Working in small businesses. A history of the working worlds of private small businesses during the long 1980s in the Leipzig region

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Patrick Wagner
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 540513972

The project examines a facet of the world of work in the late GDR and during the transition to the Federal Republic of Germany's market economy. This subject has received little attention so far, namely the history of privately-run small businesses in the fields of crafts, small businesses and commerce. Our starting point is the change in the SED regime’s commercial policy since 1976, which led to around 470,000 GDR citizens working in one of the almost 100,000 private companies in 1989. Although the SED viewed them as ideologically outdated, the regime remained economically dependent on these private companies because they took on important tasks in supplying the population. Two thirds of these companies held their ground during the first turbulent years of transformation (until around 1992). Using the example of the Leipzig region, the question will be examined to what extent these companies represented an alternative working world to that of the state-owned companies in the late GDR and what consequences the collapse of the state socialist system had for them. The focus of interest is the company as a space of experience for its owners and employees, and thus we try to write a history of working experiences in private enterprises. For this purpose, two fields of investigation and their interactions are examined. 1.) the external world of the companies is examined in order to reconstruct the diverse relationships between the companies, their employees, and their social environments from the state, party, unions, population and other companies. The main focus of the study, however, is 2.) on the inner world of the companies, i.e. the intra-company interactions, in order to understand how social relationships and policies worked and to what extent and why they changed during the study period. Using oral history sources created specifically for this project, supplemented by archival sources, the specific experiences that this working world brought about will be identified and analyzed. This project thus helps to correct the misperception that the working world in the GDR was shaped almost exclusively by large state-owned companies. At the same time, it promises an alienation of the view on the “typical” working world of state-owned companies and thus an innovative approach to understanding the working society of the late GDR and the young, reunified Federal Republic as a whole.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants