The
fine line that some East German photographers straddled between conformity
and personal self-expression was made possible by the relaxation of
Soviet authority following the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953. During
the ensuing thaw, the constitution of the GDR was revised by the state
legislature to reflect the evolving identity of the growing nation.
Socialist realism was revised to reflect both the growing independence
of East German art from the Soviet mold and the awakening of East
German artists to their own cultural history. Having apparently outgrown
its close identification with Stalinist rigidity, East German socialist
realism came to be theorized from two opposing points of view.  One
side argued that change itself was the fundamental characteristic
of socialist realism, and that this transformative quality was the
key to its endurance and social significance. The other side concluded
that socialist realism lacked theoretical coherence. Socialist realism,
they declared, had been degraded into a slogan or sign used by proponents
of widely opposing ideologies but was meaningless in and of itself.
For these artists, the absence of a theoretical substructure revealed
the superficiality of socialist realism, and suggested the eventual
collapse of the authority of the state in cultural affairs.
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