“The Problem Can Be Solved Only by Those Imbued with a Socialist Sense of Justice!”: Social Conflict and the Lower Courts in the German Democratic Republic
Keywords:
concentrates, the massive project, collectives, assigned, close to the peopleAbstract
The article concentrates on the massive project of popularizing the court system and penal practice in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the 1960s. From then on, the GDR transferred a considerable amount of jurisdiction to collectives, which were further assigned the task of adjudicating “close to the people” within and alongside the existing legal system. We will analyze how the government, with this project, managed to translate the ideological task of sanctioning the inner-state enemy into existing legal concepts and how it used law as a means to advance its political aims. By focusing on the judicialization of politics in the GDR, the article examines the legal history of the GDR as an important example in the broader and pressing phenomenon of the relationship between law and authoritarian politics.
References
1
Hilde Benjamin, “Recht und Rechtsbewusstsein,” Staat und Recht 4 (1955): 240.
2
For example, Hilde Benjamin,“Grundsätzliches zur Methode und zum Inhalt der Rechtsprechung,” Neue Justiz 5 (1951): 150.
3
Cf. Chinese “turn against the law” for mitigating the possibly escalating social conflict in the 2010s, Carl F. Minzner, “China’s Turn Against Law,” American Journal of Comparative Law 59, no. 4 (2011): 938–939.
4
Gunther Teubner, “Juridification – Concepts, Aspects, Limits, Solutions,” in Juridification of Social Spheres: A Comparative Analysis in the Areas of Labor, Corporate, Antitrust and Social Welfare Law, ed. Gunther Teubner (Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1987) 3–48.
5
Cf. Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty. A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy (London & New York: Routledge, 2013), 136, 502.
6
Cf. Weitseng Chen and Hualing Fu, “Authoritarian Legality, the Rule of Law, and Democracy,” in Authoritarian Legality in Asia: Formation, Development and Transition, eds. Weitseng Chen and Hualing Fu (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020) 1–14; Mark Tushnet, “Authoritarian Constitutionalism. Some Conceptual Issues,” in Constitutions in Authoritarian Regimes, eds. Tom Ginsburg and Alberto Simpser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36–49.
7
On the GDR’s historical transition from the German legal tradition to socialist legality, and how the particular form of socialist legality chosen by the SED also served the GDR in its legal battle against West Germany, see Sebastian Gehrig, Legal Entanglements. Law, Rights and the Battle for Legitimacy in Divided Germany, 1945–1989 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2021) 96, 265. On the shift from “revolutionary legality” to “socialist legality” in the Eastern Bloc in general, see Yoram Gorlizki, “After the XXth Congress: Liberalization and the Problem of Social Control,” in Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev. The Phantom of a Well-ordered State, eds. Immo Rebitschek & Aaron B. Retish (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2023), 237–241.
8
Inga Markovits, “Law or Order – Constitutionalism and Legality in Eastern Europe,” Stanford Law Review 34, no. 3 (1982): 513–614; Yoram Gorlizki shows how the failure to understand people’s grievances and current problems became the undoing of Nikita Khrushchev’s reign. Yoram Gorlizki, “After the XXth Congress,” 252–253.
9
See, for example, Jennifer Altehenger, Legal Lessons. Popularizing Laws in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1989 (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2018), 213–214, 257; Dina Moyal, “Social Control in Post-Stalinist Courts: Housing Disputes and Citizen Demand of Legality,” in Social Control under Stalin and Khrushchev. The Phantom of a Well-ordered State, eds. Immo Rebitschek & Aaron B. Retish (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2023), 301–302.
10
Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning, and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 57–96; Friedrich-Christian Schroeder, “The rise and fall of the criminal law of the German Democratic Republic,” Criminal Law Forum 2 (1991); Gehrig, Legal Entanglements, 88–92.
11
In line with many socio-legal scholars before us, we label the socialist legal system with increased lay participation in adjudication, in legal proceedings, and in penal practice as “popular,” but in order to highlight its close connection to social conflict and social historical trajectory, that is, changing historical circumstances, we will in this article use the term “popularized justice.” See, for example, Sally E. Merry, “Popular Justice and the Ideology of Social Transformation,” Social & Legal Studies 1, no. 2 (1992): 161–176.
12
A key text of the reform is Karl Polak, “Über die weitere Entwicklung der Rechtspflege in der DDR,” Staat und Recht 10 (1961): 607–657. On why it was Polak and his understanding of the “socialist legality” that prevailed in the power struggle, see Marcus Howe, Karl Polak: Parteijurist unter Ulbricht (Frankfurt a/m: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002) 221–230. On the centrality of the institutions of popular justice to the East German legal system, see Paul Betts, “Private Property and Public Culture: A Forgotten Chapter of East European Communist Life,” Histoire@Politique 7 (2009): 1, 8. On how different traditions of legal rights played out in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, see Benjamin Nathans, “Soviet Rights-Talk in the Post-Stalin Era,” in Human Rights in the Twentieth Century, ed. Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 173–183.
