The German Democratic

Republic
HI136: History of Germany
 Totalitarianist interpretations
• Popular in 1950s West German interpretations; revival post-1989
– Comparisons drawn with brown dictatorship of NS
• Stress illegitimacy of Soviet occupation & East German ‘puppets’
– State ideology of ‘socialist personality’ within collective
– ‘Leading role’ of ruling party enshrined in constitution
– Stasi secret police
– State control of economy
– Control of media
– Control of economy
• Berlin Wall as epitome of state control of individual
– Breached UN human rights on freedom of travel
• Klaus Schroeder, Der SED-Staat (1998)
• Eckard Jesse (ed.), Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert (1998)
• Anthony Glees, The Stasi Files (2003)
• Also popular with many former GDR citizens; but is this because it
denies personal responsibility?
 Modernising dictatorship?
• Complex industrial economy required ‘rational’ not ‘ideological’ elite
– More university graduates enter party apparatus from 1960s
– Peter C. Ludz, The Changing Party Elite in East Germany (1968/72)
• Economic reforms of 1960s (New Economic System)
– Attempt at decentralisation and incentivisation of economy
• Technological revolution
– Special role of intelligentsia in GDR (see dividers on state emblem)
– Precision engineering from Dresden & Leipzig
– 1980s gamble on microchip technology (too high investment costs)
• Welfare dictatorship (Konrad Jarausch)
– Indirect use of ‘social power’ to predispose groups to choose socialism
– Full employment, hospitals, education system > fond memories
• Educational dictatorship (Erziehungsdiktatur)?
– Party ‘in loco parentis’, knowing what was good for the people
– Rolf Henrich, The Guardian State (1989); party man turned dissident
 Collective biographies & everyday histories
• GDR lasted more than one generation;
post-1949 generation ‘born into’ socialism
• Are we patronising GDR citizens by
treating them all as ‘released prisoners’ &
victims?
• Gaus, Locating Germany (1983): ‘niche
society’, relatively normal private life
possible behind public conformity The Children of Golzow
Born in Year
• Mary Fulbrook, The People’s State (2005) (7-up TV biography, One, Wierling’s
1961 ff.) 2002 collective
• Material culture: 1990s growing interest in biography
popular culture of GDR
• Ostalgie/’Eastalgia’: re-issuing of GDR
brands (see the Spreewald gherkin
episode in Goodbye Lenin); fight to
preserve minor symbols of difference
(traffic light man)
• Danger of ‘commodifying’ the GDR past & Goodbye Lenin (2003):
relativising idealistic motivations Alex with his allegorical
mother/motherland who
cannot survive the fall of GDR green man –
the Wall is nothing sacred?
 The Achievements of Socialism
Katarina Witt,
Olympic ice-
skating
champion &
Charité hospital, GDR ‘ice
Berlin: GDR princess’: the
polyclinics are one GDR measured
of the few legacies its success
adopted by united against the FRG
Germany in gold medals
First GDR East Germany’s
cosmonaut in ‘honours system’:
1976; from the the state was
1960s astronomy adept at rewarding
was on all GDR participation with a
school mania for badges
curriculums
 Walter Ulbricht, SED leader 1946-71
• Reliable but uncharismatic functionary
• Weimar KPD leader in Berlin in 1930s
• Nazi exile spent mainly in Moscow,
avoiding purges of later 30s; viewed as
Stalinist even after Stalin’s death
• Favoured ‘hard line’ of constructing
socialism in half a country rather than
pursuing reunification; in 1953 under
heavy fire from Politburo colleagues, but
‘saved’ by 17 June uprising
• Activist role in pushing Khrushchev into
aggressive stance over Berlin Crisis; WU
devoted most of later time to foreign pol.
• 1960s attempted to play the moderniser,
with focus on technology
• 1971 ousted by ‘palace coup’ by
Honecker, with Soviet backing of
Brezhnev; died in 1973
 Erich Honecker, SED leader, 1971-89
• Spent most of Third Reich in prison
• 1946 leader of Free German Youth
• From late 1950s responsible for internal
affairs in GDR
• 1971 acquired Moscow’s backing to
remove Ulbricht
• EH formed an unwritten ‘social pact’ (the
Unity of Economic and Social policy)
which subsidised popular standard of
living (at height in mid-70s); increasingly
