[Katya Hoyer argues for a closer look at the triumphs and travails
of everyday life under socialism. ]
[[link removed]]

THE LOST HISTORY OF EAST GERMANY  
[[link removed]]


 

Samuel Clowes Huneke
September 22, 2023
The Daily Beast
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Katya Hoyer argues for a closer look at the triumphs and travails
of everyday life under socialism. _

Trabant, Wbs 70 (CC BY 2.0)

 

At the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta, Katarina Witt, the
figure skater once dubbed
[[link removed]] “the
most beautiful face of socialism,” took to the ice to perform a
routine set to Bizet’s opera _Carmen__._ Dressed in a black and
red flamenco-inspired suit, Witt outperformed her rivals, including
American Debi Thomas, who was also skating to _Carmen._ Triumphing
in the “Battle of the Carmens,” Witt became the second woman in
Olympic history to collect back-to-back gold medals in figure
skating. 

Her performance was no accident of history. In its 40-year existence,
East Germany dominated the Olympic Games. Despite its small size—the
country’s population never rose past 19 million—the German
Democratic Republic won 519 medals, including 192 gold. Due to an
infamous doping scheme paired with broad-based fitness programs that
East Germans remember fondly, the GDR still ranks among the top
medal-winners, even 30 years after it disappeared from world maps.

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany by Katja Hoyer

Buy on Bookshop [[link removed]]
Basic Books, 496 pp., $35.00

That uncomfortable union of illegal steroids and broadly accessible
social programs captures something essential about the GDR’s
paradoxical nature. It was one of the strangest countries to have ever
existed, a jewel box of contradictions. Desperately impoverished, at
least compared to its West German twin, East Germany was also an
engine of social mobility. Citizens were spied on by its infamous
secret police—the Stasi—at the same time that East Germany
achieved unparalleled gender equality in the workplace. Imprisoned
behind a fortified border by an authoritarian regime, East Germans
were among the most vocal citizens on earth, sending millions of
petitions to their central government.

These contradictions are beautifully captured in _Beyond the Wall: A
History of East Germany_ [[link removed]],
German-British historian Katja Hoyer’s second book. While most
people continue to think of East Germany as “a grey, monotonous
blur—a world without individuality, agency or meaning,” Hoyer
contends that it is well past time to recognize its distinctive
society and culture. Doing so not only acknowledges the personal
experiences of million of East German citizens but also gives us an
opportunity to think more capaciously about what, if anything, might
be worth salvaging from twentieth-century socialism. Crafting an
expansive and generous history of East Germany, Hoyer brings
long-standing academic scholarship to a broader audience, explaining
how the GDR evolved over its 40-year existence, the triumphs and
travails of everyday life under state socialism, and why so many East
Germans continue to pine for the country they have lost. 

While East Germany was a product of Germany’s postwar occupation,
its roots stretch back to the origins of socialism. Germany, after
all, is the land of Marx and Engels. The two socialist thinkers
published the _Communist Manifesto_ during the revolutionary year
1848, a cri de coeur against grotesque inequality and exploitation
that still resonates with readers nearly two centuries later. In 1875,
two socialist workers groups merged to form what would become the
German Social Democratic Party, or SPD, the oldest socialist party in
existence as well as Germany’s governing party today. Suppressed
during the nineteenth century, the SPD became the country’s largest
parliamentary bloc in the years before World War I.

But World War I caused a schism in the party, and radical, anti-war
members broke off to found what became the German Communist Party.
When the SPD took power at the end of the war, it collaborated with
far-right paramilitaries to hunt down renegade Communists, including
the new party’s leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who
were both murdered on January 15, 1919. While the Communist Party
survived through the years of the Weimar Republic, the SPD remained
mortally hostile to it. And when the Nazi Party came to power in 1933,
its first order of business was rounding up Communists and sending
them to purpose-built concentration camps, where many of them
perished. The lucky ones fled Germany, crossing the border before they
could be arrested. Some went West. But many traveled East, to Moscow,
where what would become the core of the East German government waited
out the war.

Hoyer begins her story in the cauldron of Stalin’s Great Terror,
which lasted from 1936 to 1938 and claimed around one million lives.
Many of the German Communists who had sought safety in the USSR were
purged: arrested, tortured, sent to the Gulag, or even murdered. Those
who survived were a Stalinist core, including Wilhelm Pieck, who would
go on to become the GDR’s first president, and Walter Ulbricht, who
would become the first secretary of the East German Socialist Unity
Party.

Berlin fell on May 2, 1945; the remains of the Thousand Year Reich six
days later. The Red Army occupied Germany’s eastern reaches. The
western parts were divided among France, the United Kingdom, and the
United States. Governance of the Soviet zone soon fell into the hands
of German Communists. Ulbricht, who arrived in Berlin with his Soviet
patrons, remarked to an associate, “It must look democratic, but we
must control everything.” Hoping to capitalize on the postwar
popularity of the SPD, the Soviets forced a merger with the Communist
Party, creating the Socialist Unity Party, or SED, which would govern
East Germany for 40 years. But when the SED suffered humiliating
results in the 1946 polls, winning less than 50 percent of the vote,
leaders resolved never again to hold free elections.  

