Abstract
By using the workhouse of Dresden as a microstudy, this article explores local continuities in postwar East Germany. It argues that this example not only illustrates the persistence of mentalities towards ‘sexual and social deviance’, not least as a legacy of the Third Reich, but also questions the assumption of a strictly centralized state and 1945 as a caesura. In a first step, the article shows the continuity of personnel at the state level, who decided that the workhouse as an institution should have a future in the new East German state after 1945, before revealing that local authorities were also unable to dissociate themselves with the views towards this institution of the past. In the end, the article enters this institution with help of archival sources, architectural plans, and photographs, exploring the impact of this state and local continuity on the everyday lives of inmates in this workhouse in Dresden. In doing so, it contributes to the historiography of East Germany by revealing the agency of different individuals, even if confined to a ‘total institution’.
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