Technocrats Take Over
For most Central and Eastern European states, the 1960s were a period of intense reorganization in both their economies and administrative structures. The GDR, for instance, developed a broad reform program in the wake of the heated years of the second Berlin Crisis and the failure of the Five-Year Plan of 1958 (which had to be prematurely abandoned in 1961). Its economic dimension was christened the New Economic System (NOS).5 By then, the failures of central planning as a mechanism for organizing an economy had become obvious. The reforms soon concentrated on the economy, burying any hopes for political or social change in East Germany. From 1961 to 1964, East German economists and planning experts had to come up with new concepts of planning as well as ways of changing the organizational structure linking the state to producers and consumers. While cost efficiency and rationalization became the planners' predominant buzzwords, cybernetics and computing emerged as the tools to overcome economic hardship.6 Uncovering ways to improve the social and economic mechanisms of East German society made its planners and economists forage for solutions in the West.7