Daily Life and Party Rule in the GDR 1971–1989
Translated from the German by David Burnett
Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin
This is the English translation of the Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR 1971–1989, first published in March 1998 by Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin.
The pictures in this book were taken in the 1970s and 1980s by former stern photographer Harald Schmitt at various locations in the GDR. © Harald Schmitt / Foundation for the Study of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany
1st edition, June 2019
(corresponds to the 2nd german edition, 1998)
© for the English translation: David Burnett
© for the German original: Christoph Links Verlag GmbH, 1998
Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin, Tel.: (030) 44 02 32-0
www.christoph-links-verlag.de; mail@christoph-links-verlag.de
Cover design: Ch. Links Verlag, using a photo by Harald Hauswald /
Ostkreuz agency
Translation: 2003 / 2019 by David Burnett
Editor: Philipp Kaufmann, Ch. Links Verlag
Typesetting: Nadja Caspar, Ch. Links Verlag
eISBN 978-3-86284-453-1
Prologue to the English Edition A Brief Word on Long Goodbyes
World history is the world’s tribunal
Homesick for dictatorship
A happy life in the GDR?
Prologue to the Original German Edition (1998) In the Labyrinth of the Past
The minute of departure
The divided memory
The unrelenting memory
The dialogic method or the double truth of Rabbi Loew
History as uneventfullness
Cheerfully tackling the past
Clio as the goddess of freedom
Part IChange and Continuity
Chapter OneThe Sixties and Seventies in the History of the GDR
The end of the Ulbricht era
The endless winter of 1969–70 or the four main difficulties of building socialism
The struggle for power behind the scenes
Chapter TwoThe Honecker Era
The Eighth Party Congress of the SED
Erich Honecker at the head of the Party
The Ninth Party Congress
The late seventies
Stagnation and crisis in the eighties
Erich Honecker and the fall of the GDR
Part IIThe GDR and Europe
Chapter OneThe Policy of Détente in the Early Seventies
Change of government in Bonn
Transit agreement and the Basic Treaty
Chapter TwoThe GDR and the “National Question”
Relinquishing the German nation
SED leadership between isolation and “common German responsibilities”
Chapter ThreeDaily Life in Divided Germany
The GDR and Western television
The divided heaven over Berlin
The Intershop—A glimpse into the paradise of affluent society
Divided language in a divided land?
The GDR as seen in the West or the “noble savage” of the consumer age
The return of the German nation in the fall of 1989
Chapter FourThe GDR as Part of the Soviet Empire
Stalinism in the guise of the GDR
The GDR as “homunculus sovieticus”?
The unloved brother
The Polish crisis of 1980–81
German-Polish friendship in everyday life
Part IIIThe Structures of Power
Chapter OneThe Party
The Party as the mother of the masses
Party congresses
The Central Committee
The Politbüro
The Party apparatus
Chapter TwoBloc Parties and Mass Organizations
Secret opposition or allies of the SED?
The mass organizations in daily life
Chapter ThreeThe State Apparatus
Unity of state and Party
Elections in the GDR
Part IVControl and Submission
Chapter OneThe Legitimation of Power
Historical forms of state legitimation
The dictatorship of love
Ideology as the opium of the rulers
Legitimation through history
Chapter TwoPower and Secrecy
The public sphere and communication under dictatorship
Decreed publicity as a loss of freedom
The secret state
Censorship and “cold book-burning” in the land of readers
Control of the public sphere
Surrogate publicity
Chapter ThreeThe Theater of Power
The GDR as a Potemkin village
The World Festival of Youth an Students in the summer of 1973
FC Bayern München vs. SG Dynamo Dresden, November 7, 1973
Güstrow, December 13, 1981
Part VSociety and Economy
Chapter OneEast German Society
Demographics
Love, sex and tenderness
Women and socialism
The land of happy babies
Senior citizens
Housing shortage and urban development
Chapter TwoEconomic Policy of the SED
The foundations of a socialist economy
The economic development of the GDR in the seventies and eighties
Debt crisis
The “KoKo empire”
Ecological crisis as “classified information”
Chapter ThreeDaily Life in the GDR
The secret power of the guardians of scarcity
Classified ads as a realm of freedom
The automobile as the hobbyhorse of East Germans
Life in the GDR
Chapter FourZeitgeist
The walled-in state as a poetic sphere
“Es geht seinen Gang” or the “comfy” dictatorship of the SED
Socialist Biedermeier as a lifestyle of the eighties
Subculture, or the culture of negative freedom
Part VIElements of Crisis
Chapter OneCritical Intellectuals and the SED
“When power and intellect unite …”
The dream of democratic socialism or the immanence of heresy
Cultural policy after the Eighth Party Congress of the SED
The singing movement and the Festival of Political Songs
The expatriation of Wolf Biermann and its aftermath
Literature and politics after 1976
Chapter TwoChurch, State and Opposition
Churches in the GDR
“The Church within Socialism”
The self-immolation of Pastor Brüsewitz
The summit meeting on March 6, 1978
Opposition in the freedom of the church
Chapter ThreeThe “New Cold War” and East German Society of the Eighties
World politics in the shadow of nuclear peril
The militarization of East German society
“Swords to plowshares”—The independent peace movement in the GDR
The “Western” Greens and the peace movement in the GDR
The embassy protest on November 4, 1983
Resignation and a new beginning for the human-rights movement in the spirit of perestroika
Chapter FourThe Wall and the Problem of Emigration
The border
Parole from the prison of a socialist state—The “travel cadre” system
Republikflucht, or illegal emigration
The applicant movement
Part VIIThe Road to Collapse
Chapter OnePerestroika and the GDR
The end of the Brezhnev era
East German society and the advent of perestroika
The ban on Sputnik
Perestroika and opposition
Chapter TwoProtest Actions of the Opposition
The “Zionskirche affair” of November 1987
The “January incidents” of 1988
The conflict over church newspapers
Radio Glasnost
January 1989
The local elections of May 1989
“Heavenly peace”
The founding of New Forum
The West and the East German opposition
Chapter ThreeThe Decline of the SED Leadership
The Party in crisis
The failed “secret glasnost” of the SED leadership
Chapter FourThe End of Party Rule
October 1989
The 4th of November
The fall of the Wall
Epilogue: The Dialectic of Decline
The GDR in German history
The beginning and end of the “third way”
The individual in the system of repression
The Stasi and the Wende
The end and the idealization of East German opposition
The lessons of history
Publisher’s Afterword to the English Edition
AppendixNotes
Abbreviations
Index
Author and Translator
The verdict of history is harsh, if not to say merciless. The GDR was created in 1949 following the world’s division into power blocs. When Moscow lost all hope of preventing the greater part of Germany from being integrated into the Western bloc, the Soviet occupying power installed the German Democratic Republic in its own sphere of influence. The colder the winds of the Cold War blew, the more secure the existence of this East German state seemed.
Still, it is likely that many Germans sincerely thought of the GDR as the antifascist alternative to the newly founded West German state with its capital in Bonn. The “first peaceful state on German soil” had “eradicated fascism root and branch,” to use the stereotypical and archaic expressions of endless SED propaganda. The expropriation of big industry and Junkerdom had removed the objective causes of warmongering and expansionism, or so the ideology went. Never again would Germany begin another war. The state’s internal legitimacy rested on this premise.
History has asked a lot from devout followers of socialist ideology. The failure of the GDR was utter and complete: economic, political and moral. The verdict of history was passed by its own citizens in the fall of 1989. A democratic mass movement transformed into a tidal wave that positively washed away the SED state and its Wall. This verdict was confirmed in the first free elections in the GDR, on March 18, 1990, when East Germans voted with a near absolute majority for the hastily cobbled together party coalition which held out the promise of rapid reunification.
If world history is the world’s tribunal, as Friedrich Schiller claimed,1 the defense had little in the way of good arguments. The GDR had left behind an economic disaster, ecological devastation, dilapidated cities and a host of social and mental problems. One is tempted to simply close the books and file them away in the archives, allowing the occasional historian to blow off the dust from their yellowing pages. Indeed, no appeal is in the offing, for the people as the highest authority has already passed its judgment.
And yet a curious residue remains. This residue is the lives of the individuals who happened to live in this state. Their memories are more colorful, varied, nuanced, personal, joyful and sometimes happier than the images offered by scholars and journalists. A smile lights up people’s faces when conversation shifts to the little joys and adversities of everyday life in the GDR. These smiles—whether one calls it Ostalgie, a nostalgia for the East, or by any other name—are stronger than the photo-documents of lines outside of stores, display windows in their almost touching barrenness, monotonous new mass-housing developments and dilapidated historic downtowns. The sunny vista of memory is stronger than statistics on political escapees or applications to emigrate, even stronger than the Stasi records of its attempts to “corrode” suspected regime opponents, stronger than the deaths by shooting at the Wall and the unjust political convictions.
Many individuals are apparently no longer interested in reaching a sound verdict about political structures in the GDR and the overall historical context. They are more concerned about honoring their own biographies. Many feel adversely affected by blanket statements condemning the GDR. They also evaluate their former lives against the new experiences of recent years. More than a few individuals perceive their new situation as a devaluation of their personal achievements and the lives they once lived. They have had a hard time coping, feel slighted, humiliated and disappointed—and blame it, justly or unjustly, on political upheaval and the change of system. Some even see the new Vergangenheitsbewältigung—the country’s public reckoning with its communist past—and the Stasi background checks of the post-reunification years as a proven method for eliminating “superfluous” East Germans in the competition for scarce jobs.
The answer to all of this is a sense of defiance among many from the former Eastern half of the country. Hence a GDR that never existed is being created to fill an emotional void. The movie Good Bye, Lenin! from 2003 ingeniously divined this psychological mechanism, anticipating much of the research later conducted by social scientists. In the movie’s final sequence, an apotheosis of sorts, the search for lost objects from the GDR, becomes the search for a lost utopia. The upshot is a GDR that gracefully departs from the stage of world history. Mock TV news reels show people fleeing the unemployment and capitalist exploitation of imperialist West Germany for a more humane, socialist GDR.
In recent years there has been the occasional discussion about whether or not it was possible to lead a happy life in the GDR. Of course every individual, no matter his outward circumstances, has the possibility to pursue and find personal happiness at a micro level—in his family or in his hobbies, doing gardening work or collecting stamps. This fact is as truthful as it is banal. But the issue runs deeper than that. The real question is: Was genuine personal happiness possible in an unjust state? The answer can only be: Yes, this sort of happiness did indeed exist. A “conversation about trees” did not, in Brecht’s opinion, mean “silence about so many atrocities.” Joyfulness and love of life, jest and irony were the most important weapons in the fight against the dictatorial hubris of wanting to control the lives of individuals. Wolf Biermann demonstrated this in his finest hour and his greatest songs. Happiness could consist in liberating oneself internally from totalitarian thought patterns. Many found happiness in the invisible society of those who dared to think differently, the dissidents and regime critics. Happiness may have even meant renouncing a career and the privileges that came with it. If there were ever anything like a retrospective East German national anthem, Wolf Biermann’s “Encouragement” (Ermutigung) would be a good candidate:
Du, lass dich nicht verhärten / In dieser harten Zeit. / Die all zu hart sind, brechen / Die all zu spitz sind, stechen / und brechen ab sogleich (Don’t let yourself be hardened / In these hard times of ours. / The all too hard ones shatter / The all too pointed stab / and promptly break their tips off).2
This principle should be followed by historians, too, in their efforts to describe reality. Life in all its diversity should never been buried under documents. And yet nothing should be left out—none of the lowliness, lies, absurdities and crimes. It is essential to show that dictatorship and daily life were two sides of the same coin, a dialectic unity of opposites very much in the spirit of Karl Marx. The quotidian nature of dictatorship and daily life under dictatorship are inextricably linked. Security and the lack of freedom went hand in hand. The warmth of the community and collectivist control formed an indivisible unit. Job security and State Security were not just semantically related. The law and order so many people cherished was of a piece with the deathly silence of dictatorship. Explaining these connections is of course another matter. As Brecht put it in “In Praise of Communism,” it’s “that simple thing which is so hard to do.”3
There’s a nice custom in Russia that before departing you take a minute to sit down in silence. While the taxi driver outside is honking his horn, an air of eternity permeates the room. Even if time is pressing, “the minute” is essential. Memories of good times and bad times resurface. The uncertainty of the future comes to mind, along with the thought that it will never again be the way it was in the past. After a brief moment, you get up and kiss each other farewell. Then it’s off to the airport or the train station.
East Germans have been faced with an overabundance of farewells. Very seldom, however, has there been time for the minute of reflection. The events were too sudden and abrupt. When Erich Honecker declared on January 19, 1989 during the opening ceremonies of the envisioned Thomas Müntzer Year that the Wall would stand another fifty or hundred years, there was by no means an outburst of uproarious laughter; people were more inclined to shake their heads in resignation over the mulishness of the Party leadership, whose good will seemed indispensable if things in the GDR were ever to take a turn for the better. In January, the Thomas Müntzer festivities had still held out the promise of being one of the highlights of 1989. The main ceremony was slated for December 21, when the geriatric general secretary was to give a festive speech commemorating the 500th birthday of the peasant leader. Yet when the moment finally arrived, the gigantic process of bidding farewell had long since been underway.
The first things to disappear were the fear and the oppressive eventlessness of dictatorship. Then the Wall came down. The symbols and uniforms of the GDR disappeared, along with the seemingly endless police controls and the blue hundred-mark bills with the bearded countenance of Karl Marx. The “Mokka-Fix” coffee in its gold paper package, the “Jugend-Mode” stores for youth fashion, the green social-security cards, and the flip-badges of the secret police all disappeared. Job security, the warmth and solidarity of the collective, the whole narrow yet easy-to-keep-track-of world of real socialism also vanished. Even the specific smell of the GDR was lost for good, the exact nature of it now destined to remain a mystery. The unmistakably brusque and admonishing tone of saleswomen, waitresses and policemen disappeared.
Looking at old pictures or watching old films, a cozy feeling often sets in when recognizing the brand names, the symbols, the gestures and idioms, the things that were once a part of daily life. GDR television series, in particular, have captured this everyday world for eternity and become quite popular again. It is not so easy to explain what’s so fascinating about detective shows like Polizeiruf 110 or Der Staatsanwalt hat das Wort. It’s not the gripping plots or artistic quality that secure these films a loyal following of viewers. Rather, there is a sort of reunion taking place in front of the TV screen. The gray plastic telephones with a real dial, the “Sibylle” wall unit from the People’s Own Furniture Combine Zeulenroda, and the typical design of the state-owned “HO” restaurants with the flowered wallpaper and limp curtains—all of this exudes the singular and cozy atmosphere of the GDR.
All of this has vanished. The sites where it took place are gradually disappearing too. Obituaries could appear on a daily basis. Renovation, demolition and construction are going on everywhere. At first, the colorful billboards and signs, the chintzy facades of a market economy covered up the gray world of real socialism. Closures and liquidations soon followed. Finally, new things began to emerge: the same drugstores, pizza parlors, fast-food chains and supermarkets found in the West, in Düsseldorf or Hamburg. It is tempting to want to capture and preserve things, to put them in mothballs, even though it is obvious that the museumization of reality is a senseless undertaking. Feelings cannot be put into the archives, and you cannot put fears and hopes into a glass display case. The legacy of objects is lifeless—at best they have a sort of signal effect.
The years of transformation and radical change are also becoming a thing of the past. The dizzying plunge from the years of lethargy into the turbulent changes of the Wende or “watershed” period was followed by a gradual return to a kind of normalcy. In the late summer of 1989 the “most boring land on earth,” as the East German writer Volker Braun once called it, was transformed into an adventure playground. What was taking place was not only the now proverbial “peaceful revolution” but also a “cheerful revolution.” The sudden outburst of unexpected wit, the jokes and puns in the protest slogans from the fall of 1989, has often been admired. Indeed, there was a lot to laugh about. The revolution was, until the onset of everyday life in the summer and fall of 1990, a gigantic happening, a work of art that no artist could have conceived more beautifully.
The old Federal Republic of Germany also vanished, almost unnoticed. While the Wall was being torn down in Berlin, conservationists bemoaned the destruction of certain biotopes that had come into existence in the shadows of this “antifascist protective barrier.” Rare species of amphibians and reptiles had settled in the quiet recesses between concrete walls and tank traps. These biotopes were mercilessly disrupted by the demolition of this bulwark structure. This can of course be understood in a symbolic sense. It initially only affected the victors of the Cold War: the Federal Ministry of Intra-German Relations, the All-German Institute, RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty. It was a rude awakening indeed in idyllic Bonn on the Rhine. More than a few individuals in the West grumbled about German unity, and there emerged a secret longing for the warm and cozy familiarity of the Cold War.
