This study began as a doctoral dissertation about the way in which the political character of communist regimes is defined by their environments. At the time, I was particularly interested in analyzing the steps that such regimes typically take to shore up their citizens' tenuous loyalties in the face of unwanted contacts with the nonsocialist world, and East Germany seemed the perfect example of this kind of defensive reaction to the threat of capitalist ‘contamination.’ Its leaders had practically trembled at the idea of resuscitated ties between the populations of the two Germanies, and of course, East Berlin eventually became famous for its opposition to the Soviet detente initiatives of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, as this study progressed, I became aware that there was much more to East Germany's actions than simply a mechanical response to the changes surrounding the country. As the regime matured, its leadership seemed to operate according to a kind of progressive learning curve, no longer merely responding to the changes around it, but slowly acquiring a limited ability to control its setting and even to set agendas for the country's future. This was important for at least two reasons: first, because it showed that the relationship between leadership and environment can go both ways, as states learn to manage their surroundings as well as be managed by them; and second, because it suggested that many of the old truisms associated with East Germany – that the state was a weak and largely deferential satellite of the Soviet Union, that its leaders feared any but economic contacts with the West – were at best overly simplistic ways of coming to grips with an ever more complex situation.