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Christoph Lorke
Constructions of (Non-) Belonging:
1he Visualization of Marginalized Social
Groups in "Actually Existing Socialism"
In the context of the Cold War, the existence of a formative imaginary dimension
can be assumed, which determined symbolic and societal interpretative patterns
regarding different spheres of the involved Eastern and Western societies (politics,
culture, social issues, and daily life; see Eugster & Marti 2015). Taking into account
this assumption, this chapter will concentrate on the processes of social and moral
engineering in three different socialist states: the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. These processes
were mainly orchestrated by the state within the context of the mass media, where
the circulation of certain social images can be observed. Through their performativ¬
ity, they represent the result of the struggle for interpretative dominance over the
“appropriate” and socially accepted classification, presentation, and performance of
social differences. Thus, the integration of the concept of social images into a his¬
torical analysis may offer new insights into the processes of the establishment and
mediation of meanings and interpretation. The following discussion seeks to illus¬
trate the relationship between semantic and visual strategies regarding the (desired)
social order in the period between the 1960s and the late 1980s. The communist
ideal of an egalitarian society was persistently and enthusiastically espoused in the
official political culture of the countries in the Eastern Bloc. The Marxist-Leninist
approach had no place for social grievances, let alone poverty, and in fact they were
even considered as “alien” to socialism. However, certain marginal social groups
were constantly present in the socialist state (Lorke 2015). After the phase of de¬
Stalinization, an orientation towards inner social problems in the decade of the
1960s can be observed in most of the eastern European socialist states due to an
economic and political consolidation. As a result, many scientific studies—internal
and never widely published but rather “under lock and key’—took a look at the
margins of society with the aim to finding out where and why the enforcement of
political targets regarding the process of social reproduction were not satisfactorily
solved. In the case of the Soviet Union, in spite of all the social improvements
under Nikita Khrushchev as the first secretary of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union, 30 percent of all blue- and white-collar workers’ households could
be, relative to Soviet standards, considered to be poor in the year 1965 (Matthews
1972, 1986; for an overview see Neutatz 2013: 445-447; Ivanova & Plaggenborg
2015). In the GDR at the beginning of the 1970s, every third household was living