Agony & Barbed Wire - The Grim Reality of Former East Germany

By Steffen Blaese

On October 3, 1990, West Germany and East Germany became one state again after 45 years of post-war division. Just one year earlier, many East Germans could not imagine that the socialist dictatorship would soon come to an end. Head of state Erich Honecker had claimed that the Berlin Wall would still be standing in a hundred years. Many were happy about the freedom, about being able to visit their relatives and friends in the West, and also about no longer having to queue for shopping. Others, who had lost their power and privileges, were of course less happy about this development.

East Germany was a dictatorship, a state of injustice that oppressed and patronized its citizens in many ways. There was no independent judiciary, no administrative jurisdiction. Citizens were only subjects and could not legally prosecute the state and its actors. The paranoid state leadership hindered every free spirited person in their professional advancement and private happiness. The regime went so far as to cage its citizens behind barbed wire and concrete and to have refugees shot at the border.

All this must not be forgotten, because, as the saying goes, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yet thirty years after German reunification, the memory of the East German regime hardly plays a role. One reason for the historical ignorance is a lack of knowledge, paired with a diffuse sympathy for the idea of socialism.

The author Steffen Blaese, himself born in the GDR, takes a critical look at the past, at what was good and at what was not. Concise, authentic, sometimes humorous, and with an unfortunately unavoidable bit of bitterness, he takes us through the reality inside the self-proclaimed workers' paradise. He tells of the retreat into the private sphere and of life in illusions, of deprivation and decay, surveillance and repression, and finally of the peaceful revolution and the collapse of the GDR and what psychological consequences the dictatorship has for millions of Germans to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steffen Blaese
• Release date: Jan 29, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224827275

Book preview

For Lisa Sparkling Iris

To the Past

«Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.»

George Santayana

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We were still schoolchildren on that October 8, 1989, thirteen and fourteen years old. It was the day after the 40th anniversary of the GDR. A classmate picked me up from home. We went to Alexanderplatz, the city center of East Berlin. The atmosphere there was tense. Small groups of young men in trench coats with party badges on the lapels were standing everywhere, watching all the activity in the square. Several hundred protesters had gathered along the route between Alexanderplatz and the Palace of the Republic, the seat of government, chanting «No violence!» and «We are the people!».

The day before, the Stasi and police had put down a demonstration with brutal force and arrested hundreds of people. That evening, too, the protest grew to several thousand participants. Again, the police and the Stasi beat them up. But it was the last time that the regime showed strength. A few months later, angry citizens stormed the Stasi headquarters in Berlin Lichtenberg. One year later, the GDR no longer existed.

More than 30 years have passed since then. One might ask, why deal with the problems of a failed state today? Communism should have been consigned to the trash can of history. The «Black Book of Communism» documents the atrocities committed by communists around the world. «And don’t you want to be my brother ...» is the title of the first bestseller by British historian Timothy Garton Ash, in which he delivers a factual and realistic account of everyday life and repression in the GDR in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But the more time passes, the more the awareness of the immense human devastation of communist rule seems to fade. Surveys show that young people know surprisingly little about the former East and tend to view it positively.

«It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t all bad either! » is the mantra of the die-hard lovers of the workers’ and peasants’ paradise. While glorifying the past as a cozy socialist living room, the romantics don’t mention that large parts of the country were still in ruins decades after World War II. West Germans traveling through East Germany were shocked by the desolate state of the towns and villages. Nor do they mention the inefficiency of the economy and the constant shortage of almost everything. Nor the repressive apparatus with which the government held on to power. There was no freedom of speech, no freedom of the press, no freedom of assembly and association, no independent judiciary. You were not allowed to go wherever you wanted.

Those who refused to submit to the rule of the party were broken. Those who stood its way were surveilled and persecuted. Those who tried to escape the country were shot. It took decades before people finally dared to take to the streets. And while many lacked even basic supplies, the political elite sealed themselves off from the rest of the people and enjoyed themselves quite well. Later, they’d say: «We didn’t want it that way.» – A phrase you’ve heard many times in history. They still did it.