Initially, there were hopes that a neutral, democratic Germany could
be reunited. But as the logic of the Cold War took hold, those hopes
curdled. A Western currency union, the Berlin blockade, and finally
the founding of a West German state turned an independent East Germany
from a socialist pipe dream into reality.

While the country was grounded in anti-fascist rhetoric and the
egalitarian ideals of communism, the East German government suffered
from what historian Andrew Port has termed a “siege mentality.”
Led by men traumatized by decades of violence at the hands of the SPD,
the Nazis, and the Soviets, convinced that they were ruling a hostile,
fascistic populace, the GDR “never stopped looking for monsters
under its bed.” After a workers’ strike rocked the country in June
1953, the state slowly but surely grew its security apparatus, until
the Stasi was the largest police force per capita that the world has
ever seen.

The country also suffered an economic stillbirth, which Hoyer tenderly
excavates in the opening chapters. The sandy plains of Brandenburg
were never the wealthiest part of the German Reich, lacking the rich
mineral deposits that made the western Rhineland one of Europe’s
industrial powerhouses. Adding insult to injury, the Soviet Union
squeezed the country for reparations to make up for the devastation of
World War II. While West Germany reaped the benefits of the U.S.
Marshall Plan, Soviet forces plundered the eastern zone. From
kidnapping engineers and scientists to stealing art to dismantling
whole factories and shipping them east, the Red Army made the GDR pay.
The economic drain made it hard for Ulbricht and his lieutenants to
fulfill the promise of socialism to provide stable work and an
adequate standard of living.

High work quotas and a lack of opportunity in East Germany’s early
years convinced millions to move westward. The flight of technical
experts was particularly concerning to East German authorities. After
receiving a first-class education at East German schools, they could
then cross the border, where they were granted automatic West German
citizenship and could earn a much larger salary than in the socialist
republic.

Indeed, migration proved an existential threat to the young country.
In the 1950s, the GDR slowly hardened the “inner-German” border
separating the two countries. The government moved “unreliable”
residents out of the border zone in what was dubbed “Operation
Vermin,” erected barbed wire, planted land mines, and more. But
Berlin, which was still in theory under Allied administration,
remained accessible to East Germans. Eventually, Ulbricht decided to
stanch the flow. On August 14, 1961, the Berlin Wall began to go up,
dividing the capital and cutting off East Germans’ last route to the
West. Remembered today as one of the greatest human rights violations
of the Cold War, the militarized border ironically stabilized East
Germany’s domestic situation, as well as relations between the two
countries. “With the ideological divide cemented,” Hoyer writes,
“a period of calm set in.” 

That calm led to decades of relative stability and comfort when
“East Germans’ lives improved enormously.” Ulbricht’s
government began to focus less on rapid industrialization and more on
consumer staples and adequate housing. Household appliances that we
take for granted today became commonplace in the 1960s. Whereas only 6
percent of homes had washing machines at the start of the decade, over
half did by the end. The same for refrigerators: Over 50 percent of
East German households had them in 1970, while only 28 percent of West
German homes did. Under Erich Honecker, who ousted Ulbricht in a 1971
palace coup, these trends picked up steam. The number of East Germans
with a car nearly doubled between 1970 and 1975. By 1980, almost every
home had a television. 

The GDR also made good on its commitment to social mobility. In a
self-professed “workers’ and farmers’ state,” the grip of the
aristocracy was smashed and working-class Germans were elevated into
the upper echelons of society. Around a third of East German
university students hailed from the working classes. In West Germany,
that figure was 3 percent. The military and secret police, ironically,
also provided new opportunities. In the GDR’s final year, some 60
percent of army officers were working-class recruits.

Gender too was part and parcel of East Germany’s drive to social
equality. Communism had long preached gender equality. In Germany, the
Communist Party had been a long-standing ally in the push to legalize
abortion. Although Ulbricht’s regime espoused conservative social
mores in its first years, the regime took its commitment to women’s
equality seriously, enshrining equality of the sexes in the 1949
constitution. Over the decades, the state slowly made good on that
promise. It liberalized divorce laws, legalized abortion in 1972, and
developed a generous social safety net to provide for mothers.

These programs were effective. By the early 1980s, over 90 percent of
women were employed—more than anywhere else on earth. They occupied
all manner of positions, from doctors and factory workers to
professors and judges. By the time Ronald Reagan appointed America’s
first female Supreme Court Justice, around 50 percent of East German
district and regional judges were women. In the United States today
that figure is only 30 percent
[[link removed].].
East Germany far outpaced West Germany (and most other countries) in
affording women social, economic, and political opportunity.

