What Remains?: The Dialectical Identities of Eastern Germans 303118887X, 9783031188879

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What Remains? The Dialectical Identities of Eastern Germans Joyce Marie Mushaben

What Remains?

Joyce Marie Mushaben

What Remains? The Dialectical Identities of Eastern Germans

Joyce Marie Mushaben BMW Center for German & European Studies Georgetown University Washington, D.C., WA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-18887-9    ISBN 978-3-031-18888-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

Indirectly occupying my thoughts for thirty years, this book proves that national identities are rarely de- and reconstructed in the space of a single generation. While I cannot personally thank the historical muses who put me “in the right place, at the right time” with regard to this project on East German identity, I can express my gratitude to many earth-bound actors who contributed to the production of this book. For starters, I acknowledge the Ford Foundation which financed my initial Fellowship in GDR Studies at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies (AICGS), 1989–1990, then extended my grant for two months commensurate with the increasing complexity of the topic. I also recognize the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University which enabled me to start analyzing my data as its first research fellow, 1990–1991. Likewise included in my thanks are the German Marshall Fund of the United States, the German Academic Exchange Service, the GDR Studies Association of the United States and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, whose financial support made it possible for me to travel to the German Dramatic Republic at critical turning points, as well as to continue my investigation regarding the fates of eastern residents over the next few decades. Completion of this book would not have been possible without the sustained support of multiple colleagues at different stages of my research, though some of us have drifted apart since the 1990s. My interactions with “regulars” and visitors at the AICGS ensured access to a broad spectrum of political perspectives on the course of unification, a never-ending flow of newspaper and journal articles, as well as unanticipated v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

opportunities to view the making of history from a front-row seat. I enjoyed the company and friendly assistance of AICGS “co-workers,” especially the late Dr. Manfred Stassen (DAAD), well beyond my year in residence. Co-fellow and subsequent Research Director, Lily Gardner Feldman, provided detailed readings of my work, countless recommendation letters and years of Frauensolidarität well beyond the institute walls. Other intellectual compatriots gratefully discovered by way of my earlier affiliations included Friederike Eigler, Daniela Dahn, Christiane Lemke, Jonathan Olsen, Ann Phillips, Helga Welsh, Pastor Bernd Wrede and Jennifer Yoder. I extend heartfelt thanks to Judith and Reinhard Maiworm (Goethe Institute), who sustained me for years (actually decades) with their professional enthusiasm, private hospitality, personal friendship and a shared belief that it is possible to build a permanently peaceful, democratic German nation. Nor could I have completed core components of my fieldwork without the assistance and candor of several GDR facilitators, especially my 1990 hosts at the former Central Institute for Youth Research in Leipzig, Wilfried Schubarth, Ulrich Heublein and Rudolf Dennhardt. Siegfried Sach at the GDR Institute for International Relations helped me to secure a number of appointments with leading SED officials (rarely granted to academics from a capitalist-imperialist “enemy state”) during the critical twelve months preceding the 1989 Wende. Klaus Richter, Marianne Eschenbach and Herr Viererbe, wherever he may be, arranged invaluable interviews with parliamentarians from Bundnis ’90, the SPD and the CDU, in the wake of the first truly democratic Volkskammer elections. Gisela Richter, Ruth and Hans Misselwitz, Marianne Birthler, Eckhard Priller, Heinrich Bortfeldt and Detlef Pollack provided updates with respect to post-unity currents in the East-Länder during my annual summer sojourns. The University of Missouri-St. Louis accorded me flexible research leave opportunities, while the late Jan Frantzen, Linda Miller and Lana Vierdag helped with successive grant deadlines, allowing me to commit many extraordinary experiences to paper while I still remembered them. My son Joshua provided me with the opportunity to experience the eastern child-care system first-hand in Erfurt. His time at Zwergenland, in turn, supplied him with the German language skills that enabled him to pursue two internships at Schiffshebewerk Niederfinow, as well as a master’s degree at the University of Stuttgart. My particular thanks to German taxpayers for funding not only my research projects but also two years of my son’s graduate education.

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

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Marriage, motherhood and four intervening books delayed the completion of this work, but those years blessed me with new colleague-friends who urged me to continue with this academic equivalent of a painstaking archeological dig. Gabriele Abels and Sabine Lang, especially, extended countless speaking invitations and fantastic hospitality, which kept me going through good times and bad. The wonderful facilities and cheerful assistance of my favorite librarians at the Bundestag Bibliothek in Berlin made sure that the final draft of this book materialized in accordance with the Humboldtian tradition of Einsamkeit und Freiheit. Strange as it sounds, I also owe a certain debt to the otherwise devastating COVID pandemic. The latter kept me seated at my dining room table in front of a laptop for months on end, pulling together a wide assortment of old and new books, government reports, journal articles, newspaper clippings, critical re-reflections and personal memories. This book is dedicated to the millions of “essential workers,” worldwide, who did not enjoy that luxury but whose devotion and hard work made it possible for me to emerge from this difficult time in good health, a little bit older and possibly wiser.

Contents

1 Introduction:  Prelude to a German Revolution  1 Methodology   9 Part I Dimensions of the Dialectical Identity  17 2 Exit,  Voice, and Loyalty: The Theoretical Parameters 21 A Concentric Approach to Identity Theory  27 Circle One: Identity as the Bio-Psychology of the Individual  27 Circle Two: Identity as Social Interaction  31 Circle Three: Identity as National Consciousness  32 The Circles Broken: Exit versus Voice  35 Expanding the Framework: Making the Case for Loyalty  45 Reinterpreting die Wende, 1989–1990  49 Identity from Below: Socialist Subcultures  55 3 Selection  by Consequences: What Did It Mean to Be GDR-German? 63 The Parameters of Political Legitimacy  68 A Spectre Haunting …: The Stalinist Legacy  74 Founding Narrative Versus Historical Record  79 The Quest for Socialist Legitimacy  85 Redefining the Significance of State, Nation, Nationality  89

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“The Problem of Generations”  98 Love of the Socialist Fatherland: Ideal Versus the Real 100 Historicism Versus Materialism 103 Part II The Deconstruction of Official GDR-Identity 113 4 Real-Existing  Socialism: Consumer Culture and Vitamin “B”115 The Perils of Planning Under Real-Existing Socialism 118 Collective Reponses to Chronic Scarcities 126 Intershop Socialism and Its Discontents 134 Creating the “Socialist Consumer” 138 The Paradox of Real-Existing Materialism 149 5 “Now  out of Never”: Exit, Voice, and Riding the Revolutionary Bandwagon159 Learning to Live with “Arrangements” 161 Protest Currents and the Velvet Revolution 165 Unanticipated Consequences: Freikauf, Expulsions, and Local Reactions 172 The Dialectical Forces of Exit and Voice 176 Ostalgie: Marketing East German Memories 183 Conclusion: Loyalty, Habitus, and “the Wall in One’s Head” 188 6 Heimatgefühl and the Reconfiguration of Civil Society205 Political “Representation Gaps” in the Eastern Länder 208 Die Grüne Liga (Green League) of MecklenburgVorpommern 212 Volkssolidarität (People’s Solidarity): Landesverband Berlin 218 Runder Tisch gegen Gewalt (Round Table Against Violence) in Sachsen-Anhalt 224 Gleichstellungsstelle-Erfurt (Erfurt Office of Equal Opportunity), Thüringen 229 Forum Ostdeutschland (SPD) and Aufbau Ost (CDU) in Berlin/Brandenburg and Saxony 234 The PDS as “Comeback Kid” 241 “The End of Apprenticeship” 244

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Part III Reconstructing East-German Identities: Peer Cultures 255 7 Conscience  of the Nation: Writers, Artisans, and Intellectuals257 Cultural Policies and the Forces of Socialist Realism 260 Anti-fascist Imperatives: Loyalty and the Aufbau Generation 268 “Profiles in Courage”: Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym 272 The Sixty-Eighters and the Dilemmas of Cultural Revolution 281 The Post-Wall Literaturstreit: “The West” Versus Christa Wolf 285 Loyalty, Voice, and the National Question 293 8 From  Losers to Winners, and Back: The Stasi, Pastors, and Dissidents303 Shield and Sword of the Party: The Ministry for State Security 306 Opiate of the Masses: The SED and Religion, 1945–1970 316 From Peaceful Coexistence (1971–1979) to Church from Below (1980–1989) 320 (Re)Marginalized Voices: Pastors and Politics, 1990–1998 324 The Helsinki Factor: Loyalty as Dissent 328 Prosecuting the SED Dictatorship 334 Loyalty, Voice, and Retributive Justice 341 9 From  State Paternalism to Private Patriarchy: East German Women355 Gender and Ideology: State Paternalism 357 Equality without Emancipation: Double Burdens and the “Right to Work” 365 Revenge of the Cradle: Reproductive Rights and Wrongs 377 Private Patriarchy and the Re-domestication of Eastern Women 387 Deutschland einig Mutterland: Gender Policies under Angela Merkel 393 Winning Women 397

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10 The  Anti-political Identities of East German Youth409 Redefining Class Consciousness: The Uniform Socialist Education System 413 Not-so-free “Free-time”: FDJ and the Jugendweihe 421 “Leave Us Kids Alone”: Finding Voice Through Music 429 From Voice to Exit: Normalos, Avantis, Gruftis, Punks, and Skins 435 Writing for the Panzerschrank at the Central Institute for Youth Research 444 Through the Looking Glass: Unification and Normative Loyalty 451 “Be careful what you pray for …” 462 11 No Country for Old Men: Second-Class Citizenship and its Discontents475 The Double Bind of Military Machismo 478 The Treuhand Versus the “Heroes of Labor” 485 A Clash of Male Cultures: Eastern Underlings, Western Bosses 492 Backlash: Far-right Populism and the New Misogynists 495 Relative Deprivation: Second-Class Citizenship and the “Unhappiness Curve” 502 Working-Class Men: Winning the Battle, Losing the War 507 12 The  Dialectical Identities of Germans United519 Caught in the Middle: Die Wendekinder  525 The Post-Turnaround Generation: Difference Still Matters 529 The Blessings of Late Birth 532 13 Epilogue: October 3, 2021539 Index545

Abbreviations

AfD BEK CC CDU CPSU CSU DA DEFA DFD EOS FDJ FDGB GSS IFM KoKo KPD MfS NVA NÖS PDS POS SDP/SPD

Alternative für Deutschland/Alternative for Germany Bund Evangelische Kirche/Evangelical Church Union Central Committee of the SED Christian Democratic Party Communist Party of the Soviet Union Christian Social Union (Bavaria) Demokratischer Aufbruch/Democratic Awakening German Film Company Demokratische Frauenbund Deutschland/Democratic Women’s League in Germany Expanded secondary school Freie Deutsche Jugend/Free German Youth Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund/Free German Trade Union Federation Gleichstellungsstelle/Office of Equal Opportunity Initiative for Peace and Human Rights Kommerzielle Koordinierung/Commercial Coordination Communist Party of Germany Ministry for State Security Nationale Volksarmee/National People’s Army New Economic System Party of Democratic Socialists Polytechnical school system Social Democratic Party

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ABBREVIATIONS

SED SMAD Stasi VEBs VK ZIJ

Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands/Socialist Unity Party of Germany Soviet Military Administration (occupation zone) State Security Forces Volkseigene Betriebe/“people’s own factories” Volkskammer/People’s Chamber Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung/Central Institute for Youth Research

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 10.1 Fig. 10.2 Fig. 11.1

Concentric model of identity Forms of exit, voice, and loyalty Vladimir Putin’s Stasi identification My personal Stasi file: Department XX excerpt Wende attitudes, unemployment and GDR affinity Achieving economic parity and internal unity Number and rate of unemployed workers in Germany, 1980–2019 (in %) Fig. 11.2 West/East vote shares in the Bundestag elections, 1990–2017 (in %) Fig. 11.3 Non-voters and AfD voters, Bundestag Elections 2009 and 2017

28 47 308 312 460 462 493 496 499

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 5.1 Table 5.2 Table 5.3 Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 9.1 Table 9.2 Table 9.3 Table 9.4 Table 9.5 Table 9.6 Table 9.7 Table 10.1 Table 10.2 Table 10.3 Table 10.4 Table 10.5

Average gross wages (east marks), according to labor sector, 1955–1988139 Annual food/nutritional consumption, 1955–1989 142 Possession of major household appliances (in %), 1955–1985 147 Out-migration from the SMAD/GDR to the Federal Republic, 1950–1961 167 Physical exits, 1961–1989 (including transfers from East to West Berlin) 174 “Resettlers” from East to West Germany, 1989 179 New entries in selected registers of associations, 1990–1996 211 Projected life expectancy in East Germany 219 Women’s employment across major economic sectors (as a proportion of total employment), 1970–1985 372 GDR women in political leadership positions, 1971–1985 374 Number of live births per woman, 1955–1989 380 Divorces initiated by women and men, 1960–1989 384 Children born to unwed mothers (% of all live births) 385 East-West unemployment rates, 1990–1996 (socially insured workers) 389 Women in state parliaments, 2012 (pre-AfD), and 2022 (with AfD presence) 396 Class backgrounds of students in higher education, 1960–1966419 Trust in the SED (in %) 447 Identification with the SED (in %) 448 Identification with Marxism-Leninism 450 Identification with the goals of the FDJ 451 xvii

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List of Tables

Table 10.6 Political orientations of youth, 1987–1989 Table 10.7 Dimensions of personal identity (in %) Table 10.8 Attitudes reflecting systemic versus normative loyalty; systemic, policy-oriented loyalty elements Table 11.1 Perceptions of the Bundeswehr and willingness to defend the GDR (in %)

458 460 463 483

List of Boxes

Box 1.1 Box 3.1 Box 4.1 Box 5.1 Box 10.1 Box 10.2 Box 10.3 Box 11.1

On the Perils of “Collecting Qualitative Data”: Holcolm’s Evaluation Laws National Anthem of the German Democratic Republic Understanding “The Plan” “Die Lösung”/ “The Solution” (Bertolt Brecht) The Ten Commandments of Socialist Morals and Ethics The Jugendweihe Oath (February 17, 1955) Typical Responses: ZIJ Surveys, 1989 “Eigentum”/“Property” (Volker Braun)

10 65 121 166 425 426 453 490

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Prelude to a German Revolution

The date was May 10, 1989, the place was St. Louis, Missouri. In less than two weeks, I would be moving to Washington, D.C., where I planned to investigate GDR-identity as it had crystallized across a span of four decades since its founding in 1949. I had already spent four years exploring the contours of postwar German identity as it had evolved among the cohorts born into the Western state, 1949–1989.1 I secured funding and outlined a research agenda in late 1988, uncertain at the time what barriers I would encounter in trying to unearth the official and unofficial dimensions of GDR state-consciousness in a closed socialist society, the German Democratic Republic. As one of my last formal duties in St. Louis, I attended a dinner hosted by the Goethe Institute featuring the prominent if querulous West German author, Günther Grass. Seated next to the guest of honor, I briefly described my upcoming project, to which Grass immediately responded: “Identity? Homeland? I believe that a homeland is something one can only define as that which one has lost.”2 Our casual dinner-party exchange came back to haunt me six months later. On November 9, 1989—that chaotic, champagne-drenched night during which the Berlin Wall suddenly came tumbling down—Grass’s definition of identity wedded to homeland assumed the status of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nearly twenty years of living and researching abroad have confirmed my belief that the concepts of Heimat and Identität are most easily defined from a distance. The pressures and distractions of day-to-day living at close range tend to obscure the contours of the larger picture. By contrast, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_1

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the ability to look back on past relationships and dependencies helps an individual to accord new weights to the influence each has exercised on her personal development. The opportunity to return to a place of origin, and possibly reminisce with those who stayed behind, yields a sense of the permanent and the transitional, the core and the peripheral elements of one’s personal identity. Time, distance, and lapses of memory usually render one critical of certain aspects and laudatory toward others, although the truth usually lies somewhere in between. Homeland is, more often than not, a place one “comes from.” Serving as Berlin’s Reigning Mayor, Willy Brandt sustained the moral courage of his people when the Wall suddenly went up in August 1961. As Germany’s first social-democratic Chancellor, he just as courageously dared to pursue East-West rapprochement under the rubric of Ostpolitik. The day after the Wall fell in 1989, he eloquently summarized the hopes of millions of postwar European citizens with the words, “Now that which belongs together can grow together.” My initial aim in writing this book was to challenge that proposition, to persuade the reader that the search for “German identity” did not end with unification. I argued back then that while the former SPD Chancellor had been a brilliant statesman, he was not an expert demographer: Had he reflected on generational change, his prognosis would have been a lot more pessimistic. By 1989, two-thirds of Westerners and three-fourths of Easterners had been born after World War II, meaning that most had never experienced a whole nation. Once the Wall fell, 16.4 million GDR citizens were expected to jettison the lives they had known, and to reassess how they had “arranged” themselves with the SED regime, how they may have suffered as its victims, and how they might best adapt to a new world. Over 61 million FRG citizens were ostensibly free to pursue business and politics as usual. My earlier study of generational differences in the old Federal Republic of Germany had nonetheless persuaded me that rather than ending a search for shared feelings of national belonging, the formal merger of two ideologically opposed states marked only the beginning of a new quest for deutsche Identität. This story of East German identity before and after the opening of the Wall is a study of identity lost, found, and reconfigured. But history is not a soliloquy. Any national narrative involves characters, places, events, multiple plot twists, a climax, and sometimes a denouement. The German Democratic Republic had all of these, but “the rest of the story” cannot

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be told unless and/or until Western Germans come to recognize that their own past and future is intricately connected to the experiences of the other side. Assessing the strengths and weaknesses of what used to be GDR-­ identity has been rendered no easier by the curious nature of my discipline: political science pits the scientific against the political, the normative against the empirical, and institutional imperatives against human components. In 1906 Arthur L. Bowley at the Royal Statistical Society (London) prescribed the first rules for determining a “representative sample,” a mechanism that has become the lifeline of political behaviorists everywhere. German identity nonetheless predates the existence of survey research techniques by a few hundred years, its core elements having been established by countless wars and regime changes. The relatively closed nature of GDR society made it virtually impossible for scholars to employ standard methodologies used to test the attitudinal waters in the West. This does not mean that East German officials prohibited any and all forms of public opinion data; it does imply, however, that one cannot take the existing data at face value. I was the first US-American to be accorded unlimited access to archival materials at the GDR’s Central Institute for Youth Research (ZIJ) in Leipzig. Prior to the so-called Turn-around (Wende) of 1989, the survey data generated there could only be accessed by SED Politburo members, select Central Committee departments, the Office for Youth Affairs in the Council of Ministers, and top officials of the Free German Youth League (FDJ). For better or worse (given the outdated copying facilities I encountered during my first two-week stay), I was also the last American to enjoy this privilege as a formal guest “during GDR times.” In accordance with provisions appended to the Unity Treaty, the ZIJ was abgewickelt, “wound down” and dissolved in December 1990. Several works drawing on the Leipzig data have been published since 1991, usually by former ZIJ researchers, but most texts have appeared only in German. This book attempts, inter alia, to provide a broader picture of the Institute’s longitudinal findings than is usually accessible to English-speaking readers. The experience of having both one’s “target-group” and “data base” officially cease to exist halfway through a research project is but one of the occupational hazards which have tested the mettle of East European analysts since 1990. Feeling quite blessed not by my “late birth” but rather by my good fortune at landing in the GDR when I did, mine was a very moving but also an extraordinarily chaotic research experience from the start.

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I had expected to encounter much distrust, if not outright official hostility toward a project as controversial as mine. Since its inception, GDR leaders had viewed the constructs of nation and nationality as very touchy issues, subjecting them to many ideological revisions. My contacts quickly trained me to employ the term DDR-Staatsbewußtsein [GDR state-consciousness] in all “identity” discussions with public officials. I arrived in East Berlin for preliminary talks the very week that hundreds of vacationing GDR citizens began to seek refuge at West German embassies in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw, August 5–12, 1989. To my great surprise, office doors opened, prominent SED officials offered to supply me with critical background materials and a few of them even treated me to lunch. The conditions I experienced during the exhilarating yet chaotic months of August 1989 through December 1990 have been replaced by routine archival visits on the part of younger scholars interested in GDR life. Though over thirty years have passed, I find it useful, on occasion, to remind ourselves just how fundamentally German conditions and life-styles have changed—not only in the eastern Länder but also in the “old” federal states. With amazing speed, an overwhelming majority of Eastern Germans embraced democratic processes as natural and good, despite forty years of socialization under an authoritarian regime. This book gives them long-overdue credit for this achievement. I can best illustrate these points by recounting my initial experiences in the field. On November 26, 1989, two weeks after the Wall had opened, I was escorted along the labyrinthine hallways of the building housing the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party. I passed by numerous uniformed armed guards en route to a prescheduled interview with Klaus Hoepcke, the then-Minister for Cultural Affairs serving the Politburo. Promised only half an hour to discuss the historical evolution and contemporary significance of “GDR state-consciousness,” I took the risk of addressing the obvious collective-identity crisis highlighted by the crowded embassy compounds. To my astonishment, Hoepke responded in a very personal manner to my questions about identity, extending the interview to an hour. Seven months later, as a PDS delegate in the first democratically elected parliament (Volkskammer, VK), he invited me to visit him at home in order to continue our discussion along with his wife and daughter. I did not receive his letter (which he had hand-delivered to the Academy for Social Sciences where I was occupying a dorm room) until four days after the proposed meeting. This was but the first of many “communication breakdowns” impeding my plan to conduct over sixty official discussions in the still-existing GDR.

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My efforts to secure interviews with members of the new parliament were Kafkaesque at best. Anticipating a dearth of xeroxing facilities at the Academy, I had brought along a hundred copies of a letter explaining my project and requesting interviews with VK delegates. Supported by the German Marshall Fund, I had been able to observe the elections first-hand in March 1990, but no comprehensive list of the new parliamentarians had been published prior to my April return. To compile a somewhat representative sample of prospective interviewees, I needed the names and addresses of all the new legislators. Landing in East Berlin on Tuesday, April 24, 1990, I headed for “the Palace of the Republic” on Wednesday, certain that such a list would be available six weeks after the election. Notified that the Volkskammer would convene at the end of the week (April 26), I hoped to post my letters before the legislators left the capital-city for a long holiday break. The uniformed men at the reception desk were unable to offer direct assistance, but they indicated that the delegates’ offices were located in the former Central Committee building. I rushed over to that once-intimidating complex that had been rechristened the House of Parliamentarians. Three uniformed men at the reception desk immediately demanded my “identification.” I handed over my passport, explaining in German who I was (a university professor from the USA, officially invited by the Academy of Social Sciences) and what I needed (a list of the new VK representatives and their contact addresses). They told me that the entire building was undergoing renovation; few MPs had moved into the offices, hence no such list was available. They urged me to return to the Volkskammer, housed in the (asbestos-­ permeated) “Palace,” colloquially known as the Ballast of the Republic. The guards there were surprised to see me back. Having “no information,” they felt no further obligation toward me and resumed their own conversation, though I did not leave. My outsider status afforded me a degree of courage: I insisted that someone in the building had to have some way of informing the people’s democratically elected representatives about upcoming committee meetings and plenary sessions. All I wanted was access to that person. They rang up a press liaison who agreed to meet me in the cloakroom. After twenty minutes, the young man consented to share his own list which classified the MPs by party only. Lacking access to a xerox machine himself, he graciously allowed me to hand-copy all 400+ names into my notebook. Two hours later I reappeared at the Palace reception desk with forty letters in care of selected members. Lacking

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specific addresses, I requested that they be placed in the parliamentarians’ mailboxes prior to the next plenum, set to convene a day later. One functionary accepted the letters, though the in-house mailroom was closed for the afternoon. It had been, I thought, a very productive day. The next morning I registered with the city police for my temporary residency permit, exchanged D-Marks for East Marks at the official 1-to-1 rate, and returned to the People’s Chamber. Given my need to track down each letter-recipient to set up individual meeting dates, I reiterated my request for phone numbers and contact addresses. The VK guards sent me back to the House of Parliamentarians, where that crew was likewise surprised to see me again. I re-explained the situation at length. Insisting they had no such list, they advised me to check with die Fraktionen [caucuses] at the headquarters of the individual parties. I spent all day Thursday being shunted back and forth from one site to another under the following refrains: ★★★  At the central CDU office: “You want addresses and phone numbers of our VK members? We’d like to have them ourselves! Try the House of Parliamentarians.” ★★★ Back at the HoP reception desk: “We don’t have ‘em. You have to go back to the party caucuses.” ★★★ At the now smaller, back-door office of the SED-turned-PDS: “As you can see, they made us move. Maybe Herr-So-und-So can help you.” Herr-So-und-So found my project very interesting and told me he hoped to receive a copy of my book when it came out. Regretfully he had no addresses and phone numbers for his party’s VK delegates. ★★★ Back at the People’s Chamber: “No, [they] didn’t know where the Liberal Party had moved to. Maybe the SPD could help.” ★★★ Returning to the SPD headquarters: I had a long conversation with an amiable office worker, Marianne Eschenbach who, in addition to offering me coffee, cookies and a place to stay, promised to arrange an interview with “her” MP, Angelika Barbe, confirmed the next day. Utterly frustrated, I returned to the House of Parliamentarians on Friday morning prior to appointments with Michael Brie (Humboldt University), the Wiens (two dissident film-makers from Pankow who were sheltering a Romanian refugee family in their three-room apartment), and

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Jens Reich, a cofounder of New Forum. Adopting a more Teutonic tone, I demanded access to MP addresses/phone numbers and remained at the reception desk for forty-five minutes. Now constituting something of a security risk, I was assured that an official responsible for “international relations” was on his way to appease (and/or dismiss) me. After another forty-five minutes of circular arguments, I squeezed out one name and (wonder of wonders) the room number for the managing officer of the CDU-caucus, Herr Viererber. I thanked the guards for their “assistance,” noting that I would return on Monday to contact the CDU. “You can’t do that,” they responded; “the holiday is coming up.” Yes, I noted, “May First (International Workers’ Day) falls on Tuesday, but I’ll be back on Monday.” They repeated: “You can’t do that. We will be closed. Wir haben vorgearbeitet” [“We’ve worked our hours ahead of time”]. Two and a half months after the elections, parliamentarians had no offices, no phones, no contact addresses. The building itself was a hazardous construction site, with old bugging devices openly visible in the walls—yet the “workers” would take an extra day off because they had built up “compensatory” time! It is easy to see why the interim government of Lothar de Maizière did not occupy a particularly strong bargaining position vis-à-vis FRG officials in Bonn during the critical phase of negotiations over the conditions for accession. When I reappeared at the reception desk at 8:00 a.m. on Wednesday after the holiday, I announced (disingenuously) that I had an appointment with Herr Viererber, located in Room 4135. Not knowing his actual whereabouts and having no phone contact, the guards presumed that I did have an officially scheduled meeting and allowed me to ascend in the pater-noster unaccompanied. I spent the next two hours roaming the halls of the former Central Committee, encountering huge piles of plaster and scaffolding materials but nary a worker. I eventually discovered not only the “real-existing” Herr Viererber but also Klaus Richter, Managing Officer for Bündnis’ 90, who immediately agreed to locate prospective interview partners in his party. Another chance discovery, a kindly secretary for the FDP, Frau Wagner, agreed to schedule interviews with three of “her” parliamentarians, after disclosing many of her own economic fears and identity concerns linked to the so-called Wende. A few days later, a CDU parliamentarian already back home in Dresden called to say he had seen his name atop a large stack of envelopes left in a reception room after the Friday VK plenum. My letters had not been distributed, much less on

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time, to legislative delegates; those who eventually did respond to my interview request would not reach me until weeks later. In short, each interview referenced in this book usually entailed serious detective work, as well as many hours underway with the decrepit DDR Reichsbahn. Colleagues who established their own scientific reputations in the field of GDR Studies prior to 1989 will appreciate the valiance of my struggle as well as the numerous historical and psychological ironies depicted herein. The need to “read between the lines” prior to 1989 infused all GDR-analyses with a higher degree of subjectivity than Western number-crunching analysts are inclined to tolerate. That special breed known as “GDR researchers” had to seek confirmation for their hypotheses across many sub-fields ranging from literature and history to social-­ psychology, organizational theory, and even psycho-therapy, resulting in a kind of multi-dimensional “validation” not enjoyed by those committed to quantitative analyses. Many survey experts unfamiliar with GDR history and culture nonetheless headed eastwards during the final months of the regime, hoping to ply their trade. Armed with batteries of questionnaires—a real improvement over the tanks and missiles of old—they sought to record the historical moment, to compare the identities of Western and Eastern Germans at their respective peaks, and to capture the essence of DDR-Identität before it assumed its proper place (as Friedrich Engels opined) in the “museum of human history, next to the bronze ax and the spinning wheel.” Having found what they deemed to be “statistically significant” political similarities (e.g., electoral preferences), too many underestimated the long-term impact of other socio-psychological variables. Their methodologies often precluded them from looking in the “right places” for deep-seated differences between the Germans of East and West, analogous to the proverbial town drunk looking for his wristwatch under the streetlamp, not because that is where he lost it but because that is where the light happens to be. My investigations over the last three decades began with a single, albeit complex question: Had forty years of division resulted in the formation of separate identities for the Germans of East and West, or was it possible that the historical bonds of “national consciousness” had transcended the horrors of war, the ignominy of defeat and the imposition of diametrically opposed socio-­ economic systems? This is the second of two books focusing on that question, based on my belief that separate identities had indeed emerged in the two Germanys as early as 1972. I remain convinced that one must first comprehend how far the peoples of a divided nation had grown apart

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between 1949 and 1989, before one can begin to figure out (with all due respect to Humpty-Dumpty) how to put them back together again. This book is divided into three parts. The first part (Chaps. 2 and 3) explores the historical and “national” components of GDR-Identity as it was officially defined and propagated over a span of forty years. The second part (Chaps. 4, 5, and 6) analyzes major factors that contributed to a growing gap between the national consciousness espoused by the Socialist leadership and average citizens’ willingness to embrace the official version prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It explores the transformation of identity among former GDR state officials, party functionaries and “true-­ believers.” Fired or forced into early retirement, many came to perceive themselves as outright “losers” following unification, though a few became surprisingly successful capitalists. The third part (Chaps. 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11) investigates the unofficial dimensions of East German identity which imprinted themselves on the personal consciousness of specific subsets of citizens, as a key to understanding, in the words of Christa Wolf, what remains.3 It explores an array of often erroneously conflated subcultures—writers, intellectuals, pastors, dissidents, women and youth—along with working-class men, whose identities have been marked by alienation and hostility since the political implosion of 1989, attracting them to the rightwing populist Alternative for Germany party.4 The concluding chapter is devoted to speculations about the orientations and identities of post-Wall youth (Third Generation East), and the curious failure of West Germans to recognize the extent to which their own identities have been reconfigured in the wake of unification.

Methodology Although my Ford Foundation grant had been approved in mid-1988, I was unable to commence work on this project exploring DDR-Identität until June 1989. My initial experiences in the field provided many important lessons about the lives and mind-sets of citizens made-in-the-GDR, a number of which can be used retrospectively to “defend” the eclectic methodological approach adopted here (see Box 1.1). For younger scholars whose curiosity has been piqued by the collapse of the GDR, my account will call forth the image of an academic stone-age or, at a minimum, tales of a Great Depression they did not personally witness. They may find it hard to imagine an industrialized country unable to provide visiting professors with the names of elected officials, much less to supply

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its citizens adequately with women’s underwear and other personal hygiene articles as late as the 1970s. As Holcolm noted in reference to “the perils of qualitative research,” the nine-to-five set need not have applied for an adventure such as this. Box 1.1  On the Perils of “Collecting Qualitative Data”: Holcolm’s Evaluation Laws

☺ Always be suspicious of data collection that goes according to plan. ☺  Research subjects have also been known to be people. ☺ The evaluator’s scientific observation is some person’s real life experience. Respect for the latter must precede respect for the former. ☺ Total trust and complete skepticism are twin losers in the field. All things in moderation, especially trust and skepticism. ☺  Evaluators are presumed guilty until proven innocent. ☺ Make sure when you yield to temptation in the field that it appears to have something to do with what you are studying. ☺ A fieldworker should be able to sweep the floor, carry out the garbage, carry in the laundry, cook for large groups, go without food and sleep, read and write by candlelight, see in the dark, see in the light, cooperate without offending, suppress sarcastic remarks, smile to express both pain and hurt, experience both pain and hurt, spend time alone, respond to orders, take sides, stay neutral, take risks, avoid harm, be confused, seem confused, care terribly, become attached to nothing… The nine-tofive set need not apply. ☺  Always carry extra batteries and getaway money. Scholars who study authoritarian regimes recognize the methodological limitations inherent in the conduct of empirical research, irrespective of its specific ideological orientation. It is difficult to accumulate quantifiable data in countries which regularly prohibit opinion polls, falsify governmental statistics to glorify their own achievements, bar foreign researchers from their territory, and utilize secret police or criminal statutes to intimidate prospective interview partners. Scholars compelled by circumstances to rely upon qualitative methods are frequently called upon to “defend”

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their sources and strategies by quantitative experts whose objects of study are open, liberal-democratic systems. Decades after unification, I still view the findings of Western pollsters who “discovered” the East European states in 1989/1990 with skepticism. Individuals continuously socialized into hiding their real feelings about leaders and policies will not automatically shift to candid expressions of political self-interest, no matter how delighted they are to be asked, at long last, about their personal preferences. Recently liberated citizens usually have too much at stake to reveal their innermost political feelings, seeking to avoid charges of complicity with the old regimes or due to their collective need to please would-be foreign investors. My pre-1989 experiences in the realm of GDR research taught me to integrate many kinds of data, ranging from official parade slogans to anti-­ state jokes circulated among members of the underground. This study draws on books, newspapers, radio broadcasts, official documents, opposition leaflets, campaign materials, hand-copied surveys from the ZIJ, and on-site observations. My findings also derive from an exhausting yet exhilarating array of personal discussions, including 50+ in-depth interviews (lasting one to three hours each), executed at five key points throughout the transformational process. They included: the period of mass emigration in August 1989; the opening of the Wall, November 1989; the first free elections in March 1990; communal elections and preparations for the arrival of the D-Mark, April-June 1990; and the first all-German elections of December 1990. I completed roughly thirty interviews with members of the first democratically elected Volkskammer, two of whom subsequently became Ministers in the first all-German government under Chancellor Helmut Kohl: Rainer Ortlebb (Education), and Claudia Nolta (Women and Family). De Maizière’s Deputy Press-speaker, Angela Merkel, became Minister for Women and Youth, later responsible for the Environment and Nuclear Safety. Merkel then moved on to become Germany’s first woman Chancellor (2005–2021), while another interviewee, Joachim Gauck, subsequently served as Federal-President (2012–2017), after directing the agency responsible for processing Stasi files for ten years. More than half of my VK sample moved on to seats in the all-German Bundestag or assumed positions in the new Länder governments after 1990, though several then left the political arena to pursue other careers. The realization that all investigators respond to political phenomena on the basis of their own values and interests is not a barrier to solid empirical

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research. The questions I judge most essential to an understanding of GDR-identity cannot, for the most part, be answered on a quantitative basis. But hard data do have their place in a longitudinal study of this sort; this text utilizes insights compiled by Eastern experts of a quantitative bent, formerly employed by the Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung in Leipzig. The Central Institute for Youth Research was created in 1966 under the direction of psychology professor Dr. Walter Friedrich, who remained at the helm until its December 1990 dissolution. Subordinated to the Office for Youth Questions in the GDR Council of Ministers, the ZIJ’s tasks and structure were defined by way of the Ministerial Resolution of 26 February 1968. The Socialist Unity Party (SED), in cooperation with the Free German Youth (FDJ), retained for itself the power to approve the development of research emphases, the formulation of research plans, as well as the establishment of contacts between commissioned researchers and participating institutions. Scholars sought to influence the choice of methodologies by way of a limited number of seats on the Scientific Council. The latter consisted of delegates from the ZIJ, the communist youth league and the SED, named by the Director of the Office for Youth Questions. Resident scholars conducted over 400 investigations from the time of the Institute’s inception until its dissolution, including a battery of studies which sampled the mood of youth throughout the critical periods of 1989/1990.5 Administrators at both the Academy in Berlin and the Central Institute in Leipzig had learned one thing about the “free market economy” immediately prior to the arrival of the western D-Mark under the Currency Union (scheduled to take effect on July 1, 1990). They informed me that I would have to pay an “organizational use fee,” but neither was willing to accept the still-valid coin of the realm, the East-­Mark. My costs ranged from $100 for “tuition,” plus DM50 per night for lodgings at the desolate-looking Academy, to a charge of DM60 per week at the ZIJ. Never mind the fact that I had to cross paths with Academy employees to get to the restroom/shower at 6:30 a.m., and that all the lights in the building were shut off on weekends. When the concierge took a break, or left his/ her post for unexplained reasons, the overnight “house-guests” found themselves locked in for lengthier periods. This also happened to two of my very surprised West Berlin friends who had come to meet me there. I had neither a typewriter nor a xerox machine at my disposal during my initial stay in Leipzig, meaning that I had to copy most of statistical tables by hand—even though the ZIJ, according to official reports, met

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“all the requirements of modern social research.” Institute researchers relied on a typing-pool, allowing the government to control the dispersal of a potentially controversial document. I was never treated to a tour of the “computer facilities,” but it was easy to conjure up the image of “Hal” from the classic film, 2001, sitting in a basement next to the winter supply of coal brickets. The Institute’s unisex water-closet on our floor, always to be locked after use, afforded interesting insights into pre-war German plumbing techniques. Most of the materials placed at my disposal were in the process of being declassified, though they still bore the labels “Confidential Document,” “Confidential-Classified” or “Top-Secret Document.” Unfortunately, ZIJ co-workers had not yet completed the task of re-cataloguing newly declassified documents during my May 1990 visit. It was therefore difficult to locate many of the “top secret” documents, based on the registry of titles I was given. By the time I returned in November, the Institute’s dissolution was already imminent under the Unity Treaty. Realizing that they would be unemployed by mid-December, some 90% of the support staff no longer subscribed to the principle of a full working day. Only once did I succeed in locating the librarian at her designated workspace (7:30 to 11:30 a.m. on Wednesdays); when I requested access to the top-secret documents from the basement archives, she expressed surprise regarding my interest in “that old stuff.” I had less than twenty-four hours to examine several “historical” studies, uncovered two weeks before the Central Institute officially ceased to exist. Its data were transferred to the Deutsches Jugendforschungsinstitut (German Institute for Youth Research) in Munich and the Central Archive for Empirical Social Research in Cologne. The services of some eighteen former institute members were retained only through 1994. The perils of relying on official GDR-data, in general, and ZIJ data, in particular, are self-evident. First, there is the “non-representative” nature of earlier GDR-youth surveys. To some degree, this deficit reflects the state-of-the-art problems confronting behavioralists of decades past. For the most part, the ZIJ evaluators included an appropriate caveat regarding problems of statistical sampling in the introductory sections of their studies. Second, there is the politically “loaded” nature of the questions researchers were expected to pose (see Chap. 10). In addition to facing questions heavy with official terminology—as opposed to colloquial formulations which might have more clearly reflected their real feelings— young participants were limited to SED-sanctioned response options.

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Another qualification regarding ZIJ data stems from the fact that responses were solicited under a command system rather than on the basis of voluntary participation. Though researchers sought to guarantee anonymity by collecting classroom surveys into a large pile, it was always difficult to assess the sincerity of the answers provided, the contents of which may have been motivated by fear, by a concern for one’s university or career prospects, by a sense of duty-consciousness, or by direct teacher supervision. Attempts to verify individual responses with follow-up interviews would have resulted in further distrust, multiplying the number of disingenuous replies, although this method was used on occasion. Added to this dilemma is the fact that most GDR-youth would have been well-­ versed in “double-speak” by the time they were teenagers. Last but not least, there were the formidable problems of interpretation, replication, publication, and, ultimately, open discussion of the results. Consistent with its general self-glorification tendencies, the regime tolerated only those interpretations of data stressing that “the glass was almost full,” as ominous as the signs of youth discontent had become by the early 1980s. Though regularly denied permission to publish any data suggesting an erosion of systemic support, Institute members could, on occasion, lecture on their findings among “selected” publics permitted to discuss them, for example, FDJ functionaries. By the summer of 1989, a direct order from the Chief of the Office for Youth Affairs in the Council of Ministers barred all ZIJ analysts from discussing the deteriorating political climate publicly. That muzzle was only removed in the wake of the dramatic events of October/November, by which point it had already become impossible to reverse the course of GDR history. These serious qualifications notwithstanding, the Leipzig data do tell a rather astounding story. More important than the extent to which young survey participants protected themselves by voicing the party-line is the degree to which they did not, despite the negative repercussions most realized they might face. Surveys of the late 1970s testify to a consciously articulated loss of faith in the system, especially among young members of the working class. A comparable decline in support would not be observed among university students and party-political youth until the mid-1980s. Educational Minister Margot Honecker, along with the Politburo members who were privy to these data, might have undertaken policy changes at the onset of the decade to ensure the system’s survival, yet they refused to see the handwriting on the Wall, real and proverbial. Thus, the

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beginning of the end of the German Democratic Republic was rooted in the hearts and minds of East German youth almost a decade prior to the Party’s “great fall.” This book is, to a large extent, an effort to tell youth’s side of the story (citizens now in their 40s and 50s), as well as to assess the role of generational change in precipitating the system’s collapse. My work challenges many Western publications which “explain” the GDR’s demise solely in terms of dictatorship and command-economy rationalizations. Drawing on Hirschman’s oft-cited framework of exit, voice, and loyalty, I attempt to determine which elements of East German identity have persisted under unification as a function of GDR-specific socialization mechanisms, the critical dimension of loyalty having been ignored by most authors exploring the exit-voice dynamics of the short-lived Wende phase. My analysis is grounded in the belief that residents of the young Länder need not abandon “East German” identity in its entirety in order to embrace new democratic institutions and values cultivated under the Western-dominated Federal Republic. I contend that the rediscovery of personal East German identities, a process mockingly referred to as Ostalgie [East-nostalgia], should not be viewed as an attempt to paint the GDR past as a golden one, nor as an attempt by former citizens to exonerate themselves from complicity with what was admittedly an authoritarian regime. As my earlier study of West German identity attested, residents of the old Länder have cultivated a Nestalgie of their own, that is, a yearning for the well-feathered western nest in the “unsullied” economic-miracle state they used to know. I see the rediscovery of differences among German citizens today as fulfilling a fundamentally necessary purpose: the renewed search for an East-identity is one phase of a process of taking pieces of the old-life—a multitude of familiar cultural norms, practices, behaviors, and tastes (their habitus, as Bourdieu would say)—and reassembling or reconfiguring them into new networks. In other words, it is a search for mixed modes of social capital—another way of describing one’s “loyalty” to old norms, behaviors, interpersonal relationships, and even tastes—that lend themselves to more effective use under new institutional conditions and new socio-psychological imperatives. As was true throughout the socialist bloc, the slightest changes in official terminology oftentimes signaled fundamental shifts in doctrine. Certain German terms are so fraught with historical significance that an English translation may render them trivial, however. The German term

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das Volk, for example, bears “organic” connotations ideologically at odds with its American equivalent “the people,” just as Heimat is culturally more significant than “home” as understood by geographically mobile Americans. Terms like this have been left as is, with profound apologies to non-German readers. I otherwise provide original East German terms, accompanied by an English equivalent; all translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own. It is to the official, historical, and ideological dimensions of DDR-Identität, propagated by the Socialist Unity Party across a span of four decades, that we now turn.

Notes 1. Joyce Marie Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations. Changing Attitudes towards the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998). 2. In his own words: “Identität? Heimat? Ich glaube Heimat ist das was man nur definieren kann, als was man verloren hat.” 3. This is the title of a literary treatment of Wolf’s own encounters with the Secret Police or Stasi in the late 1970s. The author’s decision to publish her account after the Wall fell led to charges of “opportunism,” followed by a sustained public assault on her literary accomplishments, led by conservative western male critics. See Chap. 7 for details. 4. Umbruch or implosion is the term some GDR experts prefer to use over the term “revolution” to describe the peaceful dynamics of democratic awakening and regime collapse between August 1989 and October 1990. 5. Among its more “historically” valuable survey holdings are a number of interval/panel studies initiated in 1969, under the titles STUDENT ’69, STUDENT ’79, and STUDENT ’89, the eastern equivalent of the West German Shell Studies.

PART I

Dimensions of the Dialectical Identity

Once upon a time, there was a country about which most people knew and probably cared so little that they only referred to it by its initials. It was the “so-called DDR.” Like other countries throughout history and across the globe, this one was created to pursue a specific set of ideals, derived from the not-so-happy history of the big and powerful country that had preceded it, which had also been German. It wanted to guarantee that this horrible history would never be repeated, so it adopted a new model for a perfect, peaceful society—and for a brief period it showed the promise of becoming die deutsche (anti-faschistische) demokratische Republik, 1945–1948. But human leaders aren’t perfect and, like so many countries, this one had a hard time living up to its ideals. Step by step, the theory became alienated from the praxis so, like many other governments, this one tried to win the hearts and minds of its citizens by using ever more boasting, propaganda and even coercion. Its rulers wanted the country to give birth to millions of “socialist personalities” in their own image and likeness. But the message became stale, the schools became authoritarian and the goods were not always delivered, during this phase of die deutsche demagogische Republik, 1949–1970. As a result, the people became more apolitical, as they pulled into their private niches; the state grew ever more distant, but they found a quiet middle ground. They invented an historical compromise they called an “arrangement.” The people would go to May Day and Founders’ Day parades (most big governments love parades on their birthdays) and the state would leave them more or less alone to struggle through the periods of scarce consumer goods, albeit with lots of subsidies. Contradictions were, after all, just part of

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the process of growing up to be real-existing socialists, and this was clearly the phase of die deutsche dialektische Republik, 1971–1987. The contradictions worsened, however, when the people in the Land of Resistance Fighters woke up one day, turned on their televisions to watch the evening news, on West-TV, and discovered that other countries were changing all around them, opening their borders, even printing real-news in their newspapers. DDR citizens wanted to know why they couldn’t at least be as free as the Hungarians if they couldn’t be as rich as “the other” Germans. So they headed out, in many new places, for a different kind of parade with lots of candles; with lots of candles; only this time their children—actually the children of the children of the comrades who had built the country in the first place—pointed their fingers and called out loud that the emperor was wearing no clothes. Their parents were a little ashamed, not of their leaders’ nakedness (after all, they had fought for nudist beaches) but of their own silence all those years, and suddenly they became “the people” in die deutsche dramatische Republik, 1988–1990. Now some people wanted to ask important, theoretical questions, after their own local parades, to talk about rebuilding their country based on a new set of ideals. Most of their neighbors didn’t want to wait around for the answers, however. Instead they packed their camping gear, got into their funny little cars called Trabis (for Traurige Arbeiter und Bauern Initiative/ The Sad Initiative of Workers and Peasants), and following the wisdom of a famous cigarette commercial, they shouted “Let’s go West.” Though our story does not end here, this phase could be labeled die deutsche demolierte Republik, which dominated the headlines from March 18 to October 3, 1990. Not too long after the Wall came tumbling down, some people who looked into their academic crystal balls and psychology textbooks predicted it would take at least a decade for our sheroes and heroes to learn how to live happily ever after in their glittery new republic. Five years into the internationally celebrated marriage of the richly attired Western King and the somewhat haggard-looking Eastern princess, the new people living in the Bigger (though not totally Better) Kingdom started to ask, in the words of their own Cassandra, “What remains?” They started to wonder ostagically, so to speak, why they were being treated like strangers in a strange land. Too many had lost their jobs, their benefits, their Heimat and often, quite literally, “a home of their own,” in this new, deutsche däprimierte Republik, 1991–1998. Now Old King Kohl was not such a merry, bold soul by the end of his reign, so he and his minions hardly noticed that something amazing was taking place in the far-away parts of his kingdom. The people started talking out

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loud, or talking to each other, while thinking about tactics and tricks they had used to make their homeland better “in GDR times,” as they were wont to say. Remembering their clubs, their grill- and other kinds of parties, their Handys, their days and (k)nights of the Round Table, they took one last look in the Spiegel (surveys); although the photo still wasn’t very flattering, they suddenly realized that they had lost their ugly Duckmäuser demeanor and were anxious to become a deutsche dynamische Region, 1999–2007.1 That would have been a happy ending, but the dark clouds of an EU financial “shit-storm” (as the Germans say) spread across the land. Shortly thereafter many new people from foreign lands began pouring into the Kingdom in search of peace and freedom, just like these Germans had done many years ago. But some of the citizens grew afraid and resentful, so they took to the streets once again, chanting “we are the people.” But this time they started voting for angry, taboo-breaking politicians who reminded too many others at home and abroad of the deutsches dämonisches Reich that had caused them to be divided in the first place. Unlike most fairy tales, this is not the end of his- or her-story, so let us continue the tale.

Note 1. An earlier version of this tale appears in Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2010. “Unification and the Law of Unanticipated Consequences,” German Studies Review 33 (3): 483–488.

CHAPTER 2

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: The Theoretical Parameters

Im traurigen Monat November war’s,        It was in November, that dreary month; Die Tage wurden trüber,           The days were growing shorter; Der Wind riss von den Bäumen das Laub     The winds ripped all the leaves from the trees; Da reist’ ich nach Deutschland hinüber.      And I came to the German border. Und als ich an die Grenze kam,       And as I reached the borderline Da fühlt’ ich ein stärkeres Klopfen     A stronger pulse began In meiner Brust, ich glaube sogar       To throb within me; down my cheeks Die Augen begunnen zu tropfen…      I think some teardrops ran.                      Heinrich Heine,                    Deutschland, ein Wintermärchen1

More than three decades have passed since the two parts of a long-­divided German nation became one, but even thirty years may not be sufficient to make or break an identity, be it personal or national. Generational studies suggest that it takes at least twenty years for people to sort through a myriad of attitudes and behaviors in a conscious effort to determine which identity traits are worth preserving, and which ones are best pitched into the recycling bin of historical memory.2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_2

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This book began as a narrowly defined effort, prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, to pinpoint the quintessential components of a divided national identity that rendered the German Democratic Republic a separate state across a span of four decades. Its initial purpose was to determine the extent to which specific elements of that identity contributed to, or worked against, the leadership’s efforts to legitimize the GDR’s existence in the eyes of its own citizens between its founding in 1949 and the 1989 Wende [Turn-around]. In the mid-1990s, I expanded my framework to investigate not only the officially mandated “GDR-identity” but also key features of a little studied, unofficial “eastern” (ostdeutsche) identity likely to shape the formation of a new all-German identity following unification, a topic I have followed for three decades. While the German Democratic Republic ceased to exist as a political entity on October 3, 1990, a de facto merging of the Eastern and Western cultures had yet to occur by the time of the 2017 national elections. Ironically, it took the rise of a rightwing populist party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), to force prominent elites in the “old” Federal Republic to recognize the import of psychological factors in the unification process. The potential sources of ongoing division I had emphasized in 1990–1991 resurfaced in public debates around 2014, following the rise of the PEGIDA movement (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident) in Dresden.3 The fact that the official GDR-identity lacked deep roots among average citizens no doubt contributed to the state’s rapid demise after the dramatic opening of the Wall on November 9, 1989. The extraordinary pace of unification denied Easterners a chance to assess their attachment to familiar elements of everyday GDR culture and values, however, undercutting their ability to voice mounting dissatisfaction with the path that “unity” had taken. The GDR’s forty-year history embodies a complex interplay of continuity and change, successes and failures. Like every society, this one was fraught with contradictions and conflicts, both class- and gender-based. But eastern political culture also evinced its own forms of accommodation, bargaining, and social solidarity. Its dissolution was simplistically characterized in many quarters as the triumph of capitalism over communism, and/or freedom over dictatorship. But identities do not die as a consequence of new borders and a new currency alone. Were this the case, there would have been no rational basis, and certainly no socio-cultural foundation for a “reaffirmation” of national unity after forty years of German division.

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At issue in this work is the staying-power of political culture. In his classic exploration of the Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Barrington Moore Jr. ascertained that human beings have frequently been “punched, bullied, sent to jail, thrown into concentration camps, cajoled, bribed, made into heroes, encouraged to read newspapers, stood up against a wall and shot, and sometimes even taught sociology,” under many types of regimes seeking to preserve or transmit a particular value system.4 This eclectic array of socialization methods, some more coercive than others, implies that the goal of any state is not only to promote its official political culture but also to have it internalized at the level of individual consciousness. Political culture and national identity are synergistically linked, but the de jure elimination of the former does not produce the immediate disappearance of the latter. Indeed, the difficulties inherent in the inculcation of a new identity tell us how hard it must be to wipe out old ones propagated by regimes of some duration. The significance of political culture has been emphasized by political theorists and would-be social engineers of many ideological persuasions, ranging from Vladimir Lenin, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Margarete Mead, and Ruth Benedict, to Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Talcott Parsons, Gabriel Almond, and Sydney Verba. This is not to imply that analysts share a consensus as to its content and role in processes of societal change. At a minimum, a country’s political culture can be understood as the cumulative impact of identities developed at multiple levels of “citizen consciousness.” Devoting significant energy to the study of communist states, Archie Brown defined political culture as “the subjective perception of history and politics, the fundamental beliefs and values, the foci of identification and loyalty, and the political knowledge and expectations which are the product of the specific historical experience of nations and groups.”5 Created after 1945 as a consequence of World War II, the socialist states of Eastern Europe were extremely ambitious in their efforts to redefine political culture “from above.” Seeking the total transformation of political, economic, and cultural values, the fledgling regimes faced the awesome task of introducing new historical-cultural traditions and “personalities” consonant with their own ideologies, in hopes of securing popular recognition of their new borders and institutions. The extent to which they were successful remains an open question, given the electoral comebacks of “reformed” socialist parties across Central/East Europe through the 1990s, followed by shifts to the radical right over the last decade. As one skeptical observer cautioned decades ago,

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what the scholarship of comparative communism has been telling us is that the political cultures are not easily transformed. A sophisticated political movement ready to manipulate, penetrate, organize, indoctrinate, and coerce and given an opportunity to do so for a generation or longer ends up as much or more transformed than transforming.6

While efforts to induce political-cultural change from above often fall short of the founders’ ideals, this does not preclude the possibility of fundamental, albeit incremental changes entrenching themselves from below over a period of many decades. Focusing on post-war Eastern Europe, Frank Parkin emphasized the transformation of values as a function of institutional power: “Values are much more likely to flow in a ‘downward’ than an ‘upward’ direction; consequently moral assumptions which originate within the subordinate class tend to win little acceptance among the dominant class.”7 Moore disputed this claim, maintaining that a complete set of values does “not descend from heaven to influence the course of history.” Political culture never serves as “more than an intervening variable’ [operating as a filter] between people and an ‘objective’ situation’, made up of all sorts of wants, expectations, and other ideas derived from the past.”8 It does so in ways that emphasize certain aspects of the objective situation by screening out others, a process involving selective memory. Alternatively, Brown posited that the ostensible (in)effectiveness of measures to secure political-cultural change may not be a question of an upward/downward flow but rather the result of minimal interaction between one (official) value system and another dominant or “peer” culture. New values, particularly those conducive to official aims, may be fused with old ones, while old ones might be reinterpreted and renamed. One should not presume that all cases of ostensible continuity involve processes of direct transmission. Indeed, revolutionary change in the political system opens up the possibility of dissonance between the political culture and the political system… That is to say, there may be a prolonged failure on the part of the controllers of institutional power to socialise the population into acceptance of the official political culture. In such a case, a crisis triggered off by other stimuli ­(frequently but by no means always economic) may produce a more open political situation in which the strength and direction of political change may be strongly influenced by the dominant—and no longer dormant— political culture.9

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The speed of “acceptance” and the degree to which the parameters of a new political culture will be internalized depends, in part, on the nature of citizens’ historical break with the pre-existing culture. Mary McAuley stresses the interactive patterns between “past” and “present” factors, including but not limited to “the speed of economic change, the type of economic change, the role of the state, the relationship with other states, intellectual movements within and outside the country, historical memories,” as well as collective religious orientations.10 A third variable influencing this process derives from the forces of demography, that is, the proportion of a population that has reached political consciousness before, during and after transformative events have occurred. Last but not least, widespread absorption of a new paradigm of values, expectations, and behaviors may well depend upon the methods of inculcation employed in political (re)socialization. This study is rooted in a concept of identity that is explicitly multi-­ dimensional in character, incorporating objective as well as subjective features of East German political culture. It does not equate identity with the sentimentally driven “love it or leave it” mentality (alias patriotism) that typifies many US-American discussions of this topic. The construct utilized here covers a much wider range of behaviors and attitudes, some more inwardly directed than others. Like political socialization, identity-formation is an ongoing process, subject to many agents and environmental influences. Although this process takes place at many levels simultaneously, two are particularly important for the purposes of this study. The first entails official, collective culture which determines that dimension of identity best understood as “state consciousness.” This is the meaning ascribed to the term GDR-identity throughout this book. Secondly, identity is shaped at the unofficial, individual or personal level, in the realm Christiane Lemke and others have labeled “peer culture.”11 In this context, I apply the label East German identity. Both identity types usually encompass a spectrum of distinctive or competing sub-identities (women vs. men), ranging from an “all-German identity” or a specific “GDR-consciousness,” to regional and/or local micro-identities (e.g., as Saxonians or Berliners). The identity traits acquired at each level are interactive as well as cumulative; while distinguishable in theory, they are much harder to disaggregate in practice. This investigation nonetheless rests on these analytical distinctions, highlighting the key components of GDR-identity as it was officially defined, collectively cultivated and individually experienced throughout the

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course of East German history. Although I do not posit a perfect correspondence between identity variables mandated at the political-systemic level and those observed at the level of human psychology, I believe that it is only by establishing linkages between the two that one can understand persistent tensions between Eastern and Western Germans, which is essential to facilitating their alleviation. Identity paradigms developed by social-psychologists can serve as effective heuristic devices in untangling the processes of national identity-­ formation.12 Observing in 1935 “how often in the last few years has one heard… that it is quite inexplicable how the Germans could have changed so completely in so short a time,” Karl Mannheim noted that an analyst misinterprets psychological trends when he (sic) speaks of a sudden change in national character… The most serious mistake… is to select a single man as his criterion, and then to regard him as the incarnation of all the changes that have taken place. If the different phases of the psychological changes that have been diffused throughout a large community are projected onto a single individual, one has only to multiply this figure a millionfold in order to pride oneself on being a social psychologist. In this case it is clear that the cardinal mistake was in creating the fiction of a uniform change passing steadily over an entire nation, instead of making a concrete analysis of social mechanisms. If we are to avoid mistakes of this kind we must divide this complex transformation into its successive phases, with a different social mechanism at work in each. [my emphasis]13

Mannheim’s caveat remains relevant for any scholar seeking to capture the essence of German national character in the post-war and post-Wall eras. We cannot assume that the GDR’s past efforts to instill a new “national” identity by fiat were uniformly effective among various segments of its population. Nor can we presume, as many post-unity prognoses did, that market forces will move Eastern Germans in equal measure to embrace the prevailing western or FRG-identity as their own. This chapter begins by outlining a concentric model of identity developed in conjunction with my earlier work on West German identity, before and after the fall of the Wall.14 Building on developmental and “operant conditioning” theories advanced by Abraham Maslow and B. F. Skinner, I explore key dimensions of individual-psychological, social-interactive and national-collective identity. I then consider the ways in which the abrupt demise of an official GDR-identity—but not its day-to-day counterpart, East German identity—has redefined the significance assigned to each dimension over the last three decades.

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I then revisit the exit/voice/loyalty paradigm first espoused by Albert O. Hirschman in 1970 and revived after 1989/1990 to explain the sudden collapse of the GDR. I argue that Hirschman’s analytical framework, rooted in Western, market-oriented and liberal-democratic assumptions, overlooks critical forms of social communication stressed by Karl Deutsch, that is, other types of exit and voice which evolved in response to the GDR’s one-party dominant, command-economy system.15 I contend further that Western bias led many post-Wall analysts, including Hirschman, to neglect the paradigm’s critical third dimension, loyalty. As a result, many scholars and political officials seriously underestimated the “staying power” of eastern identities at the level of peer culture. I attempt to remedy that miscalculation by linking loyalty to the concept of social capital, an ingredient I view as absolutely essential to the internalization of democracy among East German citizens in the nation united.

A Concentric Approach to Identity Theory Identity begins with the individual, adding “layers” as it moves into the larger communities of family, neighborhood, city, state, and nation. To grasp the phenomenon of national identity in its entirety, it is helpful to imagine it as concentric in nature (Fig. 2.1). The innermost circle encompasses the psychological needs of the individual. The second circle involving specific patterns of social interaction may impose external limits on individual identity but can also provide alternate sources of self-worth. The outer circle finds identity moving beyond a personalized “community” to a legal or historical collectivity known as the nation-state. Academic scholarship often construes the forces operating within each of these circles as the province of a particular social science. There is nonetheless much to be gained by exploring competing or complementary frameworks for “identity” borrowed from more than one field. My search for East German identity therefore builds upon the works of political scientists, literary critics, social-psychologists, psycho-historians, and even psycho-therapists. Circle One: Identity as the Bio-Psychology of the Individual The acquisition of cognitive and affective orientations toward the self has long occupied the attention of psychologists and psycho-analysts ranging from Piaget to Freud. Theories regarding the contextual and interactional components of self-identity are less well-developed yet all the more

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Fig. 2.1  Concentric model of identity

interesting because of their inherently dynamic character. A broader interdisciplinary perspective helps to bridge the gap between individual and collective identification processes. An individual’s search for identity involves questions of personal as well as political motivation. In his classical work on motivational theory, Abraham Maslow posited five categories of human needs comprising a “hierarchy of relative prepotency.” Once each class of needs is satisfied, new and higher needs are expected to emerge which then come to dominate the individual [or collective] organism.16 In ascending order, the scale consists of basic physiological or sustenance needs, safety or security needs, belonging and love needs, esteem or status and independence needs and, finally, the need for self-actualization. Implicit in Maslow’s theory is the notion that neither woman nor man can be satisfied “by bread alone.” Humankind possesses an innate desire to advance from one level of the scale to another, but the quest for a sense of belonging is not inherently at odds with a striving for greater independence; the former serves as a precondition for the latter. Maslow anticipated the rise of a “new discontent and restlessness” in the face of a

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repressed “desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”17 A fundamental thwarting of these needs would “give rise to either basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic needs,” and possibly to severe traumatic neurosis.18 The latter is reflected in certain psychological “deformations” affecting particularly sensitive or politically persecuted individuals (but certainly not all citizens) under the old GDR regime.19 Desire alone will not enable an individual to attain a state of physical and psychological well-being. Each person must discover and engage in “functions furthering the interchange between organism and environment,” known as behavior.20 Not all behaviors move people toward their desired end of self-actualization; some can even prove counter-productive, causing humans to pursue a strategy B. F. Skinner characterized as “selection by consequences.” Drawing on patterns of biological evolution, Skinner traced persistent modes of human behavior back to the first molecule that managed to reproduce itself and prevail against the rest. Other organisms followed, whose reproduction occurred under ever more diverse and, in part, adverse conditions. The environment played a determining role in the genetic endowment of biological functions, rendering an organism most likely to survive/thrive under conditions equivalent to those underlying its selection. Hence, “the definition or identity of a species, person, or culture” is transmitted from one generation to the next to the degree that select behaviors are reproduced as part of an individual’s repertoire.21 Skinner held that successful reproduction over time depends on two processes enabling organisms to acquire behaviors appropriate to subsequent changes in the environment. The first is known as respondent (Pavlovian) conditioning, whereby responses pre-programmed by natural selection can be redirected and controlled by new stimuli. The second process is operant conditioning, whereby events immediately following new stimuli serve to strengthen or reinforce new responses. This method amounts to “selection in progress, resembling a hundred million years of natural selection or a thousand years of the evolution of a culture compressed into a very short period of time.”22 To the extent that human behavior is primarily social in nature, other members of the species provide one of the most stable fixtures within a given environment. “Imitation” of others is critical to reinforcement and thus to the perpetuation of a behavioral repertoire; contingencies inducing one “organism” to perform in a certain way will generally impel others

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to behave in the same manner. Thus, “by taking advice, heeding warnings, following instructions, and observing rules, [humans] profit from what others have already learned. Ethical practices are codified in laws, and special techniques of ethical and intellectual self-management are devised and taught.”23 Codification of behavioral rules, based on the collective experiences of preceding generations, secures the survival of the species. Human beings nonetheless differ from other species by virtue of their verbal capabilities. Their capacity for voice, Skinner observes, gives rise to a further mode of selection by consequences embodied in social environments: “A culture evolves when practices originating in this way contribute to the success of the practicing group in solving its problems. It is the effect on the group, not the reinforcing consequences for individual members, that is responsible for the evolution of culture.”24 The quality of voice may be subject to modification under operant conditioning insofar as “the consequences of verbal behavior… are mediated by other people.”25 Skinner stressed that selection by consequences has not been sufficiently recognized as a “causal mode” of behavior in the realm of psychology or anthropology, an insight that also applies to political science. The reluctance to embrace operant conditioning as a societal determinant owes to modern scholars’ belief in the “voluntary” nature of human behavior, as a product of free will; nowhere is this image more evident than in the rational actor model which dominates many schools of political-economic thought. The notion that behavior is controllable without reference to a biologically imprinted “principle of mind” infers that a socio-cultural environment generates self-knowledge without the assistance of a collective consciousness. Stripped of gender, race, and class, the rational actor model presumes “the expendability of essences,” which political ideologies and religions nonetheless use to define “the significance of living.”26 For Skinner, the human variable assumes the form of an “initiating agent”: a constellation of individuals seeks to introduce new modes of behavior, either by instructing people how to respond to relevant contingencies or by imposing new “selective contingencies.” Skinner attributes a certain purposiveness to such intervention (Weberian Zweckrationalität), while setting aside the ethical questions it may pose: Contingencies are needed first of all to teach people to follow rules. People must first become effective listeners, and that means they must acquire all behavior that can be specified in rules if they are to do what the rules describe. Much more important are the contingencies under which they will continue to follow the rules once they have learned them.27

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Here Skinner introduces the concept of the contrived reinforcer. Historically speaking, there exist two fields in which general agreement has been reached that “contrived contingencies” are persistent if not imperative. The first pertains to the economic domain, the second to the political arena. Regarding economics, Skinner contends that early forms of production engendered “natural consequences”: Pay by the day or week is often mistakenly called reinforcement; its real function is to establish a standard of living from which the worker can be cut off … [insofar as] production in industry “depends in part on subordination, discipline, and acceptance of managerial authority”… The contrived reinforcer called money remains effective only when it has been exchanged for strongly reinforcing goods.28

Contrived reinforcement in the political realm can produce “frankly aversive” consequences: “when the power to punish is assigned to the government, the contingencies are more likely to be contrived and their shortcomings evident… Governmental practices tend to move farther and farther from natural, face-to-face contingencies.”29 The contrasting approaches adopted by Maslow and Skinner reflect the age-old debate as to the preeminence of “nature versus nurture.” For Maslow, the individual’s search for identity is internally driven, a basic component of human nature. For Skinner, the first step toward establishing personal identity is a reactive one, a function of external forces which accord more weight to the nurturing process. A third school, considered below, looks to identity-formation as a discrete process of individual unfolding that is embedded in a reciprocal relationship with the environment. Circle Two: Identity as Social Interaction According to Richard Logan, an “individual’s sense of self inevitably and necessarily reflects the general world views prevailing in a given era,” while a collectively shared sense of self can, over time, become “a ‘cause’ of subsequent cultural change.”30 From this contextual perspective, individual identity is rooted in developments through which “mental and behavioral events” come to be viewed as “historically situated constructions emerging from social process.”31

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Recognizing that identity-formation requires a differentiation between self and other, Sheldon Stryker holds that the perceived distance between the two derives from one’s commitment to a unique configuration of “particulars.” One’s relationship “to particular others depends upon his or her being a given kind of person, i.e., occupying a particular position in a network of relationships, playing a particular role, and having a particular identity.”32 Neither the direction nor the intensity of one’s commitment to significant others must remain constant. What appears to be a change in identity (e.g., as individuals advance through the life cycle) may actually be a reflection of changes in the relationships between self and other. As befits the nature of the variable human, identity combines (and conflates) actual and ideal states of being in its efforts to link past, present, and future states of consciousness. Individuals who have experienced deep-­ seated identity problems in the past will sooner engage in a “problemistic search” for self than persons for whom identity implies a steady state. The more problematic that search has been in the past, the higher the degree of salience accorded to one’s present identity, and the more sensitive its bearer will remain to external or contextual evidence confirming or refuting that identity. As the German case illustrates, the link between “salience” and “self-consciousness” may (paradoxically) deny the bearer of a particular identity the chance to achieve a steady state. Circle Three: Identity as National Consciousness Likewise grounded in social interaction, national consciousness affords a more advanced manifestation of a prevailing “world view.” Psychologically linked and historically intertwined self-identity and national consciousness become mutually reinforcing. Stressing the interdependence of personal and political identity-formation, Mildred Schwarz argues: Out of the interaction of historical events, actions of government, activities, personalities, and ideologies of leaders, and conflicts and accommodations between interests, a nation emerges, and in so doing, acquires a distinctive character. This image of a nation then provides the focus for the personal identities of its members, sometimes lying dormant and other times becoming mobilized in the self-definitions of citizens.33

In a path-breaking study of post-war Germany, Alexander and Margret Mitscherlich addressed essential links between the character of the political system created in the Western state and the psychological orientations

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of individual citizens whose behavior had determined its substance prior to 1989.34 For these analysts, a sincere passion for democracy is rooted in a presumption of individual responsibility and tolerance. The stability of a democratic “consciousness” depends on the collective grasp of and citizens’ self-placement in history. Echoing elements of Skinner’s theory, the Mitscherlichs held that human history begins “way down below” and very early on. What is collectively defined as acceptable behavior becomes automatic over the course of a generation as morality becomes institutionalized. Once ensconced within the larger collective qua normative framework, an individual can only exercise freedom of thought to the extent that she exhibits an adequately developed “ego.”35 This does not mean that a stable society is atomistic in nature. On the contrary: the Mitscherlichs stressed that an individual can only develop self-sufficiency to the extent that her efforts to exercise self-initiative are grounded in a sense of empathy and participation, that is, in a willingness to share good times and bad times with those in one’s own environment. How an individual relates to her country at the socio-psychological level may or may not converge with the identification possibilities presented at the political-systemic level. The “identity” projected onto a given state by external actors, allies, and adversaries may be largely at odds with that state’s conception of itself. Herbert Kelman describes the theoretical linkage between these two levels of analysis, observing that a nation goes beyond the conception of “this is the way we do things” to a conception of “there is something unique, special and valuable about our way of doing things.” It is ideologizing of this sort that makes it possible to develop allegiance to and invest one’s identity in a collectivity that goes beyond in both space and time one’s primary group, face-to-face contacts.36

Explicitly “nationalist” sentiments are but one aspect of an individual’s relationship to the state, however. Even if nationalism is rejected or discounted at the affective level, citizens need to develop modes of personal involvement with the political system in order to satisfy a broad spectrum of material, institutional, and integrational needs. Involvement with the national system may range from symbolic and/or normative modes of identification, to functional types of commitment, respectively. Kelman outlines six patterns of personal involvement with the nation-­ state, grounded in what he believes to be sentimental or instrumental

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sources of “attachment” to the system, providing a foundation for “loyalty.” Sentimentally motivated individuals recognize the state’s right to allocate roles and impose duties based on their commitment to shared cultural values; this type projects a collective identity overlapping with one’s own value preferences. Secondly, citizens may derive identity from a commitment to the national system, perceived as an extension or enhancement of personal identity. A third form of identification stems from a commitment to the “sacredness” of the state, as an embodiment of an organic, holistic community. Alternatively, instrumental attachment emerges as a function of one’s commitment to particular socio-economic institutions. Another mode of national identification may result from a commitment to the institutionalization and effective performance of specific social roles. Finally, instrumental involvement with the system can also find roots in one’s commitment to “law and order” as desirable ends in and of themselves.37 The stability of the nation-state is secured through a balance of different types of “commitment,” more or less randomly distributed throughout the population. Personal attachment ensures a measure of political legitimacy and continuity to the extent that it stimulates further involvement with the system. Correspondingly, “involvement” or participation may generate a greater sense of collective consciousness, enhancing the likelihood that mobilized individuals will identify with the state that has provided participatory opportunities. As conventionally understood, the bonds of collective qua national consciousness are rooted in a common language, ethnicity, religion, and matching customs, usually within the framework of a shared history.38 The uniqueness of the German search for identity after 1945 owes to the fact that the creation of two separate states required not the evolution of common bonds but rather the dissolution of pre-existing ethnic, cultural, and historical ties. In this respect, the stages of collective consciousness-building in the two post-war states of Germany were reversed, or at least subject to a qualitatively different dynamic than the one usually projected by classical theories. As Kelman observes, the push from state to nation may violate the ideal model of the modern nation-state, which is presumably based on an already existing sense of national identity, but it is not all that inconsistent with historical precedents. Whether such a push will succeed… depends on the extent to which the state contains a well-functioning society with members who are interdependent and whose needs and interests are adequately met.39

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This implies that instrumental forms of “attachment” can provide a measure of stability in the absence of sentimental ties during the initial stages of nation-building. It moreover suggests the existence of a symbiotic relationship between the processes of identity-formation and political legitimation, as mirrored in the diverging experiences of the two Germanys from the 1950s through the 1970s. On the one hand, the perception of the state as representative of national unity can compensate for failures to meet people’s needs and interests [GDR]. On the other hand, the perception of the state as meeting the people’s needs and interests can compensate for a lacking sense of national identity, and can in fact help to create such an identity [FRG].40

In most cases, the nation-state serves as the institutional embodiment of a common national consciousness, albeit one encompassing many types of collective consciousness within a given territory. The German language is replete with terms seeking to draw fine yet significant lines among competing modes of collective consciousness or, alternatively, to blur ultimate distinctions among those types. At different points in their separate histories, the leaders of both post-war states invoked the terms Kulturnation [cultural nation], Staatsnation [state-nation], Nationalbewusstsein [national consciousness], Staatsbewusstsein [state consciousness], and Bewusstseinsnation [nation of shared consciousness], in an effort to highlight, refute, or reestablish the ties that divided and bound them. To those who possess “normal” national identities, these distinctions appear to be a question of semantics. As regards the constitutional self-­ identities projected by the two Germanys between 1949 and 1989, however, these constructs were sooner dialectical in character. Each country’s process of self-identification and self-determination of “national” interests, geared toward a repudiation of “the other,” lay at the very heart of its own concept of political legitimacy.

The Circles Broken: Exit versus Voice If identity can be construed as the cumulative, concentric product of multiple forms of social interaction, what consequences can we expect when any one of the accustomed circles is fundamentally redefined? Under what conditions might the other “layers” of identity persist, adapt, or acquire new meaning?

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Long before the Wall fell, Albert O. Hirschman developed a theoretical framework that has been widely used to analyze individual responses to processes of systemic decay, neatly characterized in terms of exit, voice, and loyalty. Exploring the operations of business firms, large-scale organizations, and nation-states, Hirschman observed that all three were likely to experience occasional lapses in rational, efficiency-oriented, or legally directed behavior.41 Sharing a tendency to develop “more or less permanent pockets of inefficiency and neglect,” all societies display a certain measure of tolerance toward dysfunctional performance, leading them to ignore or avoid significant opportunities for self-correction.42 He then analyzed the respective merits of two mechanisms, exit and voice, which could alert primary decision-makers to the need for corrective action, in order to ensure institutional survival and recovery. Its exquisite simplicity rendered the exit, voice, and loyalty paradigm very useful for experts’ intent on explaining cycles of decline and recovery after 1970. Its metaphorical qualities moreover led many, including Hirschman, to use this framework to “explain” the breathtaking turn-­ around witnessed in East Germany in 1989.43 The GDR case affords an intriguing opportunity to reexamine pendular swings in the relationship between exit, voice, and loyalty, given the regime’s deliberate attempts to manipulate all three factors over a period of forty years. I contend, however, that the paradigm itself, rooted in Western norms, is subject to challenge once we move beyond the exceptional period of 1989–1990. I interpret die Wende as the culmination of cross-cutting “performance lapses,” coupled with the quintessential impact of generational change. The increasing tendency of disgruntled individuals to “vote with their feet” between 1949 and 1961 led the government to build a Wall, terminating the right to travel or depart for all but the most loyal—or most troublesome—citizens until 1984. According to Hirschman, when exit ceases to exist as a real option, voice is expected to carry the entire burden of alerting “management” to its failings. Yet voice was also an option denied to most citizens under the authoritarian state. As originally conceptualized, loyalty was assigned a secondary role in individual responses to decline—deemed significant only to the extent that it either inhibited or promoted a willingness among citizens/consumers to notify key decisionmakers of critical lapses in performance. As this book demonstrates, however, it was sooner the absence of loyalty which fueled a propensity for voice among the GDR’s successor generations. The relationship between voice and exit was a dialectical one that ultimately induced the SED state to

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accept emigration as a means of undercutting direct protest which, in turn, generated new forms of voice. My purpose in revisiting Hirschman’s work is not to repudiate his theory but rather to give it new meaning by transcending the pro-western bias driving his core concepts. I begin with a treatment of the original framework, outlining the conditions under which exit and voice are normally expected to remedy problems of institutional decline. I then critique Hirschman’s efforts to re-apply the concepts of exit, voice, and loyalty to the chain of events resulting in the dissolution of the East German state in 1989/1990. Drawing largely on the experiences of advanced industrial societies, Hirschman posited that the task environment of any major enterprise or political entity is in perpetual flux. Indeed, the allegedly dynamic nature of free-market and/or democratic processes ensures a system’s vitality.44 Ongoing processes of environmental change compel the members of a political-economic system to remain “on their toes,” pushing them toward a realization of their potential. At the same time, the presence of surplus (slack) generally enables the polity to take a certain amount of mediocrity and deterioration in its stride. The capacity for overproduction inherent in industrial (more accurately, “capitalist”) society is construed as “the inevitable counterpart of man’s increasing productivity and control over his environment.”45 Yet the presence of surplus does not automatically alleviate problems of inequitable material distribution. Society as a whole may enjoy comfortable levels of growth and consumption without ensuring that all of its members acquire a fair or even minimum share, due to gender, race, and class—variables mainstream economists prefer to ignore. A similar argument can be made regarding the distribution of opportunities for political participation. In the real world, citizens rarely expend more than a fraction of their energies and resources on preserving “democracy.” Apathy is not without its advantages, however; in addition to ensuring a measure of stability, a certain amount of indifference, or non-participation guarantees the presence of reserves in times of potential crisis.46 This realization leads individuals committed to radical visions of social transformation to the conclusion “that only revolutionary changes can tap and liberate the abundant but dormant, repressed, or alienated energies of the people.”47 Organizational change often occurs as a function of crisis management, despite the fact that slack would afford some opportunity for “preventive maintenance” and/or experimentation. Leaders are alerted to the need

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for change by way of two distinctive processes, exit and voice. Under exit, “[S]ome customers stop buying the firm’s products or some members leave the organization… As a result, revenues drop, membership declines, and management is impelled to search for ways and means to correct whatever faults have led to exit.”48 Voice, by contrast, means that “the organization’s members express their dissatisfaction directly to management or to some other authority to which management is subordinate or through general protest addressed to anyone who cares to listen….” This impels leaders to engage again “in a search for the causes and possible cures” of member dissatisfaction.49 Hirschman expressed concern that reliance on the exit mechanism is too often restricted to the economic realm, while voice is understood primarily as a vehicle for political action. Rather than treat either as an exclusive set of corrective mechanisms, he proposed that societal needs would be better served by applying each device to both spheres of human activity. At issue are the circumstances under which one option comes to prevail over the other, or the conditions under which the two might be brought into play jointly to maximize societal well-being. Publishing his work well before merger-mania, downsizing, toxic debt swaps, or even gender equality had become household terms, Hirschman’s analysis was grounded in the belief that recovery could and would take place, provided that both mechanisms for securing managerial attention were used “with moderation.” He did not address the problem of realistic time frames for improvement. Exit offers a neat, albeit impersonal and indirect expression of discontent, provided that consumers can resort to some other market, or that citizens are indeed free to leave a particular state. Free-market advocates ascribe a certainty to the benefits of exit not matched by the probability of improvement under voice: instead of complaining about the inferior quality of Product A, customers are expected to display their power by purchasing Product B. This option harbors its own disadvantages, however. In order for exit to function effectively as a mechanism for self-­correction, there must be a mix of “alert” and “inert” clients. The former supply the feedback necessary for improvement, while the latter ensure a cushion in terms of the time and the resources needed to implement reform. Should too many customers decide to pursue the exit option simultaneously, an enterprise may try to counter significant revenue losses through increased prices. Alternatively, it may try to attract an equivalent number of consumers from some other supplier. In so doing, a firm may be able to secure an

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acceptable level of revenues/profits yet fail to correct the essential problem. Once slack and other sources of elasticity have been exhausted, the producer may face obsolescence or bankruptcy. Voice, by comparison, offers a messy or confrontational response to institutional decline, albeit a more direct one. Equated with interest articulation in the political realm, voice suggests a “blending of apparent contradictions.”50 Citizens must be vocal enough to provoke an official reaction yet deferential enough to allow elites to implement policy change without too much disruption. Hirschman attributes the creation of the United States to the millions who chose “the neatness of exit” over “the heartbreak of voice” across three centuries. The dream of “heading West” allowed Americans “more than most other people to think about solving their problems through ‘physical flight’… Why raise your voice in contradiction and get yourself into trouble as long as you can always remove yourself entirely from any given environment should it become too unpleasant?”51 Though not oblivious to the powers of myth, Hirschman’s interpretation of American history is a rather generous one: the exit option implicit in the slogan “go West” reflected more wishful-thinking than reality for large segments of the population; he mentions residents in the eastern states but not women and slaves. He claims that “the myth itself … provided everyone (sic) with a paradigm of problem-solving” long after the frontier had closed. It is paradoxical that a democratic society founded upon a belief in government of, by and for the people would look to voice as a residual mechanism, to be used in the event that the exit option was deemed unsuitable. In the case of open systems, it is often the threat of exit that renders the use of voice effective; the exercise of voice remains grounded in the possibility of resorting to exit at a later date. Non-exiters provide both a formal and informal source for the use of voice. Even under the best of circumstances, voice may be subject to formal constraints, for example, voting age. Like mass exit, too many people exercising too much voice over too many issues may hinder rather than help the process of recuperation, resulting in policy paralysis or system overload. As is also true of exit, the effectiveness of voice depends significantly on the status of its users: those at the top of the organizational hierarchy or membership pyramid are presumed to value “quality” more than those at the bottom. Despite occasional references to non-democratic regimes, Hirschman restricts his analysis to the impact of exit as a voluntary pursuit, not as a

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decision imposed from above. Under authoritarian regimes, its exercise may be construed not as cumbersome but as traitorous or even criminal. The latter are “notoriously unresponsive” to the warnings inherent in both the exit and voice mechanisms. It is unclear whether exit leads to comparable results when we consider the extent to which the action is or is not undertaken freely. The dynamics of the GDR Turn-around from August through November 1989 approximate the contingencies of citizen choice outlined by Hirschman at some levels but not at others. To exit, or not to exit? It is curious that this question precedes the question To voice or not to voice? in the economic context, given the free-­ market’s mantra that “the customer is always right.” The “easier” option may be the more radical one, insofar as most consumers have a hard time registering their complaints through voice, even if today’s manufacturers all want us to “connect” with them on Facebook, etc. The decision to stay with a particular product or provider “will presumably be taken only by those who wish for and expect A to recover its original superiority over B.”52 The optimistic consumer will “undergo the sacrifice of staying with A because he (sic) feels that he… is able to ‘do something’ about A and because only by remaining… will he be able to exert this influence.” Self-­ confident actors may decide “not to exit in the face of a clearly better buy,” based on the expectation that “the complaints and protests of others, combined with their own faithfulness” [my emphasis], will ultimately prove successful. A third possibility is that “others may not care to switch to B when they feel that they would soon want to switch back,” due to other costs involved.53 As these nuances suggest, the decision to engage in exit or voice is complicated by loyalty. Individuals who are moved to utilize voice must not only believe that it is possible to remedy a deteriorating state of affairs, but also share the conviction that the situation requires and merits a personal investment of time and energy. According to Hirschman, there are those who stay with A out of loyalty, that is in a less rational, though far from wholly irrational fashion. Many of these “loyalists” will actively participate in actions designed to change A’s policies and practices, but some may simply refuse to exit and suffer in silence, confident that things will soon get better. Thus the voice option includes vastly different degrees of activity and leadership in the attempt to achieve change “from within.”54

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The decision to “suffer in silence” cannot be equated with the exercise of voice; at best, it implies a case of non-exit, especially in cases where exit is prohibited. More importantly, many citizens may choose to stick with a system despite an ostensible performance gap, depending on their assessment of the chances for impelling the provider to get “back on track,” either through individual engagement, risk-taking or collective action. It also requires a personal belief that it is “worthwhile” to exchange the certainty of B, “available here and now” for whatever unknown reforms might ensue. The exit strategy is more easily pursued vis-à-vis the market—reflecting its impersonal “rational actor” bias—than in relation to primordial human groupings, for example, bonds involving family and tribe, church and country. Indeed, most trade-offs affecting human beings cannot be reduced to questions of the brand name-versus-generic sort. Few mothers have the option of “exiting” with respect to unpaid child-rearing processes, for example, even if their pursuit of paid employment would be a more “rational choice.” Loyalty may render the citizen-consumer less likely to abandon a given party or producer, but the question remains as to how this factor then warrants the effectiveness of voice. Hirschman’s 1970 contention that the probability of voice increases with the degree of loyalty felt by key members may apply to Western systems, but this was not true of high-ranking SED party officials and prominent East German intellectuals prior to 1990. Given the increasingly competitive nature of the environment, no political system can hope to survive indefinitely without an expanding core of faithful supporters. Loyalty nonetheless possesses its own internal logic and inherent limits, as Hirschman recognized in 1970: that paradigm of loyalty, “our country, right or wrong,” surely makes no sense whatever if it were expected that “our” country were to continue forever to do nothing but wrong… the expectation that, over a period of time, the right turns will more than balance the wrong ones, profoundly distinguishes loyalty from faith.55

Too much loyalty can prove just as counter-productive to institutional survival as too little, especially if it is of the “blind” sort. Correspondingly, loyalty may fail to unleash corrective impulses in systems where the sanctions against displays of non-loyalty are severe.

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A special, personalized attachment to a system redresses the balance between exit and voice by raising the cost of the former, by slowing down the outpouring of a system’s most “quality conscious” members. Those who know more and care more about its goals will stand by it longer “in the hope or, rather, reasoned expectation” that significant improvements can be effected from within or below. Largely subjective and emotional, loyalty is not an irrational trait; rather, it is one which “can serve the socially useful purpose of preventing deterioration from becoming cumulative, as happens all too frequently when there is no barrier to exit.”56 From this perspective, systemic fidelity constitutes an integrative as well as a legitimizing force, an idea implicit in Kelman’s classification of sentimental attachments to the state. It presumes an individual’s acceptance of the fundamental values, roles, and ideological parameters used (or imposed) for the purpose of structuring societal interaction. Processes of internal integration and legitimation occasionally necessitate a strategy of external delineation. Modern history has produced many divided countries exhibiting a strong resemblance to each other, based on a common past, a shared language, culture, or religion; Germany, Korea, and Vietnam are but a few examples. Such countries may find it necessary to demand greater loyalty on the part of their citizens than nation-states which stand alone, especially if the sibling states evince different levels of development. To the extent that countries “can be ranked along a single scale in order of quality, prestige, or some other desirable characteristic, …those at the densely occupied lower end of the scale will need loyalty and cohesive ideology to a greater extent than those at the top.”57 Founders of the German Democratic Republic sought to intensify citizens’ identification with the new state after 1949 through a deliberate demarcation of “self” from “other”—rendered concrete in 1961 by way of the Berlin Wall, which vastly undermined the loyalty of those below.58 Loyalty is not a quality that can be easily manufactured from above. As East European developments of 1989 testify, a widespread lack of personal identification with a given land can hold serious consequences for the stability of the system. It is precisely a measure of internalized or sentimental attachment which ensures a reservoir of legitimacy and stability during those periods when the state finds itself incapable of meeting citizens’ instrumental expectations, especially in times of economic crisis or social upheaval. Loyalty impels certain individuals to stay locked into the political system longer than might have been expected, just as it moves them to apply voice with more determination than generally demonstrated by the masses.

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The GDR offers no historical confirmation of the proposition that those who care intensely about the quality of a system, viz., “the most active, reliable and creative agents of voice,” will be among the first to exit in the case of significant decline. Hirschman’s argument that the early departure of quality-conscious individuals paralyzes voice “by depriving it of its principle agents” is also subject to qualification.59 There is little substantive evidence that those who left the GDR prior to 1961 fit the model of the would-be activist-reformer; indeed, some rose to prominent positions in the enemy-FRG state, like Egon Bahr and Hans-Dietrich Genscher. By contrast, prominent intellectuals who had been forced to flee under the Nazis actually returned to the East after 1949 (e.g., Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers) in hopes of building a new “anti-fascist, democratic” Germany. In short, the relationship between exit, voice, and loyalty was subject to many paradoxical shifts—some deliberate, some not—across the GDR’s forty-year history. Any attempt to limit this paradigm to a discrete set of events in 1989/1990 undercuts its extraordinary heuristic value for explaining real-existing identity trends over time. The erection of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 eliminated the exit option for average GDR citizens; rare exceptions through the 1960s involved officially negotiated efforts to reunite families or daring escape ventures. In November 1976, however, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) revoked the citizenship of dissident song-writer and poet Wolf Biermann, then touring in the West. This action set a precedent for the forced exit of many disgruntled intellectuals concerned about the “quality” of GDR socialism over the next several years. The FRG’s increasing willingness to “buy” the freedom of citizen openly declaring their lack of loyalty to the regime in the 1980s then provided SED leaders with new capital resources for alleviating “quality product” complaints voiced at home. This raises three questions regarding the loss of “creative agents” for restoration and reform. First, how did the elimination of voluntary exit for all but a few courageous souls or outspoken personalities affect the exercise of voice in the GDR between 1961 and 1974? Second, how did the practice of forced exit influence the exercise of voice inside and outside the GDR’s borders between 1975 and 1985? Third, how did growing tension between “exiters” and “remainers” as of the late 1980s unleash the panoply of voices that led not to internal reform but to a peaceful revolution? The GDR experience prior to 1989 supports Hirschman’s contention that the impact of exit may not be perceived by those in charge as matter of “utmost gravity,” especially if those who are potentially the most vocal

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are among the first to go. The exit option was not available to average East Germans, unless they were willing to risk imprisonment or death through illegal flight attempts between 1961 and 1984. Those who sought to exit were of no great concern to the regime during this period, unless they could be “bought out” by the West in exchange for hard currency. At the same time, the “permanently provisional” demarcation between the two polities signified by the Wall contributed to a consolidation of leadership in the East. By the end of the decade, political stabilization led to formal improvements in the relationship between the two Germanys (Ostpolitik). This gave rise to a liberalization of intellectual production qua voice— allowing some GDR writers to publish their works in the West, which were likewise “taxed” to bring in more hard currency for the regime. Prior to their systematic expulsion during the 1970s, GDR intellectuals sought to protest the restricted nature of “voice” in ways not immediately apparent to outside observers. Following the VIII Party Congress of 1971, artists and writers, in particular, were encouraged to air their “open, objective, creative differences of opinion… in the inventive search for new forms of full understanding” with the party qua the state.60 In 1975, the regime formally signed the Helsinki Accords, swearing to uphold the exercise of universal human rights within its own borders; of course, the SED’s socialist emphasis fell on “freedom from want,” rather than on western-­ style free speech and the right to travel. By 1983, more than 200,000 had filed applications for a “release from GDR citizenship,” citing the Helsinki Accords; the SED temporarily reversed course, liberalizing travel rules that resulted in 25,000 legal exits in April 1984 alone. Given his interest in repairable lapses, that is, in the restoration of faltering enterprises, Hirschman did not explore the role of loyalty in cases involving the dissolution of an entire state. His initial study neglected distinctions between conscious and unconscious reservoirs of loyalty, important insofar as the latter may become operative after exit, and systemic collapse, has already taken place.61 Is it possible that diffident exiters might develop a measure of loyalty after the fact, should the new socio-economic structure turn out to be less satisfactory than the old one? Will the concrete experience of exit render individuals more inclined to use voice next time, should the grass prove to be not so green on the other side of the fence? Rudi Dutschke, who fled in 1961, stands as one concrete example. These questions regarding the before-and-after effects of loyalty lead us back to the theme of identity. Ultimately, “it does not follow… that there is some peculiar and unique way in which Germans [either individually or

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collectively] can define their identity by not having one.”62 Even those who voluntarily left the GDR prior to the regime’s 1989 collapse were forced to redefine their identities, with varying degrees of difficulty and success.63 This is not to argue that all Germans exhibit the same level of attachment to each component of their respective concentric identities. There are many individuals for whom the “outer circles,” that is, the state-­ political or national dimensions of identity, have never been particularly important. Those individuals may be willing to accept a redefinition of certain dimensions of their identity without too much conscious reflection. It is impossible to test this and corresponding “salience” propositions empirically, beyond the use of retrospective interviews or other methods aimed at reading-between-the-lines. This does not render questions linking loyalty and identity any less significant. Does “timing” matter in shaping the nature and extent of retroactive loyalty, defining normative orientations? What about the impact external events on the willingness to use voice or pursue exit (Prague Spring in 1968, Polish Solidarność in 1980)? What factors, personal, political, and generational, complicated an East German’s desire to emigrate? Which subset of exiters found it easier to assimilate the values and behaviors prevalent among West Germans? How did unification processes per se reconfigure feelings of loyalty, and the use of voice after 1990?

Expanding the Framework: Making the Case for Loyalty We now turn to Hirschman’s direct effort to apply the exit, voice, and loyalty paradigm to countless “irreparable” lapses in performance which triggered the GDR’s demise. Hirschman subsequently maintained that expanding the chances for exit redefined the political opportunity structure for average citizens, allowing for greater voice and participation, to the ultimate detriment of the regime.64 My work challenges this simple cause-and-effect relationship, arguing that it was not “the opening up of previously unavailable opportunities of choice (sic) or exit” that fostered a sense of empowerment which enabled the masses to prevail over the regime.65 Rather, I contend that it was the convergence of already-existing, albeit inobtrusive processes of “inward-migration” and quiet, if not secretive channels of voice, added to the processes of generational change, which transformed the political opportunity structure in the Eastern state. Where

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Hirschman claimed that “the presence, real or imagined, of the exit option did undermine the development of the art of voice” in the GDR, I hold that ambivalent public attitudes regarding the exit option had already led to the development of alternate modes of voice, especially throughout the 1980s, which served for many as a surrogate form of exodus.66 New forms of voice included a variety of “underground” culture scenes (music, literature), amounting to various types of “internal migration” (detailed in subsequent chapters). Others “migrated” into Church circles where they began to build basic “civil society” networks, focusing on environmental, peace, and human rights issues. While Hirschman admits that diverse exit-voice relationships are likely to emerge over the course of a country’s history, his own applications are limited to the physical emigration and institutional-democratic participation sort. This leads me to distinguish among a broader array of exit and voice options, outlined in Fig. 2.2, essential for delineating the contours of GDR-identity—and what remains of it. This model requires us to consider the differential impact of temporary versus permanent, voluntary versus involuntary, and physical versus symbolic or psychological forms of “exit” from the system. It moreover addresses the effectiveness of the two strategies with respect to diverse groups of loyal citizens, ranging from true-believers (party dissidents) to born-again believers in the system who discovered their attachment to specific GDR policies after the fact of unification. Finally, my model highlights multiple factors affecting the perceived “cost” each group encounters in exercising one or the other option. The framework I propose is a modest attempt to transcend the biases inherent in the application of Western constructs and methodologies to East European phenomena. Social scientists are not immune to subconscious notions of “what ought to be,” no matter how sincere their interest in determining how a system “really works.” When dissecting the complexities of foreign cultures, comparativists sometimes search for variables and correlations which seem to correspond to their own (virtual) realities. Too often these analyses by analogy acquire an explanatory power “independent of direct evidence, a strength which derives from the simplicity and coherence of the inference structure they embody and the role they play in organizing a great deal of ambiguous information.”67 Hirschman’s post-unity analysis rested on the belief that “exit is the act of simply leaving, generally because a better good or service or benefit is believed to be provided by another.”68 But a citizen’s decision to leave her homeland is never the kind of “simple act” implicit in a consumer’s

2  EXIT, VOICE, AND LOYALTY: THE THEORETICAL PARAMETERS 

MODES OF EXIT AND VOICE I.

FORMS OF

Physical-external A. Permanent Exile = enforced from above (intellectual dissenters. e.g., Wolfgang Biermann, Roland Fuchs, Jena Peace Group, Bettina Wegner, Manfred Krug, Sara Kirsch, Jurek Becker, Freia Klier, Erich Loest) B. Temporary exile (Bärbel Bohley and Vera Wollenberger) C. Planned, voluntary migration (legal and illegal ÜbersiedlerInnen, 1949-1984; Monika Maron) D.

Spontaneous mass migration (vacationers, youth, summer 1989)

EXIT

II. Internal emigration A. The Niche Society (careerists, Notgemeinschaften) B.

Free-lance intellectuals (writers, artists, Prenzlauer Berg Scene)

C.

Alternative Youth Cultures (Skins, Punks, Grufties, Christians)

****************************************************************************** I. Internalized (party reformists, writers, Lutheran Church hierarchy) FORMS

II.

OF VOICE

III. IV.

Externalized (dissidents, including peace, ecology, human rights activists; authors publishing in West; underground literature) Symbolic (Youth culture, rock music, "GDR-Joke" tellers) Imported (West German TV/radio, Intershop consumption)

****************************************************************************** FORMS OF LOYALTY AND PERCEPTIONS OF PRICE I. True Believers (SED members and functionaries) FORMS II. Shared culture OF (intellectuals, clerics, dissidents, notorische Hierbleiber) LOYALTY III. Born-again patriates (women, the new Heimat-seekers) IV.

Neo-nationalists or Anti-loyalists (youth, non-voters) ****************************************************************************** Age Entry PRICE Gender Exit P e r c e p t i o n OF influenced Voice Location LOYALTY by Occupation Doing Nothing Re-Entry

Resources Experience "Identity"

Fig. 2.2  Forms of exit, voice, and loyalty

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decision to switch from a gas-guzzling American car to a more fuel-efficient Japanese model, a voter’s shift from one political party to another, or even a university graduate’s abandonment of Saxony in favor of better job prospects in Baden-Württemberg. Hirschman construes “exit” prior to 1989 as a “purely private activity… in secret, silently, on tiptoe” which undermined the public function of voice.69 It is extremely difficult to distinguish between “private” and “public” types of activity, however, in a system whose ideology repeatedly equated the “personal” with the “political.” The state itself engaged in a relentless albeit unsuccessful effort to influence the conscious and subconscious orientations of GDR citizens as a nation built upon “all-sided socialist personalities.” Ignoring the subconscious features of loyalty moreover makes it impossible to grasp why two million “informal co-workers” would report on the anti-system activities of friends, relations, and even spouses to the Stasi, often in excruciatingly intimate detail.70 Hirschman found it surprising that neither the Berlin Wall, nor “draconian border controls” served to stem the flow of out-migration across nearly three decades, statistical evidence to the contrary (Chap. 4). He moreover held that “the hope for escape to the West was kept alive year after year by the actual life experiences of thousands of exiting people,” providing no empirical evidence along these lines.71 In fact, the news sent home by ex-patriates was often negative, according to reports detailing their experiences.72 Hirschman did not address the improvements in living conditions witnessed in the GDR over time, the expansion of social policy, an increase in real incomes, enhanced economic opportunities for women, and the salutary effects of Ostpolitik on visitation, inter alia. Nor did he allow for the possibility that “thousands” (out of 16 million) might constitute a normal distribution of malcontents in any given society. What separated would-be GDR exiters from dissatisfied customers in democratic systems was their inability to act on their discontent in manners consonant with Western expectations. The inference that the restrictions on physical migration left West Germans “with” and East Germans “without” voice also underestimates the extent to which their respective political cultures experienced very different transformation processes after 1961, with the result that each side found it increasingly difficult to understand the “voice” used by the other. The Wall’s presence rendered Germany’s division into “two noncommunicating halves” concrete and visible, although the Occupational Powers themselves had initiated this process in 1945.73 The dynamics of

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generational change reconfigured not only fundamental attitudes about “national” identity on both sides; it also significantly altered the structure and syntax of their respective political languages (replete with Americanisms, on the one side, with Russian terms, on the other). Some familial ties persisted, but the fact that the Germans divided found it more difficult to communicate directly with each other does not mean that Easterners stopped communicating among themselves regarding their dissatisfaction with socialist governance.

Reinterpreting die Wende, 1989–1990 This section provides a brief overview of select exit-voice currents that precipitated the GDR’s demise, treated in greater detail in subsequent chapters. Limiting his treatment to the “hot autumn” of 1989, Detlef Pollack has argued that exit (out-migration) and voice (anti-state protests) worked in tandem and reinforced each other, jointly achieving the collapse of the regime. While I concur with Pollack’s general assessment, I hope to set the stage for the “generational” analyses to follow by (re)embedding the events of 1989–1990  in a broader historical context, especially for readers born after unification. Hirschman’s observation that “exit took place by and large at the expense of voice” between 1961 and 1989 relies exclusively on the use of Western lenses. Though few in number, most physical departures occurring between the 1960s and the early 1980s involved individuals motivated largely by self-interest, if they exited voluntarily. Those who abandoned their “niches” did not expect their departures to trigger changes in the behavior of the SED leadership, nor did they intend to continue a struggle against systemic flaws from outside the country. The impact that earlier emigration waves had on the system, as well as on friends and family members left behind, was more often than not arbitrary and unintentional. Those who resettled from East to West “were immigrants rather than émigrés,” whose post-exit behavior suggested that they “…‘couldn’t care less’ about the fate of the communities whence they came.”74 By contrast, certain groups like party officials, writers, scientists and other professionals were allowed to take advantage of both “exit” and “voice” options, albeit only in exchange for frequent, public and personal demonstrations of loyalty to the system and its leaders. GDR leaders were not oblivious to popular discontent, but they were more intent on alleviating the symptoms rather than the sources through

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curious extensions and retractions of both the exit and voice options over time. Hirschman refers to the opportunity for “vicarious, if temporary, mass escape” provided by Easterners’ ability to watch West German television, but he underestimated its significance. Signaling dissatisfaction by way of TV viewing and radio dials is certainly less direct than voting with one’s feet, but such behavior did force changes in GDR programming. Over time, the SED lifted the ban on FRG-viewing for officials, even going so far as to sandwich its own nightly news between the Western evening broadcasts, Heute and Tagesschau. Authorities gradually broadened the classification of “urgent family matters”—births, serious illnesses, deaths, weddings, major anniversaries—which enabled citizens with FRG relatives to undertake short-term visits. Temporary exits allowed many to return with goods unavailable at home, partially alleviating the need for voice on the part of a significant minority while triggering greater resentment among those who lacked western ties. The GDR moreover revised formal statutes regulating permanent emigration rights and procedures, enabling a record 40,000 to depart by spring 1984.75 From an Eastern vantage-point, one could argue that exit overrode the exercise of a particular kind of voice. The SED established new organs expected to function as channels for “democratic” voice, for example, countless structures for work-place participation, added to communal election campaigns which brought many local grievances to light.76 These mechanisms fell far short of redirecting the behavior of leaders, unable to shed Stalinist identities and absolutist loyalties acquired prior World War II. Once the Berlin Wall was in place, the regime allowed for other limited voice channels, such as the party-sponsored Institute for Opinion Research (Institut für Meinungsforschung) in Berlin; subject to various Central Committee departments, it was dissolved by party decree in 1978. The Central Institute for Youth Research regularly sampled the attitudes of successor cohorts from 1966 until 1990. Though its findings were rarely released for public consumption, the ZIJ proved a veritable thorn in the side of educational minister Margot Honecker during the last ten years of its existence. Two additional mechanisms provided an important feedback-­ channel for public officials to a degree not witnessed in the West: one involved letters to the editors, submitted by average citizens and filtered through the official press organs; another drew upon the quasi-­ institutionalized device of Eingaben, a petition of the last resort addressed directly to high-ranking officials, including Honecker himself.

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Alternatively, the regime sought to inhibit voice by ridding itself of potential critics and rabble rousers who, more often than not, were willing and eager to exit, especially after imprisonment for “attempted flight.” SED officials may have viewed forced exit as an efficient mechanism for disposing of dangerous or incorrigible “class enemies,” but this practice had lost much of its effectiveness as a safety valve by the mid-1980s. The state’s monopoly over exit rights impelled millions of others to discover new ways of expressing their discontent without denying themselves whatever benefits the system continued to afford, for example, job security, extensive maternity benefits and a “clean” historical slate vis-à-vis West Germany, which presented itself as the Third Reich’s legitimate successor. By the early 1980s economic decline and serious deterioration of the physical environment had become obvious to most GDR consumers, especially to women who remained primarily responsible for household procurement and caring for sick children. Both developments had their roots in the energy crises of 1973 and 1979. It is far from coincidental that this period witnessed a significant mobilization of protesting voices among countless underground “initiatives,” shielded by the Lutheran Church. Attempts to silence system-critical voices at the top fueled many creative campaigns to discover voice from below, through a highly decentralized Öko-pax (ecology + peace) movement. The collective SED leadership consistently chose to ignore warnings articulated at many levels regarding a multitude of system-internal “performance gaps.” Indeed, “management’s” decision not to heed voice was best evidenced by the Politburo’s 1982 resolution classifying all investigations of environmental destruction as “top secret” and imposing criminal penalties for any dissemination of data, including related health statistics.77 Occasionally the exercise of underground voice was construed as a key to “exit.” The fact that some citizens used peace movement or church involvement to have themselves imprisoned and “bought out” by the Bonn government produced tensions within the movements, often undercutting their voice potential. Hungary’s decision to open its Western frontier in May 1989, permitting countless GDR citizens vacationing within its territory to depart for Austria, brought into focus the critical significance of loyalty, even if mass exodus failed to evoke that “wonderful concentration of mind” among party bosses attributed to one en route to the gallows for hanging.78 SED intransigence caused the exercise of voice to grow in scope and intensity, as other opportunities for exit via Czechoslovakia were temporarily cut off in October 1989. Since exit is a strategy generally ascribed to individuals

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who lack loyalty, we can assume that “exit is not usually undertaken for the purpose of gaining more influence than one had as a member. That is nevertheless the way it often works out, especially when exit is a highly unusual event,” according to Hirschman.79 This proved quite an understatement with respect to the thousands who occupied embassies and/or fled during the weeks preceding the GDR’s 40th anniversary in October. Mass exit was accompanied by mass voice during the fall of 1989, but the dynamics did not follow the model. Referring to November 9 as the GDR’s “most spectacular exit event,” Hirschman noted that millions crossed the Berlin border that evening “to enjoy their newly won Freizügigkeit [freedom of movement].” Yet he failed to note that the desire to travel freely cannot be equated with a desire for permanent “exit.”80 While many GDR residents spent the entire night celebrating with newfound friends, an overwhelming majority returned to their eastern homes in time for work the following day, as did the millions who headed West to claim their DM100 of “welcome money” over the course of the next three months. Nor should we conflate East Germans’ demands for higher standards of living, free elections and personal freedom of movement with a desire for unification per se; this demand arose later as new groups displaced the original protestors at weekly demonstrations.81 The short-term exits witnessed on that extraordinary night were not an attempt to abandon voice but to render both options permanent mechanisms for political and economic self-determination. In deliberating the fate of the German Democratic Republic, Hirschman found it necessary to revise his original notion of loyalty. His post-1990 analysis emphasized that all organizational entities, including political parties and nations, are comprised of two kinds of members: those whose feelings of loyalty run quite strong (“Remainers”) and those whose sense of attachment is minimal or non-existent (“Departers”). He continued to stress loyalty as an either/or proposition, however, rather than as a construct subject to different types and different degrees, manifesting themselves at different points in time, as suggested by my classification scheme. The events of 1989/1990 did not precipitate “an intimate fusion” with respect to the aims of maximal and minimal loyalists, in my judgment, but rather an antithetical reaction. As my 1989/1990 interview partners explained after the fact, mass flight initially triggered feelings of anger and shame among residents left behind—or choosing to stay behind—causing them to engage in largely “voiceless” protests in the form of church-­ gatherings and silent, candle-lit marches. Protests became more “vocal” as

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hundreds of thousands of formerly passive citizens joined the ranks of the initial demonstrators, demanding free elections and the right to travel, which Hirschman equated with exit—again, a debatable proposition. Following the accidental opening of the Berlin Wall, conventional forms of exit persisted (with hundreds of thousands relocating to the western Länder), just as new forms of voice emerged, for example, the Round Tables which assumed quasi-governmental functions at all levels.82 Hirschman’s concentration on the “see-saw” relationship between the two mechanisms caused him to overlook another variable crucial to the actual outcome of events: the role of external actors. It was Gorbachev’s introduction of “voice” in the Soviet Union, not the GDR’s denial of exit rights per se, that initially undermined the SED’s capacity for repressing dissent at home. The ultimate irony was that East German rulers sought to prohibit voice on the part of their master qua ally by banning the dissemination of Soviet articles supporting glasnost and perestroika after 1986. This action triggered increasingly bold uses of voice inside the GDR (e.g., commemorative demonstrations honoring Rosa Luxemburg in 1987, 1988), which culminated in the formation of New Forum two years later. What the occurrences of 1989 really demonstrate is that the suppression of exit was not “the touchstone of [GDR] authority,” as Hirschman claims, but rather its last resort.83 The Politburo’s miscalculated renunciation of this power on the night of November 9, 1989, wiped out its only remaining back-up device, the more important one having been repressive Soviet support prior to Gorbachev’s 40th anniversary visit in October. Equally ironic, it was mass exit, not years of “voice” in the form of underground protest movements, that finally evoked a strong response from the West German government which then deliberately hastened the system’s collapse. It did so by refusing to provide the immediate economic assistance it had promised but did not deliver to Interim Premier Hans Modrow in December 1989. Temporary stabilization might have resulted in the institutionalization of self-defined forms of voice, foreseen by the Round Table’s draft constitution. If the mass exodus commencing in August 1989 forged an unanticipated sense of community among would-be exiters, it also created a sense of group-empowerment among heretofore disparate voice elements among the remainers. This newly emergent “We-in-the-GDR feeling” advanced notions of loyalty and belonging which, for the first time, were publicly decoupled from official versions of DDR-Identität. Unfortunately,

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the opposition’s open proclamation of a “national identity” thus liberated—embodied in its November 26, 1989, appeal, For Our Country— was quickly “coopted” and invalidated by proponents of the no-longer unacceptable official identity, especially the new Premier Egon Krenz. Issued on November 28, Chancellor Kohl’s Ten Point Program for Germany offered an immediate, non-cooptable “alternative identity” to those more inclined to exit.84 Others who had already applied for legal emigration, like East Berliner Angelika Barbe (later elected to the Volkskammer and the Bundestag), opted to remain in the country, once voice became possible. Neither Hirschman’s initial framework nor his subsequent application of the exit-voice model consider the quality or durability of loyalty itself. How deep are its roots? Does it penetrate all three circles of human consciousness? How might loyalty blind itself to the need for system transformation? One needs to consider the impact of loyalty, not only in relation to a system in decline but also in regard to its eventual replacement. What factors motivate or impel loyalists to develop a new self-concept, or group-­ consciousness, in the event that both exit and voice fail to rescue “their” system? Under what circumstances might a breakdown in collective consciousness automatically trigger a paradigm shift in the realm of personal-­ psychological identity? The alternative voices cultivated by self-reflective or system-critical Eastern Germans over a span of four decades were, in many respects, incomprehensible to Western Germans once the Wall fell. The Kohl government demonstrated its reluctance to “listen” to these voices by the manner in which it conducted both the Unity negotiations and the Treuhand-driven privatization processes (see Chap. 11). The “Unity Chancellor” consistently refused to reflect on the inadequacy of the FRG’s own mechanisms and venues for ensuring expressions of popular will through 1998.85 One result was a rapid, perhaps avoidable, escalation of tensions between the peoples of the two states in one nation, a configuration that soon revealed itself to be one Volk in two cultures. If, in Hirschman’s words, the “exit-induced vacuum of leadership and of political life explains a good deal about the eventual collapse of the GDR as an independent entity,” then what explains a resurgence of East German identity after 1990, the Ostalgie wave of the early 2000s, and its ostensible links to AfD electoral successes thirty years later?86 If GDR leaders were so effective in dispensing with prominent figures linked to reservoirs of opposition (presuming that all revolutions have an identifiable

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“leader”), then why did West Germans find it necessary to launch their own assault on figures ranging from Lothar de Maizière and Gregor Gysi to Christa Wolf after unification? Why was the Kohl Government so quick to reject Jens Reich, Wende-spokesperson and co-founder of New Forum, as a serious contender for the Federal Presidency in 1994? GDR-specific forms of voice, demanding a new constitution and legal abortion, inter alia, posed an ostensible threat to politics-as-usual in the old Federal Republic. Is it possible that citizens who eventually rebelled against a holistic ideology might have depended upon more collectivized power-networks, bearing the imprint of their own distinctive socialization? And how do we explain not only the incredible staying-power of the Federal Republic’s first female, eastern Chancellor, Angela Merkel, but also her significant expansion of gender equality policies that bear a very strong resemblance to the social benefits GDR women once enjoyed?87

Identity from Below: Socialist Subcultures It is conceivable, in the aftermath of unification, that those who cared enough about the system to place themselves at risk prior to 1989 might experience a more fundamental loss of identity than those who resorted to exit. Might they not also pose a greater challenge to the identities of citizens in the old FRG, as they are forced to assimilate? This raises another fundamental question: Even if the state-defined, monolithic “GDR identity” failed to take root between 1949 and 1989, what do we know about the potentially deep-seated nature of identities that had been cultivated at the level of peer culture? How have the personal identities of distinctive societal groups, shaped by diverging everyday experiences, been subsequently transformed? As this study illustrates, the East German population never comprised a homogeneous mass marching in formation to the beat of a socialist drum. Like any government, the SED had to cater to a variety of citizen groups, some of which benefited more than others at different times in diverging ways. Correspondingly, the costs and benefits of unification neither were spread equally across the new Länder, nor were they randomly allocated. Women, for example, quickly emerged as losers, not only because they were excluded from core negotiations but also because gendered policies like legal abortion and state-provided child-care disappeared practically overnight. Youth subject to constant relegation suddenly found

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themselves free to travel and define their own life-styles, but they also lost the security of guaranteed job placement. This study considers the dialectical fortunes of five groups whose identities have been dramatically reconfigured between 1989 and 2019: writers and intellectuals; pastors and dissidents; working women, youth and middle-aged men. The socialist regime was no stranger to the forces of dialectical materialism. Marxism posited that human history has been driven by “the dialectic,” whereby thesis collides with antithesis, resulting in a new synthesis. Though all groups considered here faced immense personal-transformation challenges after unification, many of the initial winners and losers have traded places, especially over the last ten years. Just as importantly, west German identities have also been reshaped by post-unification dynamics, highlighting, above all, the significance of generational change on both sides of the former Wall. We now turn to the core dimensions of GDR-identity, as it was defined by the country’s founders. We then examine some of the factors that led the public at large to embrace select components of that “official” identity during the early years, and the main events that led them increasingly to reject others as of the 1970s.

Notes 1. The English translation stems from Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub, eds. 1982. Heinrich Heine—Prose and Poetry, German Library Collection, Vol. 32. New York: Continuum: 231–297. 2. Karl Mannheim. 1970 ed. Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, trans.: Edward Shils. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World; Helmut Fogt. 1982. Politische Generationen: Empirische Bedeutung und theoretisches Modell. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag; Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1998. From Post-Wall to Post-War Generations: Changing Attitudes towards the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany. Boulder: Westview; Adriana Lettrari, Christian Nestler and Nadja Troi-Boeck, eds. 2016. Die Generation der Wendekinder: Elaboration eines Forschungsfeldes. Wiesbaden: Springer. 3. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1989. “On Germany, Old Models don’t help,” Christian Science Monitor, December 5; “East German Elections: D-Mark über älles,” Christian Science Monitor, March 23, 1990; “Dissent and Faith in the GDR,” Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 1990; and “German Unification: Haste makes Waste,” Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 1990.

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4. Barrington Moore, Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. Boston: Beacon Press, 486. 5. Archie Brown and Jack Gray, eds. 1977. Political Culture and Political Change in Communist States. New  York: Macmillan Press, 1. By 1952, anthropologists employed over a hundred definitions of “culture”; Brown and Gray delineate four types: (1) a unified culture reflecting substantial consensus among all segments of society; (2) a dominant culture which coexists with various sub-cultures, “harnessing” local identities; (3) a dichotomous political culture and (4) a fragmented political culture, in which no dominant mode emerges, 5–8. 6. Gabriel Almond, cited in Archie Brown, ed. 1984. Political Culture and Communist Studies. New York: Macmillan Press, 7. 7. Frank Parkin, cited by Brown and Gray, Political Culture, 6. 8. Moore, Social Origins, 486. 9. Brown and Gray, Political Culture, 4–5. 10. Mary McAuley. 1977. “Political Culture and Communist Politics: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” in Political Culture, 23. 11. The term “dominant political culture,” used by Brown, McAuley and Rytlewski is misleading, insofar as the political preferences of das Volk did not determine the contours of GDR culture. “Majoritarian culture” is a more appropriate term for what is implicit in the idea of peer culture. Cf. Christiane Lemke.1989. “Eine politische Doppelkultur—Sozialisation im Zeichen konkurrierender Einflüsse,” 81–93, and Ralf Rytlewski. 1989. “Ein neues Deutschland? Merkmale, Differenzierungen und Wandlungen in der politischen Kultur der DDR,” 11–28. Both in Hans-Georg Wehling, ed., Politische Kultur in der DDR. Stuttgart/Berlin: Kohlhammer. 12. My analysis of West German identity drew on Karl Mannheim. 1928. “Das Problem der Generationen.” Reprinted in Ludwig von Friedeburg, ed. 1985. Jugend in der modernen Gesellschaft. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. I was also inspired by Krysia Yardley and Terry Honess, eds. 1987. Self and Identity. Psychosocial Perspectives. Chichester, NY: John Wiley & Sons. 13. Mannheim, Man and Society, 23–24. 14. Mushaben, From Post-war to Post-wall Generations. 15. Karl W.  Deutsch. 1953 (republished in 1969). Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality, Cambridge MA: MIT Press. 16. Abraham Maslow. 1954. Motivation and Personality. New York: Harper, 83. 17. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 91–92. 18. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 91.

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19. Hans-Joachim Maaz. 1990. Der Gefuhlsstau: Ein Psychogramm der DDR. Berlin: Argon Verlag; Wolfgang Engler. 1995. Die ungewollte Moderne: Ost-West Passage. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. 20. Burrhus Frederic Skinner. 1983. “Selection by Consequences,” In A Matter of Consequences. New York: Knopf, 51. 21. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences, 55–56. 22. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences, 55. Reshaping behavior is more likely to occur on the basis of a “graded series” of reinforcements. 23. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences, 53–54. Humans adapt in response to three types of contingencies: natural selection (biological); reinforcement (psychological); and those maintained by the social environment (anthropological). 24. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences, 54. He admits that “what is good for the species or culture may be bad for the individual,” 60. 25. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences, 54. 26. Skinner counters (63): “We tend to regard ourselves as initiating agents only because we know or remember so little about our genetic and environmental histories….” 27. Skinner observes: “Through behavior modification we are said to intervene in the lives of others and manipulate them, and whether we should do so is an ethical question.” See “The Contrived Reinforcer,” 73. 28. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences, 177–178. 29. Skinner, A Matter of Consequences, 178. 30. Logan, cited in Yardley and Honess, Self and Identity, 13. 31. Kenneth J. Gergen. 1987. “Toward Self as Relationship,” in Yardley and Honess, 53. 32. Sheldon Stryker. 1987. “Identity Theory: Developments and Extensions,” in Yardley and Honess, 97. 33. Mildred A.  Schwarz. 1967. Public Opinion and Canadian Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 9. 34. Alexander and Margret Mitscherlich. 1967. Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern. Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. Munich: Piper. 35. The Mitscherlichs argue: “… a leap forward for one’s identity can only take place where the id development is cultivated from the beginning of life and where the individual possesses significant ego-functions.” Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, 216. 36. Herbert C.  Kelman. 1969. “Patterns of Personal Involvement in the National System: A Social-Psychological Analysis of Political Legitimacy,” 284. In James N. Rosenau, ed., International Politics and Foreign Policy. New York: Free Press. 37. Kelman, “Patterns of Personal Involvement,” 284 ff.

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38. The essence of nationhood lies in shared systems of social communication and economic interchange, linked to a power-center able to compel cohesiveness among citizen-members. See Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication. 39. Kelman, “Patterns of Personal Involvement,” 285. 40. Kelman, “Patterns of Personal Involvement,” 285. 41. Albert O. Hirschman. 1970. Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hirschman admits that many assumptions regarding organizational and/or political rationality rest upon a model of perfect competition, although most real-world cases are far from perfect. 42. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 1–2. 43. See Albert O. Hirschman. 1993. “Exit, Voice and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic. An Essay in Conceptual History. World Politics 45:173–202; Detlef Pollack. 1990. “Das Ende einer Organisationsgesellschaft.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 19 (4): 292–307; Rogers Brubaker. 1990. “Frontier Theses: Exit, Voice and Loyalty in East Germany,” Migration World 18 (3–4): 12–17; and Steven Pfaff. 2006. Exit-­Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany: The Crisis of Leninism and the Revolution of 1989. Durham NC: Duke University Press. 44. Regarding dynamic processes inherent in the institutional field itself, see Shirley Terreberry, 1968. “The Evolution of Organizational Environments.” Administrative Science Quarterly 12 (4): 590–613. 45. Terreberry, 6. Slack implies that “development depends not so much on finding optimal combinations for given resources and factors of production as on calling forth and enlisting for development purposes resources and abilities that are hidden, scattered or badly utilized.” See Richard Cyert and James March. 1963. A Behavioral Theory of the Fir. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.. 46. Hirschman shares Almond and Verba’s reservations regarding “the civic culture,” substantiating Kelman’s distinctions between sentimental and instrumental attachments to the nation-state. 47. A.  O. Hirschman. 1958. The Strategy of Economic Development. New Haven: Yale University Press, 13. Non-participating members of a given system are rarely randomly distributed. The “civic culture” model relies on participation by upper-class, white male elites, who excluded women and minorities. See Carole Pateman. 1980. “The Civic Culture: A Philosophical Critique”: 57–102. In Gabriel A.  Almond and Sydney Verba, eds., The Civic Culture Revisited. Boston/Toronto: Little, Brown & Co. 48. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 4. 49. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 4. 50. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 24–32.

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51. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 107–108. 52. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 37. 53. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 37–38. 54. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 38. 55. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 78. 56. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 79. 57. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 81–82. 58. A. James McAdams. 1985. East Germany and Détente: Building Authority after the Wall. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 59. McAdams, East Germany and Détente, 51. 60. See “Kulturpolitik,” in Hartmut Zimmermann, ed. 1985. DDR Handbuch. Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 770. 61. The unconscious loyalist “is by definition free from felt discontent,” hence will not engage in voice. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 91. 62. Ralf Dahrendorf, cited in Wolfgang Pollack. 1987. German Identity— Forty Years After Zero. Sankt Augustin: Friedrich Naumann Stiftung, 47. 63. See Irene Böhme. 1982. Die da drüben. Sieben Kapitel DDR. Berlin: Rotbuch Verlag; Martin Ahrends, ed. 1989. Mein Leben: Teil Zwei. Ehemaliger DDR-Bürger in der Bundesrepublik. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch; and Volker Ronge. 1985. Von drüben nach hüben. DDR-Bürger im Westen. Wuppertal: Hartmann + Petit. 64. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic,” 177. 65. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice and Fate,” 177. 66. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice and Fate,” 178. 67. John D.  Steinbruner. 1974. A Cybernetic Theory of Decision. New Dimensions of Political Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 116. 68. Steinbruner, A Cybernetic Theory, 175. 69. Steinbruner, A Cybernetic Theory, 198. 70. Ariane Rieker, Annett Schwarz and Dirk Schneider. 1990. STASI Intim: Gespräche mit ehemaligen MfS Mitarbeitern. Leipzig: Forum Verlag. 71. Rieker et all, STASI Intim, 181. 72. Horst-Günter Kessler and Jürgen Miermeister. 1983. Vom ‘Großen Knast’ ins ‘Paradis’? DDR-Bürger in der Bundesrepublik. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 73. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice and Fate,” 186. 74. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 108. 75. Regulations were revised in November 1987 and early 1989. See “DDR Verordnung über Reisen und Ausreisen.” Deutschland Archiv, 22 (1), January 1989. This decision was part of a larger scheme to accumulate hard currency, since many citizens were “bought out” by the Bonn government at “going rates” based on their educational and professional qualifications.

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76. Landolf Scherzer. 1988. Der Erste: Protokoll einer Begegnung. Rudolstadt: Greifenverlag, 1988. 77. Anordnung zur Sicherung des Geheimschutzes auf dem Gebiet der Umweltdaten of November 16, 1982. See Peter Wensierski and Wolfgang Büscher. 1981. Beton ist Beton. Zivilisationskritik aus der DDR. Hattingen: edition transit; and Peter Wensierski. 1986. Von unten nach oben wächst gar nichts. Umweltzerstörung und Protest in der DDR. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. 78. Samuel Johnson, cited by Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 21. 79. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 126. 80. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice and Fate,” 193. 81. Peter Förster and Günter Roski. 1990. DDR zwischen Wende und Wahl. Meinungsforscher analysieren den Umbruch. Berlin: LinksDruck, 161ff. 82. Regarding its accidental nature, see Elizabeth Pond. 1990. After the Wall. American Policy Toward Germany. New York: Priority Press. 83. Hirschman, “Exit Voice and Fate,” 187. 84. Kohl failed to consult with Bundestag members or NATO partners prior to issuing the proclamation, though his proposal touched directly on Four Power prerogatives. 85. This charge was leveled publicly during the 1994 constitutional revisions process, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on July 2, 1994. 86. Hirschman, “Exit, Voice and Fate,” 185–186. 87. Joyce Marie Mushaben, 2018. “The Reluctant Feminist: Angela Merkel and the Modernization of Gender Politics in Germany.” Femina Politica 27 (2): 83–94.

CHAPTER 3

Selection by Consequences: What Did It Mean to Be GDR-German?

Der eine bewegte sogar den Mund     One of the monarchs moved his mouth Und hielt eine Rede, sehr lange;      And delivered a long oration, Er setzte mir auseinander, warum      Explaining why he’d a right to demand Er meinen Respekt verlange.      My awe and admiration. … Hier üben wir die Hegemonie,     Hier sind wir unzerstückelt;      Die andern Völker haben sich      Auf platter Erde entwickelt.     

Here we become one mighty state, Here, in dreams, we are crowned— While other peoples build their realms Upon the level ground.

      Heinrich Heine, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen

In seeking to carve out a distinctive identity for itself and its citizens, a newly created state must cultivate its own national symbols and historical turning points. Charged with composing a new national anthem in 1949, Johannes R. Becher and Hans Eisler characterized the German Democratic Republic as a phoenix-like configuration “arising from the ruins” of a defeated fascist Reich. Over the next four decades, the GDR anthem would come to symbolize ideological twists and turns pursued by SED leaders in an effort to consolidate power and foster legitimacy for the postwar regime.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_3

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In essence, the new state faced a two-fold task with respect to the question of national identity. First, the SED would have to dissolve a myriad of preexisting historical and cultural bonds between the peoples of East and West, whose postwar fates were determined by factors beyond their control: one’s political and economic destiny as a “German” hinged primarily on who was living (or had fled) where by the time the victorious powers arrived. Second, GDR leaders would have to persuade their citizens that they were the better Germans, building a new, superior nation. Paradoxically, the identity-building strategies they pursued produced the opposite effect. By 1989 generations born and raised in the GDR came to believe that only a clear break with their own state could entitle them to the good life as “real Germans.” On February 8, 1950, four months after its “provisional” creation, recently elected members of the Volkskammer [People’s Chamber] approved a new national anthem for the second German state. Hoping to discredit leaders in the western republic who chose to retain the imperialistically tainted Deutschlandlied, the GDR’s founders adopted a text expressing a hope that the nation-divided might be someday be reunified, albeit under the banner of socialism.1 By 1955, SED leaders were impelled by Cold War developments to break with the common past, in order to pursue formal recognition as a sovereign state. One unintended consequence of their subsequent “demarcation” (Abgrenzung) efforts was that the lyrics composed by their socialist Minister of Culture would subsequently be deemed ideologically subversive. Rather than substitute new lyrics, GDR authorities merely decreed that its three verses could no longer be sung, comparable to the 1952 decision by FRG officials declaring only the third verse penned by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben suitable for postwar use.2 The fact that SED leaders banned all vocal renditions of the GDR anthem as of the early 1970s would not diminish the regime’s pride in hearing it played repeatedly during award ceremonies at the Olympic Games. In another twist of fate, one of Becker’s original lines was invoked to reduce the GDR to ruins in 1989, namely, its appeal to Deutschland einig Vaterland [Germany, united Fatherland]. According to GDR scholars, the creation and development of the eastern state represented “the most important interval in time of all German history.”3 Abjuring the ratification of the western Grundgesetz [Basic Law] on September 7, 1949, for “tearing apart the former unified German nation,” GDR leaders insisted that the new socialist republic, proclaimed on October 7, 1949, laid the foundation for a “consistent policy for the

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Box 3.1  National Anthem of the German Democratic Republic Auferstanden aus Ruinen      From the ruins newly risen Und der Zukunft zugewandt,    To the future turned, we stand. Laß uns Dir zum Guten dienen,    Let us serve the common good, Deutschland, einig Vaterland.   Germany, united fatherland. Alte Not gilt es zu zwingen,      We must overcome old sorrow, Und wir zwingen die vereint,     And united we must overcome Denn es muß uns doch gelingen    For we shall attain a morrow Daß die Sonne schön wie nie       So that the sun beautiful as never before Über Deutschland scheint.      Shines over Germany. Glück und Friede sei bescheiden     May both peace and joy inspire, Deutschland, unserm Vaterland!     Germany, our fatherland. Alle Welt sehnt sich nach Frieden!   Peace is all the world’s desire, Reicht den Völkern eure Hand.     To the peoples lend your hand. Wenn wir brüderlich uns einen,    In fraternity united Schlagen wir des Volkes Feind:     We shall crush the people’s foe. Laß das Licht des Friedens scheinen,   Let all paths by peace be lighted, Daß nie eine Mutter mehr      That no mother shall again Ihren Sohn beweint!         Mourn her son in woe! Laßt uns pflügen, laßt uns bauen,   Let us plow and build our nation Lernt und schafft wie nie zuvor,    Learn and work as never yet, Und der eignen Kraft vertrauend,    That a free new generation Steigt ein frei Geschlecht empor.     Faith in its own strength begets Deutsches Jugend, bestes Streben      German youth, for whom the striving Unsres Volks in dir vereint,      Of our people is at one Wirst du Deutschlands neues Leben,  You are Germany’s new revival Daß die Sonne schön wie nie       That the sun beautiful as never before, Über Deutschland scheint.      Shines over Germany.         Johannes R. Becher (poetic translation)

preservation of national unity and democratic renewal.”4 Its existential aim was “the destruction of the power of the promoters of militarism and imperialism,” strategic responsibility for which would be borne by a new political party, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED).5 Its framework for eradicating the vestiges of

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fascism and promoting genuine parliamentary democracy would be “national but not in the sense of the bourgeoisie.”6 The Communist Party was one of multiple partisan organizations that had reconstituted itself in the East-zone with the permission of the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) after June 1945. The emergence of a one-party-dominant state resulted from the forced merger of the Communist and Social Democratic Parties in April 1946. Under its new name, the Socialist Unity Party set out to secure its power and to legitimize its “leading role” regarding the formation of a new anti-fascist-­democratic state; it characterized itself as the Party for the Revitalization of German Culture. Two decades would pass, however, before the SED divorced itself entirely from the larger, historically tainted German nation. Seeking to promote an autonomous “national” identity, the SED’s second Party Program of 1976 decreed: With the socialist revolution and the formation of the socialist society, the foundations, contents and forms of national life in the German Democratic Republic have been qualitatively transformed. … Led by the working class, the people of the German Democratic Republic, in accordance with the historical transition to socialism, have realized their rights to socio-­economic, state and national self-determination. In the German Democratic Republic there now develops the socialist German nation.7

As developments of the late 1980s attest, successive SED campaigns to bring about the “qualitative transformation” of national life proved quixotic at best. Numerous ideological and economic revisions over the years did little to foster the legitimacy of the system per se; the SED ultimately failed to instill an unshakable love of the socialist Fatherland among average citizens. As this chapter illustrates, many of the tactical and conceptual maneuvers adopted in pursuit of these goals violated the very tenets of orthodox Marxism the Party purportedly sought to uphold. The history of the German Democratic Republic, 1949–1989, therefore provides an intriguing framework for investigating the forces of “dialectical materialism.”8 The SED’s struggle to secure both de jure and de facto recognition of its status as a new sovereign state lay at the heart of most policy-making in the GDR, foreign as well as domestic, up until its dissolution. By the mid-­1970s the regime managed to secure external recognition from all but its nemesis, the Federal Republic (Hallstein Doctrine). Cultivating widespread acceptance of the system among its own citizens was viewed as a necessary though not a sufficient condition for ensuring the stability and continuity of the East German state.9 At no time was this better demonstrated than during

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the turbulent months of 1989, when hundreds of thousands of citizens engaged in spontaneous flight. The “great migrations” via Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia evoked little more than Premier Erich Honecker’s diffident proclamation of October 1: “We will cry no tears [for those who have left],” including more than a few children of established SED members. The party chieftains appeared unmoved by TV-images of the October “Freedom Trains,” even when riots broke out among would-be fellow travelers as they chugged through GDR cities heading to the FRG.  Rather than accept a need for reform, Politburo members insisted on asserting their right to accord exclusive citizenship to East Germans and to regulate their domestic affairs free from West German interference, direct or indirect. Many sources made available after the regime’s demise make it easier to see why scholars were led astray in their projections of the state’s economic health and political durability. Neither hardline anti-Communist scholars nor academics sympathetic to the ideological goals of the regime accurately predicted its breath-taking collapse, although some made that claim retroactively. David Childs insisted as late as April 1989 that the GDR would never attain the congruence necessary to secure an identity of interests between citizens and the state which might render its existence “legitimate” as a separate nation; he nonetheless inferred that the “dictatorship” would merely carry on as before.10 Gert-Joachim Glaeßner recognized that generational change, coupled with an international environment transformed by science and technology, had substantially undermined the rudimentary legitimacy of the SED. In a book published just months before the revolutionary TurnAround, he nonetheless maintained that most Germans had already “bid adieu to the illusion of reunification” during the Ostpolitik era of the 1970s.11 My position is that a postwar “identity of interests” between the Germans of East and West entails a more complicated interplay of variables than can be evaluated in terms of citizen preferences for Mercedes over Wartburgs, or Mediterranean vacations over holidays on the North Sea. The 1980s did find the GDR citizens in the midst of a national identity crisis that eventually precipitated the collapse of the regime. I argue, however, that this crisis had a cultural foundation as well as material base. I contend it was not the absence of a pervasive DDR-Identität that led to systemic collapse but rather the emergence of competing and conflicting subcultural “identities” at lower levels, rooted in various forms of economic malaise, that undercut SED leaders’ ability to secure a GDR-­national future. Generational change exacerbated feelings of relative deprivation, a condition that has returned to haunt all-German politicians with the rise of the AfD.

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This chapter outlines core ideological elements that were expected to foster “socialist legitimacy,” then considers the impact of Stalinism on the GDR’s founding fathers, obsessed with centralized, bureaucratic control. Next I offer a brief historical narrative, illustrating the extent to which Stalinist methods undermined the regime’s ability to secure legitimacy among successor generations even in the face of later “socialist achievements.” While its socialist Staatsräson (reason for being) secured a measure of compliant acceptance during the early years—by exonerating most citizens from personal responsibility for Nazi atrocities—official anti-­fascism lost its relevance as the keystone of SED legitimacy by the late 1960s. The leadership’s persistent, dysfunctional reliance on Stalinist methods impeded exactly the types of scientific-technical innovation, intellectual creativity and authentic citizen engagement that might have secured popular support. This brings us to the (unintentionally) dialectical character of the regime’s evolving approach to the “national question” as a force for socialist development. I define the core ingredients of official GDR-identity, used by the SED to divorce itself from a shared German history through the 1970s. Finally, I reflect on the aging leadership’s failure to address “the problem of generations,” decades removed from the Nazi experience. Ignoring the prerequisites of dialectical materialism specified by Karl Marx himself, ruling elites refused to adapt to new conditions, precluding their acceptance of long-overdue reform demands following Gorbachev’s appearance on the world stage in the 1980s.

The Parameters of Political Legitimacy Western theories of legitimacy focus primarily on relationships between the rulers and the ruled, as grounded in either the Weberian or the Marxian tradition. Legitimacy, Dolf Sternberger writes, “is the foundation of such governmental power as is exercised both with a consciousness on the government’s part that it has a right to govern and with some recognition by the governed of that right.”12 The notion of “right” precludes neither a legal-rational (Weberian) nor a class-struggle (Marxian) orientation. The last 150 years of German history bear witness to the diversity of conditions and values under which people are prepared to embrace a state as their own, ranging from the Wilhelmine Empire to the Third Reich, to a democratic Federal Republic. After 1945, most western analysts judged the legitimacy of Eastern regimes according to liberal-democratic standards, an approach rendering all self-proclaimed socialist states illegitimate by definition, if not by design.

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Correspondingly, eastern scholars applied criteria attesting to the illegitimate character of bourgeois-capitalist governments. Both positions overlook the multi-dimensional nature of legitimacy: Legitimation entails both a process and a relationship, implying reciprocity and mutual accommodation. To warrant long-term political stability, legitimacy must be woven into the fabric of political culture. As Henry Krisch observed in 1986, a system needs to foster congruence between existing political structures and the values embodied by the majoritarian culture. Congruence is rooted in “a tendency toward increasing regime stability by increasing acceptance of the regime among a broad strata (sic) of the population through the diffusion of political culture attitudes supportive of existing political arrangements.”13 Governments must engage in “continuous accommodation” to maintain the fit between attitudes, roles, and structures. Stability is sooner ensured in cases where leaders are prepared to tolerate, if not to embrace, traditional or popular values, instead of merely imposing their own. The degree of accommodation need not be symmetrical, insofar as the value mix is likely to change over time. Over the years, “the elements of the traditional culture reappear to modify and transform official doctrines, resulting in an amalgam of legitimizing values and attitudes.”14 This explains why it became necessary for the GDR to incorporate the German past in its entirety into the fabric of its own political culture as an “anti-­fascist state.” The quest for legitimacy under any system is rooted in a “struggle to make political power, as expressed in structures and processes, correspond to values of the political culture.”15 A comparison of the foundations of legitimacy in capitalist and socialist states nonetheless suggests a few overlapping dimensions. The critical difference rests with the rank-ordering and weighting of certain factors according to ideological imperatives. Legitimacy’s essence lies in the quality of power and the acceptability of its exercise in a given system. Its normative dimensions imply the recognition of concrete reference points, which Peter Ludz defines in terms of the questions for whom?, to what end? and using what means?16 Securing state legitimacy is an ongoing process, thus the significance and weight of various factors may shift over time. Its components are interactive in character, including countervailing or compensatory effects: the system’s objective parameters and/or citizens’ subjective perceptions can change throughout the course of national development. Among the various applicable bases for legitimacy are:

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(1) an acceptance of authority grounded in traditional-religious terms à la Max Weber; (2) citizen acquiescence in response to charismatic leadership or, alternatively, fostered by the cult of personality; (3) recognition of the state based on ideological-historical justifications; (4) adherence to authority deriving from a sense of community based on cultural-affective ties; (5) acknowledgment of the right to rule grounded in material or performance-­based factors; (6) obedience conditioned by constitutional-procedural consensus (explored by Weber, Luhmann, and Habermas); (7) internalization of the prevailing values conditioned by instrumental-­ participatory factors; (8) submission to the exercise of power based on a recognition of expertise. Let us briefly consider how these conditions featured in the GDR’s campaigns to legitimize its rule over a period of four decades (details in subsequent chapters). Among the variables distinguishing East European political cultures from those of Western states, Krisch emphasized nationality factors, role definitions ascribed to class, acceptance of Marxism-Leninism as framework for political life and acknowledgment of the vanguard party’s role. Under the Soviet model, these systems claimed to foster a high degree of personal involvement in societal organizations; a commitment to the scientific-­ technological revolution; public homage to revolutionary qua ideological traditions; and faith in the character of socialist democracy (viz., belief in the historical inevitability of egalitarian society). Finally, they ascribed to clearly delineated relations vis-à-vis external actors, based on diverse but ever-present friend/enemy categorizations. GDR theorists defined their own political culture as the embodiment of “the processed, applicable knowledge of the nature, character and functioning of politics and political power and the relevant social activity of classes, strata and individuals.”17 As such, it was inextricably linked to the socialist way of life, grounded in the formation of all-sided socialist personalities. The leadership sought to anchor its vision of socialist culture through political socialization, the imposition of a constitutionally embodied “socialist theory of rights,” and through its persistent, if hollow espousal of the “identity of interests” between citizens and the state, affirmed through regular elections. These mechanisms embodied, in Michael Peltzer’s words, “objective contradictions.”18

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Founders of the “godless” East German state would have had a difficult time justifying their rule based on traditional-religious arguments, notwithstanding their rehabilitation of Martin Luther in the early 1980s (to generate tourism). Rejecting “the opiate of the masses,” the SED sought to build legitimacy based on beliefs shared with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Thomas Baylis noted that theoretical orthodoxy was “sanctified” by virtue of its deeper USSR roots, though many of its tenets were later challenged by modernization processes affecting Soviet society itself. Marxism-Leninism enjoyed the status of an ersatz religion, used to justify any and all exercise of authority beyond the circle of party elites. Later the SED sought legitimation by recognizing Protestant clergy and parishes as “the Church in socialism,” hoping to sever its western ties. Ulbricht and Honecker did indulge in various “cult of personality” practices, as reflected in the number of times their photos and full titles were featured in the media; Honecker reached an all-time high, with 43 photos in a single issue of Neues Deutschland on March 16, 1986.19 The SED nonetheless failed to produce outstanding figures who might have enjoyed the advantages inherent in charismatic leadership. Indeed, both rulers were often the brunt of “GDR jokes,” related to their rambling speeches, grating voices and thick accents.20 As Sigmund Freud observed, “Jokes are the weapon of the powerless.” Better-educated, heroic figures evincing missionary zeal either perished as resistance fighters under Hitler, lost all standing during the Stalinist era or were later persecuted from within the SED. The ideological-historical dimension was quintessential to SED legitimation strategy. Founded by individuals persecuted for their opposition to Nazism, the German Democratic Republic deliberately disassociated itself from the Third Reich. An emphasis on the “anti-fascist-democratic” character of socialist Germany and the simultaneous projection of the state as the embodiment of true proletarian interests were the most consistent features of their efforts to consolidate public acceptance. This dimension proved most critical in sustaining the loyalty, or at least the tolerance of East German intellectuals and clerics, although the praxis often failed to measure up to the theory (e.g., in its elevation of Communist victims of Nazi barbarism over all others, including Jews). Cultural-affective ties proved to be a double-edged sword. Ironically, the SED initially benefited from an earlier, “typically German” attachment to the Obrigkeitsstaat (the organic, authoritarian state) and Bildungsbürgertum (an educated elite stratum). It heralded the return of intellectuals and authors like Bertolt Brecht, but then set out to destroy the

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institutional foundations of old attachments. It forged new communal ties based on “socialist culture” but was regularly compelled to acknowledge the existence of the other Germany pursuant to shifting systemic goals. After July 1963, Ulbricht “took the lead in making ‘national interest’ and ‘national economy’ common terms in the lexicon of East German officialdom,” all the while stressing its model character and independent achievements.21 Material/performance-based factors played a crucial role in the legitimacy calculations of average citizens, more concerned about food, housing and jobs in the wake of war. Major rhetorical shifts, for example, the stress on the “unity of economic and social policy” during the 1960s, eliminated few of the chronic deficiencies under “real-existing” socialism. Inflated propaganda claims, coupled with the subversive forces of West German television, raised consumer expectations more quickly than the system could satisfy them. Ludz speculated in the mid-1970s that “if the SED were more active and effective in complying with the materialistic and psychological expectations of the people, then an ersatz legitimacy would be likely to develop.”22 Strategies designed to increase consumption were often doomed to fail, insofar as satisfying citizen demands was often viewed as a means to an end, that is, political stabilization. Many socialist policy achievements were simply taken for granted among the generations “born into” the GDR. Whatever legitimacy might have derived from constitutional-procedural consensus was undercut by the leadership’s mounting paranoia and over-­ politicization of the legal establishment. Rooted in the precept of democratic centralism, prerequisites for the exercise of state power were elaborated in two constitutions (1949 and 1968, amended in 1974), as was an extensive catalog of citizen rights and responsibilities. The problem lay in the gap between theory and praxis. A general acceptance of state authority formalized in law was reflected in repeated efforts by dissidents to claim rights contained not only in domestic statutes but also codified in the international treaties which the GDR had signed, especially the Helsinki Accords and the United Nations Charter. The SED leadership moreover failed to take advantage of instrumental-­ participatory factors which might have helped to bolster legitimacy in the early 1980s. The masses were ascribed an activist role in hopes of enhancing system stability. Although it provided an array of participatory organs and work-place mechanisms in accordance with the dictum, Plane mit, arbeite mit, regiere mit [“plan with, work with, rule with”], the party’s ritualized calls to action contradicted its real-political goal of managing a

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compliant citizenry. The aim of participation was not to promote individual self-determination but to centralize control and force collective integration. Official stress on the need for mass involvement generated new demands for genuine, autonomous opportunities for participation, to which the government refused to respond even during its final days by denying legal status to New Forum. Higher levels of education guaranteed to GDR citizens in the wake of three reform campaigns established the principle of expertise as a basis for legitimacy under “scientific Marxism,” although citizens increasingly challenged the types of knowledge needed to advance the socialist cause (e.g., paramilitary training for school children). The imperatives of the “scientific-­ technological revolution” exacerbated the debate regarding the primacy of Red-Experts over Expert-Reds as of the 1970s.23 The exhortations to embrace a socialist-style “achievement principle” were intended to increase production, not to enhance self-determination. As Baylis noted, the SED’s calls for “more ‘imagination’, creativity, self-confidence, ‘joy in decisionmaking’, ‘readiness to take risks’, and even the development of ‘ideas, preferably crazy ones’,” pitted the operative principles of hierarchy, predictability and control against individuals’ desires for equality, flexibility and spontaneity.24 Rhetorical homage to greater “individual initiative” moreover raised the thorny problems of income differentiation and anti-egalitarian societal rewards. Here we need to distinguish among the potential threats to legitimacy, stressed by Bogdan Denitch: (a) challenges to the political order and the nation-state; (b) challenges to the economic and social order; (c) challenges within the educational system and among prospective elites; and (d)  challenges to the traditional patriarchal family. I would add the less frequently explored challenges invoked by generational change, which for a time worked to the GDR’s benefit but came to erode system stability by the 1980s. Building on Denitch, I maintain that certain GDR policies did create “a loyal, or at the very least, a passive stratum whose personal advances were the result of the social transformation in Eastern Europe.”25 New opportunities extended to traditionally disadvantaged groups triggered new dilemmas, however. Efforts to expand the educational system for children of the working/peasant classes, eager to use this avenue for social advancement, led to youth “surpluses,” over-trained for existing vacancies, frustrated by a lack of career choice and pushing for genuinely responsible positions.

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The GDR nonetheless acquired some legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens along most of these axes by the mid-1970s, especially after it was accorded UN membership. As we explore in later chapters, legitimacy is a political resource that elites elect to enhance or squander at many levels, based on specific policy choices addressed to diverse segments of the population. Most political systems rest on a population mix of true believers, the satisfied, the dissatisfied, and dissenters, although the proportions differed significantly from East to West prior to 1990. Few governments risk subjecting their citizens to extraordinary, thought-provoking tests of support or loyalty all of the time.

A Spectre Haunting …: The Stalinist Legacy My earlier studies exploring the dialectical nature of East and West German identities as they evolved across four decades sensitized me to the value of interdisciplinary approaches to this topic. Revisiting the classical works describing the politics, policies and protests that shaped GDR-­consciousness between 1949 and 1989 thirty years after unification led me to a second methodological insight: to comprehend the wide gap between theory and praxis that triggered the collapse of the socialist state, one needs not only to draw on inconsistencies in the regime’s ideological underpinnings but also to wrestle with the psychological trauma of the Stalinist years that shaped country’s founders. The personal experiences of Walter Ulbricht, responsible for the institutionalization of authoritarian norms and practices from 1945 to 1971, seem particularly salient in this context. One of Ulbricht’s early assistants, Wolfgang Leonhard, offered a compelling, autobiographical account of his own “coming to terms” with Stalinism in his book, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder (English edition: Child of the Revolution), published in 1955.26 Having joined the German Communist Party (KPD) in 1918, Leonhard’s mother quit in 1925 but remained active in far-left campaigns; she fled to Moscow in 1935 to escape Nazi persecution, accompanied by her 13-year-old son. In 1937 she was arrested by the NKVD (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the secret police responsible for most of the dirty work behind Stalin’s purges. She spent the next twelve years in a Soviet labor camp, as her son advanced through various stages of communist education/indoctrination. By his own admission, he suppressed questions regarding her unjust incarceration until the SED’s authoritarian turn in occupied Germany precipitated his own break with Stalinism. Soviet officials allowed his mother to return to

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Berlin in 1948, where her son had already become a high-ranking party functionary. She eventually joined him in Yugoslavia, after he fled the SED’s newly established security apparatus in March 1949. Leonhard provides a detailed account of his years in a special school for German immigrants, his energetic involvement in the Komsomol youth organization, and his days at a Soviet university specializing in foreign languages. In sober, dispassionate terms, he described his efforts to internalize, without question, countless ideological absurdities and dialectical turns, starting with the barbaric purges that targeted even his school friends for the “traitorous” leanings of their parents. His feverish embrace of antifascism was followed by his collectively shared shock over the 1939 HitlerStalin Pact, and its equally stunning abrogation in June 1941. He detailed the ways in which countless Communist heroes (including Lenin’s own Politburo members) were erased overnight from school history lessons, denounced as revisionists and sectarians. Without ostensible regret, Leonhard noted early on: “We took it for granted that in the Soviet Union one could be flung from the very highest levels into the deepest chasm, and that the same thing could also happen in reverse.”27 Stalin’s mindless invasion of Finland, 1939–1940, then his ignominious failure to conquer that small neighboring state, presaged a paradigm shift away from proletarian internationalism in favor of Soviet patriotism. Caught up in the forced deportation of resident Germans to desolate, hungerdriven outposts of the Soviet empire once Hitler invaded Russia, Leonhard’s hardship-plagued trips through Kazakhstan and Siberia exposed him to the “indescribable misery” of the population at large: “During these months I saw and learned more about the Soviet Union than during my many years in Moscow.”28 A stroke of luck allowed him to resume his studies at the Pedagogical Institute in Karaganda, surrounded by starving villages, until he was recruited in 1941 to attend the Comintern (Communist International) School in Kushnarenkovo, 1280 kilometers from Moscow. There he was introduced to physical forms of privileged treatment (clothing, housing, food rations), accorded to strictly defined “classes” of functionaries. Forced to turn in their radios and denied access to original theoretical texts, Leonhard and his fellow students were subject to “24/7” training and testing, replete with Orwellian shifts in the “correct interpretation” of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Looking back, he realized that “the hierarchical division into Know-nothings, Know-mores and Know-alots, the exact dosing of information across specific groups of human beings was a

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significant characteristic of the Stalinist system.”29 His subsequent assignments as a propaganda writer, the author of party teaching materials, as a radio announcer, a lower-level newspaper editor and temporary party archivist (ordered not to read what he was classifying!) rendered him better informed than most. Physical isolation, combined with the privileged status he experienced during the hunger years, completely stripped him and other young communists of an ability to engage in critical reflection beyond the bounds of rigorous “dialectical” argumentation applied to “political questions of the day.” Stripped of even their own names, the future ideologues sharing Leonhard’s experiences with “criticism and self-criticism” at the Comintern School lost their capacity for personal moral judgment. He reflected later: “it seems to me that the total isolation of the responsible functionary stratum was an essential characteristic of the Stalinist system. … Within eleven months they turned this life-embracing, open-minded student and Komsomol member into a party functionary who weighed every single word” before daring to speaking.30 Inducted into the National Committee “Free Germany,” Leonhard was sent to the Soviet Military Administrative Zone as part of the elite “Ulbricht Group” in April 1945. Born June 30, 1893, in Leipzig, Walter Ulbricht was the son of a poor tailor; he left school early to train as a cabinetmaker, securing his life-long status as a member of the working class. Joining the SPD in 1912, he served in the Balkans, Galicia, and Ukraine during World War I but deserted in 1918, resulting in brief imprisonment. Mentored by Ernst Thälmann, he switched to the German Communist Party in 1919 and was sent as a delegate to the Comintern’s Fourth World Congress, where he briefly met Lenin. Married in 1920, he lost contact with his first wife and child within a few years.31 Despite his earlier dereliction of duty, he was appointed to the KPD Military Council, then attended the International Lenin School in 1924, where he learned Russian and acquired revolutionary expertise in “party organization.” This appears to have been his only period of concentrated study in matters of Marxist-Leninist theory.32 Elected to the state parliament in Saxony in 1926, Ulbricht advanced to the Reichstag in 1928, representing Westphalia; he reportedly once shared a speakers’ platform with Joseph Goebbels.33 Following the Nazi’s antiCommunist pogrom after the Reichstag fire, Ulbricht fled to the Soviet Union in 1937, where he acquired an NKVD “skill set”; he was then deployed to Spain, where he targeted and executed Trotskyite soldiers among the republican resistance, seen to oppose Stalin’s control of the

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international communist movement. He assumed a leading role in the KPD, following Thälmann’s execution by the Nazis in 1944. Only 23 when he was assigned to Ulbricht’s group in Berlin, Leonhard was tasked with especially delicate reporting and negotiating roles, aimed at forging a “national front” among a wide array of autonomous anti-­fascist and social-democratic groups. The initial goal was to deliberately recruit former bourgeois-party members and even religious activists to serve as local mayors and urban administrators; their job was to restore essential services and avert a food catastrophe in 1945. The postwar years were marked by extreme hunger and scarcity, exacerbated by the Soviets’ immediate extraction of war reparations from the eastern occupation zone. In addition to the pillaging and mass sexual assaults attributed to Russian soldiers, the SMAD organized so-called trophy battalions to dismantle whole factories, laboratories, and even railroad tracks, for transport back to the Soviet Union. Avenging Soviet troops helped themselves to furniture and food supplies, on top of the increasing demands for monetary compensation imposed by Stalin.34 GDR citizens would later stress the crippling effects these reparation demands had on their economy, in stark contrast to the “Economic Miracle” witnessed in the western state, stimulated in part by Marshall Plan assistance. Constituting a temporary united front, Communists and Social Democrats managed to re-establish administrative units across local, district, and provincial-level communities by July. According to Leonhard, “We believed in a major uplifting, a rebirth—some of us even used the word renaissance—the building of a new socialist movement and the rise of new socialist states, that in many respects would be different from the Soviet Union.”35 Anticipating potential resistance in SPD strongholds like Wedding and Friedrichshain, as well as in “noble quarters” like Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, and Zehlendorf prior to the arrival of other victorious powers, Ulbricht initially limited communists to key functional roles at lower levels. He personally directed police, personnel, and education reforms. Invoking tactical logic, Ulbricht insisted: “It has to look democratic, but control must rest in our hands.”36 The picture changed considerably following the forced merger of the SPD and KPD in April 1946. Leonhard’s reconstruction of the events leading up to the birth of a socialist eastern state in October 1949 provided no evidence of a desire on Ulbricht’s part to pursue a self-determined, national path to socialism. Neither his “talent for revolutionary grunt work” nor his ruthless

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treatment of potential rivals was burdened by ideological stand-points, theoretical reflections, or personal feelings, beyond his absolute loyalty to Stalin.37 Looking back, Leonhard held that “the very selection of specific functionaries who were first sent to Germany were an accurate reflection of the dominant functionary types embodying Stalinism.”38 An apparatchik par excellence, Ulbricht was unlikely to inspire the masses to pursue a socialist transformation along Soviet lines; indeed, his cold demeanor, lack of humor, high-pitched voice, Saxonian accent, and bumbling rhetoric were ridiculed among the masses. Ulbricht’s willingness to sacrifice his fellow citizens in favor of subservience to the Soviets who would ensure his power base for over two decades was demonstrated early on. Despite concerns expressed by local health administrators, Ulbricht refused to allow them to discuss the problem of mass rapes, even when the local Soviet commanders proved incapable of halting drunken rampages by Red Army soldiers. When lower-level party activists advocated for “the rights of working women” to abort, he fired back: “those who were now raising such questions should have been a lot more agitated and active back when Hitler was starting the war”—as if women would have been in a position to stop it.39 Ulbricht’s quick rise to power during his time in the Soviet Union owed largely to Stalin’s elimination of hundreds of better-educated communists with more heroic biographies, a pattern he would emulate in the GDR. His NKVD training during the height of the purges outfitted him with a “powerful impulse to punish” that he immediately directed against even those who helped to ensure the dominance of the Socialist Unity Party. His mantra remained: “Disgruntled workers? Arrest the ringleaders. Restless students? Beat them up. Outspoken intellectuals? Lock them up.”40 Denounced as “illegal Schumacher agents,” Social Democrats who had opposed the KPD-SPD merger in Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen, and Berlin constituted largest group of those arrested and imprisoned after 1948. A similar fate awaited CDU and Liberal party delegates, even after they were compelled to accept national “bloc party” status.41 Adhering to the Stalinist play-book, Ulbricht established a Ministry for State Security in February 1950, immediately followed by the Waldheim show trials (April to June) and the purging of roughly 150,000 members of the new party.42 Within three years, nearly half of the conference delegates who had approved the KPD-SPD merger in April 1946 fell victim to Ulbricht’s elimination campaign, including 10 of 14 members of the Central Secretariat.43 Social Democrats and student activists were among

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those arrested and executed. Following the 1956 Hungarian uprising and Ernst Bloch’s 1957 arrest, one student declared: “Prison was the place where they first beat communism out of me. I wanted to discuss with the commissars conducting the hearing, and they answered with their fists. What a lesson they conveyed to me.”44 Dramatically expanded under Honecker, the Stasi became a power in its own right, key to sustaining a system of nomenklatura-dominated, bureaucratic authoritarianism. Ulbricht’s insecurity following Stalin’s death in 1953, the June workers’ rebellion and Khrushchev’s “secret speech” revelations in 1956 triggered further campaigns against revisionist intellectuals and student activists, hoping to pursue a national path to socialism. One such victim, Wolfgang Harich, noted, “We don’t want to break with Marxism-­Leninism, we want to liberate it from Stalinism and dogmatism, and to lead us back to its humanistic and undogmatic way of thinking.” But as Alfred Kantorowicz discerned, “to expect de-Stalinization from Ulbricht would be like entrusting de-Nazification to Himmler.”45 It is hard for one raised in a democratic society to imagine the intense fears and blind, political devotion that drove the men of Ulbricht’s generation, socialized in the clutches of two World Wars and two all-or-nothing, adversarial dictatorships. Still, many would-be revolutionaries with a more sophisticated grasp of Marxist theory—Ernst Bloch, Max Fechner, Franz Dahlem, Wilhelm Zaisser, Rudolf Herrnstadt—adhered to a vision of “socialism with a human face” that resurfaced again in 1968 and 1989. The SED’s “working class” leaders—Ulbricht the carpenter, Honecker the roofer, Willi Stoph the brick-layer—chose loyalty to the Soviet Union over trust in the societal groups they claimed to represent. The more they aged, the more long-term memories shaped their responses to social change, especially in relation to youth movements (Chap. 10). In a classic case of goal-displacement, securing their own power became an end in itself, leading to ever more “antagonist contradictions” at home. As a result, they proved incapable of adapting to the dialectical forces of historical materialism that they themselves had set in motion, beginning in 1949.

Founding Narrative Versus Historical Record Three “objective conditions,” as defined by SED ideologues, allowed the GDR to define itself as the anti-fascist, democratic German state from 1949 onward. First, Adolf Hitler had waged an undeniably aggressive campaign to purge the Reich of socialists and communists, placing them in the morally superior category of “victims and resistance fighters.” SED General

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Secretary Erich Honecker and Minister for State Security Erich Mielke spent years in the same Nazi prison (Brandenburg-Görden) where they would later incarcerate their own “political enemies.” The glorification of their own roles in opposing National Socialism resulted in the undervaluation of the brutal treatment of other anti-fascist activists (Honecker was actually jailed before the Nazis took power). Until its dissolution in 1989, the Eastern state provided higher pensions to Communist resistance fighters as “victims of Hitler fascism” than to a small number of surviving Jewish citizens fitting those categories. Second, German Junkertum (large landowners in Prussia and Brandenburg) and the nascent forces of monopoly capitalism had willingly thrown their support to the Nazi regime. In exchange for active collaboration, they accrued enormous profits generated by military industrialization and their exploitation of cheap, forced labor [ZwangsarbeiterInnen] from conquered Eastern territories. Lenin’s treatise on imperialism declared that only the elimination of private property would vest power in the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” whose international solidarity would ensure the triumph of peace. By expunging capitalist elements, embracing the Soviet model of development and committing itself to “eternal love and friendship” vis-à-vis the very nation Germany had twice sought to destroy, the new state hoped to emerge as a “victor of history.” Third, GDR founders claimed to have rigorously purged and “re-­ educated” eastern citizens, although the effectiveness of their methods was open to question. There was some truth to the communist claim that many “big fish” fled to the West at war’s end, where they were permitted to return to “business as usual.” The chief architects of National Socialism were held accountable for their crimes against humanity at the Nuremburg Trials, but major war-time entrepreneurs like Krupp and Flick spent only a few years in prison. Western occupational forces quickly ended broader “denazification” measures, due to more pressing concerns over potential Soviet expansion. Active NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) members were, in fact, soon accorded prominent political roles in the FRG, such as Hans Globke (Federal Chancellor’s Office), Federal President Carl Karstens, Minister-President Alfred Dregger, and Judge Hans Filbinger. Their re-instatement affirmed the SED claim that the “line of tradition” between the Nazis of the 1940s and resurgent far-right forces of the late 1960s was essentially unbroken. Other Third Reich elites escaped retribution for their crimes in places as far away as Argentina and Chile, where Honecker himself would flee in 1990.

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Official statistics do not support the image of hordes of fleeing fascists, leaving behind an eastern zone populated largely by victims and resistance fighters. Saxony, for example, had allowed 780 right-wing local groups to mobilize after 1929, while electoral support for the NSDAP nearly tripled by March 1933, rising to 43.6% (Dresden-Bautzen) and 50% (Chemnitz-­ Zwickau). Prior to Hitler’s seizure of power, the National Socialist party garnered higher electoral support in Prussia, Mecklenburg, and Thuringia than in Bavaria.46 This is not to deny the massive displacement of peoples that occurred immediately before and after Germany’s compete capitulation in 1945: 11–15 million people fled or were driven out by the approaching Red Army. The 4.3 million forced to carve out new lives for themselves in the Soviet occupation zone were officially labeled Umsiedler, that is “persons who resettled,” though Wolfgang Meinicke argued that they were actually Umgesiedelte, refugees who “were resettled. FRG officials characterized those seeking refuge in the Western zones as the Vertriebenen, meaning ‘persons driven out’.”47 The occupying powers held diverging views regarding measures to track down and punish active Nazis and their supporters. Western allies increasingly turned responsibility for processing Nazi crimes (denunciations, and eventually “crimes against humanity”) over to German courts, granting them significantly more autonomy than their SMAD counterparts. Expected to expedite the process while instilling new respect for the rule of law, this decision brought other complications, for example, low conviction rates: as of 1949 in Bavaria, for example, 82% of the judges, along with 85% of state prosecutors were former NSDAP members. By comparison, as of 1947 only eight judges and fourteen prosecutors linked to the Nazi party and affiliated organizations still held office in the Soviet zone.48 According to GDR historian Meinicke, prosecution rates ranged from 88.7% in the French zone to 52.7% in the British domain, largely under Control Council laws. The UK eventually granted German courts jurisdiction regarding certain “crimes against humanity,” like forced sterilization and race persecution, with the exception of cases involving Jews. Americans tended to lag behind; they mailed out 12 million questionnaires as a prelude to denazification but drowned in the responses; they ultimately decided 3.6 million cases, divided into five categories. “Crimes against humanity” in the American sector were tried under German law, given US concerns about the application of ex post facto law. Between 1945 and 1950, some 14,046 western criminal investigations resulted in 13,333 indictments, 4667 convictions, and 3703 acquittals. In other cases,

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investigations were terminated, and charges were dropped or incorporated into denazification proceedings.49 Denazification in the eastern zone proceeded in different, inconsistent waves; the total number of cases reported varies according to the source and location. The Soviet Military Administration quickly approved the formation of anti-fascist parties, labor unions, youth, and women’s committees, along with an association for the victims of Nazi persecution. During the first phase, for example, spontaneously created anti-fascist committees among former concentration camp inmates compiled lists of known activists and recommended personnel replacements for public posts. The second stage concentrated on establishing communist control over offices and factories. Returning German communists accorded greater priority to administrative and industrial reconstruction than to chasing down smalltime Nazis, characterized by Ulbricht as “ancient history.”50 He soon ordered the dissolution of all anti-fascist committees, however, deeming them potential undercover organizations for Nazis. Leonhard later characterized this move as “the first victory of the apparatchiks,” seeking to prevent the rise of a powerful, independent socialist movement, particularly after the forced merger of the SPD and KPD.51 Losing confidence in the Germans’ willingness to carry out far-reaching purges, the Soviet Union initiated a third phase, focusing on bureaucrats and private sector employers who had been NSDAP members. Their removal proceeded more rapidly in Sachsen, Brandenburg, and Mecklenburg than in Thüringen or Sachsen-Anhalt. By January 1, 1947, the SMAD had eliminated 390,478 former Nazis from all important bureaucratic agencies. Special commissions compiled 155,864 cases by March 1947, classifying 75,025 (53.4%) as nominal members by August.52 Another 11,167 were fired from their posts, resulting in a total of 520,734 persons purged from state structures, while 10,482 were demoted and 44,025 applications for reinstatement were denied.53 The final stage was marked by SED control, but party rulers were not empowered to pass judgment or impose differential sanctions. SMAD Order Nr. 201 (August 1947) emphasized a need to distinguish between former activists and those who might be won over to a new “democratic” Germany. The primary aim was to eliminate potential opposition to a radical restructuring of the socio-economic order. They restored active and passive electoral rights to the latter, and charged German courts with the prosecution of NSDAP activists. According to Devin Pendras, early trials in the East followed established legal procedures, warranting a “reasonable

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chance” of acquittal or standard sentences—a source of vexation for Russian authorities. East German courts conducted “regular” trials against 12,807 persons, 118 of whom were sentenced to death, 231 to life imprisonment and 5088 to incarceration.54 Many landed in “special camps” in Bautzen, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen, previously used by Nazis. Soviet occupiers formally terminated denazification in 1948 (SMAD Order Nr. 36), replaced by other potential integration processes. In May, for example, they approved the formation of the National Democratic Party of Germany, the party of so-called little Nazis along with the German Farmer’s Party. Former resistance fighter Erich Mielke and his secret police nonetheless continued the domestic hunt for ex-Nazis. The Waldheim trials of 1950 marked a dramatic shift toward “authoritarian political justice.” At issue were the fates of 3400 prisoners among some 29,000 who had been interned in special camps; many of the latter had been tried, convicted and sentenced by Military Tribunals. The rest were turned over to East Germans, on the assumption that they would be quickly tried and harshly punished, based on the Soviet model. Final verdicts included 33 death sentences and 146 internees subjected to life imprisonment; a majority received sentences of ten to twenty-five years. The only woman given the death penalty was transferred to a sanatorium after appeal.55 Ulbricht and company wasted no time in seizing the property of Nazi activists for purpose of “democratic land reform,” starting in September 1945. By autumn 1946, they had created 210,000 new farms, and improved the lot of 12,600 small agricultural undertakings, benefiting an alleged half-million families. Nearly 78% of the participants in a state-wide referendum in Saxony, conducted in June 1946, voted to convert Nazi-­owned factories into “people’s property.” By spring 1948, 9281 holdings had been socialized, including the eastern production assets of Flick, Mannesmann, Siemens, Krupp, IG Farben and AEG.56 Authorities expropriated 3843 of 39,919 industries, accounting for 39% of total industrial production by 1949.57 Ulbricht was moved by Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948 to intensify his own top-down control and loyalty to the Soviet model of development across other sectors as well.58 As witnessed in the western zones, a critical lack of qualified personnel compelled communist authorities to back-track on earlier denazification measures. In October 1952, the “Law on the Formal Political Rights of Former Officers of the Fascist Military and the Former Members and Sympathizers of the Nazi Party” restored the full rights of select citizens.

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The SED used the new NDPD to pull former Wehrmacht officers and soldiers into the National Front. With the exception of the Interior and Justice Ministries, along with police-related fields, nominal NSDAP members were allowed to return to their posts, to ensure economic-industrial “efficiency.” By 1953, 25% of the works directors, 83.3% of the technical directors, 42.9% of the business directors, and 57.9% of the supervisors in the Mansfield Kombinat (conglomerate) were known to have been card-­ carrying members of the NSDAP prior to May 1945.59 While the society-wide need to “come to terms with the past” remained an open question, systemic debates differed significantly between the two new states. Having asserted itself as the legitimate successor to the Third Reich, the Federal Republic provided massive compensation to former Nazi victims, although Central/East European slave laborers, especially women, were excluded from payment until 1998, as a function of Cold War politics.60 The SED curiously began to re-envision itself, moving from the image of “the conquered” to “co-conqueror,” blaming Nazism and its atrocities on monopoly capitalists rather than on the masses who had directly or indirectly collaborated with the regime. The socialist strategy excluded all-encompassing cultural and/or personal examinations of culpability. While I share Richard von Weizsäcker’s conviction that “collective guilt” is a problematic concept, a strategy deliberately ignoring the role of individual responsibility prevented significant “societal learning” from ever taking place. Consider, for example, the oral histories of first-generation “proletarians” compiled by Lutz Niethammer, Dorothee Wierling, and Alexander von Plato two years prior to the regime’s collapse. Reflecting on “legacy and tradition,” these scholars conducted 150 detailed biographical interviews in the postwar industrial strongholds of Bitterfeld, Eisenhüttenstadt, and Chemnitz. As of 1987, they searched high and wide for “veteran anti-­ fascists,” but found instead many workers, especially in Bitterfeld, more inclined to reflect on their defining experiences of June 17, 1953. They found others who had participated in Hitler Youth (HJ), the Nazi party, or even the SS, whose accounts of “building socialism” contained anti-­Semitic references and occasional Freudian slips, for example, use of the term “HJ” (Hitler Youth) instead of the intended “FDJ” (communist youth league).61 Landolf Scherzer and Günther Wallraff likewise discovered seamless transitions between earlier anti-Jewish orientations, disparaging attitudes toward foreign “contract workers” in GDR times, and anti-Turkish sentiments after unification.62

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Germans lucky enough to have landed in the British, French, and American occupation zones experienced none of the draconian reparations and industrial dismantling inflicted on their compatriots in the Soviet zone after 1945—one factor fueling the post-unification frustrations of older easterners whose biographical hardships were ignored by westerners. The collapse of the Nazi distribution system, the loss of imports from formerly conquered eastern territories, labor shortages and poor agricultural harvests were accompanied by extreme winter cold-spells.63 During the “hunger year” of 1946/1947, Cologne Archbishop Josef Cardinal Frings went so far as to declare stealing coal and food for survival purposes “morally justifiable” for those unable to work for pay. Averaging 3113 per day in 1936, adult caloric consumption plunged to 1550 by late 1946, hitting lows of 720–770 in some cities; roughly 80% suffered from malnutrition.64 These dire material conditions provided anything but an auspicious beginning for the socialist regime’s quest to secure its legitimacy and identity, calling to mind Becher’s image of the phoenix rising out of the ashes.

The Quest for Socialist Legitimacy Joseph Rothschild posited that it is “not so much the failure to master any one crisis that will result in precipitous delegitimation, but rather a string of failures in the face of a series of such challenges extending over time.”65 Not all citizens are inclined to defect simultaneously, as suggested by the concept of loyalty explored earlier. Reinhard Bendix compared political legitimacy to the consumer confidence which enables a bank to reinvest its customers’ savings in a variety of ventures over many years, secure in the assumption that not everyone will insist on a total withdrawal of deposits at the same time.66 Until the mid-1980s, the GDR was able to master occasional challenges to its legitimacy, largely through small concessions and citizen “arrangements.” Its legitimacy had already been sorely tested prior to its official creation, starting with the Allied currency reform of June 1948, applied to the three western zones and Berlin. Soviet objections triggered an extensive blockade, lasting from June 1948 to May 1949, which the West mitigated through its legendary “Berlin airlift.” The tripartite resolution of July 1948 (excluding the USSR) approved the promulgation of a West German Basic Law (constitution), ratified in May 1949. The Soviet Military Administration countered with its own east-zone constitution, establishing a separate East German state on October 7, 1949.

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All parts of the former Reich had been stripped of national security forces by virtue of unconditional surrender. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, formed in 1949, accorded special membership status to the fledgling Federal Republic, including the three western zones. Moscow leaders and the new Ulbricht regime saw the FRG’s inclusion as evidence of NATO’s imperialistic aims; they accused the Alliance’s founders of driving a permanent wedge between the western and eastern zones, under the guise of Truman’s containment policy. Officially offered to the fledgling East European states, the Marshall Plan was decried as part of a larger scheme to “divide and conquer” progressive socialist forces. Adenauer’s pro-western campaign to secure “half of Germany completely rather than all of Germany halfway” forced the SED to take an ideological stand on its own political status in 1950. A “new reality” had emerged, declared at its Second Party Congress (1952), based on the existence of two sovereign states which had arisen independently of each other, diametrically opposed in their social orders. This was substantiated by the western refusal to consider the establishment of a neutral, unified Germany, as outlined in the Stalin Note of March 10, 1952. The 1952 Conference declared “the establishment of socialism,” moving the Volkskammer to “democratize” the administration of its five Länder [states], replacing them with 15 districts and 194 precincts. Expropriating major landowners, the SED initially sought to win peasant support by adopting Lenin-style land reforms, reallocating over two million hectares (5 million acres) to small farmers while designating 1 million hectares state property. It then sabotaged those reforms by imposing mandatory production quotas (for state outlets), punitive taxation, and centralized control of farm machinery use. Popular discontent had begun to surface in 1950/1951, due to cuts in consumer production in favor of heavy industry. The onset of agricultural collectivization led many farmers to bolt for the west, triggering a new course of “intensified class struggle” against private property owners and church activists. Commensurate with the 1949 constitution (Art. 17, wage determination through workers’ councils; Art. 14 right to strike), workers initiated warning strikes at Leuna and Zeiss in 1951. The number of people abandoning the SMAD zone rose from 4343 in 1951 to 15,000–23,000 per month in 1952, exacerbating food shortages and raising the price of basic goods.67 Devastated by Stalin’s death in March, SED leaders had ironically declared 1953 “the Year of Karl Marx.” Rulers eliminated food-ration cards for the self-employed, East Berlin professionals (doctors, lawyers) and residents whose jobs were located in the western sector in April. A 10%

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increase in productivity norms was announced on Ulbricht’s 60th birthday, amounting to wage reductions (through the elimination of “bonuses”), as of June 1. For skilled male workers this meant a cut from 168 East Marks to 72 EM per week, for women, from 52.80 EM to 46 EM.68 Though the SED would later attribute the mass uprising to western saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries, Fritz Schenk noted, “when the windows of the HOs (state-owned grocery stores) are shattered, but private shops are left untouched, then it is clear … this is no longer about norms.”69 Honecker’s autobiography describes the massive reparations that World War I victors had transferred “to the shoulders of the workers” through rising productivity norms and wage cuts imposed on coal and iron miners in the Saarland when he was growing up. He lauded the workers’ strikes waged between 1919 and 1923, decrying the state’s brutal crackdown and the harsh sentences inflicted on 72,000 mine-workers following their 100-day strike in February.70 He failed to see any historical parallel to the events of 1953. Apprised of growing unrest, the Politburo had already rescinded the norm increase on May 28 but had not publicized the reversal. Unionized construction workers assigned to complete East Berlin’s new showcase boulevard, the Stalinallee, were the first to mount a spontaneous strike on June 16. By the time they ended their march from the Trade Union Federation (FDGB) headquarters to the House of Ministries, their ranks had swelled from 300 to over 10,000 protesters. The leadership’s refusal to address the assembled crowd resulted in calls for a general strike the next day. On June 17, more than 300,000 abandoned their worksites in 272 towns, encompassing about 10% of the paid labor force.71 The largest turnouts were recorded in the proletarian strongholds of Berlin, Bitterfeld, Halle, Leipzig, and Merseburg; other sites included Brandenburg, Ludwigsfeld, Potsdam, Cottbus, Görlitz, Dresden, Halle, Magdeburg, Jena, Gera, Rostock, and Rügen. Recognizing they were indispensable to fulfillment of the state’s Economic Plan, chemical and steel workers in Leuna, Buna, Wolfen, and Hennigsdorf (“the backbone” of industry) joined the strikes, calling for a return to former wages, cheaper living costs, free elections, and immunity for strikers and spokespersons. When some local police refused to use force against the demonstrators, the Soviets moved in; arriving at Alexanderplatz at 9 am, T-34 tanks advanced to the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz. The first shots were fired around 11 am, martial law was declared, and Berlin streets were “swept clean” by 9 pm.72 Demonstrations elsewhere quickly acquired “a purely political character.” Workers at factories and mines around Bitterfeld issued nine demands. They included resignation of the entire government; formation of a

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provisional government; recognition of Western democratic parties; direct, secret elections within four months; the release of all political prisoners; the elimination of zone-borders and the removal of Vopos (People’s Police). They also called for a normalization of living standards, dissolution of the National People’s Army (NVA), and freedom from prosecution or sanctions against demonstrators.73 Depending on the source, historians report that roughly 200–267 protesters and 100–116 police were killed. Stasi fatality figures were significantly lower (19 demonstrators, 2 bystanders, and 4 police) but exclude injured protesters who fled to West Berlin.74 Protests continued in Leipzig and East Berlin until July 9, while 167 of 217 cities/districts were subject to martial law. Ringleaders were tried and sentenced by Judge Hilde Benjamin, who had established her reputation during the Stalinist show trials (1400 convictions, 3 death sentences, as reported in west). Soviet military tribunals were responsible for 19 executions.75 As Arnulf Baring observed, June 1953 marked an historical turning point, “but history failed to turn.”76 Instead of seizing the moment and recognizing that East German economic policy was failing to foster legitimacy among the very class it claimed to represent, the SED purged itself of those sympathetic to the laborers’ demands. On July 16, Ulbricht’s minions arrested the Minister of Justice, Max Fechner, who opposed mass punishments. Ten days later, the Minister for State Security, Wilhelm Zaisser, and chief editor of Neues Deutschland, Rudolf Herrnstadt, were expelled from the Politburo and stripped of party membership. Other critical party members were reprimanded and lost their bids for reelection to the Politburo, including the lone female, Moscow-trained Elli Schmidt, who led the Democratic Women’s League (DFD). Still, the SED was forced to make concessions. The Central Committee agreed to raise minimum earnings and pensions for the four lowest wage groups, to increase food production and expand light, consumer-oriented industries at the expense of heavy industry. In January 1954, the Soviet Union decreed that it would no longer require payment on the remaining war debt ($2.5 million). It restored German “ownership” of 33 major industries, accounting for 12% of GDR manufacturing facilities, extended credits of half a million Rubles and agreed that the cost of deploying Soviet troops on the territory of the defeated would not exceed 5% of the new state’s revenues (1.6 billion Marks in 1954). Roughly 814,000 “voted with their feet” against the fledgling state between the Soviet intervention of 1953 and the invasion of Hungary in 1956.77

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For the next two decades, “explanations” for the GDR’s poor domestic performance continued to stress external sabotage and anti-state activity. Rather than alter its own tactics, it blamed unrepentant fascist/bourgeois lackeys for undermining the socialist advances of the new state, especially westerners and occupying soldiers who induced shortages by buying cheaper eastern goods. The physical flight of ever more East Germans precipitated its next major legitimacy crisis. Interpreting containment policy, the “Korean shock,” and plans to rearm the FRG as a smoke-screen for western roll-back aims, the GDR claimed it had no alternative but to erect its own “anti-fascist protection Wall.” According to SED bosses, August 13, 1961 (labeled Black Monday in the West), “established the international position of the GDR as an act of state and national sovereignty.”78 The Wall brought a modicum of stability to a tense Cold War setting. One could conceivably argue that it later contributed to the leadership’s efforts to secure “external” legitimacy by way of Ostpolitik. Dialectically speaking, the fact that they could no longer “exit” in a physical sense also fostered, in some respects, East Germans’ ability to identify with their own state as of the early 1970s. We now consider the official components of GDR-identity.

Redefining the Significance of State, Nation, Nationality Socialist rulers held open the possibility of a unified German nation-state as a component of official policy for many years. As late as April 1968, Article 1 of the revised constitution characterized the GDR as the socialist state of the German nation, a designation that lost favor after the new FRG Chancellor, Willy Brandt, embraced the existence of two states in one nation as Bonn’s official policy in 1969. The initiation of Ostpolitik precipitated a rift between Ulbricht and Brezhnev, ultimately resulting in the first premier’s replacement by Honecker in 1971. The SED’s shift from its selfidentity as a “socialist state of the German nation” to one based on socialist-nationhood was also a reaction to the dramatic turn in FRG policy, away from Adenauer’s policy of non-recognition. Under Honecker, the SED embraced the idea of the socialist German nation-state, proclaiming at the VIII Party Congress of 1971 that “the national question has disappeared from German soil.”79 The change in course was reflected in constitutional revisions announced in October 1974. Beyond expunging all remaining references to the schrittweise Annäherung (moving closer, step-by-step) between the two Germanys, the

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constitution declared the GDR the state of workers and farmers (Art. 8, Abs. 2). Cognizant of the confusion intensified demarcation might create in the popular mind, Honecker’s ideologues introduced the formula, Citizenship: GDR, Nationality: German in December 1974. Over the next five years the SED worked to “de-Germanize” its territory by replacing the adjective deutsch with the label GDR-national or of the GDR in the names of official organizations and publications. Notable exceptions were the Deutsche Reichsbahn (German Railway), the name of its primary press organ, Neues Deutschland (New Germany), and the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands per se. These actions were influenced by significant ideological shifts occurring within the international socialist arena during the same period. Shortly after the Warsaw Pact Organization brutally terminated the Prague Spring in 1968, Brezhnev proclaimed the inviolability of the socialist commonwealth, explaining the nation-state’s continuing existence in terms of a harmonization of class interests under a new phase of developed socialism. This doctrine held that the ever more complicated administrative needs of society, coupled with the continuing presence of hostile outside forces, precluded the state’s “withering away” in the foreseeable future. Developed socialism placed the SED under increasing pressure to justify the GDR’s existence as a state whose “national problem” was unlikely to be resolved by integrating the other Germany into an historically imminent, proletarian-­ internationalist community. It also increased pressure to ensure greater economic satisfaction among citizens, promising “fundamental perfection of the direction, planning and stimulation of production, creation of effective branch and basic production structures, and optimal proportioning across the economy.”80 The détente breakthroughs of the 1970s increased the GDR’s need to be recognized as a sovereign entity, given the growing importance of bilateral relations between eastern and western bloc-members. The onset of détente moreover informed a revaluation of key dimensions of GDR historiography, ranging from questions of methodological diversity to new substantive foci.81 The 1970s introduced ideological distinctions deemed essential for refining the GDR’s historical identity, as well as its search for internal legitimacy. Among the key proponents of the new approach were historians Walter Schmidt and Alfred Kosing (interviewed in 1988 and 1989), whose works provide the foundation for the following distinctions.82

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The first historical “truths” judged worthy of revision centered on the SED’s efforts to distinguish between the objective and subjective components of national identity. Identity was to be viewed as a composite, involving the formula, continuity plus change. Its “national” components were differentiated as follows: ★ The Nation = the objective component of identity. It is construed as a stable “historical community of human beings which derives from the formation of community based on its economic relations, its territory, its language, its specifics of culture, its character.”83 The GDR was presented as a new type of nation, emphasizing the primacy of socio-economic structures and the revolutionary nature of its social order, which redefined relations between the classes and reorganized relations of production. Its evolution from socialism to communism, which Marx envisioned as a linear progression, was preordained by certain objective “laws” of history. The quality of being a nation-state (Nationalstaatlichkeit) derived from a lengthy period of deliberate formation and development. This entailed a cognitive acceptance of new structures and values, based on their inevitably progressive nature. Hence, the concept nation came to be viewed as a variable “subject to change” in the dialectical equation of what it meant to be German. ★  Nationality  =  the subjective component of identity. Grounded in a shared past, common language, and other ethnic factors, one’s psychological attachment to an older community should not be underestimated; but pre-existing ties of this nature do not represent the essence of what it means to be a nation. Theorists maintained that a citizen’s affective ties to culturally rooted practices or life-styles deserved respect and, in the case of ethnic diversity, merited a spirit of equal treatment and non-discrimination. This postulate justified the “special protection” status accorded the Sorbian population through 1989.84 Sentimental qua psychological attachments were expected to persist for several generations, pending completion of the “process of melting the historically transmitted traits, proclivities, and characteristics with the determining societal foundations of socialism and the

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spiritual-­mental processing of the new reality of national life in the socialist national consciousness.”85 Nationality thus represents the “continuity” component of the dialectical identity. Official pronouncements were replete with references to GDR state-­ consciousness, socialist consciousness, socialist patriotism, and proletarian internationalism, vaguely defined but nonetheless standing in “dialectical unity” with one another.86 These were embedded in two core constructs: ★  Sozialistische Vaterlandsliebe (love of the socialist fatherland): This quality is posited as the missing link between the cultivation of Heimatliebe (love of homeland) and the full internalization of DDR-­ Staatsbewusstsein (GDR state-consciousness).87 The “homeland” theme may have contributed to a proclivity on the part of average citizens to withdraw ever more deeply into private “niches,” a form of internal exit, as of the 1970s. By appealing to personal attachments to family and neighborhood, the SED hoped to strengthen the citizenry’s resolve to defend the fatherland at other levels. As Gerhard Schüssler opined, “Socialist state-consciousness is ever so deeply permeated by a love for the socialist fatherland, by a socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism as well as by conscious commitment to the active defense of the GDR.”88 This revision recognized that the subjective identification needs of GDR citizens were not only important in ideological terms. They were also acquiring new significance among youth lacking direct experience with fascism, who might be easily swayed by the material promises of capitalism, conveyed via West-TV. Heimatliebe was frequently invoked in exhorting youth to exercise vigilance and actively defend the “achievements” of the socialist state; this was reinforced by the Party’s 1978 decision to require regular small-caliber weapons training for boys, coupled with first-aid instruction for girls, as of ninth grade. Once it accepted the importance of subjective factors in fostering its own legitimacy, the leadership turned with renewed vigor to the cultivation of the “socialist personality.” In this respect, the state began to seek change in the nature of citizen identification. ★  Proletarian internationalism = a reaffirmation of orthodox Marxism, with an historically exceptional twist. The working-class experiences the exploitative forces of capitalism wherever the latter may prevail. The bat-

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tle facing communists and workers takes place on national soil, obliging them during each successive stage of the struggle to reevaluate the relationship between national and international interests. Proletarian internationalism is “nothing other than a reflection of the burning, direct requirements of the class struggle.”89 The GDR’s standing as a new nation found little validation under the tenets of Marxism-Leninism; yet it hoped to maintain itself as a discrete political entity as long as it professed unflappable loyalty to the Warsaw Pact Organization. Under two 1955 treaties, the GDR saw itself eternally bound in “love and friendship” to members of the socialist commonwealth, especially to the Soviet Union, as a component of “the international community of socialist nations.” Its reluctance to disavow national aspirations in favor of world revolution was reflected in a GDR-specific loophole in the WPO accords: a protocol note reserved the eastern state’s right to release itself from the obligations of the Treaty/Alliance in the event of a peaceful reunification of the two German states. SED leaders nonetheless distinguished their own Vaterland attachment from that of their Western counterparts: “Our national pride has nothing to do with national domineering (Überheblichkeit),” declared Erich Honecker.90 Having jettisoned the prospect of reunification after 1955, the state hoped to ensure its own continuity through internationalism. Encouraged by perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union after 1985, Poland and Hungary began to assert that the internationalist cause could only be served by not requiring fraternal states to violate their “national interests.” The SED, by contrast, remained devoted to the socialist commonwealth, mirrored in its vehement defense of the 1968 Czech invasion after other WPO members had expressed a degree of historical regret. The GDR was left holding the bag of internationalism by 1989, once its comrades-­in-arms embarked upon national courses of reform—no surprise, given that its 40-year adherence to this norm had become the ultimate guarantor of its separate “national” existence. Socialist Unity Party rulers failed to pose the self-critical, soul-searching questions emerging from glasnost in the Soviet Union by 1986, particularly in relation to the vestiges of Stalinism and the need for democratic “restructuring.” In short, they abandoned the very precept they had promoted as a fixed component of proletarian consciousness since 1946: “To learn from the Soviet Union means to learn victory.”

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Eastern intelligentsia meanwhile engaged in a decade of historical re-­ evaluation, leading to a more positive emphasis on the history that the GDR had once shared with its nemesis, the FRG. Reassessment activities included taking on formerly taboo topics, constructing detailed accounts of daily life and local customs (Alltagsgeschichte), and adopting new social-­ scientific methodologies.91 I leave to others the complex task of exploring parallels between a bolder approach to “writing history” adopted in the GDR and the FRG’s highly publicized Historians’ Controversy (Historikerstreit) during the early 1980s.92 I merely suggest that these “rehistoricization” processes were intricately connected with a desire for political normalization (whether justified or not) in both states. Studies conducted by the Central Institute for Youth Research revealed that increasing numbers of East German youth preferred the history of older eras and customs over lessons about the history of the new Republic, and the Socialist Unity Party. A less honorable motive for change in the historiographic course rested with the hard currency earnings likely to accompany an influx of western tourists, undertaking pilgrimages to sites of shared historical significance. The 1980s brought a wave of historical “rehabilitations” just in time for major jubilees, for example, Martin Luther’s 500th birthday and Berlin’s 750th anniversary, marked by expensive, albeit separate celebrations on both sides of the Wall. It is clear that das deutsche Volk needs to know where it has come from, in order to determine where it is or ought to go. The return to a common historical foundation provides no guarantee that a people-divided will interpret this history in the same light or derive the same lessons for the future, however. Underscoring this point, GDR historians introduced the following distinctions: ★  Erbe (Legacy) = the objective, and thus inevitable dimension of a common past. Focusing on the sum total of a nation’s history from which no one can consciously divorce him/herself, this construct incorporates “the directly discovered, given, and transmitted conditions,” grounded in “the entirety of historically emergent economic, social, political, ideological and cultural relations, the behaviors of the individual classes and strata.”93 To pursue a progressive course, one must first become conscious of history in its entirety, to distinguish among “the good, the bad, and the ugly” elements that have contributed to a nation’s character. This implies that

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German history is embedded not only in European history but in all epochs of human development. National history derives from internal, societal forces as well as from larger, world-historical processes, as contradictory as certain patterns may appear. This legacy as a whole embodies the “continuity” inherent to the dialectical process of identity-formation. ★  Tradition = the selective, albeit class-relevant dimension of a past once shared. Comprehending the relationship between the socialist GDR and German history as a whole rests upon two processes: “first, the continuation and fulfillment of the progressive, humanistic and ­revolutionary traditions of the people and secondly, the deliberate, final break with German reactionism.”94 While people cannot deny or change their history in its totality, successors can distinguish between its progressive and reactionary components, in hopes of learning from both. By recognizing the progressive contributions of previous actors, events and movements against the backdrop of their times and revealing their “revolutionary” character, citizens of a fledgling state can build a new historical consciousness. Peasant cooperatives of the feudal era, for example, organized agrarian production processes which also became a key “weapon in the hands of peasants” in their struggle against exploitation. Understanding tradition—“picking out the raisins,” as one interview partner phrased it—allowed the socialist state to expropriate the positive aspects of all-German history, leaving its capitalist counterpart (positing itself as the legitimate heir to the Third Reich) to assume responsibility for its negative features. “The German Democratic Republic today,” Honecker declared in 1973, “is the state embodiment of the best traditions of German history.” Delegates to the IX Party Congress (1976) took their historical chutzpah one step further, proclaiming that “the Socialist Unity Party is the heiress to all progressive elements of German history.”95 Tradition thus contributes to “change for the better” in national-­historical identity. The fascist experience had significantly redefined the political fate of Germans and Europeans, but it was not the only factor dividing them into two ideologically exclusive camps. Detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945, the Cold War and nuclear proliferation altered the course of history regarding the consequences of violent conflict between nations. Coupled with other developments inherent in the “scientific-technological

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revolution,” class struggle had to make room for questions of global survival, as illustrated by further revisions to the GDR’s official “self-concept.” ★  Peaceful coexistence = a new approach to internationalism under new material conditions. Once projected as the continuation of class struggle by other means, this notion was redefined as an end in its own right, against the backdrop of a nuclear “balance of terror.” New modes of military and ecological insecurity fostered growing interdependence among “all states and all peoples of the earth,” irrespective of their membership in “this or that social system.”96 The Party’s new emphasis on “realism” and “dialogue” stemmed, in part, from the GDR’s success in attaining legitimacy at the level of international relations. East Berlin’s willingness to improve relations with “the other German state” under Ostpolitik secured its full-fledged membership in the United Nations in 1973. The GDR’s acceptance of coexistence reflected “the spirit of Helsinki” born of the 1975 Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe—reluctant signatory that it was, given its human rights stipulations. The SED embraced the pursuit of confidence-­ building measures and common security mechanisms, ranging from nuclear and chemical weapons-free zones to ecology partnerships. The stress on human rights à la Helsinki produced a new batch of contradictions: the Party continued to emphasize the socio-economic rights younger GDR citizens had come to take for granted, while denying the need for “Basket Three” political/human rights emphasized in the West. The deployment of additional short- and medium-range missiles in both parts of Germany after 1983 solidified GDR support for arms limitations. The renunciation of force declared by Schmidt and Honecker (“war shall never again begin on German soil”) put the GDR on the correct side of the new-peace-order debate, as an arms control and disarmament proponent. Coexistence as a means and an end signaled a search for continuity in and through change. But SED non-proliferation policies were not without complications for citizens who pursued conscientious objector status, or supported this cause outside the confines of the official “peace movement.” SED rulers initially viewed Church-based protests of the 1980s as a source of legitimacy and support for their “peace policies.” Mild criticism of further WPO deployments on eastern territory (SS-20s, vs. Pershing IIs in the FRG) accorded Honecker a short-lived legitimacy boom between

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1983 and 1987 but triggered a second paradox. Efforts to secure external legitimacy meant that the GDR could no longer depict the FRG as the ultimate enemy, since both faced potential annihilation in case of war. This rendered 30 years of political “demarcation” moot, given the complex web of trade, communication, transportation and cultural-exchange agreements that had arisen out of the 1971 Basis of Relations Treaty [Grundlagenvertrag]. This generated grassroots level perceptions that East and West Germans comprised a Schicksalsgemeinschaft, a “community of destiny,” with a very special responsibility for securing peace in Europe.97 For those old enough to recall the state’s founding, the theoretical reassessments of what it meant to be a German, especially what it meant to be a GDR-German, inferred that the “provisional” national division had become permanent. Impelled by Ostpolitik dynamics, efforts to distinguish between nationality and citizenship allowed the SED to begin cultivating a “special relationship” with its political nemesis, the economic benefits of which were enormous. The fine line between these two dimensions of political consciousness nonetheless granted the regime a degree of flexibility in responding to the diverse subjective-identification needs of its citizens. The dialectical emphasis on continuity and change helped those whose socialization had occurred under a single, albeit troublesome nation to begin identifying with their new state as “the better Germany,” the psychological benefits of which were no less significant than the legitimacy bonus which fell to the state. For cohorts raised during the 1950s, the redefinition of national status was the theoretical correlate of events that had jarred their consciousness, viz., the creation of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and 1968 intervention in Czechoslovakia, justified by “the socialist commonwealth.” The next generation, born after 1960, would associate their revaluated national status with developments of the Ostpolitik era; this was also the group for whom GDR identification seemed most “natural,” with qualifications. The ideological revisions of the 1970s would provide the backdrop for the political socialization of youth in the 1980s, with another dialectical twist. Decades removed from the traumas of fascism, the youngest cohorts would not exclusively ascribe to first half of the identity equation, Citizenship: GDR. Rather, growing media exposure to life on the other side would lead some to carve out alternative identities for themselves, rooted in second half, Nationality: German. We now turn to the unofficial contours of Eastern identity, viewed through a generational lens.

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“The Problem of Generations” In 1984 I set out to explore the identities of west German successor generations, persuaded that protest movements of the late 1960s had precipitated that “historical break with the past” theorized by Barrington Moore.98 Drawing on Karl Mannheim, I discovered clear distinctions regarding the “national identities” of postwar and post-Wall cohorts, which I classified along demographic lines. Having conducted 100+ in-­ depth interviews with Bundestag members, peace activists, academic experts and students regarding their personal identities, I discerned three distinct groups, which I characterized as the Economic Miracle Generation, the Long March Generation, and the Turn-around (Wende I) Generation, respectively.99 In May 1989, I initiated a parallel study of East German identities, involving equivalent interviews with members of the post-Wall Volkskammer, human rights activists, party officials and academics. I classified those respondents along similar lines, as the Reconstruction Generation, the Born-Into Generation, and the Turn-around (Wende II) Generation but soon discovered that Western and Eastern demographics were out of synch. While GDR woman gave birth between the ages of 19 and 23, average ages among their FRG counterparts fell between 27 and 30. Their fertility rates also diverged: while 90% of eastern women became mothers, only 60% did so across the border, accounting for a “demographic deficit” (Chap. 9). This means that generational change occurred at shorter intervals in the east, roughly every 20 years, in contrast to every 30 years in the FRG. As a result, western and eastern Baby Boomers came of political age at different points in time; key historical events taken for granted on one side usually held different significance for the other. FRG politicians defined the Prague spring of 1968, for example, as an act of Soviet aggression against Czech citizens’ campaign for national self-determination. The official GDR view was that the National People’s Army “proved itself” when it joined Soviet forces in defending the socialist commonwealth. Angela Merkel turned 14 two weeks before the 1968 Czech uprising, rendering her too young to join in protests, had she been so inclined. Already a leftist activist and occasional street-fighter, Joschka Fischer was 20. The two would clash over the “meaning” of 1968 in 2001. Merkel’s generation experienced a renewed crackdown against students, though workers were the main protestors. This was followed by a short period of cultural liberalization from 1971 to 1973, coinciding with

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Ostpolitik.100 Denounced as a “class traitor,” Wolf Biermann’s expulsion in 1976 marked the onset of another repressive wave; ironically the singer had moved voluntarily from West to East Germany at the age of 17 to follow his communist ideals. Rudi Dutschke, by contrast had fled to the west in 1961, the day before the Wall went up, rendering him an outspoken proponent of “democratic socialism.” The rest of the New Left evinced no interest in real-existing socialism next door.101 Brandt’s exhortation to “dare more democracy” in the West began to bear fruit in the mid-1970s, allowing protesters there to reshape policies and politics by way of Citizen Initiatives, new social movements and, ultimately, a new Green Party. The next ten years in the East, on the other hand, were marked by mass resignation, economic stagnation, and “internal migration.” The closed, highly regulated nature of Warsaw Pact countries through the 1950s and 1960s moreover suggests that East European youth were significantly influenced by events lacking political salience in the west. One such event was the GDR’s pompous staging of the X. World Youth Festival in July 1973. hoping to reap the legitimacy benefits of Ostpolitik and its admission to the United Nations, the regime opened itself to 25,600 foreign visitors; in addition to the 800 comprising the official FRG delegation, the SED extended special status to 400 far-left Spartakus and DKP activists. The goal was to foster “political dialogue” and international adolescent solidarity with “the heroic struggles” of communists in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, as well as with national liberation fighters in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Its 8 million attendees included 5000 singers and bands, performing beat- and rock-music on 95 stages, all closely monitored by 4260 members of the State Security Forces (Stasi). Remembered as a “bit of vacation from the GDR” and their first chance to exchange diverse political views (though FDJ members had been schooled to counter them), eastern youth were crushed when the mega-­event failed to produce further cultural liberalization as millions had hoped.102 Despite their inflated political rhetoric regarding the progressive, scientific nature of GDR socialism, aging SED Politburo members continued to view their own experiences under brutal fascist and Stalinist regimes as “the end of history.” They relentlessly sought to apply the lessons they had personally derived from those eras to cohorts whose lives, interests, and needs had been dramatically transformed by the very “socialist achievements” they had subsequently introduced, starting with greater educational opportunity. Ignoring the dialectical forces of history, SED rulers undermined their own legitimacy by refusing to trust “all-sided socialist personalities” at

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all levels. Paradoxically, their routine response to acts of youth rebellion against total control was to apply an even heavier hand, reminiscent of their own authoritarian socialization stretching from the 1920s to Stalin’s death in 1953. The chief enforcer was an increasingly bloated, bureaucratic Ministry for State Security.

Love of the Socialist Fatherland: Ideal Versus the Real Stressing the role of capitalism, the SED’s official explanation for the rise and fall of fascism eased the burden of personal responsibility for GDR citizens who had directly or indirectly complied with the Nazi regime. The incarceration of countless anti-Stalinist or democratic adversaries in former concentration camps in the late 1940s/early 1950s eliminated or stifled other groups’ willingness to challenge this one-dimensional interpretation of Hitler’s ascension to power. Basing its reason-for-being, and thus its legitimacy as a separate state, on its rejection of responsibility for the Third Reich, the SED had a concrete stake in keeping its “new” history in the forefront of citizen consciousness. By the early 1980s the number of GDR youth whose parents had directly participated in World War II was virtually zero. Centralized control of the media and a restructured educational system allowed regime elites to glorify their own resistance records and bask “in self-satisfied triumphalism about its antifascist purity.”103 Ulbricht loyalists found even less reason to engage in soul-­searching over their own persecution of dissenters during the Stalin years and following the June 1953 uprising of their heralded “working class.” The cohorts “born into” the GDR, especially after 1961, experienced neither the absolutist practices of the Stalinist era nor the intense propaganda of the Cold War years. Their coming of political age coincided with an easing of Cold War tensions and even rising consumer standards, benefits linked to Ostpolitik. Educators thus faced a three-fold task in persuading their young charges that the creation of the GDR amounted to the coronation of German history. First, teachers were expected to instill in youth a brand of historical consciousness that manifested a “scientific” foundation while also motivating them to cultivate an emotional-­normative relationship to GDR history. Second, historical knowledge was to be transmitted “in its totality,” notwithstanding the fact that learning was structured in line with highly restrictive methodological and pedagogical requirements.

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Finally, school personnel were obliged to instill in their protégés an independent capacity to “think historically,” that is, to grasp the dialectical ebbs and flows of history without losing sight of its “objective” laws—ebbs and flows that apparently ceased with the GDR’s own “coronational” founding. According to socialist pedagogues, the higher the level of historical knowledge, the more profound the next generation’s class consciousness would become. The empirical evidence (see Chap. 10) suggests that these efforts were not particularly successful among cohorts directly exposed to “socialist achievements.” The ideological language used to depict and interpret the GDR’s history rendered it “the most boring stuff one could imagine,” according to Stefan Wolle. Printed on poor-quality paper, most class materials featured the same-old clichéd illustrations and slogans. Self-laudatory presentations consisted of mindless lists of party congresses, conferences, plenary meetings, and plan goals, devoid of “anything that made history interesting— photos, details, eye-witness accounts.” Events that did not suit its ideological purpose implied deviation, deemed dangerous by out-of-­touch authorities. “Had the GDR been able to lie down on a psychiatrist’s couch, the diagnosis would quickly become clear. Birth trauma and [the people’s] permanent withdrawal of love led to a heavy inferiority complex, for which [the state] compensated by way of authoritarian bearing.”104 As multiple surveys illustrate, not even half of GDR youth were particularly interested in the history of their socialist “fatherland.” Confronted in 1969 with the proposition, “the GDR is the greatest achievement in the history of Germany,” merely 47% of the students at the Karl Marx University (Leipzig) completely agreed, while 35% expressed qualified acceptance. Only 75% among future grade-school teachers enrolled at the Pedagogical Institute agreed without reservation. Not surprisingly, self-­identified FDJ members (67%) offered the most positive responses, followed by “children of workers” (60%). The offspring of self-employed parents (26%) were least inclined to accept the revised narrative; only 48% of the university students in Leipzig resolutely concurred that “the GDR embodies the future of all Germany”; future educators exhibited a “higher consciousness,” with 68% in total agreement.105 When asked to specify areas where they felt “unreserved admiration for the characteristics of the GDR,” broader samples stressed its job security and “peace policies,” despite the noteworthy incorporation of military exercises into school curricula as of 1978. The share of those expressing

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unqualified “love for my fatherland, the German Democratic Republic,” plunged from 60% in 1969 to 9% in April 1989. Between 1975 and spring 1989, the proportion “willing to give their lives to defend the GDR” declined from 46% to 24% among students (future elites!), and from 52% to 26% among working-class apprentices.106 As to their personal preferences, 44% claimed to be “strongly interested” in sports, 28% in technology, but only 11% in politics and 9% in history. The fact that less than half expressed a strong interest in sports contravened SED’s hopes that countless medals secured by GDR athletes at international games would provide an additional foundation for “national identification” with the system. By 1988 ZIJ researchers had observed a broader adolescent tendency to reject “GDR history as an enlightening image for the present,” perhaps because the official picture was routinely challenged by Western media. A majority of those who would become the first post-wall cohort expressed greater interest in older, less-political aspects of German history: while 64% had a strong interest in broader WW II history, only 13% were “very curious” about the SED’s history. One-third of ninth and tenth graders polled in May/June were “disinterested” in the history of socialism, while 55–67% expressed a preference for local and social history (Heimat- and Alltagsgeschichte).107 Even more shocking were the survey results addressing the effectiveness of “anti-fascist” education shortly before the 1989 Wende. A major Central Institute for Youth Research study divided 350 teens into two groups, prior to an excursion to the Buchenwald concentration camp, where some 250,000 people had been enslaved and 65,000 died. In most districts, visiting a concentration camp was a prerequisite for school graduation. One group undertook the trip without any special preparation, while the second digested new historical information before their departure. Researchers relied on three time frames for assessment, surveying the pupils’ pre-visit expectations, their reactions immediately following the visit, and a followup questionnaire six weeks later.108 They registered the greatest change in attitudes toward Nazi atrocities and its victims six weeks after the field trip, indicating a dramatic increase in emotional Betroffenheit [“affectedness”]. ZIJ analysts suggested that heightened sensitivity toward the victims of fascism might have owed to the societal crisis-situation in which the students found themselves in 1989. Others might have discounted the intended lessons in light of sudden revelations regarding the privileged (Wandlitz) existence of the corrupt resistance fighters who ruled them, including Honecker himself.109 The fact

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that the greatest impact was measured six weeks after the Buchenwald excursion implies that youth had not internalized the classroom “lessons of fascism” drummed into them by educational authorities. Needless to say, students learned nothing about the camp’s subsequent use. In August 1945, the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs transformed Buchenwald into a “special camp,” first used to intern various SS members, Nazi functionaries, and teenage boys suspected of Werwolf mobilization (a guerrilla organization trying to sabotage the new Soviet order). It then became a disposal site for subsequent SED purges, ensnaring Communists, Social Democrats, Christian Democrats, and Liberals. Russian archives recorded the postwar incarceration of 122,671 Germans, of whom 42,889 died of starvation and disease. FRG estimates run considerably higher, positing up to 260,000 prisoners and 65,000 to 80,000 deaths. A second camp twenty-five miles north of Berlin was also repurposed. Sachsenhausen purportedly held 50,000–60,000 postwar prisoners, accounting for 15,000–30,000 deaths; roughly 1000 more were deported to camps in the Soviet Union.110 East German leaders undermined their own legitimacy over time by adhering to a very narrow, economically driven construct of anti-fascism as the primary justification for GDR’s separate existence. Paradoxically, some youth adopted an “anti-anti-fascist” posture, resulting in heavy state crackdowns against “rowdys and hooligans” (Chap. 10). Catapulted into a moral vacuum after 1989, many adolescents encountered a break-down in their collectively held ideals, partially inflicted by a western-dominated processing of “SED history.”111 History becomes particularly vulnerable to re-interpretation, once actual participants are no longer around to correct the record, as the distinction between Erbe and Tradition suggests.

Historicism Versus Materialism As Marx himself once saw fit to invert the historical logic of Hegel, the GDR’s founders stood classical Marxism on its head, using a centralized, authoritarian template internalized during the Stalinist era to pursue rather non-Marxian ends: the establishment of a separate identity and state legitimation as “a nation of the new type.” But this was not the only ideological twist characterizing the SED’s quest for legitimacy. Unable to deliver on the promise of an imminent, socialist “economic miracle” heralded by its propaganda, the party reconceptualized its understanding of “history” and “identity” to prove its superiority vis-à-vis its western nemesis, the Federal Republic.

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Prior to 1961, the SED’s “selective reconciliation” with German history—based on its distinction between Erbe and Tradition—aligned with Lenin’s exhortation to his own vanguard to employ the power of national identity (as well as land reform) to establish the legitimacy of a new socialist system.112 For tactical reasons, Stalin initially embraced Lenin’s take on the “national question” at home, promising the right of self-determination to the diverse population groups comprising the Soviet Union, initially including the right to secession. His shift in the 1930s from proletarian internationalism to an emphasis on “socialism in one country” precluded any chance that members of his postwar buffer zone would enjoy analogous rights to self-determination regarding their paths to socialism. Mounting Cold War tensions between the occupying powers of East and West, 1945–1949, nonetheless created a unique, dialectical opportunity for the fledgling GDR to pursue “national” goals, as well as primus inter pares status, through its willing subordination to “the Soviet model.” Ulbricht’s consistent adherence to Stalinist methods laid an early foundation for distrust among the workers and peasants, and also inhibited economic recovery for decades, given his compliance with extreme Soviet reparation demands. It was only when the SED opened itself to interactions with “the other German state” during the Ostpolitik era that a new leader, Erich Honecker, secured a measure of grudging respect among his own citizens, although the reach of the Ministry of State Security expanded dramatically during his watch. Through the 1970s, the GDR acquired a degree of international recognition, and its material conditions improved significantly, thanks to FRG credits and trade. Lenin’s reflections on revolutionary crisis also offer a partial explanation for the extraordinarily rapid collapse of the regime in 1989, after the SED’s forty years of “muddling-through.” A country becomes ripe for revolution, he observed, when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis … in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for “the lower classes not to want” to live in the old way; it is also necessary that “the upper classes should be unable” to live in the old way.113

Gorbachev’s initiation of perestroika and glasnost marked the point at which youth “no longer wanted to,” and the old guard was “no longer able to” continue living as before.

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By the time the regime collapsed in November 1989, the German Democratic Republic had become a “country of old men,” some of whom were classified as alcoholics by the doctors tasked with determining whether/not they were sufficiently fit to stand trial after 1990.114 Honecker (born 1912), Stoph (1914) and Mielke (1907) persisted in subordinating themselves to an even older group of doddering Soviet rulers (Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko), whose deaths in quick succession opened the door to Gorbachev. A growing body of neurological studies suggests that elderly males, in particular, are subject to increasing brain cell loss, especially over the age of 70. With fewer brain cells to draw upon, “their performance may be affected in some tasks by slower reaction times, lower attentional levels, slower processing speeds, detriments in sensory and or perceptual functions, or potentially a lesser ability to use strategies.”115 For two generations born and raised in the GDR, the self-idealized, “anti-fascist/resistance fighter” history invoked by Honecker, Mielke, and Stoph could no longer be used to justify forty years of bureaucratic-­ authoritarian rule, even among younger members of the Socialist Unity Party—some of whom, as they told me later, “had reform plans in the desk drawer.” Nor could the aging leadership resort to dialectical materialism, having failed to “overtake [the Federal Republic] without catching up,” to cite Ulbricht. But as noted earlier, identities do not die merely as a result of new borders, a new currency or expanded access to consumer goods. While the official GDR-identity failed to take root, it did give rise to subcultural, peer group orientations that help to explain the persistence of an unofficial East German identity thirty years into unification.

Notes 1. The Federal Republic kept the lyrics composed in 1841 by August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, set to music by Josef Hayden and adopted by the Weimar Republic in 1922; it nonetheless eliminated the first verse, abused by the Nazi regime to laud its imperialist war aims. 2. The West German national anthem became a renewed source of controversy during the late 1970s and early 1980, when Educational Ministers in conservatively governed states, for example, in Bavaria, BadenWürttemberg, and Berlin, began demanding that exam candidates for teaching certification, as well as pupils preparing to leave school, demonstrate their ability to recite all three verses. See Joyce Marie Mushaben, State versus the University: The Juridicalization of Higher Educational

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Reform at the Free University of Belin, 1969–1979 (Ph.D., Indiana University, 1981). 3. Heinz Heitzer. 1984. “Die Geschichte der DDR—wichtigster Zeitabschnitt der deutschen Geschichte.” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 32(5): 387–394. 4. Jürgen Hoffmann. 1989. Ein neues Deutschland soll es sein: Zur Frage nach der Nation in der Geschichte der DDR und der Politik der SED. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 68 ff. 5. Hoffmann, Ein neues Deutschland, 70. 6. Hoffmann, Ein neues Deutschland, 26. 7. Cited in Hoffmann, Ein neues Deutschland. 8. The dialectic is rooted in Hegelian philosophy, which was “turned on its head” by Karl Marx. It encompasses the interaction of historical-material conditions in their original state (thesis), clashing with new productive developments and relations (antithesis), emerging into a new set of objective historical realities (synthesis). See Bertell Ollman. 1971. Alienation. Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 9. A. James McAdams. 1985. East Germany and Détente: Building Authority after the Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 10. Childs declared during an April 1989 conference presentation that he had concluded twenty years earlier that the GDR state constituted an unacceptable dictatorship and had found no grounds since then to modify his original assessment. Visibly distraught over this characterization, East Berlin sociologist Artur Meier admonished that many aspects of the system had changed since the Stalinist era, and that “no matter what might transpire” during the interlude preceding the next biennial symposium, “of one thing [he] was certain: that the GDR constituting the focus of discussion by that point would be one that had undergone a fundamental transformation.” I recorded this exchange in my notes, while serving on the panel with Childs at the 4th Pacific Workshop on German Affairs at California State University, Long Beach. 11. Gert-Joachim Glaeßner. 1989. Die andere deutsche Republik. Gesellschaft und Politik in der DDR. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 81. 12. Dolf Sternberger. 1968. “Legitimacy,” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Bd. 9, London: Macmillan, 244. 13. Henry Krisch. 1986. “Changing Political Culture and Political Stability in the German Democratic Republic,” Studies in Comparative Communism, 19 (1): 41–53. 14. Krisch, “Changing Political Culture,” 50. 15. Krisch, “Changing Political Culture,” 53.

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16. Peter C. Ludz. 1979. “Legitimacy in a Divided Nation: The Case of the German Democratic Republic.” In Bogdan Denitch, ed., Legitimation of Regimes. International Frameworks for Analysis. Beverly Hills: Sage, 161ff. 17. Cited by Krisch, “Changing Political Culture,” 46. 18. Michael Peltzer. 1987. Sozialistische Herrschaft und materielle Interessen. Zum Legitimationsproblem im gesellschaftlichen System der DDR. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 19. Honecker’s “boundless vanity” led him to personally select and occasionally retouch each photo used, as reported by Stefan Wolle. 1999. Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR, 1971–1989. Munich: Econ & List Taschenbuch Verlag, 62–63. 20. Clement de Wroblewsk. 1986. Wo wir sind ist vorn: Der politiche Witz in der DDR. Hamburg: Rasch und Röhring; Reinhard Wagner, ed. 1998. DDR Witze: Walter schütz vor Torheit nicht, Erich währt am längsten. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. 21. Ludz, “Legitimacy in a Divided Nation,” 168. 22. Ludz, “Legitimacy in a Divided Nation,” 171. 23. Thomas A.  Baylis. 1972. “East Germany—In Quest of Legitimacy,” Problems of Communism 21 (2), 51–52. 24. Baylis, “East Germany,” 55. 25. Denitch, Introduction, Legitimation of Regimes, 13. 26. Citations stem from the German original, Wolfgang Leonhard, 1955. Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder, reprinted in 1987. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 27. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 152. 28. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 153. 29. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 146. 30. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 233–234. 31. Austin S. Matthews. 2013. Stalinism and Survival: The Political Motives of Walter Ulbricht, MA thesis, Texas State University (December). 32. Honecker’s autobiography suggests that he also had only one year of formal, university-style training in ML theory at the Lenin International School, 1930–1931. Erich Honecker. 1981. Aus meinem Leben. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. 33. John Koehler. 1999. Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 39–40. 34. Filip Slaveski. 2013. The Soviet Occupation of Germany, Hunger, Mass Violence and the Struggle for Peace, 1945–1947. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 35. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 275. 36. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 316–317.

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37. Catherine Epstein. 2003. The last Revolutionaries: German Communists and their Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 21–22. 38. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 297. 39. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 332. 40. Johanna Granville. 2006. “Ulbricht in October 1956: Survival of the Spitzbart during Destalinization,” Journal of Contemporary History 41(3): 477, 487. 41. Karl-Wilhelm Fricke. 1984. Opposition und Widerstand in der DDR. Ein politischer Report. Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 41–43. 42. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 43. 43. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 391. 44. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 124. 45. Cited in Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 118, 117. 46. Sven Felix Kellerhoff. 2019, “In Sachsen begann der Siegeszug der NSDAP,” Welt on-line, May 12; also, https://www.archiv.sachsen.de/ archiv/bestand.jsp?oid=10.01.01; and Statistik des Deutschen Reichs. 1978 ed., Bd. 434. Osnabrück: Otto Zeller Verlag, 142, 542, 47. Wolfgang Meinicke. 1990. “Entnazifizierung—durchschlagend und doch begrenzt.” In Siegried Prokop, ed., Deutsche Zeitgeschichte, neu befragt. Berlin, 42. 48. Devin O. Pendas. 2020. Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 68, 148. 49. Pendas, Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice, 101. 50. Timothy R.  Vogt. 2000. Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany: Brandenburg 1945–1948. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 235. 51. Leonhard, Die Revolution, 344. 52. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 23–27. Weber offers significantly higher figures for the SMAD stage: By August 17, 1947, Soviet commissions investigated 820,000 former NSDAP members, of whom 520,000 lost their administrative positions. 53. Meinicke, “Entnazifizierung,” 37–47. 54. Herman Weber, ed. 1986. DDR Dokumente zur Geschichte der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1945–1985. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 21. 55. Pendas. Democracy, Nazi Trials, and Transitional Justice, 163. 56. Hoffmann. Ein neues Deutschland, 47–49. 57. Fricke. Opposition und Widerstand, 27. 58. Weber. DDR Dokumente, pp. 26–27. 59. Meinicke. “Entnazifizierung,” 46. 60. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2004. “Memory and the Holocaust: Processing the Past through a Gendered Lens,” History of the Human Sciences 17(2/3): 147–185.

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61. Lutz Niethammer, Alexander Plato and Dorothee Wierling. 1991. Die volkseigene Erfahrung, Eine Archäologie des Lebens in der Industrieprovinz der DDR. Berlin: Rowohlt. See, for example, the interview with Ludwig Färber, 147ff. 62. Landolf Scherzer. 2004. Die Fremden. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, especially the Nachwort by Günther Wallraff, 227ff. 63. Katje Iken, Caroline Schiemann, and Benjamnin Braden. 2017. “Zeitzeugen des Hungerwinters 1946/47: Die Moral geht zum Teufel” Der Spiegel, February 20. 64. Alexander Häusser and Gordian Maugg. 2009. Hungerwinter. Deutschlands humanitäre Katastrophe 1946/47. Bonn: Propyläen. U.S. troops were ordered not to share food with Germans (“to be destroyed or made inedible”), but military wives often passed on leftovers, until Truman allowed foreign relief organizations to assess scarcities among the vanquished. 65. Joseph Rothchild. 1977. “Observations on Political Legitimacy in Contemporary Europe,” Political Science Quarterly 92 (3), 498. 66. Bendix, cited in Rothchild, “Observations,” 497. 67. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 87. 68. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 91. 69. Cited in Weber, Kleine Geschichte der DDR, 68. Archival materials showed that many districts lacked marmalade, honey, and sugar; some had no butter, margarine, or oil for more than 14 days, despite a guaranteed state norm of 2 kilos. Udo Wengst. 1993. “Der Aufstand am 17. Juni 1953 in der DDR,” Vierteljahresheft für Zeitgeschichte 41(2): 277–321; also, Bundesministerium für gesamtdeutsche Fragen. 1953. SED—Der Volksaufstand vom 17. Juni 1953. Denkschrift über den Juni-Aufstand in der sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in Ostberlin. Bonn, 70 ff. 70. Honecker, Aus meinem Leben. 71. Weber, Geschichte der DDR, 238ff. Staritz, Geschichte der DDR, 78ff; and Arnulf Baring. 1972. Uprising in East Germany. June 17, 1953 (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press. 72. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 93. 73. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 96. 74. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 95. 75. Fricke, Opposition und Widerstand, 99. 76. Baring, Uprising in East Germany. xvii. For an evaluation based on declassified Stasi files, see Armin Mitter. 1991. “Die Ereignisse im Juni und Juli 1953 in der DDR,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B/5: 31–41. 77. Staritz, Geschichte der DDR, 87, 92. 78. Hoffmann, Ein neues Deutschland, 183. 79. Hoffmann, Ein neues Deutschland, 251ff.

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80. Willi Ehlert, Heinz Joswig, Willi Luchterhand, and Karl-Heinz Stiemerling, eds. 1973. Wörterbuch der Ökonomie: Sozialismus. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 247. 81. Peter C. Ludz. 1980. Die DDR zwischen Ost und West. Von 1961 bis 1976. Munich: C.H. Beck, 246–250. Also, Irma Hanke. 1988. ‘Sozialistischer Neohistorismus? Aspekte der Identitätsdebatte in der DDR”: 56–76; and Sigrid Meuschel. 1988. “Auf der Suche nach Madame L’Identité? Zur Konzeption der Nation und Nationalgeschichte”: 77–93. Both in Gerd-­ Joachim Glaeβner, ed., Die DDR in der Ära Honecker: Politik, Kultur, Gesellschaft. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 82. Helmut Meier and Walter Schmidt. 1988. Erbe und Tradition in der DDR.  Die Diskussion der Historiker. Berlin: Akademie Verlag; Alfred Kosing and Walter Schmidt. 1974. “Zur Herausbildung der sozialistischen Nation in der DDR,” Einheit, 29 (2): 179–188; and Hermann Axen. 1973. Zur Entwicklung der sozialistischen Nation in der DDR. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. 83. Thomas Heubner. 1981. “Nation und Nationalität. Staatsbürgerschaft: DDR, Nationalität: deutsch, oder wie entwickeln sich Nationen?” Junge Generation 35 (10), 34. 84. Numbering about 65,000, the Sorbs were a Slavic minority concentrated in the Lausitz region. During a June 1990 interview in Leipzig, literary expert Angela Stachowa voiced her fear that unification would trigger discrimination and eventual elimination of Sorbian cultural distinctiveness, based on her “observations” of West Germany’s treatment of foreign guest workers. In December 1990, Stachowa was elected to the all-German Bundestag. A report on the Sorbian community published after the GDR’s collapse presented a much more negative assessment of their status under “real-existing socialism.” See Hans Joachim Schöps. 1990. “Mit roter Soβe übergossen,” Der Spiegel, May 28. 85. Kosing and Schmidt, “Zur Herausbildung der sozialistischen Nation.” 86. West German literature made equally ambivalent appeals to state consciousness, national consciousness, the cultural nation and the state-nation. 87. Ulbricht “Ten Commandments of Socialist Morality” used the word “love” (see Chap. 10); further, Hans Spyra. 1979. “Vaterland—Heimat— Nation: Patriotismus ist Liebe und Tat,” Junge Welt 4, 16–18; and 1977. “Unser sozialistisches Vaterland—Werk und Stolz des Volkes,” Einheit 32: 1103–1110. 88. Gerhard Schüssler. 1982. “Staat und Staatsbewußtsein bei der Gestaltung der entwickelten sozialistischen Gesellschaft in der DDR,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 30 (10), 1211. 89. Gerhart Neuner. 1977. “Sozialistische Patrioten und proletarische Internationalisten erziehen,” Einheit 32 (5): 548–556; and Johannes Zelt.

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1983, “Sozialistischer Patriotismus und proletarischer Internationalismus in unserer Gesellschaft,” Einheit 38 (12): 1132–1137. 90. Cited in Meier und Schmidt, “Einleitung,” Erbe und Tradition, 13. 91. One sensation-provoking example of new thinking was Ernst Engelberg’s 1985 text, Bismarck. Ostpreusse und Reichsgründer, Berlin. Rosemarie Schuder and Rudolf Hirsch produced another historical soul-searching work in 1987. Der gelbe Fleck. Wurzeln und Wirkungen des Judenhasses in der deutschen Geschichte. Berlin: Rütten & Loening. For further “rehabilitations,” see Erbe und Tradition. 92. Rudolf Augstein, ed. 1987. “Historikerstreit”: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung. Munich: Piper. 93. Horst Bartel, “Erbe und Tradition in Geschichtsbild und Geschichtsforschung der DDR,” in Erbe und Tradition, 132. 94. “Einleitung,” Erbe und Tradition, 14–15. 95. “Einleitung,” Erbe und Tradition, 13–14. 96. Max Schmidt and Wolfgang Schwarz. 1989. “Notwendigkeit, Erfordernisse und Elemente eines umfassenden Systems des Friedens und der internationalen Sicherheit.” In Autorenkollektive. 1989. Sicherheit und friedliche Koexistenz. Berlin: Staatsverlag der Deutschen Demokratischen Republic, 10–25. 97. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1987. “Peace and the National Question: A Study of the Development of an ‘Association of Responsibility’ between the two Germanys,” Coexistence: A Review of East-West and Development Issues 24: 245–270. 98. Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy; also, Laurence William Wylie. 1957. Village in the Vaucluse. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. 99. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1998. From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations, Changing Attitudes towards the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany. Boulder CO: Westview. 100. Stefan Wolle. 2008. Der Traum von der Revolte: Die DDR 1968. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. 101. See Peter Schneider. 2008. Rebellion und Wahn. Mein’ 68. Eine autobio­ graphische Erzählung. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 102. Thomas Bickelhaupt. 2013. “Weltjugendfestspiele: Als die DDR sich weltoffen gab,” Die Welt, July 27. 103. Cited by Norman M.  Mainark, reviewing Timothy R.  Vogt. 2002. Denazification in Soviet-Occupied Germany: Brandenburg 1945–1948 in the Journal of Cold War Studies 4 (3): 140–142. For a self-laudatory Eastern account, see Heinz Heitzer. 1989. DDR: Geschichtlicher Überblick. Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

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104. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 27–28. 105. ZIJ colleagues shared these previously classified data during my pre-­ unification visit in 1990. Additional survey results appear in Walter Friedrich, Peter Förster, and Kurt Starke, eds. 1999. Das Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung Leipzig 1966–1990. Geschichte, Methoden, Erkenntnisse. Berlin: edition Ost. 106. Friedrich, Förster, and Starke, Das Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung, 84. 107. Wilfried Schubarth. 1999. “Forschung zum Geschichtsbewuβtsein.” In Friedrich, Förster, and Starke, Das Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung, 214. 108. Schubarth, “Forschung zum Geschichtsbewuβtsein,” 215–218; Sarah Farmer. 1995. “Symbols that Face Two Ways: Commemorating the Victims of Nazism and Stalinism at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen,” Representations 49: 97–119. 109. Honecker devotes only three of thirty-four chapters to his resistance activities and his nearly ten years in the Berlin-Moabit, Berlin-Plötzensee, and Brandenburg-Görden prisons. Though he claims to have been tortured, he enjoyed regular access to books, occasional family visits, scheduled prisoner appointments with doctors, and was even loaned out as a “roofer” for government construction projects. See Aus meinem Leben, 91–107. 110. See Andrew H.  Beattie. 2019. Allied Internment Camps in Occupied Germany. Extrajudicial Detention in the Name of Denazification, 1945–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 111. Deutscher Bundestag. 1994. “Working through the History and Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in Germany” (1992–1994), Drucksache 12/7820, May 31; and 1998. “Overcoming the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in the Process of German Unity” (1995–1998). Drucksache 13/11000, June 10. 112. Walker Connor. 1984. The National Question in Marxist Leninist Theory and Strategy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 38 ff. 113. V.  I. Lenin. 1964 ed. “The Collapse of the Second International,” Collected Works, Vol. 21: August 1914–December 1915. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 213–214. 114. “Enger Radius,” Der Spiegel, July 30, 1990, 57–58. 115. R. Peters. 2006. “Ageing and the brain,” Postgrad Medical Journal 82(964). February, 84–88. https://doi.org/10.1136/pgmj.2005.036665.

PART II

The Deconstruction of Official GDR-Identity

Frazer: “Well, this is our lawn. But we consume it. Indirectly, of course— through our sheep. And the advantage is that it doesn’t consume us. … We solved our problem with a portable electric fence which could be used to move our flock of sheep about the lawn like a giant mowing machine, but leave most of it free at any time. At night the sheep are taken across the brook to the main fold. But we soon found that the sheep keep to the enclosure and quite clear of the fence, which didn’t need to be electrified, So we substituted a piece of string, which is easier to move around.” “What about the lambs?,” Barbara asked, turning her head at a slight angle and looking at Frazier from the corners of her eyes. “They stray,” Frazier conceded, “but they cause no trouble and soon learn to keep with the flock. The curious thing is … that most of these sheep have never been shocked by the fence. Most of them were born after we took the wire away. It has become a tradition among our sheep never to approach the string. The lambs acquire it from their elders, whose judgment they never question.” “It’s fortunate that sheep don’t talk,” said Castle. “One of them would be sure to ask ‘Why?’ The Philosophical Lambkin.” “And some day a Skeptical Lambkin would put his nose on the string and nothing would happen, and the whole sheephold would be shaken to its very foundations,” I added. “And after him, the stampede!” said Castle. “I should have told you,” Frazier said soberly, “that no part of the small force of tradition is due to the quiet creature you see yonder.” He pointed to a

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beautiful sheep dog, which was watching us from a respectful distance. We call him the “Bishop.” We walked in silence, but Castle pretended to be troubled. “Leaving us,” he said hesitantly, “with the question of the relative merits of electricity and the wrath of God.” B.F. Skinner, Walden Two (1948)

CHAPTER 4

Real-Existing Socialism: Consumer Culture and Vitamin “B”

… His troops will awake, and leap … Sein riesiges Volk erwacht und springt                  from the ground Laut rasselnd empor von der Erde ….       With a tremendous roar. … They ride out into the echoing … Sie reiten hinaus in die klirrende world Welt,                   Und die Trompeten rufen.          And how their trumpets will sound. They sniffed at everything, rum… Beschnuffelten alles, kramten maged around herum                     In Hemden, Hosen, Schnupftüchern;     To see if jewels were hidden; They dug through breeches, Sie suchten nach Spitzen, nach handkerchiefs, shirts, Bijouterien,                 Auch nach verbotenen Büchern ….      For lace, or a book that’s forbidden. Mein Gott! da sieht es sauber aus!       My word! This is a pretty place! Der Kot liegt nicht auf den Gassen.     The streets are very clean. Viel Prachtgebäude sah ich dort,         I saw some splendid buildings here— Sehr imponierenden Massen ….        A most imposing scene.) 

Heinrich Heine, Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_4

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Nowadays all it takes is the click of a mouse or a touch pad to “google” online contacts for groceries, household services, dating partners, movies, travel reservations, access to museum collections, and specialized economic databases covering nearly every country on the planet. Most western citizens have become so dependent on cell phones and the Internet, first accessible in the mid-1990s, that they would have trouble planning their daily lives without such devices, much less an entire national economy for years at a time. Despite their lack of modern information technology, early communists nonetheless deemed themselves capable of organizing and executing manifold processes of capital accumulation, resource acquisition, production, distribution, and consumption, starting in the Soviet Union—an underdeveloped land so vast that it covered ten different time zones. As a social philosopher, Karl Marx sought to disaggregate the stages of human development that culminated in the rise of capitalism. Appearing in 1867, Das Kapital provided a sophisticated analysis of the relationship between commodities and money, surplus value and wages, mechanization and the division of labor, then assessed the role of colonialism in capital accumulation. Marx proved quite adept at documenting capitalism’s day-to-day abuses, using concrete examples drawn from The Economist, government Blue Books and other statistical sources he perused in the Reading Room of the British Museum.1 Together with Friedrich Engels, the exiled arm-chair rebel composed a pamphlet in 1848, summarizing his revolutionary vision for the London branch of the Communist League. After attacking the bourgeoisie and deviant schools of socialism, the Communist Manifesto outlined measures to be quickly implemented following a socialist take-over; they included the abolition of private property, the nationalization of land and credit, elimination of inheritance rights, taxation reforms, intensified production and free education for all, inter alia. The manifesto ended with an appeal for unity among “workers of the world” who had “nothing to lose but their chains.”2 Engels predicted that a society “which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.”3 Neither author offered a specific time-table for moving from revolution to utopia. Despite Russia’s record of producing brilliant mathematicians, scientists, and economists, Lenin’s immediate goal following the 1917 November revolution was merely to win over illiterate peasants with basic

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promises of “peace, bread and land.” Having barely abandoned feudalism, the Soviet Union met none of the criteria Marx had defined as essential for advancing to socialism. Lenin compensated for the lack of a proletariat eager for revolution, and a dearth of basic industries capable of supplying the masses, by introducing the idea of a vanguard party. Using his post as the CP General-Secretary to consolidate his own power after Lenin’s death, Stalin introduced the first Five-Year Plan in 1928. He jettisoned an agricultural modernization strategy in favor of accelerating iron, steel, machine-tool, and energy production, to shore up defenses against a potential capitalist invasion. The first Five-Year Plan did not go well, given its unrealistic production targets which foresaw a 330% growth rate for heavy industry; actual iron and steel production barely surpassed 1913/1914 levels. Intensified industrialization and the onset of agricultural collectivization had a devastating impact on consumer and housing production, from which it would take decades to recover. Initially preoccupied with extraordinary physical destruction, fuel shortages, and collapsing food supply chains in the wake of World War II, the Ulbricht government did not adopt the GDR’s first Five-Year Plan until 1951.4 While the western occupation zones were able to draw on funds and trade agreements linked to the Marshall Plan as of 1947, conditions in the Soviet occupation zone (SMAD) were far from fortuitous. Reconstruction problems were compounded by refugee waves from the eastern territories, mounting Cold War tensions, and Moscow’s crushing demands for war reparations, mirrored in the deliberate dismantling of whole factories (cement, machine tools, chemicals) and transit routes.5 East German efforts to remind westerners of their unequal starting points 40 years later fell on deaf ears. This chapter explores multiple factors contributing to a popular loss of faith in the socialist vision espoused by SED rulers, resulting in citizens’ eventual rejection of GDR-identity as it was officially defined. It begins by revisiting chronic deficiencies of “real-existing socialism,” describing the nature of the planned economy and the often-contradictory efforts of SED elites to respond to countless material crises that threatened to undermine political stability. Next we consider state-sponsored modes of “collective action,” as well as the self-help strategies used by citizen-­ consumers to counter chronic shortages. This is followed by a treatment of Intershop socialism, responsible for new societal divisions that fueled the mass exits of the 1980s. We then turn to dubious efforts by SED rulers to control and redirect the fashion- and product-preferences of “socialist

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consumers”; rooted in the narrowly defined taste of male ideologues, these campaigns were doomed to fail among women and youth, in particular.