A turbulent year lies behind us. The fight against the pandemic has divided people into two camps. Proponents and opponents of the Corona measures face off. One side advocates the measures as imperative in the fight against the pandemic. The others feel patronized and fear that democracy and freedom are in danger. We would live in Orwellian times, they say. Lockdowns would be one of the greatest export successes of the Chinese communist government. Never before has there been so much lying and so much surveillance, almost like in the former East Germany, or worse.

This book is not only meant to remind, but to allow you an actual comparison. Don’t expect it to cover everything – it’s not a comprehensive history of the GDR, but a piece of a complex puzzle. People’s memories of the past are as varied as people themselves. I have included what I deem important so that everyone can form their own opinion. It is not an autobiography or family history, even though I draw on my own experiences here and there.

I focus on the 1980s, the most contradictory decade of the country. To the outside world, it wanted to appear open-minded and progressive. Within its borders, stagnation, narrow-mindedness, dissatisfaction, and secret grumbling characterized everyday life. The history of the GDR illustrates how a dictatorship works and how people behave in it.

KPD + SPD = SED

«The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves.»

Lenin

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«It was a bright cold April day» – with these words begins the story of Winston Smith, a low-level employee in the Ministry of Truth, busy purging files and historical photos to fit current political doctrine. Plagued by a joyless daily routine and nagging doubts about the prevailing ideology, he begins a struggle for a slice of freedom and happiness, only vaguely foreseeing that it could cost him his life. He begins a secret diary and falls in love with a fanatical young activist of the «Junior Anti-Sex League» who in reality leads a covert hedonistic life.

In the apartment of O’Brien, a false confidant with a perfect mimicry, they join the secret brotherhood that wants to overthrow Big Brother. O’Brien raises his glass to propose a toast and asks as pathetically as ironically: «What shall it be this time? ... To the confusion of the Thought Police? To the death of Big Brother? To humanity? To the future?» – «To the past», replied Winston.

The manipulation of the past – along with the surveillance of the elites – is one of the pillars of the oppressive regime in Orwell’s «1984». The party’s slogan is: «Who controls the past controls the future: Who controls the present controls the past.» A common misconception is that Orwell’s novel is science fiction – rather, it is a grotesquely distorted vision of reality. Tyrants constantly rewrite history to legitimize their rule. As a communist joke goes: Marxists can predict the future, but not so easily the past.

Orwell was himself a socialist and had risked his life for his ideals in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). In «Animal Farm» (1945) he reckons with Stalin’s betrayal of the ideals of the Russian Revolution. Probably the most famous quote from this book is that «All animals are equal.». It comes from the Seven Commandments, a kind of constitution that the animals gave themselves. As the plot unfolds and the pigs take over, the slogan changes to «All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.».

With «1984» he develops the allegory into a dystopian nightmare and dissects the mechanisms of tyranny like a pathologist. Now it is no longer the pigs that rule, but the party, the INGSOC. You might as well say CPSU. Or NSDAP. Under different ideological cloaks, the principles of ruling and power are the same. This is the lesson of Orwell’s life experience.

When you spoke of «the party» in the GDR, everyone knew which of the actual five parties you meant. It always referred to the ruling party, the SED, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. It had evolved from the forced merger of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The latter was founded by radical left-wing groups at the turn of 1918/19 after the end of World War I and the fall of the German Empire. They were fierce opponents of the first German democracy, the Weimar Republic. Their goal was to establish a soviet republic on the Russian model.

KPD chairman Karl Liebknecht was a Bolshevik and wanted to seize power for his party in a civil war, not in democratic elections. In January 1919, they attempted a coup d’état and occupied the Berlin newspaper district, but drew almost no attention. The vast majority of the German working class did not want «Russian conditions». After the horrors of the lost World War, they wanted peace, not a civil war.

Ultimately, the coup attempt of the left-wing extremists weakened the young republic and strengthened its right-wing enemies. To protect the young democracy, secretary of defense Gustav Noske, a Social Democrat, deployed right-wing paramilitary free corps which put down the insurrection with unnecessary brutal force. Several hundred insurgents were shot, and Communist Party leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered.

In March, riots broke out again, spreading beyond Berlin this time. The blood of an estimated 2,000 insurrectionists who died in the fighting caused deep bitterness among the Communists. From then on, they fought the Social Democrats as their «mortal enemies» even more than the Nazis, smearing them as «traitors», «social fascists», and the «left wing of fascism». When it came to attacking the hated Weimar «system», they even aligned themselves with the brownshirts.

