Introduction

Future – the bright socialist or communist future – was one of the key concepts in official propaganda in the GDR (German Democratic Republic), as it was in all socialist countries. For some time partyFootnote 1 ideologists were able to convince parts of the population, especially some groups of intellectuals, that the future belonged to socialism. To put it in Karl Mannheim’s (1929) terms: The socialist-communist utopia transformed into an official ideology backed by governmental institutions.

According to alleged laws of societal evolution, there should be a steady progress throughout the world towards the highest stage of societal evolution: communism. Consequently, party leaders were never inclined to accept a more open thinking about the future. Only revisionists would propose alternatives! If you knew already the outcome of history, why bother to spend much thought about the future? If history follows only one line – delineated a century ago by Marx and Engels – there was no place for thinking in alternatives, no need for open minds … Political leaders proclaimed to rely on science, but in fact they rarely appreciated expert consultancy from independent bodies. Nevertheless, there were some attempts to establish futures studies in the GDR within the general teleological framework (cf. e.g., Steinmüller, 2001; Steinmüller, 2014).

The way a society is approaching and managing long-term issues casts much light on pivotal elements of that society, on its specific knowledge culture and on the integration of futures intelligence into political procedures – as e.g., Dayé (2020) has shown for Cold War America. In the following we want to expose the specific conditions under which futures thinking was organized in the GDR, how experts operated within the restrictions set by power structures and ideological premises and which impacts futures studies had on East German society. Since prognostics went through several distinct developmental stages with its heyday during the 1960s, we have chosen a primarily chronological approach.

Following the Soviet Model

In the very early years of the GDR, the future was not yet subject to specific studies. The doctrines of Marxism-Leninism, the official ideology of the ruling party, seemed to answer all questions about things to come. As there was no place for “bourgeois” disciplines like psychoanalysis, sociology or even cybernetics at universities or academic institutions, there was none for a specific futurological discipline. Marxism-Leninism provided the base for all approaches to the future, be they academic or popular. And, at least officially, it was the only source of decision-making in politics. Since the vast body of Marxist-Leninist teachings was rather open to interpretation, party leaders could justify any political move with it – with appropriate quotations from the “classics” Marx, Engels, and Lenin.

Public interest in the future was stimulated mostly by translations of Soviet popular-science books like Sachartchenko’s Eine Reise in das Morgen (A Voyage into Tomorrow, 1954). Soon East German writers began to follow their example, e.g., Karl Böhm and Rolf Dörge with Unsere Welt von Morgen (Our World of Tomorrow, 1959). Writers like these depicted primarily technological developments: computers, automated factories, space travel, an industrialized agriculture and the benefits of nuclear energy – they never grew tired of stipulating that cornucopia would come only with the new, socialist society. However, they avoided to describe this society in more specific terms. In their way, focused on technology, they promoted “Perspektivbewusstsein” – the “awareness of the prospects” of communism and of the superiority of the socialist system. Like others, even the later dissident Stefan Heym (Das kosmische Zeitalter, The Cosmic Age, 1959), they emphasized a catchphrase of that epoch: The future has already begun. It can be observed in the Soviet Union.

Overtake Without Catching Up

During the 1960s, the future became a subject for more specific research endeavors. In this respect, the GDR was in line with developments in other countries, and again following the Soviet model. Science and technology progressed rapidly and produced new challenges for both systems, the liberal Western one and the socialist Eastern one. The political leadership of the GDR understood that propaganda alone – making appeal to the image of a bright future – did no longer suffice for the global competition of socialism with capitalism.

According to official propaganda, the socialist bloc was a whole historical epoch ahead of the West. The launch of the first Sputnik satellite in 1957 and the first orbital flight of Juri Gagarin in 1961 provided ample proof of the superiority of socialist science and technology. However, the economy did not expand as dynamically as wished and planned. Rigid, top-down hierarchical planning procedures combined with dire post-war starting conditions and a constant brain-drain to the West led to increasing difficulties. The aim of the “Siebenjahrplan“ (seven year plan) to catch up with West German living standards by 1961 was grandiosely missed. Walter UlbrichtFootnote 2 gave orders to close borders and to erect “the wall”.

But even disregarding the confrontation with the Western system, there was a need for more – and more practicable – information about future trends as an underpinning for decisions to be made and ways to be chosen: How to organize society in the age of the global transition from capitalism via socialism to communism? How to “unleash” the productive forces, i.e., how to foster innovation? How should the economy be planned in that age of transition? How could scientific-technological progress be “mastered” – shaped – to the benefit of the people?

