The debate over the extent of the SED's autonomy is one of the more interesting developments withing GDR historiography. The idea that the SED was little more than a catspaw of the Kremlin was treated as a fact during the Cold War in the FRG and the US. Such sentiments have survived the 1989 and transect left-right boundaries; no less a luminary than Hans-Ulrich Wehler dismissed the GRD as a "Russian satrapry," as late as 1996. Diplomatic and political historians of the nineties and aughts have seriously questioned this interpretation of the SED. The result is the current trends in GDR historiography favor a more nuanced approach where the SED enjoyed a degree of agency, sometimes to the consternation of the "friends" in Moscow.

Hope Harrison was one of the leading scholars pushing this interpretation. Her aptly-titled monograph, Driving the Soviets Up the Wall argued on the basis of archival information from Germany and Russia that the SED often drove Soviet policy in the Berlin Crisis and other Cold War flashpoints over the German question. In short, Harrison contends that the SED had a degree of job security in that no matter how much Moscow might be dissatisfied with Ulbricht and his compatriots, the stakes in having "their" Germany succeed were too high for them to let it fail. In the same vein, Sheldon Anderson's A Cold War in the Soviet Bloc examines how much wartime antipathies permeated the Polish-German relationship, even between socialist brothers. Rather than conceiving and driving policy, Anderson notes how Moscow often intervened to force harmony, such as having the SED formally accept the Oder-Neisse line. The Warsaw Pact Reconsidered: International Relations in Eastern Europe by Laurien Crump extends such analyses through the entire bloc and contends that the Pact members were far more autonomous than their position as satellite states suggested and each country had their own agenda. Within the context of the GDR, the SED were both hardliners and acted as "enforcers" to orthodox Marxist-Leninism, even while pursuing their own policies. Crump's interpretation of the SED is in keeping with other analyses of German communism over the longue duree such as Catherine Epstein's The Last Revolutionaries and Eric Weitz's Creating German Communism. DEFA films are a reflection of these deep-seated beliefs in part because besides being propaganda, they do evince a certain, consistent Weltanschauung that was simultaneously communist and deutsch. Patrick Major's Behind the Berlin Wall also gives the SED its due as driving events with regards to migration and outflow.

As this slice of contemporary historiography shows, the SED was far more than a satrap or puppet of the Soviets. This does not mean they were completely independent or always got their way in these disputes over policy. But the evolving picture of the GDR's autonomy mirrors other trends in the historiogaphy of Western Europe that argues that the NATO countries were far from pliant spear-carriers of Washington and they too hewed to their own policies when they did not dovetail with those of their superpower patron. While these Western governments certainly had far more legitimacy in the eyes of the population than those on the other side of the Iron Curtain, the Cold War situation was more complicated than a Manichean division between American liberalism and Soviet totalitarianism.

Aside from such political histories, another powerful strand of GDR historiography is that of daily life. Rather than blathering on, here are some suggestions for further reading:

• The Staatsbibliothek of Berlin has digitized a lot of GDR newspapers and while they give the SED's official lines, they also show what else was going on inside the GDR like sports scores.

• Mary Fulbrook is a name to familiarize with for GDR studies. Although her The People's State is an often infuriating book, it is an influential alternative view to the dictatorship, as is her Dissonant Lives: Generations and Violence through the German Dictatorships. The anthology she edited with Michael Port, Becoming East German is what it says on the tin.

• Alan Mcdougall's The People's Game looks at mass sport, specifically soccer, whic evolved semi-independently from the SED state- Mcdougall talked about his monograph in the New Books in History podcast

• Working in East Germany: Normality in a Socialist Dictatorship 1961-79 by Jeannette Z. Madarász details the accommodation of GDR citizens after the Wall went up.

• Mark Landsman's Dictatorship and Demand The Politics of Consumerism in East Germany is an excellent monograph on consumption in East Germany and the relationship East Germans had to what some historians of consumption accurately call "stuff." Landsman's book can also be supplemented with Heather Gumbert's Envisioning Socialism: Television and the Cold War in the German Democratic Republic which details one of the sectors of the economy- television ownership- where the GDR was not that far behind the FRG.

• The anthology Socialist Modern: East German Everyday Culture and Politics tackles a wide variety of topics ranging from race relations, sex, to advertising.

• One of Socialist Modern's editors, Paul Betts, has produced an excellent monograph on everyday life, Within Walls: Private Life in the German Democratic Republic showing how private life anf other social circles became a refuge away from politics and the dictatorship.