In 1933, the Weimar democracy finally collapsed under the pressure from the extreme right and left, and Hitler seized power. Tens of thousands of Communists and Social Democrats were deported to concentration camps. Many Communists fled to Moscow. There, they fell victim to Stalin’s purges. Only the most ruthless of them survived. It was precisely these people, whom Stalin ordered back to East Germany in 1945 to rebuild the Communist Party.

Back from exile, they kept silent about Stalin’s terror, the arrests and disappearances of comrades, their own interrogations, the years in prison, and the «betrayals without which survival was almost impossible», according to historian Andreas Petersen. They were willing to take power and were aware that their rule would be possible only with Soviet support.

They believed that within a few weeks and months they would become the strongest party. But the math didn’t work out. Despite massive repression by the Soviet occupation forces, the number of SPD members exceeded that of the KPD, which soon acquired a reputation as the «Russian Party». Fearing a loss of influence, Stalin ordered the merger of the Communist Party and the Social Democrats. The handshake between KPD leader Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl of the East Berlin Social Democrats in April 1946 sealed the founding of the SED.

In a blatant misjudgment of reality, Grotewohl proclaimed that «30 years of bruderkampf would now come to an end.» It soon turned out that the partnership, as little as it had come about democratically, was a partnership of equals. Thousands of East German Social Democrats were persecuted, arrested, imprisoned in Soviet special camps, or deported to gulags in Siberia. Many of whom had already spent years in Nazi concentration camps. Only few returned from Siberia. Those who could, left home and fled to the West.

The «new» party was communist to the core. Ulbricht had promised the Social Democrats half of all seats on the party’s executive board. But he never intended to keep his promises. Five years later, not a single former Social Democrat held a top position in the SED. Not only the top positions, but also in the middle levels, communist comrades held the posts.

Officially, all members of the party had the right to elect its leadership. In reality, rank-and-file members had minimal influence on decisions in the party. The party apparatus was strictly hierarchical, following Lenin’s vision of a «democratic centralism». The nomenclature decided which candidates were eligible for the posts to be filled. Members in the lower bodies had neither the opportunity to propose candidates nor to stand for election as candidates themselves.

While in democratic parties the will permeates from the base to the top, in the SED it was the other way around. Already in May 1945, Walter Ulbricht had put it this way: «It must only appear democratic, but we must have everything in our hands.» A small leadership circle set the political course and had the entire party apparatus under its control. All power emanated from the Politburo and the Secretariat of the Central Committee.

Unconditional loyalty was the sacrosanct principle by which each member’s actions were measured. They rigorously fought and eliminated any sign of opposition within the party. Violations of party discipline were usually punished by expulsion.

Following the same anti-democratic principles, they began to reorganize the entire state. Loyal party cadres took all the important posts here as well. At all levels, the party apparatus and the state apparatus were closely intertwined. Teachers, lawyers, policemen, officers, professors, the heads of state enterprises or cultural institutions, and civil servants were almost invariably members of the party. This system has been put into a simple but apt formula: «Where there is a comrade, there is the party!»

The Making of a State

The «German Democratic Republic» was neither democratic nor republican. It was created at the instigation of Stalin as political leverage against the West to prevent Germany’s full integration into a Western alliance. During World War II, Roosevelt and Stalin had been loyal allies. But as the end of the war approached, mutual distrust grew. With great losses, the Red Army had taken Eastern and Central Europe. Stalin did not want to give up these territories and instead pushed for a communist takeover.

As ruthlessly as arbitrarily, he wiped states off the map and created new ones to secure Russia’s influence. A compromise between the former allies was impossible. Already in March 1946, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill spoke of an «Iron Curtain» separating the West from the East. One year later, the U.S. implemented the Marshall Plan to contain communism in Europe and the Cold War began. The division of Germany was the inevitable consequence to prevent it from turning into a hot war.

In mid-September 1949, leading SED officials stayed in Moscow for almost two weeks to consult with their puppet masters on the modalities of founding the state. In a letter to «Father Stalin», they asked questions and made proposals about the formation of the government, economic matters, party issues, the social integration of former Nazis, and the closure of the Soviet special camps. Since the Soviet Politburo had dictated the letter into their pens, they were sure not to make any «inappropriate» suggestions, and as expected, the response was in line with their «proposals». It contained the exact script of how the state was to be built.

