The Ideal World of Dictatorship E-Book

Stefan Wolle

• Herausgeber: Ch. Links Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 881

Beschreibung

Life in the German Democratic Republic was a permanent balancing act between conformity and revolt. Political pressure and an economy of scarcity coexisted alongside the more pleasant and seemingly idyllic aspects of everyday life. Stefan Wolle takes these contradictory images of a now defunct world and weaves them into a coherent picture. He shows that the meticulously kept death strip at the border and lovingly tended allotment gardens were two sides of the same coin, that dictatorship and daily life necessarily went hand in hand.
Wolle tells the history of the last two decades of the GDR from the inside out, as the collective biography of its inhabitants. The result is a thoroughly researched and ambitious scholarly work that doesn’t shy away from radical subjectivity. He describes the attempts of East German citizens to create a modicum of intellectual and spiritual freedom, takes stock of the shattered dream of a human, democratic socialism, and reclaims the multifaceted lives of those who lived under Communist Party rule.
Originally published in 1998, this seminal history of everyday life in East Germany is now available for the first time in English.

Leseprobe

Stefan Wolle

The Ideal World of Dictatorship

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, 1998Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin, Tel.: [phone]www.christoph-links-verlag.de; [email protected] design: Ch. Links Verlag, using a photo by Harald Hauswald /Ostkreuz agencyTranslation: 2003 / 2019 by David BurnettEditor: Philipp Kaufmann, Ch. Links VerlagTypesetting: Nadja Caspar, Ch. Links Verlag

eISBN 978-3-86284-453-1

Contents

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

Prologue to the English Edition

A Brief Word on Long Goodbyes

World history is the world’s tribunal

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.

Homesick for dictatorship

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.

A happy life in the 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

Prologue to the Original German Edition (1998)

In the Labyrinth of the Past

The minute of departure

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 divided memory

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 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.

The unrelenting memory

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 dialogic method or the double truth of Rabbi Loew

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.

History as uneventfulness

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?

The “passion to know,” which Husserl considered the essence of European spirituality, seized the novel and led it to scrutinize man’s concrete life and protect it against “the forgetting of being”; to hold “the world of life” under a permanent light … Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.13

The purpose of historiography, too, could not be put more succinctly. The question, then, is the possibility of achieving some sort of synthesis, or at least what historiography and literature might learn from each other. Literature and history are normally taken to be two distinct approaches to recording human experience, quite at odds with each other. The one is characterized by the free reign of fantasy, the fully detached subjective imagination, and the apparent ease of donning the poet’s laurel wreath. The other is associated with the laborious task of strictly adhering to the facts, the sober technical jargon of academia, and the earnestness of scholarly judgement. Being classified as “novel-like” is a crushing blow for a scholarly work, whereas the epithet “scholarly” is at best an ambivalent compliment for the literary writer. Although there has never been a lack of crossovers between scholarship and literature, the reader is still entitled to expect what the title page promises him. In this respect, novels, memoirs and history books should be strictly differentiated. Nevertheless, the questions and opinions of the author stem more from experience than studying the sources. The virtually endless mass of documentary material serves rather to verify, correct and to make things more precise, but also as evidence and illustration. In short, the historian should not promise to deliver the truth, but merely truthfulness.

