History of labor and industrial relations was a well-established and mutually contested subdiscipline in both parts of Germany during the Cold War. Though it did not stand in the center of the overall settling of accounts with the communist past in unified Germany the swift opening of all relevant archival sources made sure that these themes established themselves as relevant topics on the research agenda about the history of the GDR. Profiting both from an advanced state of art in West Germany and a handful of original innovators in East Germany the GDR was explored and increasingly understood as an essentially ‘work-centered society’ governed by a panoptic ‘welfare dictatorship’. When it came to interpreting the multifold and heterogeneous findings one line of reasoning gained peculiar attractiveness, namely to read the East German ‘case’ as a variant of Fordist modernization in the middle of the twentieth century which unable to face the challenges of globalization.