Exploring Institutional Power and Individual Agency in the GDR: Case Studies from the Ministry for Culture and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the German Democratic Republic

My dissertation investigates the agency (Handlungsmacht) of individual and institutional actors in the cultural and foreign policy of the GDR towards the Middle East and North Africa through the ASID framework – Agency, Structure, Institutions, and Discourse. Using critical discourse analysis and organization theory, the research identifies how identity narratives and institutional language articulate hierarchies, autonomy, and strategic positioning across policy and cultural initiatives. This study applies a case-based methodology: individual agency is analyzed through correspondence with the Ministry for Culture and two publications concerning the penultimate Minister of Culture – an interview conducted in early 1990 and a posthumously published memoir. Structural dynamics are drawn from autobiographical remembrances of former GDR diplomats active in the Middle East and North Africa. Institutional agency is examined through a personal interview with the head of the Künstleragentur, while discursive complexity is further explored through correspondence with the Ministry for Culture and articles published in the art magazine Bildende Kunst. These layered sources reveal how discursive agency was constructed within institutional settings – through acts of self-positioning, rhetorical negotiation, and contextual navigation – demonstrating that participation in GDR cultural and foreign policy was mediated by intersecting logics of ideology, professional expertise, and historical circumstance. By exposing the complexity and plurality of GDR actors’ positioning, this project challenges dominant historiographies that flatten systemic actors into monolithic caricatures. Through close textual and narrative analysis of pre- and post-1989/90 sources, it disrupts the enduring discourse that delegitimizes GDR biographies and contributes to a much-needed paradigm shift in scholarship on the GDR by demonstrating how agency was discursively negotiated within complex institutional frameworks. It also critiques the lingering use of reductive narratives in present-day German political and cultural arenas and calls for a recontextualized and theoretically grounded understanding of socialist institutional practice, one that resists ideological flattening and affirms the historical and discursive richness of GDR internationalism.