paid for by loans from West, turning GDR
into loan junkie by 1980s
• Gorbachev’s arrival as a Soviet reform
communist leader in 1985 caused SED a
succession crisis as ‘gerontocracy’ hung
on to power; EH was hospitalised at
crucial points of the 1989 crisis
• Famous in GDR for panama hat & natty
pale suits; died 1994 in exile in Chile
 Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED)
• June 1945 Soviets relegalise political parties
• Autumn Communists decide on merger with Social
Democrats; local resistance from some SPD, but
pressure from SMAD
• United workers’ party of SED founded April 1946
(debates: was this the spontaneous will of workers,
learning lessons of divided labour movement in 1933,
or creature of Soviets?)
• 1948-51: SED Stalinised into ‘New-Type Party’; purge
of former Social Democrats & loss of parity principle
• 1946 free elections: SED polls 48%
Wilhelm Pieck (KPD) shakes hands
• SED functions as hub of Antifascist Bloc including with Otto Grotewohl (SPD) on
Christian Democrats and Liberal Democrats, and later formation of SED, April 1946
National Democrats and Farmers; elections also
fought as single Bloc list (aka National Front)
• SED membership: rose from 1.3 (1946) to 2.3 million
(1986), including many careerist members; women’s
shared only reached 35.5%; functionaries (i.e.
officials) liked to list themselves as ‘workers’ but had
they functionally become middle-class?
• ‘Politbureaucracy’ lived sheltered existence in
Wandlitz compound, including all mod cons
• ‘Foot soldiers’ often true believers, working hard &
living frugally (see Landolf Scherzer, Der
Erste/Number One, 1988, shadowing hardworked
local party secretary)
Propaganda poster for unity
 The Stasi (MfS): Shield and Sword of the Party
• Founded as clone of KGB under Soviet occupation
• Early on used mainly for counter-intelligence (to keep out
or kidnap western spies)
• Markus Wolf’s Foreign Section scored notable
successes in planting moles with West German
Chancellor Willy Brandt in 1970s
• 1952 Stasi given control of border; later policed the
border troops
• Poor early warning for 1953 uprising & temporarily
demoted from ministerial status
• Central Evaluation & Information Group (ZAIG)
monitored popular mood
Erich Mielke, Manfred Stolpe,
• Self-image as pro-active ‘social workers’ or agents of the
‘invisible frontier’; ‘operative missions’ included Minister of State dogged by IM
infiltration & decomposition from within of suspected Security, 1957-89 accusations
dissident groups
• 1960s MfS adopts more sophisticated techniques & ‘total
surveillance’
• Informelle Mitarbeiter (IMs) (‘informal collaborators’ or
informants: growing reliance for ‘total surveillance’ on
coopted members of public
• ‘Destasification’: prominent cases show difficulty of
proving if suspect was indirectly reported or IM (Manfred
Stolpe, minister-president of Brandenburg)
• Timothy Garton Ash, The File (1997)
• Mike Dennis, The Stasi: Myth and Reality (2003) Stasi HQ at
Normannenstrasse, Berlin
 17 June 1953: A People’s Uprising?
• March 1953: Stalin dies; power vacuum?
• May: new Moscow leadership order more
liberal ‘New Course’; Ulbricht criticised
• But workers excluded from some reforms
(ration cards, work quotas increased)
• 16 June: building workers on Berlin’s
Stalinallee strike for economistic reasons
• 17 June am: spontaneous strikes in cities;
Berlin strikers march on ministerial district
• 17 June pm: more political demands (free
elections, national unity); late afternoon
Soviet tanks impose martial law
• East German explanation: CIA-organised
putsch (‘Tag X’) using teenager thugs
• West German explanation: people’s revolt
‘The People’s Uprising of 17
against Soviet tyranny
June’, West German poster
 The Open Border
• 1945 interzonal borders policed by Allies
•Berlin: quadripartite city with access via
U-Bahn & S-Bahn
• Grenzgaenger (border-crossers): by
1961 50-60,000 E. Germans commuted to
W. Berlin; others simply shopped there
• Currency speculation across Berlin-
Berlin border at 1:5 East:West marks
Potsdamer Platz, 1952, before the Wall
• Republikflucht (flight from the Republic):
60,000
defection by ca 1 in 6 of GDR population Republikflucht Berlin Wall