An answer to these questions was the introduction of the „Neues ökonomisches System der Planung und Leitung der Volkswirtschaft“ (“New Economic System of Planning and Directing of the National Economy”, NöSPL) in 1963. It was aimed to cut back rigidities and to allow more flexibility to the companies, based on an allegedly scientific understanding of socialist economic procedures. “Overtake without catching up” became the new slogan: surpassing the West without following on its track. It implied, as party leader Walter Ulbricht put it later in 1970, “not stalking towards the current highest level”, but to develop principles and procedures, not seen before, and to take benefit of them with the aim “to establish in this way a new scientific-technological maximum level” Footnote 3 (Cornelsen, 1989, p. 267).

The new economic policy was implemented through a multitude of measures. Research and development were at least in parts reorganized and more amply funded. Huge investments were allocated to electrical engineering and electronics, chemistry, optical devices, mechanical engineering and vehicle construction. In order to compensate for these expenses, state investments in consumer goods production, the light and the food industry were cut back. Universities scaled up courses in mathematics, sciences and engineering.

All these efforts were based on the conviction that science and technology are key to progress and future prosperity, finally to communism. The economy should be managed by scientific principles, and science should open up the way into the bright future. This implied that a new kind of cadre should take the helm in the economy, experts trained in scientific approaches – and not only fluent in Marxist-Leninist phraseology.

Prognostics, Not Bourgeois Futurology

At that time, the influences of Western futures studiesFootnote 4 were considerable. Contrarily to the usual policy of ideological isolation, even one West German futurological book, Fritz Baade’s Der Wettlauf zum Jahr 2000 (The Race to the Year 2000, 1960) was published after six years of delay in the GDR. It forecasted that the East would be the winner in that race. Herman Kahn’s and Anthony Wiener’s The Year 2000. A Framework for Speculation on the next thirty-three Years (West German title Ihr werdet es erleben, You will live to see it, 1967) found a self-confident answer in the East German publication Wir werden es erleben (We will live to see it, Müller-Claud, 1971). Researchers who wanted to take advantage of Western futurological sources, had first to distance themselves from these sources. Therefore, they criticized Western futurology as a “bourgeois pseudo-science” and an apology of capitalism, without the sound basis of a social theory, technocratic in its approach and eclectic in style. For experts, trained in Marxist-Leninist phraseology, this was a rather simple exercise.

In an attempt to distinguish acceptable foresight activities from futurology, the word “prognostics” (Prognostik) came into use in the second half of the 1960s. At the 11th plenary session of the Central Committee (1967), Ulbricht underlined that the working classes and the party had the task “to elaborate and to use the Marxist-Leninist societal prognostics to an extent not known before.” (Ulbricht, 1967, p. 92) One year later, the VIIth party congress of the SED declared that “the Marxist-Leninist societal prognostics is a decisive instrument of scientific leadership for shaping the developed societal system of socialism in the GDR” (see e.g., Edeling, 1968, p. 12). Here, like in other cases, the GDR borrowed from the model of the USSR, where new efforts of forecasting and planning were undertaken from 1966 onwards and futures studies expanded in an epic dimension (see Bestuzhev-Lada, 1992, p. 343; Rindzevičiūtė, 2016b).

Prognostics was not at all meant to be, as the term may indicate, a socialist counterpart of Western, allegedly “technocratic” forecasting. Prognostics should be based on the knowledge of the “objective law of social development” (i.e., the dialectics of productive forces and the mode of production), and it should by itself undergo a dialectical relation with planning and shaping the socialist society (see e.g., Edeling, 1968, p. 228). In fact, prognostics reflected the planning euphoria of that age, which inflicted both systems, albeit in different ways.

The Short Spring of Cybernetics

In the perception of that time, prognostics was – as futurology in the WestFootnote 5 – strongly connected with systems-theoretical approaches, operations research and cybernetics. In the early 1960s, cybernetics, a formerly rejected discipline, had just been rehabilitated and superficially integrated into the official worldview. Georg Klaus, one of the most influential philosophers of the GDR, became the most important proponent of cybernetics. He published several books that took the odium of pseudoscience away from cybernetics. Footnote 6

Since basic cybernetic concepts like feedback and information, self-regulation and self-organization could be applied everywhere, cybernetics was about to obtain the status of a new guiding science (Leitwissenschaft). Adherents of the new approach regarded “the total system of society as a complex cybernetic system” (Bauer et al., 1968, p. 160–161).