The Perils of Planning Under Real-Existing Socialism The term real-existing socialism has a dialectical history of its own. It was initially coined by Western hardliners after the Axel Springer Press began referring to the other German state in all of its publications as “the so-­ called GDR.” This followed Ulbricht’s optimistic assertion at the Fifth Party Congress in July 1958 that the socialist state would soon overtake its western counterpart, which was already experiencing an economic miracle. During a five-hour speech to SED delegates, the First Secretary proclaimed: “We will fulfill this historical task, if we succeed in accelerating the speed of an economic upswing, and in the last years of the second Five Year Plan, that is, 1959 and 1960, increase production in several domains beyond the Plan. It is entirely possible that the standards of living in the German Democratic Republic will already exceed the living standards in West Germany by 1961.”6 External critics quickly took advantage of the comparison, pitting the GDR’s “socialist achievements” against conditions in the west in order to undermine SED propaganda.7 Ulbricht invoked the word Überholen (overtaking) again in 1959, adding the phrase ohne Einzuholen (without catching up), drawing on a Soviet cybernetics professor who had optimistically applied the phrase to the technology race between the superpowers. In the early 1970s, Western leftists would increasingly distance themselves from authoritarian practices next door by invoking the term “democratic socialism.” This left the SED free to expropriate the “real-existing” characterization for its own purposes, coupled with the idea of “developed socialism” as an autonomous stage of socialist evolution. Erich Honecker first made official use of the term while addressing the 9th Plenum of the Central Committee in May 1973.8 Neither the relations of production nor class relations were transformed overnight but rather across five stages of East German economic development.9 The immediate postwar period was marked by two hard winters and two summer droughts; average consumption plunged to 750–1200

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calories per day—“too much to die, not enough to live”—depending on one’s labor classification. The ration books issued to the elderly, disabled, former Nazis and others unable to work were labeled “cemetery cards”; 80% of children reportedly suffered from malnutrition.10 First established in 1948, state retail outlets (23 stores, 25 restaurants) known as Handel-­ sorganisationen (HO) began to offer non-rationed goods at set prices, but many farmers withheld their products for sale on the black market. In 1950, 2294 HO stores accounted for only 26% of sales volume.11 Beyond establishing new administrative structures to manage reconstruction, the resource-scarce period 1946–1953 saw the promulgation of the first GDR constitution establishing its ideological foundation. Among its key precepts were the centralization and monopolization of political-­ economic authority, coupled with socialized ownership of the means of production. Established in 1950, the State Planning Commission drew on “the conscious utilization of the economic laws of socialism” to raise the material and cultural living standards of the people. Its activities were geared toward “rapidly accelerating development and ever more effective production, the enhancement of scientific-technological progress and increasing worker productivity.”12 The aim was to secure “the necessary proportions for macropolitical development and the proper balancing of plans” at all levels and across all sectors, in cooperation with the trade unions, the FDJ and other mass organizations.13 Like its Soviet predecessor, the GDR’s first Five-Year Plan (1950–1955) embraced unrealistic goals, leading to the production norm increases that provoked the June 17 uprising. In 1953 the regime eliminated ration cards for the self-­ employed and residents commuting to jobs in West Berlin. Geared toward “modernization, mechanization, automation,” the second version (1957) was soon rolled over into a Seven-Year Plan for 1959–1965. The chemical, energy, metal-working, and ship-building industries accounted for a growing share of total industrial output, while the light-industry share declined by 22.5%.14 This stage saw intensified efforts to industrialize the north, as well as to eliminate private enterprise. Small farmers who had benefited from Nazi and large landowner expropriations after 1945 were “voluntarily” incorporated into large-scale agricultural production cooperatives (LPGs); private owners who resisted faced high tax burdens, and limited access to centralized “agricultural machinery” stations. Food processing declined to 14.7% of total

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production, explaining the need to continue rationing through 1958 as supplies fell below early 1950s levels. Mounting public complaints led Ulbricht to instruct the Politburo in June 1961 that the small number of bakeries and butcher shops still in private hands “would not endanger socialism … so simply open up all of the bakeries, and they should start baking themselves. But make sure that the population gets bread.”15 Although the “anti-fascist protection” Wall erected two months later in Berlin stemmed the westward flight of rural and professional workers, small towns continued to face intermittent shortages of butter, meat, milk-products, and marmalade, leading to residents to ponder: “What are the four main problems hindering the building of socialism?” Their answer: “Spring, summer, fall and winter.” Ulbricht’s promise to out-­produce the FRG raised unrealistic expectations, reinforced by SED propaganda touting socialist successes and glorifying “heroes of labor” who over-fulfilled production norms at sites well prepared in advance. When FRG minister Ludwig Erhardt described the SED’s plan to triumph over the west in a few years as “unreal,” Ulbricht declared in Neues Deutschland on August 21, 1959: You see, Mr. Erhard is in a difficult position. Although he is beginning to learn the truth, he cannot tell it to his own people as the representative of monopoly capitalism. … He is no better figure than Don Quixote in his struggle against the windmill. The truth is this, however: by 1961 the GDR will catch up with (einholen) and surpass (überholen) West Germany across all important domains providing the population with food and consumer goods.

His war-of-words assumed ever more grotesque forms, leading him to declare euphorically during a Volkskammer speech that October: “The reign of humanity has arrived!”—for which he received a standing ovation.16 Ideologically trained cadres who valued their jobs and hoped for promotions were inclined to send overly positive reports regarding plan fulfillment up the chain of command (see Box 4.1). Overtime pay and bonuses for “exceeding” production norms were gradually incorporated into the plan, recognizing that workers extended their breaks or slowed down assembly during regular shifts in order to supplement their pay.17 “Relabeling” items to fulfill the norms was another common practice; in 1957, for example, the state’s mail-order catalogue counted a large wash-­ bucket with paddles for wringing clothes by hand a “washing machine.” Factories reported larger amounts of food served in their cafeterias as an increase in “consumer production.”18

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Box 4.1  Understanding “The Plan” In the beginning was The Plan and then came the assumptions, and the assumptions were without form, and the Plan was completely without substance, and darkness was upon the face of the workers, and they spake amongst themselves, saying “It is a crock of shit, and it stinketh,” and the workers went unto their Supervisors and sayeth “It is a pail of dung, and none may abide by the odor thereof,” and the Supervisors went unto their Managers, and sayeth unto them, “It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong such that none can abide by it,” and the Managers went unto their Directors and sayeth, “It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength,” and the Directors spake amongst themselves, saying to one another, “It contains that which aids plant growth, and it is very strong,” and the Directors went unto the Party Secretaries, and sayeth unto them, “it promotes growth, and is very powerful,” and the Party Secretaries went unto the Premier and sayeth unto him, “This new Plan will actively promote the growth and efficiency of this country, and these areas in particular,” and the Premier looked upon The Plan, and saw that it was good, and The Plan became policy. Source: Unknown, shared with the author in the 1980s.

The Ministry of State Security (MfS) was the only agency with access to the big picture, given its surveillance of citizens who filed complaints, but even Stasi agents had trouble getting their bosses to read detailed reports on local conditions. The MfS also recognized the impact of bureaucratic incompetence at lower levels, responsible for supply failures at “the people’s own factories” (VEBs) like Zeiss, Schott, and Jenapharm, for

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example. It determined that the Fish-Kombinat in Sassnitz had its boat spend weeks at sea but registered only a few days actually catching fish, while a textile factory in Schwerin had to pay DM200,000  in damages when it twice failed to fulfill an export contract.19 According to many analysts, the years 1963–1968 comprised the reform-­ richest period in GDR history, marking a bold, albeit brief attempt to liberate human resources, though light industries and food supplies still fell short of public demand.20 Ulbricht announced a dramatic change of course at the Sixth Party Congress in June 1963, marking the third stage of socialist development. The New Economic System of Planning and Management (NÖS) sought to rationalize pricing and production, while restructuring factory incentives to foster innovation through decentralization. Shifting to indirect management, large enterprises were to cover their own costs, in exchange for planning flexibility and use of cost-benefit analysis. Top performers received premiums for increased exports (5–10% of profits), and permission to pass on some of the cost for higher-quality raw materials and new products, coupled with price reductions for old ones. The NÖS urged enterprises to offer merit-based rewards to workers (vacation, wages, bonuses) and make direct use of scientific expertise. The state pushed for research and investment in micro-electronics, electronic data processing, and other technology-intensive fields. Hoping to optimize industrial processes and worker behavior, the party turned to the “sorcerer’s apprentice” of cybernetics, following a trend from the USA. Staging a cybernetic conference in 1962, it purchased its first mega-­ computer from France (Gamma 3) in 1963. The next year leaders embraced a Program for Development, Introduction and Implementation of Mechanized Data-Processing by 1970. Twelve enterprises cooperated in producing the Roboton 33; hailed as “world-class” in 1966–1967, it was quickly surpassed by western (IBM) advances. As of 1968, there were only 18 Roboton 300 systems, whose effectiveness was hindered by the state’s security-obsessed control of limited printing technologies.21 As usual, das Volk put a humorous spin on the cybernetic revolution and its demise: “All essential GDR data were fed into a main frame computer, while functionaries eagerly awaited the output. Quickly establishing the source of the malfunctioning, the optimization software program recommended doing away with the SED Politburo. The recommendation was rejected because ‘the computer lacked an adequate class consciousness’.”22 The First Secretary’s attempt to reconcile Marxism with mathematical logic was thwarted by a lack of qualified operating personnel, as well as by

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the usual “power relations.” Competition among factories fostered sectoral tensions, at the same time consumer complaints about “new packaging at higher prices” forced the state to subsidize ever more products. The SED reversed course again, discrediting Ulbricht and recentralizing control under the Socialist Economic System (ÖSS), reportedly in response to a direct order from Brezhnev. The latter included the creation of massive Kombinate, conglomerates seeking to integrate all aspects of production (scientific research, engineering, manufacturing, and distribution functions). The net result was sooner mind-numbing bureaucratization than innovation.23 Not surprisingly, these modernization efforts came at the expense of “non-productive” sectors, especially housing construction. This triggered internal Politburo backlash against reformers, as well as the first push for Ulbricht’s removal (also at Brezhnev’s command).24 Eulogizing the NÖS in 1971, chief ideologue Kurt Hager insisted that the leadership could not allow cybernetics and system theory, “as important as they are and remain, … to take the place of dialectical and historical materialism, socialist political economy and scientific communism.”25 Well acquainted with vagaries of real-existing socialism, average citizens added their own spin to dialectical materialism as the force for socialist continuity and change: “continuity rests in the perpetuation of economic deficiencies, change depends on the type of deficiency we are facing at the time.” Twenty years into its existence, the GDR found it difficult to persuade younger cohorts with no exposure to postwar deprivation to delay their gratification indefinitely. “Developed socialism” implied that it was high time for the state to deliver on its many promises. Comprising the peak of an eastern baby-boom, citizens “born into” the GDR between 1950 and 1955, spiking again 1959 to 1965, were the direct beneficiaries of increasing educational opportunities, extensive vocational training programs, scientific-technological advances and the onset of Ostpolitik. Their coming-­ of-age coincided with the changing of the SED guard. Ulbricht’s successor was described as an “unobtrusive accountant-type with crooked-­sitting glasses from the state optometry collection … boring, unimaginative, provincial, mocked and checkered—just like life in the GDR.” Popularly labeled “Honi,” Erich Honecker embodied the usual “uneventfulness” of eastern life, “striving for only bits of happiness beyond his grand ideological claims.”26 The new First Secretary nonetheless initiated a fourth stage of socialist development, 1971–1976, starting with a push to eliminate the vestiges of a private sector. Between February and May 1972, authorities liquidated

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2568 private and 5600 semi-state enterprises. They turned 1700 skilled-­ trade cooperatives, along with 10,850 small- and medium-sized business into Volkseigene Betriebe (VEBs), although “the people” had little control over “their own” factories. The dissolution of small businesses did more to foster an underground economy than to advance socialism: plumbers, carpenters, electricians and other skilled-trade workers could easily supplement their incomes with “extra jobs” on evenings and weekends, using spare parts and materials pilfered during their state-managed day-jobs. Only 2000 family businesses with 182,000 employees (2.1%) remained in private hands into the 1980s.27 Honecker was personally intent on raising living standards, leading the Eighth Party Congress to embrace the “unity of economic and social policy.” It approved a host of consumer-oriented initiatives, beginning with a very ambitious housing construction project.28 Hoping to enhance worker productivity, the regime invoked a motto attributed to model-weaver and “labor hero,” Frida Hockauf: “how we work today is how we will live tomorrow,” though most citizens were inclined to respond, “how we worked yesterday is how we want to live today.” The popular mood was one of cautious optimism, but public hopes for fundamental change were dashed on two counts by the mid-1970s. The first centered on cultural liberalization and a possible opening to the west, cut short by Biermann’s expulsion and renewed “demarcation” after the World Youth Games. The second blow derived from the onset of a global recession, precipitated by the 1973 OPEC oil crisis. The latter unfortunately coincided with GDR plans to increase energy consumption at what had been “fraternal” Soviet prices, to expand the production of consumer goods. Prior to a jump in interest rates, Honecker also expected to use foreign credits to finance western technology imports, which he intended to pay off by the end of the decade through an “export offensive” vis-à-vis non-socialist countries. The oil embargo’s impact on Honecker’s new course was not immediate. Locked into constant prices by their respective Five-Year Plans, COMECON members were initially cushioned against petro-dollar price hikes. In June 1975, however, the Soviet Union issued a formal note to the GDR Minister of External Trade, demanding an immediate “price correction” based on five-year averages in world-market prices. Domestic oil costs rose from 14 to 35 Rubles per ton, while the price of natural gas increased from 4.25 to 31 Rubles per cubic meter, adding 725 million Marks to its energy bill in 1976. The cost of oil would increase ten-fold between 1973 and 1981, leading the state to turn to its own brown-coal

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resources; massive strip-mining over the next decade would wipe out hundreds of hamlets, turning parts of Saxony and Brandenburg into “moon landscapes.”29 Between 1960 and 1980, over 70 villages, 125 km of train tracks, 200 streets, and 60 km of waterways were eliminated or relocated to make way for mining operations; over 30,000 citizens were “resettled” as well.30 The final stage of development, stretching from 1977 to 1988, brought some recognition of GDR-sovereignty, with Honecker paying rhetorical homage to détente, the Helsinki process and nuclear weapon-free zones. Polish and Romanian loan insolvency led Western bankers to restrict the credit available to other “socialist commonwealth” states. The Politburo sought to relieve its own credit crunch by restricting imports from non-­ socialist states and mandating an increase in exports, premised on (questionable) improvements in worker productivity. The SED had not reckoned with a generational shift in consumer expectations, however. Instead it wound up importing ever more manufactured goods, along with animal feed, to avoid unrest at home. Its trade imbalance worsened considerably; by 1980 the GDR faced a deficit of 2.5 billion transfer-­ Rubles. Its hard currency debt rose from DM4.5 billion to DM26 billion in 1981, forcing the leadership to turn to its western nemesis for new credits to cover its old debts.31 Secret talks between Schalck-Golodkowski and Franz Josef Strauss in May 1983 resulted in the “bombshell” announcement of a DM1 billion credit deal, delivered via a western finance consortium headed by the Bavarian State Bank. “Anti-communist” Strauss sought to appease other hardliners with the claim that he had secured the elimination of 60 motion-­ triggered shooting devices (SM-70s) positioned along the inner German border, but declassified documents later revealed that Honecker had already shared that decision with Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski (Federal Chancellor’s Office, serving Helmut Schmidt) in September 1982, after the GDR signed a UN convention outlawing such weapons.32 Other concessions eased family unification and freed children from mandatory currency exchanges. The reprieve was only temporary, however. In 1984, Honecker had to secure a second credit of DM1.95 billion, resulting in a brief liberalization of emigration rules. In 1985/1986, GDR wound up forfeiting US $1.5 billion in currency reserves.33 Used to living beyond its means, the SED leadership developed an insatiable appetite for western currencies, leading to ever more dubious methods of capital accumulation. In addition to the unscrupulous Freikauf

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practices (Chap. 10), Honecker allowed Schalck-Golodkowski to pursue lucrative albeit highly unethical deals with FRG, Austrian and Japanese pharmaceutical companies. Western firms were all too happy to circumvent their own strict drug-testing, informed-consent and damage-liability laws for new cancer medications, beta-blockers, anti-depressants, and genetically engineered substances, by using clueless East Germans as guinea pigs. The outcomes were often very painful and debilitating for patients, but doctors had no say in the testing process. The GDR regularly sold blood reserves (DM61 per bag) to the FRG, disguising such factory blood drives as a form of “humanitarian aid” to allies in conflict zones; it also “donated” organs to a Dutch Euro-transplant bank. Most of the profits—17 million Marks in 1989 alone—flowed back into KoKo’s (Commercial Coordination) Berlin Import and Export (BEIG) empire, rather than into desperately needed medical clinic upgrades.34 In 1975 the GDR moreover signed a 20-year contract with the Federal Republic, agreeing to dump garbage from West Berlin and Hamburg at five sites across the border. By 1988, some 5 million tons per year included 400,000 tons of toxic waste and 200,000 tons of industrial sludge. Failure to deliver the agreed-upon tonnage required the west to pay compensation.35 While the deal brought in DM1.2 billion by 1989, the East invested only DM40 million in environmental protection during that period.36 Signs of economic deterioration intensified at home, coupled with external threats to domestic stability, like the Polish Solidarity movement and Gorbachev’s glasnost/perestroika initiatives. Before he fled to the west in December 1989, Schalck-Golodkowski reported that the GDR’s total hard currency debt had risen from 2 billion Valuta Marks in 1979 to 49 billion VM by 1989.37 Even East German economists were embarrassed by Honecker’s last-gasp declaration in August 1989, “den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf hält weder Ochs noch Esel auf” [“socialism running its path is hindered neither by oxen nor ass”].

Collective Reponses to Chronic Scarcities According to East German economists interviewed after 1990, Politburo member Günter Mittag had possessed “dictatorial powers to intervene in all sectors,” rendering him personally responsible for many policy failures dating back to the 1960s, a charge he later denied.38 In the eyes of critical GDR economists, the planned economy rested on “fiction, improvisation, chaos, schizophrenia, double-regency, and squaring the circle.”39

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The secret was to utilize modern-sounding terminology and methods, while falsifying the numbers (or renaming products), making the country appear financially solvent to outsiders. Honecker managed to pay off western credits of the 1970s by blocking imports, while draining his own stores, and parts of his military arsenal, in order to expand exports.40 The long-serving economic minister later admitted that the regime had lived beyond its means for decades, allowing millions to disappear behind the scenes through KoKo operations. According to popular wisdom, there was nonetheless something miraculous about the planned economy: “Although we don’t know what the Plan is, we produce twice as much as it calls for. Although we have overfulfilled the Plan, there is nothing worth buying in the stores. And although there is nothing worth buying, we all have almost everything.”41 Any group attempting to mobilize autonomously to protest environmental decay, the militarization of schools or just to play rock-music could bring down the heavy hand of the state. When it came to everyday efforts to procure scarce goods and services, however, improvisation qua self-­ initiative was the name of the game. Socialist consumers proved quite adept at forming distinctive, self-help networks at many levels. The latter contributed to personal social capital reserves that were not only key to overcoming economic deficiencies but also essential to processes of “self-­ actualization” à la Maslow. The feelings of solidarity, trust, and mutual reliance they engendered were not limited to friends and family members; many such relationships were linked to the workplace, which meant that they often endured longer than marriages, based on guaranteed lifetime employment. Transcending formal interest organizations, these functional relationships did not require immediate transactions, nor were they primarily focused on material gain. For many they brought the satisfaction of knowing that average citizens could outsmart a system that remained oblivious to popular complaints regarding production bottlenecks, unequal distribution, and poor quality appliances sold at high prices. In one post-­unity survey, 72% characterized their participation in these mutual-aid channels as “very significant,” not only because they helped to secure goods that were normally inaccessible but also “because it was fun.”42 Mutual aid networks assumed three main forms. The first, the collective, prevailed at the factory level, where it was expected to foster working-class consciousness, even if the types of assistance such groups rendered often transcended legal bounds. Occasionally operating outside the formally

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controlled unions, collectives, and “work brigades” offered a base for maximizing systemic integration. They also supplied social spaces in which laborers could organize indirect resistance against externally imposed rules and production quotas, as well as against industrial shortfalls and poor provisions. Work contacts enabled individuals and even whole brigades to acquire scarce goods, especially in key industries. Laborers felt few qualms about helping themselves to “the people’s own” repair parts and construction materials, needed to expand their datsches, for example. Expropriating supplies for personal use rarely resulted in serious consequences like job loss, given chronic labor shortages. One such case involved Altenburger Klarer, a schnapps considered ideal for consuming at Skat card games; in fact, the brand was so popular that it was often used as “substitute currency” (M 11.80 per bottle). Producers consistently “overfulfilled” plan goals but little was to be found in regular stores. The District Party Control Commission determined in 1980 that roughly 100 factories and 40 state institutions were buying large quantities directly from the factory before the final product could enter official distribution channels. The list of regular customers included the Military District Command, the County Police headquarters, the Leipzig Economic Council and even the local Stasi office (though the latter disappeared from the prosecutor’s list). Labeling itself a “nominal business partner,” the VEB Minol Altenburg bought 495 bottles over a six-month period. High-value liqueurs were purportedly purchased as “gifts” for visiting dignitaries. Estimated damages, amounting to M 750,000, resulted in only 14 arrests, including a number of SED members.43 Workplace collectives were multifunctional spaces, essential not only for producing goods and services but also for distributing many social welfare benefits. Employers assisted in allocating apartments, providing medical services, arranging cultural excursions and even caring for retirees. Supervisors recognized a need to engage in ongoing compromises (e.g., on bonuses, norms, vacation benefits) to keep workers committed to “filling the plan,” if only to avoid jeopardizing their own privileges and positions. Mutual trust, and turning a blind eye to self-provision (e.g., disappearing tools), created a buffer zone for all concerned, inside and outside the factory. This is not to argue that collectives constituted “communities among equals” devoid of hierarchies or divisions of labor. The ability to deliver equivalent goods and services at a later date depended on occupational

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standing and income differentials: the older the worker, the better the contacts, although younger cohorts were often less willing to play the game. Gender differences were also evident: despite high rates of female employment, men were disproportionately concentrated in the occupational sectors and skilled trades that offered the best access to scarce materials (construction industries) and coveted services (plumbing, auto, or electrical repairs). Females were relegated to secondary production branches (textiles, food processing) or assigned to pink-collar service sectors (retail, childcare, schools, healthcare). A less formal associational mode used to overcome chronic scarcities entailed a multitude of semi-private Notgemeinschaften; though largely instrumental in nature, these “communities of need” also depended on social trust to grease the proverbial wheel. Women were more likely to play an active role in these configurations, as the primary managers of household consumption. Concentrated at the neighborhood level, these communities rested on complex gifting chains, “round-robin” favors or “ring-exchanges.” It was not unusual for A to share something with B, who then traded with C or D, who was best positioned to deliver the item desired by A. The most important ingredient shaping communities of this sort was “Vitamin B,” for Beziehungen or connections. Knowing the right people was “worth real money,” if only because many things could not be bought for Alu-chips (the lightweight DDR coins) in official state stores, despite the elimination of private enterprise. Given the many shortages that consistently plagued the system, it was largely assumed that everyone had access to “something” that others might eventually want or need. The logic of “whoever gives can receive” unfortunately led many consumers to buy not according to need but rather according to what was available, following the “SKET Principle”: sehen, kaufen, einlagern, tauschen (see, buy, store, trade later).44 Stores might be empty, but closets and freezers were full, resulting in a socialist “tragedy of the commons.” Loosely defined, Easterners regularly encountered an economic situation in which individuals operating in a shared-resource system engaged in self-interested consumption at the expense of the common good. Because the demand for many products often exceeded the local supply, each consumer who purchased more than s/he needed, in hopes of exchanging it later for something else, immediately deprived others of access. While it was possible, in theory, for planners to calculate the need for basic foodstuffs on a per capita basis, they were unable to deal with a

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growing demand for luxury items like chocolates, alcohol, cigarettes, and tea, following wage increases in the early 1970s. “New arrival” or scarce items displayed in store windows were known as Bückwaren—goods that store employees “bent over” to pull out from under the counter, where they had been stashed away for relatives, friends, and special customers. Sudden shortages or rumors of imminent price hikes could also trigger a run (known as “hamstering”) even in relation to basic products like sugar and flour. Attempts to limit how many/how much any one could purchase on a given day merely led shoppers to move from one store to the next, until they had accrued a sufficient quantity. One woman in Suhl was publicly “named and shamed” for buying six pieces of butter in two days, then sending her son out to buy two more.45 Other prices were intentionally cheap (a “socialist achievement”) but so low that they failed to cover production costs, resulting in tremendous waste. While many refused to eat tasteless, machine-produced bread-rolls, others bought large quantities (100 Brötchen for 5 Marks) to feed their chickens, rabbits, and pigs.46 Writing in the early 1980s, one housewife in a small village close to an odiferous, swine-producing LPG, described the extent to which local shortages forced her to engage in a wide array of special transactions on a weekly basis. Embracing the motto, “Whoever complains will never get anything special,” she learned to live with the ornery behavior and snarly demeanors she encountered at the post office, the grocery store and various administrative offices. During one seven-day period, she resigned herself to the news that no coal would be delivered for two months, then was surprised to find a big pile in front of the cellar entrance three days later, until she remembered that she had accidentally given the delivery man a 20-Mark tip last time around. She had her father discretely pass on 50 Marks while ordering gravel “under the table” for drainage around her house, knowing that one of every five deliveries by a certain truck driver involved a private deal. She likewise appealed to a neighbor to “borrow” a sack of cement to fix her garage. Unable to find bed pillows during her day in the city, she saw a synthetic quilt, and automatically bought two, along with a new dress for M 140. Having delivered freshly slaughtered meat to the home of the woman booking appointments at the car wash, she secured a monthly slot. Friends with “the best baker” in the next village, she took an extra loaf for “Grandpa” (a carpenter with access to wood products) and an aunt, who worked for a butcher. After standing in line at the grocery, she celebrated the fact that the milk container she grabbed was not leaking. Having

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supplied three of the cashiers with a pound of real coffee at Christmas, she was happy to find that one had slipped a jar of honey into her bag, though there was none to be found on the shelves; there had been no strawberry jam for three months. She invited the stonemason in for breakfast, and later fed his two children lunch, knowing he would be more motivated to work on her garage. She closed her diary entry by reporting that on Sunday evening, she poured herself a glass of wine and turned on the record player, to mark her pleasure regarding her “successful” week. 47 Initially described by Günter Gaus in 1983, niches afforded a third source of social capital, reciprocity, and trust of a more sentimental sort, as understood by Herbert Kelman. In contrast to the amorphous nature of the Notgemeinschaften, niches represented a type of personal “internal migration.” They relied on well-guarded boundaries, separating the public world of work and politics from the private sphere of family relations and intimate friendships. Citizens withdrew into their little worlds of personal relationships to escape and/or recover from ritualized participation in meaningless public spaces. Although work brigades and collectives also produced genuine personal friendships, members were expected to perform pre-scripted roles as soldiers loyal to the socialist cause during May Day parades or other holiday commemorations. In exchange, they expected the state not to intrude in their private lives and spaces for the rest of the year. Despite high divorce rates, “family” was an extremely important anchor in navigating stormy political seas, accounting, in part, for the tendency to marry and procreate at younger ages than seen in the west. The latter also was also a way for young adults to secure their own apartments and furnishings, especially after 1971. Datsche culture afforded another source of refuge from the state. Originally known as Schrebergärten, these small plots of land leased to workers outside the city had grown out of concerns voiced by a Leipzig physician, Dr. Daniel Schreber, that children confined to urban tenements would be stunted physically and emotionally without access to fresh air and playgrounds. What began as small urban gardens in the late 1800s became so popular that officials introduced regulations in 1919 to control their average size (25 square meters) and to “keep things orderly” as they spread beyond city limits. The ability to cultivate their own food on these plots ensured the survival of many urban families during World War II. They played an equally crucial role in sustaining the population when the rationing system collapsed, following Germany’s unconditional surrender in 1945.

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Although Wilhelm Pieck had participated in Schrebergärten culture prior to his Moscow exile, the SED initially viewed small gardeners as a regressive group, despite their working-class roots, presumedly because these leased plots reflected an attachment to private property. The leadership nonetheless faced a more immediate problem of preventing mass starvation, 1945–1947, since eastern fields had served as sites of fierce fighting. Wealthier farmers had managed to transfer some of their animals to the west prior to the arrival of Soviet troops, then fled themselves. Undernourished Russian soldiers randomly slaughtered those that remained and dug up potato fields to make their own vodka.48 Complicated by the influx of 4 million refugees and a burgeoning black market, average consumption in the SMAD fell to 800 calories, forcing the regime to accept the “pacification potential” inherent in self-provision. In May 1946 it approved the renewed formation of an Association of Small Gardeners. By the time the regime imploded in 1989, there were more registered small gardeners than agricultural cooperative (LPG) workers. Despite their domestic origin, GDR residents began to refer to these leased plots as datsche, derived from the Russian word meaning “vacation home.” Like their western counterparts (still called Schreber-gardeners), they erected small structures allowing them to spend the night in areas emanating “a rural flair.” The buildings grew more elaborate over time, as did the gardens, reaching an average size of 300 square meters per plot. Garden communities had their own rules, clothing, foods, customs, grill parties, and festivals. Comprising “the paradise of the little people,” these pacts featured everything from fruit trees, berry patches, vegetable beds, herb, and flower gardens, to pigeon coves, rabbit hutches, and chicken coops. Under the auspices of the Union of Small Gardeners, Settlers and Small Animal Breeders (VSKS), most tenants “worked hard with a purpose” in places where they were free to harvest the fruits of their own labor.49 Many datsches were in a constant state of construction, as inhabitants mended fences, built fountains, and expanded their domiciles, using materials salvaged or “borrowed” from the state. Despite their ambivalence toward any type of association they could not directly control, Politburo members regularized the status of these plots, incorporating tenant “user rights” into the Civil Code (§287–289 ZGB) in 1976. Though averse to private property, they permitted citizens to acquire long-term leases which they could, for a fee, “externalize” (translate: sell) or pass on to family members after death. Commensurate with the 1984 agricultural price reforms, officials began to include

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small-­ garden output in their plan calculations, to “stabilize” supplies. Regional party officials were urged to buy up 150,000 tons of vegetables, and 170,000 tons of fruit, at prices higher than those awaiting consumers in state stores, to encourage intensified land use and build up “reserves.”50 As reported at the Eleventh Party Congress of 1986, the number of VKSK members rose from 232,000 to nearly 1.4 million. Beyond increasing the supply of fruits and vegetables, the creation of 96,000 new garden plots dating back to 1981 afforded new sources of wool, honey, and rabbit meat. Delegates approved a plan to create an additional 150,000 small gardens in time for the Twelfth Party Congress, which would have taken place in 1991, had the regime survived.51 Facing another ideological contradiction of its own making, SED officials redefined the role of small gardeners and breeders in time for the 25th jubilee of the VSKS and the 35th anniversary of the GDR’s founding, rendering them part of the larger plan to advance the socialist cause. Describing the VSKS as “a unified, democratic mass organization,” authorities claimed that under socialism, the gardening and breeding activities of pact-holders for the first time, have been able to blossom completely and to secure high societal recognition as an integral component of our socialist way of life. The pride of its members in the VKSK’s contributions to the growth and development of the GDR, their devotion to the socialist fatherland and the VKSK should mark and foster their willingness to further intensify their achievements with regard to plant and animal production.

VKSK groups allegedly pursued “highly effective political work to deepen the belief in active, anti-imperialistic solidarity with peoples who are fighting to attain their liberation.”52 These “parcels of happiness” on the outskirts of town evolved into whole settlements, especially in scenic lake regions. By 1989, an estimated 13 million (of 16 million) East Germans had access to 2.6 million “weekend properties” and 855,000 small gardens.53 Many pensioners stayed at their datsches for months at a time to escape pollution and the regimentation of daily life. Unbeknownst to most weekend farmers, the Alfred Frank Settlement about 30  km outside of Leipzig was home to a major Stasi bunker. Because they could only lease the ground on which their privately owned cabins and sheds stood, many settlements became embroiled in contentious property-reclamation battles with “expropriated” Westerners

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after unification. As of October 3, 2015, owners, including communal governments, were given the right to terminate leases to promote “significant” development projects.54 Although collectives, need-communities, niches, and datsches helped to alleviate some production and distribution problems, they could not keep pace with the revolution of rising expectations that accompanied generational change. Lacking the experiences and idealism of the Aufbau years, 20-somethings found their workplace mobility and promotions blocked by 40-something parents and 60-something grandparents still participating in paid labor. The more the Party raged against western consumer goods, like nylon parkas, blue jeans, and electronics, the stronger the youth demand for such items. State ownership of the means of production had purportedly eliminated class differences, but occupational status and residential location continued to reproduce social inequalities across these networks. Honecker’s 1971 pledge to raise living standards exacerbated the problem of “too much money chasing after too few goods,” although inflation was not an acceptable socialist concept. Minimum wages and pensions rose dramatically over the next decade; the average monthly salary grew from M897 (1975) to M1030 (1980), while 3.4 million retirees saw an average increase of 30–60 Marks.55 The introduction of a 40-hour work-­ week, coupled with additional vacation days, meant that people not only had more money to spend but also more time to spend it, leading to another dialectical turn, commonly known as Intershop socialism.

Intershop Socialism and Its Discontents Perhaps it was the motto, “to learn from the Soviet Union is to learn victory” that motivated SED leaders to seek new sources of hard currency by copying the Soviet valuta model; the idea was to attract hard currency through the sale of luxury goods at international hotels and airports. The GDR established its first specialty stores in Rostock and Wismar in 1955, featuring “travel items” (spirits, tobacco, candies) for purchase by foreign sailors and cruise passengers. The first three Intershops opened in 1962, to extract western money from the thousands of outsiders who attended annual international technical and trade fairs (Messe) in Rostock and Leipzig. The network was gradually expanded to airports, points along FRG-GDR transit routes and expensive hotels reserved for non-­socialist tourists and business travelers. Would-be domestic buyers required a

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special type of Vitamin B to access these stores; well-placed functionaries and party members with high incomes could show an official identification card entitling them to foreign-currency purchases. The number of Intershops grew quickly, from 240 in 1966, to 470 by 1979, encompassing international hotel and Mitropa shops, along with select HOs.56 Total sales volume rose from 170 million Valuta Marks in 1971 to 285.6 million VM in 1974. In February 1974, the state granted average citizens the right to possess and spend foreign currencies they might have accrued from friends and relatives, due to a growing influx of visitors under Ostpolitik. To expedite its own capital accumulation, it required all citizens to convert their western currency into “Forum checks” at state banks as of 1979; the smallest denominations, worth DM1 and 50 cents, ensured that local purchasers never received “proper change” at Intershops, eliciting Eingaben complaints over their involuntary donations to state reserves. Total sales volume reached 555.8 million VM in 1976, then 988 million VM in 1984. By 1989, Forum GmbH, under KoKo control was amassing over 1.16 billion VM in purchases.57 The socialist adage, “from each according to his ability, to each according to need” was reformulated to read, “to each according to the address of her/his aunt,” as long as it was somewhere in the Federal Republic.58 Admitting to growing discontent among groups lacking “west-money,” Honecker insisted in 1977 that Intershops “were naturally not a permanent fixture in socialism.” They were presented as merely an “accommodation” to a growing stream of international visitors, due to détente and the GDR’s new status as a UN member.59 While members of the armed forces (military, police, Stasi agents) had to renounce all ties to FRG relatives and friends (denying them access to “west-money”), store personnel at such outlets were entitled to a monthly bonus of 30 DM by the 1980s. Citizens flocked to Intershops in search of fashionable clothing, home electronics, tobacco, specialized foods, Ikea lamps, and Salamander-brand shoes.60 Many items available in these stores had been produced in the East by western firms taking advantage of lower wages. Status-conscious consumers cautiously hoarded and displayed containers that had originally held west-products, refilling their Jacobs coffee-tins with eastern Mokka-Fix, for example. One couple I visited in Dresden in 1988 had decorated their living room bookshelves with empty Nivea bottles, marmalade and Nutella jars, western shampoo containers, and so on. When I treated them to coffee at the “international” hotel, they asked me to buy a West German newspaper, but rather than pour over the front

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pages for political news, they immediately turned to the advertising supplement featuring Sommerschlussverkauf (end-of-the-summer sale) items. The working class opined: “Better backwards out of the Intershop than forward to the XI. Party Congress.” While Intershops focused on siphoning off convertible hard currencies, two other mercantile ventures were supposed to relieve pent-up demand stemming from rising wages at home. Shortly after the Berlin Wall blocked access to western boutiques, the Ministerial Council decided to open high-end stores specializing in clothing, shoes, and cosmetics. In addition to imports, so-called Exquisitläden (elegance stores) featured items produced by 30 certified domestic fashion designers, who presented their seasonal collections at the Leipzig trade-fair. After testing designs for durability, form, and “suitability,” fuddy-duddy SED men usually limited production to 300 outfits (in a country with over 7 million women), using fabrics imported from Austria, Italy, France, and Japan, inter alia. By 1978, 30–35 exquisite boutiques opened in the show-case cities of Berlin, Leipzig, Magdeburg, Dresden, and Rostock, further attesting to the fact that some citizens were more equal than others under socialism. In 1966, the state introduced another market variation, the Delikatläden (delicacy stores), to cover public demand for “luxury” food and drink items. In 1978, the government ordered the creation of 25–30 such stores, featuring special chocolates, better cuts of meat, choice sausages, canned pineapple, peach preserves, mandarin oranges, western whisky, and prized domestic liqueurs, among other things. Like their pricey counterparts, so-called Delis were found primarily in Berlin, Halle, Leipzig Dresden, Magdeburg, and Erfurt. Pensioners permitted to visit the west found that canned pineapple priced at 8 Marks in the East could usually be had for only 1 DM on the other side.61 A final market innovation centered on the Geschenkdienst (Genex GmbH), the Gift Service and Small Import Network. Friends and relatives in the FRG were allowed to deposit hard currency in their own banks, which would be transferred to a GDR account. Easterners could then place their orders and have their “gifts” delivered, averaging about 230,000 orders per annum. Functionaries entitled to travel abroad (Reisekader) could also use this network to pick out and purchase goods during their trips to non-socialist countries. Outside the larger cities, average consumers noticed that standard products were disappearing from the HO shelves, only to reappear in new packaging at higher prices in specialty stores. Perennially scarce items like color TVs, tape-recorders, stereos, computers, CD players, and instamatic

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cameras were likewise available, at cheaper prices, in luxury stores, often made in the GDR.  Despite an officially inflated exchange rate (DM1: M8), domestically produced colored TVs featuring imported cathode-ray technology, for example, Colotron, cost M6250, five to six times the average monthly salary but at least expected to last eight to ten years. “Shadow-­ mask” Chromat models, ranging from M5775 to 6250 each, were only good for two to five years. Both models were hard to procure through regular supply channels, yet Intershops offered technologically advanced models for DM900. Domestically produced car-radios, priced at M 11,040 in retail centers, could be had for DM100 at the Intershop.62 One East Berlin friend summarized the plight of average consumers with a popular ditty: “In der HO keine Verwandten/Im Konsum keine Bekannten/ Von Westen kein Paket, und/da fragst Du mich, wie es mir geht?” (“No relatives at the grocery, no acquaintances in retail stores, no package out of the West, and you ask me how I’m doing?”). GDR leaders preached the gospel of socialist economics but ruled according to the primacy of politics. As the schnapps example illustrated, the problem was not under-production per se, but rather regular attempts by officials, workers, and consumers to circumvent product allocations foreseen by planners. Berlin residents generally enjoyed higher wages, a wider range of products, and even shorter waiting times for pre-ordered goods, for example, 132 months for cars versus 156 months elsewhere. When shortages arose in “the Capital City of the GDR,” functionaries pulled in products from outlying districts, fueling resentment there. As a result, hundreds of thousands would get into their cars on weekends to shop in Berlin. “Brigades” would take workers’ orders, then send company trucks to the Hauptstadt to pick up goods not available close to home. Families also traveled to larger cities on the weekends to fill their cars with food, or order appliances, furniture, and other durable goods. The SED, they noted wryly, “has solved the supply and distribution problem: they transport the goods to Berlin, then we all pick them up there.” Having declared private property the root of all evil, SED leaders were ironically forced to rely on small gardeners, elite shopping venues, and substantial loans from capitalist banks, to help them muddle through the 1970s and 1980s. Having laid the foundation for a better educated “working class,” eager to move on to the next stage of development, the old guard grew ever more fearful that any move to unleash the self-productive forces of the proletariat would result in its own displacement. Their vision of the “all-sided socialist personality” was monochromatic at best, but this

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did not stop party officials from seeking to regulate “the lives of others” in ever greater detail, even in matters of personal taste. We now turn to a few of their curious campaigns to cultivate the politically correct “socialist consumer.”

Creating the “Socialist Consumer” Reportedly the tallest structure across both German states, the newly constructed TV tower close to Alexanderplatz officially opened on October 7, 1969, marking the GDR’s 20th birthday. On a good day, one could see places up to 26  miles away, then enter the rotating bar and restaurant, where uncharacteristically friendly waiters served fancy cocktails in exchange for western currency. Four years later, construction commenced on the Palace of the Republic (in popular parlance: “Ballast of the Republic”), which housed the Volkskammer from 1976 to 1990. Featuring restaurants, cafes, art galleries, barber-shops, beer halls, a skating rink, a cinema, a video-game arcade, a bowling alley and even a casino open to the public, its distinctively modern, minimalist style included huge, bronze-mirror windows, which ironically reflected the massive Berlin Cathedral across the street, built under the last Prussian emperor, Wilhelm II.  The western-dominated Bundestag approved its demolition (2006–2008), to make way for a privately financed reconstruction of the eighteenth-century Prussian Royal Palace, now known as the Humboldt Forum. Despite their rhetorical and architectural homage to “modernization,” the long-serving SED men who dominated the system failed to grasp the significance of dialectical materialism as a force for societal change. Curiously incapable of anticipating shifts in the consumer environment precipitated by their own Five-Year Plans, their first instinct was to resist any call for improvement that originated outside the Politburo, until signs of political unrest forced them to make costly concessions. Generational change and the officially propagated “scientific-technical revolution” were not the only factors reconfiguring citizen needs and demands. Equally important was a reduction in normal working times, cut to 45 hours per week in 1966. This was supplemented by additional vacation time and fewer days on the job; except for retail personnel, Saturdays were no longer mandatory as of 1967, a break eventually extended to schools. Honecker’s stress on “the unity of economic and social policy” likewise contributed to a revolution of rising consumer expectations. Promising to

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raise living standards, the state dramatically increased wages and pensions after 1971, costing it M6.7 billion between 1976 and 1981. Average monthly earnings rose from M889 in 1975 to M1021 in 1980, though some groups again proved “more equal” than others (Table 4.1). Women were nearly ten times more likely to fall into the minimum pension category. The state also introduced “supplemental pensions” based on voluntary contributions, which naturally benefited higher earners.63 In May 1956, rulers tried to improve rural shopping by introducing a catalogue merchandising system (Versandhaus, VH, the GDR equivalent of Sears), based on the motto, “you order, we deliver.” Urban dwellers quickly overloaded the system with orders, however, forcing the VH to publish lists of undeliverable, sold-out items; it shut down completely in 1976. Its successful FRG counterpart, Quelle, sold many expensive GDR goods to clueless west Germans at discount prices, including those produced by prisoners. Forced laborers at the women’s Hoheneck prison sewed Quelle bed linens, for example, while men in Staβfurt assembled its Universium-brand televisions.64 The Seven-Year Plan adopted the slogan, “modern people buy modern things,” leading women to complain vociferously about a dearth of household items. The year 1958 saw a new campaign for “a 1000 little things,” including peelers, hand-graters, egg-cups, sandwich-boxes, coffee grinders, electric razors, frying pans, and vacuum cleaners. The chemical industry was ordered to shift production to soap powder, cosmetics, and Table 4.1  Average gross wages (east marks), according to labor sector, 1955–1988 Year

Production worker

White collar (Angestellter)

Agricultural worker

Trade, retail

Total average

Pensioners (minimum)a

1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1988

435 567 640 748 869 1018 1116 1260

459 575 655 768 893 1038 1145 1290

324 475 573 710 886 1000 1076 1197

365 480 – 659 768 868 979 1088

342 555 633 755 889 1021 1130 1269

90 (1952) 153 – 199 – 343 – 380

At least 15 years of employment, excluding widows’ and disability pensions

a

Source: Statistisches Jahrbuch der DDR, 1989; also, Gunnar Winkler, Sozialreport ’90 (Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft, 1990), 229

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household containers. Housewives were later exhorted to embrace Plasta (plastic), heralded as odorless, hygienic, unbreakable, and available in pleasing, colorful shapes, “not a cheap substitute but a valuable resource.”65 Though the hunger years were behind them, East Germans continued to encounter sporadic shortages of butter, meat, bread and dairy products (yogurt, cheese) through the 1970s, especially in small towns. The Soviet Union’s first manned space flight in 1961 led citizens in the satellite state to note sarcastically, “Keine Butter, keine Sahne, aber auf’m Mond ‘ne rote Fahne” (“no butter, no cream, but a red flag on the moon”). To compensate for the postwar shortage of male laborers, party officials recruited “women into production,” necessitating steps to enhance their shopping efficiency at the end of the work day. No effort was made to re-­ educate, much less require men to share the triple burden of work, family and household management. Accounting for less than 50% of food consumption in the late 1950s, existing HOs were converted into “self-serve” groceries, with a standardized building lay-out. By 1966, there were 13,995 HOs, but rural stores sooner resembled mom-&-pop operations with a limited assortment of goods. Not surprisingly, the practice failed to live up to socialist-efficiency theory. Many stores lacked sufficient store baskets required for shopping, as well as appropriate packing materials; Wundertute (plastic bags) were not widely available. Women were required to stand in separate lines for vegetables, meat, and baked goods, moving into a third or fourth line for check-out. Many products sold out well before the lines abated, as indicated by frequent Eingabe complaints. Encouraged to order supplies in the morning for pick-up on the way home, female workers often found their bags only half full, or containing the wrong items. Routine HO shortages of meat, fresh fruits, and vegetables generated a further problem: countless administrative offices closed during prime working hours, while public employees went out to forage or stand in line for their own goods. Countless letter-writers admonished: “why must I go into so many stores, always starting with the question ‘do you have …’?”; “Hamm’Se …?” was one of the most frequently (m) uttered phrases in the GDR.66 West Germans used the word Angebot (supply) in reference to a “special deal” or sale item, whose purpose was to entice customers into favoring one brand over multiple product options; for Easterners, Angebot indicated the only item available at the time one happened to be shopping. To overcome beef and pork shortages, party officials “over-planned” the breeding of hens, leading to an appeal to the public to “eat one more

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egg”—with the expected result. What began as a surplus problem soon morphed into an egg shortage, costing at least one district party secretary a career advance in Rostock.67 The state also opened a chain of “Gold Broiler” (roast chicken) restaurants which became quite popular in the 1960s. A party-internal report compiled in 1968 clearly recognized that “discontinuities in the supply of foodstuffs are hindering the establishment of socialist consciousness and undermine the people’s trust in their state. … The guarantee of an attractive continuous supply is not only a question of proper provision but is also a political matter of the highest order.”68 The winter of 1969/1970 proved more difficult than most. Coal was in short supply, causing schools to close for lack of heat and canceling trains for want of fuel. Even more troubling was a shortage of the German war-time staple, potatoes. Factory and university cafeterias were ordered to serve noodles and macaroni; students described Mensa food as “memory-­ depleting” (“we’ve forgotten the taste of potatoes”) and “impotence-inducing” (“buried in enough sauce to last a year, reducing life-expectancy”).69 Authorities ultimately had to import a more expensive, higher-quality potato from Egypt prior to Christmas, to avoid a holiday housewife-rebellion.70 Urban black-outs around New Year’s Eve triggered a milk shortage, due to an inability to run the electric milking machines. Ostensibly intent on mitigating women’s double burden, authorities introduced “labor saving” food items (pre-packaged soups, canned goods), which the public sometimes deemed inedible. They were more successful with frozen food products, with the exception of a frozen cucumber and tomato salad, which thawed into a pile of mush. Not surprisingly, this product line raised demands for affordable refrigerators and freezers. As of 1966, only 30% had electric refrigerators; 60% relied on cooling units requiring blocks of ice! Shoppers complained about leaking milk containers, necessitating a return to more expensive bottles. The state routinely counted on packages from western relatives to fill certain gaps, duly registering the “kilo-tons” of coffee, cocoa, and chocolates that arrived by mail, along with valuable clothing items, for example, 11.4 million pairs of women’s stockings (1979).71 Sooner interested in quantity than quality, the SED proudly announced annual per capita growth in meat and butter consumption, leading to the next problem: increasing obesity. One study found every fourth citizen overweight, having consumed more than 1000 unnecessary calories per

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day in the form of meat, sugar, alcohol, cake, and sweets (Table 4.2). Per capita meat consumption rose from 45 kg in 1955 to 77 kg in 1975, then to 98  kg in 1985; “pure alcohol” use rose from 4.1  liters in 1960 to 10.9  liters in 1989, coupled with 146  liters of beer and 15.5  liters of schnapps, qualifying the GDR as the world’s top per capita consumer of adult beverages (though adolescents also indulged).72 This was accompanied by a troubling rise in tobacco consumption, up to 1833 cigarettes per capita in 1985.73 The state turned to espousing “optimal nutrition” and developing low-­ fat foods (e.g., cheese), but “the generation that retained living memories of postwar hunger had set itself different nutritional goals. For these people food that was rich in fats and meat was a sign of affluence.”74 It began promoting fish consumption as a healthy alternative but had to cancel a popular TV-chef show (“Fish on every Table”) in 1972, when it proved unable to deliver the main ingredient to areas south of Berlin, owing to insufficient refrigerator trucks.75 Hoping to spend my mandatory-­ exchange currency (M25) during my summer day-trips to East Berlin, I would visit a large fish restaurant called the “Banquet of the Sea” close to Alexanderplatz; the menu listed over 30 entrees, but after many “Hamm wir nicht” (“don’t have it”) responses from waiters, I learned to ask for the “special” of the day. The “coffee crisis” of 1977 posed a particularly serious challenge to GDR leaders. Used to paying, on average, M150 million per year for this treasured import from 1972 to 1975, planners saw their bill for 53,307 tons shoot up to 667.2 million Marks, due to a spike in world-market prices. Table 4.2  Annual food/nutritional consumption, 1955–1989 Food item

1955

1960

1970

1980

1989

Meat products (kg) Fish (kg) Butter (kg) Milk (liter) Cheese (kg) Sugar Products (kg) Vegetables (kg) Fruits (kg) Eggs

5.0 6.7 9.5 90.7 3.0 27.4 37.0 21.8 116

55.0 7.0 13.5 94.5 60.7 29.3 60.7 57.0 197

66.1 7.9 14.6 98.7 84.8 34.3 84.8 55.5 239

89.5 7.4 15.2 113.9 93.8 40.6 93.8 71.1 289

100.2 7.6 14.6

Source: Adapted from Annette Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte der DDR, 163

100.6 40.5 100.6 78.6 301

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Mounting debt induced by the 1973 oil crisis led the Politburo to call for tough cuts in raw coffee and cocoa bean imports. Schalck-Golodkowski recommended that the GDR cease production of assorted roasted coffees, to be replaced by a single brand (Rondo), priced at 120 Marks per kilo. Raising the price 100% was expected to cut demand by 25–30%, which could be partially alleviated through Intershop purchases or packages from “west-relatives.” Producers were to introduce a new mixed brand, consisting of 50% real coffee, supplemented by chicory, diced sugar beets, barley, and rye. Factories, administrative agencies, and cafes would only be permitted to serve new mixed blends, Mon and Mokka-Fix Gold. The latter was popularly ridiculed as Erich’s Krönung (Erich’s Coronation), a wordplay linked to a popular FRG brand. Coffee was the one luxury item consumed daily in most households; meeting for “coffee and cake” was one national past-time still shared with the west. The substitutes not only tasted terrible, they also ruined coffee machines. The Politburo had to arrange quick trade agreements with Ethiopia, Angola, the Philippines, Brazil, Colombia, India, and Vietnam, in exchange for further manufactured goods. Although “get rich quick” schemes seem rather un-Marxian, one enterprise that did function efficiently and profitably was the lottery system (VEB Vereinigte Wettspielbetriebe, later East German Lottery, GmbH). Among the most popular was the TV-Lotto “5 out of 35,” played by roughly 60% of all viewers. Jackpots were limited to M 50,000 but the chances of winning were fairly high. For 50  cents, socialist consumers could also try their luck with “6 of 49” and “5 of 45,” for prizes up to 2 million Marks. Regulars could use automatic bank transfers for monthly purchases and winnings. During its last year, debt-free, East Lotto revenues hit 1066 billion Marks, one-third of which went into state coffers. West-lottery operators with “questionable motives” persuaded the Treuhand to do away with eastern games, “to everyone’s disadvantage.” In addition to killing the proverbial goose that laid the golden egg, the de-licensing of eastern lotteries eliminated 800 jobs. High “processing” fees for western lotteries (free in the GDR) raised ticket prices up to DM 5–6 (e.g., “Spiel 77”), rendering them too expensive for thousands of newly unemployed workers.76 Honecker’s strategy of managing his burgeoning debt by way of an aggressive export policy only compounded domestic supply problems. East German baby-boomers had begun to enter the workforce, intent on starting families of their own. Industrial capacities that should have

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benefited domestic consumers were placed at the disposal of 6000 FRG companies, attracted by lower labor costs, for example, Salamander, Adidas, Bosch, and Nivea, though they did reserve set quantities of such products for Intershop and Exquisite stores.77 Of the 293,000 single-lens reflex cameras made by Jena Optic, 77,000 were sent abroad, as were 90,656 of 375,000 washing machines, 170 million of 242 million porcelain objects and 18 million pairs of women’s stockings—as the population approached 17 million.78 Pantries and refrigerators in wealthy West Germany were filled cheaply at the expense of socialist workers and farmers. During the first half of 1984, GDR, Inc. exported 40,000 cattle, 100,000 pigs, 470 million eggs, 5.7 million liters of milk, 10 million liters of beer, 4.4 million liters of schnapps, 91 million cigarettes and 32 million cigars.79 Could regime officials have been any more “out of touch” with the quotidian needs of average consumers than these figures suggest? When we turn to the needs of their female “comrades,” the answer is a resounding YES! The male party elites who controlled the levers of the national economy were especially clueless when it came to anticipating the interests of women, socialist or not. Planners had reduced their advertising budget by 50% in 1963, along with summer and winter “sales,” deeming these practices un-socialist. Women’s incorporation into the paid workplace reversed that decision, in hopes of persuading female consumers, in particular, to desire what was available, then to wear the same clothes for years until they wore out. Officials initially railed against Frau Mode (Ms. Fashion) and Herr Geschmack (Mr. Taste), exhorting women to reject senseless capitalist consumerism in favor of “timeless chic” materials and practical styles, in order to avoid a demand for rapid changes in production. In 1964, the average woman reportedly owned 32 items of clothing, limited to nine dresses, six blouses, and assorted smock-aprons. By wearing “purposefully designed” clothes, women were told, “your work will be twice as joyful.”80 While narrow or pleated skirts and jackets with pockets or flaps could prove dangerous on the assembly line or on mowing machines, frumpy, boring clothing was unlikely to generate “pleasure at work” among those laboring in state agencies, banks, educational institutions, and retail outlets. Party bosses further appealed to female thriftiness, stressing the efficient use of textiles and resources “for things that really mattered,” like financing a new port for the Rostock ship-building industry. It tried to re-educate female consumers with appeals to their “love of the socialist fatherland.” Glossy new catalogues for the Konsument and

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Centrum department stores marked the GDR’s 20th anniversary with patriotic slogans and state flag photos, praising the party for stabilizing supply and reducing delivery times.81 Although Eastern catalogues of the 1960s depicted young, slender women in elegant, colorful dresses, smoking cigarettes and carrying portable radios or hand-bags, SED leaders started promoting images of strong, robust women who could take on work in urban or rural settings, in contrast to the “completely thin” (presumedly frail) models in the west.82 They staged 160 rural fashion shows, presenting the “wholesome” woman as the socialist ideal, since surveys showed that corpulent women were less likely to follow new fashion trends. The campaign not only fell flat with women; even textile firms balked at being told to produce large sizes because they used up more material and resulted in smaller quantities, undercutting their bonuses for “overproduction.” Although the SED always found enough fabric for parade flags and propaganda banners, it remained curiously blind to the dearth of materials and seamstresses needed to supply female intimate apparel. In 1989, Inge Lange, director of the Democratic Women’s League, wrote to Politburo member Günther Kleiber regarding the absurd proposal that the DFD should teach women—already juggling jobs, children, and households— to sew their own underwear! The Kombinat Trikotagen Karl Marx Stadt had sent packages containing patterns and instructions to DFD branches in Halle, Neubrandenburg, Cottbus, Magdeburg, Dresden, Suhl, and Berlin. Lange urged the regional SED leadership to halt the campaign immediately, regretfully noting that she could not send a sample because even those were in short supply.83 She closed the letter with the phrase, “As fresh as ever, Inge Lange.” Women also criticized the super rough toilet paper distributed to “humans who are oh so soft in certain parts.”84 When sewing machines became widely available, women immediately asked FRG relatives to send “Burda” patterns, in order to make their own clothes, once the GDR developed “test-tube wool” and easy-care synthetics in 1969. Likewise unable to win the fashion battle for the hearts and minds of youth, the regime began producing its own blue jeans at moderate prices during a brief era of liberalization. The initial appearance of “Wisent” and “Boxer” brand jeans at state stores amounted to a major cultural “happening” during the week of November 8–11, 1971. Anticipating great demand, stores were instructed to hire extra personnel and provide additional fitting rooms; adolescents bought up 120,000 pairs in Berlin within

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four days, while stores in Potsdam sold 22,000 pairs on the first day; another 4600 pairs vanished off the shelves in Frankfurt Oder.85 Jeans were nonetheless barred from classrooms, dances, and FDJ events, despite their origin as “workpants of the American proletariat.” Levis sent by western relatives continued to enjoy special status.86 Factory supervisors as well as workers were more interested in “mass than class,” that is, (over)filling the plan norms, with little attention to quality. One firm manufactured 15,000 coats out of the flimsy fabric left over from cheap suits for Jugendweihe (youth dedication) ceremonies; they continued to produce another 6000 even after it became clear that none were selling even when the price was cut by 75%.87 As late as January 1986, a retail clerk wrote to the TV show, Prisma, complaining about a sweater shipment from VEB Mülana: “Those of us behind the counter hardly dare to present this pull-over to a customer. Marked as a size 48, this pullover has the width of a size 54 and the length of a size 40. We don’t know how the workers at Mülana could have come up with this curious set of measurements, but in any case, there are no such small, four-­ cornered inhabitants in Hoyerswerda.”88 Women’s hair was another topic beyond planners’ comprehension. VEB Flanschenwerk Bebit proudly announced in 1961 that it had purchased appliances that female crew members could borrow “to help lighten their work at home,” including a washing machine (“delivered and picked up at no cost”), two vacuum cleaners in transportable bags, and three hairdryers at the plant to ensure that they “would not catch cold by going home with wet hair.”89 Chairing an annual meeting of Czech and German hairdressers in 1961, Comrade Fries of PGH Haar-Kosmetik complained that GDR women “wore their hair too long,” contributing to the dryer shortage.90 A party insider told me in 1990 that Honecker personally checked the design of many public buildings to ensure that they had a ladies’ hair salon, to “help our working women.” Once women joined the paid workforce, their need for labor-saving devices like washing machines, freezers, sewing machines, pressure cookers, steamers, and coffee machines rose accordingly. To circumvent resistance to female employment, authorities stressed that men would need neither to sacrifice their own creature comforts nor to take on more household chores, since technical assistance would make women’s homecare activities “fun!”91 The fact that there were not enough transistors to meet the demand for portable radios in the early 1960s did not stop SED officials from claiming that playing them would “lift women’s moods

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while they were cooking and washing up.”92 With bedding and washing machines in short supply, women waited two to three weeks to reclaim cleaned items at laundromats. As Table 4.3 illustrates, the 1970s brought some improvement in relation to durable goods procurement. Shorter work-weeks, more vacation time (18–23 days by 1989) and higher wages led to further demands for leisure time products, starting with sun umbrellas, chaise lounges, tents, and camping gear.93 By the mid-­1960s, 3.75 million were seeking “sun and fun” across the GDR, while another 750,000 set out to see the world, or at least a few of the fraternal socialist states, heading for the Black Sea (Bulgaria) or the Tatra Mountains (Poland). Visitors to the Baltic seacoast increased from 310,000 in 1952, to 1.41 million by 1966. Tent-spots at domestic campsites rose from 172,000 in 1959 to 500,000 in 1970.94 New fitness and relaxation trends naturally fueled consumers’ interest in sailboats, canoes, motorboats, bicycles, roller skates, cameras, hammocks, lanterns, camper stoves, grills, sporting apparel, and bikinis. The more popular these activities became, the more authorities felt compelled to regulate socialist free-time by way of crowd-control; they blocked access to some camping spots, claiming they lacked sufficient sanitary facilities. Public swimming pools in Berlin that had remained open until 19:00 (7 pm) prior to the five-day work week began closing as early as 14:30 (2:30 pm). Excursions organized by state travel agencies proved more expensive than subsidized facilities run by labor unions; the latter offered trips for 14 days, including meals and travel by bus or train, for only 75–180 Marks. In 1988, the FDGB managed 63,914,758 overnight stays, compared to 882,950 domestic and 540,180 days abroad booked Table 4.3  Possession of major household appliances (in %), 1955–1985 Year

Refrigerator

Television

Radio

Washing machine

Private automobile

1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985

0.4 9.0 25.9 56.4 84.7 108.8a 144.5a

1.2 18.5 53.7 73.6 87.9 105a 117.6a

77.1 89.9 86.5 91.9 96.3 99 99.3

0.5 6.2 27.7 53.6 73 84.4 99.3

0.2 3.2 8.2 15.6 26.2 38.1 48.2

More than one in a single household (e.g., one for the datsche)

a

Source: Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte der DDR, 163

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through state travel offices; the “Young Tourist” agency accounted for another 4,712,781 travel-days.95 Czechoslovakia, Russia, and Romania were added to the list of approved foreign destinations. Their limited options notwithstanding, East Germans developed an itch to travel freely—a core demand of the 1989 protests—intensifying their desire for automobiles. The Trabant 601 and Wartburg 353 arrived on the scene in the early 1960s. Citizens learned to apply for a car as soon as they got a driver’s license, insofar as waiting times (without “Vitamin B”) ranged from 12 years for a Trabi, to 18 years for a Wartburg, and up to 17 years for a Russian Lada. Because they were immediately available, used cars cost more than new ones, based on the formula, “double the price, minus 1,000 M for every year of age.”96 By 1986, nearly 50% of all households owned cars; as of September 1988, there were 7.5 million licensed vehicles, of which an estimated 3.6 million were privately owned. 97 Honecker’s grand plan to expand the housing stock was long overdue. As of the Eighth Party Congress, 29% of the existing multi-family buildings and 48% of single/duplex homes had been constructed prior to 1918; another 34% were built between 1919 and 1945, war-damage notwithstanding. Per capita living space increased with new construction, rising from 15.8 m2 (1961), to 20.6 m2 (1971) to 27.6 m2 (1989) as the number of functional apartments grew from 5507 (1961) to 7002 (1989).98 Many otherwise uninhabitable places were simply abandoned but later “reclaimed” by enterprising squatters. Plans for modernizing old housing stock nonetheless lagged behind: as of 1961, only 22% of all dwellings had baths or showers while 33% had indoor toilets, rising to 82% and 76%, respectively, by 1989. Most residents heated with coal through the early 1970s, compared to 47% who enjoyed central heating by 1989.99 Without Vitamin B, waiting times for telephone installations averaged over two years. For the record, older housing in FRG cities also lacked amenities that US citizens take for granted. During my undergrad years in Hamburg (1970s), many students installed plastic shower stalls in their kitchens, hooked up to hot water heaters over the sink. In 1982, my shared Hinterhof apartment in West Berlin (Tiergarten) relied on coal heating and a hall toilet shared by four households spread across two floors. Honecker promised to “solve” the housing problem by constructing 2.8 million new apartments between 1976 and 1990. Berlin, as usual, received the lion’s share of the funding, resulting in large, pre-fab (Plattenbau) complexes in the outlying neighborhoods of Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Ahrensfelde, colloquially known as “worker’s lockers”

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and “snore-silos.” To facilitate pre-fabrication, all apartments were standardized (based on family size), as were the new furnishings needed to fill them. When I mentioned to a Polish acquaintance that her place resembled that of my other friends, she dryly responded, “yes, we feel at home wherever we go.” There were countless delays, due to a perennial shortage of workers and materials, exacerbated by the regime’s pursuit of show-case renovation projects for “the Capital City of the GDR” in time for its 750th anniversary. Touting cheap rents as a major socialist achievement, SED leaders hardly fit the “rational actor” model espoused by western economists. A Plattenbau apartment in Rostock, consisting of three rooms (roughly 60  m2), cost the state 60,000 Marks to construct, but renters paid only 80–100 Marks per month (plus subsidized heating). I paid DM 500–800 per month for comparable sublets—without elevators—in West Berlin during the late 1980s.100

The Paradox of Real-Existing Materialism Although it had enough problems directing and regulating “the means of production,” aging SED elites shaped by Stalinism and world war relentlessly sought to cultivate all-sided socialist personalities, disfunctionally rooted in their own experiences of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Ideology drove them to ignore the extent to which their own promises and policies had redefined the expectations of younger cohorts lacking those experiences. Despite four decades of ideological drilling, geriatric elites continued to believe that the working class had yet to internalize the proper level of socialist consciousness, confining citizens to a state of “eternal childhood.” The Old Guard’s distrust of its own people laid the foundation for the entrenchment of what Rolf Henrich labeled “the patronizing state.”101 By the time it collapsed, GDR state machinery had earned its own place in “the museum of antiquities,” in a room adjoining “the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.” Wandlitz became a metaphor for the ruling class’s everyday isolation from the people it claimed to represent. Local party secretaries ensured that visiting Politburo members encountered the German equivalent of Potemkin villages: garbage was removed and store shelves were filled for 48 hours, at best. Storefronts and housing façades were repainted, albeit only as high as could be seen out of a limousine window and only along the main thoroughfares; elites never turned down the side streets.102 Towns lacking amenities occasionally benefited from new cafes, ice cream parlors and telephone cell installations, before

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the Stasi troops arrived and cleared the streets of actual residents. FDJ and loyal brigades would be used to line the streets, waving flags, and delivering flowers. Local residents, as well as potential protestors, were cleared out prior to international festivals or visits by foreign dignitaries. To promote its image as a country of happy, optimistic adolescents during the 1973 World Youth Festival, for example, the Stasi “cleaned up” or arrested “asocials,” criminal groups, mentally ill persons and even women known to change sex partners frequently. Over 26,000 were detained in work-camps, psychiatric clinics, delinquency homes, and prisons, or barred from traveling to Berlin.103 During Chancellor Helmut Schmidt’s visit to Gustrow (Mecklenburg) in December 1981, Stasi agents blocked all access roads as of 6  am, ordering residents to watch the visit on TV.  FRG journalists noticed that many alleged locals lining the route to the Cathedral had distinctive Saxonian accents.104 Beyond the problem of erratic supplies, party leaders rigidly adhered to two miscalculations that fostered and intensified citizens’ reliance on the “niche-society.” Their core precept, “the party always knows best,” led to a fixation on petty elements of political correctness, beginning with the leaders’ mind-numbingly repetitive official rhetoric. The Old Guard’s lack of ideological sophistication resulted in ritualized formulations devoid of empirical content. Even younger party officials hoping to draw attention to real-existing problems at lower levels felt compelled to follow a rhetorically overblown “recipe” for their endless reports: One starts by writing down the most important points noted in Neues Deutschland and the report of the last plenary of the SED Central Committee. Then cleverly blend in several passages from the most recent speech of the General-Secretary. Now season it with several citations from the classics of Marxism-Leninism. Garnish it with a quote from the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Next mix in powerful praise for the party of the working class, its current county and district leadership, and the Politburo with Erich Honecker at the summit. Then take a few pinches of criticism against imperialism and a very tiny bit of criticism. … No, no, not what you think! God forbid, no criticism of your immediate superior in the party leadership or any one functionary. That would not be a party report, that would be political suicide! No, just a pinch of self-criticism regarding your own local organization and yourself. Now let the whole thing simmer, while you discuss it with the authority at the next level. And when the partisanship finally melts in your mouth,

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crown it with a rosy-red shot of sugar, with heartfelt thanks to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany and the Head of the State Council of the German Democratic Republic, our highly honored Comrade Erich Honecker. At that point the Party report will be tender, done just according to the taste of real socialism.105

A second miscalculation centered on authorities’ obsession with cheap prices, at the expense of qualitative improvements, presumedly also rooted in their experiences during the Great Depression, the war years, and the occupation period. Honecker declared during the 10th plenary session of the Central Committee in June 1985: For more than a quarter of a century the people of the GDR have paid the same prices for meat, butter, sausages, milk, bread and other basic nutritional goods, for heating and energy, for transportation as well as for many industrial products. These stable consumer products are indispensable to the climate of social security and comfort that constitute an essential accomplishment of real socialism in the GDR. These values are to be defended in the future.106

But persistently cheap prices came at a substantial systemic cost. By the early 1980s, East German economists, including Jürgen Kuczynski, were admitting to FRG journalists that the system was doomed: third-world countries were already surpassing total GDR exports to OECD states, due to its outdated production technologies. Textiles, long a best-seller broad, had lost 50% of their clientele over the previous ten years. To maintain the façade of cheap prices at home, the state was forced to subsidize ever more products. Food, electricity, and transport supports absorbed over 51 billion Marks annually, housing another 16.6 billion Marks; total subsidies, 275.1 billion Marks, were equivalent to a quarter of its entire budget, leaving little for investment in modern production processes.107 The more the SED tried to command, control, and centralize all “relations of production” with binding plan goals (214 by 1989), the less it managed to foster the innovation and work ethic it so desperately wanted— out of fear than any experiment that went awry (like Ulbricht’s NÖS) would offend Soviet leaders or jeopardize its own hold on power. Politburo members probably realized that modernization and innovation would force them to yield control to younger, better educated technical experts. Those at the top were allegedly planning to “verify the credentials” of

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(read: purge) 2.3 million SED members in time for the 1990 Party Congress. Despite the timely development of the Roboton computer system, rulers’ refusal to yield control over the flow of information precluded the comprehensive networking required for data-sharing purposes. Heinz Muller, data-bank director at the TU Dresden, reported in 1989 that to convey institutional data directly to Berlin, he had to wait one hour just for a telephone connection. Vitamin B to the rescue: he traveled to Berlin on International Women’s Day to deliver gift baskets to the phone operators, after which the TU Dresden staff could get its connection within ten minutes.108 Though the SED insisted that it had transcended the commodity fetishism of capitalism, its efforts to create the “socialist consumer” were embedded in a never-ending cycle of scarcity, misallocation, and stimulation. Having eliminated productive, privately owned enterprises, the state had to re-invent its own, less efficient equivalents. To overcome chronic shortages, it was forced to rely ever more heavily on a paradoxical combination of usually under-supplied state retail outlets, a parallel chain of well-stocked elite stores, a routinized underground economy and collaboration with capitalist financiers, to shore up its currency reserves. As Jonathan Bach observed: The unofficial, if not outright illegal, economy helped to contain the dynamics of stimulation and deprivation caused by the inability of central planning to deliver the promised goods. Yet it also dispersed the market into all aspects of life. Valuable deals, connections, and opportunities could present themselves everywhere and at a moment’s notice (as in the often told anecdote about standing in a line without bothering to ask what it was for, since if there was a line the items at its origin must be scarce and therefore good), thus creating pent-up consumer desire.109

These alternative economies were self-reinforcing; without the last three, the first would have collapsed much earlier. The greatest paradox of all is that party elites themselves grew addicted to the western products they publicly and vehemently railed against. Diversion of “the people’s own property” for private projects by normal mortals was no more criminal than KoKo’s annual misappropriation of hard currency reserves to finance the luxurious life-styles of Wandlitz residents. In true bourgeois fashion, GDR political elites passed their “working class status” on to their children to guarantee their privileged access to

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universities and white-collar jobs. By the late 1970s, they were effectively manipulating opportunities for social mobility among the real “workers and peasants” by channeling school-leavers into specific occupations. Fixated on a limited (un-Marxian) vision of the “all-sided socialist personality,” authorities increasingly sought to direct citizen’s “free-time” activities, including their musical, literary, artistic, and fashion tastes. The more authorities tried to regulate their personal lives, the more creative younger cohorts became, inventing new types of self-organization to escape state control. I am not alone in arguing that without the diverse forms of self-­ mobilization and personalized exchanges outlined here, “there would have been few possibilities of establishing the kind of alternative cultures and citizen initiatives that later fed into a powerful movement that proved so essential to the dissolution of the system as a whole.”110 The tragedy is that an extraordinary amount of improvisational skill and organizational talent accumulated by East Germans over the space of four decades was simply pushed aside in the rush to unity. What GDR citizens lacked after 1989 was neither motivation nor talent, but rather access to western forms of Vitamin B, financial capital, and the physical collateral deemed essential for securing FRG loans for new businesses. FRG bankers and corporate Treuhand “advisors” refused to recognize anything short of bona fide property ownership as real collateral. Those who might have claimed rights based on eminent domain or adverse possession (squatters’ rights) fell victim to Kohl’s insistence on “restitution before compensation”— despite promises made during the unification negotiations. Over 2 million westerners, or their collective heirs (Erbgemeinschaften), rushed to file claims on properties “taken” from them or bought for below-market rates dating back to the 1930s, properties potentially acquired as a result of Nazi Aryanizations. Forty years of authoritarian rule and Stasi surveillance led millions of average citizens to distance themselves from the East German state, although they continued to “arrange themselves” with the system. Despite a clear lack of sentimental attachment, they mastered official-speak, turned out for official parades, and willingly embraced a multitude of “socialist achievements” ranging from job security to subsidized childcare. Their ultimate rejection of the official GDR-identity derived from the SED’s persistent inability to ensure their instrumental attachment—a crucial “compensatory” mechanism, according to Herbert Kelman—despite its repeated promises to “overtake” the other Germany in supplying

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high-­quality goods and services for the working class. This is not to argue that they were immediately willing or able to embrace another “official” identity imposed from above, once all forms of state-socialist legitimacy had disappeared. We turn now to their mixed motives for heralding the demise of the German Democratic Republic.

Notes 1. There is no single treatise on Marx’s understanding of “all human history” as a linear process rooted in “discoverable” laws. For an abridged version, see Karl Marx, Capital, A Critique of Political Economy, especially Volume 1, edited by Frederick Engels. 1967. New York: International Publishers. 2. Isaiah Berlin. 1963. Karl Marx, His Life and Environment. London: Oxford University Press, 167. 3. Friedrich Engels. 1884. Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-­ family/index.htm, downloaded June 8, 2020. 4. Peter C.  Ludz and Ursula Ludz. 1985. “Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED)” in Hartmut Zimmermann, ed., DDR Handbuch. Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik: 1160–1189. 5. Matthias Judt, ed. 1998. DDR-Geschichte in Dokumenten. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 89–91, 106–109. 6. See the Deutschlandfunk report of July 16, 2008, https://www. deutschland-­f unkkultur.de/vor-­5 0-­j ahren-­u lbrichts-­o ffensive.984. de.html?dram:article_id=153428. 7. Walter Ulbricht. 1970. “‘Überholen ohne einzuholen’—ein wichtiger Grundsatz unserer Wissenschaftspolitik,” Die Wirtschaft, No. 9: 8–9. 8. Ludz, “Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED),” 1176. 9. Peter C. Ludz. 1977. “Legitimacy in a Divided Nation: The Case of the German Democratic Republic.” In Bogdan Denitch, ed., Legitimation of Regimes: International Frameworks for Analysis. Beverly Hills: Sage: 161–175; Judt, DDR Geschichte in Dokumenten, 95 ff. 10. Annette Kaminsky. 2001. Kleine Konsumgeschichte der DDR: Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück. Munich: C.H. Beck, 18–19. 11. Willi Ehlert, Heinz Joswig, Willi Luchterhand and Karl-Heinz Stiemerling, eds. 1973. “Handelsorganisationen,” Wörterbuch der Ökonomie: Sozialismus. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 961. 12. See Gert-Joachim Glaeβner. 1989. Die andere deutsche Republik: Gesellschaft und Politik in der DDR. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag: 254–268.

