There are people, believe it or not, who think that communist East Germany wasn’t really so bad. After all, the argument runs, people sat around talking about books, music, and the meaning of life because there was no dumbed-down mass culture.There was a warm communal spirit, and the state provided cradle to grave welfare, free child care, cheap housing, and so on. So it’s not surprising that there are all these elegiac German films and novels now appearing that draw on the prevalent Ostalgie (one of those untranslatable German compound nouns that combines “East” and “nostalgia”).

A recent weekend magazine feature in Britain’s leading left-wing newspaper, the Guardian, even claimed that East German fashions – 1970s garments made of synthetic materials and even more hideous than those then current in the West – are enjoying a kind of retro-chic revival. Plus ca change: When these clothes were new, the same newspaper was trying to persuade its readers that East German GDP per capita was about to overtake Britain’s. The fact that the statistics on which such claims were based were all cooked was no excuse: You only had to cross Checkpoint Charlie to see that even the showcase capital of East Berlin was terribly short of everything except tedium and fear.

Let us be charitable. If you were a Marxist academic who had no interest in things like clothes, cosmetics, hairdressers, or anything else that helped you look good, if you didn’t care about things like money, food, democracy, freedom to worship, a free press or television, and about a million other things that make life in a place like New York or London fun – well, then you might also think East Germany wasn’t so bad. But even then, you might get a bit impatient with the fact that half your neighbors, colleagues, and even family were secretly working for the Stasi and spying on you. Or with the fact that the government hadn’t bothered to repair or rebuild ruins all over the country – including some of your greatest buildings in the middle of Berlin – even 40 years after World War II ended. That it allowed some of the worst pollution anywhere in the world to fill your lungs every day.You might just mind that the communist officials enjoyed Western luxuries while most people couldn’t even buy basic commodities. And you would very definitely object to the Berlin Wall stopping you from leaving or even making a day trip to the West without risking your life.

Funnily enough, there isn’t much about all this in Mary Fulbrook’s book (titled apparently without irony) “The People’s State” (Yale University Press, 352 pages, $35). She tries to disarm criticism by warning that “some commentators will no doubt wish to argue [that] I am allegedly an ‘old leftie’ nostalgically hankering after some mythical past.” Well, she said it. She rather primly claims that “as a professional historian and scholar with a social-science background,” she rejects politicized interpretations in favor of “empirically founded new ways of thinking.” The trouble is that these “new ways of thinking” sound remarkably like the old ways that were so familiar during the decades of the Cold War, when every possible excuse was made for communist states by Western “experts” who, wholly dependent on their patronage to gain access, persistently ignored the evidence of emigres and dissidents.

Instead of the “black-and-white vocabulary of Cold War castigation,” visa-vis the notion of totalitarianism, Ms. Fulbrook prefers her own delightfully euphemistic term of art: “participatory dictatorship.” This dovetails neatly with a regime that was built very largely on euphemisms. Just as the Holy Roman Empire was, as Voltaire famously observed, neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, so the “German Democratic Republic” was neither German nor democratic nor a republic. (It was, if any client state lacking all legitimacy can have a national character, Prussian rather than German.)

“Participatory dictatorship” is not just a euphemism, it is also an oxymoron. As Ms. Fulbrook’s voluminous archival material demonstrates, there were only two freedoms in the People’s State: the freedom to obey the party and the freedom to denounce one’s neighbor. The only participation was the petition, thousands of which were presented, to be filed away and forgotten. They provide a vivid picture of life under collectivism, and it is not a pretty one. Class differences based on political rather than economic factors were more insuperable than those under capitalism because the Marxist intelligentsia relied on privilege rather than wealth to secure its advantages. It became, in fact, a hereditary, sacerdotal caste.

What she calls “the people’s paradox” is the claim that “a degree of freedom, constructive participation in, and facilitation by, the socialist project, was authentically possible at the very same time as the knowledge of outer political constraints.” Surely the real paradox of the GDR’s distinctive form of dictatorship is that it proved to be less bloody but even more total than either the Nazi model which preceded it or the Soviet one that imposed it. The Stasi were not only far more numerous than the Gestapo in a state only a quarter the size of the Third Reich, but seem to have employed a much greater proportion of the population as informers.

Although Ms. Fulbrook does draw limited parallels with Nazi Germany, and the subtitle of her book explicitly links Hitler and Honecker, she is in no doubt that the two systems were so different as to be incomparable. While there is no comparison between their capacities for aggression, both external and internal, it is precisely in a social history such as this that similarities, objective and subjective, do stand out. If anything, the Nuremberg rallies were more “participatory” than anything in Honecker’s state. And when she seeks to justify the “genuine nostalgia for lived experiences” that undoubtedly exists today in East Germany, it does not seem to occur to her that very similar forms of nostalgia still sustain old – and young – Nazis, too.

The fact that nostalgia for an evil regime is “genuine” does not make it any less pernicious. Historians who gild the memory of dictatorship, “participatory” or otherwise, are playing a very dangerous game.

Mr. Johnson’s “London Letter” appears each Thursday in The New York Sun.