13
See, for example, Michael Stolleis, Sozialistische Gesetzlichkeit. Staats- und Verwaltungsrechtswissenschaft in der DDR (Berlin: J. H. Beck, 2009), 37–40; Rainer Schröder, Maren Bedau, and Caroline Dostal “Deutsche Demokratische Republik,” in Handwörterbuch zur Deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, Vol. 1. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2008), 957–971. On the uses of the Unrechtsstaat-concept, see Robert Hansack, R., “Unrechtsstaat DDR”. Zur Genesis des Terminus politicus “Unrechtsstaates” nach der Transformation 1989—Versuch einer historischen Bestandsaufnahme (Berlin:Peter Lang, 2015).
14
See, for example, Markovits, Justice in Lüritz, at 236–242; Uwe-Jens Heuer, “Recthsverständnis in der DDR,” in Die Rechtsordnung der DDR. Anspruch und Wirklichkeit, ed. Uwe-Jens Heuer (Baden-Baden, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995), 18–23; Volkmar Schöneburg, “Rechtsstaat versus Unrechtsstaat? Vier Argumente gegen eine Schwarz-Weiss-Klassifikation,” in Ansichten zur Geschichte der DDR, Vol. 5., ed. Jochen Cerny, Dietmar Keller and Manfred Neuhaus (Eggersdorf: Verlag Matthias Kirchner, 1994), 149ff.
15
Gehrig, Legal Entanglements, 97–98.
16
One of the regional characteristics that affected the GDR project to popularize its legal system was, for example, the building of the Berlin Wall (Inga Markovits, Justice in Lüritz: Experiencing Socialist Law in East Germany [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010]), although in many areas the Wall’s effect was not that significant (See Sagi Schaeffer, S. States of Division: Border and Boundary Formation in Cold War Rural Germany [New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 139, 154–156). For the GDR, the example of the Soviet Union and Nikita Khrushchev’s revision of penal practice and criminal law were important (Schroeder, “The rise and fall of the criminal law”). Decriminalization and de-penalization were also global trends in 1960s criminal policy (Erich Buchholz, “Strafrecht,” in Die Rechtsordnung der DDR: Anspruch und Wirklichkeit, ed. Uwe-Jens Heuer (Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, 1995)). Yet, one should not ignore the solid belief that the GDR’s political elite had in the socialist doctrine and especially in “education” (see Stefan Wolle, The Ideal World of Dictatorship: Daily Life and Party Rule in the GDR, 1971–89 [Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2019] 157–161).
17
Torbjörn Vallinder explains judicialization of politics as “the spread of judicial decision-making methods outside the judicial province proper […] judicialization essentially involves turning something into a form of judicial process.” Torbjörn Vallinder, “The Judicialization of Politics – A World-wide Phenomenon: Introduction,” International Political Science Review 15, no. 2 (1994): 91. Tamir Moustafa and Tom Ginsburg use the concept in their excellent book on authoritarian regimes. See Tom Ginsburg and Tamir Moustafa, “Introduction: The Functions of Courts in Authoritarian Politics,” in Rule by Law: The Politics of Courts in Authoritarian Regimes, eds. Tom Ginsburg and Tamir Moustafa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 2.
18
Previous research on GDR lay justice has mostly concentrated on the system of institutionalized lay tribunals and arbitration committees that was an important part of the GDR legality but was, nevertheless, only one part of the massive legal reform. See, for example, Paul Betts, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 148–172; László Boros, Ágnes Gyulavári, and Zoltán Fleck, “Die Beteiligung von Laien an der Rechtspflege im sozialistischen Ungarn,” in Recht im Sozialismus. Analysen zur Normdurchsetzung in osteuropäischen Nachkriegsgesellschaften (1944/45–1989). Band 2 Justizpolitik, eds. Gerd Bender and Ulrich Falk (Frankfurt a/m: Vittorio Klostermann, 1999).
19
Cf. Moritz Vormbaum, “Wirtschaftsstrafrecht in der DDR,” in Deutsche Diktatorische Rechtsgeschichten? Perspektiven auf die Rechtsgeschichte der DDR. Gedächtnissymposium für Rainer Schröder (1947–2016), eds. Hans-Peter Haferkamp, Jan Thiessen, Christian Waldhoff (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018), 106–107; Felix Muhl, “Volkseigentum ist unantastbar”. Das Volkseigentumsschutzgesetz der DDR und der Bestimmtheitsgrundsatz (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2011), 48. We have translated the German concept of Volkseigentum (or later sozialistische Eigentum) as “common property.”
20
For example, Hilde Benjamin, “Volkseigentum ist unantastbar!,” Neue Justiz 7 (1953); also Vormbaum, “Wirtschaftsstrafrecht in der DDR,” 93, 99.