Cheerfully tackling the past

This book is written in a style greatly influenced by personal experience. The grotesque and absurd characteristics of real socialism have not been overlooked—and certainly never had been. The hero of Milan Kundera’s novel Farewell Waltz remarked shortly before leaving his homeland: “in his country things were getting neither better nor worse but only more and more ridiculous.”14 This was true for Czechoslovakia in the gray years of “normalization” following the end of the Prague Spring, as well as for the GDR. “The greatest GDR in the world” one often heard mockingly even years after the fall of the East German state. One should perhaps be reminded not to overlook the hidden structural similarity between caricatures and satire on the one hand, and a historical account of the past on the other. The caricaturist and comedian exaggerate the characteristic features of a person or situation in order to achieve the desired effect, the one with his pencil and drawing board, the other with words. The historian, too, having gathered a wealth of material, chooses the examples which seem to him to be particularly telling or meaningful, since he cannot approach the essence of things—in his own view—by establishing a statistical mean. The aim of the exercise is not balance and proportion. It is only the burning glass of the grotesque that can distort things into a recognizable form. The anecdotes, metaphors, and even individual experience are hardly just the icing on the cake of an otherwise all too tedious portrayal of past events but rather, if approached correctly, the key to understanding the complex interplay of events. A forest landscape at dusk can be described in detail in meteorological, botanical and geological terms—from the humidity to soil conditions. And yet the results will have nothing in common with Goethe’s “Wanderer’s Nightsong.” Poetic truth has no use for wind speeds in the phrase “hardly a breath,” or the genus and species of the “treetops” in which this breath is heard. The fact that the poet, in this case, was in fact a passionate meteorologist and rock collector might drive the point home. Conveying a satirical truth depends on the selection of characteristic, illustrative, in the ideal case even allegorical details which help make an inordinately complex reality transparent and comprehensible.

Clio as the goddess of freedom

The following key scene takes place in George Orwell’s dystopia Nineteen Eighty-Four. Winston Smith and his lover Julia are in O’Brien’s apartment and have just joined the secret society to topple Big Brother, whereupon O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, raises his glass in a half pathetic, half ironic gesture to make a toast: “‘What shall it be this time?’ he said … ‘To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?’ ‘To the past,’ said Winston.”15 This unusual toast points to the central role of history and its falsification, not only in Orwell’s vision of a future state but also, more generally, in the tension between total power and intellectual resistance. “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past,” is one of the Party slogans in Orwell’s book. Winston Smith begins to doubt the wisdom of Big Brother when he gets hold of a newspaper article about three Party leaders who were “vaporized” some time back. In theory, every recollection of them should have been extinguished and the three would never have existed. The newspaper article, however, proves the reverse. Smith wants to find out how it was “before the Revolution.” He thus commits thoughtcrime, and ultimately ends up in the torture chambers of the Ministry of Love. After his betrayal, he spends his days as a broken man in the Chestnut Tree Cafe, where the blissful news of Oceania’s latest victories reaches his ears and, moved to tears, he declares his love of Big Brother. Winston Smith is ripe for a bullet in his head and so the novel comes to a close.

George Orwell wrote this pessimistic yet stirring novel while terminally ill, residing on a lonely island. The simple inversion of the year 1948 into the title’s 1984 suggests that he already perceived the present as the realm of Big Brother. His deep pessimism was nurtured by Hitler, Stalin, as well his experiences in the Spanish Civil War and with the British Ministry of Information. Orwell’s dystopia offers no way out. Yet it is also an apotheosis of “the last man”—as the book was supposed to be called—and, by emphasizing the central function of historical falsification in Big Brother’s system of rule, sings praises to the enlightening, anti-totalitarian, subversive, and emancipating power of memory. A glass paperweight with a colorful coral inlay becomes the symbol of “true” history. “A little chunk of history that they’ve forgotten to alter,”16 is what Winston Smith calls the in fact rather useless object he acquired in an antique store.

The turbulent months when the Wall came down and the Stasi was disbanded were accompanied by a feeling of triumph: It didn’t do “them” any good after all—their huge spy network, their perfect methods of surveillance, their mind-numbing propaganda, their gigantic military apparatus, the highly refined psychology of controlling human beings. What took over forty arduous years to build up fell apart in a matter of days. Winston Smith countered to his torturer that the “spirit of Man” will never be vanquished, and in return received nothing but the scorn of one stronger than him. In Orwell’s book, it is O’Brien that comes out the victor. The course of history, however, has proved Winston Smith right. The East German people ushered in the collapse of the GDR in a non-violent manner, with candles in their hands.