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13. “Staatliche Plankommission,” Wörterbuch der Ökonomie, 848–849. 14. Judt, DDR-Geschichte in Dokumenten, 97. 15. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 70. 16. Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle. 1993. Untergang auf Raten: Unbekannte Kapitel der DDR-Geschichte. Munich: Bertelsmann, 302–303. 17. Peter A. Thüt. 1985. “Von der Schwierigkeit, ein Proletarier zu sein.” In Werner Filmer and Heribert Schwan, eds., Das andere Deutschland: Alltag in der DDR. Düsseldorf: Econ Verlag: 249–258. 18. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 59; “Allein die Statistik im Griff,” Der Spiegel, September 9, 1991, 85. 19. Mitter and Wolle, Untergang auf Raten, 320. 20. Stefan Wolle. 2006. Der Traum von der Revolte: Die DDR 1968. Berlin: Christoph Links, 37. 21. Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 38–39. 22. Stefan Wolle. 1998. Die heile Welt der Diktatur: Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR, 1971–1989. Berlin: Christoph Links, 46. 23. Fred Klinger. 1988. “Organisation und Innovation—die Grenzen der Fabrikautomatisierung,” in Gert-Joachim Glaeβner, Die DDR in der Ära Honecker: Politik, Kultur, Gesellschaft. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag: 371–401. 24. “Allein die Statistik,” Der Spiegel. 25. Wolle, Traum von der Revolte, 39. 26. Wolle, Traum von der Revolte, 81. 27. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 323. 28. Erich Honecker. 1981. Aus meinem Leben. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 244ff. 29. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 324. 30. Frede Hvelplund, Niels Winther Knudsen and Henrik Lund. 1993. Erneuerung der Energiesysteme in den neuen Bundesländern—aber wie? Flensburg: Druckzentrum, 17. 31. Doris Cornelson. 1988. “Die Wirtschaft der DDR in der Honecker-­Ära.” In Glaeβner, Die DDR in der Ära Honecker, 358–59. 32. Klaus Wiegrefe. 2017. “Die Legende vom listigen Franz Josef.” Der Spiegel, January 19. 33. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 335–336. 34. Money-laundering was used to convert earnings into D-Marks. “Affären: Dresden an 1168,” Der Spiegel, June 25, 1990, 29–30; “Das ist russisches Roulett,” Der Spiegel, February 4, 1991, 80–90. 35. “Ausverkauf an den Klassenfeind,” Der Spiegel, January 14, 1990, 57–66. 36. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 344 ff. 37. De Maizière’s interim government charged him with criminal fraud, but the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) extended protection after 1990

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(code name “Snow White”) in exchange for information regarding secret GDR currency acquisitions. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 333. 38. Theo Pirker, Rainer Lepsius, Reiner Weinert and Hans-Hermann Hertle. 1995. Der Plan als Befehl und Fiktion. Wirtschaftsführung in der DDR. Gespräche und Analysen. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 39. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 311–312. 40. “DDR: Kalaschnikows für die Dritte Welt,” Der Spiegel, August 30, 1976. 41. Reinhard Wagner. 1998. DDR Witze. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 117. 42. Martin Diewald. 1995. “‘Kollektiv’, ‘Vitamin B’ oder ‘Nische’? Persönliche Netzwerke in der DDR.” In Johannes Huinink, Karl Ulrich Mayer et  al., Kollektiv und Eigensinn: Lebensverläufe in der DDR und danach. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 234. 43. Henrik Eberle. 2007. Mit sozialistischem Gruβ: Briefe, Akten und Absurdes aus der DDR. Bergisch Gladbach: Lübbe, 28–30. 44. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 225. 45. Eberle, Mit sozialistischem Gruβ, 25. 46. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 315–316. 47. Filmer and Schwan, Das andere Deutschland, 33 ff. 48. Isolde Dietrich. 2003. Hammer, Zirkel, Gartenzaun. Die Politik der SED gegenuber den Kleingärtnern. Berlin: Books on Demand, 27ff. 49. Dietrich, Hammer, Zirkel, Gartenzaun, 24ff 50. Dietrich, Hammer, Zirkel, Gartenzaun, 286. 51. Dietrich, Hammer, Zirkel, Gartenzaun, 303. 52. Dietrich, Hammer, Zirkel, Gartenzaun, 294. 53. Ulrike Häußer and Marcus Merkel, eds. 2009. Vergnügen in der DDR. Berlin: Panama. 54. Peter Gärtner, “Wochenendhäuser: Die Schonfrist für DDR-Datschen endet,” Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, October 1, 2015. 55. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 75–77. 56. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 118–119. 57. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 118–119. 58. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 145. 59. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 120. 60. The FRG Salamander chain specializes in cheap shoes, which were known to hold up better than expensive GDR equivalents. 61. Retirees were allowed to visit West Berlin or the Federal Republic, on the assumption that if they stayed, the state would no longer have to cover their pensions and benefit costs. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 328. 62. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 156–157. 63. Helga Michalsky. 1988. “Soziale Sicherheit ist nicht genug! Konzeptionen und Leistungen der sozialistischen Sozialpolitik.” In Glaeβner, Die DDR

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in der Ära Honecker: 402–421; Gunnar Winkler. 1990. Sozialreport 1990. Daten und Fakten. Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft, 224–225. 64. “Der letzte OTTO-Katalog: West-Kataloge voller Ost-Produkte,” reported on MDR, November 23, 2018, https://www.mdr.de/zeitreise/ quelle-­und-­ddr-­produkte-­100.html. 65. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 63. 66. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 66. 67. Eberle, Mit sozialistischem Gruβ, 92. 68. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 103. 69. Wolle, Traum von der Revolte, 129. 70. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 49–50. 71. Judt, DDR-Dokumente, #W66, 157. 72. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 135. 73. Volker Gransow. 1988. “Colleague Frankenstein and the Pale Light of Progress: Life Conditions, Life Activities, and Technological Impacts on the GDR Way of Life.” International Journal of Sociology 18 (3–4), 197. 74. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 102. 75. Eberle, Mit sozialistischem Gruβ, 65. 76. “Glückspiel: Uff een Ruck,” Der Spiegel, March 18, 1991, 93–95. 77. “Der letzte Otto Katalog,” MDR. 78. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 332. 79. Filmer, “In Westergebirge,” Das andere Deutschland, 268. 80. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 78. 81. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 75–76. 82. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 92. 83. Eberle, Mit sozialistischem Gruβ, 60–61. 84. Eberle, Mit sozialistischem Gruβ, 38. 85. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 66. 86. Bernd-Lutz Lange. 2006. Mauer, Jeans und Prager Frühling. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 41ff. 87. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 93–96. 88. Eberle, Mit sozialistischen Gruβ, 37–38. 89. Eberle, Mit sozialistischem Gruβ, 80. 90. Eberle, Mit sozialistischem Gruβ, 70. 91. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 78. 92. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 112–113. 93. Even “free-time” was subject to ideological review. See Helmut Hanke. 1987. “Freizeit in der DDR—Tendenzen und Perspektiven.” Weimarer Beiträge 33 (7): 1061–1077. 94. Kaminsky, Kleine Konsumgeschichte, 106–108. 95. Winkler, Sozialreport 1990, 249. 96. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 361.

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97. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 359. 98. Winkler, Sozialreport 1990, 157, 11. 99. Winkler, Sozialreport 1990, 158. 100. Filmer and Schwan, Das andere Deutschland, 56. 101. Rolf Henrich. 1989. Der vormundschaftliche Staat—Vom Versagen des real-existierenden Sozialismus. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 102. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 268–269. 103. Wolle, Traum von der Revolte, 234–237. 104. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 276–277. 105. Franz Loeser. 1985. “Über die Parteilichkeit des Parteisekretärs,” in Filmer and Schwan, Das andere Deutschland, 241–42. 106. 10. Tagung des ZK der SED. June 20–21, 1985 (Berlin), 28. 107. Herwig E.  Haase. 1985. “Staatshaushalt.” In Zimmermann, DDR Handbuch, 1291ff. 108. “Genosse Starrsinn regiert,” Wirtschaftswoche, June 30, 1989, 34–43. 109. Johannes Bach. 2002. “The Taste Remains: Consumption, (N)ostalgia and the Production of East Germany.” Public Culture 14(7), 551. 110. Karl Ulricht Meyer. 1995. “Kollektive oder Eigensinn: Der Beitrag der Lebensverlaufforschung zur theoretischen Deutung der DDR Gesellschaft.” In Huinink, et al., Kollektiv und Eigensinn, 351.

CHAPTER 5

“Now out of Never”: Exit, Voice, and Riding the Revolutionary Bandwagon

Nur träumend, im idealen Traum,     Only while dreaming ideal dreams, Wagt ihnen der Deutsche zu sagen      Does the German dare impart Die deutsche Meinung, die er so tief    The German opinion he has held Im treuen Herzen getragen ….       So deep in his loyal heart. Jag fort das Komödiantenpack,       We’ll shut down all the theaters Und schliesse die Schauspielhäuser,      And chase the clowns away Wo man die Vorzeit parodiert—      Who parody the olden times— Komme du bald, o Kaiser! ….       O King, we await your day!         Heinrich Heine, Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen

The peaceful revolution leading to German unification demonstrated that the relationship between exit, voice, and loyalty can be a lot messier than Hirschman’s initial framework led foreign and domestic experts to believe. The complex interplay of these variables in 1989 unleashed an autumn revolution that came as a surprise even to secret police, veteran dissidents, and young activists. It also shaped a path to formal unification that would undermine efforts to develop an effective, authentically East German voice for many years to come. Exit and voice cannot be considered in isolation. In order to explore the question of “what remains” of Eastern identities, to cite Christa Wolf, we need to take a closer look at various types of loyalty that evolved over © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_5

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the GDR’s forty-year history.1 Nor can we ignore the interplay between SED efforts to thwart exit and voice and the occasionally questionable responses of CDU/CSU leaders on the other side. One could argue, for example, that the FRG’s policy of rescuing individuals by “buying them out” of prison reinforced coercive SED tendencies, especially in relation to youth. I also hold that conservative politicians’ very narrow approach to “processing” a second German experience with dictatorship after unification essentially nipped eastern voices in the bud. The inability to “tell their own stories,” coupled with the complete devaluation of their occupational know-how, their perceived relegation to second-class citizenship and westerners’ ongoing monopolization of elite positions across three decades, has led many eastern voters to support the unsavory forces of the AfD. The 1990s gave rise to many fine publications regarding the fall of the Wall and the unification process.2 Though I am reluctant to re-invent the historical wheel in its entirety, I do find it necessary to revisit select events that set the stage for the 1989 “turn-around,” mindful that today’s students were born long after they took place. Even readers who closely followed those events 30+ years ago are likely to have forgotten the details, given the breath-taking speed at which they occurred. My argument here is that tensions between would-be exiters and those who hoped to exercise voice from within did not derive primarily from the gap between easterners’ public and private identities, though I value Timur Kuran’s compelling analysis of “preference falsification.”3 Viewing the GDR “from inside out,” I believe that they sprang instead from a collision among rather diverse niches, collectives and civil society groups. While physical exiters focused on hopes of immediate material gratification, voice-proponents set their sights on long-term political reforms; as the Monday night demonstrations grew in size, the latter were increasingly displaced by the former.4 Accordingly, the protest mantra shifted from We are the people! to We are one people!, effectively eliminating prospects for achieving a “socialist third way.” The chapter begins with a brief description of key events and public mood-swings that invoked the widespread practice of inward migration, which had its origins in the hope-crushing events of the 1968 Prague Spring. The SED’s faith in its own “arrangement”—making intermittent concessions to GDR consumers, in exchange for political diffidence— lulled aging leaders into believing that they possessed the resources necessary to secure their own power indefinitely. The next section continues the narrative through the 1990s, examining shifting exit-voice dynamics. We

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then consider the curious phenomenon of Ostalgie, that is, the born-again sentimental attachment to East German products and life-styles that emerged roughly ten years after unification. It concludes with an assessment of forms of exit and voice that were overlooked by western analysts, as well as GDR-specific linkages between loyalty and habitus underlying the so-called “Wall in one’s head.” The latter has been exclusively, and thus somewhat erroneously, attributed to citizens in the eastern Länder.

Learning to Live with “Arrangements” The two men who dominated East German politics between 1949 and 1989 did not count among the regime’s best-schooled theorists, capable of grasping the sophisticated nature of dialectical materialism espoused by Karl Marx. Having attended the Lenin International School in Moscow for one year each, Ulbricht and Honecker had spent most of the 1930s and 1940s honing their skills in relation to party organization, secret policing, and underground agit-prop (agitation-propaganda) activities. At Ulbricht’s urging, Honecker returned to the Soviet Communist Party School from 1955 to 1958, where he personally witnessed Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU. The simplistic ideological invocations and poor rhetorical skills marking the official speeches delivered by both of these men rendered them the brunt of countless “GDR jokes” for decades. The latter constituted a subtle, albeit subversive form of voice in their own right, combining wit and sarcasm with dialectical twists on official slogans: for example, “All the Best to the Delegates of the VIII. Party Congress of the Socialist Unity Party! The rest to the people.” Rather than welcome the insightful philosophical analyses offered by the SED’s smartest members, a small clique intent on preserving its own power consistently purged these perceived rivals from top party positions and state ministries. They were also stripped of influential positions across various universities, research institutes, and media outlets, beginning in the 1950s. Obsessed with shoring up political stability, Politburo members ironically embraced Adenauer’s precept, keine Experimente (“no experiments”), thus undercutting many forms of industrial innovation and private entrepreneurship that might have prevented their scarcity-prone economy from precipitating mass exit by the mid-1980s. Although they regularly invoked Marxism-Leninism to justify their actions, both Ulbricht and Honecker ignored a fundamental premise

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espoused by Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (1848): “working men have no country” (the same presumably applies to working women). Both regularly invoked their loyalty to the Soviet Union in order to secure the existence of a separate, socialist German state, one they considered superior to all of the “normal” nations comprising the eastern bloc. Marx attributed the rise of a modern nation-state to the demise of feudalism and the new relations of production arising under capitalism. It was created to serve the exploitative, mercantilist purposes of the bourgeoisie, which would ultimately be displaced by its antithesis, proletarian internationalism. The state was expected to “wither away,” not to establish itself as a new, institutionalized basis for power and privilege, although the latter became a hallmark of socialist rule as early as the 1930s. Wolfgang Leonhard documented his access to better food rations and living conditions as he moved up the party ladder, starting in the Soviet Union. He also described the villas allocated to transplanted communists in Berlin, and Ulbricht’s peevish insistence on better office furniture amidst that city’s 75,000 cubic tons of war rubble in 1945.5 SED rulers moreover failed to recognize that their insistence on the “all-sided socialist personality” meant that the identity needs of GDR citizens were bound to expand beyond the world of work, as posited by Maslow. Marx envisioned a future society in which citizens would escape the surly division of labor that denied workers the freedom to choose their occupations, as well as the right to creative expression and “self-­ mobilization” not sanctioned by the party. In communist society, Marx opined, “where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Although he relegated his own impoverished wife and daughters to reproductive household labor, Marx rejected a “fixation of social activity” that might consolidate “what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations,” as witnessed during the early stage of GDR development.6 The Brezhnev era contributed to a further SED violation of orthodox Marxism, that is, the embrace of “developed socialism” to justify its continuing rule. According to popular wisdom, the difference between the

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old and new interpretation of the state’s role read: “Real socialism is not developed, and developed socialism is not real.” 7 Unlike Ulbricht, Honecker was happy to leave the heavy theoretical issues up to his “ideology pope,” Kurt Hager, a full member of the Politburo as of 1963. By this point, party schools responsible for training four types of “cadres” were already deeply rooted in the ideological landscape. Founded in 1946, the Higher Party School Karl Marx—“the fortress of dogmatic hardliners”—offered one- to four-year courses of study, as did its district subsidiaries.8 The Academy for Social Sciences served as a “research base” for elite cadres and scholars, while the Institute for Marxism-Leninism, the Institute for Politics and Economics, and the Central Party Archives were tasked with upholding Louis Fuernberg’s dictum, “the party, the party, it is always right …” (Song of the Party, 1949). Becoming ever more obsessed with state security over time, the SED upped the production of large metal safes (so-called Panzerschränke) for its own use, then created an Institute for the Protection of State Secrets in 1977, employing 140 instructors for roughly 21,000 students.9 Lacking a traditional, sentimental attachment to older notions of what it meant to be German, Easterners born after 1950 developed an instrumental attachment to their socialist identities. The greatest challenge to state legitimacy remained the existence of a prosperous, democratic alternative next door. Once the Wall was in place, GDR rulers found it easier to limit western contacts and exchanges with relatives that had allowed its citizens to compare their physical, political, and economic conditions with life on the other side. For a time the regime managed to counter the liberalization of visiting rights secured by Ostpolitik while also lining its own pockets, by raising the amount of hard currency westerners were required to exchange for each visit. In 1980 the GDR raised the price of admission (D-Marks to East Marks, at a rate of 1:1) from EM13 to EM25 for adults, and from EM6.50 to EM25 for Berliners; pensioners also became subject to mandatory exchanges, while the age exempting children was lowered from 16 to 6. By Christmas of that year, visitation had fallen by 50%.10 GDR authorities further tried to avoid unfavorable comparisons by outlawing the use of West-TV and radio networks through the 1960s (e.g., Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, RIAS-Berlin). Tuning into these outlets was absolutely verboten for state employees, national army, and secret police personnel, as were contacts with western relatives, a rule often ignored by wives, sisters, daughters, and grandparents. For the record, women accounted for a very small segment of security-related

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positions all the way to the end. Growing citizen demand for colored televisions nonetheless forced GDR firms to draw on French know-how, resulting in “two-system reception” by 1979. ZIJ surveys found that 60% of workers, 50% of intellectuals, 54% of apprentices, and even 47% of SED members admittedly relied on both sides for political news.11 Eventually officials surrendered, shifting their own nightly news program, Aktuelle Kamera, to 7:30 pm, to sandwich it between the FRG’s airing of Heute (7 pm) and Tagesschau (8 pm). Because its geographic location hindered West-TV reception, the Dresden region became known as “the valley of the clueless.” Denied exposure to self-­ critical FRG reports regarding poverty and unemployment, Dresden residents accounted for a disproportionate number of emigration-applications, leading the SED to “tolerate” private satellite dishes and antennas there, to balance their images of real-existing capitalism. Access to West-TV gave rise to a curious form of collective internal emigration, confirmed by my interviews. A young, upwardly mobile couple I met in 1989 was eager to describe their relatively privileged, everyday life in Leipzig: only 37, they had already inherited a large house in a central, tree-lined neighborhood, and drove a 10-year-old Trabi. Despite her formal training as a technical drafter, “C.” was one of the rare eastern women who did not engage in paid employment. She routinely took on the frustrations of running from store to store, planning meals based on what was available, before picking up their two children from school (ages six and ten). Her spouse, “J.,” worked as an engineer in the coal industry, specializing in water quality. When he returned from work in the family’s yellow Trabi (for which they had waited almost twelve years), they left behind life made-in-the-GDR. She put dinner on the table, he closed the living room curtains and they turned on the color television in time for the FRG-Tagesschau. Thus cocooned, they felt themselves transported into the world of the West Germans, until the alarm-clock sounded the next morning. Intended to stop workers from voting with their feet, the Wall ironically conditioned GDR citizens to judge state leaders based on their inflated promises to “overtake” the FRG by way of scientific-technological production. Boringly pedantic in nature, official speeches by SED leaders made excessive use of superlatives: “Every year marked ‘one of the most successful in history’, every task it had to undertake was ‘the biggest’ ever, each success was the ‘most extraordinary’ …, although its permanent

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declaration of exceptional situations amounted to a contradiction in and of itself.”12 Ironically, its real achievements—like free education, job security, free contraception, legal abortions, cheap rents, subsidized energy and generous maternity leave—were taken for granted by cohorts “born into” the Eastern state.

Protest Currents and the Velvet Revolution Despite its tolerance of other political parties (so-called “bloc-flutes”), the SED was quick to eliminate real electoral competition in favor of a “unified list” of approved candidates, explaining its ability to garner 98–99% of the mandatory vote every four years. Its 1949 constitution nonetheless guaranteed workers the right to participate in production and wage determination via unions and worker councils (Art. 17), as well as the right to strike (Art. 14). Claiming to represent the working class, the SED encountered its first major legitimacy crisis by way of the June 1953 uprising, after announcing plans to increase mandatory production norms which, in effect, cut already low wages. The state’s brutal response to the workers’ rebellion, abetted by Soviet tanks and troops, was reinforced three years later by Big Brother’s equally forceful response in Hungary. In fact, both parts of Germany remained under formal military occupation until 1955. Standing under the heavy shadow cast by Nazi atrocities, many who landed in the Soviet zone had also suffered tremendously due to their forced expulsion from once-conquered eastern territories. Thus cowed into submission, members of the Aufbau (Reconstruction) Generation, born prior to 1945, turned their attention after the uprising to the slogan “the way we work today is the way we will live tomorrow.” Bertolt Brecht’s 1953 poem memorializing the protests (Box 5.1) continued to circulate for decades, however. Accepting the premise that capitalism had fostered fascism, pre-war cohorts found it necessary to accommodate themselves to small waves of liberalization followed by lengthy crackdowns, often rooted in leaders’ persistent fears of another 1953. The regime’s second major legitimacy crisis derived from the division of Berlin, inflicted by the so-called

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Box 5.1  “Die Lösung”/ “The Solution” (Bertolt Brecht)    “Die Lösung”             “The Solution” Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni          After the uprising of the 17th June Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands          The Secretary of the Writers Union In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen     Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk       In which one could read that the people Das Vertrauen der Regierung          Had forfeited the confidence of verscherzt habe              t he government Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit     And could win it back only zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da      by redoubled work efforts. In that case Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung          Would it not be easier for the government Löste das Volk auf und           To dissolve the people Wählte ein anderes?            And elect another?

anti-­fascist protection wall as of August 13, 1961. Paradoxically, the Wall’s presence contributed to a measure of internal political stability over the next two decades.13 The Wall not only made it impossible for Eastern workers and professionals to vote with their feet (Table 5.1), to counter severe labor shortages; it also stopped Westerners from crossing over to buy up cheaper goods in eastern stores.14 Although chronic shortages continued to plague areas outside the “showcase” capital city, material conditions improved considerably over the next few years. Over time, citizens reacted to the Wall’s presence by “arranging” themselves with small concessions, even securing the right to maintain nudist beaches, over the puritanical inclinations of their Stalinist leaders.15 According to Stefan Wolle, the period 1963–1968 comprised the “reform-richest period” in GDR history, marking “a brief attempt to liberate human resources.”16 The New Economic System granted planners some flexibility, along with a degree of cost-benefit analysis and decentralized management, infusing “scientific expertise” to increase labor productivity. Efforts to rationalize prices and end subsidies triggered tense competition among factories, however; backlash against reformers soon led planners to retreat to the “Socialist Economic System.” Unable to exit physically, citizens developed new forms of

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Table 5.1  Out-migration from the SMAD/GDR to the Federal Republic, 1950–1961a Statistical yearbooks (Federal Republic) 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 Total

337,300 287,800 232,100 408,100 295,400 381,800 396,300 384,700 226,300 173,800 225,400 233,500 3,582,500

Reception center applicants (Notaufnahmeverfahren)

Approved (in %)

197,788 165,648 182,393 331,390 184,198 252,870 279,189 261,622 204,092 143,917 199,188 207,026 2,668,500b

37.4 38.8 78.7 95.5 81.4 82.5 88.0 96.2 99.1 98.5 98.7 99.0

Includes East and West Berlin departures/arrivals Number who did not apply, possibly involving family unification or relocation to another country: 973,300 a

b

Source: Helge Heidemeyer. 1994. Flucht und Zuwanderung aus der SBZ/DDR, 1945/1949–1961. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag, 44–45

voice: individuals occasionally used the threat of “non-participation” in ritualized elections, for example, to force local party secretaries to undertake minor housing repairs or to fix potholes (known as “Lenin’s footsteps”). Over time they would begin to write personal complaint letters, known as Eingaben, to top party officials, occasionally producing positive results on a case-by-case basis.17 Individuals born after 1949 comprised the first-generation born and raised in the GDR, most of whom attained higher levels of education. Bearing no personal scars from earlier Soviet interventions, their political coming-of-age coincided with the onset of the Prague Spring in 1968. SED rulers initially welcomed the rise of a western “extra parliamentary” movement vociferously opposing capitalist imperialism, the Vietnam War and the Axel Springer Press. They invited FRG radicals (SDS, Falken) to meet with FDJ activists to discuss “revolutionary strategies” but soon

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discovered that their own vanguard-youth often used these meetings to learn about western trends. GDR rulers denied FDJ delegates the chance to attend a major Anti-Vietnam Congress in West Berlin in 1968. Their objection: New Left organizers opened the event to Maoists, Trotskyists, and other sectarians, demanded “free speech” for all participants and refused to recognize the “leading role of the Soviet Union.” State authorities reacted even more allergically when eastern adolescents, including FDJ activists, started identifying with western preferences for long hair, free love, rock music, peace protests, and “sunshine!” (details in Chap. 10).18 The SED began to restrict travel to Czechoslovakia, where citizens could buy western record albums, newspapers, and clothing, see foreign movies in the original language, experience friendly waiters in cafes, and acquire exit-visas to Austria. The GDR tourist flow dropped from 244,000 visitors in June to 154,000 by mid-July.19 It had even bigger problems seeking a dialectical justification for the fact that the evil force behind the “counter-revolutionary” movement emerging in Prague was not the revisionist clique in Bonn but a fraternal socialist party. When asked why all dominant parties comprising the Soviet bloc were labeled “fraternal,” GDR citizens often replied: “because you can’t choose your family.” Despite their pride in opening universities to the children of “workers and peasants,” Ulbricht and company developed a deep distrust of students and intellectuals, although they accounted for less than 10% of those arrested domestically for protesting the Warsaw Pact invasion.20 Ironically, the activists included the children of prominent party elites, indicative of a “communist Oedipus complex.”21 They included Thomas Brasch (son of the Deputy Minister of Culture); his pregnant partner, Bettina Wegner (whose family had KPD roots); Erika Berthold (whose father headed the Central Committee’s Institute for Marxism-Leninism); and Anton Krahl (son of a Neues Deutschland editor). The father of Frank and Florian Havemann chaired the Physics Institute at the Humboldt University; a former communist resistance fighter, he would soon join the dissident ranks with philosophical critiques of his own. The 1953 rebellion had mobilized adult workers, still under Soviet occupation, whose material needs far outweighed their democratic concerns, insofar as the SED continued to espouse a commitment to unification. By contrast, the GDR’s participation in the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion shattered high hopes among younger cohorts for change-from-­ within under a socialist banner. Ulbricht’s advanced age (75) had provided

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a false glimmer of hope; indeed, 1968 marked the beginning of the end for the arch-Stalinist premier, who irritated Brezhnev by attempting to “teach” other bloc members about proper socialist ways. By 1971, “many of the comrades who had grown up in his shadow fell upon him like young wolves jumping on to the mortally wounded leader of the pack.”22 The fact that domestic protests were concentrated among youth—61% of those detained were under 25—suggests that the impact of 1968 was largely psychological, triggering more resignation as well as political alienation among older workers and the intellectual class. Following the arrival of Soviet tanks in Prague on August 20–21, 1968, the SED massively expanded its security bureaucracy, along with its network of “informal” Stasi collaborators (IMs). Headed by resistance-fighter Erich Mielke since 1957, the Ministry for State Security ran fifteen district headquarters, 200+ regional offices and seven special units—collectively known as “the Firm.” By the late 1980s, it would have 78,000 full-time staff of military rank and 170,000 IMs at its disposal.23 Mielke admitted that many regulars recruited after the war “could not even write”; post-­ secondary degrees were not required for command positions until the 1980s. Interviewed in 1990, younger Stasi agents complained about their elderly, undereducated superiors. Older cadres “with a class-struggle mentality” who blocked their promotion prospects were perceived as self-­ satisfying elites, known to smoke only FRG cigarettes purchased from special stores. After unification, some recalled how devastated they were by revelations of mass corruption among those they had sworn to protect.24 Following a bit of Soviet collusion, Ulbricht was removed from his post as SED General Secretary in May 1971. His replacement, Erich Honecker, had cofounded the Free German Youth and helped to organize the Wall’s construction. Honecker’s arrival heralded a new era of modernized consumption, improved housing, and cultural liberalization, rooted in the Eighth Party Congress of June 1971 and subsequent Central Committee plenaries.25 The SED had already displayed a willingness to tolerate “a bit of leftist deviation and revolutionary impatience”—for example, against America’s dirty war in Vietnam, the fascist coup in Chile and the Greek military dictatorship—during the 1970 Festival of Political Songs. The trend continued with the GDR’s hosting of the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students, July 28–August 5, 1973. The so-called red Woodstock signaled a “controlled opening” toward the west, followed by increasing acceptance of longer hair, shorter skirts, and a home-grown rock music scene. Isolated at home, Ulbricht died the same week.

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Providing further grounds for cautious optimism, credits, and trade deals linked to Ostpolitik helped to ease consumer demands for more sophisticated goods, offered at specialized stores. The first few years under a new SED chief also brought new social policies, like free contraceptives and extended maternity leave, benefitting younger citizens. Greater exposure to FRG trends through new visitor-streams and West-TV nonetheless rendered younger cohorts impatient for change. Afraid of what their own courage had begun to unleash, authorities reversed course again in 1976, by stripping Wolf Biermann of his GDR citizenship on the basis of popular song-lyrics deemed “hostile towards the state.”26 Once public outrage died down, members of the intellectual and artistic scenes withdrew more deeply into their private, apolitical niches (Chap. 7). The rulers began to accept the Volk that they had, and the ruled settled for peaceful coexistence and improved consumption: “There was more talk of order and modest well-being than of marching forward and securing victory. Enthusiasm was only demanded of those who wanted to rise, for the rest subordination was sufficient.”27 SED elites likewise retreated into their private niches. Most resided in Wandlitz, a hermetically sealed residential enclave outside Berlin, built between 1958 and 1960 to ensure the “safety” of Politburo members. Guarded by two security rings and a special Stasi corps (800 men in the “Felix Dzerzhinsky” Guard), it contained 23 individual houses, with 7–15 rooms each, spread across 2 square kilometers. Though very modest by western upper-class standards, their “gated community” featured a swimming pool, sauna, its own medical center, recreation facilities with tennis courts, a kindergarten, a cinema, a restaurant, and even a shooting range. Formed in 1966 to regulate foreign trade and maximize hard currency access, the party’s Commercial Coordination agency (KoKo) morphed into an “imperial” enterprise answering directly to the Minister for State Security and the Economic Minister. One of its key functions was to assist party elites in furnishing their homes, filling their refrigerators and stocking their wardrobes with imported western goods denied to average citizens. Between 1980 and 1989, total expenditures for western creature comforts supplied to Wandlitz residents (foodstuffs, cigarettes, alcohol, furnishings, antiques, colored TVs, hunting rifles, telescopes) rose from DM2 million to DM62.8 million.28

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Rita Kuczynski provides a fascinating insider’s account of life in the elite complex.29 Clueless as to his family background, she married the son of Jürgen Kuczynski (the SED’s chief economic ideologue), beginning her initiation into the secret world of Wandlitz. Her new last name immediately secured her a privileged position at the Philosophical Institute in the GDR Academy of Sciences, where she quickly mastered the “optimal ratio” of Marx and Lenin quotations (five to one) for each of her Hegel citations, allowing her to otherwise devote her writing to “pure theory.” When her husband advanced from the Censorship Division in the Ministry of Culture to heading the Institute of Economic History, she resorted to the role of “prominent professor’s wife,” privy to black chiffon, Indian silk, and an “image-related” expense account to choose his clothes, ties, and entertainment venues. The extended family enjoyed unlimited access to imported wines, beef roasts, contraband books, hand-tailored clothing, and private psychiatric treatment for Rita (paid by her mother-in-law). Favored by her famous father-in-law as poetic and “loveable,” she was permitted to carve out her own ideology and politics-free realm within the extended family. A true believer of sorts, her husband was devastated by the GDR’s implosion in 1989, and the marriage ended shortly thereafter. It would take another twenty years, and another generation, to ignore the collective lessons of the Prague Spring and challenge the resignation of their predecessors. Acutely aware of the Stasi’s repressive tactics, young activists ignored the risks and occasionally outsmarted their persecutors by cultivating new forms of protest from below, starting in the mid-1980s. Under the protective wing of sympathetic pastors, often at odds with church officials, they began to test the limits of the system. Born after 1970, members of the Blocked Generation refused to accept the pre-­ determined nature of their futures, as well as the appalling environmental conditions in which their lives and opportunities were embedded. As Lenin had predicted, a revolutionary situation is most likely to arise when “the young ones become unwilling, and the old ones are unable” to maintain control of the complex systems they have created.

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Unanticipated Consequences: Freikauf, Expulsions, and Local Reactions In contrast to earlier eras, activists of the 1980s were well positioned to take the SED leadership at its word. Many challenged the regime by literally citing passages from the 1968 constitution, the ratified Helsinki Accords of 1973, and the revised Criminal Code during repeated Stasi interrogations, suggesting a degree of normative identification with the state’s declared values. It was particularly fitting that they used the SED’s ritualized memorialization of the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, starting in 1987, to stress her admonition: “The freedom that I mean is the freedom of those who think differently.” CPSU chief Mikhail Gorbachev utilized the 30th anniversary of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the 20th Party Congress (February 1986) to announce his radical economic reforms rooted in glasnost (transparency) and perestroika (restructuring). Sensing no movement in the GDR a year later, he sent his foreign minister to “inform” his SED counterpart of key Central Committee resolutions. Ideology-guru Kurt Hager replied indirectly in an April 1987 interview with West Germany’s Stern Magazine: “Would you, by the way, feel obligated to re-wallpaper your apartment, just because your neighbor has newly wall-papered his?” Following Biermann’s expulsion in 1976, the SED had adopted a deliberate policy of deporting or releasing critical intellectuals, assuming that their voices would be drowned out on the other side. It silenced others by threatening to withdraw their privileges, especially their ability to travel to “non-socialist” states. Beginning in 1984, the SED broadened the classification of “urgent family matters”—births, serious illnesses, deaths, weddings, significant anniversaries—that enabled more residents with Western relatives to undertake short-term visits. These temporary exits allowed many to return with goods unavailable at home, partially alleviating the need for voice on the part of a significant minority. It also took the unprecedented step of allowing nearly 32,000 average citizens to emigrate to the Federal Republic, which reportedly paid for their official exit-visas.30 Just as suddenly, the state reversed course. The number of first-time applications for legal exit nonetheless doubled from 53,000 to 105,100 between 1985 and 1987.31 The state seemed more interested in collecting hard currency by ransoming prisoners who had tried to flee the Republic than in accepting legal emigration. Constituting an alternative form of exit, the FRG’s Freikauf (buying-free) practice dated back to 1963,

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gaining momentum over time. Individuals associated with the Lutheran Church (Diakonisches Werk Stuttgart) had approached the Adenauer government with a plan to liberate eight unjustly imprisoned East Germans, in exchange for goods intended to relieve the scarcities afflicting average citizens. Within a year, CDU Minister for Inner German Relations, Rainer Barzel, appointed a State-Secretary for government’s “special efforts in humanitarian matters.” Fearful that such activities, or even regular trade relations, might be construed as formal recognition of GDR statehood, it filed these exchanges under the code name “Church Enterprise B.” Original shipments contained oranges, cocoa beans, medications, textile cellulose, and tons of raw coffee beans. These resources were quickly diverted to finance other SED priorities. Authorities found ways to sell these goods on the world market before they reached East German soil by setting up a fake company (Elmsoka) in Lichtenstein. Most deals were arranged by four key players who regularly met at expensive hotels to arrange details while wining and dining, all without a paper-trail. In 1974, proceeds began flowing into an account directly controlled by Honecker (#0628) at the Deutsche Handelsbank in East Berlin. By the mid-1970s, the GDR had largely reduced its wish-list to four commodities: copper, silver, rough diamonds, and oil, easily tradable across foreign stock markets.32 Efforts by western customs officials to investigate potential currency violations in 1977 were immediately shut down from above. Over time, FRG partners were lulled into sharing information with the Stasi, as “a contribution to clarifying the operations of capitalist agencies.”33 Between 1963 and 1989, the FRG bought freedom for 33,755 individuals, many younger than 25, for a total cost of DM3.5 billion (Table 5.2).34 Initially set at DM40,000 per person, the prisoner “value” rose to DM95,847 in 1977, allegedly compensating the GDR for having educated/trained malcontent members of the noble working class. Indeed, 1984 and 1985 marked an all-time high in the number who were thus bailed out.35 Only DM100 million per year could be used for special party needs; the rest served as currency reserves to ensure GDR creditworthiness. Pompous celebrations marking the state’s 30th birthday, for example, “cost” 939 prisoners; in summer 1989, ransom money was used to purchase 189 Citroen cars for nomenklatura personnel in the capital city. The resulting bank deposits amounted to DM2,105,781,065  by December 1989.36 The final payment was made in June 1990, amounting to 1034 VW buses. Stasi co-workers Schalck-Golodkowski and lawyer

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Table 5.2  Physical exits, 1961–1989 (including transfers from East to West Berlin) Year

Persons a fleeing

GDR-authorized migrants

Ransomed political prisoners c

Total

1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984b 1985 1986 1987 1988

207,026 16,741 12,967 11,864 11,886 8456 6385 4902 5273 5047 5843 5537 6522 5324 6011 5110 4037 3846 3512 3988 4340 4095 3614 3651 3484 4660 6252 9718

208,332 4624 29,665 30,012 17,666 15,675 13,188 11,134 11,702 12,472 11,565 11,627 8667 7928 10,274 10,058 8041 8271 9003 8775 11,093 9113 7729 37,323 21,428 21,518 12,706 27,939

– – (8) (880) (1160) (400) (550) (700) (850) (900) (1400) (730) (630) (1100) (1500) (1490) (1470) (1480) (900) (1010) (1584) (1491) (1105) (2236) (2676) (1536) (1247) (1083)

207,026 21,365 42,632 41,876 29,552 24,131 19,573 16,036 16,975 17,519 17,408 17,164 15,189 13,252 16,285 15,168 12,078 12,117 12,515 12,763 15,433 13,208 11,343 40,974 24,912 26,178 18,958 37,657

Some discrepancies owe to “approval” processes carried over from previous year Higher “authorized” figures after 1984 owe to a liberalization of GDR emigration regulations c Included in “authorized” figure a

b

Sources: Adapted from Thomas Ammer, “Stichwort: Flucht aus der DDR,” Deutschland Archiv (November 1989), 1207; and Hartmut Wendt, “Die Deutsch-deutsche Wanderungen,” Deutschland Archiv (April 1991), 390

Wolfgang Vogel were protected from prosecution after 1990 by the same Diakonie agents who had managed their transactions. One FRG ministerial official did spend three and a half years in prison for siphoning off DM6 million into his personal account.

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Despite its official peace policies, SED leaders turned to weapons exports as a further vehicle for capital accumulation, going so far as to short-change the National People’s Army to increase exports in this domain. They also displayed few qualms about importing military-­ industrial machinery or purchasing West German, Swedish, Swiss, and Austrian weapons, illegally channeled to socialist allies in Iran, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories. Millions in Valuta marks went directly into Schalk-Golodkowski’s account at the Deutsche Handelsbank. Post-unity investigations revealed that West German firms had moreover provided barbed wire for the border, as well as the precision-equipment used to produce the bullets fired at persons attempting to escape to the other side.37 Oblivious to the high-finance dimension of increasing militarization, a small group of activists had begun assembling every Monday evening in 1982 at the Nikolai Church in Leipzig for a silent peace vigil. By mid-­ decade, loose networks were taking shape across the country, fostering exchanges among 300+ local groups, focusing on peace, environmental, human/gay rights, and Third-World causes. Informal representatives also met secretly with like-minded groups in Czechoslovakia and Poland, giving them easier access to information banned at home. Individual Lutheran pastors allowed these groups to assemble in their churches, to share information, conduct informal concerts and create “environmental libraries,” where non-parishioners could access contraband sources or publications like Umweltblätter and Grenzfall. The arrest of two Berlin dissidents, author Freya Klier and song-writer Stephan Krawczyk, at an unauthorized Rosa Luxemburg demonstration in January 1988 induced 300 residents to start filling the pews at the Nikolai Church. By April the number attending the Monday night “peace prayers” in Leipzig had grown to 900, including many who had applied for legal emigration. The latter identified themselves by wearing white gym shoes, white socks, white scarves, and arm bands; some hoped that potential arrest/imprisonment would expedite their departure, by way of FRG buy-­ outs.38 Their presence changed the tenor of the vigils, irritating Church officials, and fueling tensions with risk-taking activists, whose causes were being displaced. Outside the sanctuary walls, those shouting “we want out” (wir wollen ’raus) were countered by protesters chanting “we’re staying here” (wir bleiben hier). Anxiety levels rose among party officials in anticipation of the communal elections scheduled for May 7. Growing publicity, channeled through West-TV reports, induced Leipzig officials to approve 2000 exit-visas

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prior to Election Day in an effort to “keep the peace.” Local groups posted their own election observers at polling places to document irregularities. They demanded the right to recount “rejected” or “invalid” ballots, finding in some instances that 10–20% of the ballots had disappeared by the time they were delivered to the central “counting” station. By then many groups had already established regular contacts with accredited western journalists. On the evening of May 7, Egon Krenz announced that 98.89% had approved the official candidate slates, invoking public scorn.39 On May 19 the Ministry for State Security issued “Measures on the Rejection and Undermining of hostile, oppositional and other negative Forces discrediting the Results of the Communal Elections of May 7, 1989,” but by then the SED had already lost the ability to intimidate younger activists. Used to relying on a massive security apparatus to hold public expressions of discontent in check, Politburo members refused to heed local warnings, indicating that das Volk might turn against them “as tiny oppositions mushroomed into crushing majorities” over the summer.40 Adolescents in Leipzig had already found ways to harass and outwit the Stasi officials who were tracking their movements, for example, by exhibiting photos of them moving around their neighborhoods. Citing constitutional passages in their flyers to justify their actions, they even invited local party officials to their unauthorized street-music festivals and environmental happenings. “Grown-up” dissidents did not collectively challenge authorities until early September, when they sought official recognition for New Forum (promptly denied).41 The larger the number of demonstrators, the lower the risk threshold for individuals, leading to the October “cascade” effect described by Kuran.42 Older party members and cultural elites like Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym would be among the last to join the appeal for “socialist renewal,” as signaled by their presence among the 500,000 who joined the (state-approved!) demonstration in Berlin on November 4. Also invited to speak that day, Wolf Biermann was denied entry by guards at the Friedrichstrasse border crossing.43

The Dialectical Forces of Exit and Voice On August 3, 1989, FRG Minister Rudolf Seiters urged GDR leaders to increase the number of youth allowed to participate in cultural/sport exchanges with their western peers.44 Two weeks later, he rushed off to a Berlin meeting with his counterpart, Minister Herbert Krolikowski, to “crisis-manage” a tidal wave of East Germans fleeing to the FRG by way

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of the Austro-Hungarian “green border.” The Hungarian government had decided in May 1989 to remove the barbed-wire fencing delineating its western frontier to mark Pan-European Day, thus signaling its compliance with both the Geneva Convention on Refugees and the Helsinki Accords regarding freedom-of-movement.45 It took several weeks for other vacationing GDR citizens to grasp the significance of Hungary’s decision to apply the human rights provisions to anyone within its borders. It all began as a spontaneous exodus. On the night of August 3, 60 East Germans crossed the Austro-Hungarian border and applied for West German passports. By August 5 over 150 kindred spirits had occupied the FRG Embassy in Budapest. Nearly 250,000 eastern vacationers woke up to the news in their tents around Lake Balaton. Suddenly scores of otherwise apolitical working-class campers were afforded an unprecedented opportunity to “test the West” without undergoing the arbitrary, degrading procedures linked to formal emigration. The ranks of the “green border-­hoppers” swelled, literally overnight, from several hundred in mid-­ August, to 13,000 by September 14, to entire trainloads chugging across the Czechoslovakian and Hungarian frontiers during the first week of October. Early headcounts found that most of the illegal émigrés (as defined by GDR law) were under 30, many with small children in tow. Had these vacationers previously participated in opposition movements or filed for permission to exit permanently, they would have been denied visas for travel to a more liberal fraternal state.46 Nor was freedom of expression the first item on their post-flight agenda. Spiegel surveys revealed that a majority who exited by way of Hungary were far from economically deprived: over 70% had traveled to the Balaton camping grounds in their own automobiles, for example. The normal waiting time for automobile purchases ranged from twelve to seventeen years, with prices far exceeding their western equivalents. One exiter told a TV-reporter that he fled because he “finally wanted to drive a decent car, not a Wartburg or a Trabi.” 47 This brings to mind another poem by Bertolt Brecht, penned “in praise of dialectics” back in 1933, which ends with the lines: “The vanquished of today are the victors of tomorrow/And out of never grows now, today!”48 The rapid succession of events, from mass demonstrations to regime collapse, roughly paralleled the course followed by other “Velvet Revolutions,” albeit in a shorter time frame.49 The rest of the story did not, owing to Germany’s unique status as a divided nation. The SED’s hardline response to would-be exiters occupying FRG embassies in October was “typically

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GDR” in nature.50 Politburo members insisted that all freedom-train riders traveling from Prague, Warsaw, and Budapest first pass through their own territory, to sustain the appearance of national sovereignty. GDR citizens would exchange their identity documents for FRG passports, as if undertaking a routine process of legalized emigration. The SED had already liberalized the travel code for citizens in November 1987, permitting more family visits and professional excursions than at any time since 1961.51 It had nonetheless failed to grasp the fact these changes had intensified domestic polarization between two new classes: those whose ties to Western relatives or elevated professions enabled them to travel and procure scarce goods, and those who lacked FRG connections, leaving them no choice but to make do with systemic deficiencies. A further factor rallying the masses was a sense of shame and bitterness over official SED reactions to an unanticipated wave of young, working-­ class exiters in summer 1989. Even party-loyalists and intellectuals were stunned by Honecker’s October 1, 1989, declaration: “We will shed no tears over those who have left.” The state moved to restrict travel to Czechoslovakia on October 3 but approved the mass transfer of citizens occupying FRG embassy compounds. The Politburo’s primary motive was to maintain a façade of political stability for Gorbachev’s imminent visit on October 7, commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Socialist State of Workers and Peasants. Instead of eliminating the problem, citizens tried to jump on the packed trains heading to the FRG, provoking a riot at Dresden’s central train station. The Soviet premier’s visit turned out to be the kiss of death for the Honecker regime, rendering the GDR’s 40th birthday party its last.52 In this case, the SED’s efforts to have its citizens internalize a long-standing party exhortation backfired, namely, “To learn from the Soviet Union is to learn victory.” Gorbachev’s public admonition on October 7 that “life would punish” those who failed to change—SED hardliners—set off a chain reaction among the “notorious here-stayers,” who took to the streets in ever larger numbers following his visit. Participants in Leipzig’s weekly vigils-turned-marches rose from 17,000 to 75,000, then to 120,000 over the next three Mondays. Honecker was replaced by Egon Krenz on October 18, but the crowds continued to swell, reaching 300,000 on October 30. By this point the protests had spread to many other cities, each attracting 20,000 or more. November 4 saw the largest postwar demonstration registered in Berlin. Despite heavy rainfall, an estimated 500,000 marched again in Leipzig on November 6.53 The Wall opened on November 9, 1989.

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The first call for “Germany united Fatherland” was recorded in Plauen on November 25. Protests continued, but so did the race to leave; transitional camps in the western states registered 2500–3000 new arrivals per day, November through January (Table 5.3). The number of FRG citizens who began to fear disadvantages for themselves regarding housing and jobs rose accordingly.54 While eastern voice-proponents wanted to restructure the authoritarian state, they had no time to formulate designs for a new system, much less to reach a consensus on a possible “third way,” once Kohl introduced his “Ten-Point Program” on November 28, 1989. The chaotic transformation triggered by the over-flowing camps at Berlin-­ Marienfeld, in Giessen and Schöppingen bei Munster is hardly what the FRG’s founding fathers and mothers had in mind when they incorporated the unification mandate into the Preamble of the 1949 Basic Law. The entire process was quickly taken over by Western politicians. My 1989/1990 interview partners highlighted a few “typically GDR” features characterizing their revolution.55 First and foremost, the demonstrations were initiated not by average citizens or prominent dissidents but by local groups of young, alienated niche-dwellers constituting an eco-­ peace and human rights underground; many had already experienced Stasi detention. Secondly, some noted with irony that the main events leading up to the collapse of the workers’ state all took place after the workday

Table 5.3  “Resettlers” from East to West Germany, 1989 January February March April May June July August September October November December Total

4627 5008 5671 5887 10,642 12,428 11,707 20,955 33,255 57,024 133,429 43,221 343,854

Source: Hartmut Wendt. 1991. “Die Deutsch-­ deutschen Wande rungen,” Deutschland Archiv 24 (April), 390

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ended (5 pm).56 Third, the phase October through November did, for a fleeting revolutionary moment, forge a new, positive GDR-identity at the level of peer culture, as stressed by interviewees younger than 35; my sample included young proletarians from Erkner, and students enrolled at the Karl Marx Universität in Leipzig. A belief in “socialism with a human face” was but one component of the born-again identity implicit in the initial chants of We are the people! Others confirmed that “the people” calling for a united fatherland in December and January were not the same ones who had been physically present at the September/October demonstrations. Young women had actively engaged, in roughly equal numbers, in orchestrating underground “happenings” in Leipzig, dating back to 1987.57 The share of female marchers declined from one-third in early December to one-fourth by February, however, as the crowds grew rowdier. Candles disappeared in favor of black-red-gold FRG flags, clearly brought in from the other side. White-collar, peace, and ecology activists were displaced by working-class males. By February, only 8% of the demonstrators polled (19% among students) rejected the idea of unification.58 Drinking coffee with an LDPD member prior to the first democratic Volkskammer elections in March, I was very surprised to hear that unification would “probably” take place by October—a decision ostensibly taken in Bonn before “the people” had a chance to exercise a conventional form of political voice. Scheduled for March 18, the first free elections on East German territory since 1933 were an appeal to “Father State” to provide immediate material improvements for citizens. A majority of GDR voters saw D-Mark nationalism, not the constitutional patriotism espoused by Jürgen Habermas and Round Table members, as the key to their new identity.59 Their limited experience with Western free-for-all campaign styles fueled a naive presumption that Unity Chancellor Kohl held enough power to directly implement his promises of “blossoming landscapes,” in which most would be better off—despite dire predictions issued by unification-­ opponent Oscar Lafontaine (SPD). The interviews I conducted in East Berlin and Leipzig during the final week of the campaign (March 13–20) led me to draw the following conclusions about the electoral dynamics. First, the pre-unification elections occurred too early, and too quickly, to benefit the parties and groups that logically deserved to win, namely, the (reconstituted) Social Democratic Party (SDP), New Forum, and Bündnis ’90 (eastern Greens). Post-election interviewees suggested that the SDP’s early lead stimulated fears of a return to the one-party dominant

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state, while the New Forum’s chances were impaired by its refusal to declare itself a “real” party. As a potential left-center coalition partner, the Liberals might have profited from the personal role played by Hans-­ Dietrich Genscher, responsible for the October transfer of embassy occupiers, but they made the mistake of changing their name, rendering themselves harder to identify. Second, Kohl enjoyed the benefits of the bully-pulpit, which ensured a number of tactical advantages. The CDU recognized that campaigning under its western name would link it to the bloc-party that had collaborated with the SED. It moved quickly to integrate the Right (including other bloc parties) under a renamed, generously financed “Alliance for Germany.” Although party offices were suddenly flooded with new technology (computers, printers, fax machines), as well as Western campaign experts, I should remind readers that none of the Eastern party offices could provide me with a full list of names and addresses of recently elected VK-parliamentarians as late as June 1990.60 Interim Prime Minister Hans Modrow complained that Kohl did not deliver the credits he had promised, which might have allowed for a longer, self-determined transition period.61 Third, the shift from “too few” to “too many” parties and issues proved overwhelming for many who had distanced themselves from politics long ago. The proliferation of parties (24 on the ballot, including the Rostock Beer Drinkers’ Union) proved too confusing for an electorate used to casting an alleged 98% of its ballots for the ruling SED and a few “National Front” options. Western parties merely projected their old rivalries and issue-orientations onto eastern voters, making little effort to learn about the ways, values, and actual policy preferences of the target population. Those included complete job security and legal abortion, which the CDU/ CSU adamantly opposed. Reconstituting itself as the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), the ex-SED played to its loyalist base. After unification, the latter defied many predictions of its imminent demise; perceived as the authentic voice of East German interests, the PDS-turned-­Die Linke managed to successfully sustain itself across the newly enfranchised states until 2014. Fourth, those who had championed political voice from the start had already been pushed aside by the changing tenor of the demonstrations. Rejecting simple “annexation” under Article 123 of the Basic Law (“Kein Anschluss unter dieser Nummer”), Round Table participants advising the interim government sought to build consensus for a new, all-German

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constitution, essentially marginalizing themselves.62 Members of New Forum, the Humanistic Union, and the Independent Women’s Union, inter alia, saw their proper role as raising “the right questions” in the expectations that the people would seek their own answers via the democratic process. The latter possessed neither the patience nor the self-confidence necessary to think through those questions. However, their ingrained reliance on a largely patriarchal, paternalistic state left them unable to imagine the negative economic outcomes that would follow: they put their faith in the precept, Kohl hat die Kohlen (“Kohl has the moola”), noted one Leipzig voter. The good news, historically speaking, was that voter preferences were divorced from any deep-seated nationalist resurgence. Their desire for unification was instrumental rather than sentimental in nature: average citizens were willing to accept as legitimate that system which was best capable of “delivering the goods.” They presumed that there would be plenty of time for politics later. The negotiations following the March 1990 elections deliberately undercut the exercise of Eastern voice. Chief-negotiator Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU) admonished his GDR counterparts for seeking more concessions than his government wanted to make, “reminding” them that they were not “equal partners.”63 Thirty years later he would ironically exhort those same citizens to “display more self-confidence,” rather than emphasize their victim status.64 Kohl focused on limiting mass exit as quickly as possible, due to concerns about potential instability in the Soviet Union and an observable shift in FRG voter attitudes. While 69% of the westerners polled “welcomed the influx” in November 1989, the share of those who “completely understood” why they continued to come fell to 22.8% in February 1990; 35% had “no understanding” for their ongoing flight.65 In fact, citizens in the old Länder had no opportunity to express their views on unification until after it had been signed, sealed, and delivered on October 3, 1990. The first all-German elections took place on December 2. Although his own “Ten-Point Program” foresaw a gradual transition by way of a confederation, Kohl opted for the quick introduction of a currency union, based on exchange rates opposed by his own Central Bank officials. The aim was to stop Easterners, impatient for western consumer goods, from continuing to exit; they had made it clear, “if the D-Mark doesn’t come to us, then we will go to her.” The result was an immediate liquidity crisis for all GDR industries, even before the Treuhand’s rush to privatization allowed western buyers to shut down whole factories

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(Chap.  11). The July 1990 Currency Union generated new groups of “haves” and “have-nots,” provoking antagonism among sub-cultural groups who had shared membership in various niches and “communities of necessity.” Women and youth were the immediate losers. The mass unemployment that ensued deprived citizens of social contacts, material benefits and milieu identities that had long been tied to the workplace, generating a psychological crisis for many.66 Euphoric over the regime’s rapid collapse, average citizens gave little thought to deeper identity needs; indeed, both sides completely underestimated the extent to which easterners had internalized socialist values. As GDR author Peter Hacks opined: “There are fewer communists than they say, but more communists than they think.” People denied the right to travel outside their own bloc could easily dismiss the SED’s perpetual harping on poverty and unemployment in capitalist systems as pure propaganda. Indeed, the civics teachers (Staatsbürgerkunde) I helped to “retrain” in Erfurt in 1996 were surprised at the wide array of social welfare benefits that existed in the FRG but also overwhelmed by the byzantine, bureaucratic procedures they had to master in order to secure them. Average citizens assumed that the benefits of western consumer society would outweigh other social benefits they had taken for granted since the 1970s. They had yet to learn that freedom, security, and equality are antithetical concepts.

Ostalgie: Marketing East German Memories As Marx noted in his “Critique of Political Economy,” das Sein bestimmt das Bewusstsein—material being determines consciousness, not only among workers but also among consumers, one could argue. Inseparable from habitus, one’s acquisition of tastes establishes the boundaries of personal identity and further embeds individuals in a broader social milieu.67 Whether freely cultivated or collectively imposed, patterns of consumption also play a role in building social and cultural capital, while satisfying, or thwarting, personal needs for self-actualization. As dissatisfied as they may have been with their own system, East Germans were completely unprepared for both the material shock and the status losses that accompanied unification. Historically speaking, millions had been educated to see themselves as “the better Germans,” given the regime’s ideologically grounded, anti-fascist origins, and its incessant, rhetorical homage to the vanguard nature of the working class. Relative to

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other socialist states, the GDR clearly ranked as “the first among equals” in terms of its industrial capacities, technological advances, and even living standards. Over the next decade, East Germans would find themselves subject to persistent second-class citizenship and a bad case of social anomie, stemming from the disappearance of their familiar “collective culture.” Briefly praised for their role in the regime’s peaceful collapse, they were subsequently charged with “having led a false life in the wrong system.” Most easterners took their skilled-labor certification and constitutionally guaranteed jobs for granted, though younger cohorts had become frustrated with the gap between their formal qualifications and their limited social mobility. Completely unknown in “GDR times,” unemployment surged to 7.2% with the onset of the 1990 currency union, hitting 25% in spring 1991, then 30% at year’s end, despite temporary job-­creation (ABM) and retraining programs. The workforce shrank from roughly 9.7 million in 1991 to below 5 million by the second half of 1992.68 People not only lost their physical workplaces but also psychological forms of recognition flowing from their identification with “the collective,” for example, honors received for years-of-service and on-the-job achievements, bonuses, promotions, and shared holiday celebrations. Longcultivated connections and survival skills lost their value overnight. Used to operating as a united front against “those on top,” thousands were forced to compete with each other for scarce employment opportunities, often at the expense of personal friendships (as shared with the author). The elimination of subsidized child-care facilities and the sexist orientations of many FRG bosses had an even bigger negative impact on women. Despite their general ignorance regarding conditions and life-styles on the other side, West Germans quickly resorted to negative stereotypes in pursuit of their own agendas. FRG politicians and media outlets found it easier to concentrate on the crimes, mismanagement, and deficiencies of the “Stalinist terror-regime” and “the second dictatorship” than to question Bonn’s role in propping it up with credits, ransoms, and the exploitation of cheap GDR labor through the 1970s and 1980s. Besser-Wessis (Know-it-all Westerners) took it upon themselves to diagnose Jammer Ossis (Whiny Easterners) as ungrateful, authoritarian personalities, unable to understand real democracy. They expressed some sympathy for dissidents and victims but dismissed the rest as “collaborators,” ignoring countless milieu groups located between those two poles, like the 80% who did not apply to see their Stasi files.

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As John Borneman observed, the chronic scarcities of socialism “had trained them to desire, then capitalism stepped in to let them buy,” which they did with a vengeance.69 Within a year of the D-Mark’s arrival (July 1990), East Germans generated 19.1 million tons of garbage (1.2 tons per capita), three times the FRG rate, in the rush to secure coveted membership in the Club of Capitalist Consumers.70 Anticipating higher salaries and a rapid transition to “blossoming landscapes,” they marveled at the brands and products they had always wanted: clothing, electronics, and fancy foods, many available at lower prices. Some took longer than others to discover that the consumer frenzy marking their first year as Federal Republicans did not guarantee a sense of belonging. Many encountered unscrupulous sales-people (especially in the used car sector), insurance scams, carpet-bagger employers who dumped them when subsidies expired, their first plunge into personal debt and “the planned obsolescence of glitzy products.”71 Sustained unemployment conveyed the lesson that “money matters” under capitalism in ways they had not anticipated under socialism. Five years into unity, West Germans remained indifferent toward a lack of eastern investment; if anything, they griped about increases their own taxes to cover “transfers” to the new Länder. By the late 1990s, Easterners began to reflect on their past and present experiences under two ideologically opposite economies; they were moreover able to compare relationships and products, no longer idealized by way of surreptitiously viewed West-TV commercials. For those with jobs, wages had risen, but so had rents, basic food, and fuel costs; only one-third had assets roughly matching average households in the old FRG. Used both whimsically and pejoratively, the term Ostalgie (Eastern nostalgia) conveyed a diffuse sense of longing for things lost—products, values, friendships—in the rush to unification. Limited knowledge regarding the lives of their real-existing compatriots did not stop FRG politicians, journalists and intellectuals from dominating the discourse over GDR identities. As Thomas Ahbe noted, dismissive descriptions of the latter as provincial, backward, authoritarian, and devoid of a proper work ethic “said less about the typical characteristics of the East German population and more about the ideal-typical self-image of Westerners.”72 Ostalgie was an attempt to reconstruct their own identities “not as totally deficient beings but simply as human beings,” without which they were unlikely to forge a stable identification with their new surroundings. As formulated by GDR dissident Günter Nooke, “Naturally we used to ride our bikes

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through the Spree forest and then drank a few bottles of beer … [everyday life] also took place under the brown dictatorship.”73 Surveys revealed that by 1995, East and West Germans felt that they had grown farther apart, despite conservatives’ insistence that “internal unity” had been achieved.74 The first Ostalgie-hotel opened in a former FDGB facility in Amselfeld in 1997, while would-be entrepreneurs began hosting Ostalgie-parties. In 1999 two West Germans staged an exhibition focusing on everyday life in the GDR, housed in a former Intershop at the Friedrichstrasse station. When visitors inquired about buying many items on exhibit, they added a retail component to the display. Viewed as kitsch by some and cult by others, ost-modern offered an ironic twist to post-modern: going “retro” gave Easterners a chance to reclaim their symbolic capital, although their rediscovery of GDR products turned into another dream come true for FRG advertisers.75 Thanks to Treuhand privatizations, many products perceived as “authentically GDR” were now being manufactured by FRG firms, including F6 cigarettes (Philip Morris), Spee laundry soap (Henkel), and Radeberger beer (Oetker Group). The “Western marketing of Eastern identity” drew on ironic slogans suggesting discontent with capitalist products: “I smoke Juwel because I’ve already tested the West” (a swipe at a popular FRG brand). Karo cigarettes relied on a double entendre, Anschlag auf den Einheitsgeschmack, inferring a rejection of “uniform taste” as well as “the taste of unification” per se.76 Rondo coffee offers a further case in point. Magdeburger Röstfein Kaffee GmbH reintroduced its medium-priced brand in the familiar blue and silver packaging, under the slogan, “Naturally not all the things we made before were bad.” It was overwhelmed by its own success: instead of selling a projected 100–200 tons per year, over 5000 tons vanished from store shelves, as its staff of 40 swelled to 96 employees. The run on “good old Rondo” was rather ironic, given its poor reputation at the height of the 1977–1978 coffee crisis; back then, the use of an inferior class of imported beans triggered over 14,000 refund demands, due to its bad taste. In 1991, 90% of the easterners polled had reported that they preferred western coffee; when asked if they might consider buying a former GDR brand, 70% had responded “never.”77 By 1998 Rondo (6500 tons) ranked as third most popular brand in the new states. There were other small victories along the way. Designed by Karl Peglau in 1961, the red/green proletarian figures (Ampelmännchen) seen at

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GDR street crossings became the focus of a regional “rescue campaign” led by Markus Heckhausen. When the owner of MAKE Design GmbH began using the figures for souvenir bath towels, soaps, lampshades, vases, key-rings, t-shirts, mouse pads, and coffee cups (grossing 2 million Euros), the former manufacturer of GDR traffic lights, engineer Joachim Roßberg (earning 50,000 Euros), sued him for rights to the logo. The two eventually reached an out-of-court settlement, leading politicians in the new states to keep their little friend at all non-federal traffic light crossings. A third attempt to reclaim their symbolic capital involved a 2004 lawsuit over commercial control of various icons associated with the SED in 2004. A Karlsruhe businessman tried to obtain exclusive rights to symbols ranging from the GDR state seal, FDJ, and Young Pioneer emblems, to images tied to GDR soccer teams, the National People’s Army and even the Ministry for State Security. A Hamburg state court rejected the claim, arguing that none of the contested icons represented a company-specific brand or logo; individuals’ use of such items actually constituted a potentially “funny or political statement,” as a “provocative or nostalgic” reflection of their personal world-views or life-styles.78 The highly popular film Goodbye Lenin premiered in 2003, leading to a stream of broadcasts involving GDR-based TV shows. ZDF aired the first “Ostalgie-Show” on August 17; MDR followed on August 22, 2003, with a six-week broadcast of “Ein Kessel DDR” (A Kettle of GDR) named after a popular variety show dating back to 1972. SAT-1 joined in next, then RTL and Pro 7 with East-specials that registered viewer shares ranging from 14.6% to 34%.79 Their popularity impelled West-TV stations to see that they, too, had to adapt to shifting tastes in the nation united. Like frogs subject to slowly boiling water, old FRG citizens took longer to realize that their identities were also subject to reconfiguration. Unification was not merely a case of “move the border, add the D-Mark and stir.” Long overdue social policy reforms, like child-care provision and pro-­ active integration policies, would finally kick in 20 years later, under an eastern-born female Chancellor. For older citizens, Ostalgie opened the door to a kind of self-therapy rooted in memory culture; for younger cohorts, it became a way to poke fun at Westerners’ sense of “all-­knowing” self-importance. In both cases, it served its purpose as a vehicle for self-­ integration, not as a sinister desire to return to the old regime.

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Conclusion: Loyalty, Habitus, and “the Wall in One’s Head” Looking back on the rapid proliferation of underground movements I had researched in the 1980s, and revisiting the tumultuous events of 1989, I believe that Leipzig’s reputation as “the City of Heroes” is well-deserved. A mass uprising is only likely to occur when a plethora of social groups decide to join in risky protests directed toward systemic change. Although widespread discontent is usually a necessary condition for bringing down an oppressive state, it is certainly not a sufficient one, as 1953 and 1968 proved.80 Each revolutionary process begins with a particularly courageous band of risk-takers who refuse to separate their “private preferences” (values, life-style choices, political beliefs) from hypocritical public displays of loyalty to the regime, like May Day parades. While underground activists can start the bandwagon rolling, it often takes the appearance of larger or better-organized groups to impel other people to jump on. Contrary to conventional assumptions, the individuals who really deserve the credit for initiating the 1989 protest cascade were local eco-­ peace activists who were too young to have personally experienced 1953 and 1968. Resisting efforts by Church superiors to rein them in, brave pastors in Berlin, Leipzig, Wittenberg, and elsewhere provided both a safe physical space and a crucial organizational base for youth who had largely given up on “the system,” although they did try to “engage” SED rulers at various levels, as Peter Wensierski documents. They networked with other small, like-minded groups inside and outside the GDR, building alternative information and communication channels—without the aid of the Internet, email, social media, and cell-phones, we should recall. This allowed local groups with minimal resources but a lot of creative energy, to make an observable dent in the state’s invulnerability shield.81 Many of the original risk-takers resented the efforts of would-be exiters to undermine their courageous attempts at voice, triggering a new kind of loyalty (We’re staying here!). Academic analysts invoking Hirschman’s framework in the early 1990s missed these communal dynamics and tensions, along with the significance of physical decay (e.g., in Leipzig) in strengthening local identity qua patriotism.82 This version of events confirms a thesis advanced by Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio in relation to the Arab Springs, namely, that authoritarian regimes are often a lot more fragile than they appear. 83 The Wall began as a physical construction, but it gradually became a state of mind,

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immobilizing even its creators. Its presence eliminated the physical exitoption for most, while the presence of mines and motion-triggered shooting devices testified to the overwhelming “power” of the state. But the Wall also put an end to the regime’s favorite “explanation” for chronic scarcities: western saboteurs. Later it would shift to accusing Polish daytraders of emptying its store shelves in the border towns. Operant conditioning on both sides held the system together—until a few of the lambs, to use Skinner’s metaphor, decided to test the fence. The Wall forced the SED to use both cooptation and coercion to foster political stability. With respect to cooptation, GDR rulers learned in the 1950s that the best way to ensure political acquiescence was to make sporadic, albeit costly concessions to consumer demands, causing the state to live well beyond its means. The 1973 oil embargo had a particularly devastating impact on the national economy, exponentially increasing sovereign debt after the Soviet Union began charging the “fraternal states” world-market prices. Despite their cultivation of alternative funding sources (e.g., special FRG credits, prisoner buy-outs), Honecker and his cronies reached the point when they could no longer compensate for their lack of political legitimacy through economic accommodation. Physical deterioration and the erosion of living standards were particularly evident outside the socialist showcase of East Berlin. I personally witnessed the extent to which residents elsewhere erected scaffolds in front of their apartment entranceways, so as not to be hit by stones crumbling off of housing façades. Countless condemned buildings, left to rot in EastLeipzig and Prenzlauer-Berg, gave rise to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” squatters’ movement that helped Angela Merkel, for instance, to find an abandoned apartment after her divorce in the early 1980s.84 Unmitigated air and water pollution induced high levels of respiratory disease in chemical and mining districts like Bitterfeld and the Lausitz region. The official response was to declare appalling medical and environmental statistics “state secrets.” Coercion worked both ways. As one Stasi agent remarked: “GDR citizens were so gullible (gutgläubig). … Often times you didn’t need a document in your pocket to identify yourself, they just started telling you things, like a book.” Local IMs often drew the line at routing through people’s mail, however, which they considered illegitimate; those at higher levels had fewer inhibitions along these lines, explaining why many western care-packages went missing.85 Rather than address the core problems, the Politburo went AWOL, allocating ever more authority, resources, and

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personnel to the Ministry for State Security. These shifts left local leaders devoid of the funds they needed to respond to individual crises and infrastructure problems. On October 9, urban mayors ultimately ignored a command from above to use brute force against the Monday night marchers, although they had been ordered a week earlier to clear hospital beds and stock up on blood reserves, in anticipation of violent encounters with the opposition. Their refusal to do so grew out of their own feelings of having been abandoned by central authorities. Commensurate with Teti and Gervasio’s findings, the pervasive presence of state security forces erroneously caused the public to conflate militarized “ferocity” with state “strength.” The regular deployment of Stasi agents and police squads says little about their competence and effectiveness. Indeed, the “people’s police” (VoPos), few of whom had higher secondary educations, were a regular target of public ridicule. One example: What is the difference between Eastern police before and after unification? In the GDR you had to complete sixth grade and be a party member. Since unification, you only have to finish sixth grade. Drawing on declassified archival materials, Daniel Niemetz shows that most local police forces, factory-­ based Kampfgruppen (combat groups) and even local military reserves were grossly underequipped and inadequately trained to deal with a domestic uprising of major proportions.86 Politburo members felt so secure that they failed to heed detailed Stasi reports, much less to develop contingency plans through the summer of 1989. The prospect of a mass rebellion against party dominance and socialist ideology “lay outside the scope of their imagination and way beyond the horizon of their organizational planning.”87 One district company-­leader complained, “[I]t was a paper war—as it usually is with the Germans. He [the commander] wanted a concept, and a plan and a report, and then another report and another report. And then a file, and then an evaluation, so that it was all rounded out.”88 Other agents carried out orders they found inherently wrong, despite their belief that the state should have pursued a dialogue with activists, especially those under 25: “We had discussions among ourselves where we openly stated: This is shit, it can’t go on.”89 A former director of the Central Committee’s state security department reflected on “the shameful flight of thousands, then tens of thousands” during the summer of 1989: People wanted to end the speechlessness of the party leadership, to change the stagnated nature of politics and economics. … In June 1989 we had

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worked out a detailed analysis of the political situation in this country. This material was so hot that we said, it has to get onto the Politburo’s meeting-­ room table. Egon Krenz passed it on to Erich Honecker, who immediately deposited it in the Panzerschrank [for state secrets]. With that, the paper disappeared.90

Sentiments of this sort mirror another “false strength” dilemma stressed by Kuran. Those who board the revolutionary bandwagon at later stages, when individual persecution is no longer likely, often claim retroactively that they, too, had lost faith in “the old order” and had privately sympathized with protest causes. After November 9, these latecomers were labeled Wendehälse (wrynecks), after a type of woodpecker capable of tuning its head 180 degrees. While I agree that ex post facto efforts to distinguish between one’s private attitudes and ritualized displays of support for the regime distort the historical picture, I do not share Kuran’s contention that an overwhelming majority of GDR citizens “remained outwardly loyal to communist rule primarily out of fear.”91 Socialist loyalty was not an all or nothing proposition. Like exit and voice, it acquired different meanings subject to varying degrees and manifestations across time. Having lived through the deprivations of the 1940s and 1950s, older cohorts had “arranged” themselves with gradual improvements and learned how to avoid the system’s more repressive elements. The problem was that by 1989, nearly two-thirds of the population had been born into the GDR, rendering them unable to identify personally with anti-fascist/ anti-war justifications that had been used to discipline or subdue the Aufbau generation. Most younger citizens accepted the SED’s ritualized embrace of anti-­fascism but increasingly objected to the fact that official “peace policies” were at odds with the militarization of schools introduced after 1978. As ZIJ data showed, not even obligatory visits to concentration camps could ignite an adolescent passion for anti-fascism, though it did awaken youth’s interest in World War II and Soviet history—tricky issues for the SED in the Gorbachev era. By 1986 even a majority of FDJ activists had lost faith in “the leading role of the party”; by spring 1989, only 48% of young party members (18–25) subscribed to the view, “the SED enjoys my complete trust.”92 Unfortunately, the SED’s conservative FRG counterparts were still fighting old wars as well. Intent on discrediting “’68 leftists” in conjunction with anti-nuclear, environmental, and feminist mobilizations, the politicians who later dominated official Bundestag inquiries assessing 40 years

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of GDR history placed a very narrow emphasis on the regime’s “dictatorial” features. Average citizens were given no time to process their own pasts, at least partially explaining why East German identity would return to haunt the CDU/CSU 30 years later by way of the AfD. Had their life experiences only been negative, most would have sought to distance themselves immediately and entirely from a panoply of eastern values, behaviors, and policy orientations, if only to avoid allegations of complicity with the regime. But as Lothar de Maizière observed, “perhaps two percent [had been] victims, and perhaps three percent perpetrators. But 95 percent were just ordinary people,” trying to secure a good life for themselves and their families.93 Hirschman’s reflections on exit, voice, and loyalty offer a valuable theoretical framework for exploring the dynamics inherent in displays of (dis)satisfaction and attachment to a given economic or political entity. At the same time, one needs to recognize that his conceptualizations are rooted in the workings of capitalist market economies and liberaldemocratic systems. These constructs lend themselves to some “conceptual stretching,” but only to the extent to which they remain sensitive to the specific historical, material, and structural nature of the entity in question. Referring to November 9 as the GDR’s “most spectacular exit event,” Hirschman notes that millions crossed the border that evening “to enjoy their newly won freedom to move.” One should not confuse a desire to travel freely with a drive for permanent exit from all other facets of GDR daily life, however.94 In contrast to Hirschman’s concentration on physical exit, I believe it was the convergence of pre-existing, albeit inobtrusive processes of “inward migration” and quiet, though not secretive channels of voice, coupled with processes of generational change, that transformed the political opportunity structure in East Germany. While many GDR citizens spent the night of November 9 celebrating with old and new friends on the other side, almost all returned to their homes in time to show up for their jobs the next day. The same was true for the millions who headed West to claim their 100 D-Marks in “welcome money” over the next three months. Their short-term exits in November were not an attempt to undermine voice, but rather to render both options permanent mechanisms for self-determination within their own borders. Despite the stop-and-go nature of many reforms, SED leaders sought to improve material production, in order to enhance state legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. Functioning as a closed system, the GDR gave rise

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to its own modes of exit which compelled the SED, to a degree, to alter its policies and practices over a span of forty years. Physical forms of exit ranged from pre-wall departures, efforts to “flee the Republic” and “voluntary” and forced deportations, to allowing oneself to be incarcerated, then “ransomed” by the FRG.95 The SED’s liberalization of legal emigration and family visitation rules eventually yielded to “border-hopping” by way of other socialist states, then to the fall of the Wall itself. These diverse escape mechanisms co-existed with less obvious forms of psychological exit, labeled inward migration. As Andreas Graf opined: “It was terribly easy to drop out. Money and career played no role. One had time, and nothing but time.”96 Other exit options included personal “withdrawal” from the system via resignation qua “preference falsification”; “dropping out,” by abandoning pre-normed life-styles (so-called asocials, squatters); self-immersion in an imagined community through West German media; confining oneself to family and workplace “niches”; and cultivating underground literary, artistic, and music scenes.97 The system likewise gave rise to distinctive forms of voice. These ranged from active party membership and FDJ participation to occasional workers’ strikes, frequent work slow-downs, and pressuring officials prior to communal elections. Quieter versions centered on letters to the editor (carefully monitored, if not published), as well as the growing practice of petitioning officials concerning individual problems (Eingaben)—both of which supplied crucial “feedback” to the state.98 Literary works and theater productions by prominent cultural elites were perceived as “critical voices,” as were clandestine discussion groups, cabarets, fashion shows, and exhibits in private galleries; alternative music and literary scenes also circulated tapes and texts. The (barely tolerated) satirical magazine, Eulenspiegel, GDR jokes, “samizdat” materials (e.g., mimeographed song-­ texts, Entwerter-Oder, Schaden), and self-organized “happenings,” under the protective wing of sympathetic pastors, magnified the voices of literati and youth.99 Getting state officials to listen to these voices in a direct, pro-­ active sense was another matter entirely, but politicians in democratic systems also tend to ignore the interests of those opposing them, until protests acquire a mass character. I confirmed this as a participant-observer in various FRG protests against nuclear energy and Pershing II deployments during the 1980s.100 Voice, in turn, can be linked to different types and degrees of loyalty, some of which may seem more rational than others to outsiders. Hirschman concedes that there are different degrees of loyalty, but his GDR analysis

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centers on its short-term impact; he does not consider diverging types of fidelity to one’s country, nor their potential long-term effects. Citizens might stick with a system for an extended period, despite an observable performance gap, for at least two reasons. First, they optimistically assume that “management” can be pushed “back on track” by way of their own engagement or through the voice-related activities of others. Hopes that the SED might eventually move onto the track leading to “socialism with a human face” were not completely laid to rest until the Prague Spring. Second, they might believe “that it is worthwhile, for a variety of reasons,” to accept the certainty of the “here and now” over whatever changes might ensue.101 For years after the war, Aufbau cohorts were certainly more likely to see the “here and now” as preferable to what had gone before. Post-unity analysts invoking Hirschman’s framework usually limited their focus to loyalty of the ideological-systemic sort, while neglecting the “dialectically” historical context in which it was rooted.102 Socialist commitment to universal education, free healthcare, and guaranteed employment created new avenues of social mobility for workers, farmers, and their offspring through the early 1960s. A second type of loyalty was also historically driven. Members of the GDR’s founding generation, encompassing bona fide resistance fighters, Jewish and intellectual repatriates, authors, playwrights, and first-wave party members were deeply committed to its historically derived values, pacifism, and anti-fascism. Loyalty grounded in their personal experiences of exile, persecution, and imprisonment inhibited them from voicing political criticism, with rare exceptions (Biermann expulsion).103 This form of loyalty was increasingly difficult to reproduce among cohorts too young to have witnessed World War II. Nor can we overlook the significance of peer-group loyalty, grounded in deep attachments to specific social rights and stratification factors shaping the habitus of average citizens. According to Pierre Bourdieu, habitus entails “a subjective but not individual system of internalised structures, schemes of perception, conception, and action common to all members of the same group or class.”104 Sympathetic to Marxist thought, Bourdieu viewed cultural capital as the foundation of collective identity, which determined one’s position in the social order. More than the sum of the parts, habitus reflects the deeply ingrained nature or “embodiment” of tastes, skills, mannerisms, values, credentials, and even possessions acquired by way of one’s personal experiences as a member of a particular “class.” In addition to reproducing themselves, these identity elements acquire an

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objectified, institutionalized character over time, leading to a shared “view of the world.” As Barrington Moore Jr. observed, authoritarian systems often need to resort to bullying, imprisonment, bribes, propaganda, executions, and “even sociology courses,” in order to induce citizens to adopt a new, politically correct habitus. Loyalty to one’s own identity persists longer than its systemic counterpart (or replacement), for the simple reason that one cannot go back and “relive” the personal experiences that underlie it. Even the party’s most dogmatic ideologues recognized the wisdom of redefining the “German national” component of GDR-identity in stages, despite the fact that the population’s cataclysmic experiences under National Socialism and a brutal Soviet occupation might have provided an optimal “blank-slate” (Stunde Null) setting. The two generations born and raised in East Germany had no alternative— beyond police surveillance, discrimination or imprisonment—but to accept their own values, behaviors, life-styles, and relationships as “normal.” To be told by outsiders after 1990 that they had all been “living a lie” was unlikely to generate a sense of loyalty to the new system, in any case. West Germans outside Berlin were inclined to project Soviet might onto the SED regime but remained largely oblivious to the extent to which their own government’s policies fueled repressive GDR policies against young dissidents and drop-outs (Chap. 10). They, too, internalized the Wall as a “normalized” fact of postwar life. As Peter Schneider noted in his classic text, Die Mauerspringer, the Wall created the illusion that it was the only thing separating the Germans of East and West for nearly three decades. For FRG citizens, “the Wall became a mirror that told them day by day, who was the fairest in the Land. Whether there was life on the other side of the death-strip was something that soon interested only pigeons and cats.”105 Initially viewed as an amputation, producing phantom pains for those with relatives on the other side, the Wall eventually became one of West Berlin’s most popular tourist attractions. Both sides had developed a “wall in the head,” though West Germans were unlikely to admit this. The farther they lived from the border, the more residents of the old states were inclined to think of unification in terms of the extra taxes they had to pay to cover the costs. For the record: East Germans also paid the Soli (solidarity) surcharge, along with all other taxes; as late as 2022, many West Germans still erroneously assumed they did not. For decades, politicians on both sides had routinely referred to people on the other side in “enemy” terms, an image that was bound to take root among those who had no relatives beyond the Wall.106 By the

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mid-1980s few of the real “brothers and sisters” were likely to visit in any case, were they still alive; the share of FRG citizens who claimed to have friends and relatives in the East declined from 41% in 1953 to 13.6% by 1985. GDR residents were sometimes annoyed by the condescending attitudes of West visitors.107 By 2019, 95% of all Easterners had visited the old Länder, while 21% of their counterparts had never been to the other side.108 Drawing on retroactive assessments, Eckard Priller found that many Easterners considered alternative forms of voice available to them prior to 1989 more effective than those they encountered in united Germany. According to a 1997 poll, a majority held that their ability to affect decisions at the national, district and communal levels was “the same,” while their influence at the factory and trade-union levels had been greater in GDR times. Questioned about specific participatory mechanisms after unification (elections, party work, holding office, petitions), 45–50% claimed that such activities achieved “little,” 11–20% responded “practically nothing.”109 The point is not that Easterners are inherently anti-­ democratic but rather that voice and loyalty come with their own cultural “baggage”; the latter also gives rise to social prejudices against “others.” This is clearly reflected in the negative adjectives each side used to describe the other after unification, summarized by the labels Besserwessis and Jammerossis.110 The former grossly undervalued the latter’s ability to carve out meaningful lives and careers in the face of chronic scarcities, if residents in the old Länder thought about GDR conditions at all. After briefly “testing the west,” many eastern residents decided that some of their own ways and products were better, resulting in the Ostalgie wave of the late 1990s.111 Curiously, no one talked about Westalgie, beyond the “loss” of the D-Mark in exchange for the Euro. It has taken thirty years for westerners to admit, finally, that East German experiences had not been adequately “recognized.”112 The fact that 72% of East Germans still think that this is the case at least partly explains why roughly 20% have gravitated to rightwing AfD politicians, some of whom openly espouse neo-Nazi positions; examples include Lutz Bachmann (Saxony), Björn Höcke (Thüringen), and Andreas Kalbitz (Brandenburg). Few, including Hirschman, could have anticipated this exercise of voice among self-liberating easterners, given four decades’ worth of official anti-fascist socialization. Unification also precipitated a curious twist with regard to exit. In addition to the hundreds of thousands who headed for the Federal Republic

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between 1989 and 1990, another 3.3 million migrated westward after unification. In December 1989 alone, Leipzig lost 5269 of its “heroes,” out of 547,000 residents (1988); by late 1992, over 16,000 had left the city. Dresden, Karl Marx Stadt (renamed Chemnitz), and East Berlin lost another 54,000.113 The East German population declined from 16.3 million to 12 million by 2013. The ones who departed were younger, better educated, and disproportionately female, depriving the new states of critical human capital, on top of the extraordinary financial and cultural capital losses inflicted on the new states after 1989.114 We now turn to a few post-unity efforts by Eastern Germans to integrate some of their own mobilizational and trust-building skills into a new, democratized civil society landscape.

