and other international agreements to argue their case, but when these demands were refused human rights rhetoric was largely abandoned. Similarly, while the East German intelligentsia became increasingly disillusioned with the GDR in the 1970s, few wanted to take up the cause of human rights against the SED for fear of being seen as endorsing Western anti-communism.

Although East Germany and its state security agency, the Stasi, have become synonymous with human rights violations, the ruling SED considered itself a champion of human rights. The introduction outlines the implications of socialist human rights theory and politics and how it requires us to reconsider the history of GDR foreign policy, the rise of the dissent movement and the collapse of state socialism in 1989/1990.

Chapter 1 examines the beginning of the ideological conflict over the meaning of human rights from the founding of the SED in Soviet-occupied Germany to the June 1953 Uprising. In 1946, elections in occupied Berlin forced the SED to face off against their Social Democratic (SPD) rivals. Aiming to mitigate hostility to the party’s Soviet patrons by presenting a moderate image to the German people, the SED ran on a platform of constitutionalism and democratic rights that recalled the rhetoric of nineteenth-century liberalism rather than Marxist revolution. The SPD was triumphant in the elections, however, denouncing the SED as seeking a return to dictatorship under the slogan “No Socialism without Human Rights!” In response, the SED ceased its efforts to find a democratic path to power and instead turned to coercion and authoritarianism. At the same time, it also adopted the language of human rights to legitimise its rule and the establishment of a socialist dictatorship, calling for “No Human Rights without Socialism!”

The end of the GDR in 1990 also resulted in the erasure of human rights alternatives to capitalist West German norms developed before reunification. The idea of “socialist human rights” collapsed in tandem with SED rule, and many of its own proponents evolved into democrats who renounced their earlier work on the subject. East German dissidents and feminists – who advocated for conceptions of democratic rights and rights to bodily self-determination in conflict with those established in West Germany – were deemed to be deviant and marginalised. While some dissidents saw reunification as the ultimate triumph of the mass demonstrations of 1989, others saw it as a lost opportunity to create a better form of democracy and human rights.

In the 1980s, many disillusioned East Germans dropped out of the official social system and created a parallel civil society within the Protestant Church, striving towards disarmament, demilitarisation and environmentalism. While these activists sought to eschew politics, the SED’s repression of a social sphere outside of party-approved organisations demonstrated to many that political reform was imperative to achieving even purely moral goals such as peace. In 1986, a small group of activists created the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, sparking a rallying cry for disparate groups of disaffected East Germans, who invoked human rights not as the antithesis of socialism but as a core value forgotten and abused by the SED. Simultaneously, the SED’s ideological bulwark against such a movement began to crumble as it sought to create a socialist version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite initial enthusiasm from allies who saw it as a means to unify the socialist world against Western pressure, one country after another pulled out, scared off by various human rights guarantees contained within. Simultaneously, reformers began to see human rights as a rhetorical tool to liberalise sclerotic political institutions to save the socialist project as a whole.

By the 1950s, the SED had to compete with an independent West Germany for international recognition, while also contending with the global politics of human rights emerging out of the Third World. On the one hand, the SED created the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights to campaign against abuses in West Germany, including the imprisonment of Communist Party members who had been deemed a threat to the constitutional order. On the other hand, legal scholar Hermann Klenner developed a philosophy of “socialist human rights” in response to the Third World’s struggle to place self-determination at the centre of the UN agenda. Klenner integrated the idea of self-determination into a Marxist interpretation of rights, claiming that state socialism, human rights and the realisation of state sovereignty in opposition to the imperialist West were, in fact, a singular unified political goal. By the mid-1960s, the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights – using Klenner's new ideological formulations – shifted its focus from West German prisoners to international human rights campaigning.