Back in East Berlin, the comrades hurried to implement the plans. At a meeting of the Party Executive Committee on October 4, they informed the other top officials of the SED about the decisions of Stalin, presented the future government, and defined the character of the country: The GDR would be a socialist state based on the Soviet model. The rulers by Moscow’s grace did not even think of establishing a society different from the one they knew from the USSR.

Ulbricht left no doubt about the absolute rule of the SED. At the meeting of the Party Executive Committee, one of the participants remarked: «As Marxists, we must know: When we form a government, we will never give it up again, neither by elections nor by other methods.» Ulbricht’s terse reply was: «Some have not yet understood that!» – They would soon.

On October 7, 1949, the Soviet zone officially became the German Democratic Republic. Just ten days later, they decreed that all laws and regulations had to be approved by the SED Politburo as an «Ueber-Government» before being passed by the People’s Chamber or the Cabinet. The separation of powers was eliminated. The hopes of many people for democratic conditions were shattered. Only a relatively small part of the population shared the «euphoria of reconstruction» spread by the propaganda. Terror swept the country, suppressing all democratic initiatives with draconian measures, as they had learned from «Father Stalin».

As a result of the often terrifying biographies of the German Communists who returned from Moscow, «horror, lies, and silence became the mental foundation of the new state», explained historian Andreas Petersen. From the beginning, it bore the characteristics of a deformed personality: It was incapable of self-criticism, paranoid, and distrustful; it sought approval and attention and had a tendency to force these.

The new state was officially independent, but the comrades did not make any autonomous decisions. They were responsible for the policies that shaped everyday life, not least the ever precarious economic situation. But they acted fully under the watch and control of the Soviet Union. Moscow took care that nothing ran counter to its own political interests and that any change remained compatible with its system.

The Soviet ambassador in East Berlin, Pyotr Andreyevich Abrasimov, characterized the GDR as a Soviet «homunculus», a product of foreign policy will that was not viable on its own, but merely an outpost of the Soviet Union. In the years and decades that followed, however, this strategy became a boomerang. This homunculus developed into a subsidy grave for the Soviet Union. To keep it alive, they had to pour billions into it. Ironically, many East Germans believed that it was the other way around, and that the small country was supporting the big Soviet Union.

Stalin never lost sight of the idea of handing over East Germany in a political horse trade with the West. But it remained a mere thought exercise. West Germany’s political and military ties to its western neighbors and the United States finally buried his plans. For the communist leadership of the GDR, on the other hand, it was crucial to bind itself to the Soviets, because as long as the Soviets regarded the GDR as an integral part of the socialist camp, their rule was secure even without democratic legitimacy.

Accordingly, they always took the interests of the Soviets more seriously than those of their own fellow citizens, confirming their reputation as the «Russian party», which is why they never had popular support.

Although elections were held regularly in a pseudo-democratic process, the regime never faced free and democratic elections. The power of the party was never at stake. You could endorse the SED as the state party with unified lists – or not. In the latter case, you had to cross out all the names on the ballot one by one. People referred to voting as «folding the paper». They took a quick look at the ballot, folded it, and threw it into the ballot box. Hardly anyone used the voting booth, if there was one at all, because it would have made them suspicious. They thought twice about provoking the authorities in this way.

Meaningless as the ritual was in light of the fact that the outcome was predetermined, the staging of the election was elaborate in order to mobilize people «for» the SED. After all, everything should appear democratic. Legally, there was no compulsory voting, but in reality there was. Every local election committee wanted to achieve the «best result», the highest turnout, preferably before noon, and the highest approval rating as proof of good ideological work in the run-up. Low participation, on the other hand, was considered a sign of poor preparation and resulted in inspections and endless meetings. This, of course, had to be avoided.

All relevant political bodies were urged to bring voters to the polls on election day. Those who were traveling on these day were to cast their ballots at the «pre-election office». Those who were sick, old, and invalid also had no excuse: «Volunteers» with «flying ballot boxes» showed up even in nursing homes and hospitals. Those who did not show up at all were visited at home by election workers and asked to vote. If you were thick-skinned and bold, you could negotiate something for yourself: a repair, a new stove, or even a new apartment or phone line, in exchange for voting.