East German authoritarianism, that is to say, was not as rigid as Cold
War–era histories have made it out to be. Of course, elections were
neither free nor fair: Citizens were presented with a preselected list
of candidates of which they could either approve or disapprove. But
they had other ways to communicate with the government. Petitions,
known as _Eingaben,_ were a common way for East Germans to express
discontent. Every year, hundreds of thousands of these letters flowed
into the central government, so many that scholars have termed the
country a “grumble _Gesellschaft_” (grumble society).

And there are notable moments when East German activists were able to
change government policy. Historian Josie McLellan, for instance,
documents how ordinary citizens were able to preserve the country’s
famed tradition of nude beaches (known as free-body culture or FKK),
even in the face of state opposition. My own book on LGBTQ politics in
postwar Germany documents how successful the East German gay and
lesbian movement was. By the middle of the 1980s, East Germany had a
legitimate claim to being among the most queer-friendly states on
earth, far outpacing conservative West Germany.

But social and economic progress was not enough to save the country.
An aging leadership, still fretfully on the lookout for enemies
foreign and domestic, remained rigid and unable to adapt. As the
security services played whack-a-mole with new activist movements, the
economic stress of the 1980s overwhelmed the GDR’s command economy.
The violent contradictions of East German rule, of an authoritarian
state that proudly proclaimed itself an anti-fascist democracy and a
guardian of human rights, proved too much for it to handle. It was
caught in what historian Mark Mazower has called “the paradox of the
Party.” By sweeping away old privileges and leveling the playing
field, by educating its populace and providing a basic standard of
living, the party had “cast doubt upon its own existence.” The GDR
had achieved what it set out to do, but by the 1980s, it had outlived
its usefulness.

On November 9, 1989, thanks to the flubbed
[[link removed]] rollout
of a more liberal emigration policy, East Germans flooded through and
over the Berlin Wall and into the West. It was the end of the regime.
But, as Hoyer aptly explains, the GDR did not simply vanish, even
after it formally ceased to exist on October 3, 1990. No, its
footprint remains everywhere, from the reunified country’s generous
childcare to the frightening popularity of the far-right Alternative
for Germany in the former Eastern lands to the Cold War kitsch that
tourists can still buy in Berlin.

To Hoyer, the GDR’s spectral presence is evidence
of _Ostalgie,_ nostalgia for the East. It proves only that many
retain fond memories of the country of their youth, even if few
“East Germans long for a return to GDR socialism.” Dismissing the
GDR’s socialist legacy in this way, especially in such an exciting
narrative that restores the drama of East German history, strikes me
as too simplistic. It evades the question of why we should care about
East German history at all. 

Of course, for Hoyer the answer is simple. East Germany is, quite
simply, part of German history and the country she grew up in. To
ignore it, or to understand it through Cold war clichés, would be to
misunderstand German history as a whole. But for those who do not have
an emotional attachment to the country, East German history must offer
another appeal. The most obvious is that the GDR provides a striking
case study in the history of socialism.

If, as we Americans are fond of saying, most politics devolves to
“It’s the economy, stupid,” then there are good reasons why East
Germans would look back on their small state fondly.

The warnings that the country offers are all too clear and are
recounted in uncountable histories. But what Hoyer brings to life is
that the GDR actually achieved remarkable progress on a host of social
and economic fronts in its short life span. It is precisely because of
those triumphs that the country won the approval and even admiration
of some of its citizens. If, as we Americans are fond of saying, most
politics devolves to “It’s the economy, stupid,” then there are
good reasons why East Germans would look back on their small state
fondly. As Mary Fulbrook, one of the most esteemed historians of East
Germany, insists, there was “also a ‘normality’ about the
history of the GDR that needs to be recaptured.”

To recognize the GDR’s “normality,” to comprehend what it did
well, is not, of course, an argument to return to authoritarian state
socialism. Rather it highlights that there is something about
socialism that East Germans miss and something about neoliberal
capitalism that is profoundly alienating. Many East Germans feel
cheated by the unequal way that reunification was carried out—jobs
cut, welfare slashed, and public property auctioned off. Since 1990,
social mobility has ground to a halt: Germany now ranks
[[link removed]] near
the bottom for opportunity, worse than the U.S. East Germans miss not
only “the sickly taste of the bright-green peppermint liqueur
consumed in secret behind the sports hall during a school disco” but
also the meaning and tangible benefits that came from the socialist
project. To take seriously the history of the GDR means to think about
socialism “beyond the wall,” as Hoyer asks us to do, and to
recognize where it succeeded as well as where it failed. Perhaps,
then, from the wreckage of state socialism, we might find our way to a
more utopian future.  

_Samuel Clowes Huneke
[[link removed]] @schuneke
[[link removed]] is an assistant professor of modern
German history at George Mason University. He is the author of States
of Liberation: Gay Men Between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War
Germany
[[link removed]]._

The New Republic newsletters: Ideas. Influence. Impact.
[[link removed]]

* German Democratic Republic
[[link removed]]
* East Germany
[[link removed]]
* socialism
[[link removed]]
* History
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]