Clio, the muse of history, is certainly not the goddess of liberty, who in Eugène Delacroix’s famous painting is leading the people to the barricades, bare-breasted, the French tricolor in her right hand and a musket in her left. The experiences of earlier struggles should not simply be discarded, however. The theoretical approach to history in the century of totalitarian dictatorships should be radically enlightening, emancipating, liberal and, if need be, also subversive and rebellious. Milan Kundera wrote in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting that “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”17 This book would like to be part of the joyous struggle against the power of forgetting.

Part I

Change and Continuity

Chapter One: The Sixties and Seventies in the History of the GDR

The end of the Ulbricht era

East Germans were neither overjoyed nor stricken with grief when on May 3, 1971 Walter Ulbricht was relieved of his duties as first secretary of the Central Committee of the SED and Erich Honecker took over. Loyal SED followers greeted this change in the Party leadership and the new man soon managed to gain a certain, positive image, among his own people as well as Western observers. He was at least considered the lesser of two evils. Besides, most people had come to expect little more from a Party leader anyway. The image of Ulbricht increasingly faded in the ensuing years, eventually disappearing almost entirely. Not until the agonizing phase of 1988–89 did functionary circles begin once again to praise the attempted reforms of the 1960s. In comparison to the stagnation of the late Honecker era, the Ulbricht period seemed like an economically flourishing and intellectually lively period. Party members, in search of points of identification with their own party history, became more and more nostalgic about the reform efforts under Ulbricht.

It is clear in retrospect that the decade between the construction of the Berlin Wall and Ulbricht’s removal from power was a curiously contradictory period of East German history. After the erection of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961, many East German citizens—especially those in Berlin—presumed that the system was nearing its end. The economic, political and moral bankruptcy of the regime was all too obvious. What kind of a state is forced to put up barbed wire and to gun down its own citizens just to keep them from running off? Added to this was the fact that forced collectivization, the so-called “socialist spring in the countryside,” had critically worsened the food supply. When the borders were finally sealed off for good and things should have taken a turn for the better, meat and butter became scarce, a situation that could only be ameliorated by the massive import of foodstuffs from the Soviet Union. In domestic policy there were indications of more stormy weather to come rather than skies clearing. The SED regime suppressed every opposition with draconian punishments or the threat of punishment. In the second half-year of 1961, a total of 18,297 political convictions were meted out, in comparison to only 4,442 in the first half-year.1 A kind of law of the jungle even emerged for a short period of time. East German newspapers proudly reported that alleged workers had beaten “agitators and saboteurs” bloody. Under the slogan “Campaign Lightning—Contra NATO stations,” patrol groups of the Free German Youth (FDJ), the official youth organization of the GDR, climbed onto housetops in order to redirect TV antennas—so that those set-up to receive Western stations would receive East German ones instead—or even to tear them down completely.

“Soon it will be different,” was one of the idioms of the era. Yet nothing seemed to change at all. The influence of Soviet power and foreign policy and, with this, the power of the Party and the division of Germany seemed more entrenched than ever. The bulwark structure was becoming more and more impenetrable. In spite of much talk in the West, it was clear that the Americans would not do anything to tear down the Wall. On the other hand, to constantly live in a state of inner strife and moral indignation is rather difficult, if not impossible. East Germans figured—quite correctly—that they only had one life to live, and came to accept the fact that they would live their lives in the GDR. Most were preoccupied with their careers and their children’s futures. Day-to-day concerns took center stage: registering for a car, finding an apartment, and above all the permanent pursuit of scarce goods and services. This required making arrangements. Although the economy of scarcity still seemed to set the tone of daily life, it was somehow not as bad as it used to be. The waiting lists for televisions, refrigerators, washing machines and other much sought-after consumer goods had abated to a certain extent. In 1958 the system of ration cards was finally done away with, so that the “potato stamps,” “butter numbers,” “apple certificates” and other relics of the rationing economy eventually disappeared along with it.

