When we think about East Germany, we wouldn’t be likely to consider it a beacon of human rights. While it called itself the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the state is notorious for the Berlin Wall and the Stasi secret police, and widely portrayed in film and in mass media as an example of socialist “totalitarianism.” Most contemporary scholarship presents a much more nuanced view of ordinary life in the GDR — rejecting the idea it was somehow akin to Nazism. But the language of human rights is normally associated with the state’s opponents, or even as imported from the West after the 1975 Helsinki Accords and the oppositional movements of the 1980s.

Ned Richardson-Little’s book The Human Rights Dictatorship, recently published by Cambridge University Press, offers a rather different perspective on this question. He explores how the notion of “human rights” was deployed by the East German leadership right from the end of World War II, as it sought to promote an alternative socialist notion of “rights” different from those in the West. Before the creation of Amnesty International, the GDR already had its own Committee for the Protection of Human Rights to defend the rights of prisoners — that is, prisoners in other countries.

Looking at this history allows us to understand wider aspects of GDR history, in particular as concerned creating an antifascist popular culture, its efforts to build solidarity with Third World countries, and its place in the international order. Jacobin’s David Broder spoke to Ned about his work and the legacy of the GDR thirty years since German reunification.