Notes 1. Christa Wolf. 1990. Was bleibt. Darmstadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand. 2. Die Taz published a collection of speeches, eye-witness accounts, and time-­capsule elements extending from August to December 1989: see Ute Scheub and Bascha Mika, eds. 1989. DDR Journal zur November Revolution. Frankfurt/Main. Deutschland Archiv issued another account, covering August 1989 through May 1990, “Chronik der Ereignisse in der DDR.” For day-by-day chronicles, see Christoph Links and Hannes Bahrmann. 1990. Wir sind das Volk, Die DDR im Aufbruch. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag; and Jean-Jacques Alcandre. 1991. BRDDR: von der Wende in der DDR zur Vereinigung Deutschlands. Strasbourg: Presse Universitaires. 3. Timur Kuran. 1991. “Now out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989.” World Politics 44 (1): 7–48. 4. Peter Förster and Günter Roski. 1990. DDR zwischen Wende and Wahl. Meinungsforscher analysieren den Umbruch. Berlin: LinksDruck Verlag, 161ff. 5. Wolfgang Leonhard. 1955. Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 6. Karl Marx. 1845. “Private Property and Communism,” The German Ideology, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/germanideology/ch01a.htm. Regarding his personal life, see Volker Elis Pilgrim. 1990. Adieu Marx. Gewalt und Ausbeutung im Hause des Wortführers. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 7. Reinhard Wagner. 1998. DDR Witze: Walter schützt von Torheit nicht, Erich währt am längsten. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 81.

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8. Stefan Wolle. 1999. Die heile Welt der Diktatur. Alltag und Herrschaft in der DDR, 1971–1989. Munich: Econ & List, 167–170. 9. The number of “tank-safes” supplied by VEB Gothaer Metal Works rose from 100 to 12,020 in six years. The state likewise controlled printing and copy machines, until new technologies made it easier for westerners to smuggle them in during church visits. Wolle, Die heile Welt der Diktatur, 228–229. 10. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 99. 11. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 109. 12. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 29. 13. Walter Ulbricht declared at an East Berlin press conference on June 15, 1961: “No one has the intention of building a wall.” 14. Exact numbers of those fleeing to West Germany and West Berlin vary according to the source. I rely on Helge Heidemeyer, 1994. Flucht und Zuwanderung aus der SBZ/DDR, 1945/1949–1961. Düsseldorf: Droste Verlag; and Bettina Effner and Helge Heidemeyer, eds. 2005. Flucht im geteilten Deutschland. Erinnerungsstätte, Notaufnahmelager Marienfeld. Berlin-Brandenburg: be.bra Verlag. 15. Solveig Grothe. 2008. “FKK in der DDR: Aufstand der Nackten.” Der Spiegel, June 10. 16. Stefan Wolle. 2008. Der Traum von der Revolte. Die DDR 1968, Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 37. 17. See Landolf Scherzer. 1988. Der Erste. Protokoll einer Begegnung. Rudolfstadt: Greifenverlag. 18. Objecting to “free love,” Ulbricht remarried in 1953; Honecker married for the third time in 1955. 19. Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 150. Angela Merkel’s family was vacationing in Prague in August 1968. 20. Not all Warsaw Pact countries sent troops, nor was the GDR’s military role as active as it claimed; Soviet leaders were reluctant to re-awaken historical memories of German boots on Czech soil. 21. Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 172, 168. 22. Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 226. 23. Uwe Kraehnke, Anja Zschirpe, Matthias Finster, Philipp Reiman, and Scott Stock Gissendanner. 2018. “The District Leadership Cadre of the Stasi: Who were these Men and why did They not crush the Mass Protests in 1989?.” German Politics and Society 36 (4), 2. 24. Ariane Riecker, Annett Schwarz and Dirk Schneider. 1990. Stasi intim. Gespräche mit ehemaligen MfS-Mitarbeitern. Leipzig: Forum Verlag, 84–85. 25. Peter C. Ludz. 1980., Die DDR zwischen Ost und West. Von 1961–1976. Munich: C.H. Beck, 151ff.

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26. See Wolf Biermann. 1991. Uber das Geld und Herzensdinge. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. 27. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 376. 28. Jürgen Danyel and Elke Kimmel. 2016. Waldsiedlung Wandlitz: Eine Landschaft der Macht. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag; “DDR Korruption: Ganz absurde Kult,” Der Spiegel, December 31, 1990, 31–32. 29. Rita K. Kuczynski. 2015. Wall Flower: Life on the German Border (trans: Anthony J. Steinhoff). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 30. Volker Ronge. 1985. Von drüben nach hüben: DDR Bürger im Westen. Wuppertal: Hartmann & Petit. 31. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 477. 32. “Freikäufe: Stempel der Unmoral,” Der Spiegel, April 1, 1991, 69. 33. Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff and Oliver Schröm, “Das Kirchengeschäft B,” Die Zeit, September 4, 1992, 7. 34. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 346. 35. See https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-­de/aktuelles/haeftlings freikauf-­letztes-­kapitel-­422280. In 1979, prison sentences were increased from six to eight years. For details regarding his two-year experience in prison prior to forced deportation, see Karl Winkler. 1983. Made in GDR: Jugendszenen aus Ost Berlin. Berlin: Oberbaumverlag. 36. Kleine-Brockhoff and Schröm, “Das Kirchengeschäft B,” 6–8. 37. “Niklas, Hölle und Kalle,” Der Spiegel, September 30, 1991: 67–72. 38. Peter Wensierski. 2017. Die unheimliche Leichtigkeit der Revolution: Wie eine Gruppe junger Leipziger die Rebellion in der DDR wagte. Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 314. 39. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 514. 40. “Ich bin das Volk,” Der Spiegel, April 16, 1990: 72–90. 41. Jens Reich. 1992. Abschied von den Lebenslügen. Die Intelligenz und die Macht. Berlin: Rowohlt. 42. Kuran. “Now out of Never.” 43. Links and Bahrmann, Wir sind das Volk, 80. 44. Cited in Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin), August 4, 1989, Interviewed by the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, Seiters reported that 70,000–80,000 FRG adolescents had crossed the border between 1987 and 1988 to engage in GDR sponsored cultural, touristic, and sporting activities, while the number of young Easterners permitted to attend comparable events in the west had been limited to 3,800–5,000. 45. The border “opening” began as a technical decision not to replace malfunctioning electronic components along the fence that Hungary could no longer order from the Soviet Union. 46. See “DDR—Sehr allein,” Der Spiegel, July 31, 1989, 25ff. 47. Wolle, Die heile Welt, 359.

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48. My translation of Bertolt Brecht’s 1961 “Lob der Dialectic,” in Gedichte. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag. 49. A banner hanging in Prague read: “Poland -10 years, Hungary -10 months, East Germany 10 weeks, Czechoslovakia -10 days, “as reported by Timothy Garten Ash. 1990. “Czechoslovakia: The Velvet Revolution,” Uncaptive Minds 3 (January–February), 11. The Romanian regime collapsed in merely 10 hours, ending in the summary execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife on Christmas Day. 50. The phase “typically GDR” came up frequently during my interviews, usually uttered in a disparaging tone, like the phrase “typically German” in the FRG.  I use this term to indicate traits that citizens perceived as weaknesses or faults, which they felt unable to change. 51. See “DDR-Verordnung über Reisen und Ausreisen,” reprinted in Deutschland Archiv 22, Nr. 1, (January 1989). 52. Ironically, Gorbachev had visited Poland shortly before the Jaruzelski government fell, as well as China, one week before the People’s Democracy Movement was terminated at Tiananmen Square. 53. See the Leipzig anthology, Wolfgang Scheider, ed. 1990. Demontagebuch: Demo Montag Tagebuch. Leipzig/Weimar: Kiepenheuer Verlag. 54. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1998. From Postwar to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes towards the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany. Boulder CO: Westview, 131–134. 55. Uwe Meiselbach shared a personal report describing his 24-hour detention by the Stasi in a horse-stable outside of Leipzig. 56. The “duty to work” was sacrosanct, as was the belief that one should never do more than legally required. 57. See the cast of characters profiled by Wensierski, in Die unheimliche Leichtigkeit der Revolution. 58. Förster und Roski, DDR zwischen Wende und Wahl, 61–164. 59. Both terms stem from Jürgen Habermas. 1990. “Der DM-Nationalismus,” Die Zeit, April 6. 60. In spring 1990, I hosted a Sunday brunch at which one East Berliner boasted about how much donated “technology” was still sitting around in boxes unused, due to the surplus; this visibly irritated two West Berliners who had contributed DM5000 to purchase it, to assist the SDP. 61. “Das war wie eine Ohrfeige,” Der Spiegel, February 19, 1990. 62. For a list of Round Table participants, see Helmut Herles and Ewald Rose, eds. 1990. Vom Runden Tisch zum Parlament. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 308–314. 63. “Jahre der bitteren Wahrheiten,” Der Spiegel, July 15, 1991, 41. 64. “Bundestagspräsident Schäuble: ‘Ostdeutsche haben Westdeutsche wertvolle Erfahrung voraus’,” Der Tagesspiegel, December 28, 2019.

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65. Mushaben, From Postwar to Post-Wall Generations, 131; “Übersiedler: Einzelzimmer im Puff,” Der Spiegel, January 7, 1990, 55–58; “DDR: ‘Sie fühlen sich betupft’,” Der Spiegel, January 14, 1990, 16–18. 66. Michael Vester, Michael Hofmann, and Irene Zierke, eds. 1984. Soziale Millieus in Ostdeutschland: Gesellschaftliche Strukturen zwischen Zerfall und Neubildung. Köln: Bund Verlag. 67. Pierre Bourdieu. 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgment of taste (trans: Richard Nice). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 68. Thomas Ahbe. 2005. Ostalgie. Zum Umgang mit der DDR Vergangenheit in den 1990er Jahre. Erfurt: Landeszentrale für politische Bildung Thüringen, 27. 69. John Borneman. 1981. After the Wall: East meets West in the New Berlin. New York: Basic Books, 81. 70. Thomas Ahbe. 1993. “Ostalgie als Laienpraxis: Einordnung, Bedingungen, Funktion, Berliner Debate INITIAL 10 (3), 87. 71. Jonathan Bach. 2002. “The Taste Remains”: Consumption, (N)ostalgia, and the Production of East Germany.” Public Culture 14 (3), 551. 72. Thomas Ahbe. 1997. “Ostalgie oder die Fähigkeit zu trauern,” Die Zeit, May 23,. 73. Ahbe, Ostalgie, 62. 74. Hans-Joachim Veen. 1997. “Innere Einheit—aber wo liegt sie? Eine Bestandsaufnahme im siebten Jahr nach der Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 40–41: 19–28. 75. Bach, “The Taste Remains,” 546. They tried to name the store Kaufhaus des Ostens (spoofing West Berlin’s show-case store, KaDeWe), then Kaufhalle des Ostens, but both attracted letters from corporate lawyers. 76. Bach, “The Taste Remains,” 552, 549. 77. Ahbe, Ostalgie, 50, 54. 78. Ahbe, Ostalgie, 60. 79. Ahbe, Ostalgie, 61. 80. Kuran, “Now out of Never,” 16. 81. There were a few noteworthy exceptions to the “safe space” rule, for example, the 1988 Stasi raid on the Zionskirche. 82. Andrew Demschuk. 2020. Bowling for Communism. Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 83. Andrea Teti and Gennaro Gervasio. 2011. “The Unbearable Lightness of Authoritarianism: Lessons from the Arab Uprisings.” Mediterranean Politics: 321–327. 84. Jacqueline Boysen. 2001. Angela Merkel, Eine deutsch-deutsche Biographie. Munich: Ullstein, 54–55. 85. Riecker, Schwarz, and Schneider, Stasi Intim, 76.

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86. Daniel Niemetz. 2020. Staatsmacht am Ende. Der Militar- und Sicherheitsapparat der DDR in Krise und Umbruch 1985 bis 1990. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag. 87. Kraehnke, Zschirpe, Finster, et al., “The District Leadership Cadre,” 23. 88. Riecker, Schwarz, and Schneider, Stasi intim, 74. 89. Riecker, Schwarz, and Schneider, Stasi intim, 70. 90. Riecker, Schwarz, and Schneider, Stasi intim, 113, 115. 91. Kuran, “Now out of Never,” 33. 92. Mimeographed data provided by ZIJ colleagues in 1990. Also, ZIJ, 139–141. 93. Cited in Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2017. Becoming Madam Chancellor: Angela Merkel and the Berlin Republic. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 56. 94. Albert O. Hirschman. 1993. “Exit, Voice, and the Fate of the German Democratic Republic: An Essay in Conceptual History.” World Politics 45 (2), 193. 95. See Winkler’s prison memoire, Made in GDR. 96. Andreas G. Graf., “Öffenlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit in der geschlossenen Gesellschaft der DDR,” Expert Report for the German Bundestag Inquiry, Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur im Prozess der deutschen Einheit (1995–1998), 54. I rely on the draft copy Graf shared with me prior to its inclusion in the officially published report. 97. Wolfgang Büscher and Peter Wensierski. 1984. Null Bock auf DDR: Aussteigerjugend im anderen Deutschland. Hamburg: Rowohlt; further, Hans-Joachim Maaz. 1990. Der Gefühlsstau. Ein Psychogramm der DDR. Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1990. 98. For examples, see Graf, “Öffenlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit.” 99. Thomas Günther. 1992. “Die subkulturellen Zeitschriften in der DDR und ihre kulturgeschichtliche Bedeutung.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 20: 27–36. 100. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1986. “Grassroots and Gewaltfreie Aktionen: A Study of Mass Mobilization Strategies in the West German Peace Movement.” Journal of Peace Research 23 (2): 141–154. 101. Albert O. Hirschman. 1970. Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 78–79. 102. Christian Joppke. 1993. “Why Leipzig? ‘Exit’ and ‘Voice’ in the East German Revolution,” German Politics 2 (3): 393–414; Steven Pfaff. 2006. Exit-Voice Dynamics and the Collapse of East Germany: The Crisis of Leninism and the Revolution of 1989. Durham NC: Duke University Press. 103. See the Spiegel series, authored by Cordt Schnibben, “Das bessere Deutschland,” Part I 15/1991, 154–167; Part II, 16/1991, 146–164.

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104. Pierre Bourdieu. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 86. 105. Peter Schneider. 1982. Der Mauerspringer. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 13. 106. Ute and Wolfgang Benz, eds. 2001. Deutschland, deine Kinder. Zur Prägung von Feindbildern in Ost und West. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag. 107. For examples, see Mushaben, From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations, 102–108. 108. Christiane Hübscher. 2019. “Wie die Deutschen in Ost und West über einander denken,” ZDF report, aired August 8. 109. Eckhard Priller. 1997. Ein Suchen und Sichfinden im Gestern und Heute. Verändern die Ostdeutschen ihre Einstellungen und Haltungen zur Demokratie und gesellschaftlichen Mitwirkung? Working Paper FS III 97–411. Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, 8. 110. Susanne Rippl. 1995. “Vorurteile und persönliche Beziehungen zwischen Ost- und Westdeutschen.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 24 (4): 273–283. 111. Ahbe, Ostalgie: Zum Umgang mit der DDR Vergangenheit. 112. “Viele Ostdeutsche fühlen sich bis heute nicht gehört,” Der Spiegel, September 16, 2019; Detlef Pollack. 2019. “Außer Klagen nichts zu sagen?” Der Tagesspiegel, October 21; D. Pollack. 1997. “Das Bedürfnis nach sozialer Anerkennung. Der Wandel der Akzeptanz von Demokratie und Marktwirtschaft in Ostdeutschland.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B13: 3–14. 113. Leipziger Statistik: Sonderinformation 1/1991, “Bevölkerungsentwicklung und Struktur der Stadt Leipzig (Amt für Statistik und Wahlen, 1991), 8–11; also, https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/204439/ leipzig/population. 114. Statistisches Bundesamt. 2019. 25 Jahre Deutsche Einheit. Wiesbaden, 10, 14.

CHAPTER 6

Heimatgefühl and the Reconfiguration of Civil Society

Eins kann ich Dir sagen:     One thing I can tell you: die Lehrjahre sind vorbei.     The apprentice years are over. Mirko Hempel, Erfurt (1997)

The combined influences of generational change, exposure to Western television, and chronic economic deficiencies provided fertile ground for the seeds of an underground civil society that began to blossom in 1986, the year Gorbachev introduced New Thinking to the Soviet Union. Though rudimentary and fragmented by Western standards, a home-­ grown network of “citizen initiatives”—encompassing church groups, peace, and ecology activists, amateur historian clubs, artistic/literary circles, and human rights groups—successfully instigated what forty years of NATO strategizing could not: the peaceful collapse of an authoritarian, socialist regime in 1989. Following unification in 1990, new elites (mostly West Germans), rapidly dismantled GDR administrative, economic, and cultural structures on the presumption that a common institutional framework would soon, in Willy Brandt’s words, allow “that to grow together which belongs together.” They simultaneously eliminated over ninety mass organizations comprising the eastern foundation for social communication and community interaction dating back to 1949. Even GDR citizens who had actively © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_6

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mobilized against oppressive state practices found their new associations pushed aside in the rush to unity. A fledgling citizen-culture intent on fostering new forms of grassroots participation was wiped out, to warrant its replacement by a civil society type deemed more compatible with the Federal Republic’s own “free-democratic order.” Scholars dating back to Alexis de Tocqueville have stressed the pivotal role of civil society in effecting democratic transitions, though few distinguish between the former, positing a new delineation of public and private spheres, and the ideal of a civic culture, evincing high levels of citizen participation in governance.1 The separation of public and private spheres may be a necessary condition, but it is certainly not a sufficient one for integrating non-elites into the governing process. How does one reshape a civil society born of authoritarian conditions into a self-sustaining network of less-than-heroic participants, persistently willing to contribute their time, energy, and money to securing the common good? Like identity, civic culture emerges out of a specific political-cultural and material context. The broader socio-economic landscape lends a particular shape and salience to formal democratic institutions and procedures over time, as demonstrated by the experience of the “old” Federal Republic after 1949. To prove stable in the long run, democratic institutions not only need to represent citizens in a territorial sense; they must also respond to more deep-seated identity needs. My argument here is that citizens who cultivate subjective ties to various intermediary associations will internalize democratic values more quickly than those lacking such ties; they will also be more likely to establish effective channels for advancing their own interests.2 The opportunity to draw on familiar forms of social capital helps newcomers to adapt to unfamiliar institutions and values in hard, transitional times. It also aids them in carving out new spaces for themselves within the existing power structures. East Germans encountered a serious dilemma in this regard, however. The ability to make effective use of social capital presupposes the existence of a positive group identity. In this case, ruling FRG elites could not imagine any features of GDR-identity that might have been worthy of preservation, due to their own failure to differentiate between its official, ideologically driven components and the everyday solidarity dimensions of peer culture. According to Thomas Ahbe, West Germans conditioned by negative media portrayals stereotyped GDR citizens as “politically incapable of democracy, believing only in authority and displaying hostility towards

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foreigners…, (as) provincial, petty-bourgeois, tacky and nerdy, not very diligent at work, lacking drive and entrepreneurial spirit and, as far as aesthetic preferences go, [occupying] a totally backwards milieu.”3 They presumed that “on the basis of many years of dictatorship,” Easterners entered their union with the FRG with “no experience in self-organization and volunteer engagement.”4 In fact, networking was very dense during GDR times, some of it good, some of it mandatory, but much of it humanly spontaneous. Workplace collectives and neighborhood niches arose out of personal, utilitarian reflections: Who can provide me with what, and what can I offer in exchange? Interest mobilization of this sort is also a driving force of democracy. Members of various “friendship” societies, regional soccer clubs or local gardening associations did not see themselves as the active accomplices of an authoritarian regime. The millions of citizens who participated in diverse mass organizations, even if state sponsored, were more likely to view their engagement as a normal means of “belonging” to a larger culture of collective action. The largest organizations, the Free Democratic Youth (FDJ, 2.3 million), the Democratic Women’s Federation (DFD, 1.5 million) and the Trade Union Federation (FDGB, 9.6 million), clearly exercised official system-maintenance functions, but they also arranged courses, rock-concerts, dances, and family-vacation trips. The Deutsche Turn- und Sportbund, the Union of Small Gardeners and Animal Breeders, and Volkssolidarität (assisting retirees) had several million members each; the Kulturbund enlisted another 260,000 dues-paying members.5 One study indicated that roughly half of the GDR citizens surveyed in 1987 were already involved in diverse volunteer functions, largely tied to the workplace; 12% participated directly in communal affairs. A majority polled prior to the 1989 demonstrations expressed dissatisfaction with official political institutions, implying that their engagement was motivated by factors other than mere conformity or positive identification with the regime. The most frequently cited reasons for NOT participating back then centered on a “lack of time” (34%) or “family burdens” (31%), the same excuses offered in the old Länder, although more GDR women (90%) held full-time jobs and produced more children than FRG women.6 According to a 1993 survey of thirty-three clubs, self-help groups, and citizen-initiative activists in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, only 18.8% felt that die Wende (Turn-around) provided them with their first real opportunity for citizen engagement; 70.3% disagreed with that proposition.7 The rudimentary civil society rooted in state-socialism had little chance to

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unfold, however, given the rapid take-over by well-endowed West German parties and interest organizations. Still, the clear-cutting of the GDR associational landscape after 1990 left behind some very fallow ground. The first four years of unity were marked by a veritable “founding boom” of clubs, though most were non-political in nature. This chapter explores early efforts by local activists to adapt eastern mobilizational habits to new civil society opportunities and requirements. The social capital they sought to invest in new interest groups was derived, in part, from their experiences with formal, state-sanctioned organizations. This leads me to construe their post-unity activities as an effort to de- and reconstruct the GDR-feeling that emerged between May 1989 and September 1990. It starts with a description of the so-called representation gap that initially moved East Germans—understandably loathe to join political parties after forty years of SED domination—to ally themselves with new or resuscitated intermediary associations. After considering the role of interest organizations as generators of social capital, the sine qua non of civic culture, I offer six regional case studies, illustrating ways in which East Germans sought to create spaces for their own norms, needs and associational styles within the western institutional framework during the first decade of unification. These depictions draw on internal organizational documents and field interviews with key players in each domain. In contrast to the image of the passive, whiny Easterner (Jammerossi) prevailing in the old Länder at the time, the individuals comprising my sample evinced a spirit of self-assertion, citizen-competence, and belonging that Westerners failed to recognize as legitimate sources of voice.

Political “Representation Gaps” in the Eastern Länder Surveys conducted over the last thirty years make it very clear that East Germans are far from content with the way democracy “works” in the Federal Republic. It was apparent in 1990 that they would initially be relegated to minority status, given their dismal economic situation and smaller population size: between 1989 and 1990, domestic production plunged by 40%, accompanied by rising unemployment. In 1994, the point at which the eastern GDP returned to 1990 levels, the new Länder were still generating less than 10% of that in the old states (DM 256.7

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billion vs. DM2709.6 billion, respectively).8 Few expected the representation gap across all societal domains to persist for another thirty years, however: as late as 2016, Easterners accounted for merely 1.7% of all elite positions in Germany.9 In formal-constitutional terms, the “accession territory” (under Article 23, Basic Law) enjoyed no special representational rights in the governing organs, despite the extraordinary problems it faced. The four ex-GDR citizens who served in Kohl’s two Cabinets through 1998 possessed none of the political clout exercised by “eastern expellee” (BHE) spokespersons under Adenauer. The five young states were outnumbered by eleven old ones in the Bundesrat, yet the four biggest western Länder were granted a special right to block any vote (Sperrminorität, twenty-four of sixty-eight votes) deliberately denied to the new ones. The lack of a single eastern judge on the bench of the Constitutional Court (BVerfG) was particularly galling, when the latter recriminalized abortion for GDR women in 1993.10 Of the eight new BVerfG justices appointed between 2013 and 2019, not a single one hailed from the young states. Born in Sachsen-­ Anhalt, Ines Härtel became the first to join that bench in July 2020, thirty years after unification. Outnumbered in the Bundestag by 523 (including West Berlin) to 139 (with East Berlin), parliamentarians from the new Länder were once again subject to party-discipline, pitting eastern members (MdBs) against each other even when they shared policy preferences; they were permitted to form their own parliamentary “group” in March 1996, holding token seats in the executive organs of the major parties, along with 20% of the seats in larger delegate bodies. As Heidrun Abromeit attested prior to 1998, “in none of the relevant interest mediation organizations do eastern interests have even the slightest internal chance of being carried out. The representational gap could hardly be greater.”11 Only western party bosses were deemed adequately qualified to determine electoral themes and strategies for the East-states, reminiscent of the FRG’s earlier Alleinvertretungsanspruch—the claim that only Bonn could legitimately represent Germany as a whole. Claims of this sort were ironic, given that Politikverdrossenheit (political vexation) was a serious problem in the FRG itself prior to unification.12 The one thing east and west voters have consistently shared since 1990 is their annoyance over the self-serving machinations of “the party state.” Several years into unity, eastern constituents found their Cabinets, administrative agencies, and party headquarters still dominated by western

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“imports.” Willy Bürklin determined in his 1995 elite study that 41% of the 402 leadership positions located in the new states were still occupied by West Germans. Comprising nearly 20% of the total population, East Germans accounted for only 2.5% of the top national administrators, 0.4% of the economic leaders, 12.4% of all union officials, 11.7% of media executives, 7.4% of the academic/scientific elites, and virtually none of the military brass.13 Where they might have felt irritated, in Helmut Wiesenthal’s words, by the “extreme asymmetry of the starting conditions” immediately after unification, the focus soon shifted to a “responsiveness gap” pertaining to policy outcomes, a gap only the PDS actively addressed.14 Younger residents looked for ways to engage at other levels, confident that they had sufficiently mastered the rule of law to participate in policy debates beyond their own border. A 1996 survey of citizens from both parts of Germany set their share of registered organizational memberships at 27% (W) and 16% (E), respectively. Many ascribed their non-engagement to the fact that “no one had personally asked them” to join (38% West, 46% East), attesting to the significance of personal ties in fostering collective action. “Self-help” or groups like sports or fitness clubs added 15.9 million registrants.15 A further Potsdam study determined that volunteer work in the athletic domain fostered community identity and democratic “learning,” though the high cost of privatized facilities posed problems for the newly unemployed.16 Others were pre-occupied with home renovations or going out to “see the world.” Members of the Aufbau generation had more time to volunteer, coupled with deeply rooted collective experiences, since most workers over fifty-five were forced into early retirement. A few state-directed organizations quickly transformed themselves into registered and/or non-profit associations (Table  6.1), leading Priller to reject the image of Easterners as passive or incapable of democracy: “a dynamic and multifaceted yet structured organizational landscape has been established in the east German transformational society. The impression that people are tired of organizations, which could arise inter alia by looking at the widespread decline in [traditional] memberships, is consequently not accurate.”17 A municipal official in Magdeburg told me in June 1997 that his department was once again receiving many personal letters requesting that he “fix things,” a practice stemming from the Eingabe-petitions of old, suggesting that new, party-bound politicians were not up to the job.

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Table 6.1  New entries in selected registers of associations, 1990–1996 Register of associations (site of county court)

State capitals Berlin Dresden Erfurt Magdeburg Potsdam Schwerin Rural-industrial regions Gorlitz Malchin Teterow

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

509 1237 536 554 469 287

1021 102 76 121 279 128

1566 209 141 139 248 178

990 395 233 165 78 116

1,112 495 155 146 220 76

855 297 138 124 148 78

– 195 127 91 138 85

284 81 54

70 15 18

21 22 8

40 24 18

44 29 15

30 14 12

25 10 13

Source: Helmut K. Anheier, Eckhard Priller, and Annette Zimmer, “Civic Society in Transition: The East German Non-profit Sector Six years after Unification,” Working Paper No. 13 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University), 4

Unification undermined or deconstructed social capital made-in-the-­ GDR that had allowed for non-state political communication under an otherwise authoritarian system, beginning in the late 1970s.18 For Pierre Bourdieu, social capital “is the sum of resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition.”19 Concerned with the deterioration of social capital in the United States, Robert Putnam described it as a broad assortment of interpersonal networks embodying the “civic solidarity” that renders a democracy both stable and responsive to citizen needs. Beyond strengthening social trust, it fosters “sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity”; recognizing their personal stake in the outcomes of collective action, citizens undertake purposive action on behalf of others.20 This is not to argue that all forms of social capital contribute to civic culture. Convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was, after all, a member of a local “bowling league.” Correspondingly, resurgent white supremacy and right-­ extremist groups, as well as more radical “anti-fa” elements on both sides of the Atlantic, make extensive use of social media to pursue anti-­ democratic ends. Drawing on the writings of democratic theorists, I developed a number of operational criteria (detailed elsewhere) to identify several post-unity

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groups that were initially effective in merging old forms of associational life with new democratic-participatory causes.21 We now turn to six case studies involving old and new forms of associational life which fit into the civil society turned civic culture framework outlined above. Focusing on a wide array of policy or communal issues, my sample encompasses three types of configuration: (1) groups emerging out of the 1989 Turn-­ Around, attracting new members in pursuit of new causes; (2) former GDR organizations that democratized themselves, in order to take on new purposes; and (3) FRG organizations that sought to establish themselves in the new Länder by “reshaping” themselves to fit local/regional conditions. The following sketches include at least one from each category. Die Grüne Liga (Green League) of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern One successful interest organization that deliberately applied GDR experiences to its pursuit of democratization from below was the Green League, a Wende-era environmental group with “entrepreneurial” branches operating in all five new states. The League had its roots in the underground ecology movement that took refuge in the Lutheran Church during the late 1970s. Having created an Environmental Ministry in 1969, the GDR was the second country, after Sweden, to adopt a “comprehensive” ecology law (Landeskulturgesetz) in 1970. Recognized for its efforts at Stockholm’s first international eco-conference in 1972, it attempted to map areas subject to noise, air, and water pollution but made it clear that only state organs could access the data.22 SED Minister Hans Reichelt declared in 1984, “We have pursued environmental politics in our state of workers and farmers since its founding, not as a value in and of itself but as an immanent component of our overall policies. It finds its expression not in spontaneous actions but rather … always with forward-looking planning, executed by state organs, the conglomerates, factories and cooperatives.”23 Concerned citizens were usually thwarted in their efforts to build a broader constituency by way of the state-sanctioned Society for Nature and the Environment (GNU), established in 1980. Beyond tracing the evolution of underground protest groups, Peter Wensierski documented the rapid deterioration of environmental conditions, deliberately ignored (and exacerbated) by western currency-addicted SED organs. Covering the period 1970 to 1986, he investigated nine categories of air, water, chemical, agricultural, noise, workplace, and nuclear

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pollution, based on 3500 sources.24 The picture he painted prior to 1989 was both depressing and frightening, especially when coupled with FRG waste-dumping deals that violated many laws on its own turf. As pastor’s wife Kerstin Klaubert fumed: “What they [West Germans] did to us was simply a gigantic scandal (eine Riesenschweinerei)… burying us in garbage for years, though they knew exactly that we could not defend ourselves.”25 Post-1990 reports published by Der Spiegel contained equally horrifying details regarding near melt-downs at state-operated nuclear plants, poisoned groundwater, toxic gas incidents, workplace hazards, and skyrocketing cancer rates, leading one to wonder how workers and their offspring managed to survive long enough to bring down the system.26 Many experts noted after the fact that the massive shut down of GDR mines and industries in the wake of privatization was “the best environmental policy ever adopted” in the East, despite the economic hardships it entailed for those who had labored in them. The oil price shock of the 1970s led the SED to rely primarily on the only natural resource at its disposal: brown coal, known as lignite. Considered “soft,” brown coal ranks as one of the world’s cheapest, dirtiest fossil fuels; containing less carbon than “hard” black coal, it produces less heat when burned, while also generating greater sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions, a known source of “acid rain.” To replace one ton of oil, eastern power plants had to burn eight tons of brown coal. Having depleted its more productive coalfields, the regime turned to geologically inferior sites, where extractions consumed ever larger surface areas: between 1966 and 1980, it sacrificed 15,000  hectares of forest to open eighteen new mines, followed by another nineteen mines. While collecting a ton of ore required 3.65 cubic meters of stripped land in 1975, it gobbled up 8.5 m3 in some areas by 1986—equivalent to 8000 soccer fields per year.27 Between 1960 and 1980, strip mining displaced 30,000 residents, eliminating seventy villages, 125 km of railroad tracks, 200 km of streets, and 60 km of waterways.28 By the mid-1980s, the GDR was releasing more SO2 into the atmosphere than the FRG, three times its size. The Lausitz mines generated more SO2 than all of the power plants in Norway and Denmark combined. The “super power-plant” at Boxberg, responsible for 20% of GDR electricity generation, consumed 30 million tons of coal, emitting 460,000 tons of sulfur dioxide in exchange. The party abandoned its 1970 plan to shut down refining facilities in Boehlen, Deuben, and Espenhain, whose processes dated back to the 1920s. It also rejected the idea of reducing sulfur

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dioxide emissions by mixing it with lime as “unrealistic”: requiring 20 tons of lime for each ton of SO2, experts projected a cost of 2 billion Marks.29 As early as 1980, Bonn had been forced to invest over DM230 million on its side to counter GDR industrial lime-salt flowing into the Werra and Weser Rivers from Thüringen, affecting drinking water in Hessen, Niedersachsen, Nordrhein-Westfalen, and Bremen.30 The toxic cocktails regularly released into freshwater bodies by eastern chemical industries, along with the unbearable stench, smoke, and gases belching out of factory chimneys, poisoned not only factory workers but also entire residential settlements. Hardest hit were the areas surrounding Halle, Karl-Marx Stadt, Cottbus, Bitterfeld, Wolfen, Merseburg, and Leipzig. As the second most populated district, Halle accounted for 40% of all chemical production. The amount of mercury pumped into the Saale River by the Buna conglomerate would have sufficed to produce 3 million thermometers a year.31 Many plants built in the 1920s lacked basic equipment for measuring arsenic, coal ash, lead, cadmium, chlorine, magnesium, phenol, benzene, zinc, and dioxin run-offs. Water-poor by nature (800 m3 per capita, compared to 3000 m3 in the FRG), the GDR’s lack of sewage-filtration systems had rendered all but 17% of its water sources “dead,” explaining the lack of fish available for “heathier diets.”32 Over 7.6 million citizens faced regular disruptions in the drinking water supply; mothers were advised to prepare baby foods with bottled water. Corroded, leaking pipes became breeding grounds for bacteria, pesticide run-offs, and chlorine compounds; health officials in Dresden even found decomposed rats and frogs in the drinking water supply.33 The fifteen civil servants charged with monitoring 531 kilometers of river in the Halle district had two vehicles at their disposal.34 The SED approved countless remediation measures, but few were executed, due to costs. Facing only low fines, industrial conglomerates had little incentive to stop leakage or upgrade technologies. The SED’s first response was to relegate all ecological and related health statistics to the Panzerschrank as “strictly classified.” It adopted the Ordinance Securing the Protection of Secrets in the Environmental Data Domain in November 1982, insisting that “nothing could be worse” than revealing data that its enemies “could use to damage our republic.”35 Next, it blamed increasing lung cancer rates and childhood bronchial diseases on “people smoking too much,” as well as on the “egotistical behavior” of individual factories, bent on their own gain at the expense of limiting emissions—in a centrally planned, command economy! It

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nonetheless allowed local officials to negotiate with their respective industries (800 of 2500 deemed heavy polluters) to raise the level of “acceptable emissions.” When experts reported that 40% of its 1768 known plant types had disappeared, 6000 animal species were threatened with extinction, and only 14% of its forests were not “visibly” dying, top officials proclaimed, “the forests aren’t dying, they are just changing.” The rest was blamed on “weather anomalies.”36 Rulers then ordered that all industrial chimneys be heightened to 300  meters, rendering East Germany “the land of 1000 volcanos.” Workers and their dependents could breathe more easily in the worst areas, but the net result was that toxic residues were dispersed across the rest of the country, raising SO2 levels as far north as the Baltic Sea. Laborers at its disaster-ripe nuclear plants received 400 Marks in “garden money” to purchase fresh vegetables and fruit, to prevent consumption of local products. Near-meltdowns involving Greifswald and other reactors led authorities to “deputize” all technicians as Stasi agents, sworn to secrecy regarding all accidents and repairs.37 If there was one thing the GDR got right, it was the “Sero” system, the secondary recycling of raw materials. It involved a network of 16,000 drop-off centers, employing of 11,000 workers. They accepted paper, glass, plastics, and elastics, along with other reusable materials. Pensioners and youth often went door-to-door collecting such items, receiving 20 cents per bottle, 30 cents per kilo of newspapers, and M1.80 for each two pounds of aluminum they turned in. In 1989, the GDR reprocessed 1.27 million pieces of glass, 620,000 tons of old paper, 11,000 tons of plastic, and 422,000 tons of scrap materials.38 Average Easterners threw 180 kilos each into the regular garbage, only a third of that ruthlessly disposed of by residents in the old Länder. Following unification, western authorities reduced “Sero to zero,” shutting down 137 stationary and 14 mobile drop-off stations in Berlin alone, costing 400 jobs. Private garbage services quickly moved in, hoping to open several new incinerator sites in the east. Although the Nature Society was largely restricted to symbolic tree-­ planting and bike-riding actions, the SED was loathe to leave ecological issues up to church groups, which were becoming a rallying point for other opposition causes. By 1987, the Interest Community for Urban Ecology [Interessengemeinschaft Stadtökologie] boasted of 380 groups with 7000 members. The latter staged its own forum with delegates from twenty-six “urban-ecology task forces” in conjunction with the GDR’s

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40th anniversary (October 7, 1989), calling for democratic reforms. The latter position enabled the group to seat its own representative at the Central Round Table under the interim Modrow government in December. After meeting at the Bekenntniskirche (Berlin-Friedrichsfelde), participants issued a “founding document” on November 24, 1989, calling themselves Grüne Liga. Their first congress took place on February 3, 1990, in the “ecological catastrophe region” of Halle/Bitterfeld. The Green League faced the same dilemma afflicting other post-unity activists. Despite the catastrophic conditions resulting from the SED’s “industrialization at any price” orientation, most Easterners accorded low priority to the environment in the face of mass unemployment, reaching 25–40% in some locales. The post-Wende period saw a rapid differentiation among environmental initiatives. The GL withdrew from parliamentary processes after the first communal elections (May 1990) in a conscious effort to maintain its own image, work style, and name prior to unification. Autonomy was perceived as “an identity question, to be sure” (interview with Matthias Baerens, GL-Schwerin) among activists hoping “really to make use of a little bit of what was good about the GDR.”39 Members established a federative NGO, promising legal autonomy to its five state branches (Landesverbände) in 1992. Its Central Speakers’ Council and Executive Committee were housed in Berlin, aided by regional Contact Bureaus, a National Members Assembly and semi-annual regional meetings. Executive officers responsible for routine coordination tasks served on an unpaid/volunteer basis as of 1996. League organs were officially recognized in 1991 as “bearers of public concerns” under the Federal Nature Protection Law, entitling them to deliver impact statements and participate in hearings on public development plans. High rates of member activism helped to garner political visibility: 50% directly engaged in project work, compared to the “check-book memberships” of larger organizations. Members were integrated into “anti-institutional,” non-hierarchical networks stressing self-mobilization. The Mecklenburg-Vorpommern bureau only helped grassroots groups to secure funding if they had their own sponsors and proved capable of sustained action, a logic shared with the organization as a whole: “The people who come to us are the ones who want to do something themselves. We don’t just represent them. We give advice that promotes self-organization, action on site…. “[we are] working on ourselves, not only to acquire democratic participatory skills but also to advance personal lifestyle changes.” The Green League saw itself as “a subversive element in a system that is

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generally considered ‘the victor of history’.” Reflecting their socialist roots, members held that western insistence on “the private ownership of the land, the means of production and resources serves the privatization of profits but socializes the resulting damages to water, air and soil.”40 Early GL projects ranged from campaigns to block Autobahn expansions and the Transrapide (super-speed trains) through sensitive areas, to actions against strip mining and damming projects along the Saale, Elbe, and Havel rivers. Others advocated for nature preserves along formerly undeveloped border zones (Mauerstreifen), eco-friendly sanitation/waste disposal systems, and “skill sharing” through city-partnerships with East European groups. Not averse to new technologies per se, it created email and web-page sites, in addition to publishing an ecological telephone/ marketing directory. GL efforts to educate youth by way of eco-tours and eco-vacation camps were so popular in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern that coordinators could hardly meet the demand. The League’s financial resources derived from membership dues, charitable contributions, and project grants secured through state or federal ministries; it received DM230,000 from the Federal Environmental Ministry in 1994 for its Transregional Initiative for Public Education, for example.41 Its entrepreneurial ventures (organic “bio-farms,” beach-hikes, self-financing kindergartens) were grounded in the belief that the GL must “expand or stagnate,” suggesting an effort to impart free-market skills. Members learned how to “use the system” by tapping into federal structural funds linked to unification. Beyond volunteerism, the GL utilized federally funded ABM-Stellen (job-creation programs) to establish local projects. Baerens noted that the GL became “interesting as a job-­ providing model” for West Germans: the Schwerin office had up to seven ABM workers before funding ran out in 1994. It also supplied “alternative service” posts for conscientious objectors (“green helmets”) and adolescents enrolled in a year-long, ecology-volunteer program (Freiwilliges Ökologisches Jahr), covering sixty to seventy participants in Mecklenburg-­ Vorpommern. Financed by the Federal Family and Youth Ministry and other state ministries, the FÖJ allocation totaled DM4.5 million in 1996, supplemented by the EU Social Fund.42 Five Polish youth served as ecointerns in 1997, affirming the GL’s interest in international cooperation beyond “Rio.” The Green League effectively held its own against larger FRG organizations like the Naturschutzbund Deutschland, the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz and Bundesverband Umwelt Schutz (BBU). The state’s

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disaster-­prone nuclear plant (Greifswald) was shut down in 1990. It even scored a few significant court victories. After sixteen years of resistance, it defeated a plan by Dutch investors seeking to establish a giant pig farm (37,000 animals) in Haßleben/Uckermark on what had been the GDR’s largest swine-raising site (140,000).43 In 2019, the Brandenburg state court shut down coal mining in Jänschwalde (Spree-Neiße rivers), for failing to meet EU requirements in a protected flora-fauna habitat. By contrast, the GL’s party equivalent, Bündnis ’90, failed to establish itself in new state parliaments, even after merging with the western Greens in 1993. They lost their only seats in Sachsen-Anhalt in 1998, but registered an eastern comeback in 2019.44 The League embodied “a bit of successful self-assertion,” reconfiguring East German identity by imparting practical skills and a strong community orientation. Unfortunately, the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Landesverband lost traction as many younger citizens migrated westward in search of jobs, though it still has a website (https://de-­de.facebook.com/grueneligamv/) and supports local projects. More disconcerting is the fact that this largely agricultural state saw a surge in AfD voters (over 20%) during the 2016 elections, although the CDU/SPD government retained a ruling majority. Ironically, “Meck-Pom” was Angela Merkel’s home constituency, which profited immensely as a result of the major wind-turbine subsidies under the Chancellor’s “Energy Turn-Around.” By 2012, it was collecting €162 million, while consuming only a fraction of the power it generated, leading one to wonder why the Mecklenburg AfD assiduously attacked Merkel through 2021.45 Volkssolidarität (People’s Solidarity): Landesverband Berlin Our next case involves a GDR institution lacking an FRG equivalent, which continues to operate thirty years after unification. Volkssolidarität (People’s Solidarity) was a mass organization of 2.15 million members tied together by common life conditions, since most social capital ties evolved via the workplace. Created in 1945, it preceded the GDR’s founding, then became the national provider of a wide array of volunteer support services to the elderly and the disabled through 1989. Registering nearly 500,000 dues-paying “subscribers,” 40,000 paid employees and 4000 volunteers in 1996, this association “which had a good reputation” in GDR times” quickly surpassed its FRG competitor, Arbeiterwohlfahrt (Workers’ Welfare), in Berlin and Brandenburg.

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Financially speaking, East German retirees comprised an economically disadvantaged group, based on SED assumptions that cheap rents, free medical care, as well as food and energy subsidies would sustain them in old age. Persistent labor shortages led to a growing pronatalist orientation, with the result that state savings in hard times (e.g., after the 1973 oil crisis) came at the expense of the no longer “productive” elderly.46 Women of the Aufbau generation derived almost no benefit from the “boom years” of the 1960s, meaning that those who had borne the combined burdens of war, widowhood, reconstruction, and child-rearing were shut out, although they had earned less and were living longer. Women continued to lag behind even when 90% engaged in full-time labor, due to their occupational classifications (see Chap. 9). Nor did older women benefit significantly from Honecker’s housing construction and renovation projects after 1972 (central heating, modern bathrooms, elevators), since apartments were generally allocated according to family size. Women comprised a demographic majority for four decades (57% in 1946, 52% in 1989), accounting for 74% of 2.8 million pensioners when the GDR imploded.47 The life-expectancy gap followed gendered patterns witnessed in other industrial societies, as Table  6.2 shows. Two factors deserve mention here: first, life expectancy may have risen at a faster pace for women than for men as a function of dramatic improvements in child-­ birth procedures (prenatal care, lower infant mortality) and/or fewer war-­ related injuries. Second, changes in longevity after 1960 were not as dramatic as one might have expected in a country boasting of free, comprehensive health care, possibly due to poor consumption habits (fatty

Table 6.2  Projected life expectancy in East Germany Year

Male

Female

1952 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1989

63.9 66.4 67.9 68.1 68.5 68.7 69.2 70.1

67.9 71.3 72.9 73.3 74.0 74.6 75.2 76.4

Source: Gunnar Winkler. 1990. Frauenreport 1990. Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft, 159

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diets, rising alcohol consumption) and the toxic environmental conditions outlined above. In 1989, average life expectancy in West Germany stood at 75 years, 79.2 for women, 72.6 for men. The FRG registered its highest life-expectancy gains 1980 through 1986; easterners would see their greatest improvements between 1992 and 1996, after unification. Post-1968 retirees saw their pensions increase by roughly 30% under new calculation rules. The statutory retirement age for those completing at least fifteen years of employment was sixty for women (compensating for the double burden) and sixty-five for men (lower for those in hazardous jobs). The “model work biography” presumed fifty years of service (which few attained, beyond the party bosses), along with consistent earnings and mandatory insurance contributions, but even under those criteria, the average pension (M446, 1989) fell below 50% of the average wage.48 The minimum for those registering less than fifteen years was M300 per month, for those laboring forty–forty-five years, M360. Although increments for child-rearing were included, women with five or more who had not “worked” still received minimum benefits after 1973.49 Increasing living costs impelled the state to raise minimum pensions several times (1972, 1976, 1979, 1986). To reduce its “non-productive” expenditures, the SED introduced Voluntary Supplementary Retirement Insurance (FZR) in 1971, suggesting it had jettisoned the Marxian precept, “from each according to ability, to each according to need.” It began to stress “individual responsibility” and “individual merit,” though only those with higher incomes could afford additional monthly contributions. Despite its glorification of “the working class,” the GDR’s complicated system of pension supplements disproportionately benefited its non-­ manual laborers. For the former, the basic payment amounted to M380.94, or M481.56 with FZR; members of the intelligentsia (in scientific, artistic, pedagogical, technical, or medical fields) started with M500. In December 1989, 12% of women drew only M330, based on twenty-­five to thirty years of service, compared to less than 1% of men; males accounted for 75.3% of those with the highest statutory benefit, M470 (pre-FZR), females only 22.7%.50 Personnel serving the police, the military, customs officials, and postal workers made the same contributions but received higher payouts. Health workers, coal miners (age fifty, with twenty-five years, or fifteen years underground), widows, and the disabled received other subsidies. Equally noteworthy were the generous “honor pensions” (M600–1500, added to statutory benefits) accorded to “recognized” resistance fighters, victims of fascism, and others “making special

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contributions to the state.”51 One fringe benefit of retirement was the ability to visit the West. The state expected to save pension and health costs if senior citizens failed to return; limits on currency-exchange meant that most could not go very far. Situated in neighborhoods and factories, VS clubs blanketed the country until 1989; individual branches scheduled social events, ensured house-­ cleaning assistance, warm meals, and select health services for citizens no longer able to care for themselves. Memberships declined to 852,083 (30%), in 1990/1991, in part because administrative offices stopped collecting dues without “orders from above” (interview with Norbert Clemenz, Landesverband Berlin). Still, the VS retained half a million members whose primary aim was not self-interest or career advancement but rather ministering to the needs of others.52 The number of unpaid VS volunteers fell to a low of 27,046 in 1993, but rose to 36,528 in 1996, especially in Brandenburg, Sachsen-Anhalt, and Mecklenburg-­ Vorpommern.53 It nonetheless remained the largest senior-organization in the East.54 Activists struggling to preserve the association had to adapt to radically new conditions overnight. Dues rose from one East-Mark to DM10–15, as most subsidies disappeared. They immediately had to create a chain of “social stations” for home- and healthcare functions no longer performed by state-financed community nurses.55 Unlike the Green League which could build new sites on unchartered territory after 1990 (given Bündnis 90’s poor electoral showing), People’s Solidarity faced direct competition from well-entrenched FRG welfare organizations (Caritas, Diakonie) which immediately sought to “divvy up” Berlin into distinct service-­ provider areas. Though “not initially understood by the panel of western evaluators” sent in to decide its fate, according to its Director, the VS received strong support from the Paritätische Wohlfahrsverband, the FRG roof organization of welfare providers, in which it now enjoys formal standing. The review process was a learning experience for both sides. Westerners were surprised by the large contingent of volunteers whose point of affiliation was the workplace, in contrast to their own career-tracked social service suppliers. Easterners, including interim Director Clemenz, had to develop and display an unfamiliar degree of “backbone,” to avoid being put in same box with the PDS, because of the VS’s systemic roots. Western directors were oblivious to the ideological underpinnings of their own organizations, conditioned by direct religious affiliations. East Germans moreover

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had to learn not to discuss the size of their pensions, something “not done” in the old states where earnings-differentials and status concerns were much bigger. After democratizing its operational statutes and shifting to a market-­ based (albeit non-profit) accounting system, the Volkssolidarität adopted three functional pillars. First, despite a dramatic breakdown in familiar forms of solidarity, new inequities stemming from mass unemployment and a reconfigured social opportunity structure, it chose to remain a mass membership organization. Though united German pension rules benefited many, the elderly felt overwhelmed by “the extraordinary amount of bureaucracy” they had to master to access their entitlements. The VS cut back on administrative staff to devote more personnel to care-work, like assisting seniors with subsidy applications, as well as to stage volunteer recruitment drives. It was harder to secure long-term involvement among younger citizens, busy with families, career, and new travel opportunities. Second, People’s Solidarity continued to offer a wide array of professional care services and cultural activities. In the 1990s, it managed 24 old-age homes, 506 social centers, adult day-care facilities, self-help stations, and in-home services. The western legal requirement that persons with disabilities be divided into degrees of “need” (to determine the amount of subsidization they “deserved”) initially proved problematic for Eastern seniors who viewed care as an equal right after decades of participation in the paid labor force. Many were too proud to admit actual need, leading to a deterioration in their condition. Following VS intervention, Berlin was no longer subject to functional/territorial divisions; most processing took place through the health insurance system rather than through “welfare” offices as of 1996. Amidst complaints that united Germany was an alienating, selfish place, the VS sought to overcome retirees’ isolation by orchestrating 42,759 interactive events, attracting 1.2 million participants. Among the most popular were efforts to help seniors enjoy a long-coveted freedom to travel: the Berlin branch arranged 38,000 visits to the Matterhorn in 1995, and 30,000 senior vacations to Mallorca in 1996. It accounted for 12,553 jobs in 1997, including 8561 regular, paid-positions, 1350 ABM-­ Stellen, and 1110 “alternative service” jobs (based on internal documents). The third pillar centered on political interest representation, comparable to the AARP’s role in the United States. Volkssolidarität understood itself as a “as a value community with economic clout.” On June 8, 1997, it staged a theater “happening” at the Berlin Schauspielhaus around the

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motto, “Hot hearts against societal coldness”; the first 2000 tickets sold out within hours, obliging VS to stage a second performance later in the day. The price of theater and concert tickets had become prohibitive for many on fixed incomes, but the enthusiastic response was not only cultural; it served as a protest against the Kohl government’s welfare cuts. The political thrust behind its “31 Theses—On the Future Development of the State Pension System,” formally presented to the Berlin Assembly, was more explicit. VS staff used its quarterly magazine, Volkssolidarität heute, to foster political education, and issued a platform statement in time for the 1998 elections (Wahlprüfstein der Volkssolidarität). Eastern residents are now aging at a faster pace than their western counterparts, partly due to a post-unity youth “exit.” Life expectancy now stands at eighty-three for women, seventy-nine for men, but fertility also declined for two decades, shifting the dependency ratio. While the average age was 38.1 (39.6 west) in 1990, this figure was expected to hit 50.4 by 2030, compared to 46.5 in the old states (prior to the 2017–2018 baby-­ boom). On the positive side, a 2013 VS study found that two-thirds of the 50- to 64-year-olds polled belonged to other civil society organizations, like sports clubs, garden associations, and unions.56 People’s Solidarity achieved organizational sustainability under the new democratic requirements. Like the GL, it expanded its range of direct services, eventually sponsoring youth homes and services for persons with disabilities, though the latter formed their own interest organization in 1991. It acquired a kind of “model” character, establishing its first Western branch in Berlin Spandau in 1997 with the support of all political parties; it also began working on a social-station with Turkish activists in Berlin-­ Kreuzberg. A 1994 door-to-door funding drive increased donations by 120% over 1993; collecting DM504,000  in 1995, its 1997 fund drive garnered DM560,264 during the first ten days after its February launch. As of 2011, it had 244,00 members, 17,500 paid staff, 29,000 volunteers, and revenues approaching €500 million. During the week of my 1997 interviews, the VS-Berlin staff was heavily involved in crisis management. The West German catering company responsible for its meals-on-wheels program went bankrupt in June; it simply stopped delivering food to the elderly without notification, placing many at risk to a degree “inconceivable in the GDR.” Director Clemenz revealed that he “didn’t bother to call a second West Berlin business” for an estimate; an eastern firm that came to the rescue was given an immediate contract. In 2011, People’s Solidarity helped to found the Berlin

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Energy Table, partly responsible for the successful 2013 referendum to “deprivatize” energy utilities in the city-state. In this case, the slogan, Wir kaufen Ost (“We buy eastern”) was rooted in reliability, not Ostalgie. Runder Tisch gegen Gewalt (Round Table Against Violence) in Sachsen-Anhalt A third case involving municipal authorities in Magdeburg offers an example of Western “transplants” being partially reshaped by eastern problems, norms, and interactive styles. The period 1991 to 1993 was marked by an extraordinary surge of rightwing, xenophobic violence across the nation united (see Chap. 10). Magdeburg had been rocked with sensational incidents of “Skinhead” violence since unification, primarily targeted against foreigners. The first four years of democratic governance in Sachsen-­ Anhalt were plagued by scandals at the highest levels, compelling the resignation of one western and two eastern CDU minister-presidents, eighteen ministers and twenty-one state secretaries by 1994! Opposition leader Reinhard Höppner (SPD) formed a minority government after new elections, “tolerated” by the Greens and the PDS. He was reelected in 1998 (with PDS toleration), though an extreme-right party, the German People’s Union (DVU), scored a shocking 12.9%. Joblessness at the time hovered between 20 and 30%, although the state had begun attracting foreign investment.57 The catalyst for Magdeburg’s Round Table (RT) against Violence was the death of a young Punk, murdered by Skinheads in the dismal Plattenbau neighborhood of Olvenstedt. A second sensational incident occurred on May 12, 1994 (Ascension Day, known as Fathers’ Day), when drunken Skins and Hooligans rampaged for hours swinging baseball bats, as they chased Bulgarian, Algerian, and African migrants through the streets. Rather than offer protection, some police reportedly cursed the latter, arresting more “foreigners” than Germans despite their familiarity with rightwing trouble-makers.58 First convening on September 11, 1995, the Round Table served as a forum for engaging party delegates, administrative experts, social agencies, and quasi-private field-workers in discussions regarding “the entire spectrum” of violence issues affecting city residents. Public solicitation of participants resulted in a roster of forty-four voting members and thirty “permanent guests.” In 1998, the RT “clear(ed) the corpses from its membership file,” voting out delegates who failed to attend faithfully.

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Starting with a three-month cycle, the group shifted to meeting for two to three hours every two months; its deliberations rested on a set of formal by-laws, a pre-circulated agenda and voting rules; most took place “after work” (4–7 p.m.) on an unpaid, volunteer basis. Responsibility for technical coordination (issuing invitations, producing minutes, advising on legal issues) rested with my interview partners, Dr. Hans-Heinrich Tabke, and Christiane von Wagner. Both hailed from the Department of Communal and Public Order Affairs, directly subordinate to the Mayor; the RT elected its own Chair, however. The Round Table was a participatory model first utilized by protest activists during the exuberant transitional period, December 1989–March 1990, drawing on the experiences of the Polish Solidarnosc. Central Round Table delegates from various opposition groups were accorded equal standing with official members of the interim Modrow Government, to ensure stability, non-violence, grassroots representation, and citizen in-­ put, as well as a quick turn-around of the sclerotic ship of state.59 Lacking extensive grassroots experience of their own, post-1990 politicians used the term broadly to indicate their “closeness to citizens,” leading Leo Jansen to specify seven objective criteria for recognizing “the real thing.” Democratically constituted Round Tables were intended to • undertake an objective/substantive treatment of a clearly determined problem; • make use of self-organization to strengthen a sense of responsibility among individuals and groups; • maintain an unbureaucratic character, allowing them to take up causes on short notice through special links to politicians and administrators; • emphasize transparency and foster public access during early stages of decision-making, in an effort to accelerate the political process; • forge trust among groups affected by conflict, especially those with polarized interests; • establish common goals (and criteria for defining them as such) through an open presentation of competing interests. Last but not least, the primary goal of Round Tables was to build consensus as the key to problem resolution.60 The Round Table in Magdeburg experienced none of the high drama afflicting the Central Round Table prior to the SED’s collapse, though the

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violence precipitating its existence was sensational. The “table” I experienced in the old City Hall was not round but rather an inverted U; its Berlin predecessor also reportedly had “square edges.” The municipal constellation was initially framed by a cultural clash of a different sort, not between a “party that was always right” and a suddenly self-assertive Volk but between East and West. New city administrators were caught between the “bureaucratic perfectionism” of western personnel imports and ingrained eastern habits of trying to circumvent the system through personal appeals [Eingaben] to select officials. The Round Table’s accomplishments over a three-year period indicated that it qualified as “the real thing,” however. The scandal-ridden beginnings of democratic governance in the state capital through 1994 contributed to the Table’s functioning as a source of “moral support” for fledgling organs or groups formerly embedded in the state apparatus who were compelled to become “free agents.” The old regime had invested heavily in youth clubs and culture centers as vehicles for collective socialization, accounting for their earlier political and financial dependency. Public administrators and social service providers had to learn to lobby on their own behalf under new institutional imperatives. The RT format afforded a unique opportunity for participants to acquaint themselves with new projects and actors throughout the area, expediting the networking process. Blessed with substantial continuity of personnel (even when individuals’ day-jobs and titles changed), and a few deeply committed personalities, the group effectively generated a shared understanding as to the multifaceted nature of “violence” during its first year of operation. By the spring of 1997 the Round Table had formulated a catalogue of fifteen broadly defined “measures against youth criminality” that were both reactive and preventative in nature. It fostered the formation of local “urban-district conferences” and coordination offices, to link neighborhood resources to families, children, and schools. It brought about the adoption of anti-violence curricular modules, changes in court proceedings against young offenders and new modes of community policing to promote communication between neighborhood officers and troublesome youth groups. It introduced special police training for handling sexual abuse cases, and formulated concrete recommendations for the Mayor, who exercised ultimate decision-making power. Because its proposals derived from non-partisan, expert deliberations, the RT was often able to diffuse controversy over especially sensitive proposals, such as the

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move to open youth club facilities to Skinheads, in hopes of preventing them from joining explicitly political, professionally organized neo-­ Nazi organs. Its ability to generate an expert, non-partisan consensus moreover induced the city to allocate more funds for youth programs, despite its dire financial straits. By 1997 Magdeburg had more youth club facilities (44) than the wealthier west-city of Braunschweig (33) with an equivalent population. Communal allocations rose from DM3.96 million in 1991 to DM4.53 million in 1995, to DM6.78 million in 1997, subsidizing seventy local organizations and projects.61 Beyond shoring up multiple project workers after ABM funding ran out—staff continuity being absolutely essential to building youth trust—Magdeburg managed to provide every local applicant with an apprenticeship in 1997/1998. It became increasingly difficult to add new projects, however, since new allocations would have come at expense of those already up and running. The Round Table’s effectiveness ironically gave birth to a competitor at the formal-administrative level, the Council for Crime-Prevention. Initially proposed by the CDU Interior Minister in 1994, the Council was established under SPD auspices in 1997; its Steering Group consisted of the Mayor, two administrators (Communal Order, Social/Youth Affairs), and three top-ranking police officials. They were supplemented by five Work Groups focusing on drug addiction prevention, city planning/housing, school violence, youth-recreation, and technical installations to inhibit shop-lifting. RT activists criticized the Council’s drain on resources that might have otherwise gone to its own affiliates: DM2 million went directly to the Police for programs along the lines of “midnight basketball,” enabling them to hire trainers and referees unavailable or unaffordable for comparable RT-approved programs. My interview partners expressed further concern over the enhanced power of the police “to make youth policy” independently of substantive-expert actors, for example, the Office of Youth Affairs. Relying on direct ties between the Mayor’s office and Police Directorates, the Council’s very composition resulted in less transparent decision-making, and fewer in-put opportunities for affected citizen groups. Dr. Tabke was included in the steering group, due to his position as a Beigeordneter (Councilor). The Round Table’s most notable achievement was undoubtedly its contribution to building “transparency, tolerance and trust.” Attempts to instrumentalize the RT for any one group’s goals were rare; Tabke noted two exceptions involving the PDS and the Women’s Round Table. Voting

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outcomes were generally more moderate than occasional rhetorical outbursts, suggesting that no single actor wanted to fracture the work of the whole. Three participants interviewed at length in June 1998 held that East-West differences did not affect group deliberations, though the two lead figures were westerners. Participants’ responsibility for separate dimensions of the problem (street-worker vs. state prosecutor) naturally triggered a need to clarify their differences. I recall how Ms. von Wagner, a new law school graduate from Bonn, had insisted in 1997 that “no Easterners had the legal qualifications necessary” for the post for which she had been recruited. By 1998 she openly admitted that as a jurist, she initially had trouble digesting the idea that such a Quasselgremium (a motley crew of random chatters) could accomplish anything. Being brought together regularly with Bai Hai transcendentalists, soccer fan-club directors, advocates for sexual abuse victims and drug counselors, inter alia, she “personally developed more tolerance for other approaches.” The mix was “multi-cultural and colorful,” allowing people to clarify “fronts,” work in small groups, bundle their issues, and still reach shared conclusions. She concluded: “they have to grasp this as valuable in and of itself…. There is no other place where these people would come together to discuss with each other; there is no substitute for the kind of network(s) developed here.” Magdeburg’s municipal Round Table constitutes a prime example of what Jansen labeled “the rediscovery of the political, through problem-­ oriented learning.”62 It offered a sobering, real-democratic experience for the city’s eastern residents as to the inherent limits of “the rule of law” and its corollary institutions. Participants stressed the need to secure a binding character for their “engaged citizen” resolutions, noting that their efforts generated “a flood of information” but not an equivalent ability to turn “data” into practical solutions (Tabke), due to missing feedback loops among party-political factions. Nor were they able to engage youth directly in their deliberations, despite invitations to school-representatives. The RT also lacked effective public communication channels, having intentionally excluded media actors from its regular sessions to ensure candid discussions. Its participants encountered the ultimate “free-market” paradox. It demonstrated that there was serious public “demand” for effective anti-violence programs, and a more than adequate “supply” of citizens willing to pursue them. Yet there was little money to pay for them in the new, a profit-driven economy after the Kohl government “transferred” old GDR state debts to the communal level.63 Still, the process

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allowed Magdeburg activists to view themselves and their contributions to the system as essentially equal, a welcome antidote to the “second-class citizenship” perception of their compatriots to date. The original body subsequently yielded to an anti-racist Round Table for Migration and Integration, which grew out of another RT constellation encompassing Christian, Jewish, and union representatives. Unfortunately, Sachsen-Anhalt has likewise seen a rightwing populist turn-around with double-digit electoral gains for the AfD. Despite multiple scandals and spilts, the party garned 24.3% in the 2016 state elections, then 19.3% during the 2017 Bundestag elections. Its leaders have included some very unsavory characters, like André Poggenberg and Götz Kubitschek, linked to neo-Nazi groups and the Identitären movement. Not every story has a happy ending. Gleichstellungsstelle-Erfurt (Erfurt Office of Equal Opportunity), Thüringen Formal legal equality, economic opportunity, full reproductive rights and substantial infrastructural supports for women as paid worker-mothers counted among the GDR’s “socialist achievements,” to a degree not realized in united Germany until Merkel became Chancellor. The SED’s practices regarding “the women’s question” frequently deviated from the theory, taking the unequal division of household labor as a given (see Chap. 9). Nor did the mostly male Politburo pay much attention to domestic violence and child abuse under real-existing socialism. Women never enjoyed “a room of their own,” given the subordination of all female-centered organizations and needs to Party-defined priorities. Erfurt saw the creation of the first eastern Women’s Center in February 1990, called to life by a Wende-era group known as Women for Change.64 Situated in a former Stasi villa that had been used to wire-tap local residents, the original Center featured a cafe, drop-in daycare, meeting rooms for self-help groups and instructional programs, along with three on-site counselors. A former Western owner filed a restitution claim immediately after it opened, but the site was retained. City officials appointed Sabine Fabian to direct the Office for Equalization of the Sexes [hereafter Equality Office or GSS]. She and three co-workers assumed their posts on March 15, 1990, three days before the free Volkskammer elections. The GSS office quickly established a number of “safe” apartments for victims of domestic violence, no easy task in a land plagued by housing

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shortages. It then reached out to rapidly proliferating initiatives covering diverse “women’s issues.” Appointed in April 1993, its second director, Birgit Adamek, adopted a “cooperative leadership style.” Women’s Center and GSS staff members met for “coordination discussions” every two weeks; other team meetings took place every eight to ten weeks. By 1997, the Center had five regular employees and six co-workers hired under “job creation” contracts; during the first six years, the two entities provided ABM posts for forty-seven women. To borrow an EU formula, the Equality Office pursued a strategy of “completion, deepening, and enlargement.” Institutional completion centered on a push to have its competencies formalized and functions recognized by “real” decision-making entities. Despite leadership changes and redefinitions of its location in the official power structure, the GSS cultivated a positive working relationship with City Hall. This was significant insofar as the state and local governments were both controlled by the CDU after 1990—a party resistant to pro-active promotion of women’s rights at the national level. Although relations within the state’s CDU/ SPD coalition were far from harmonious, the Equality Office enjoyed the support of Mayor Manfred Ruge (CDU) from the start. He included Fabian in City Council meetings and allowed the GSS to review pending legislation for its women-specific impact. Despite Thüringen’s dire financial straits, the city provided regular funding for GSS initiatives, especially for its campaign against domestic violence. In 1991 Ruge allocated DM 400,000 to renovate a four-story shelter in the city center, with places for twenty-five women and children, increased to forty-four places in 1994. Land officials committed another 1 million DM for shelters and initiatives. The GSS prided itself on a “high measure of professionality” in dealing with the bureaucracy and carrying out its functions (Jahresbericht 1997). Public funding did not deter advocates from speaking out against equal opportunity violations on the part of “city fathers” themselves. It openly protested the actions of one official who fired City Hall’s in-house staff of 130 cleaning women, in order to replace them with a private, mostly male janitorial service.65 Noting that women comprised 68.7% of the City’s lower/mid-range positions, it called for a “modernization” of municipal administration (“optimal personnel management”), both to improve working conditions for government employees, for example, though flexible hours, and to preserve jobs among “endangered” groups, like pre-­ school teachers, in the face of budget deficits and declining births. The

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GSS formally networked with municipal and state agency staffs (e.g., the Ausländerbeirat), as well as with counterpart offices at different levels. By 1993, 420 Equal Opportunity Offices had been established throughout the new Länder, the year Erfurt hosted the Commission of Women’s Affairs Officers for the German Conference of Cities. Its Director participated in the national roof organization for 1125 Women’s Commissioners (Frauenbeauftragte), as well as in the Land-level association for equality officials (56  in Thüringen). Its annual Women’s Report, first issued in June 1995, documented the life-conditions of Erfurt’s female and male residents on an ongoing basis.66 It added “data collection” to its core tasks in 1996. The Office cultivated formal cooperative or advisory relationships with fifty-five local and regional associations and autonomous groups. Regarding functional enlargement, the projects developed or supported by the GSS mushroomed rapidly under the sudden crush of mass unemployment; women accounted for 58% of the jobless in 1991, up to 61.2% by 1993. One result was an ostensible increase in domestic violence, and/or women’s inability to flee abusive situations: forty-eight women utilized the new shelter in January 1991 alone. The GSS/Center sponsored seminars on alcoholism, drug addiction, eating disorders (a post-unity phenomenon), and divorce law. Roughly, 3580 women and children were enrolled in its 32 “creative classes” in 1997. A GSS mail-survey on living conditions conducted in 1992 led it to explore women’s mounting concerns with personal safety, especially after dark, once the “free market” introduced the city’s first sex and pornography shops. Activists secured night taxis, women’s parking places, and improved street lighting through female involvement in urban planning, then tackled homelessness stemming from higher addiction and joblessness rates. Erfurt’s equality lobbyists directly addressed unemployment through training courses and seminars on (western) job application processes and legal rights, teaching women to reject interview questions concerning their reproductive wishes, for example. The Equality Office expanded its public relations capacities despite its limited “information technology” infrastructure; four co-workers were still sharing a single phone line and one computer in 1997. In one year, it issued 120 press releases, 35 “statements,” moderated 18 public fora and distributed 80 different brochures; it saw a 10% increase in the written inquiries it received, processing 1900 of them. First staged in May 1992, its Info-Börse, an “info-exchange fair” that morphed into a popular annual activity, featured booths representing forty-eight organizations. According

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to official statistics, 18,885 Erfurt residents attended its events in 1997, suggesting that women’s rights had become a “legitimate” public concern. Despite its matrix-orientation, that is, its ability to cut across functional domains and establish ties among diverse initiatives and agencies, cooperation among different groups “could [have been] more intense.” Dagmar Grüner, a founding GSS worker, stressed in 1996 that its highly publicized version of a national campaign (Violence against Women has many Faces) pulled together “10 municipal agencies, 11 women’s projects, all party caucuses in the Erfurt City Council, administrators from independent welfare services, 20 associations and professional organizations, diverse union representatives, advisory council members, delegates from the Justice Ministry, the Police Presidium, the State Criminal Office and police chiefs.” Over seventy actors shaped a program encompassing 100+ activities spread across the first six months of 1996. Despite that campaign’s public resonance, Ms. Grüner voiced muted disappointment that rather than building on their own momentum and new-found contacts, most groups continued to look to the GSS, expecting it to “organize” a top-down sequel. She and her colleagues had hoped that cooperation would become a self-sustaining activity. By summer 1998, she felt that local activists were entering a new stage that might allow a broad spectrum of cooperative ventures to kick into gear from below, “now that participants know each other and can communicate directly.” By then they were also better positioned to undertake measures to block policy initiatives deleterious to women before they became “the law of the land.” The Gleichstellungsstelle represents a clear case of “democratic deepening,” pushing lawmakers to incorporate new interests and needs articulated by a group historically absent from SED decision-making chambers. In November 1997, the GSS was forced to seek a new legal foundation for its affirmative action plans, when its “project” funding expired. Hearings on the proposed legislation were held in January 1998. Representatives from diverse family, health, welfare, and equality projects hoped to establish new lines of responsibility among public administrative departments (Children, Youth, Health). They issued a “common paper” delineating agencies to be held responsible for financing particular applications. The GSS secured “hard-money” for another half-time staff member with partial state funding in 1999. It sought a permanent legislative basis for equality politics, giving the Office “roots” in the city’s larger

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administrative structure, even though it was required to secure private, supplementary financing for its activities. The Erfurt Equality Office enabled grassroots activists to embrace a Western associational model to meliorate specific post-unity problems, infused with their own operational modus. Its early effectiveness derived from its willingness to respond pragmatically to women’s material needs, without years of wrangling over a feminist Gesamtkonzept (comprehensive strategy) typical of FRG activists throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Their eastern experiences moreover led them to work with the state, even when it was controlled by another patriarchal party, the CDU. Under the old regime, working against the state usually resulted in a loss of entitlements, university expulsion, or prison sentences for political agitation. GSS staff and affiliated groups taught themselves the fine art of interest representation, building communal consensus, finding ways to monitor the behavior of lawmakers and bureaucrats, while fostering public consciousness regarding topics too often relegated to the “private” sphere, like domestic violence. They simultaneously learned that the more they challenged traditional power structures and policy paradigms, the more conflicts their work would precipitate, linked to deeper sources of female disadvantage: “Interest representation means immersing yourself in conflicting interests,” they noted in their 1997 Annual Report. Recognizing conflict as a normal feature of pluralist society was a crucial step in “coming of political age.” Though it followed an FRG template, Ms. Grüner stressed that the Erfurt GSS was never strongly oriented toward its established western counterparts responsible for women’s affairs. She and her colleagues “occasionally checked out the activities” of equality offices in Munich and “Sister-City” Mainz, to see if projects or tactics there might lend themselves to use on the home-front. They sought to preserve a bit of East-­ identity, however, by looking primarily to Leipzig for ideas and advice, though the Munich office did organize a fund-raising campaign in 1991 to help with Center start-up costs. GSS co-workers also took cues from Saxony’s Round Table on Women and Employment, which had proposed grants of DM5000–20,000 to help the unemployed establish their own businesses. Eastern women had “not yet learned to follow the kind of career profiles qua managerial specialization familiar to women in the old Länder; instead, they all tried “to follow through on all of the details to the end” (June 16, 1998, interview). The GSS gradually resorted to a “separation of functions,” enabling the Women’s Commissioner to treat

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internal problems, while the Equal Opportunity Office addressed external sources of female disadvantage. “Something remains,” she noted, of a pre-­ unity working style that relied on cultivating personal contacts as vehicle for trusting one another, “then being able to rely on one another.” Few activists sought opportunities for formal influence through conventional party-political channels. The Gleichstellungsstelle in Erfurt expanded the catalogue of women’s concerns recognized as legitimate public issues by democratically elected authorities. Though quite small, underequipped, short on womanpower and facing a “growing paper flood” vis-à-vis the bureaucratic forces of City Hall, the GSS gave women a chance to have their specific interests considered in official circles. Press reviews inferred that they scored critical successes in institutionalizing anti-discrimination policies, for example. In September 1997 Erfurt was singled out as one of 15 “winners” of a national competition searching for “child- and family friendly communities,” out of a pool of 364 urban and district applicants. As of 2020, the Women’s Center has survived, and Birgit Adamek continues to serve as the Equality Commissioner, directly answerable to the Mayor. Commensurate with national developments, Thüringen’s state constitution obliges all officials to pursue active measures to secure “real” equality for women and men in all domains of public life, bolstered by its equality/anti-discrimination law of 2013. As seen elsewhere in the east, misogynist AfD forces scored 23.4% of the vote in the 2019 elections, but a hung-parliament and curious parliamentary maneuvers re-instated Bodo Ramelow (die Linke) as minister-president in 2020. The AfD’s far-right wing, head by Björn Höcke, is currently subject to surveillance by the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection. Still, Erfurt’s women finally have more than one “room” of their own. Forum Ostdeutschland (SPD) and Aufbau Ost (CDU) in Berlin/Brandenburg and Saxony Despite dire warnings from no less a figure than the head of the German Central Bank, Karl Otto Pöhl, Chancellor Kohl and his CDU/CSU-FDP cabinet were firmly convinced that the arrival of the D-Mark, “rapid and uncompromising” privatization, and the direct transfer of western political institutions would soon generate “blossoming landscapes.” This “powerful unification myth” was rooted in the unshakeable conviction that a neo-­ liberal legal framework, along with preliminary start-up capital, would

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suffice to transform the entire eastern economic order. Unification costs would be so low as to preclude a need for tax increases.67 Decades of mass unemployment and trillions of D-Marks in financial transfers have proven conservatives and liberals wrong. In 1991, Kohl appointed the first of a long line of East-Commissioners, who were subsequently shifted from one federal ministry to another without positive results. Initially, most were born in the GDR, but this said little about their power to introduce policies across all ministries. The first person responsible for “coordinating” initiatives in the new states served in the Federal Chancellor’s Office, 1991–1995. Responsibilities moved to the Economics Ministry from 1995 to 1998, followed by a return to the Chancellor’s Office until 2002. Already well occupied as Minister for Transport, Construction and Housing, former Brandenburg minister-­ president Manfred Stolpe assumed this charge, 2002 to 2005, then passed the job on to a lower-level ministerial official from 2005 until 2009. In 1997, Minister-President Reinhard Höppner (SPD, Sachsen-Anhalt) made waves in party circles with his declaration that eastern citizens, in contrast to those in the old Federal Republic, “have not been blinded by 40 years of economic growth, through which politics could simply legitimize itself by way of distributing the increases in economic growth.”68 His critique of the FRG’s reluctance to introduce long-overdue reforms (Reformstau) evoked consternation among government insiders but made perfect sense to those experiencing the persistent structural unemployment crisis. The unification experience demonstrated that “countless breakdowns came to pass because conditions just weren’t so, the way they really should have been according to West German legal requirements…. I had to stand by and observe for years, how a system totally fell apart, based on its inability to implement future oriented reforms. I do not want to stand around watching this new, victorious system experience the same destiny.”69 Höppner’s comments mirrored easterners’ rising discontent with the FRG party landscape, in particular. East Germans discovered that carving out new spaces to pursue their own interests within the western party landscape was more difficult than mobilizing for causes on their own territory. The regional political initiative, Forum Ostdeutschland (Forum East Germany), was set in motion by disgruntled members of the SPD-East in 1996. The group staged five major conferences in hopes of formulating its own electoral platform, using “eastern language,” for incorporation into the larger 1998 Social Democratic campaign.70 One of its pro-active founders was Hans-Jürgen

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Misselwitz, with whom I had multiple discussions dating back to 1990 (Chap. 8). Misselwitz functioned as the Forum’s executive manager until 2010, simultaneously serving as Wolfgang Thierse’s chief of staff and Secretary for the SPD Fundamental Values Commission until his retirement in 2015.71 The group hoped to counter a lack of co-determination channels for “highly motivated East Germans.” Treuhand privatizations had been negotiated behind closed doors, with no concrete measures enabling eastern entrepreneurs to establish themselves in areas of relative strength. Personnel replacement policies for all major institutions of higher learning, public administration, media organs and the like amounted to a one-way elite exchange from West to East. Launched on June 8, 1996, in Leipzig, the Forum attracted roughly 600 participants under the motto Network Future—A Second Chance for Eastern Germany. Thematic emphases and keynote speeches centered on defining values for a future society, industrial and structural change (emphasizing small businesses), the impact of new cultural and media landscapes on Eastern political communication, regional and communal restructuring (e.g., revenues), and revitalizing the region’s educational and scientific landscape.72 The second forum in Berlin, November 2, 1996, focused on economic development and job-creation policies, under the motto Invest in our own Strengths!73 Delegates discussed potential public sources of risk-capital, ways to network regional production facilities, export promotion for Eastern goods, rebuilding market relations with Central/Eastern Europe and restoring industry-relevant research. A third forum convened on April 12, 1997, in Cottbus, under the motto Aufschwung Ost (Upswing East), focusing on innovation potential and strengthening entrepreneurial qualifications. In May 1998, Commissioner Rolf Schwanitz (SPD) submitted a Bundestag proposal, “New Orientation regarding the Economic Rebuilding of Eastern Germany,” declaring that should Social Democrats win the next election in September, their new Chancellor would elevate eastern revitalization to “a matter for the boss” (Chef-Sache). The next two annual reports on “The State of German Unity” nonetheless testified to further regional deterioration, even after the SPD-Green coalition assumed power in 1998.74 On January 3, 2001, an eastern pastor turned Bundestag President, Wolfgang Thierse, published a critical text resting on five theses in Die Zeit, warning that the eastern region was “on the brink” of collapse.75

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Briefly summarized here, Thierse declared that a decision to extend the first Solidarity Pact, slated to expire in 2004, could not be postponed until the next election.76 The east-west unemployment ratio had increased from 1.8:1 in 1998 to 2.3:1 by 2000; long-term joblessness had risen by 10%, youth unemployment by 15%. Second, the longer conditions were allowed to stagnate, the more deterioration would come at the expense of earlier gains. Stability and trust would only return to the region under more reliable framework conditions, necessitating new investment priorities. Applied industrial research and expert personnel had actually been cut by 80%, relative to the East’s pre-1990 capacity. Foreign investors would pass it by, rather than seeing the region as a bridge to pending EU-enlargement, while new Central-East European (CEE) members would intensify competition for cheap goods and labor. Third, a sustainable economic foundation required policies promoting research and transportation to foster the eastern states’ ability to serve as a role model for CEE producers seeking new connections to western Europe. Their EU entry would reduce subsidies available for regional/ structural development in the young Länder; federal policies focused more on passive wage replacement than on future-oriented investment. Fourth, lawmakers could only hope to alleviate “objective problems” by attending to Easterners’ subjective needs for self-valuation, individual responsibility, positive media coverage and meaningful representation across all political institutions. No longer “in transition,” they were tired of marginalization. Finally, the SPD’s own fate was at stake; the party could only enhance its Eastern voter base by taking a better informed, pro-active interest in its people and their conditions. Thirty years after the (re)creation of an SPD-East, conditions remain worrisome, as starkly illustrated by the government’s 2019 findings on the “comparable worth” (or lack thereof) of living and working conditions across both parts of Germany.77 Attended by three SPD Cabinet members, the Forum convened again on January 29, 2019, in Schwante (Brandenburg), approving yet another “12-Point Program.”78 In 1998, the SPD had secured nearly 41% of the vote, including a plurality in all five eastern states; it held the reins of government, along with the Greens, until 2005. Its failure to act cost it dearly. In 2017, the party was handed its worst result since 1949, barely reaching 25%; its share of votes in the young states ranged from 10.5 to 15.2%. Forum Ostdeutschland fell far short of its goal of anchoring eastern interests in the federal party landscape.