This is a farewell book, and in the minute of farewell anything goes: tenderness and hatred, sentimentality and bitterness, nostalgia and optimism, mourning and anger. East Germans are still in a process of departure. What happened has had too great an impact on them for them to just shake it off. They have not yet found a new home in the society of the unified Federal Republic, and their only baggage consists of their experiences, memories and biographies.
The elegiac mood of departure can of course be deceptive. After all, who likes to be reminded of humiliations, embarrassing self-deception, and more than shabby compromises? Being lectured by outsiders has made it even harder. Just as emigrants such as Thomas Mann were accused after the war of being ignorant about Germany and of having followed the events from the comfort of a loge, it was hardly pleasant hearing the calls to introspection after 1989, especially coming from the persecuted and the victims of discrimination.
“The ideological strategy of the political class in the Federal Republic of Germany has concentrated since 1990 on demonizing the GDR through the doctrine of an ‘unjust state’ [Unrechtsstaat] and the theory of maladministration.” These words were penned by a one-time leading historian of the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the former ruling party of communist East Germany, and were published in a series with close ties to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the SED’s successor party.
In this way, the in itself contradictory totality of GDR society, with its positive and negative characteristics—which were certainly experienced and assimilated differently by different social groups, that is to say, experienced precisely in this very complexity—is trimmed down to a purely negative, even despicable cliché serving the needs of the present political climate.1
The intent of these convoluted sentences is obvious. The ideologists and power brokers of the SED state who have found their new home in the PDS are now trying to hide behind the many individuals who were innocently swept into the disaster. Still, there is no denying that a harmony which never existed in GDR times has sometimes emerged between former supporters of the regime and willy-nilly conformists.
Well aware of the pitfalls of opinion polls dealing with such complex issues, the results of a survey conducted by the Social Science Research Institute Berlin-Brandenburg (SFZ) seven years after the demise of the GDR are nonetheless intriguing. To quote the introductory passages:
The latest survey confirms once again that the majority of East Germans prefer a differentiated perspective with respect to GDR history. Negative blanket statements and negative clichés, e. g., the designation “unjust state,” do not find majority support … For the overwhelming majority the GDR is still considered an “attempt to create a more just society.” After the similar yet more qualifying designation “failed attempt” contained in the list of answers offered in previous surveys was dropped from the 1995 survey, agreement with the said opinion grew (1990 = 63%, 1992 = 60%, 1993 = 65%, 1995 = 75% unqualified agreement).2
The opinion that “the GDR was above all an attempt to create a more just society” elicited a response of 74.8% “yes,” 14.9% “partly,” 6.6% “no,” and 3.6% “no comment.” The view that “the GDR was an unjust state” was agreed to without reservation by only 18.2% of those polled, whereas 33.9% answered “partly,” 42.8% responded with “no,” and 4.9% did not wish to give an answer. Even if one takes into account that the questions were obviously intended to be vague, and that the research institute conducting the survey is led by formerly prominent SED social scientists, the results are still rather telling, and seem to reflect the attitudes encountered on the streets of former East Germany.
The Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy ascertained similar sentiments in its own surveys. “In East Germany, memories of the GDR era are becoming more pleasant” was the observation of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann in a survey from the year 1995.