• 1952 Stasi fortify inner-German border; 50,000 (FRG figures)

tourist visits to FRG cut drastically Emigrants 17 June crisis

40,000
Immigrants
• 1953 travel liberalised, but abused for 30,000 Returnees
Pass Law

more defections; 1957 plans to leave Westbound

Khrushchev
ultimatum
20,000
criminalised with 3 years’ prison; Berlin
became chief exit point 10,000 Army recruitment
begins Collectivization
• Hirschman’s ‘exit/voice’ model of flight & 0

protest; remaining E. Germans could -10,000

Eastbound

1954

1956

1958

1959

1961
1949

1950

1951

1952

1953

1955

1957

blackmail system for goods such as
housing; regime unable to introduce
conscription
1960
Movements across German-German border, 1949-
61: note peaks in 1953, mid-50s when tourist viasa
available, & eve of Wall
 The Berlin Wall, 13 August 1961
• Failure of 1958 economic drive to overtake West
German consumer production
• 1960 economic problems & growing E. European
subsidies
• 1961 Warsaw Pact states agree to seal off W. Berlin;
initially fences were erected (see right) to test the
West’s response; since the barrier was within E.
Berlin territorial limits it was treated as internal affair
• 1964 old age pensioners allowed to visit West
• 1971 Berlin Agreement permits ‘grade-1 relatives’ to Temporary barriers on 13.8.61
visit West; in the 1980s West German loans were tied
to the human rights liberalisation
• Shoot to kill: all told approx. 1,000 persons died at the
inner-German border; it was also mined until 1984;
after fall of the Wall border guards who shot received
suspended sentences fro manslaughter; those higher
up in the Army or Politburo received prison sentences

