Inside Party Headquarters: Organizational Culture and Practice of Rule in the Socialist Unity Party of Germany

By Rüdiger Bergien

Everyday life in the East German Socialist Unity Party revolved heavily around maintaining the “party line” in all areas of society, whether through direct authority or corruption. Spanning a long period of the GDR’s history, from 1946 through 1989, Rüdiger Bergien presents the first study that examines the complexities of the central party’s communist apparatus. He focuses on their role as ideological watchdogs, as they fostered an underbelly and “inner life” for their employees to integrate the party’s pillars throughout East German society. Inside Party Headquarters reviews not only the party’s modes power and state interaction, but also the processes of negotiation and disputation preceding formal Politburo decisions, advancing the available detail and discourse surrounding this formative and volatile stretch of German history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Aug 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781805393467

Rüdiger Bergien

Rüdiger Bergien is a Professor of Intelligence History at the Federal University for Applied Administrative Sciences, Berlin, Germany. His recent publications include the edited volume Communist Parties Revisited, Socio-Cultural Approaches to Party Rule in the Soviet Bloc, 1956-1991, New York: Berghahn Books, 2017.

Book preview

Chapter 1

BETWEEN THE KPD AND THE CPSU (1945–49)

At least in the collective memories of German communists, the weeks and months that followed May 1945 were a time of awakening, of expectations and hopes.¹ The provisional KPD party headquarters on Prinzenalle in Berlin were a reunion for many Party members after years of emigration, the underground, or in many cases concentration camps. Time and again, recalled Karl Schirdewan, a former Sachsenhausen inmate, old comrades-in-arms turned up, and each time there was a big hello . . . What bliss!² They fought their way to Berlin, sometimes on perilous paths, sometimes in prisoner’s garb—or so the retrospective narrative cultivated by Party veterans. Their aim was to once again offer their services to the Party, which now seemed to finally be on the winning side of history. Arriving at Wallstrasse, Schirdewan was told by Franz Dahlem, head of the Cadre Department of the Central Committee of the KPD, that everything is open to you—in the Party apparatus, the economy, the press!³ Wolfgang Leonhard, a graduate of the Comintern school in Kushnarenkovo and hence a particularly promising junior cadre, became deputy head of the Central Committee’s Information Department at the age of twenty-six. Even comrades with a somewhat dubious past such as Erich Honecker—who had to answer to the cadre commission in May of 1945 on account of his behavior in Brandenburg penitentiary—were given their chance. In Honecker’s case this meant an appointment in the Youth Secretariat of the Central Committee.⁴

In their memoirs, the founding fathers of the central Party apparatus invoke the activism and euphoria of the immediate postwar period. Wolfgang Leonhard had never seen a happier Wilhelm Pieck than when Party headquarters moved from Prinzenallee to Wallstraße in July of 1945. Pieck, a trained carpenter, had even lent the movers a hand.⁵ In Leonhard’s own estimation, the fall and winter of 1945 with their constant campaigning—for land reform, the expropriation of war criminals and Nazis⁶—were his best days as a KPD functionary. Franz Dahlem, along with Ulbricht (the most well-known and influential German communist of that time second only to Pieck), later recalled how incredibly demanding the life of a Party employee was back then. No sooner had they recovered from the camps or imprisonment than they threw themselves into long nights of work. Indeed, the Secretariat of the Central Committee had decreed in July of 1945 that the workday of a fulltime Party functionary was unlimited.⁷ Fritz Selbmann, first secretary of the KPD district leadership of Leipzig, supposedly even forgot his own wedding day in August 1945 on account of his heavy workload.⁸

Euphoria, optimism and loads of work—these experiences were one reality during the founding phase of the KPD and SED headquarters. The majority of former prisoners and returning émigrés gathered quite different impressions—the lack of inhabitable housing in Berlin, for example, which caused the building on Prinzenallee to be completely overcrowded in June 1945.⁹ Two KPD functionaries who had just returned from Swedish exile and were being put up in Hotel Adlon had to vacate their rooms in the middle of the night when Soviet officers requested the rooms for themselves and their German girlfriends.¹⁰ A sizable group of Scandinavian returnees who arrived at Stettin Station on January 18, 1946, spent their first night back in Berlin at a police station.¹¹ Party headquarters had forgotten to pick them up. And yet those returning from Scandinavian or British exile could count themselves lucky to wind up in Berlin at all. Most of them were held in political quarantine in Schwerin or Dresden, being forced to write reports on their time in exile rather than getting down to work. Only comrades who had been vetted and found to be germ-free, in the words of Walter Ulbricht, were to be deployed for Party work.¹²

Hence the career of every Party worker in the ruins of the old imperial capital began with questionnaires, which helped make sure that the shadows of the previous twelve years did not fade away too quickly. Many of the founding fathers and the (very few) founding mothers of the Party apparatus of the KPD/SED were likely plagued by what Svenja Goltermann termed veiled nightmares with reference to Germany’s quicksand society. The greatest of these was protracted warfare, but in the case of communists it was the memories of Nazi and Stalinist terror in their semi- or subconscious.¹³ The following will attempt to describe the Party apparatus of the initial postwar years as an organization under construction whose formalization, i.e., the formation of stable administrative expectations as conditions of membership,¹⁴ was stalled by the fact that too many of its members still seemed to live in the past—in the old KPD, in their memories of war and terror, in the fear of an un-Party-like act, whether in emigration or in a Gestapo prison, one day catching up with them. We will thus begin by outlining more precisely the war experiences of these Party employees, followed by a depiction of how the apparatus was formed in organizational terms, a process that was far from smooth. Then we will discuss the political influence exercised by Central Secretariat departments in the midst of competing actors: the Soviets in Karlshorst, self-willed central administrations, and equally self-willed SED state associations. Finally, we will take a look at Stalinization, viewed here as the tentative conclusion of the founding phase of the