This is revealed by a question that was asked in 1992 and, unchanged, in 1996 … In 1992 42% said that “one often had the feeling in this period of belonging to a larger community, which was quite nice.” By the end of 1996 agreement with this statement had risen to 50%. At the same time, the statement “the SED cheated us all” dropped in approval from 70% to 48%. In 1992 54% remembered that “in the GDR one felt constrained like a captive,” whereas only 41% did in 1996. In 1992 43% reported that “one felt spied upon and could hardly trust anyone,” in 1996 only 30% … While 60% recalled in 1992 that “the population sensed a genuine feeling of liberation as the SED regime was toppled,” only 47% did in 1996.3
There has been no lack of historical research, educational measures or critical reappraisal of the past in the years following 1989. GDR-related topics have also occupied a considerable place in the media. Some of these facts were nothing new, though barely publicized anymore, not even in the West; others were new and shocking, in particular with regard to the machinery of repression, but also the economy and environment. Still, many former citizens of the GDR feel deeply offended by how their past is being dealt with. They see their own biographies being called into question through the radical critique of realities in the GDR. Many of them labored years or even decades for their state without receiving any privileges and some of them honestly believed in the betterment of socialism. Today they feel cheated and disappointed. Their bitterness is often aimed at those who clearly know where to lay the blame. Many consider the “reappraisal of history” (Aufarbeitung der Geschichte) and the process of “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) to be little more than the attempt of their “new masters” to discredit the GDR in a wholesale manner and strengthen their own positions of power. In particular, the “Stasi debate”—the charged discussions about the East German secret police, allegedly initiated by the media in the West—is in their view intended simply to discriminate against and humiliate the former citizens of the GDR. Although they do not deny the facticity of the Wall or the vast spy network of the Stasi, they point out that these things did not have a determining influence on their personal lives. “It is no wonder,” according to the PDS brochure cited above, “that the total repudiation of the East German past is felt and understood as a disregard for and the denial of decades of hard work, as a degradation of one’s own biography, as the arrogant abasement of millions of lives lived as such.”4 Life in the GDR is considered to have been more sheltered, more humane, somehow more pleasant than in the unified Federal Republic, a state of mind expressed in a dictum just (or almost) as common that people nowadays are more afraid of unemployment than they once were of the Stasi. These kinds of arguments are on the one hand outrageous lies. On the other hand they cannot simply be dismissed. They show that the previous discussions about East German history suffer from a fundamental deficit, namely, that the gap between complex individual experiences and academic research has not yet been successfully bridged.
One often gets the impression in public debates between former citizens of the GDR that the participants lived in completely different worlds. Whereas some recall the five-penny bread rolls, the supposedly excellent day-care centers, and the friendly brigade evenings in the work collective, others point out the deaths at the Wall with accusatory fervor, or give figures concerning unjust political prosecutions and the monstrous system of eavesdropping. It is the task of the historian to fuse together divergent views and create a coherent overall picture. In creating such a perspective, it is not only a matter of finding a happy medium between demonizing and playing down the SED dictatorship but of portraying the link between repression and everyday life, in other words discovering the demonic dimension of harmlessness and the harmless, everyday aspects of the demonic. Neither existed independently of the other, even if it seemed this way to many. Rather, they conditioned one another. This link has often been consciously overlooked by West German observers. As long as the people behind the Wall seemed to cope, political division and SED dictatorship were deemed a tolerable price for political stability. In the GDR, on the other hand, the link was readily suppressed. The often referred to quote from Hegel that “freedom is the recognition of necessity” was an invitation to feel inwardly free by no longer perceiving one’s shackles.
Too much memory is dangerous. In his short story “Funes the Memorious,” the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges described a man who could not forget anything.5 This “not being able to forget” is not meant metaphorically but, rather, quite literally. Nothing which the man had read, heard or seen since being paralyzed after falling from his horse escaped his memory. The man who before his accident had only been a simple gaucho now read Latin texts with ease, remembering every word, every face, every image. “He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.” Yet he soon collapsed under the burden of this endless and perfectly undifferentiated knowledge, and died a wretched death at the age of twenty-one. The moral of the story: a person incapable of forgetting is a monster who deserves to be pitied. Forgetting has a healing function for the human soul. Memory puts things in order and presents them in a more favorable light—usually the gentle and comforting light of forgiveness.
What has long been an obvious truth in neurology seems hard to accept for a historian. Remembering and forgetting are not opposites, but two sides of the same coin: forgetting is in fact a form of remembering. The brain does not simply store sensory perceptions and other information and keep them there, ready to be retrieved like from an archive. Historiography might be likened to the invention of the past; the more intensive the degree of historical inquiry, the more the historical picture changes. Hence any kind of “reappraisal” or “coming to terms with the past” is at odds with the natural tendency of day-to-day thinking. Those who prefer to let bygones be bygones always have common sense on their side.