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As the ruling party through 1998 and dominant coalition partner after 2005, it is not surprising that the Forum’s conservative equivalent was sooner a top-down initiative. With the exception of Angela Merkel, most CDU-East politicians who had moved onto the national stage in 1990 had been compelled to withdraw within a few years, due to scandal (Krause) or to alleged Stasi ties (de Maizière). Aufbau Ost derived its name from official policies intended to stimulate the economy in the new Länder. East-­ CDU politicians were likewise dissatisfied with Kohl’s nonchalant approach in the wake of devastating Treuhand privatization processes, moving them to lobby from within for “East-interests” and a reassessment of the German “value community.” Westerners tried to impose their own coordinators on the initiative, but a new cohort of state leaders rallied in response to Kohl’s failure to deliver a thriving industrial landscape nearly ten years into unity. Two documents lay at the heart of this initiative. The first was introduced by an ardent representative of eastern interests, Eckhardt Rehberg, the CDU party chief in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. His popularity was reinforced by his service as executive chair of the federal soccer team, Hansa Rostock. Issued in January 1996, his manifesto, Regaining Identity through Upswing East, offered a response to the party’s fiftieth anniversary proposal for a “Value- and Strategy Debate: ‘CDU-2000’.” The second was a “fundamentals paper,” Germany is a New Country, circulated in conjunction with the state party conference in Wismar-Gaegelow in September 1996.79 Both suggested that a one-big-happy-family approach had failed to initiate a bona fide, all-German debate at earlier stages. This, in turn, had contributed to a “restabilization of post-socialist forces,” a reference to the electoral successes of the SED’s democratized heir, the PDS. Denying differences in the day-to-day existential concerns of the two populations had erected a “spiritual wall,” in part because West German images of conditions in the East remained fraught with inaccuracies and stereotypes. Four decades of separation from “Christian values” had left their mark on eastern orientations; the CDU-East had been a powerless member of the SED’s National Front, but FRG conservatives had failed to recognize that systemic collapse had destroyed pre-existing sources of togetherness, leaving many unable to cope on their own.80 Fifty years of “CDU history” could not be reduced to forty-five years West, plus five years as an all-German party; the CDU needed to work through substantial differences across fifty years of party history on both sides. Focusing only on the material-financial dimensions, national party elites had

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neglected the role of solidarity, moral health and civic virtues in shoring up the transformation. To foster a pragmatic, active “citizen society,” it had to pursue the politics of “small circles,” incorporating the concerns of people at the city and communal levels. This required a “de-ritualizing” of party culture and a modernization of its electoral campaign style. The point was to allow such questions to be raised and answered—on both sides. The second document, pushing the West to admit that it had also been changed by unification, called upon the latter to respect the “experiences and life accomplishments of the other.” Despite many positive changes, developments like mass unemployment, rising crime rates and excessive materialism had led Easterners to discover “that “the Federal Republic was also imperfect.”81 Ironically echoing the SPD’s 1959 Godesberg Program, the authors called for “as much market as possible, as much state as necessary” to strengthen the “self-responsibility” of the newly enfranchised and to level the playing field for competition. It held further that the values of justice and equality, solidarity and subsidiarity, freedom and responsibility could not be separated. Easterners were under relentless pressure to change, but social relations in the old Länder were likewise out of date, starting with the under-representation of women in the party’s executive organs, the undervaluation/pay gaps in relation to different forms of labor (caring for children, the elderly and the disabled), the FRG’s outdated “career-track system” (Laufbahn) that prevented people from changing occupations, and a dearth of real opportunities for lateral entry into politics.82 It was likewise critical of overly complex, prolonged approval processes at the federal level. Many administrative experts transferred to the East had worked closely with local authorities to streamline and expedite authorization processes for transportation and construction in the new states. When they returned to Bonn, they were accused of “blowing the curve,” suggesting a bureaucratic “entitlement mentality.” More importantly, the authors stressed Easterners’ discontent with the rule of law, or more accurately, the nature of judicial decision-making in the Federal Republic. Many had already learned that courts and laws did not automatically protect the weak, “especially in the FNL [Five New States], where form often took precedence over substance, deadlines were more important than the problem [and], the flood of laws was ever less comprehensible to non-­ jurists.” The courts were deemed so independent

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that even a plea to accelerate a particular process is rejected as intervention. Germany, the country with the highest density of lawyers and judges, allows itself the longest possible court proceedings…. Many experience the state as one that pays excruciating attention to whether forms are filled out correctly but is too weak to process perpetrators of violence, who do not abide by their forms and certainly not to the normal rules of the game regarding human co-existence.83

In this respect, CDU-East members shared a conclusion reached by their SPD-East counterparts. Höppner had also observed that many legal judgments were perceived as “an arbitrary act,” which had “done great damage to the acceptance of the Rechtsstaat (rule of law) in the East.” The principle of “restitution before compensation,” especially, had contributed a great deal to widespread perceptions of injustice by unleashing a “torrent” of western property claims involving countless personal residences. Article 41 of the Unification Treaty excluded properties and assets expropriated from former Nazis under Soviet occupation but allowed for restitutions dating back to the “Aryanization” of Jewish assets in the 1930s. A majority of houses had remained in private hands after 1949, but not the land on which they were situated. A disproportionate share of some 2 million claims was not filed by the original owners (many deceased) but rather by second- and third-generation heirs who banded together to hire savvy western lawyers. They quickly cashed in their “returned” properties by selling them to speculators, raising rents to exorbitant levels, and/or forcing out families who had occupied them for decades.84 The CDU issued new proposals for the eastern states in January 1997, covering pensions, old-debt burdens for communal housing cooperatives and private owners, along with a new job-creation initiative for 1999–2004.85 By fall 1998, conservatives had been displaced by a new SPD-Green coalition. Neither Forum Ostdeutschland nor Aufbau Ost produced the intended result of providing newly enfranchised citizens with meaningful channels for concrete policy input. Although most of their state governments are now comprised of politicians with regional roots (in stark contrast to the 1990s), Easterners still hold a disproportionately small share of the leadership posts across all political, economic, and media institutions, even in their home states (see Chap. 11). Their persistent sense of second-class citizenship granted a new lease on life to the PDS, which west-politicians continued to denounce as an SED-surrogate, and whose “imminent demise” they never tired of predicting.

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Following new elections in 2009, Merkel-confidant qua Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière bore official Ostbeauftragter responsibility until early 2011, turning it over to his (presumably less busy) Parliamentary State-Secretary through 2013. From early 2014 to 2020, the Commissioner’s role was delegated to three different individuals— Christoph Bergner, Iris Gleicke, Christian Hirt—who also served as parliamentary state secretaries in the Ministry for Economics and Energy. In 2019 Hirt (CDU) was forced to resign in conjunction with an AfD/FDP scandal in Thüringen, after he initiated a “competition” to generate more volunteer activity and social solidarity in eastern states. His replacement, Marco Wanderwitz, was no more popular among his alleged clientele. The fact that federal officials still refer to the eastern region as “the new Länder” after more than thirty years of unification speaks volumes. One western professor recently justified the use of this term when we shared a panel in Seattle, arguing that historians still refer to the Americas as the “New World.” What he failed to recognize is that this label was introduced by the colonial powers, not by the continent’s original inhabitants. Perhaps this explains why critical easterners still refer to their Kohlonization via the Treuhand.86

The PDS as “Comeback Kid” Following unification the Five New Länder met several criteria deemed essential for new party creation. First, the manner in which unification was executed triggered new cleavages among multiple axes, many linked to the unemployment crisis. Second, it brought in a new group of voters who had yet to solidify their partisan-political identifications, beyond an oppressive entity that they had just successfully overthrown.87 Third, there was no credible opposition party with enough clout to render Eastern interests a regular feature of major policy decisions. Fourth, the newly enfranchised Germans constituted a majority within their own region, with which they increasingly identified in the face of western dominance. Whether a party can prove sustainable over time is a very different question. The European party landscape is littered with the skeletal remains of small parties that arose to protest one cause or another after 1990. Fringe parties are prone to quick collapse, especially when they rely too heavily on a few dominant personalities. Western Greens and New Forum/eco-­ activists quickly discovered that they had little in common; the former displayed little interest in easterners’ existential problems, creating a

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vacuum for potential democratic leftists.88 The PDS, by contrast, represents another deeply rooted GDR organization whose democratic transformation enabled it to find a place in the all-German associational landscape. While the life-styles of SED elites were quite modest relative to the Western wealth-gap, their corrupt use of state funds to secure privileges for themselves essentially discredited the ideal of a socialist utopia. Honecker’s crown-prince, Egon Krenz, was quickly succeeded by “reformist” Hans Modrow.89 His failure to eliminate the Stasi apparatus with due haste, as he promised to Round Table delegates on December 14, 1989, was the last nail in the coffin for the regime. It simultaneously eliminated the prospect of establishing a gradual confederation between the German states, which Kohl himself had proposed in a “Ten-Point Program” on November 28, 1989. A significant number of SED loyalists joined the CDU, having been banned from joining the newly founded SDP (later, SPD) for a one-year probationary period. Conservatives could also appeal to the remaining 60,000 (of 140,000) CDU-East members, disparaged as Blockflöte; it quickly rechristened its eastern counterpart “the Alliance for Germany,” however, in hopes of dispelling memories of its role as the SED’s biggest ally in National Front. Many prominent figures were later discredited for their real and alleged Stasi connections, including sixty-eight delegates to the new Volkskammer.90 With most of the Old Guard gone, the SED elected a new chair, lawyer Gregor Gysi (son of former Minister Klaus Gysi), in December 1989; he declared it was time for the party to reject its Marxist–Leninist roots in favor of a new kind of socialism.91 Gysi had been a well-respected, trusted figure in GDR times, having defended many dissidents against the state, including Robert Havemann, Rudolf Bahro, Bärbel Bohley, and Reinhard Eppelmann.92 In February 1990 it formally changed its name to the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), declaring itself “the strong opposition for the weak,” such as women, children, the elderly, and the unemployed. It nonetheless took a thrashing (16.4%) in the first (and last) free GDR elections on March 18, faring even worse during the first all-German elections of December 2, 1990. The Constitutional Court ruled that the old and new Länder were to be treated as separate zones for this exceptional election. This allowed the PDS to occupy seventeen seats in the Bundestag, having secured 11.1% of the Eastern vote but less than 2.4% nation-wide (below the required 5% threshold).93 Memberships had plunged from 2.3

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million in late 1989 to 280,882 by August 1990, leading experts to predict its hasty demise. As Gysi himself cryptically commented, however, “the snake that swallows the porcupine is likely to experience significant digestion problems.” Having evolved out of an all-powerful, institutionally rooted party, the PDS suddenly had to face intense partisan competition in an arena playing by different rules. Along the ideological spectrum, the leftist, albeit market-­oriented space was already occupied by SPD, while the Greens filled the more radical, eco-peace slot, leaving the PDS no place to go but far-left. It nonetheless had to cultivate a socialist identity that was sufficiently democratic so as not to vanish into “an electoral black hole of sectarian irrelevance.”94 As the east’s only indigenous party, it presented itself as the champion of underdog-citizens, despite the fact that it had inherited assets from its SED parent organization valued at roughly 3 billion Marks. Gysi, Lothar Bisky, and other SED loyalists shrewdly protected these assets from the Treuhand, purportedly using fake companies to disperse their holdings.95 Increasing unemployment—up to 33% for men, 67% for women— enabled the PDS to return with a vengeance as of the 1994 elections.96 Forging a loose coalition with disgruntled communist and far-left factions in the west (DKP, “K-groups,” “Fundi”-Greens), the Left List/PDS garnered 4.7% nation-wide, but nearly 20% in the FNL. By the late 1990s, the PDS had embraced a mix of red, green, feminist, and pacifist policies, and had proven its ability to coalesce with the SPD-East in state and communal governments. By 1998, it boasted of 193 mayors and another 1074 politicians serving in various county, district, and urban councils, including 911 in towns of over 25,000.97 In 2005, it formed an alliance with a west SPD splinter-group headed by Oskar Lafontaine in time for the Bundestag elections. Known as WAGS (Electoral Alternative for Labor and Social Justice), it captured 8.7% (54 seats), emerging as Germany’s fourth largest party. The two groups formally merged in 2007, becoming Die Linke (The Left). The 2008 financial crisis undoubtedly contributed to its electoral success the next year, raising its share to 11.9% (76 seats) across the FRG as a whole. One of the PDS’s founding dilemmas was its heavy reliance on former SED loyalists, responsible for its internal divisions (Stalinists, reformists, independent socialists), as well as its problematic age structure. Among the delegates to the 5th Party Congress (1995), 30% were over 51; 77% were no longer employed. The departure of so-called turbo-pensioners in

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the new millennium led to a drastic decline in card-carrying members, down to 83,475 in 2000; 70 to 79 year-olds accounted for 41% of its base by 2002 (compared to 9.4% in the west).98 It faced a very different dilemma in the wake of the global financial crisis, namely, competition on its home turf in the guise of a new, far-right populist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD). The latter began scoring double digits across the eastern states after 2014, just when unemployment ceased to be a pressing problem.99 The PDS vote-share fell to 17.1% in 2017, a loss of nearly 20%. Having shifted to an anti-migration/anti-asylum platform, the AfD exploits mostly male resentment over persistent “second-class citizenship,” although its platform is also “anti-Merkel.” Despite having expropriated the 1989 mantra, “We are the people,” it offers no specifically “eastern” policy alternatives beyond claiming that the welfare system has been completely undermined by “foreigners,” coupled with a distinctively non-eastern attack on gender equality (see Chap. 11). The PDS survived as a vibrant interest organization for nearly three decades. Its all-German equivalent, Die Linke, now attracts younger voters and politicians, but the party’s success in securing its place in the united party landscape has ironically resulted in the perception that it is now part of “the establishment.” It has battled many internal divisions since 2015, but its platform continues to emphasize the need for more generous welfare benefits and restrictions on turbo-capitalism, policies that AfD voters should be inclined to support. Die Linke’s ability to attract western votes has come at the expense of its birthright status as “the one and only” champion of East German identity. This development attests to a serious democratic paradox: the more effective a civil society organization becomes in anchoring itself in the political power structures, enabling it to help shape policies, the less “the people” feel that it is really representing “their” grassroots interests.

“The End of Apprenticeship” This chapter began with the premise that in order to prove stable in the long run, democratic institutions must do more than “represent” citizen interests in a territorial or functional sense. As an institutional process, democratization requires all citizens to respect and uphold a single constitution, warranting their fundamental civil liberties, their access to free elections, and a separation of public and private spheres ensuring the “free

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development” of their personalities. As a political-cultural process, democratization mandates a sensitivity to difference that cannot be secured merely through formal communication channels and standardized procedures. The cases presented here suggested that citizens who engage with intermediary associations can develop new sources of social capital, helping them to internalize democratic values more quickly than those who do not. They are also more likely to establish effective channels for advancing their own interests within the new power structures. This is not to argue that all will prove successful and sustainable in the longer run. Comparing the East German experience to transformational processes in the other “fraternal” socialist states, Andreas Pickel observed: “There is a huge gap between the rate at which changes have been occurring in the political and economic framework of society and the speed with which individuals and social groups can be expected to learn how to cope with a new situation. Reliable ‘social knowledge’ is lost at an alarming rate.”100 Risk-taking opposition groups who instigated the peaceful revolution from below were briefly rewarded with seats at the Central Round Table. Prior to unification they assigned themselves the task of drafting a new constitution but were immediately discounted by the Kohl government. As a result, newly liberated citizens were “cemented into an irreversible constitutional and political contract,” obliging them to embrace yet another top-down, “social engineering paradigm.”101 Western-biased privatization deals were grounded in erroneous neo-liberal assumptions, minus genuine market competition. The economic consequences were as long-lasting as they were catastrophic: five years later, Western households held 93% of all private assets (DM8.9 trillion), Easterners only 7%, though the latter comprised 19% of the population.102 The “hegemonic restructuring of the public space” with respect to most institutions granted Easterners few chances to assert collective interests of their own at higher levels, with the noteworthy exception of the PDS.103 Ideological biases on the western side resulted in “problem simplification,” bound to generate unintended consequences. Although many economists and social scientists warned of dangers yet to come, FRG negotiators were driven by political expediency and self-interest, producing disastrous, costly results in the short-run, and significant societal divisions in the long run. The AfD’s popularity surge among eastern voters is but one consequence of the persistent “representation gap.”

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The pursuit of private interests during GDR times was a highly political act. Images of the “underdeveloped” Easterners proved functional for those who wanted to forget their past and assume the FRG habitus as quickly as possible. They also held heuristic value for Westerners who did not wish to be challenged regarding their own identity issues. The Round Tables offered an effective template for deepening democracy, but they were rapidly pushed aside in “the rush to unity.” In fact, the model had been used in the old Länder prior to 1989, to deal with problems of structural adjustment in coal-mining Aachen. One Central RT participant in Berlin stressed: It was a really unique experience for me, that all were present in equal measure at the table, that all had the same rights and that suddenly one would discover that the truth usually comes out of a very different corner than one would have suspected. That was the deeper, most important sense of the Round Table, this democratic experience: We all have responsibility together.”104

Civic culture can assume many different forms. Democratic pluralism should not require all citizens to draw on the same well-springs of social capital, nor even on entrenched associational structures, in order to have their needs recognized as legitimate. As the FRG’s own experience with the urban “citizen initiatives” of the 1980s demonstrated, small is beautiful thinking can generate more direct engagement than top-down campaigns. In the East German case, do-it-yourself groups helped to counter negative historical experiences with mass organizations, and alleviated problems of social trust in some quarters by allowing citizens to draw on “the familiar” amidst the turbulence of unification. Just as they misinterpreted the significance of Ostalgie, old-FRG politicians misread the re-purposing of certain GDR associations, underestimating their capacity for building bridges to a new national identity. Easterners’ democratic “apprenticeship” came to an end decades ago, although neither their ongoing classification as a “structurally weak region” nor their gross under-representation in most leadership circles reflects this fact. We turn now to examine specific groups of “winners” and “losers,” and the ways in which their lives have been reshaped during the thirty years following unification.

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Notes 1. The civic culture construct advanced by Almond and Verba in the 1960s blurred the lines between the normative and empirical dimensions of democracy, as experienced by women and minorities. See Carole Pateman, 1980. “The Civic Culture: A Philosophical Critique.” In Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba. The Civic Culture Revisited. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.: 57–102. Also, Alexis de Tocqueville.1969 ed. Democracy in America. New York: Doubleday. 2. The same applies to ethnic integration. See Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2008. The Changing Faces of Citizenship: Integration and Mobilization among Ethnic Minorities in Germany. Providence/Oxford: Berghahn Books. 3. Thomas Ahbe. 1997. “Ostalgie oder die Fähigkeit zu trauern,” Freitag, May 23, 17. 4. This view is cited but not shared by Annette Zimmer, Eckhard Priller and Helmut Anheier. 1997. “Der Nonprofit-Sektor in den neuen Bundesländern: Kontinuität, Neuanfang oder Kopie?” Zeitschrift für öffentliche und gemeinwirtschaftliche Unternehmen 1, 59 ff. 5. Eckhard Priller. 1966. “Veränderungen in der politischen und sozialen Beteiligung in Ostdeutschland.” In Wolfgang Zapf and Roland Habich, eds., Wohlfahrtsentwicklung im vereinten Deutschland. Berlin: Ed. Sigma, 285ff; and Eckhard Priller. 1997. Ein Suchen und Sichfinden im Gestern und Heute. Verändern die Ostdeutschen ihre Einstellungen und Haltungen zur Demokratie und gesellschaftlichen Mitwirkung? Paper FS III 97–411, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. 6. Priller, “Veränderungen in der politischen und sozialen Beteiligung.” 7. Günther Pollach. 1993. Unabhängige Bürgerbeteiligung in Berlin-­ Hohenschönhausen. Berlin Institut für Sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, 33. Despite high support for the PDS, only 47% supported it without reservation. More than half were not active in any political party, substantiated by low membership rates. 8. DWI data, cited by Thomas Kuczinski.1995. “Wirtschaftlich wurde Ostdeutschland um zehn Jahre zurückgeworfen.” Neues Deutschland, September 1. 9. Michael Bluhm and Olaf Jacobs. 2016. Wer beherrscht den Osten? Ostdeutsche Eliten ein Vierteljahrhundert nach der deutschen Wiedervereinigung. Universität Leipzig. 10. The BVerfG invalidated a reform law ensuring freedom of choice, albeit with mandatory counseling, that had passed with strong cross-party support. It thereby recriminalized what had been a legal procedure for Eastern women since 1972. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1997. “Concession

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or Compromise? The Politics of Abortion in United Germany.” German Politics 6 (3): 69–87. 11. Heidrun Abromeit. 1992. “Zum Für und Wider einer Ost-Partei,” Gegenwartskunde 4, 443; further, 1993. “Die ‘Vertretungslücke’. Probleme im neuen deutschen Bundesstaat,” Gegenwartskunde 3: 281–292. 12. Amir Abedi. 2017. “We are not in Bonn anymore: The Impact of German Unification on Party Systems at the Federal and Land Levels.” German Politics 26 (4): 457–479. 13. Wilhelm Bürklin. 1997. “Die Potsdamer Elitestudie von 1995: Problemstellungen und wissenschaftliches Programm.” In Wilhelm Bürklin and Hilke Rebenstorf, et al., Eliten in Deutschland. Rekrutierung und Integration. Opladen: Leske+Budrich: 11–34. 14. Helmut Wiesenthal. 1994. “Interessenrepräsentation im Transformationsprozess,” in Die real-existierende postsozialistische Gesellschaft. Chancen und Hindernisse für eine demokratische politische Kultur. Berlin: Brandenburgische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung, 187; further, Helmut Wiesenthal. 1999. Die Transformation der DDR: Verfahren und Resultate. Gutersloh: Bertelsmann Stiftung. 15. Eckhard Priller and Annette Zimmer. 1997. “Ende der Mitgliederorganisationen?,” 20th Congress of the German Political Science Association (DVPW). Bamberg, October 13–17, 9; Rainer Weinert. 1995. “Intermediäre Institutionen oder die Konstruktion des ‘Einen’. Das Beispiel der DDR.” In Birgitta Nedelmann, ed., 1995. Politische Institutionen im Wandel, Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 35: 237–253. 16. Jürgen Baur. “Die Role der Sportvereine im sozialen und politischen Transformationsprozess der neuen Länder,” unpublished manuscript provided by Priller. 17. Priller, “Veränderungen in der politischen und sozialen Beteiligung,” 296. 18. Joyce Marie Mushaben.1997. “Auferstanden aus Ruinen: Social Capital and Democratic Identity in the New Länder.” German Politics and Society 14 (4): 79–101. 19. Pierre Bourdieu. 1983. “Ökonomisches Kapital, kulturelles Kapital, soziales Kapital.” In Reinhard Kreckel, ed., Soziale Ungleichheiten. Göttingen: Otto Schwarz: 183–198; further, Pierre Bourdieu and Loic Wacquant. 1992. Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 119. 20. Robert D. Putnam. 1995. “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6 (1): 65–78. 21. The first five cases were featured in an earlier article, all of which have been updated here. See Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2001. “Die Lehrjahre

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sind vorbei! Re-Forming Democratic Interest Groups in Eastern Germany.” Democratization 8 (4): 95–133. 22. Peter Wensierski. 1986. Von oben nach unten wächst gar nichts: Umwelt Zerstörung und Protest in der DDR. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 49. 23. Wensierski, Von oben nach unten, 19. 24. Peter Wensierski.1984. Ökologische Probleme und Kritik an der Industriegesellschaft in der DDR heute, Forschungsbericht. Berlin: 1984. 25. “Ausverkauf an den Klassenfeind,” Der Spiegel, January 15, 1990, 57. 26. “Zeitbombe ‘Tschernobyl Nord’,” Der Spiegel, February 1, 1990: 30–45. 27. Wensierski, Ökologische Probleme, 21–22. 28. Frede Hvelplund, Niels Winter Knudsen and Henrik Lund.1993. Erneuerung der Energiesysteme in den neuen Bundesländern—aber wie? Potsdam: Netzwerke Dezentrale Energienutzung e. V, 17. 29. Wensierski, Von oben nach unten, 48; “Das Land der 1000 Vulkane,” Der Spiegel, January 8, 1990, 27–46. 30. “Gesalzene Rechnung,” Der Spiegel, February 4, 1980. 31. “Ein Fluss geht baden,” Der Spiegel, July 23, 1990, 39–46. 32. Wensierski, Ökologische Probleme, 87–125. 33. “‘Die Lage ist abenteuerlich’: Vergiftetes Trinkwasser gefährdet die Gesundheit Hunderttausender von Ostdeutschen,” Der Spiegel, December 31, 1990, 52–59. 34. “1000 Vulkane,” 41. 35. Wensierski, Von oben nach unten, 23. 36. Wensierksi, Von oben nach unten, 61–62. 37. Wensierski, Von oben nach unten, 45–48; “Zeitbombe ‘Tschernobyl Nord’,” Der Spiegel 5/1990. 38. “Wie uff ‘ner Kippe,” Der Spiegel, October 15, 1990. 39. Prior to 1989, Baerens had worked with church opposition groups to end toxic FRG dumping in the Schönberg landfill. He subsequently published Die Müllconnection—Entsorger und ihre Geschäfte (The Rubbish Connection), which triggered an investigation and a ministerial resignation. Still in Schwerin, he is a freelance writer, contributing to NDR documentaries. Further, Anne Hampele. 1996. “Dem Aufschwung Ost ökologisch auf die Beine Helfen. Die Grüne Liga e.V.” Deutschland Archiv 30 (2): 242–251. 40. Hampele, Aufschwung Ost, 247–249. 41. Hampele, Aufschwung Ost, 247. 42. CDU/CSU Fraktion, 1997. Das Ehrenamt: Verantwortung übernehmen— Zukunft gestalten. Bonn: Deutscher Bundestag, 29. 43. “Endgültiges Aus für Schweinemastanlage Haßleben,” Berliner Zeitung, July 7, 2020.

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44. Gudrun Heinrich. 1997. “Von Einheit keine Spur? Bündnis ’90/Die Grünen,” Berliner Debatte INITIAL 8: 40–48. 45. Erik Gawel and Klaas Korte. 2015. “Regionale Verteilungswirkungen und Finanzierungsverantwortung: Bund und Länder bei der Strom-­ Energiewende.” In Thorsten Müller and Hartmut Kahl, eds., Energiewende im Föderalismus. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 155; Jochen Dieckmann, Antje Vogel-Sper and Jörg Mayer, et al. 2014. Vergleich der Bundesländer: Best Practice für den Ausbau Erneuerbare Energien— Indikatoren und Ranking. Berlin: Federal Ministry for Economics and Energy. 46. Ulrich Lohmann. 1988. “Wirtschafts- und sozialpolitische Elemente des Arbeits- und Sozialversicherungsrechtes der DDR.” In Gerd-Joachim Glaeβner, Die DDR in der Ära Honecker. Opladen: Springer, 432. 47. Gunnar Winkler. 1990. Frauenreport 1990. Berlin: Die Wirtschaft, 171. 48. Lohmann, “Wirtschafts- und sozialpolitische Elemente,” 431–432. 49. Gunnar Winkler, 1990. Sozialreport 1990. Berlin: Die Wirtschaft, 226. 50. Winkler, Sozialreport 1990, 227. 51. Zimmermann, “Renten,” DDR Handbuch, 1119–1120. 52. Saxony introduced “Action 55” to encourage volunteerism among persons forced into early retirement; 45 were directly involved with the Grüne Liga. 53. Volkssolidarität. 1998. Info-Blatt 1. Berlin: Bundesverband, 8. 54. Susanne Angerhausen, Holger Bachau-Maul et al. 1998. Überholen ohne einzuholen: Freie Wohlfahrtspflege in Ostdeutschland. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. 55. Arjan Gjonça, Hilke Brockmann, and Heiner Maier. 2000. “Old-Age Mortality in Germany prior to and after Reunification.” Demographic Research 3. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft: July. 56. Gunner Winkler, 2013. Sozialreport 50+, Daten und Fakten zur sozialen Lage 50- bis unter 65-Jähriger in den neuen Bundesländern. Forschungszentrums Berlin-Brandenburg e.V. 57. Interview with State-Secretary Matthias Gabriel, July 14, 1998. 58. “Sonne und Alkohol,” Der Spiegel, May 23, 1994. 59. Helmut Herles and Ewald Rose, eds. 1990. Vom Runden Tisch zum Parlament. Bonn: Bouvier. 60. Leo Jansen. 1996. “Die Wiederentdeckung des Politischen durch problemorientiertes Lernen. Regionale Runde Tische und Politische Netzwerke.” Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen 9 (3), 44. 61. These figures were graciously provided by Dr. Tabke. 62. Jansen, “Die Wiederentdeckung des Politischen.” 63. Karl Mai. 2002. “Zur Höhe der Staatsverschuldung infolge der deutschen Vereinigung.” Halle: Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung. September 5.

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64. I am deeply grateful to Dagmar Gruner, for her willingness to discuss GSS developments three summers in a row. She provided key documentation, including the Pressespiegel der Gleichstellungsstelle, 15. Marz 1990 bis 15. Marz 1995, documents related to Gewalt gegen Frauen hat viele Gesichter, access to the annual Informationsbörse, as well as the Office’s 1997 Annual Report. 65. “Jetzt wird im Rathaus nicht mehr nach Hausfrauenart geputzt sondern professionell,” Thüringer Landeszeitung, July 21, 1993. 66. See Gabriele Steckmeister, ed. 1994. Das Erfurt der Frauen: 1250 Jahre zwischen Disziplinierung, Komplizenschaft und Widerstand. Fachhochschule Erfurt. 67. Andreas Pickel.1997. “The Jump-Started Economy and the Ready-­Made State: A Theoretical Reconsideration of the East German Case.” Comparative Political Studies 30 (2), 211–214. 68. Dr. Reinhard Höppner, “Menschenrecht auf Arbeit,” Rede auf dem Forum Ostdeutschland in Leipzig, June 8, 1996, provided by his press speaker, Hans-Ulrich Fink. 69. Dr. Reinhard Höppner, Rede auf dem Rechtspolitischen Kongreß der Friedrich Ebert Stiftung am 20. April 1997, Rheingoldhalle-Mainz. 70. My deep thanks to Hans Misselwitz, who shared his collection of FO working papers, conference reports and internal documents. 71. For a broader discussion, see Hans-J. Misselwitz. 1996 Nicht länger mit dem Gesicht nach Westen: Das neue Selbstbewuβtsein der Ostdeutschen. Berlin: Dietz Verlag. 72. Details in Forum Ostdeutschland der Sozialdemokratie, Vorlage für die Sitzung des Beirates, May 9, 1996. 73. Forum Ostdeutschland. 1996. In die eigene Kräfte investieren: Dokumentation. Berlin: Willy Brandt Haus, November 2. 74. Deutscher Bundestag. 1998. Drucksache 13/1043613, 13. Wahlperiode. Bonn, May 28, 21880 ff. 75. Wolfgang Thierse. 2001. “Fünf Thesen zur Vorbereitung eine Aktionsprogramms für Ostdeutschland,” Die Zeit, January 3, 2001; further, Paul Windorf, Ulrich Brinkmann and Dieter Kulke. 2000. Warum blüht der Osten nicht? Zur Transformation der ostdeuschen Betriebe. Düsseldorf: Sigma; and Fritz Vilmar, ed. 2000. Zehn Jahre Vereinigungspolitik: Kritische Bilanz und humane Alternativen. Berlin: Trafo Verlag. 76. Enacted in 1995, Solidarity Pact I allocated 105.3 billion Euros through 2004; Solidarity Pact II (2005–2019), viewed as “the last call” for special assistance, transferred roughly 2.1 billion Euros. The term “transfer” is problematic ten years into unification, insofar as funds for highway and railroad maintenance, for example, are “normal” federal expenses when distributed to the old Länder.

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77. Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat. 2019. “Unser Plan für Deutschland—Gleichwertige Lebensverhältnisse überall.” Berlin, July. 78. Beschluss des SPD-Parteivorstands am 28. Januar 2019, “Jetzt ist unsere Zeit: Aufarbeitung, Anerkennung und Aufbruch,” https://neuigkeiten. spd.de/ov?mailing=351ER9TH-­GJRRBO&m2u=351CXA10-­351ER9 TH-­QQIWJZ. 79. The German titles were Identitätsgewinn im Aufbau Ost and Grundlagen Papier: Deutschland ist ein neues Land geworden, respectively; both were provided by the CDU press office in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. 80. Identitätsgewinn, 22. 81. Deutschland is ein neues Land, 8. Regarding post-1990 economic conditions, see Peter Krause and Roland Habich. 2000. “Einkommen und Lebensqualität im vereinigten Deutschland,” Vierteljahresheft zur Wirtschaftsforschung 69 (2). 82. Deutschland is ein neues Land, 12. 83. Deutschland is ein neues Land, 17. 84. The state nationalized the land but accorded millions of guaranteed “use” titles between 1952 and 1976, many of which were never entered into the land registry. East Germans allowed to emigrate were required to sell their homes at a price set by the state. Restitution rights could be overridden (with compensation) for “special investment purposes,” for example, securing jobs, meeting housing needs, or improving the infrastructure. See D.  B. Southern. 1993. “Restitution or Compensation: The Land Question in East Germany.” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 42 (3): 690–697. 85. CDU/CSU Bundestagsfraktion. 1997. Aufbau Ost, Stichtag 1. Januar 1997: Neuregelungen für die Neuen Bundesländer. Berlin: Bundespresseund Informationsdienst. 86. For details, see Peter Ralf and Christ Neubauer. 1991. Kolonie im eigenen Land. Die Treuhand, Bonn und die Wirtschaftskatastrophe der fünf neuen Länder. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1991. 87. Though 100+ groups competed in the first free elections, most media outlets only presented platforms for the top ten to twelve contenders. Stern Extra: Zur Wahl. Die neuen Parteien: Wer sie sind, was sie wollen (February 1990). 88. “Aus östlichen Wäldern,” Der Spiegel, September 10, 1990. 89. “Nur in den Grenzen von heute,” Der Spiegel, December 4, 1989, 34–53; “Modrow vor dem Kollapse?” Der Spiegel, January 22, 1990. 90. They included party executive Martin Schnur, Interior Minister Peter-­ Michael Diestel, Environmental Minister Karl H.  Steinberg, RoundTable member Wolfgang Schnur and the democratically elected Premier, Lothar De Maizière. Nor were SPD members immune: Ibrahim Böhme

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was a Party founder and chief executive officer. See “CDU: Ernste Gefahr,” Der Spiegel, September 9, 1991; “Ich werde putschen,” Der Spiegel, September 3, 1990; “Wir sind alle beschädigt,” Der Spiegel, February 12, 1990. 91. “Marx geb’ ich nicht auf,” Der Spiegel, July 23, 1990. 92. “Erst Mitleid, dann zuschlagen,” Der Spiegel, January 15, 1990. 93. Heinrich Bortfeldt. 1991. “The German Communists in Disarray.” Journal of Communist Studies 7 (4): 522–532. 94. Jonathan Olsen. 2002, “The Dilemmas of Germany’s PDS,” German Policy Studies 2 (2), 197; Daniel Hough. 2000. “’Made in East Germany’: The PDS and the Articulation of East German Interests.” German Politics 9 (2): 125–148. 95. Assets included 502 properties, schools, vacation facilities, government buildings, 90 presses and publishing houses, 100 automobiles (with garages, repair stations), stores, warehouses, recording studios, and a paper-­ manufacturing monopoly. “Die reichste Partei Europas,” Der Spiegel, August 20, 1990. 96. Bundesanstalt für Arbeit, 1995. Strukturanalyse 1994. Nürnberg, 115. 97. Heiko Grohe. 1998. “Anregungen und Vorschläge für die kommunalpolitische Arbeit der PDS, 1998.” Schwerin: Kommunalpolitisches Forum Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 5ff. 98. Patrick Moreau, ed. 1998. Die PDS: Profile einer anti-demokratischer Partei. Munich: Hans Seidel Stiftung, 102–103; Jonathan Olsen. 2002. “Germany’s PDS: Between East and West.” Central European Political Studies Review 4 (1–2), 148ff. 99. Jonathan Olsen. 2019. “The Left Party Thirty Years after Unification: Losing its Identity?” German Politics and Society 37(4): 15–28. 100. Pickel, “The Jump-Started Economy,” 223. 101. Pickel, “The Jump-Started Economy,” 230. 102. Neues Deutschland, February 15, 1995, cited by Pickel, 218. 103. Pickel, “The Jump-Started Economy,” 237. 104. Cited in Lothar Probst. 1994. “Das Modell Runder Tische. Befunde eines politischen Experiments an Hand einer Regionalstudie.” In Misselwitz, Die real-existierende post-sozialistische Gesellschaft, 90–91; Isolde Stark. 1997. “Der Runde Tische der Akademie und die Reform der Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR nach der Herbstrevolution 1989,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23: 423–445.

PART III

Reconstructing East-German Identities: Peer Cultures

Das Vergangene ist nicht tot; es ist nicht einmal vergangen. Wir trennen es von uns ab und stellen uns fremd. Frühere Leute erinnerten sich leichter: eine Vermutung, eine höchstens halbrichtige Behauptung. Ein erneuter Versuch, dich zu verschanzen. Allmählich, über Monate hin, stellte sich das Dilemma heraus: sprachlos bleiben oder in der dritten Person leben, das scheint zur Wahl zu stehen. Das eine unmöglich, unheimlich das andere. Und wie gewöhnlich wird sich ergeben, was dir weniger unerträglich ist, durch das, was du machst. … Wie so oft in den letzten eineinhalb Jahren, in denen du lernen muβtest: die Schwierigkeiten haben noch gar nicht angefangen. Wer sich unterfangen hätte, sie dir der Warheit nach anzukündigen, den hättest du, wie immer, links liegenlassen. Als könnte ein Fremder, einer der auβen steht, dir die Rede abschneiden …. In die Erinnerung drängt sich die Gegenwart ein und der heutige Tag is schon der letzte Tag der Vergangenheit. So würden wir uns unaufhaltsam fremd werden ohne unser Gedächtnis an das, was wir getan haben, an das, was uns zugestoβen ist. Ohne unser Gedächtnis an uns selbst. Und die Stimme, die es unternimmt, davon zu sprechen. Christa Wolf, Kindheitsmuster (1976) What is past is not dead; it is not even past. We cut ourselves off from it; we pretend to be strangers. People once remembered more readily: an assumption, a half-truth at best. A renewed attempt to barricade yourself. Gradually as the months went by, the dilemma crystallized: to remain speechless, or else to live in the third person. The first is impossible, the second strange. And as usual, the less unbearable alternative will win out. … As in so many times during the last eighteen months, when

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you were forced to learn: the difficulties haven’t even begun. As always, you would have ignored anyone presumptuous enough to tell you so …. The present intrudes upon remembrance, today becomes the last day of the past. Yet we would suffer continuous estrangement from ourselves if it were not for our memory of the things we have done, of the things that happened to us. If it weren’t for the memory of ourselves. And for the voice that assumes the task of telling it. Christa Wolf, Patterns of Childhood, Translated by Ursule Molinaro and Hedwig Rappolt (1980)

CHAPTER 7

Conscience of the Nation: Writers, Artisans, and Intellectuals

Erfolg User, der            Our Success, as Du stehst in der Zeitung         You stand in the newspaper Geheiligt werde Dein Wortlaut       Hallowed be thy wording Deine Ziffer melde           Thy figures proclaim Dein Optimismus blühe         Thy optimism blooms Wie im Rundfunk             On radio Also auch im Fernsehen….         As well as on television Gib uns täglich             Give us this day Unser ruhiges Gewissen           Our quiet conscience Und vergib uns unsere Kritik        And forgive us our criticism Wie wir vergeben unseren Kritikern     As we forgive our critics Und führe uns nicht in Versuchung     And lead us not into temptation sondern erlöse uns            but deliver us Von allen Zweifeln           From all doubts Denn Dein ist die Genehmigung       For thine is the permission Und die Karriere               And the career Also auch der Beifall             And also the applause in Ewigkeit               Forever and ever Hurra.                Hooray.              Wolfgang Hinkeldey, 19781

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_7

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In a country where journalists were routinely denied the right to speak truth to power, it often fell to writers, playwrights, and artists to reflect on the far-from-utopian conditions created by real-existing socialism. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany sought from the start to establish monopoly control over a pre-­structured realm of public communication that offered little space for private expression. Touted as a “completely new objective creation,” the socialist public sphere was deemed “a powerful political-moral and societal-­structuring force.” Given the political victory of the working class over the bourgeoisie, it purportedly arose not in opposition to the regime, but rather as its corollary, “which developed through state organs and through the broadly intertwined network of non-state organizations on the basis of, and in indivisible unity with democratic centralism.” As such, the role of all recognized media outlets was “to enlighten and inform, politically and ideologically educate, to organize and inspire behavior, to analyze, to reveal and discover,” as well as to stimulate and articulate public opinion.2 Article 27 of the GDR constitution asserted that every citizen had the right “to express his opinion freely and openly”; it guaranteed “freedom of the press, radio and television,” while Article 28 warranted freedom of assembly. The SED wasted no time, however, in using licensing procedures to secure monopoly control over all branches of the media. Starting with its first broadcast on May 13, 1945, Berliner Rundfunk was expected “to play a direct, operative and organizing role in reconfiguring life in Germany.” The radio landscape grew to include four more national stations (Radio DDR I and II, Voice of the GDR and Youth Radio DT64), twelve regional programs, one allocated to the Sorbian minority and Radio Berlin International.3 Television broadcasting commenced on Stalin’s birthday, December 21, 1952, with a nightly news program, Aktuelle Kamera, on the German Television Broadcasting (DFF) network. Its main content was delivered by the General German News Service (ADN), relying on fourteen district editorial offices. By the mid-1980s, it had established forty-seven foreign correspondence sites and was accredited in eighty-seven countries.4 Color-TV programming was introduced through a second DFF channel in time for the GDR’s twentieth anniversary in October 1969. One of its more noteworthy programs was The Sandman, a short, nightly show to assist parents in sending young children off to bed—the only eastern program to survive unification. The second, the Black Channel, offered weekly, virulently anti-FRG commentaries by Karl Eduard von Schnitzler,

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a former BBC and West German broadcaster who subsequently became the eastern equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. Despite the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the first earth-orbiting satellite, Sputnik, in 1953, rapid advances in information technology posed a persistent challenge to the SED’s plans for media control. By 1962, it had established 400 “blocking stations” to halt western frequencies, followed by an attempt to produce TVs incapable of FRG reception. By the late 1970s, party bosses were forced to tolerate a forest of west-­ directed antennas across the urban landscape; after 1983, they sought to distract eastern viewers by expanding their own cultural and entertainment programming. By the mid-1980s, the regular viewer quotient for eastern news programs had plunged to 5%, attesting to the “electronic unification” that took place every evening in GDR living rooms. Roughly 84% watched the Tagesschau (ARD), 77% turned on Heute (ZDF), and 43% regularly accessed FRG regional channels, with GDR national news sandwiched in between.5 This access played a unique historical role on November 9, 1989, leading to the opening of the Wall. The Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) initiated the practice of distributing press licenses to parties and mass organizations, shutting out individual owners. The SED emerged as the key beneficiary, claiming ownership of thirty-nine daily newspapers by 1989; its holdings included Neues Deutschland and fifteen district papers, responsible for 218 local editions. Its Central Publishing conglomerate (Zentrag) controlled ninety presses and distribution networks, accounting for 90% of all printing capacities. The National Front parties, the Free German Youth (FDJ), the central trade union confederation (FDGB), and the German Athletic and Sports Union (DTSB) had their own press organs, as did some 656 factories that circulated papers at irregular intervals. Falling under nomenklatura, major editorial appointments required the approval of the SED Cadre Department (Central Committee). The state guaranteed minimum self-regulation to the Lutheran, Catholic and recognized “free churches,” although it indirectly controlled the content of their publications by way of paper allocations (in chronically short supply) and its monopoly over postal delivery and other distribution channels. Denominational newspapers could not be sold at public newsstands, for instance, and the state refused to “deliver” seventeen issues with articles deemed politically unacceptable in 1988. That year it also denied GDR citizens access to eagerly awaited issues of the Soviet digest, Sputnik, featuring news of Gorbachev’s reform initiatives. While GDR journalists ascribed to the dictum, “nothing can happen that is not

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allowed to be,” readers noted smugly, “everyone knew what nobody was told, and everything stayed the same.”6 Given these constraints on public media, it is not surprising that GDR citizens turned to literary authors, playwrights, and artists for deeper, albeit veiled reflections on their real lives. This chapter begins with the regime’s pro-Stalinist embrace of “socialist realism,” used to frame the SED’s definition of politically acceptable literary and artist production. Although not statistically “representative,” I then profile two first-generation authors, Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym, to illustrate the identity qua loyalty dilemmas eastern intellectuals faced across four decades. Next I turn to the generation of artists and writers “born into” the GDR, intent on allegedly apolitical, post-modernist forms of expression, stripped of all loyalty concerns in the wake of the Prague Spring. This is followed by an analysis of a highly publicized attack against prominent first-generation authors, especially Christa Wolf, launched by conservative western media critics shortly after unification. Enjoying relatively privileged status throughout the GDR’s existence, this group became outright casualties of the peaceful revolution, with little hope of emerging as “winners” at a later date. My argument here is that prominent GDR writers, most of whom were deeply respected and widely read in both parts of Germany, were frequently instrumentalized by both states, albeit for opposing ideological purposes, prior to 1990. Though they might have assisted in bridging the forty-year cultural gap between the two societies, eastern writers were immediately subject to a reversal of fortune by way of a vehement culture war launched by conservative FRG pundits and critics. Their putative aim was to render the old Federal Republic “the victor of history,” as well as to delegitimize home-grown “1968” leftists who, ironically, would soon assume the reins of national power in 1998. This chapter ends with reflections on the double bind inflicted on German postwar intellectuals by the national conundrum.

Cultural Policies and the Forces of Socialist Realism To foster cultural renewal and uphold a shared legacy in occupied Germany, active anti-fascist groups needed to win over liberal-humanists, bourgeois intellectuals and prominent artists, despite rising tensions among the victorious powers. Ulbricht’s Moscow-trained avant-garde relied on Berlin as

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a crystallization point for socialist mobilization and cultural revitalization between 1945 and 1950. Officers charged with executing this task were chosen on the basis of ideological criteria, meaning that most evinced little knowledge of, much less appreciation for modern forms of theater, music, art, especially twentieth-century expressionism.7 Imposed by Stalin in the 1920s, the socialist realism paradigm was rooted in an earlier Russian tradition purportedly presenting an objective mirror of life conditions that had nonetheless been stripped of earlier critical depictions of reality, found in the writings of Tolstoy, for example. Intent on the construction of a classless society, socialist leaders favored optimistic depictions that captured a broader historical significance in “realist” style. Literary texts were expected to center on an idealized, positive hero, that is, a dauntless, muscular, youthful figure who perseveres against all odds to mold the consciousness of the masses. Encyclopedia Britannica characterized these (mostly male) soldiers, inventors and engineers as “strikingly alike in their lack of lifelike credibility.”8 Incapable of transcending their own provincial, petty-bourgeois tastes, SED leaders desired to “passionately pull [socialist citizens] into great deeds.” They nonetheless spent the next forty years treating even their most loyal writers and readers as perpetual children.9 Johannes R. Becher, whose poems and novels embodied an expressionist style, was named the first president of the Cultural Union for Democratic Renewal in Berlin on July 3, 1945. Designated a communist front-­ organization, western allies banned the Kulturbund in their own sectors. Despite its anti-fascist thrust, the Union opened itself to many figures who had not actively resisted Nazis, like Gerhard Hauptmann. It also welcomed, at least temporarily, others who had been charged with “artistic decadence” by the Nazis. Along with the Writers’ Union and the PEN Center (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), it embraced prominent writers returning from exile who laid the foundation for “GDR literature” as a genre sui generis: they included Ludwig Renn, Anna Seghers, Stephan Hermlin, Alfred Kantorowicz, Arnold Zweig, and Bertolt Brecht. Two main presses under SED control, the Aufbau Verlag and the Mitteldeutsche Verlag, published an array of artistic and literary journals (e.g., Bildende Kunst, Ulenspiegel), several of which disappeared amidst an intensifying East-­ West conflict. Party leaders imposed no stylistic preferences or content requirements at the outset but did shut down several bold theater productions in 1947–1948.10

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Prior to the forced merger of the Communist and Social Democratic parties, Anton Ackermann declared at the KPD’s First Central Cultural Conference (February 1946) that “many isms were being chosen that had already been tried out after World War I that could produce nothing better than they had back then.” He spoke of pseudo-art and pseudo artists who would offend “the people’s sensibilities” if they failed to serve “freedom and democracy correctly.” Even apolitical artists like Karl Schmidt-­ Rottluff, cofounder of Die Brücke, were soon accused of “formalism,” for contradicting “the ideals that we see in art which is socialist in its content and realistic in its form.”11 Formalistic works were discredited as those that “neglected realistic content,” treating form as more or less absolute. Ackermann excoriated artists like Picasso and Chagall for their “carnival of miscarriages” and “monstrous” distortions of reality which seduced others through a “falsely understood newness”; their ostensible anti-humanism presented people as geometric creatures “while ignoring the most important and essential characteristic of mankind, his spiritual content.”12 He insulted Ernst Barlach for producing “grey, desperate, passive, decaying animalistic masses,” and even discredited Käte Kollwitz whose “pessimistic figures of workers … only reflected the suffering elements of the population.”13 Artists linked to modernism were denounced only three years after facing exclusion and persecution by the Nazis, rooted in the same charges of “arrogant decadence.” So much for “the freedom of the new beginning.”14 Between October 1949 and June 1953, the Soviet line mandating variations on nineteenth-century German and Russian realism moreover inflicted a chill on the creative climate at performing art academies and design schools. This coincided with intensifying “psycho-sacred” devotion to Stalin’s understanding of traditionalism. Architecture likewise came under fire. Despite persistent food and housing shortages, SED officials committed vast sums of money to the restoration of Berlin’s State Opera, the Wartburg monument near Eisenach and the “Zwinger,” a palace and garden complex in Dresden, recognized as one of German’s most significant baroque constructions. They ordered the transformation of Berlin’s Lustgarten into a marching ground for party and military tribunals, although Pankow was the recognized government seat. While they saw fit to repair cathedrals in Magdeburg, Halberstadt, and Merseburg, they rushed to destroy other reminders of a shared German past, including the war-damaged Hohenzollern palace (fifteenth-century origins) in central Berlin and its popular baroque Schlüterhof, associated with Prussia. Rulers

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ultimately abandoned plans to do away with “functionalist” Bauhaus constructions in Dessau and Weimar, perceived as “the genuine child of American cosmopolitanism.” The SED Central Committee sealed the fate of would-be modernists at its fifth plenary session in March 1951, barring artistic “experimentation” as defined by the hated State Commission for Artistic Affairs. Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl declared, “The idea of art must follow the marching orders of the political struggle. That which has proven to be correct in politics also applies unconditionally to art.” This triggered an outraged response from sculptor Gustav Seitz: “that content determines form is nothing new, and I do not need a herring-merchant turned art-­ functionary to pronounce this.” Philosopher Ernst Bloch likewise attacked “the same cheeky dilettantism, the same murderous mania” witnessed under the Nazis: “They are seeking revenge against the Geist that they do not possess or know.”15 Subsequent cancellation of two theater productions prepared by Bertolt Brecht—socialism’s artistic poster-boy—impelled many literati to resign and move to the west. Only two publications came to their defense, Sonntag and the Berliner Zeitung, anticipating a “new course” after Stalin’s death. The June 1953 uprising resulted in the elimination of the hated State Commission and the Office for Literature and Publishing, but by this point Culture Minister Becher enjoyed little political influence. Though temporarily weakened by Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s revelatory speech to the 20th CPSU Congress, Ulbricht was able to reimpose a strict party line in the wake of the failed Hungarian uprising of 1956. The end of a brief “thaw” led the Politburo to adopt a new cultural course in 1959, the aim of which was to raise the level of aesthetic understanding and artistic appreciation among average members of the proletariat: “Colleague, grab your pen, the socialist national culture needs you.”16 Labeled the Bitterfeld Path, the strategy was expected to generate all-sided socialist personalities and deepen class consciousness by incorporating artistic education and “creative competitions” into the everyday lives of the work collectives. Authors were encouraged to visit or work in factories to forge relationships with the proletariat. Two noteworthy examples were the Movement of Writing Workers and the Young Talent campaigns. The results were generally mediocre, sooner judged on the basis of political correctness than on high cultural standards. The state did provide heavy subsidies to approved cultural venues, however, ensuring cheap theater, film and concert tickets for the working class.

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Having reduced the external threat, construction of the “anti-fascist protection wall” in 1961 erroneously led writers and artists loyal to socialist ideals to expect greater tolerance for their efforts to critique problematic developments within society. Instead, SED authorities moved to block publication of ensuing literary works and cancelled suspect theatrical productions. Christa Wolf, Volker Braun, Peter Hacks, and Stefan Heym were just a few prominent figures encountering the heavy hand of the state. Heiner Mueller was expelled from the Writers’ Union for his comedy, Die Umsiedlerin (The Resettler, or Life in the Countryside) labeled counter-­revolutionary, anti-communist, and antihumanist. Peter Huchel lost his job as chief editor of Sinn und Form for publishing essays by Sartre, Adorno, and Horkheimer, and for supporting works by Joyce, Proust, and Kafka. Fritz Cremer (Fine Arts) and Stephan Hermlin (Writing Arts) were both dismissed from their sectionchair positions at the Academy of Arts. Konrad Wolf ’s cinematic portrayal of Christa Wolf ’s novel, Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven, 1964) triggered a fierce party-internal debate as to whether DEFA films should be permitted to tell stories with a modernist angle, or whether they had to be “close to the people.”17 The second Bitterfeld Conference of 1964 sought to link socialism’s “cultural revolution” with the scientific-technological revolution. The SED’s short-lived effort to decentralize and “democratize” industrial production under the New Economic System (1963) was accompanied by a contradictory push to centralize control over the cultural sphere, especially after Brezhnev replaced Khrushchev as the Soviet premier. Ulbricht was able to reassert control over would-be reformers in the Politburo, after Hager undertook a secret visit to Moscow just days before the SED plenary. Already a candidate member of the Central Committee, Christa Wolf took the unprecedented step of openly criticizing party policies at the 11th Central Committee Plenum in December 1965, noting “we must not be allowed to lose the artistic freedom and aesthetic progress of the last few years.” She rejected Politburo charges that the Writers’ Union was harboring a counter-revolutionary group equivalent to the Petöcki Club, allegedly responsible for the 1956 Hungarian uprising.18 Ulbricht immediately responded in polemical terms: You should not think that we as party and working-class functionaries will allow ourselves to be further spit upon by every random writer, dear Comrades! That period is over, absolutely over! …Some Comrades have

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tried to give the impression that a discussion of literary questions has begun. But it is simply not true. Discussion of quite a different topic has begun. Discussions have begun on the topic of cleanliness in the GDR, of whether Rock groups and sex propaganda, which have been systematically promoted along American lines, are the direction in which our culture is going.19

No other writers came to Wolf’s defense. This was but the first in a series of professional blows that not only resulted in a period of deep depression (as she later revealed to Günter Gaus) but also altered her writing style over the next two decades.20 Authorized by Soviet military authorities in May 1946, the German Film Company (DEFA) was also expected to advance political re-­education along socialist realism lines. Two critical turning points were the SED-­ sponsored Film Conferences of 1952 and 1958. Even portrayals of potential “problems” encountered in building socialism were expected to result in a happy ending, along the lines of boy meets tractor, boy loses tractor, girl and “the collective” help boy to recover the tractor, resulting in a twenty-fold increase in agricultural output. Following the 11th Plenum, ideologues outlawed dozens of films in various stages of production, decimating a movie industry they characterized as drowning in oceans of American “immorality and decadence” and polluted by “absolutist tendencies concerning contradictions and disregard for the dialectics of development.”21 The list of “forbidden films” included: Berlin um die Ecke (1965, Berlin around the Corner); Jahrgang 45, (1966, Born in ’45); Karla (1965); Hände hoch oder ich schiesse! (1965, Hands Up, or I’ll Shoot!); Denk bloss nicht, ich heule (1965, Just Don’t Think I’ll Cry); Der verlorene Engel (1966, The Lost Angel); Fräulein Schmetterling (1965, Miss Butterfly); Das Kaninchen bin ich (1965, The Rabbit Is Me); Der Frühling braucht Zeit (1965, Springs Takes Time) and Spur der Steine (1966, Trace of Stones).22 The latter’s lead-actor, Manfred Krug, applied for permanent emigration, while director Frank Beyer sought a multi-year work visum for the FRG. The duller the indigenous film landscape became, the more average Easterners resorted to more decadent sources of resistance, namely West-TV. Not realizing that Jürgen Böttcher had used his own East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg as his filming site for Jahrgang 45, one clearly disoriented functionary demanded to know-­how the director had found “so much time to build these slums.”23 By the 1970s, the main studio in Potsdam-Babelsberg was averaging 15–20 major cinematic productions per year; it also turned out twenty-five

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made-for-TV movies. Another 170 DEFA productions involved documentaries, commissioned projects, or advertising films: even “cultural production” was subject to the Plan, forcing the state to hawk its own goods. Major films were supplemented by sixty-five cartoons, puppet shows, and children’s programs, largely for television. DEFA had its own synchronization and copying facilities, a film technology division, and an export agency. It maintained contact with over 1100 distribution centers and TV stations located in 105 countries. By the late 1970s, GDR filmmakers had participated in 421 international film festivals, accruing 249 prizes. Though it sold 8000 import licenses to partners in 80 nations, DEFA acquired licensing rights in only 38 countries between 1950 and 1976.24 Under Honecker, DEFA became a vehicle for agitation and propaganda, “a strong weapon in our struggle,” preferring stereotypes, ritualistic metaphors, and pseudo-scientific legitimations over complex portrayals of social realities. Television and radio likewise saw their offerings reduced to the level of pedantic boredom. Authorities sought to intensify youth’s “love for the socialist fatherland” by way of musical comedies, as well as to quell potentially dangerous stirrings of young Wanderlust through historical presentations of Native Americans (known as Indians) victimized by greedy, oppressive, land-mongering settlers. The paradox of censorship is that it deprived SED bosses of critical clues and insights as to the nature of popular discontent. Unable to capture the hearts and minds of the silent majority, party leaders eventually settled for their passive complicity. Ulbricht liked to boast that the GDR had no institutionalized Censorship Office, ignoring the “Z-system” (Zensur) running through the Ministry of Culture. But when “the scissors in one’s head” fell short of delivering politically acceptable works, decisions regarding individual publications or artistic performances were passed all the way up the party ladder, to chief ideologue Kurt Hager and Erich Honecker. Ulbricht’s involuntary abdication in 1971 was accompanied by a short-lived era of cultural liberalization, producing a temporary truce with prominent authors, following the Eighth Party Congress. Honecker welcomed a “creative atmosphere” grounded in “mutual trust”: “if one proceeds based on a solid socialist position, … then there cannot be any taboos in the areas of art and literature.”25 Socialist realism purportedly allowed for a wide variety of themes and ways of shaping artistic expression. The “critical element” would only “prove to be productive in its dialectical relationship to the constructive function of art in socialist society.”26

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Liberalization was, in part, a function of détente dynamics and the GDR’s desire for international recognition beyond the athletic realm.27 Previously suppressed works were published, and several negatively sanctioned authors were reaccredited. Filmmakers were permitted to incorporate treatments of individual and societal problems on par with other foreign productions. The SED Secretary for Cultural Affairs, Kurt Hager, introduced the all-encompassing components of a new East German policy at the Central Committee’s sixth plenary session in July 1972, stressing that it would help to satisfy “very differentiated cultural and artistic needs … allowing for a rich assortment of themes, contents, styles, forms and structures.”28 Having signed on to the 1975 Helsinki Accords, rulers promised “understanding treatment of artisans” and “the promotion of all talents” at the Ninth Party Congress in May 1976. In October the Erfurt district branch of the Writers’ Union voted to expel Rainer Kunze for publishing a prose collection, Die wunderbare Jahre, in the west. In November 1976, the SED stripped Wolf Biermann of his GDR citizenship while he was giving a concert in Köln; he had already been blacklisted as a performer at home in 1965. Biermann’s Jewish father had been murdered at Auschwitz as a member of the German resistance. Born in Hamburg in 1936, he had voluntarily moved to the east at age seventeen as a devoted communist, becoming a protégé of Hans Eisler. His expulsion led twelve authors to join Stephan Hermlin in composing an open protest letter, quickly signed by 150 artists and intellectuals, then shared with western media. Hager initiated his own campaign to drive a wedge between critical and loyalist members of the literary/artisan scene. The Politburo adopted a secret resolution on “the political-ideological leadership of intellectual-cultural life,” followed by the arrest and deportation of several Biermann supporters. Prominent figures like Manfred Jentzsch, Sarah Kirsch, Jurek Becker, Hans-Joachim Schädlich, director Adolf Dresen, composer Thilo Medek and Jürgen Fuchs (1977) were “released from GDR citizenship” or otherwise pushed into extended “vacation visas” for the west. Their involuntary exit coincided with the publication of Rudolf Bahro’s book, Die Alternative, seeking ways to overcome contradictions between the ideal and the real conditions of East German socialism.29 Several prominent authors were deliberately excluded from the Eighth Authors’ Congress in 1978. Although their earnings were taxed (more hard-currency for SED coffers), writers who published with FRG presses were defamed as “bourgeois artists.” Honecker joined the hardliners in

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proscribing performances and publications. Authorities harassed intellectuals like Stefan Heym for granting interviews to western journalists, then fined them for “currency violations.” The Berlin Authors’ Union expelled Heym, Rolf Schneider, and Joachim Seppel for publishing manuscripts seeking “to harm the interests of the GDR.” Maintaining suspect contacts with western artists was declared a state crime, but the Schmidt-Honecker meeting in December 1979 (Werbellinsee) impelled the SED to approve a symposium featuring Heym and others, along with their FRG counterparts, to discuss peace issues, just as NATO and the Soviet Union geared up for new nuclear deployments. A second meeting in the Hague was less productive. The Free German Youth (FDJ) intensified tensions among divided party members at its own cultural conference in October 1982, against a “betrayal of our homeland and our ideals.” Some actually accused the SED of “selling out” by accepting western financial credits to cover its mounting foreign debt. One consequence of Biermann’s expulsion, the forced departure of other writers and dissidents, Robert Havemann’s 1976 house arrest and campaigns against SED-insiders like Rudolph Bahro was a turn toward “internal emigration” on part of many authors, artisan, and intellectuals who remained. We turn now to their loyalty dilemmas.

Anti-fascist Imperatives: Loyalty and the Aufbau Generation As the experiences of prominent GDR intellectuals demonstrate, exercising voice comes with a very heavy price under an authoritarian regime. This forces us to recall that Hirschman’s paradigm derived largely from his observations of western market economies and democratic systems. What renders his work a classic is the fact that many of its core insights can nonetheless be re-interpolated in ways that still help us to “explain” human behavior across diverging political contexts. While West Germans were (and remain) very wary of overt displays of patriotism and rhetoric invoking “loyalty to the state,” East Germans were raised on a daily diet of GDR national symbols, utopian slogans and “love for the socialist fatherland.” As a result, the interplay between voice and loyalty followed a very different trajectory across the two states. Unlike western writers and critics, GDR authors could easily grasp the loyalty conundrum described by Hirschman:

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Expressed as a paradox, … loyalty is at its most functional when it looks most irrational, when loyalty means strong attachment to an organization that does not seem to warrant such attachment because it is so much like another one that is also available … Also, there are some countries that resemble each other a good deal because they share a common history, language, and culture; here again loyalty is needed more than in countries that stand more starkly alone.30

The lines between unconscious and conscious loyalty are often blurred, insofar as an individual “may have a considerable stake in self-deception,” that is, in suppressing the realization that the institution or system to which s/he belongs is either defective or deteriorating to a considerable degree.31 People will be especially inclined to suppress this awareness if they have “invested a great deal” in securing their membership—and its potential benefits. A further loyalty dilemma arises in deciding whether the time has come to leave … members, especially the more influential ones, will sometimes be held back not so much by the moral and material sufferings they would themselves have to go through as a result of exit, but by the anticipation that the organization to which they belong would go from bad to worse if they left [emphasis in the original]. The ultimate unhappiness and paradoxical loyalist behavior occurs when the public evil produced … promises to accelerate or to reach some intolerable level … the decision to exit will become ever more difficult the longer one fails to exit. The conviction that one has to stay on to prevent the worst grows stronger all the time.32

Voice will often lose out to exit, because it takes more effort; its effectiveness “depends on the discovery of new ways of exerting influence and pressure towards recovery.” Exit, by contrast, merely allows the defective system to free itself from troublesome elements.33 Fritz Ringer’s classic study on The Decline of the German Mandarins examined increasing tensions between “orthodox” and “modernist” intellectuals leading up to the rise of National Socialism. Comprising a small elite stratum that enjoyed access to higher education and “the official privileges which were its reward,” professors, philosophers, historians, and legal theorists, in particular, viewed themselves as “the conscience of the nation,” best qualified to represent its values.34 Most were not “men of letters” in the literary sense; claiming a degree of rationality and objectivity, their writings were nonetheless controversial at times. While they “did

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not actively desire the triumph of the Third Reich,” the orthodox mandarins, especially, perceived themselves as a spiritual aristocracy, pursuing enlightenment (Geist) divorced from power (Macht).35 They shared a deep-seated cultural pessimism, as well as hostility toward industrialization and “the tyranny of the masses” implied by democracy. Modernists like Max Weber, Ferdinand Tonnies, Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Meinecke, and Karl Mannheim accepted these developments as inevitable, albeit without enthusiasm. Few, if any were inclined to dilute their philosophical discourses with real-existing social justice concerns rooted in class conflict. They relied, more often than not, on an organic conceptualization of the nation; the state was its apotheosis reified, more than the sum of its parts. The Nazi regime did not lack supporters among intellectuals, with the result that those who did not resist, perish, or resort to exile ultimately undermined the moral legitimacy and trust in a (more or less) unified intellectual elite. German division in the wake of unconditional surrender forced the survivors to identify politically with one ideology or the other, although many sought to uphold the ideal of a single “cultural nation.” The political re-education inflicted on both sides by their respective occupying powers led to the emergence of two new groups, characterized by their membership in the western Economic Miracle and eastern Aufbau generations, respectively.36 Although they were ultimately shaped by dialectically opposed ideological forces, many who rose to intellectual prominence through the 1950s and 1960s shared key traits. First, their personal experiences and geographic proximity to World War II gave them a specific sense of obligation to the new “nation” in which they found themselves. Secondly, both groups were overwhelmingly anti-fascist in their orientations. Third, most saw their own moral authority rooted in anti-nationalism; they were willing to accept division (for a time) as the price to be paid for Nazi aggression, although the cost to easterners was significantly higher, and long-lasting. Fourth, intensifying Cold War pressures forced them to decouple their mutual hopes of creating a “better Germany.” Finally, most sought to articulate “voice” outside of formal political institutions, although their governments did call on them occasionally to foster legitimacy. The first generation on both sides sought links between fascism and the human condition when the official “explanations” afforded by their respective governments fell short. Although their aversions to the nationalist past frequently overlapped, east and west intellectuals often drew

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different conclusions and lessons from history, reflecting their ideological re-socialization. They were neither militantly anti-modernity nor did their values rest on absolute truth-claims. Neither side believed that real democracy could be achieved prior to a fundamental transformation of core educational, cultural, and economic institutions. In contrast to prewar mandarins, postwar intellectuals did not avoid social justice issues, although these were often cloaked as scholarly or literary treatments. More explicit criticisms were channeled through the medium of party-political involvement. There were, in any case, gaps to be found between the theory and practice of democracy on both sides. As Adorno, the Mitscherlichs, and others testified, neither the Adenauer nor the Ulbricht government had an interest in getting to the roots of “the authoritarian personality.” The Western state heralded the values of individualism and freedom, with little emphasis on the moral imperative of “resistance.” In practice, however, its insistence on its recognition as the sole, legitimate heir to the nation (Alleinvertretungsanspruch) did result in an extended period of reconciliation with former adversaries, including formidable monetary sums extended as compensation to fascism’s victims. Among its most prominent Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), almost exclusively male, were Karl Jaspers, Carl von Weizsäcker, Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, Helmut Gollwitzer, and Walter Jens. They were bolstered from abroad by exiles like Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, whose “critical theory” reflections would shape what Helmut Schelsky labeled the skeptical generation, born after 1945.37 GDR leaders, shaped by their direct exposure to Stalinism, impelled eastern intellectuals to embrace values embedded in Marxist-Leninist thought, such as modernism, humanism, and collective solidarity, at odds with western individualism. Although its legitimacy claims were explicitly grounded in the “antifascist resistance” of its founders, the socialist state had no tolerance for subsequent displays of philosophical criticism or resistance among its own ranks. Its early thinkers included many writers qua activists: Johannes R.  Becher, Anna Seghers, Bertolt Brecht, Stephan Hermlin, Anton Ackermann, Christa Wolf, and Rudolf Bahro. The Ulbricht government actively persecuted its own, such as Politburo members Franz Dahlem and Wilhelm Zaisser, Neues Deutschland editor Rudolf Herrnstadt, then Wolfgang Harich and Walter Janka (Aufbau Verlag), for seeking a German path to socialism divorced from the bureaucratic

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chokehold of Stalinism in the 1950s.38 The pattern continued under Honecker, with Robert Havemann and Rolf Henrich. Deprived of a free press and autonomous channels of interest aggregation, writers subject to an authoritarian state acquired special status and salience, with the result that GDR literature served an existential function rarely or incompletely understood in the west. Even if their followers were compelled to “read between the lines,” authors and artisans could give voice to citizen concerns regarding guilt and pain from the Nazi past, the impact of the Wall, state corruption, women’s rights, and environmental decay. Their veiled critiques of the present aimed to preserve historical memory and to warn against a repetition of the past, leaving a wide zone of “agreed-upon silences.” Drawing hundreds of fans, their readings, performances, and exhibits were often staged in churches, one of the few semi-public spaces where dissidents could discuss more freely. The poetic license, or Narrenfreiheit (jester’s freedom) afforded by their chosen media, such as novels, lyrics, and plays, allowed them to dig more deeply into the human psyche.

