This article belongs to the special cluster, “Family, Gender and (dis)Abled Bodies after 1953”, guest-edited by Maike Lehmann and Alexandra Oberländer. Research on the history of masculinities and fatherhood during state socialism in East Central Europe is still rare. Therefore, scholars in the field of women’s and gender studies sometimes reproduce the idea of men in that region as stable characters across the period of socialist rule. In particular, they insist that “official,” that is, state-sanctioned, representations of masculinity did not change. Yet, as I show, there is evidence that socialist authors, journalists, and even the politburos of the regions’ communist parties did reflect on what they perceived as the need to change the conceptions of men and fathers. They advocated men’s greater participation in housework and child care. In this article, I examine this “struggle for a socialist fatherhood” in the GDR, focusing mainly on the discussions and suggestions of sociologists, educationalists, psychologists, and sexologists active in the study of childhood and adolescence, sex education, or marriage and family. From the 1960s on, experts from these fields as well as communist politicians targeted increasingly men to implement equality in marriage and parenting. In the 1970s and 1980s, their suggestions became more and more concrete. These suggestions as well as the theoretical discussions demonstrate the enduring belief in the socialist society’s ability to overcome traditional gender stereotypes. Even in the late 1980s, they were future directed and contained a utopian element.

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This introduction to Aspasia’s Special Forum on the history of men and masculinities under socialism demonstrates the interest and originality of applying critical men’s studies and the history of masculinities to state-socialist Eastern Europe. It reviews existing scholarship within this field, stresses the persisting difficulties in analyzing everyday performances of gender and masculinities in socialist societies, and argues for adopting new approaches in order to get closer to a social and cultural history of masculinities. It puts the contributions to this Special Forum in their broader historiographical context—in particular, concerning studies on work, family, violence, war, disability, and generational change and youth—and shows how they will contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics and everyday performances of gender in state-socialist societies.