This experience is hardly new. In his cultural history of the Federal Republic, Hermann Glaser describes ex-Nazis in the new democracy of postwar Germany in a mixture of resignation and disgust:
The “blond beast” which in its hubristic racial hatred subjugated other peoples, rooted out European Jewry, destroyed the German spirit, provoked total war, and left behind a vast expanse of ruins—this beast was domesticated. It was a zealous pupil of a second-rate school of democracy. Even the highest-ranking Nazi leaders prosecuted and sentenced in the Nuremberg Trials claimed to know next to nothing about the crimes committed … Thus, no arduous exorcism was required to free them from the Nazi view of man and the Nazi view of the world. The new surroundings gave rise to a new phenotype of democratic citizen in an almost inconceivably short period of time.6
Similarities to the period after 1989 are hardly incidental. The expediency of being a fellow traveler was followed by the expediency of forgetting. “They have forgiven us for everything they’ve done to us,” sang the well-known poet and balladeer Wolf Biermann in 1990, thereby putting the implicit psychological mechanism in a nutshell.7 They accept with the utmost ease and equanimity the principles of tolerance, liberality and the rule of law—the same principles they rejected earlier as a matter of course. This may be inevitable. A society based on the constitutionally anchored rule of law must, so it seems, accept the experience that, while—as the signs in stores declare—shoplifters will be prosecuted, it is not punishable to deprive a population of their freedom for forty years. According to legal logic, anyone who has the power to promulgate criminal laws and who adheres to them consistently shall go unpunished. Nevertheless, something irrational remains: namely, disgust. This feeling of loathing is important and worth preserving. The Russian émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, who was forced to flee the October Revolution and, later, Hitler, remarked once in reviewing his life experience: “I have learned to treasure my disgust.”8
The following anecdote is recounted in Jewish lore. The beautiful Esther appears before High Rabbi Loew and complains about her husband: “He pulls my hair and beats me for the slightest reason. Talk my husband into his senses, wise teacher!” The rabbi agrees, and summons her husband, who complains that his wife is a lazy slob: “She stands in the street for hours just gabbing away instead of keeping house.” The rabbi agrees with him as well, and sends him home. Just then the rabbi’s wife, who had been standing behind the door listening in, bursts into the room and remarks rather indignantly: “You can’t agree with both of them! Only one of them is speaking the truth, the husband or his wife.” The rabbi thinks it over a while, and answers: “This is also true.”
Every thesis gives rise to an antithesis. Thesis and antithesis are combined into a synthesis which in turn results in a new thesis. Every answer only creates new questions. The historian also finds himself in the rather bleak predicament of Sisyphus: after heaving the boulder of historical knowledge up the mountainside with the greatest of effort, it simply rolls back down into the abyss. The only solution is to acknowledge this circumstance as the true meaning of scholarly endeavor.
An example may help illustrate the point. One often hears the opinion that the GDR was, in the eyes of many individuals, a real alternative to the capitalist and restorative Federal Republic. Accordingly, public ownership of the means of production, in spite of its many obvious shortcomings, offered the opportunity to achieve a socialist utopia on German soil, and therefore presented a continual challenge to the society of the Federal Republic. But also from within there was the recurrent hope for democratic change under the banner of socialism. Indeed, if it had not been so, the enduring stability of the GDR would be inexplicable. Hence it was not merely repression, conformity and opportunism which led many East Germans to identify with their state.
The opposing view runs as follows. Any contemporary with his wits about him could have recognized that the GDR was a dictatorship kept alive by the grace of Moscow. Till the very end, its existence was based on the bayonets of the Red Army. The socialist economic system was flawed in its very theoretical foundations. The consequences of this were the perennial shortage of goods and services, technological backlog vis-à-vis the West with no hope of catching up, the over-exploitation of natural resources, and the decay of culture. The majority of East Germans considered the Western model of society a worthwhile goal throughout the entire forty-year division of the German nation. Any consistently democratic reform therefore inevitably entailed the dissolution of the East German state and the reunification of Germany.
Both viewpoints can be augmented by a countless range of further arguments. Although they are diametrically opposed to each other, they are both right in their own way but at the same time false in their claims to absoluteness. Just like in the story about beautiful Esther and wise Rabbi Loew, both versions reflect the truth. Yet the historian cannot extricate himself as easily as the Wonder Rabbi. He is expected to offer a clear standpoint. “Comrade, you have to see things dialectically!” one is tempted to exclaim, the weighty words often used by Party-appointed university instructors at the beginning of their lectures. The art of seeing things in a dialectical perspective was called upon whenever it was necessary to explain why revolutionary vigilance should be intensified in a period of political détente or why there were no fresh vegetables in the supermarkets during harvest season. The concept of dialectics ultimately got a bad name. Still, no account of history can avoid being dialectical—not the scholastic hocus-pocus of a state ideology that passed ignominiously into extinction, but the true “dialogical” method.