Border troops’ sketch of Berlin Wall

(post-1975 version): a double wall
with a sandy area between &
alarmed fences & anti-grip final wall
 Antifascism: a legitimatory ideology
• Marxist-Leninist doctrine always interpreted
fascism as an outgrowth of capitalism;
therefore antifascism linked to anti-capitalism
(big business as Hitler’s stringpullers)
• Fascism also interpreted as a political class
war (mainly v. KPD), rather than racial war (v.
Jews); GDR paid no reparations to Israel &
antisemitic attacks on graveyards persisted
• West German Federal Republic viewed as
haven of former Nazis, protected by Anglo-
Americans (especially in 1950s/60s);
antifascism thus had contemporaneous
function of anti-westernism (e.g. Berlin Wall
officially labelled ‘Antifascist Defence
Rampart’)
• SED leadership (mainly Soviet exiles) had
ambivalent attitude to ‘real’ antifascist Buchenwald memorial: unveiled in 1958,
veterans (marginalised ‘inland’ resisters, this group represents the KPD’s leading
dissolved veterans’ organisations) role in the resistance, with a (historically
• Antifascism an affective moral argument for dubious) myth of the camp’s self-liberation;
wartime generation; but younger generations Buchenwald was the GDR’s main
increasingly indifferent to abstract memorial site for school visits & veterans’
antifascism; with unification to FRG’s public meetings
culture of atonement many East Germans
had difficulties accepting ‘collective guilt’
 Socialist nationalism?
• Early Stalinist/SED policy stressed national unity (Stalin
1945: ‘The Hitlers come and go; the German people Thomas Müntzer,
remains’; Stalin Notes of March 1952 offering a neutral leader of 1525
united Germany cf Austria) peasants’ revolt in a
• GDR inferiority complex towards FRG (FRG’s ‘sole GDR biopic: a proto-
representation’ of German nation & refusal to recognise socialist?
GDR in Hallstein Doctrine); all East German citizens
reaching FRG automatically entitled to West German
passport
• ‘Peaceful coexistence’: 1955 Khrushchev signals two
German states in one nation; from 1980s policy of
‘demarcation’ (Abgrenzung) from FRG
• Socialist humanism stressed heritage of classical greats GDR flag of 1949: GDR flag of 1959: with
(Goethe & Schiller at National Theatre at Weimar) identical with FRG! added hammer, dividers
• 1980s GDR rediscovery of tradition (national poets & wheat sheaves
Goethe & Schiller of Weimar; Luther anniversary;
Bismarck biography; Frederick the Great statues in
East Germany
Berlin & Potsdam)
rediscovers its
• 1987: East Berlin celebrates its 750th anniversary,
Prussian heritage:
including historical reconstruction of Nikolai quarter & its
church, as well as 19th-century Sophienstrasse statues of Frederick
the Great come out
of mothballs on
Unter den Linden,
1980s
 ‘The Friends’: Relations with the Soviets
• Official propaganda stressed the liberation in
1945, GDR ‘brothers in arms’ within Warsaw Pact;
slogan: ‘Learning from the Soviet Union means
Learning to Win!’
• Day-to-day relations tarnished by mass rapes of
women lasting for years after 1945
• Dismantling of factories: ca. 30% of East German
plant was removed
• Russian was compulsory in schools but not
pursued by many to a high level
• Membership of the Society for German-Soviet
Friendship was automatic in the mass
organisations
• Gorbachev: belonged
to new generation of
Communist poster: Anti-communist reform communists
poster: • Renounced Brezhnev
‘This is how the Soviet
for ‘Sinatra’ Doctrine
Union is helping us to ‘Count me out’,
• ‘If your neighbours
realise the New Course: alluding to rape
re-wallpapered
Handing back SAG factories of women by their flat would you
Cancelling reparations Red Army feel obliged to
Lowering occupation costs redecorate yours?’
Cancelling postwar debts’ Kurt Hager
Mikhail Gorbachev,
face of reform
communism
 Economic decline
GDR’s ‘money man’, Schalck-
Golodkowski, meets Bavarian
minister-president, Franz
Josef Strauss
Bitterfeld, most polluted
area of the GDR & heart
of her chemicals industry
• Honecker’s subsidies at cost of western loans;
increasing pressure to liberalise in return for loans
• Microchip gamble: East Germany invested billions
in flawed silicon experiment
• Switch from Soviet oil to East German brown coal
(environmental problems)
• 9 November 1989: SED Politburo collectively
resigns over exposed debt crisis
• Crisis deepened into spring 1990 with emigration
to West of key workers, including doctors
• Key voting issue in March 1990 fast union with D-
mark zone in West (occurred 1 July 1990)
• Since reunification GDR suffered approx. twice
unemployment rate of other FRG
• Treuhand (Trustee) agency set to privatise East
German industry; beset by corruption (even
Chancellor Kohl indicted)
• Validation of Adenauer’s 1950s ‘magnet theory’
that West Germany would draw GDR into its orbit?
•
Civil society
SED state claimed monopoly of
representation; even strikes illegal
• Artists & writers as substitute
‘Öffentlichkeit’ (public sphere)?
• Wolf Biermann case: singer-songwriter
& left critic of SED (which he saw as Umweltbibliothek activists
travesty of socialism); 1976 effectively
deported from GDR Wolf Biermann, GDR’s
• Earliest civil disobedience over freedom enfant terrible
of travel (1973 GDR joined UN – human
rights issues); beginnings of illegal
contacts & groupings; white as dissident
colour
• Churches as sanctuaries for alternative
groups ‘Namenlos’ punks perform
• Environmental issues: pollution in churchyard, 1983
• Political issues: vote-rigging exposed in
May 1989 local elections
• Sept. 1989: several citizens’ groups
emerge, including New Forum,
Democratic Awakening & Initiative
Peace and Human Rights
Jens Reich & Bärbel
Bohley, founders of New Round table between SED
Forum in Sept. 1989 & opposition, Dec. 1989
9 October 1989: Leipzig
 The Fall of the Wall
• May 1989: Hungarians breach iron
curtain
• Mass exodus begins; frustrated
leavers seek refuge in Prague &
Warsaw embassies of FRG
• Leipzig peace marches from
Nikolaikirche swell from hundreds,
to thousands to hundreds of
thousands; 9 October Berlin
decides not to use violence
• 18 October Honecker relieved for Günther Schabowski, Politburo GDR citizens seek
‘health reasons’; successor Egon member, at the famous press refuge in West German
Krenz not trusted by most as conference, 9 Nov. 1989 embassy in Prague
genuine reformer
• Planned staged opening of Wall
mishandled & becomes stampede
for border crossings; GDR border
troops relinquish control