Within the framework of the NöSPL, cybernetic approaches should help to shape socialist planning procedures and management practice more efficiently. In a subtle way, cybernetic concepts – and especially the concept of feedback – made it possible to integrate market mechanisms into socialist economy without using the scorned terminology. Most importantly, cybernetics provided a fresh language to describe organizational and economic processes and structures, a language that was enthusiastically picked up by specialists with a scientific or technical background. It soon competed with the official phraseology of the party. The turn to cybernetics was accompanied by a temporary rise of the status of technocratic experts who of course paid their due lip-service to official ideology, but could, for some time at least, avoid political interference into their daily business. For these experts, cybernetic approaches were an efficient tactic to work around ideological constraints on knowledge generation and to generate new solutions to societal and economic problems.

The rise of cybernetic thinking provoked reactions from party officials. Fears that cybernetic approaches – like feedback and self-organization – would amount to undermining the “leading role of the party”Footnote 7 aggravated during the Prague Spring in 1968 (Liebscher, 1995, p. 55). In April 1969, on the 10th plenary session of the Central Committee, top level party officials – among them “chief ideologist” Kurt Hager – condemned “the schematic application of cybernetic methods to the analysis of societal processes” (Liebscher, 1995, p. 105; Segal, 2001). Cybernetics was downgraded to an individual scientific discipline (Einzelwissenschaft). Researchers were allowed to use cybernetic methods and models in their specific fields, but all opportunities posed by applying concepts like self-regulation or self-organization to social sciences were lost.Footnote 8

Prognostics and Planning, an Awkward Relation

In theory, prognosis and planning should form a dialectical relation, but in practical life the gulf between optimistic long-term visions and academic thinking about the future on the one hand and the challenges of planning for the next four years on the other hand widened. Moreover, prognostics never became really institutionalized – despite a short-lived Institut für Prognostik beim Ministerrat der DDR (Institute for Prognostics at the Council of MinistersFootnote 9) and attempts to coordinate all prognostic activities by the Academy of Sciences (see Heyden, 1968). Several organizations engaged to some degree in prognostics: Institut für Gesellschaftswissenschaften beim ZK der SED (Institute for Social Sciences at the Central Committee of the SED; this institute had a specific chair of social prognostics), Institut für Wissenschaftstheorie und Organisation der Akademie der Wissenschaften (Institute for Theory and Organization of Science of the Academy of Sciences), Zentralinstitut für Wirtschaftswissenschaften der Akademie der Wissenschaften (Central Institute for Economic Sciences of the Academy of Sciences), the faculties of economics of several universities and others.Footnote 10 Actually, prognostics had no real influence on planning, it was effectively neutralized by attaching it to long-term planning (“Perspektivplanung”).

Since prophecies about the society of the future were the domain of party officials and preachers of the official world view, persons and institutions engaged in prognostics were well advised to avoid possible conflicts and turn to other less risky topics. They discussed fundamental philosophical and methodological questions of prognosis and its relation to societal practice (e.g., Bauer et al., 1968) and put much attention on mid-term and long-term developments in science and technology.

Nevertheless, the late 1960s and early 1970s became years of wide-spread public and academic interest in foresight in East Germany as in the West, where momentum and impact of futurology were much higher than in the GDR (see e.g., Seefried, 2015; Eberspächer, 2019). Philosophers and economists, but also social scientists and physicists wrote about the future of society and technology (z. B. Lauterbach & Söder, 1965; Edeling, 1968; Bauer et al., 1968; Göttner & Fischer, 1973). They mostly abstained to paint too specific images of the far, communist future society; even with topics like the future of the family you could run into ideological troubles. Therefore, images of the future were regularly confined to technology, the bright future of industry and agriculture – and they were as overenthusiastic as in the West. Newspapers invited their readers to speculate about the year 2000.Footnote 11 G. M. Dobrov’s seminal book about prognostics in science and technology appeared in German translation (1971). First steps towards a science of sciences (“Wissenschaftswissenschaft”) were undertaken. At the same time, the ideological fight against Western futurology continued (cf. e.g., Bönisch, 1971; Klein, 1972). It gained specific momentum by rejections of convergence theory, at that time in its heyday, which assumed a slow opening and transformation of the socialist system under the impact of the scientific-technological revolution and a steady convergence of both the Eastern and the Western system. This, of course, directly contradicted basic assumptions of Marxism-Leninism (Meißner, 1971; Rose, 1974).