In the schools and universities of the GDR the history of the East German state was the most boring topic imaginable. This was not only due to the ideologically conditioned deformation of reality, which certainly existed to no less extent in other academic fields. Besides, distorted history can be quite interesting. The reason for the sense of dreariness which emanated from the semiofficial version of history (in textbooks printed on pulpy paper and invariably accompanied by the same bland pictures) was more deep-seated. The history of the GDR amounted—at least in the manner presented by school and university instructors—in effect to nothing more than a list of Party congresses, plenary sessions, proclamations and Plan figures. In principle, those in power did away with history. Every event meant change, and change was considered dangerous. The few genuine historical events, like the uprising of June 17, 1953, were reduced by the official version of East German history to a few pat and awkward dictums. Everything that makes history interesting—the images, details, eyewitness reports—was thoroughly eliminated. The same was true for the biographies of the state’s rulers, which seemed as unreal, lifeless, and typified as the hagiographic legends of Eastern Orthodox saints. Yet all the while the rulers of East Germany were yearning for historical greatness and drew from the past the legitimacy their own people denied them.
If the GDR could have laid down on the psychiatrist’s couch, its disorder would have been obvious. The trauma of birth and a permanent withholding of affection had led to an acute inferiority complex which it attempted to compensate by authoritarian behavior. The inability to exercise self-criticism, paranoia and persecution mania, the search for recognition, love and affection compounded with a strong tendency to exact these by means of force were the consequences of this traumatic deformation. In terms of individual psychology, the GDR had all the traits of an authoritarian personality.
Those in power took themselves incredibly seriously. The spirit of history was always peering over their shoulders. “In the three decades since its founding, the German Democratic Republic has accomplished a truly historical achievement”—so says the foreword of the party-official History of the Socialist Unity Party published in 1978.9 With regard to the founding of the East German state it elaborated:
The founding of the German Democratic Republic was the most significant result of the Marxist-Leninist politics of the SED, an event of historical and international importance. For the first time ever, a German state was created whose development is fully and completely determined by the character and the laws of the world historic epoch of the transition from capitalism to socialism … The creation of a workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil increased the influence of socialism in Europe. It was a formidable defeat for world imperialism … The founding of the GDR increased the chances of transforming Europe into a continent of peace and security and checking the aggressive forces of imperialism. The founding of the German Democratic Republic marked the decisive turn in the history of the German workers’ movement and the German people.10
Even individual Party congresses, Five-Year Plans, friendship treaties, and diplomatic visits were routinely given the label “historic.” Every year marked “one of the most successful in history,” every task to be solved was the “greatest,” every success the “most monumental.” The superlative was the defining characteristic of the language of SED propaganda.
To be sure, the permanent declaration of an exceptional situation was a contradiction in terms. This was true for language as well as for politics. New ways of formulating things had to constantly be found in order to surpass the old official expressions. The “increased role of the Party” was followed by the “further increased role of the Party,” the “continually further increased role of the Party,” the “even further continually increased role of the Party,” the “role of the Party increased to a hitherto unprecedented degree,” and so on. The significance of the Eighth Party Congress and the subsequent phase of development were particularly emphasized in the 1970s and 1980s.
In carrying out the resolutions of the Eighth Party Congress of the SED, the ensuing period has become one of the most successful periods to date in the history of the SED and the GDR. The benefits of socialism have become evident with extraordinary clarity, its driving forces having unfolded more and more effectively. The directives of the Eighth Party Congress for the development of the national economy were surpassed considerably in important indices of Plan fulfillment … and the most comprehensive social-policy program to date, which has also been the most significant with respect to its impact on the lives of the people, has been fulfilled.11
It would seem tempting to take all the cant of self-adulation and just invert it. But exchanging variables would result in nothing more than a new court historiography, couched this time in negative terms. Instead, the task at hand is to thoroughly examine the historical material from a different perspective. The history of the GDR can only be told “from below,” as the history of its people—their wishes, dreams and hopes. Only in this way can the GDR recover its historical dimension. Moreover, it gives those who have suffered from a loss of their personal biographies since the end of the GDR the opportunity to become reconciled with themselves.
“Historiography writes the history of society, not of man,” the Czech author Milan Kundera noted in The Art of the Novel. “That is why the historical events my novels talk about are often forgotten by historiography.”12 Why does Kundera insist so adamantly on the importance of the novel?