“Work with, Plan with, Rule with!” The Right to Work in East Germany, 1946–68

Although the East German state fell apart in 1989 in the face of mass protests for human rights, in its early years, it invoked international human rights as a means of securing legitimacy for one-party rule. The right to work was of particular importance in the propaganda of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) beginning immediately following the Second World War as it claimed to be building a "Workers and Peasant State" that would forever end the conditions that lead to Nazism. The right and corresponding duty to work formed one of the key ideas grounding the organization of society and politics in the new East German state. Society was structured around the workplace and all non-party members who were workers were necessarily members of the national trade union that functioned as the main institution through which they received benefits and social privileges. On a philosophical level, Marxist intellectuals asserted that the right to work could only truly be realized through the end of capitalist exploitation and the realization of the rule of the proletariat so that all work was for the self rather than a class of owners. The official SED conception of the right to work brought together traditional German working class political demands for stable employment and workplace representation along with the emerging international human rights norms of the immediate post-war period into a unified ideological construct to legitimize one-party dictatorship in East Germany in the name of a Marxist utopia.  Rather than run away from the new human rights standards, the SED instead co-opted the language of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to claim legitimacy as part of Germany’s Cold War competition.