In retrospect, a look at foresight methods is very telling. Specific methods of futures studies that were frequently used in the West were never applied by East German researchers. It is no surprise that there are – to my knowledge – no scenario studies, since scenarios would undermine the official doctrine that there is only one future, as delineated by party decisions. However, as a collective approach, Delphi surveys should in principle be better suited to a society that – in official stance – put so much emphasis on broad participation and the superior wisdom of the collective. But there are no such studies, not to speak of gaming exercisesFootnote 12. Party leaders distrusted uncontrolled bottom-up processes. Generally, one relied on expert opinions; in the case of the future of technology e.g., on renowned specialists in their disciplines (Tamm et al., 1969; Kusnezow et al., 1972; Sydow, 1983). To a great extent, the authority of the political decision-makers depended on the capacity of their experts as “truth-tellers”. Every new and more complex methodology involving more interaction could put this capacity into question.

In the fields of demography and economy, trend extrapolations – sometimes with elaborate models – were state of the art. As long as trends seemed to indicate the future superiority of the socialist bloc, official propaganda willingly referred to growth curves. It is also conspicuous that East German prognostics had no outstanding advocates and thought leaders like Kahn in the USA, de Jouvenel in France, Flechtheim in Western Germany – or Igor Bestuzhev-Lada in the USSR.

In the whole corpus of East German prognostics, there are rather no predictions or hypothetical speculations about future lifestyles or future family structures, about the organization of labor or new ways to collaborate. Anything that contradicted the official view of a “bright tomorrow”, e.g., extrapolation about increasing divorce rates, was surely classified – as were many empirical studies of sociologists.

Narrow Limits of Consulting Services

Officially, science ruled. Party documents never abstained from emphasizing that all decisions were based on a scientific approach. But social science, as conceived by party officials, implied the exclusive application of the principles of dialectical materialism, i.e., Marxism-Leninism. Since these principles were rather ambiguously defined, this opened up (as mentioned above) much room for interpretation – according to political needs as perceived by the ruling inner party circle.

All experts – all “intellectuals” – had to operate within the framework of the officially “true, scientific” worldview. Philosophers, social scientists, and economists in universities and research institutes had a certain freedom as long as they did not offend key topics of Marxism-Leninism. But even if you adhered to the official parlance and complied with the rules of the game, you could run into trouble. You could never know precisely which topics were just about to become dangerous.

Consultants to governmental (or party) bodies that came from universities or research institutes had to fit their advice into the given framework of party decisions. Certain topics were taboo (e.g., democratic participation), others could not be discussed openly (e.g., certain economic mechanisms). Prognostics operated under these circumstances.

The inner circle of the party recognized in principle the need for more and more qualified information (Liebscher, 1995, p. 75), but they always feared losing control on societal processes, including control of the discussion agenda. Leaders demanded input from experts, but feedback was rare and discussions were confined to the inner circle.Footnote 13 The lack of discursive procedures, not to speak of democratic mechanisms led to dogmatic, uninformed decisions at the top level that in retrospect – after a change in power – were as a rule blamed as arbitrary or “voluntaristic”. Sometimes these decisions had the character of “silver bullet” solution that did not correspond to economic feasibilities: during the late 1950s in agriculture (corn as the miracle crop, open cattle keeping), during the 1960s in industrial branches (aircraft manufacturing, chemistry), during the 1980s in megabit computer chips.

To express it pointedly: The top political leadership of the GDR was not exactly resistant to advice. But since science and research were not only funded, but controlled by “party and state”, strategic consultation services with political impact could not emerge.

It is easy to see in retrospect that prognostics was subject to the mental, ideological, organizational and political limitations of the East German political system. The concepts of an open future, of diverging scenarios or roadmaps, of bottom-up decision building simply did not fit into the societal setting of East German science where even a rudimentary SWOT analysis of the national economy could have had the stench of a counterrevolutionary activity. From the perspective of those in power, this was only reasonable. The Prague Spring of 1968 had demonstrated how rapid more open discussions would lead to a loss of control.Footnote 14

Prognostics in Crisis

The short spring of prognostics ended about 1972. During the early 1970s it became evident, that all hopes of “overtaking without catching up” were wishful thinking. The GDR – and all countries of the socialist bloc – lacked the industrial capacity to come up to the promises of an alleged technological lead-start. Despite NöSPL, the economy suffered from planning rigidities and instructions “from above”. Arbitrary top-level decisions for breakthrough projects resulted in huge failed investments as in a passenger airliner made in GDR. Soon after its installment, beginning in the late 1960s, authorities had already begun to dismantle NöSPL step by step. It was also the end of cybernetic planning optimism for the GDR.

With Honecker’s succession to Ulbricht early in 1971 and even more with the VIIIth party congress of the SED in June 1971, a deep economic and social re-orientation took place. In the end, investments into high-tech industries were reduced; more emphasis was put on lifting living standards.

Nearly at the same time, the first report to the Club of Rome, Limits to Growth (1972), was published. It had tremendous impact in the West, where it marked the end to an epoch of predominantly optimistic future visions. It was also broadly discussed in East German academic circles – and in the public too. Reactions were soon to follow. In East German newspapers as well as in academic publications (e.g., Maier, 1977), Limits to Growth was rejected as a product of neo-Malthusian doomsday thinking, not taking into account the principal difference between capitalism (which is not able to solve its social, environmental etc. problems) and socialism (which solves these problems). Later reports to the Club of Rome found a more differentiated official reception. All of them were circulated widely in academic and non-academic circles.

The politics of détente between East and West slightly improved the climate for futures studies. East German scientists collaborated for example with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis at Laxenburg/Austria, founded in 1972 (Riska-Campbell, 2011; Duller, 2016; Rindzevičiūtė, 2016a). Other opportunities for East-West encounters were provided by the transnational organization Mankind 2000Footnote 15 with its series of conferences, in particular the 1972 conference in Bucharest. Quite generally, international exchange – also about questions of the future – became less restricted. Its impact on East German prognostics remained, however, at best marginal.

In the Years of Decline

During the 1980s, futurists in the GDR should have followed H. Kahn’s phrase: “thinking the unthinkable”, i.e., the end of the communist system. With a subliminal feeling of crisis, not to speak of doom, social and mental barriers against futures studies grew. Studies, whose outcome was not welcome to party leaders, were classified, among them studies about right-wing extremist tendencies within parts of East German youth. Environmental challenges, even situations evident to everyone, were denied. Official propaganda more than ever was whistling in the dark. Sometimes it obtained a grotesque character: The economist Erich Hanke postulated in his book Ins nächste Jahrhundert. Was steht uns bevor? (Into the next century. What lies ahead of us?, 1984) that communism would be achieved if every family earned a monthly income of about 5000 East German Marks. And this would be the case sometime between 2020 and 2030.Footnote 16

In the last years of the GDR, futures studies were rather non-existent. When Bönisch wrote his critique of recent tendencies in bourgeois futurology (Bönisch, 1985), he wrote also about socialist alternatives in the field of futures studies – and came up with the political and economic program of the SED! This included activities to make peace safer; experiences of socialist countries with successful planning (that could help to overcome global problems); and the transition to an intensive type of reproduction (that would need less resources). Futures studies outside and inside political bodies had been superseded by the daily business of politics and ideology. Whereas in West Germany futurology as a research endeavor declined mainly due to internal reasons (Eberspächer, 2019, p. 344) and had a new start in the late 1980s, prognostics became a victim of external, political and ideological factors.

But from the East German grassroots – as a kind of counter-culture –, a new concern about the future grew, partly within the small opposition movement, partly under the roof of the churches, partly in academic institutions, but mostly without any definite organizational basis.Footnote 17 Quite generally, futures thinking – in the form of concern for ecological problems, of the peace and civil rights movement – contributed to the fall of the system.

In 1989, East Germans brought down the ruling political system. From the perspective of futures studies, “the fall of the Berlin wall” occurred as a wild card, a highly improbable, maybe implausible scenario, envisioned only by a handful of persons, outside and inside East Germany. In the end, there is a very limited heritage from East German prognostics: some theoretical approaches to the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of foresight, some lessons about mental and structural barriers for futures thinking. The most important lesson has been aptly formulated by Bestuzhev-Lada (1992, p. 342): Dictatorship and futures research seem to be mutually exclusive, as the latter presupposes democratic principles of knowledge generation.