Slowly but surely the economy had begun to improve since the mid-1960s. Official GDR statistics recorded a continual rise in retail sales of 10% per annum for the years 1964–67, 13% for 1968, and even 17% in 1969. Although such numbers should be viewed with caution, it is apparent nonetheless that a modest degree of prosperity had spread throughout society. TV-sets, electric refrigerators and washing machines made their way into many households during this period and more and more families could afford a car. The 1960s also saw the introduction of a five-day workweek. Whereas the six-day week with an eight-hour workday had been the norm up until then, in 1966 the first step was taken to shorten work times, reducing the workweek to 45 hours with every other Saturday off. In 1967 Saturdays were declared work-free. It is therefore hardly surprising that many East Germans look back at the 1960s perhaps not as a “golden age” but at least as a time of change and a new beginning, and also as a time of hope. Just like in West Germany, a new generation stepped to the fore, a generation which had learned about the war and postwar years only through books and films, or from the stories of their parents and teachers. As children they had been nourished with a steady stream of lofty ideals, and had learned in school that they would one day live under Communism. In the December 1958 issue of Mosaik, the comic book heroes “Dig and Dag” traveled on a spaceship from antiquity directly into the future, where they witnessed the blessings of progress.2 Indeed, the belief in the ability to influence the course of history and in the omnipotence of science and technology was common at that time all across the globe.

On October 4, 1957 the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was launched by the Soviets, marking the start of the space age. The elementary-school-aged Young Pioneers sang the following tribute: “Hejo, Sputnik, hoch am Himmelszelt, sag, was siehst du bei der Reise um die Welt?” (Hey, Sputnik, high up in the firmament, tell us what you see on your travels round the world). The satellite answered in a kind of antiphonal song: “Ich seh vom Gelben Meer herüber bis zum Elbestrand die Schar der befreiten Völker, mittendrin mein Heimatland. Die Fahnen leuchten rot und die Gesänge klingen froh!” (From the Yellow Sea to the banks of the Elbe I see the flock of liberated peoples, in their midst my homeland. The flags glow red and the songs sound joyful!). This was then followed by the chorus, in Russian: “Hey, Sputnik, ochen’ khorosho!”3 Popular figures of those years were the Siberian husky “Laika,” the passenger of “Sputnik 1,” which incinerated in the stratosphere in November 1957, and the ever-smiling and affable Yuri Gagarin, who—we know today—just barely escaped the same fate in April 1961. The Soviet empire had become much less terrifying. The second wave of de-Stalinization had reached the Soviet satellite states by November 1961. The portraits of Stalin vanished for good into the junk room and the collected works of the dictator were removed from reading rooms and relegated to the stacks. In the dead of night, a construction crew set to work on the sly, soundlessly dethroning the monument across from the pseudo-classical sports hall on Stalinallee. Stalinallee was renamed Karl-Marx-Allee, and Stalinstadt (Stalin City) became Eisenhüttenstadt (Iron Works City). Nikita Khrushchev was now at the helm in Moscow, the merry man with the bald head who became the butt of countless jokes, the best of which were the ones he told himself. The stages on the path towards the envisioned goal of a Communist society had been outlined in detail by the Twenty-Second Party Congress of the CPSU in October 1961. Communism was to be firmly established within the next twenty years. “Industrial production will have grown sixfold by 1980, agricultural production threefold,” the Party Congress proclaimed.

The U.S.S.R. will have achieved the highest levels of industrial and agricultural production in the world, and will have thereby surpassed the most advanced capitalist countries … The principle will apply: from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.4

At first, basic food stuffs would be made available for free. Then rent, utility costs, and ultimately even money would be done away with altogether. Everyone could take as much as they needed from the overabundance of supplies in stores. Thus, crime, criminal courts and prisons would become relics of the past. The distinction between physical and mental labor would gradually melt away and work would merely serve to provide a sense of fulfillment and happiness in life. “The dream of ‘living a hundred years without aging’ would become reality” was what the baffled reader could learn from the title page of the SED’s official daily newspaper, Neues Deutschland.5 All of this was supposed to become reality by the year 1980. The dawn of utopia was marked on the calendar.