Accordingly, voter turnout was extremely high, never below 98.4 percent in local elections, never below 99.4 percent in national elections. Strangely enough, the number of non-voters or no votes was significantly lower than the number of those willing to leave the country. Those who had enough of the regime voted with their feet.

The Antifascist Founding Myth

In the early years, the propaganda did not speak of building socialism. Instead, they declared that they would establish a social order that would never again allow fascism, war, and oppression. The Nazis had brought death and destruction upon the world. Anti-fascism was to be the lesson of the Nazi crimes and the war; that in itself was right and appealed to many people. This «never again» became the founding myth of the GDR. The party drew a line under the Nazi era and simply declared 1945 as «zero hour», a new beginning, at least in the part of Germany liberated by the Red Army.

Nazis were declared stooges of «world finance», to which they cynically also included Jewish people. As if the Nazis had invaded the country and not come from their midst, the East Germans became «victims» of fascism, seduced and abused by «Nazi bigwigs», nobility, military, and industrialists. With the expropriation of the capitalists, the causes of fascism had been «eradicated at the root». Their unsullied «new Germany» would have nothing to do with the recent German past, for here they had «learned their lesson from history».

East Germans felt neither themselves nor their ancestors were responsible for the crimes of the Nazi dictatorship. Many even came to believe that large parts of the German population had been anti-fascist during the years under Hitler. They felt not as losers of the war, but as winners of history, as if they had defeated fascism together with the Red Army and the German resistance.

Anti-fascism was propagated at every opportunity: with slogans on banners at the large parades, in the media, in film, and literature, but also in education from an early age. The legacy of the anti-fascists was cultivated and the concentration camp memorials were preserved. In «traditional anti-fascist cabinets» in schools and workplaces, historical documents, photos, and medals commemorating the «meritorious anti-fascists» were displayed like relics.

The SED celebrated its anti-fascism almost religiously, and this to the point of weariness. Serving almost only for propaganda, the terms fascism and anti-fascism lost their meaning, and the constant anti-fascist rituals became empty, like all other rituals of the regime.

Their use of the term «Fascism» instead of «National Socialism» went back to an Orwellian linguistic regulation of Stalin in order to divert attention from the term «Socialism».

Moreover, the history of fascism was presented in an extremely distorted ideological way. Important details were either withheld or poorly covered. In teacher training, they did not mention, for example, that the poison gas Zyklon B was once produced in the city of Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt in East Germany. The enthusiasm of millions of Germans was never addressed, nor the roots for the extreme violence. Nor did they talk about how millions of Germans had enriched themselves on Jewish property.

There were hardly any Jews left in the country, and they were rarely mentioned in the media, in literature, or in research. If at all, they were only mentioned in the context of the Nazi era. But the memory of the Shoah and the persecution of the Jewish people played only a minor role in official historiography. Jews were considered only one of many victim groups, and in the hierarchy they ranked lower than the anti-fascist resistance led by the Communist Party.

Debates and lessons about fascism, whether in schools or in public, remained formulaic, bloodless, and focused on the fates of communist resistance fighters. The genocide of the Jews was not denied; places, numbers, and methods were mentioned again and again. In school, visits to concentration camp memorials were obligatory. But the uniqueness of the «rupture of civilization» in Auschwitz was negated. The Shoa was merely classified as part of a long chain of imperialist crimes.

Anti-Semitism was declared a capitalist distraction from the class struggle and was overcome with the introduction of socialism. Until the mid-1960s, there was no independent publication on the Shoa. Internationally recognized texts, such as those by Primo Levi and Tadeusz Borowski, were banned, removed from libraries, and declared «obsolete».

Equally hypocritical was the handling of looted art and the question of compensations. While they refused to pay compensation, the economic functionary and Stasi officer Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski secretly sold looted art to the West.

The role of the working class in the rise of National Socialism was never critically questioned. Instead, the Communists falsely attributed an anti-fascist myth to the working class to underpin their claim to political leadership. In fact, most Germans had fought Bolshevism during the war. They were given absolution and did