“Profiles in Courage”: Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym The dilemmas faced by GDR writers were particularly acute where options were reduced to exit in a physical sense, or remaining to “discover new ways of exerting influence” in hopes of steering the system toward recovery. Perhaps the best way to illustrate this process is to pinpoint efforts along these lines undertaken by two real-existing GDR authors, one of whom became the primary target of a post-unification assault by FRG critics, although both were driven by loyalty to choose voice over exit: namely, Christa Wolf and Stefan Heym. A word of caution: My reflections are those of a political scientist partial to interdisciplinary sources, not a scholar intimately acquainted with literary analysis. My undergraduate triple-major included Germanistik, but my courses focused heavily on “the classics” penned by Walter von der Vogelweide, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and “the Romantics,” ending with Bertolt Brecht and Siegfried Lenz. Christa Ihlenfeld (Wolf) was born on March 18, 1929, in Landsberg/ Warthe—east of the Oder, now Gorzów, Poland—where her parents, Otto and Herta Ihlenfeld, owned a small grocery. They experienced no loss of rights following the collapse of Weimar, “because … they had

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obviously not planned any publications (freedom of the press), or participated in mass meetings (freedom of assembly).”39 They supported Hitler after 1933 and raised their children accordingly. The young Christa witnessed the boycott of Jewish businesses, organized by Nazi storm-troopers, as well as the Kristallnacht attacks (Night of Broken Glass) waged on November 9–10, 1938. The latter resulted in the nation-wide destruction of 177 synagogues, 7500 Jewish shops, 91 (officially reported) Jewish deaths and the deportation of 30,000 more to concentration camps.40 Attending classes that branded Jews as inferior, she considered herself lucky: No Jewish or Communist relatives or friends, no hereditary or mental diseases in the family, no ties to any foreign country, practically no knowledge of any foreign language, absolutely no leanings toward subversive thought or, worse, toward decadent or any other form of art… We were required only to remain nobodies. And that seems to come easily to us. Ignore, overlook, neglect, deny, unlearn, obliterate, forget.41

At age ten, Christa joined the Bund Deutscher Mädel (German Girls’ League) requiring regular attendance at meetings and camps organized by the NSDAP. In September 1939 she observed SS troops marching through her town on their way to invading Poland. Only a teen when the Third Reich collapsed, she was “horrified at how a system of delusion can seduce people into hatred for mankind,” leading her to embark on “a hunt for alternatives to these steps towards ruin, however frail the alternatives may be, however utopian they may appear.”42 The family fled to escape advancing Russian troops, but ironically landed in Mecklenburg, part of the Soviet occupation zone. They moved to Bad Frankenhausen in 1947, where Christa completed her Abitur two years later. She joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany at age 20, accepting Marxism as the ideological antithesis of fascism: “At all costs I didn’t want anything that could be like the past … That was the source of (my generation’s) commitment and … why we clung to it so long … something that critics in the west have often failed to grasp.”43 Hoping to become a teacher, Christa studied German literature at universities in Leipzig and Jena, 1949–1953, where she was probably influenced by dissident professors Ernst Bloch and Hans Mayer.44 In 1951 she married fellow student Gerhard Wolf (a writer and publisher), giving birth to her first daughter in 1952. Relocating to Berlin in 1953, she joined the

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staff of the German Writers’ Union (Schriftstellerverband). After the birth of her second daughter in 1956, she shifted to the publishing house, Neues Leben, where she edited the journal Neue Deutsche Literatur, 1958–1959. During this period she met writers who had allied themselves with the German Communist Party in the 1930s, including Anna Seghers. Her job as a reviewer at the Mitteldeutscher Verlag took her to Halle through 1962, where she produced her first work, Moskauer Novelle (Moscow Novel). That year the Wolfs moved to Kleinmachnow, near Berlin, where Christa began writing full-time. Wolf’s creative breakthrough came in 1963 with Der geteilte Himmel (The Divided Heaven), relaying the story of Rita and Manfred, ultimately separated by the recently erected Berlin Wall. Forced to choose between her socialist ideals and joining her lover in the West, the female protagonist, like the author, chooses to stay behind to build a better society. Only in her 30s, Wolf boldly describes factory slackers and the blind zeal of party hacks, as well as the systemic doubts that lead Manfred to abandon Rita and the new socialist state. Party hardliners denounced the work as decadent for portraying workers in a negative light. It nonetheless brought international acclaim, the GDR’s Heinrich Mann prize and her appointment as a candidate member of the SED Central Committee (CC), hungry for new sources of cultural legitimacy. She was invited to speak at the 1964 Bitterfeld Conference, which set the parameters for a new party line vis-à-vis writers and artists. The political honeymoon was short-lived, however. Wolf became a member of PEN Center, paving the way for her participation in PEN-­ International conferences in Yugoslavia, and a visit to the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.45 Her defense of cultural freedom at the 11th CC Plenum in 1965 led to her characterization in the east as a “loyal dissident,” and as a “socialist of independent temper” in the west. Her 1967 text, Juni Nachmittag, was soon followed by Nachdenken über Christa T. Her effort to come to terms with Ulbricht’s blistering renunciation and a return to a hardliner course was marked by a shift to an introspective narrative style. One could construe this as discovering a new form of voice à la Hirschman, addressing the “the difficulty of saying I” and “attempting to be oneself.” She looked for moral relevance under real-existing socialism, reflecting on the life of a friend who dies of leukemia in the 1960s. By 1967 Wolf was no longer a candidate member of the SED Central Committee. Official responses to Christa T. were harsh; accused of being “individualistic,” the book was banned in 1968, but eventually issued as a

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limited edition. She consistently refused to publish anything in the FRG that could not appear in the GDR. Though she was compelled to issue a public statement supporting the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion, her disillusionment after the Prague Spring led her to resort increasingly to internal emigration: “Each time … I’d moved a bit further along the road to myself.” Lesser-known works of the early 1970s included a set of essays and speeches in Lesen und Schreiben (Reading and Writing), the film script Till Eulenspiegel (with husband Gerd) and a story-collection, Unter den Linden (Under the Linden Trees). Likewise troubled by Biermann’s expulsion in 1976, she shifted to a different historical context. In Kein Ort. Nirgends (No Place on Earth, 1979), she constructs a meeting in the 1880s between two writers, Heinrich von Kleist and Karoline von Gunderrode, both of whom committed suicide, imagined within a twentieth-century society whose ideology deems despair/defeat politically unacceptable. That work expressed how she “felt about life at the time. For me there were no alternatives, no place. I was no longer playing along in the GDR.”46 In retaliation for having signed an open letter protesting Biermann’s forced exit, Wolf’s husband Gerhard was kicked out of the SED.  Despite later allegations by FRG critics like Marcel Reich-Ranicki, she never retracted her signature.47 In 2005 interview with Die Zeit, she noted that she and her husband had discussed leaving following Biermann’s expatriation.48 That same year she published Kindheitsmuster (Patterns of Childhood), the first German text to deal self-critically with the taboo topic of the fascist past. Autobiographical in nature, it tells the story of a young girl, Nelly, born in Landsberg in 1929, tracing present-day German thought patterns and the problem of collective amnesia back to life under the Third Reich. Her childhood follows a “normal” trajectory, while Jews were being crammed into boxcars and transported on trains through her town to Chelmno and Treblinka. Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll praised its brutal honesty, showing “how eyes and ears that otherwise have nothing physiologically wrong with them can see and hear so little.”49 Rather than stress the “socialist perfectibility” expected of GDR writers, she quietly challenged SED limits on “personal authenticity” and its patriarchal authority; she later wrote the foreword to Maxi Wander’s path-­ breaking interview collection concerning women’s far-from-idyllic circumstances and lives.50 Ongoing international recognition nonetheless secured her right to visit non-socialist countries where she forged friendships with other women writers. One trip to Greece triggered a curious

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epiphany regarding historical female marginalization: “I … had a real shock when I realized that in the past 2,000 years women really have not been able to exert any public influence.” Wolf was enthusiastically “mobbed” by western students in 1982, when she delivered her Frankfurt Lectures on Poetics, five lectures that would provide the foundation for Kassandra. They were characterized by Thomas Beebee and Beverly Weber as “a coherent, feminist anti-poetics, a literature of theory so unusual in its form that it has gone largely unnoticed by readers and critics alike.”51 Margaret Atwood would later contribute the preface to Wolf’s Medea (1996), stressing that “the heroes are really like devils, and the victims are the most important.”52 Following a reading at the Women’s Center in Berlin-Marzahn which assisted females rendered unemployed by unification, Wolf wrote: We spoke about the scape-goat problem in Medea, for a long time, over the exercise of male power for thousands of years and beyond, what types of men are well disposed to rise to the level of ruling class, and what kinds of women; what happens to women, when they also want to rise; how they come to terms with the negative consequences that accompany them, highly neurotic persons in neuroticizing structures, that practically force one to lose touch with reality.53

Wolf personally attributed the greatest significance to her works Der geteilte Himmel, Christa T. and Kindheitsmuster, which David Bathrick described as controversial not merely as documents of explicitly ideological deviation but also because as fictional works of modernism the epistemological premises of their narrative point of view suggest a radical degree of individual ­estrangement … The Party rightly feared the implications of an individual narrative voice uncorrected by the necessity and prefabricated articulation of socialist history.54

Her 1987 book Störfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident: A Day’s News) was grounded in the Chernobyl disaster, mirroring her concerns about technological advance and ecological decline. Despite a variety of stress-induced ailments, she refused to exit, contending that once in the FRG, she would have no reason to write. She had her first heart attack in 1965; her appendix burst while she worked on

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Sommerstück (Summer Play) in 1988, leaving her with peritonitis that resulted in further operations. She lost her father in 1989, then underwent hip operations. She quit the SED in June 1989, but exhorted thousands of citizens fleeing the country in late summer not to leave but to build “a truly democratic society.” It was, she wrote, “more difficult but also more honorable to stay in the socialist Fatherland.”55 In September 1989, Wolf and other women formulated the first critical resolution delivered to the Politburo in the name of the Writers’ Union. In October, she published two essays in Die Wochenpost, critiquing the educational system under the titles, “Das haben wir nicht gelernt” (“That’s something we didn’t learn”) and “Es tut weh zu wissen” (“It hurts to know”), later re-issued in a single volume, Angepasst oder mündig? (Coopted or mature?). These essays drew hundreds of reader responses. Shortly after her speech on November 4th, the largest single demonstration in GDR history, she suffered another heart attack. Leibhaftig (In the Flesh, 2002) draws on her experience of illness as the dream of socialism unravels. Published in 1990, Was bleibt? (What remains?) reflected on her own Stasi experiences, unleashing a torrent of western criticism (see below). A brief moment of unity between writers and their readers was shattered as the Monday night chants shifted from We are the people! to We are one people. Wolf joined Stefan Heym, theologian Friedrich Schorlemmer and others in issuing an “Appeal for Our Land” on November 26, urging her compatriots not to seek immediate unification: “we were thinking about preserving an entirely different country.” Following numerous statements, speeches, open letters, readings, and interviews, she was attacked as an “advocate of socialism” and a “domesticated opponent” of the SED, impelling her return to internal emigration in Berlin and her country home in Woserin (Mecklenburg), where I was privileged to stay and meet with her a few years before her death through a mutual friend, Ruth Misselwitz. As this biographical sketch illustrates, Wolf was more often than not a thorn in the side of SED ideologues, who tolerated her alternative forms of voice primarily for the international recognition she brought to the GDR cultural landscape. Conservative FRG critics nonetheless subjected her to harsh attacks even before the unification treaty was signed in 1990 for her alleged collaboration as a “state poet.” A guest of the Getty Foundation from September 1992 to July 1993, she reread the works of Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht, who had also sought refuge in Santa Monica during the 1930s and 1940s. Rooted in that experience, her final

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book, Stadt der Engel (City of Angels) oder The Overcoat of Dr. Freud would not appear until 2010. It looks back on her childhood and family life, friendships with the offspring of Holocaust survivors, her political beliefs and the collapse of her socialist ideals against the backdrop of Pacific sunsets that had harbored intellectuals who exited to escape an earlier German dictatorship. Wolf died at age eighty-two on December 1, 2011. Born as Helmut Flieg on April 10, 1913, in Chemnitz, Heym was the oldest son of a Jewish merchant.56 In 1932 he was expelled from the state gymnasium (academic high school) for his poem Exportgeschäft (Export Business), protesting the glorification of German weapons exports. He completed his Abitur in Berlin, then studied philosophy, German literature and journalism. While at university, he contributed his first pieces to a weekly cultural and business magazine, Weltbühne, formerly edited by Kurt Tucholsky, then Carl von Ossietzky. It was outlawed by the Nazis after the Reichstag fire, forcing him to flee to Prague in 1933, where he wrote for German and Czech newspapers. To protect his family, he adopted the pseudonym Stefan Heym. His father committed suicide in 1935, and the rest of his family perished in concentration camps. Heym emigrated to the United States, resuming his studies at the University of Chicago. Completed in 1936, his Master’s thesis centered on another Jewish author, Heinrich Heine (a distant cousin of Karl Marx), whose radical political views led him to voluntarily exit absolutist Germany for revolutionary France; Heine’s works were later denounced by the Nazis. Moving to New York, Heym served as chief editor of an anti-fascist weekly, Deutsches Volksecho, from 1937 to 1939. A member of the German-­ American Writers’ Union, his first novel, Hostages (translated as Der Fall Glasenapp), appeared in 1942. Heym joined the US Army in 1943, rising to lieutenant rank in the First Division-Europe, where he was responsible for psychological warfare; he distributed flyers urging Germans to capitulate and participated in the Normandy invasion. After a brief period editing Frontpost for Radio Luxembourg, he co-founded a newspaper, Neue Zeit, in Munich in 1945. He was soon transferred back to the USA and discharged from the Army for his “pro-Communist” views. A subsequent English novel, The Crusaders (Kreuzfahrer von heute), became an international best-seller in 1948. He returned his military medals in protest against McCarthyism and the Korean war, and then exited the US for Prague via Warsaw in 1951. Like Brecht, he returned to the fledgling socialist state in January 1952, to exercise voice from within.

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Writing columns for the Berliner Zeitung from 1953 to 1956, he soon became “uncomfortable” for the SED government as well, having joined PEN Center (East and West) in 1953. Persuaded that socialism GDR-style was a distortion of the ideal, he became a “critical Marxist,” willing to take on the SED regime; other intellectuals sought to do likewise inside the party that Heym never joined. He received the Heinrich Mann Prize, as did Wolfgang Harich, in 1953. The next year he joined the executive board of the German Writers’ Union. In January 1956 he clashed directly with Ulbricht over national cultural policy at the Fourth Writers’ Congress. Authorities then banned publication of his next novel, Der Tag X, a not-­ so-­veiled critique of the June 17th uprising. Heym nonetheless received the FDGB Literature Prize, First Class, then the Franz Mehring Honorary Lapel Pin. By 1959 he had also collected the National Prize, Second Class and the Medal of Honor accorded by his birthplace, Chemnitz. Honecker attacked him in 1965 for publishing his previously banned work on the 1953 uprising in the Federal Republic under the title 5 Tage im Juni (5 Days in June). Four years later he was charged and fined for violating “copyright” laws, after publishing Lassalle in the west without state permission. Thereafter, he had little choice, but to have most of his books issued by FRG presses. Like Wolf, Heym co-signed a declaration protesting the decision to strip Biermann of citizenship in November 1976, precipitating his constant surveillance by the Ministry for State Security (MfS). In 1978 he was barred from the Eighth Congress of Authors, then expelled from the Writers’ Union in 1979, along with eight others, “for gross violations” of the association’s statutes. His next work, Collin, also appeared in West Germany after it was blocked by SED censors, for reckoning with the GDR’s Stalinist past. He helped to organize the German-German authors’ summit, and an international peace symposium in Scheveningen (Netherlands) in 1981. One wonders why SED authorities did not use Heym’s many trips abroad to nullify his citizenship, given the exit pressures it exerted against other writers during this period. Heym was cheered enthusiastically during his speech at Alexanderplatz on November 4, 1989, exhorting Easterners to build “a new, better socialism.” His co-authored the “Appeal for our Land” which first appeared in the Liberal (LDPD) bloc-party newspaper, Der Morgen; within a week, over a million citizens had added their signatures. Hearing that the new SED chief, Egon Krenz had also signed, Heym declared it an “affront”

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that instantly rendered the Appeal “worthless.” When the post-Wall political tide shifted, he expressed disgust over “the angry hordes, pressed back to belly, pushing on to Hertie und Bilka [FRG discount stores] in their hunt for glittery rubbish”—in contrast to the self-demeaning patience with which they had once waited in line for hours for scarce goods on their own side of the Wall.57 The University of Bern (Switzerland) awarded him an honorary Doctorate in 1990, followed by another honorary degree from Cambridge University (UK), the Gutenberg-Prize (Le Grand Livre de Mois) in 1991. He co-founded the Committee for Justice in 1992, hoping for a new party that would secure Eastern support. The Citizens Initiative Art and Culture accorded him their cultural prize, Chemnitzer Ernst. Heym was named Honorary President of the German PEN Center East-West in 1993 for his engagement against racism and xenophobia. He then became the first German author to receive the Jerusalem Prize for Literature. Unable to mobilize a new party, Heym campaigned for a PDS seat (as a non-member), winning a direct Bundestag mandate in the Berlin Mitte-Prenzlauer Berg district in 1994. He justified this move by asserting that the “west German political caste” evoked nothing beyond political vexation. As the “Elder President” (81), he delivered the opening address; Rita Süssmuth was the only CDU/CSU member to applaud. He resigned his seat in 1995, in protest against lawmakers’ vote to raise their own salaries despite mass unemployment in the east. In 1997 he joined thirty-four SPD and Green politicians, union leaders, authors, theologians, and artists in issuing the Erfurt Declaration, calling for social democracy and an end to Kohl’s sixteen-year reign in 1998. Doctors for Peace and Responsibility accorded him their Peace Medal in 2000. Chemnitz declared him an Honorary Citizen shortly before he died at eighty-eight of heart disease in Israel on December 16, 2001. Stefan Heym’s understanding of loyalty, shared with Christa Wolf, was rooted in a commitment to an anti-fascism narrative that required “negative demarcation” from the other German state. Many members of the Aufbau generation “had difficulties growing up, becoming independent, and standing on our own feet” because they were “too young to be responsible for Nazism but old enough to carry a memory of involvement and guilt.”58 Although his preferred voice-mode was more confrontational and outspoken than Wolf’s style, he deliberately chose not to exit, though his ability to publish and find readers in the west would have rendered him

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quite secure. His decision to stay was not challenged by western pundits, nor was he personally attacked during the 1990 campaign to discredit GDR authors and literature as a whole.

The Sixty-Eighters and the Dilemmas of Cultural Revolution The next generation of writers, born into the GDR, gave little thought to the history and loyalty that made life so complicated for their predecessors. These cohorts came of political age between the late 1960s and early 1970s. After two decades of division, they had little in common with counterparts on the other side, beyond their respective forms of self-­ absorption. Rather than seeking distance from the present, the young rebels of east and west sought to reshape it, with varying degrees of success. Vergangenheitsbewältigung, “coming to terms with past,” took a back seat to Gegenwartsbewältigung, that is, processing the present. The 1968 Prague Spring was a seminal experience for both, albeit for different reasons. Younger cohorts on both sides viewed their intellectual predecessors as coopted by the system. They were less interested in preserving an all-­ German Kulturnation than in promoting cultural revolution. FRG rebels literally took their protest to the streets, where hundreds of thousands demanded free speech, an end to authoritarian/elitist educational practices and stagnant, bureaucratic structures. Diverse New Left factions assumed a passionate, anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist stance against Third World oppression but remained curiously oblivious to the repressive socialist state next door, with the exception of former GDR citizens like Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl (who now supports the farright).59 These do-it-yourself mobilizers later constituted a veritable Who’s Who? among SPD and Green politicians and theorists: Daniel Cohn-­ Bendit, Herta Däubler-Gmelin, Joschka Fischer, Peter Glotz, Jürgen Habermas, Peter Schneider, Gerhard Schröder, Antje Vollmer, and Heide Wieczorek-Zeul, to name a few. Schneider is one of the few who became a full-time author. Most were inclined to see themselves as post-­nationalists; their 1968 was a call to “dare more democracy.” Rather than repress the Nazi past, they challenged the generation of their parents to admit culpability and responsibility. They embraced the precept Never again war, never again Auschwitz, until ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia forced them to

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rethink the relationship between those two dicta in the 1990s. They were psychologically ill-prepared for unification.60 Second-generation GDR intellectuals, excluding prominent dissidents, were more inclined to turn inward. This group equated 1968 with the violent thwarting of the Prague Spring. They occupied a cultural landscape in which life courses were pre-determined, political ideals had been stripped of sincerity, and ruling elites remained impervious to social change. Two core groups emerged, one comprised writers who developed their own forms of voice within the system, testing the boundaries of censorship.61 Others chose physical exit, such as Florian Havemann (son of Robert), Gabriele Eckhart, and Monika Maron, whose father was a former GDR Interior Minister.62 Some published in the west but managed to hold their ground from within, like Daniela Dahn, Christoph Hein, Lutz Rathenow, and Thomas Brussig. A second group, pursuing lyric poetry and avant-garde writing styles, opted for a more radical form of internal emigration, by dropping out of mainstream cultural circles, establishing their own, quasi-legal publication outlets, and staging performances in private dwellings. Among the better-­ known participants were Sascha Anderson, Stefan Döring, Elke Erb, Durs Grünbein, Egmont Hesse, Uwe Kolbe, Frank Lanzendörfer, Klaus Michael, Bert Papenfuß-Gorek, A. R. Penck, Rainer Schedlinski, Cornelia Schleime, and Ulrich Zieger. Gabriele Stoetzer Kachold later revealed that it was difficult to generate serious reception of her feminist poetry, which Sascha Anderson saw as a threat to his own originality.63 They relied on roughly thirty self-printed samizdat periodicals across the 1980s, with titles like Der Kaiser ist nackt (The Emperor is Naked), Schaden (Damage), and Ariadnefabrik (Ariadne Factory), evading censorship through small production runs.64 The Stasi monitored and infiltrated the Scene but realized that their highly esoteric approaches made them largely unintelligible to the public; the state opted not to prosecute their self-contained rebellion, which deliberately ignored the system but did not actively oppose it. Shunning elite careers, they ascribed to a motto coined by Eugene O’Neill (The Iceman Cometh): “The worst is the best, the East lies in the West, and tomorrow is yesterday.”65 Understanding themselves as ideology-weary post-modernists, these writers and artisans withdrew into their own Bohemian niches in Berlin/Prenzlauer Berg, Leipzig, Erfurt, and Jena. Here they pursued apolitical aestheticism, another form of internal emigration. Less heavily

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mortgaged in relation to Germany’s fascist past, they avoided making moral claims or expressing faith in the virtues of collectivity. They displayed no interest in new social movements; indeed, they considered it a waste of time to challenge the gray eminence on their own turf, given the SED’s cultural and media monopolies. Rather than confront the system in the manner of earlier dissidents, they resisted by withdrawing into a post-­ structuralist camera obscura. As poet Kurt Drawert declared, I did not want to speak like my father (or grandfather, for instance) … to use this language would have been a form of subjugation … I felt that whenever father (or grandfather, for instance) spoke, it was not really father (or, for instance, grandfather) who spoke, but something distant, strange, external, something that merely used his (or her) voice. … I had no choice but to speak and thus to be forced into misunderstandings or lies, to feel observed, influenced, and dominated by something distant, strange, and external.66

The purists among them realized that they could live quite frugally as “independent” writers. As Graff reported, “it was terribly easy to drop out. Money and career played no role. One had time, and nothing but time,” to muse, philosophize, and create.67 Rents and public transit were cheap, healthcare was free, food, and energy were subsidized. The scene consisted largely of twenty- and thirty-somethings who began to generate an array of locally based literary journals and multi-media art books: Entwerter-Oder, Schaden, and Heart Attack in Berlin; Anschlag in Liepzig; UND/U.S.W. and Spinne in Dresden; POE-SIE-ALL-BEN; MAL-DOROR. Generating modest revenues through sales to western journalists and diplomats, these publications fulfilled significant, integrative, communication needs; they served as “a life-saving anchor for a generation of young artists condemned to silence.”68 They staged exhibits in cafes, small boutiques, private dwellings, cinemas, and church halls, including the Samariter- and the Zion Churches; the latter also provided a home for the underground “environmental library.” In the early 1980s, many scene participants moved from Dresden, Leipzig, and Halle to Berlin, which came to dominate the movement. Prenzlauer Berg was a testament to the unenlightened building practices of Friedrich II, who had “maximized” urban space by allowing the dense construction of multi-story tenements, connected by side structures and three or four back-court buildings, devoid of light and fresh air. Tenement

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construction of this sort was not outlawed until 1925. According to an 1861 census, 115,357 Berliners were crammed into one-room apartments, each housing five to eleven underpaid working-class residents; one in ten lived in the basement. By the 1920s, “Prenzlberg” had the highest population density of any European city: 30,000 people per square meter. Neither their monotone appearance nor their primitive sanitation options were improved by the ravages of World War II. Ten apartments shared a single toilet lodged in the stairwells; as late as 1981, district-dwellers still relied on 160,699 Treppenklos. For the record: I endured similar conditions in West Berlin (Tiergarten) as late as 1983.69 Housing many long-­ term, indigent elderly residents, abandoned or condemned apartments attracted a wide array of artists, for example, Käte Kollwitz, along with writers, hippies, punks, and illegal squatters like Angela Merkel, after her divorce. The “new aesthetes” were quite cosmopolitan, well versed in abstract deconstructionist/post-structural theories, yet curiously apolitical by nature. They managed to access suspect texts by Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari (not that SED censors would have understood them), and followed Derrida’s dictum, “to read carefully to respect the heterogeneity of each text and every person” in the “absence of a universal ethic.”70 As intellectuals, they rejected the role of “morally engaged participants” in favor of private enclaves from which they appeared “to intervene in public discussion only as interpreters of interpretation … life either comes to mean too little or too much art. It produces no knowledge, at least no practical knowledge but rather Not-knowledge.”71 Reacting against the empty, ritualized rhetoric of the state, they sought to strip their words and phrases of all “unexpected meanings and ambiguities.”72 They viewed their apoliticism as opposition and construed their “radical privatization of the utopian momentum” as a defense against both the eastern “tyranny of a decrepit regime” and the western “tyranny of the market.” Their self-proclaimed apoliticism did not protect them from the “neuroticizing” powers of the state, however. Wolf Biermann dismissed the Prenzlauer poets as “late-dadaistic garden gnomes with pencil and brush.”73 He was the first to “out” Sasha Anderson as a long-term Stasi agent, who had served the deformative purposes of the SED for years, as “an efficient informer who spied on the very friends who considered his poetry to be subversive.”74

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The Post-Wall Literaturstreit: “The West” Versus Christa Wolf As Ian Wallace and other experts have attested, the fall of the Wall and rapid merger of the two German states proved that “nothing is quite so divisive as unification.” Rather than welcome their liberation, a small clique of conservative western literary critics rushed to place a generation of GDR writers on public trial, in a spirit that was “largely unforgiving, sometimes hysterical, and not without a strong whiff of vindictiveness.”75 Their primary target was Christa Wolf, but the so-called Literary Controversy of the early 1990s had little to do with literature; it was largely a foil for the resuscitation of an FRG-internal culture war dating back to 1968. Analogous to the Historians’ Controversy of the 1980s, it sought to clear the landscape of leftist authors, east and west, to open up a path “for a new, national consciousness and a cultural renewal founded on more conservative values.”76 Ironically, many of the values espoused by the ’68ers (who were forty-­ somethings by 1989) had already taken root in the Federal Republic, including the push for anti-authoritarian education, gender equality, nuclear disarmament, environmental protection, and growing tolerance for gays and lesbians. Nonetheless intent on declaring themselves the victors of history, conservative FRG critics targeted an East German icon they had helped to elevate, in hopes of finishing off a system that their own government had kept on life-support for decades. Recognized as a prominent voice on both sides of the Wall, Christa Wolf became the subject of her own Greek tragedy. As subsequent critic Fritz J.  Radditz had presciently opined in a 1983 review of Kassandra: Wolf’s prose is perfect … Every word, every sentence … What Christa Wolf offers is a parable, breath-taking, because it is so simple, forceful, because it conceals historical truth as well as contemporary meaning: Sensible, [because] right was delusional. Back then they were called “seers,” today “crazies.”77

Attesting to her visionary skills prior to unification, it “matters” that Christa Wolf is the only eastern writer to have received every major prize for literary achievement known to postwar Germany. Her GDR honors included the Artistic Prize of the City of Halle (1961); the Heinrich Mann Prize (1963), bestowed by the GDR Academy of Arts; the National Prize,

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Third Class for Art and Literature (1964); the Theodor Fontane Prize (1972) accorded by Potsdam; an appointment to the Academy of Arts of the GDR (1976); and the National Prize, First Class for Art and Literature (1987). Wolf participated in the East-West Berlin Peace Symposium in 1981, as well as in the 1987 International Writers for Peace Conference in the Hague. Awards conferred by the old-Federal Republic included: the Literature Prize from the City of Bremen (1977); membership in the German Academy for Language and Poetry, Darmstadt (1979); and the Georg Büchner Prize from the German Academy for Language and Literature (1980). Curiously, she refused the Wilhelm-Raabe Prize from the City of Braunschweig in 1972.78 She was appointed to the West-Berlin Academy of Arts in 1981 and delivered the prestigious Lecture(s) on Poetics at the Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main in 1982. Baden-Württemberg accorded her the Friedrich Schiller Memorial Prize in 1983, followed by an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Hamburg (1985) and membership in the city-state’s Free Academy of Arts (1987). Her receipt of the Geschwister Scholl Award generated some controversy in 1987, insofar as her “resistance” to the Nazis had been retroactively covert rather than contemporaneously over in nature. Following unification, she was granted a further Honorary Doctorate by the University of Hildesheim (1990), and in 2002, Günter Grass presented her with the German Book Prize for Lifetime Achievement. She secured another top award at the Leipzig Book Fair in 2002 and, last but not least, the Thomas Mann Award in 2010. Not a single West German author can match this record. Recognition of her literary merit was not confined to the two German states. She served as the Max Kade German Writer-in-Residence at Oberlin College in 1974, her first visit to the United States. She told me later that this was also her first experience with a “dry town,” tornado shelters and unedible American white bread (she and Gerd started baking their own). She delivered a series of guest lectures at the University of Edinburgh (Scotland) in 1978, was invited to Greece in 1980, became a visiting scholar at the Ohio State University (USA) and acquired an Honorary Doctorate there in 1983. The City of Graz (Austria) bestowed its Franz Nabl Prize in 1984; that year she was also appointed to the European Academy of Arts and Sciences in Paris (France). In 1985 Wolf was designated an Honorary Fellow of the Modern Language Association of America and received Austria’s State Prize for European Literature. She took up residence as a guest professor at the Technical University in Zurich

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in 1987 and spent ten months as a guest of the Getty Institute in California just as the storm broke regarding her legacy. If there was such a thing as a “GDR bonus,” as FRG critics would subsequently claim, then it is pretty clear that millions of people world-wide—with “no burning interest in the problems of so-called real-existing socialism”—all got it wrong in honoring her for these awards.79 The “controversy” began with the June 1990 pre-release of Was bleibt (What Remains), which Wolf had written in summer 1979, after being subjected to a week of Stasi surveillance.80 She decided to publish her reflections, “lightly revised” in November 1989, via the Aufbau Verlag (East) and Luchterhand (West). Before it even appeared in bookstores on either side, a small group of West German critics declared it time for the hour of systemic reckoning. Conservative male journalists threw the most vicious punches, for example, Marcel Reich-Ranicki (Literaturmagazin), Ulrich Greiner (Die Zeit), Frank Schirrmacher, and Fritz Rudolf (Frankfurter Allgemeine); indeed, the gendered nature of this “controversy” was obvious from the start. Branding Wolf as a “state poet,” the critics completely ignored male authors like Hermann Kant, who displayed no remorse at having ruined the careers of venerated writers like Erich Loest, Stefan Heym, and Joachim Seyppel, out of opportunistic loyalty to the SED.81 Curiously they also ignored Anna Seghers, whose regime-loyal “silence” had helped to imprison Walter Janka and Paul Merker, while endangering Georg Lukács in the 1950s.82 Launching their attack in the middle of unification negotiations, Greiner and Schirrmacher set the tone, accusing Wolf of having been too cowardly to publish the story in 1979, using it instead to present herself as a Stasi victim after the system collapsed. Greiner admitted that its earlier publication “would surely have been the end of Christa Wolf as a state poet and probably have resulted in exile,” but added magnanimously (from the safety of his desk at Die Zeit), that “she could easily have found shelter in the West.”83 Testifying to his own insensitivity in decrying Wolf’s “lack of sensitivity” to real victims, Greiner infers that physical exit from the GDR constituted the only legitimate mode of resistance. This position was rejected by Wolf’s defenders, including Walther Janka and Lev Kopelev, both of whom had been tried, imprisoned, and stripped of their professions decades earlier. Freya Klier (expelled in 1988) determined in her conversations with eastern youth that their familiarity with dissident writers who had, in fact, exited (e.g., Biermann, Becker, Kunze, Fuchs, Havemann, and Schädlich) was “absolutely zero.”84 Those who remained

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(Wolf, de Bruyn, Heym, Plenzdorf, and Fühmann) were indispensable “for their understanding of the historical circumstances in which they found themselves.”85 Reich-Ranicki and Schirrmacher hinted at the moral equivalency of intellectuals who had collaborated with the Third Reich and those enjoying elite status in the GDR. They failed to note that only leftist intellectuals and ’68ers, not conservatives, had pushed for a personal/parental reckoning with Nazi atrocities in the FRG. By contrast, Kohl (born 1930) and his Union peers exempted themselves from historical responsibility based on the so-called “blessing of late birth”—although they, like Wolf, had attended Nazi-controlled schools.86 As Hans Krieger observed, despite its egregious violations of human rights and free speech, the GDR never launched a world war responsible for fifty million deaths, nor could it be accused of executing hundreds of intellectuals and theologians who refused to bend to its will.87 Rainer Kirsch, chair of the German Writers’ Union, observed sarcastically, “Now [Wolf] is being admonished for not overthrowing Mielke, Mittag and Honecker: it is well known that every GDR author had a tank-division in her basement.”88 Resolute anti-Stalinists Günter Grass and Walter Jens were among Wolf’s most prominent western defenders, sharing Hage’s view that her critics had no interest in engaging with the book’s reflections; they only wanted to knock her off the pedestal that they had built. Characterizing the campaign’s tone as poisonous, inquisitorial, and sanctimonious, Grass warned that judging the east through a western lens threatened to sink into “all too self-righteous know-it-all-ism.”89 Grass, Heym and others supported Wolf largely because they saw the conservative attacks as an attempt to undermine the anti-fascist commitment of an entire generation. Greiner bluntly admitted: “It is all about the interpretation of the literary past … The fight over the past is the fight over the future.”90 Eastern writers who had been forced to emigrate were divided over Wolf’s legacy. Hans (later, Chaim) Noll accused her of “laughable pathos,” while Günter Kunert characterized the campaign as “very German … divorced from reality, emotionalized, [her critics] blind to their own privileged position, and deaf to contrary arguments.” Wolf Biermann and Martin Ahrends deemed western critics “naïve.” The sole female writer-in exile siding with the critics was Monika Maron, who initially disparaged “the new misery of intellectuals” but shifted to mocking the crass behavior of average easterners two years later.91

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Women were significantly more vocal than men in defending Wolf, in particular, and GDR literature, in general. Therese Hörnigk called for calm in the midst of a German-German self-profiling wrangle over intellectual identities.92 Antje Janssen-Zimmermann admonished FRG critics for their Stasi-like behavior.93 Literary experts outside the FRG were even more adamant in their defense of Wolf. For Marilyn Sibley Fries, this “astonishingly vindictive enterprise,” delivering “enough low punches to take our collective breath away,” seemed intent on bringing the entire GDR population, “and the culture for which it stands, to a fall.”94 Claudia Mayer-Iswandy, Anna Kuhn, and Christiane Zehl Romero deemed the attack androcentric, antifeminist, and outright misogynistic. Kuhn questioned why a self-appointed body of male critics would suddenly replace their own iconic image of Wolf as “a scrupulously honest, self-searching, critical writer” with that of “a cowardly, servile, opportunistic, authoritarian personality.”95 The western coterie “directed its invective against a writer whose feminist analyses [had] fundamentally challenged male dominance and hegemonic culture,” just when the Kohl government was moving to eliminate legal abortion, generous maternal leaves and the subsidized child-care that had helped to level the playing field for Eastern women. Long-time GDR observer Antonia Grunenberg likewise rejected critics’ willful misinterpretation of Was bliebt. She saw Wolf undertaking “an almost suicidal attempt to show how criticism of prevailing conditions, pangs of guilt, yearning for Utopia, and blocked emotions poured into an inextricable knot from which there was no way out, even when the possibility arose … She cries not over the real conditions but over the ideals that will never be lived.”96 In stark contrast to FRG efforts to eliminate “GDR literature” from the university curriculum, North American scholars continued to recognize its significance as a genre meriting future research, as emphasized by David Bathrick and Friederike Eigler.97 Once citizens were granted access to their own (often redacted) secret police files, Wolf was shocked to find forty-two volumes of reports linked to her name, demonstrating that she, like Heym, had been monitored by the Stasi for thirty years. She admitted to the Berliner Zeitung that these files also revealed that she had served as a sporadic “informal collaborator” under the code-name “Margarete.” She had met four times with the secret police between 1959 and 1962 to report on suspect writers, encounters she described as “short and insignificant”—and certainly not frequent enough to qualify her as a bona fide IM, required to report every month.

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She immediately made her entire Stasi file public to avoid speculation about its contents, noting in a June 2010 interview: What bothered me, and actually made me angry, was that people focused on this single point and that they didn’t see my development and that they didn’t even think it necessary to find out what other files there were…. There were extensive transcripts of [Stasi eavesdropping] of telephone conversations…. In contrast, there was this fascicle of my discussions with the Stasi, which dated back over 30 years, and that was almost all anyone wrote about. When I then, and I was the only person to do this, published my so-called “perpetrator’s file” in its entirety, not a single newspaper that had previously condemned me took any notice.… Nobody wanted to portray my own development, which led to me being observed (by the Stasi) during the 1960s and after. That stunned me.98

Gabriele Dietze described the entire exchange as an exercise in arrogance, seeking to declare an ultimate western victory (Endsieg), but the battle wasn’t over yet.99 In October 1991 Biermann alleged that “key figures” of the Prenzlauer Berg scene including Anderson (“Sascha Arschloch,” who exited in 1986) and Rainer Schedlinski had directly collaborated with the Stasi.100 Schirrmacher and Greiner, who had no qualms about attacking Wolf over her four meetings with Stasi handlers at the height of the Cold War, rushed to defend Anderson against character assassination, praising his “non-political experimental poetry” as “genuine art.” They were forced to reverse course after Stasi victim Jürgen Fuchs uncovered a fourteen-year paper trail, documenting his complicity.101 Schirrmacher then dismissed the “myth of Prenzlauer Berg,” choosing to sacrifice the entire school to keep aestheticism and avant-garde literature “free from the reproach of moral corruption.”102 Having launched the bloody battle, Greiner and Schirrmacher suddenly declared a cease-fire, noting without irony or self-criticism, “Much harm has been done. It is hard to believe.”103 Wolf’s refusal to “exonerate” herself was interpreted by self-righteous FRG critics as proof of her culpability, rather than as a continuation of her “life’s work” rooted in intense self-interrogation. No other author had invested as much energy in questioning herself. As she wrote in Was bleibt: “Everyday I say to myself that a privileged life like mine could only be justified by attempting from time to time to cross the border of the sayable in the knowledge that border violations of any kind are punished.”104 Todd Gitlins described her as “German inwardness incarnate … Yet she

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was no self-abnegating troglodyte.” Her final book, The City of Angels (2010) allowed her “to surely [get] the better of the sort of triumphalist enemies who give schadenfreude a bad name.” She described her memory loss regarding her four collaborative meetings with the Stasi decades earlier as “a case for Dr. Freud, a classic case of repression [of] details that are the most unpleasant.” As Gitlins suggests, Wolf learned, in the end, that “blind spots make history.” They do not simply disappear on cue when they are denounced by those who did not live through them.105 She pinpointed the roots of her own blind spots in a Nazi childhood which had instilled in many members of her generation a longing “to be in harmony with those in charge.” In the end, no one judged Christa Wolf more harshly than herself. Identifying herself as a member of the “broken generation,” Wolf admitted to Günter Grass after the GDR’s collapse, “I loved this country,” leading the western Nobel laureate to respond: Christa Wolf belonged to the generation in which I also count myself. We were stamped by National Socialism and the late—too late—realization of all the crimes committed by Germans in the span of just twelve years. Ever since, the act of writing has demanded interpreting the traces that remain … False paths credulously followed, stirrings of doubt and resistance to authoritarian constraints and beyond that, the recognition of one’s own participation in a system that was crushing the utopian ideals of Socialism—those are hallmarks of the five-decades of writing that established Wolf’s reputation.106

In 2006, Grass (born 1927) confessed that his own distinguished career had been rooted in a self-imposed “historical blind spot.” His autobiography, Peeling the Onion, described his experiences during the final months of World War II, when he was drafted in October 1944 at age seventeen to serve in the 10th Tank Division of the Waffen SS (he had left school at 15).107 Wounded in April 1945, he was captured by American forces, remaining in prison until April 1946. In 1961 conservatives tried to have his first major book featuring the war, The Tin Drum, relegated to the federal index for “Media Harmful to Young Persons.” Joining Group 47, which offered new writers a postwar platform for literary renewal, he had survived twenty-four criminal charges of blasphemy and obscenity by 1963. While campaigning for Willy Brandt in a CDU stronghold in 1965, attendees denounced Grass as a communist, then pelted him with eggs and tomatoes.108

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Reactions to his 2006 revelations (hinted at in 1988) were predictably divided and typically German in their “all or nothing” tone. Critics concentrated on undermining Grass as a moral voice, rather than reflecting on the circumstances that had given rise to his youthful compliance with a dictatorship. Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews, claimed that his long-standing, anti-fascist criticisms of German politics had been reduced to “absurdities.” Historian Joachim Fest told the Bild Zeitung: “I do not understand how someone can elevate himself constantly for 60 years as the nation’s bad conscience, precisely in Nazi questions, and only then admit that he himself was deeply involved.” Against the protests of his anti-Nazi father, Fest had enlisted in the Wehrmacht in December 1944, at 18, purportedly to avoid conscription into the Waffen-SS, indicating that he had also been “deeply involved” in Hitler’s war. CDU-member Wolfgang Bösen complained that the left-leaning author “has been making moral demands on politicians all his life … Now he should make these demands on himself and honorably give back all the awards he received, including the Nobel Prize.” Hans Zippert at Die Welt noted cynically: “Günter Grass thought for a long time how he could get the most possible people to buy his new memoir … Then, fortunately, it occurred to him that he had been a member of the Waffen SS but hadn’t trumpeted it before. A real sensation.” Literary critic Hellmuth Karasek was more aggressive: “I hope that finally he has the sense to shut his mouth.”109 Defenders included Jewish writer Ralph Giordano who asked what else Grass, a child when Hitler seized power, “might have done in the face of the Nazis’ all-powerful propaganda apparatus? Nothing. I believed he suffered terribly for keeping silence about this.” Walter Jens found it “moving to see an old man finally coming to terms with his past.” Polish opinion was likewise divided. Former President Lech Walesa demanded that Grass relinquish his honorary Danzig citizenship (his birthplace); so did parliamentarian Jacek Kurski, now allied with the far-right populist Law and Justice Party. Former dissident Adam Michnik, supporting Grass, noted that “literature has never been Lech Walesa’s strong card.” Danzig mayor Pawel Adamowicz declared that “by his actions,” Grass had “already paid for the mistakes of his youth.” Archbishop Jozef Michalik, chairing the Polish Bishops’ Conference, held that he “had gained moral stature … through his confession.”110

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The Germans lucky enough to find themselves in the western occupation zones after 1945 had reaped the benefits of liberation from the Nazi regime, yet their “psychosocial refusal” to examine their own implication in fascism resulted in a deeply rooted, “emotive paranoia of anti-­ communism,” that resurfaced in the neo-con attacks against first-­ generation writers after unification.111 Disgruntled over “68’er” influences on political culture, added to the disruptions of unification, old-FRG conservatives found a way to exonerate themselves, by shifting the burden of processing two dictatorships onto eastern shoulders. The same elites exempted themselves from post-unity “soul-searching” as to how their own policies had artificially sustained SED tyrants through the 1980s. This leads me back to the ruminations of Alexander and Margarte Mitscherlich, who stressed two qualities that Germans had historically lacked. By 1989 a West German successor generation had mastered “an ability to mourn” (subsequently denied to Easterners), as symbolized by a proliferation of monuments, museums, and memorial services marking key world war “anniversaries.” In fact, the FRG’s largest, hotly contested commemorative site, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, did not open until 2005. But even decades later, few on that side of the border had developed a collective capacity to empathize.

Loyalty, Voice, and the National Question Summarizing the dilemma of intellectuals across the ages, Alexander Solzhenitsyn opined: “For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That’s why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.”112 The Marxist-Leninist vision that foresaw a proletarian public sphere, in which free expression would lay the foundation for societal discourse after “the withering away of the state,” grossly underestimated what power does to human beings. Reflecting on Medea, Christa Wolf recognized that authoritarian GDR leaders, whose experiences were rooted in both Nazism and Stalinism, built “neuroticizing structures, that practically force one to lose touch with reality.” The SED turned all forms of dissent into a disease, as diagnosed by ever more repressive Stasi structures expanded under Honecker. East German rulers found relatively easy and lucrative ways to eliminate their critics, for example, through forced expulsions and imprisonments leading to Freikauf. From the SED’s vantage point, out-of-sight translated into out-of-mind, impelling some deported malcontents (e.g., Dutschke and Rabehl) to shift to critiques of

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West German society. Other former dissidents were simply drowned out by the cacophony of competing, market-oriented western media. FRG media nonetheless played a seminal role in shaping the mobilization of protest among those who stayed behind. West-television, especially, had an “inestimable” impact on the creation, organization, orchestration and, to a degree, the homogenization of the “voice” needs of two ideologically opposed systems. Broadcasting and press reports on both sides of the Wall “were consciously structured as systems of debate and rebuttal, persuasion and its counter.”113 The censorious nature of SED media monopolies and policies not only led to “internal migration” as a form of exit; the discredited public sphere also redefined voice, giving rise to semi-autonomous spaces where writers and readers could begin to challenge the regime decades before the system collapsed. According to Daniela Dahn, the things that were articulated and the array of groups participating in semi-public discourse was simply “astonishing.” People learned to “say” what could not be “written” in newspapers: “Today it’s the reverse: one can curse the government and parties. The practical effect is similarly limited.”114 Whereas Polish, Hungarian, and Czech dissidents could draw on deeper national-philosophical traditions to legitimize their political resistance to Stalinist tendencies, this was not an option for intellectuals whose homeland owed its very founding to the Third Reich. The Nazi experience dictated an “historical separation of the German concept of nation from civic principles of liberty and democracy.”115 Although generational differences would undermine its willingness to conform by the 1980s, the intellectual class defined its GDR-identity in terms of one key component following the barbarity of National Socialism: a personal commitment to anti-fascism. This group included not only communists and socialists but also Jewish partisans, writers, and others who had been forced to flee prior to 1945. The first-generation’s justifiable obsession with the Nazi past, coupled with promises of a peaceful, socialist future, superseded a moral obligation to critique the present. Characterizing GDR authors as a privileged caste, FRG critics failed to recognize that privilege is a relative concept for those subject to an authoritarian regime. Even prominent cultural icons like Bertolt Brecht encountered the heavy hand of state censors, and the “monstrous banality” of a secret police ever more intent on destroying personal lives and relationships (Zersetzungsmassnahmen).116 Writers were able to live cheaply, eliminating the need to produce instant best-sellers. Those who found favor

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with the state, a status subject to constant ups and downs, enjoyed better access to “imported” sources (including FRG books and journals), and more opportunities for Western travel. They paid a heavy price regarding free expression, however, in exchange for modest benefits.117 What is clear is that popular, esteemed intellectuals across the GDR were stripped of their most significant societal roles in the rush to unification. Rooted in a shared generational commitment to anti-fascism, their loyalty was declared irrelevant by successor cohorts, decades removed from the war experience. Eastern writers are no longer obliged to substitute their “reality checks” for the work of a critical press, but they are not the only ones who experienced a reversal of fortune after unification. By the late 1990s, western intellectuals were likewise being displaced by new forms of expression. As Rainer Schedlinski, a former Prenzlauer scene member noted, “where everything is public, it is difficult for one to withdraw from this public force to preserve their (sic) authenticity.”118 The voices of authors and intellectuals have been lost in the jungle of TV talk-shows and 24/7 social media, while the idea of art for art’s sake has been displaced by high-­class galleries, auctions, and profit-seeking investments.119 These systemic factors have been more significant than the vehement Literary Controversy in permanently displacing the German Dichter und Denker class, long heralded as “the conscience of the nation.” Loyalty has clearly taken a back seat to self-interest.

Notes 1. Wolfgang Hinkeldey, in Thomas Auerbach, Wolfgang Hinkeldey, Marian Kirstein, Gerd Lehmann, Bernd Markowsky, and Michael Sallmann. 1978. DDR—konkret. Geschichten und Berichte aus einem real existierenden Land. Berlin: Olle und Wolter, 61. 2. All three quotes stem from Andreas G.  Graff. 1995. Öffentlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit in der geschlossene Gesellschaft der DDR.  Eine Annäherung. Deutscher Bundestag, Enquete Kommission “Überwindung der Folgen der SED Diktatur im Prozess der deutschen Einheit,” 7–8. 3. Graff, Öffentlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit, 14. 4. Graff, Öffentlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit, 16–17. 5. Graff, Öffentlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit, 26, 31. 6. Graff, Öffentlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit, 28.

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7. Jürgen Koller. 1990. “Vertane Chancen: Vom ‘demokratischen’ Kulturkonzept in der SBZ bis zur Illusion von einer freien Kunst nach dem 17. Juni 1953.” Deutschland Archiv 23(3): 396–408. 8. See https://www.britannica.com/art/Socialist-­Realism. 9. Graf, Öffentlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit, 19. 10. Manfred Jäger, ed. 1994. Kultur und Politik in der DDR, 1945–1990. Köln: Edition Deutschland Archiv. 11. Koller, “Vertane Chancen,” 400. 12. Koller, “Vertane Chancen,” 400. 13. Koller, “Vertane Chancen,” 403. 14. Koller, “Vertane Chancen,” 399. 15. Koller, “Vertane Chancen,” 404. 16. Andreas Trampe. 1997. “Kultur und Medien,” in Matthias Judt, ed., DDR-Geschichte in Dokumenten. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 298. 17. Trampe, “Kultur und Medien,” 298ff. 18. Günter Agde, ed. 1991. Kahlschlag. Das 11. Plenum des ZK der SED 1965. Studien und Dokumente. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. 19. Günter Agde. 2015. “‘Es gilt das gesprochene Wort!’ Zu den Tonband-­ Mitschnitten der 11. Tagung des ZK der SED 1965.”In Andreas Kötzing und Ralf Schenk, eds., Verbotene Utopie. Die SED, die DEFA und das 11. Plenum. Berlin: Bertz + Fischer, 510–516. 20. Günter Gaus. 1993. Zur Person: im Gespräch mit Christa Wolf, Rolf Hochhuth, Kurt Maetzig, Wolfgang Mattheuer, Jens Reich. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1993. 21. Erich Honecker. 1965. “Bericht des Politbüros an das 11. Plenum des ZK der SED,” cited in Neues Deutschland, December 16, 1965. 22. Kötzing and Schenk, Verbotene Utopie. 23. “Interview mit Jürgen Böttcher: Ein zensierter DDR-Film birgt jede Menge Aktualität,” Berliner Zeitung, February 5, 2015; Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1993. “GDR Cinema De-/Reconstructed: An Introduction to the “Forbidden Films.” GDR Bulletin 19 (1): 5–11. 24. “Filmwesen,” 1985. In Hartmut Zimmermann. ed. DDR Handbuch. Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 388ff. 25. Trampe, “Kultur und Medien,” 300. 26. Heinz Kersten and Harald Kleinschmid. 1985. “Kulturpolitik.” In DDRHandbuch, 770–71. 27. The 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City marked the first time that the two Germanys sent separate teams; despite its smaller population, the GDR secured nine gold, nine silver, and seven bronze medals, compared to five, eleven, and ten, respectively, for the FRG. 28. Kersten and Kleinschmid. “Kulturpolitik,” 770. 29. David Bathrick. 1978. “The Politics of Culture: Rudolf Bahro and Opposition in the GDR.” New German Critique (15): 3–24.

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30. Albert O Hirschman. 1970. Exit, Voice and Loyalty. Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 81. 31. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 93. 32. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 98, 103. 33. Hirschman, Exit, Voice and Loyalty, 80. 34. Fritz K. Ringer. 1969. The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 39; further, James C. Albisetti. 1994. “The Decline of the German Mandarins after Twenty-Five Years,” History of Education Quarterly 34 (4): 453–465. 35. Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins, 446. 36. For generational delineations, see Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2017. Becoming Madam Chancellor: Angela Merkel and the Berlin Republic. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, chapter 2. 37. Helmut Schelsky. 1957. Die skeptische Generation. Eine Soziologie der deutschen Jugend. Düsseldorf: Eugen Diederichs Verlag. 38. Christoph Kleβmann. 1991. “Opposition und Dissidenz in der Geschichte der DDR.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B5, January 25: 52–62; Walter Janka. 1989. Schwierigkeiten mit der Wahrheit.Reinbeck: Rowohlt; and Rolf Henrich. 1989. Der vormundschaftliche Staat: Von Versagen des realexistierenden Sozialismus. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 39. Christa Wolf. 1979 ed. Kindheitsmuster. Darmstadt/Neuwied: Luchterhand, 40. 40. Wolf, Kindheitsmuster, 149; United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, online Holocaust Encyclopedia, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/kristallnacht, downloaded September 19, 2020. 41. Wolf, Kindheitsmuster, 141. 42. “Christa Wolf,” The Daily Telegraph, December 1, 2011. 43. Kate Webb. 2011. “Christa Wolf Obituary,” The Guardian, December 1, 2011. 44. Bathrick, “The Politics of Culture,” 15–16. 45. The Frankfurt trials prosecuted twenty-two lower-level officials under FRG law for their concentration-camp roles, from December 1963 to August 1965. Only 789 of roughly 8200 SS members were tried; 750 were sentenced. 46. “Acclaimed Author Christa Wolf Dies at 82,” Spiegel International, December 1, 2011. 47. Marcel Reich-Ranicki. 1995. “Macht Verfolgung kreativ?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. November 12, 1995; Thomas Anz, ed. 1995. Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf. Der Literaturstreit im vereinten Deutschland. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 31.

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48. Wolf interview with Hanns-Bruno Kammertöns and Stephan Lebert, Die Zeit, September 29, 2005. 49. Holly Case. 2012. “Blind Spot: On Christa Wolf.” The Nation. May 16. 50. Maxie Wander. 2001. Guten morgen, du Schöne: Frauen in der DDR. Darmstadt: Luchterhand. 51. Thomas O.  Beebee and Beverly M.  Weber. 2001. “A Literature of Theory: Christa Wolf’s Kassandra Lectures as Feminist Anti-Poetics.” The German Quarterly 74 (3): 259–279. 52. Webb, “Christa Wolf Obituary.” 53. Christa Wolf, Ein Tag im Jahr, 572–7. 54. Bathrick, “The Politics of Culture,” 15. 55. Spiegel International, December 1, 2011. 56. Drawn from the time-line compiled by Inge Heym and Irmgard Zuendorf, Stefan Heym Bibliothek in Berlin, http://www.stefan-­heym. de/biografie.html. 57. Stefan Heym. 1989. “Aschermittwoch in der DDR.” Der Spiegel, December 12, 1989. 58. Wolf, cited by Christian Joppke. 1995. “Intellectuals, Nationalism, and the Exit from Communism: The Case of East Germany.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 37 (2), 224. 59. Manuel Seitenbecher. 2018. “Über eine kleine radikale Minderheit rechter Alt-68er. Den antiliberalen Motiven die Treue gehalten.” Neue Gesellschaft/Frankfurter Hefte, June 1. https://www.frankfurter-­hefte. de/artikel/den-­antiliberalen-­motiven-­die-­treue-­gehalten-­2383. 60. Mushaben, Becoming Madam Chancellor, Chapter 2. 61. Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle. 1993. Untergang auf Raten. Unbekannte Kapitel der DDR Gescgichte. Munich: Goldmann Verlag. 62. Maron’s GDR publications include Flugasche (Flight of Ashes, 1981); Herr Aurich (Mr. Aurich, 1982); Das Mißverständnis (The Misunderstanding, 1982); and Die Überläuferin (The Defector, 1986). 63. Friederike Eigler. 1993. “The Responsibility of the Intellectual: The Case of the East Berlin ‘Counter-Culture’.” In Friederike Eigler and Peter Pfeiffer, eds. Cultural Transformations in the New Germany: American and German Perspectives. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 166. 64. Roland Bleiker. 2000. “Stroll Through the Wall: Everyday Poetics of Cold War Politics,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 25 (3): 391–408. 65. Mufeed F.  Al-Abdullah. 2007. “Morgue of the Misbegotten: O’Neill’s Pattern of Salvation in The Iceman Cometh.” European Journal of American Studies 2 (1). 66. Bleiker, “Stroll through the Wall,” 394–395. 67. Graff, Öffentlichkeit und Gegenöffentlichkeit, 54.

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68. Thomas Günther. 1992. “Die subkulturellen Zeitschriften in der DDR und ihre kulturgeschichtliche Bedeutung.” Aus Politk und Zeitgeschichte, B 20. May 8, 36. 69. Daniele Dahn. 1987. Kunst und Kohle. Die “Szene” am Prenzlauer Berg. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 36–40. 70. Eigler, “The Responsibility of the Intellectual,” 158. 71. Hauke Brunkhorst. 1992. “Views of the Intellectual. From German Mandarins to an Aesthetic of Existence.” Presented at the Conference on Cultural Authority, University of Chicago, 9–10. 72. Eigler, “Responsibility of the Intellectual,” 163. 73. From his speech upon receiving the Eduard Mörike Prize, cited in “Tiefer als unter die Haut: Wolf Biermann über Schweinehunde, halbe Helden, Intimitäten und andere Funde aus seinen Stasi-Akten.” Der Spiegel, January 27, 1992. 74. Eigler, “The Responsibility of the Intellectual,” 167. 75. Ian Wallace. 1995. “East German Intellectuals in a Unified Germany.” In Peter Merkl, ed., The Federal Republic of Germany at Forty-Five: Union without Unity. New York: New York University Press, 101. 76. Wallace, “East German Intellectuals,” 104. 77. Fritz J. Raddatz. 1983. “Das Gedächtnis, eine andere Form des Sehens: Christa Wolfs Erzählung ‘Kassandra’ und ein Band mit Überlegungen zur Poetik.” Die Zeit. March 25, 1983. 78. Stephani Richards-Wilson. 2011. “Cry Wolf? Encounter Controversy: Christa Wolf’s Legacy in Light of the Literature Debate.” New German Review 24 (1), 64. 79. Volker Hage. 1990. “Kunstvolle Prosa.” Die Zeit. June 1, 1990. 80. Christa Wolf. 1990. Was bleibt? Erzählung. Frankfurt/Main: Luchterhand. 81. “Ich war ein Aktivist der DDR,” Der Spiegel 32 (1990): 156–171: Therese Hörnigk. 1997. “Interview mit Hermann Kant über die Geschichte des PEN nach 1945.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 2: 357–371. 82. J.K.A.  Thomaneck. 1993. “Anna Seghers and the Janka Trial: A Case Study in Intellectual Obfuscation.” German Life and Letters 46: 156–61. 83. Ulrich Greiner. 1990. “Mangel an Feingefühl.” Die Zeit. June 1, 1990. 84. Anz, Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf, 54. 85. Anz, Es geht nicht um Christa Wolf, 54. 86. “Nahost Politik: Späte Geburt,” Der Spiegel, September 5, 1983, 35. 87. Hans Krieger. 1991. “Leuchten über einem schwarze Loch. Ein westlicher Spiegel-Blick auf das Ende der DDR.” Neue Deutsche Literatur 2: 162–711. 88. Rainer Kirsch, Publizistik und Kunst, September 9, 1990. 89. “Nötige Kritik oder Hinrichtung?,” Der Spiegel, July 16, 1990, 138–143.

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90. Ulrich Greiner. 1993. “Gesinnungsethik.” In Wolfgang Paulsen, Klaus Dreitz, and Hannes Krauss, eds., Der deutsch-deutsche Literaturestreit. Munich: DTV, 139. 91. Monika Maron. 1990. “Das neue Elend der Intellektuellen.” Die Tageszeitung. February 6, 1990; “Peinlich, blamabel, lächerlich,” Der Spiegel, August 24, 1992. 92. Therese Hörnigk, Christa Wolf, Berlin 1989, 7–41. 93. Antje Janssen-Zimmermann. 1990. “Plädoyer für einen Text—Christa Wolf ‘Was bleibt’.” Neue Deutsche Literatur 38 (11): 157–162. 94. Marilyn Sibley Fries. 1991. “When the Mirror is Broken, What Remains? Christa Wolf’s Was Bleibt.” GDR Bulletin 17 (1): 11–15. 95. Anna K.  Kuhn. 1991. “Rewriting CDR History: The Christa Wolf Controversy.” GDR-Bulletin 17 (1): 7–11. Christa Wolf im Dialog: Aktuelle Texte (Hamburg: Luchterhand, 1990); Hermann Vinke, ed. 1993. Akteneinsicht: Christa Wolf, Zerrspiegel und Dialog. Frankfurt/ Main: Luchterhand; further, Helga Koenigsdorf. 1990. “Der Schmerz über das eigene Versagen.” Die Zeit. June 1, 1990. 96. Antonia Grunenberg. 1990. “Das Ende der Macht ist der Anfang der Literatur. Zum Streit um die SchriftstellerInnen in der DDR.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 44, October 26, 21–22. 97. David Bathrick. 1991. “The End of the Wall before the End of the Wall.” German Studies Review 14 (2): 297–311; Friederike Eigler. 1990. “Die Mauer in den Köpfen: Mechanismen der Ausgrenzung und Abwehr. Am Beispiel der Christa Wolf Kontroverse.” German Life and Letters 61 (1): 71–81. 98. Volker Hage and Susanne Beyer. 2010. “Wir haben dieses Land geliebt.” Der Spiegel. June 13, 2012. 99. Gabriele Dietze. 1992. “The Irresolute Reunification: Overcoming the Stasi Past in East and West Germany and the Death of the ‘Representative Intellectual’.” Presented at the Conference on Cultural Authority, University of Chicago. 100. Wolf Biermann. 1991. “Der Lichtblick im gräßlichen Fatalismus der Geschichte.” Die Zeit. October 25, 1991; Iris Radisch. 1991. “Das ist nicht so einfach.” Die Zeit. November 8, 1991; Hajo Steinert. 1992. “Die Szene und die Stasi.” Die Zeit. December 6, 1992; Iris Radisch. 1992. “Die Krankheit Lüge. Die Stasi als sicherer Ort.” Die Zeit. January 31, 1992. 101. “Mehr als 1000 Stasi-Seiten aufgetaucht.” Der Spiegel, October 3, 1999; Eigler, “The Responsibility of the Intellectual,” 160. 102. Dietze, “The Irresolute Reunification,” 10. 103. Frank Schirrmacher. 1990. “Fälle: Wolf und Mueller.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. January 21, 1990.

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104. Wolf. Was bleibt?, 22. 105. Todd Gitlin. 2013. “Dissident or Informant? The Murky Memory of Christa Wolf.” New Republic. March 7. 106. Karen J. Leeder. 2011. “Christa Wolf: Writer whose hard-won reputation suffered when her Stasi links surfaced.” The Independent. December 7, 2011. 107. Günter Grass. 2007. “How I Spent the War: A Recruit in the Waffen S.S.” New Yorker Magazine. June 4. 108. Sebastian Hammelehe. 2015. “Zum Tode von Günter Grass: Abscheid von einer Jahrhundertfigur.” Der Spiegel. April 13, 2015. 109. Alan Riding. 2006. “Günter Grass Under Siege After Revealing SS Past.” New York Times. August 17, 2006. 110. Riding, “Under Siege.” 111. Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich. 1967. Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens. Munich: Piper. 112. Bathrick, “The Politics of Culture,” 6. 113. Bathrick, “The End of the Wall,” 303; also, Marc Silberman, ed. 1997. What Remains? East German Culture and the Postwar Republic. Washington, D.C.: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies. 114. Daniela Dahn. 1996. Westwärts und nicht vergessen. Berlin: Rowohlt, 180–181. 115. Joppke, “Intellectuals, Nationalism, and the Exit from Communism,” 215; also, Andreas Huyssen. 1992. “The Inevitability of Nation: German Intellectuals after Unification.” October 61: 65–73. 116. Lutz Rathenow. 1991. “Schreiben Sie doch für uns!” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. November 21, 1991. 117. Dieter E.  Zimmer. 1990. “Eine privilegierte Kaste? Ein Bericht zur sozialen Situation der Schriftsteller in der früheren DDR.” Die Zeit. December 7, 1990. 118. Lothar Probst. 1990. “Die Revolution entlässt ihre Schriftsteller.” Deutschland Archiv 23 (6): 921–925. 119. Wolfgang Bialas. 1996. Vom unfreien Schweben zum freien Fall. Ostdeutsche Intellektuelle im gesellschaftlichen Umbruch. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer.

CHAPTER 8

From Losers to Winners, and Back: The Stasi, Pastors, and Dissidents

What does the Double-Zero Option mean from the vantage point of the GDR? Premier Erich Honecker and Economics Minister Gunter Mittag die at the same time. —GDR joke mocking the SED’s anti-NATO “peace policies,” 1988 In June of last year we started working on a comprehensive analysis of the political situation in this country, especially in light of the permanent emigrations. The material was so ripe by August that we said, this has to get to the Politburo table. Egon Krenz passed it on to Erich Honecker. Honecker took it and locked it in the Panzerschrank. With that, the paper disappeared. —Wolfgang Herger, Department Chair, SED Central Committee (1990) I feel rather abused. Because in my opinion, we were protecting the entire society, not just this clique. —Retired Stasi agent I mean the SED government-MfS clique. I was devastated by all of the things that came to the surface after the Wende. —Former MfS clerical worker

Driven by loyalty to anti-fascist ideals and visions of a better Germany, literary elites who had experienced the Nazi years were not the only ones to stay behind, in hopes of pursuing new sources of voice. Writers, artists,

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and critical academics comprised but one of three semi-public spheres that emerged in the early 1980s. A second group working to foster a counterpublic consisted of critical theologians and human rights activists; socialized in the GDR, most of these dissidents lacked war memories of their own. Their cultivation of voice drew on international treaties ratified by the Honecker regime in the 1970s, in an effort to shore up its own legitimacy. Intent on democratizing the system from within, political dissidents and critical theologians laid the foundation for a myriad of colorful protest movements to come. The third counter-public to take shape involved young activists, born after 1968, who later took advantage of semi-autonomous church spaces to advance their own cultural, ecological, peace, and feminist causes. Having lost all faith in the SED-controlled public sphere, they would challenge the state on its own linguistic turf in the mid- to late 1980s, citing GDR laws, propaganda slogans and even the constitution to justify their mobilization. Domestic efforts to foster “socialism with a human face” were inevitably shaped by broader international developments. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalinist atrocities in 1956 inadvertently provided a new foundation for “socialist legality.” Although he encountered resistance on many fronts, the Soviet General-Secretary succeeded in placing the much-­ feared state security services under the direct control of the Communist Party, to prevent future repressive campaigns targeting thousands of loyal party members per se; the bloc countries soon followed suit.1 The Berlin Wall (1961) added another layer to the SED’s efforts to protect itself against intrusive outside forces, but failed to liberalize the system from within. Honecker’s rise to power a decade later coincided with the onset of détente, driven by Willy Brandt’s overtures to the Soviet Union and its fraternal socialist states. A marked decline in Cold War tensions nonetheless confronted SED leaders with a new security paradox. As James McAdams observed, the 1972 Basis of Relations Treaty between the two German states left GDR rulers no choice but to “learn to live” with their FRG-nemesis, as well as with other western-capitalist adversaries. Still, détente proved advantageous at multiple levels. Beyond warranting GDR access to foreign markets through the back door of the European Community and supplying new ways to extract hard currency from western visitors, it accorded international recognition through an East German seat at the United Nations and membership in diverse multilateral organizations. It also granted the

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GDR new standing in Moscow and acceptance as the Soviet Union’s “junior partner” within its own bloc.2 Yet, the more internationally secure its position became, the more GDR rulers began to fear a loss of control from within. Rather than seek dialogue with critically loyal intellectuals and writers during the 1970s, they began shielding their grip on power by expelling them. Well acquainted with local problems (“the Pleiße river stinks”), the MfS agents occasionally urged Politburo members to investigate the substantive complaints of would-be exiters and grassroots groups; aging SED leaders became ever more obsessed with tracking and policing them instead. According to one informal collaborator, the Central Committee adopted the slogan, “that is not our problem, State Security will take care of it.”3 More interested in securing its own privileges than in pro-active governance, the Politburo allowed, even encouraged, the Security Ministry to evolve into a veritable “state within the state.” Viewing itself as “the shield and sword of the party” by the late 1970s, Stasi troops were charged not only with ensuring the personal safety but also the privileged life-styles of paranoid party elites. MfS methods became ever more intrusive, abetted by the recruitment of thousands of “unofficial co-workers,” expected to report on colleagues, friends and family members, including spouses. By the mid-1980s Stasi chief Erich Mielke and “the Firm” had come to distrust their own agents almost as much as alleged enemies of the state, as manifested in ever more intrusive “cadre policies.” The fates of victims and perpetrators were intricately intertwined, conditioned by the historical loyalty dilemmas outlined in the previous chapter, as well as by the idealism of second-generation dissidents, anxious to pursue a “third way” to replace the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime. Rejecting all forms of autonomous political organization, the SED ironically turned to the Protestant Church, starting in the 1970s, to serve as a bridge between the state and its dissenters. Under the mantra the Church in socialism, theologians, and pastors faced many a moral conundrum in seeking to provide limited voice options for alienated youth. At the same time they sought to preserve their own restricted institutional privileges, indirectly shoring up an otherwise eroding system. Operating outside of the halls of worship, second-generation human rights activists enjoyed a brief moment in the sun in late 1989, helping to ensure a peaceful transition when the system finally imploded. They established Round Tables, shut down the MfS (while preserving its massive

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archives), and paved the way to democratic elections through New Forum and the formation of new political parties. At that point their reform efforts were nipped in the bud by proletarians more interested in D-Mark consumption than in constitutional transformation. Victims as well as perpetrators saw their personal fortunes reversed in the rush to unification: once all-powerful Stasi agents and countless informal collaborators were “outed,” reducing them to outcast status. Several Protestant pastors took a surprising leap into politics during the transitional stage, occupying seats in the first (and last) freely elected Volkskammer as well as in de Maizière’s transitional government. Very few established themselves longer term at the national level or in the Bundestag, however. Other ostensible Wende-winners, dissidents who expected to exercise voice, find justice, and secure compensation for years of systemic abuse, were quickly pushed aside by West German politicians, eager to return to partisan business as usual. We begin with a brief description of the all-encompassing system of militarized surveillance linking regime supporters and opponents, testifying to another complex relationship between voice and loyalty. Next we turn to the double bind facing critical pastors and clerical authorities in their efforts to serve “the Church in socialism.” The focus then shifts to a treatment of prominent dissidents, whose Round Table engagements rendered them temporary s/heroes, only to find their visions unceremoniously rejected by an impatient working class. I argue here that like their once esteemed literary counterparts, well-known regime opponents were briefly instrumentalized, then cast aside by western conservatives in another effort to render the old Federal Republic “the victor of history.”

Shield and Sword of the Party: The Ministry for State Security Renouncing National Socialist atrocities to establish their own legitimacy, the GDR’s founders remained curiously unmoved by the equally barbaric practices of Stalinism which many had personally witnessed during their years of exile in the Soviet Union. Disoriented by Khrushchev’s revelations at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, they soon abandoned outright torture in pursuing “class enemies” on their home territory in favor of quieter forms of surveillance and persecution. Their growing distrust of citizens at large led to a massive expansion of state security

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operations, which continued to rely on fear of denunciation, individual sanctions, and modified forms of collective punishment, for example, denying educational and career opportunities to family members. Their desire to “know everything” fostered an increasing reliance on informal co-workers (IMs), allowing for more efficient extraction of local information. Ever more intrusive surveillance operations, in turn, contributed to anomie and niche-formation among citizens, who tried to secure a measure of social trust and reciprocity by way of ever smaller affinity groups. The MfS and its minions responded further with psychological harassment and character defamation, known as Zersetzung, to instill suspicions among friends, and destroy personal relationships, community reputations, and personal careers. As the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu noted over 2000 years ago: “He who does not trust enough will not be trusted.” East Germany’s monstrous state security apparatus grew out of the political police organized under Soviet occupation. Established by law in February 1950 as a special unit in the Interior Ministry, it remained subject to a Russian advisor until it was designated a separate ministry in November 1955. Even its coat of arms, featuring a sword and shield, approximated that of the Stalinist Cheka (later the KGB). Its core functions centered on guarding against economic sabotage and assaults on “socialist achievements,” as well as on border defense and blocking external espionage. Following Khrushchev’s lead, the Ulbricht regime transformed the MfS into the security wing of the Socialist Unity Party, responsible only to the Politburo. Rather than pledge their loyalty to the constitution, Stasi members henceforth swore to fulfill “all tasks of the party and government, without condition and with creative initiatives.”4 The MfS perceived itself as a formal military organ, eventually headed by twenty-seven Generals. All full-time staff were party members as well as “soldiers,” complete with field-service uniforms and military ranks. The first Stasi director, Wilhelm Zaisser (1950–1953) was a Politburo member who was purged after failing to prevent the worker’s rebellion of June 17, 1953. His successor, State-Secretary and Central Committee member Ernst Wollweber (1953–1957), initiated a significant expansion to aid in the “battle against agents, saboteurs, and diversionists.” The staff grew from 1000 full-time agents in 1950 to 14,000 by 1957. Reasserting hardliner control after the Hungarian uprising, Ulbricht appointed Erich Mielke the first Minister for State Security in 1957, whose subsequent rise to power coincided with that of Erich Honecker. Mielke became a

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candidate member of Politburo in 1971, advancing to full membership in 1976; he was promoted to Army General in 1980. Stasi ranks swelled accordingly, from 52,000  in 1973 to 91,015  in 1989.5 Department XX, in particular, was charged with tracking “those who think differently.” As summarized by a Citizens’ Committee investigating Stasi activities in Dresden (where KGB-agent Vladimir Putin served, 1985–1990), its operational precept read as follows: “everyone is a potential security risk; in order to be secure, we have to know everything; and security takes precedence over law” (Fig. 8.1).6 Despite the rigidly hierarchical, “command and control” nature of other state sectors, the MfS relied on a curiously decentralized administrative structure. In 1952 the SED replaced regional boundaries created under Weimar with fifteen districts, stripped of legislative and budgetary power. District chiefs were primarily responsible for “securing their territory,” further divided into 209 county offices; as a result, “surveillance intensity” varied significantly from one district to the next. Citizens in border areas and the capital city experienced the most intense scrutiny; differences also owed to population density, the presence of strategic assets, the perceived strength of local opposition groups and the zealousness of district leaders.7 If the Stasi comprised a “state within a state,” the MfS headquarters in East Berlin (Normannenstrasse) amounted to a “city within a city.” Beyond the 1000 offices at its disposal, the Ministry managed 3000+

Fig. 8.1  Vladimir Putin’s Stasi identification. (Source: Photo-ID issued to Vladimir V.  Putin by the GDR Ministry for State Security, Bundesarchiv Stasi Unterlagen (BStU), MfS, BV Dresden, Hauptabteilung Kader und Schulung, Nr. 7216, 4a-4b.)

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apartments in Lichtenberg, occupied by staff members. The Wandlitz enclave had its own construction crews, as did the district Stasi offices, accounting for serious skilled labor shortages elsewhere. It possessed its own heavily armed Regimental Guard “Feliks E. Dzierzynski,” an extensive set of underground bunkers for command staff, as well as a separate exit/entrance at Friedrichstrasse for Stasi use. Prime Minister Willy Stoph had his visiting FRG relatives picked up there regularly in a state limousine.8 But its assets did not end there. It owned 2037 buildings and properties (652 apartment complexes and 30 hectares in Berlin alone), 24 “rehabilitation” and vacation facilities with 2058 beds (international-hotel quality), a “college” in Potsdam, its own photography labs and specialty stores featuring western products.9 Its arsenal was second only to the National People’s Army (NVA), encompassing 124,593 pistols, 76,592 automatic handguns, 3611 rifles, 766 heavy-duty machine guns, and 3537 anti-tank weapons. All this was financed to the tune of 3.6 billion Marks (official figure) per year.10 By the time it was dissolved, “the Firm” was providing jobs for 91,015 full-time workers (including 17,300 Army officers), many of whom would have been part of normal law enforcement, forensic science, medical, transport, energy, and utility sectors elsewhere. Information gathering moreover relied on the non-official services of 109,000 IMs; archival materials suggest that the Stasi recruited 600,000 IMs—1 for every 180 citizens—dating back to the 1950s, most of whom were outed after 1990.11 These figures, in many respects, rendered the MfS the state’s largest single employer. Despite SED claims that it had resolved “the women question,” the Stasi itself was a very patriarchal organization. Women accounted for roughly 15,000 of its regular employees, 15.7% in 1989, down from 25% in 1954. Only 200 were found among its 10,000 “elites,” comprising 1.8% of the department heads in 1988. They were concentrated in administration (personnel and finances) and medical services; they moreover managed its “institutional memory,” especially in Department XII. They made up 38% of the “leading cadres,” but only after officials adjusted the statistics to include mid-level unit heads (Referatsleiter). Noteworthy exceptions were Klara Schellheimer, who directed the Archives, and Lieutenant Colonel Ingeburg Heinritz, who rose to the top of Department XII as a data-processing expert. Heinritz was also charged with instilling “Chekist” behavior among junior cadres, including proper dress modes. Another was Lieutenant Colonel Rosemarie Redmann, responsible for the

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Central Personnel Catalogue.12 Like other working women, female Stasi employees bore the extra burdens of child-rearing and housework, rendering them less “resilient” and deployable in the eyes of MfS bosses, despite being deemed more “reliable.” They were also less likely to serve as IMs, comprising less than 10% of that group.13 The lead unit at the national level, the Administrative Department for Intelligence (HVA Aufklärung), monitored all activities linked to the Federal Republic. Its greatest achievement was successfully planting one of its own, Günter Guillaume, in Willy Brandt’s office, compelling the Ostpolitik Chancellor to resign in 1974. Its veteran director, infamous spy-­ in-­ chief Markus Wolf (1952–1986), employed 7500 cadres, 4000 of whom ranked as Stasi elites—another 13 main departments (Hauptabteilungen, HA), 20 regular departments (Abteilungen), a computerized Data Bank (containing personal information on five million citizens), and multiple central “work groups.” These reflected a high degree of functional specialization, with little horizontal integration to protect the secret nature of their operations, even from each other. Department I monitored all uniformed personnel, including thousands of “special officers” in the NVA used for military-internal surveillance. Protection against “spies” fell to HA II, including all accredited western journalists. The latter were watched so closely that when one reporter tripped over phone cord, a repairman showed up within the hour to “fix” the broken connection.14 HA III tapped phones and monitored calls made to/from the other side of the border. Department M oversaw copy machines and separate, locally based units consisting of “steam experts,” charged with inspecting letters and packages, especially from the west. HA VI pursued border control while HA VII covered police, domestic spies, and prison inmates. Responsible for the police and Interior Ministry matters, Department VII regularly superseded its authority; Minister Friedrich Dickel heard on the radio in 1989, for example, that “he” had outlawed New Forum, after declaring it hostile to the constitution.15 It also launched the brutal attacks against demonstrators that October. The claws of Department VIII (known as Firma ‘Horch & Greif/Listen and Grab) extended all the way down to the districts; it used special forces to carry out observations, apartment searches and arrests. It maintained close-circuit monitors along highways, at gas stations and rest-stops along the FRG/GDR transit route. Parking too close to a car with western license plates was grounds for suspicion.

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Because secret police in Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia refused to monitor visiting east Germans (despite lobbying by Department X, responsible for “fraternal” relations), Department IX sent its own agents abroad to track contacts with western vacationers, uncover escape plans via those states, and initiate prosecutions. Charged with economic oversight, Department XVIII observed factory and Kombinat activities, as well as their directors, occasionally requiring its own staff to join assembly lines to remedy shortfalls in production. When technicians failed to produce a much-heralded Megabit chip in time for the 1988 anniversary celebrations, the head of XVIII sent agents from its Science and Technology Sector abroad to buy one on the world market, violating a western embargo. They smuggled it back in time for the Zeiss Jena Director to present it to Honecker, who then proudly offered it as a gift to visiting Soviet premier Gorbachev.16 Department XXII comprised the anti-terrorism unit. Erich Honecker harbored a “deep personal sympathy for underground ‘freedom fighters’,” who reminded him of his days in the Young Spartacus Federation for the Fight against Exploitation and Imperialism. He purportedly professed “a kind of fanatical love” for members of the Baader-Mainhof/Red Army Faction, trained in the Middle East, offering them refuge on GDR soil along with Palestinian and Libyan terrorists. He apparently saw no contradiction between his agents providing secret training for 176 FRG communists outside of Frankfurt Oder, while persecuting and imprisoning dissidents and youth activists campaigning for freedom at home.17 Comprising the “heart and brain” of citizen surveillance, Department XX followed any and all persons “who thought differently,” ranging from National Front party members and critical intellectuals qua political subversives, to underground activists or visiting academics like myself. Officially responsible for “combatting political-ideological diversions and underground activities,” its corps of 392 full-time uniformed and civilian staff supplemented their findings with reports from 1306 IMs. The latter functioned as “participant observers” in a wide array of church activities, youth organizations, sports clubs, hospitals, dances/concerts, health fairs, soccer games, underground presses, local festivals, and grassroots protests. It even photographed and registered persons attending the funerals of prominent critics like Robert Havemann. By June 1989 it was tracking 160 “opposition groups,” some 2500 “fanatical, unteachable enemies of socialism” and 86,000 “hostile-negative persons,” 13,000 of whom were destined for solitary confinement.18

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Fig. 8.2  My personal Stasi file: Department XX excerpt

Two years after unification, a friend who worked at the so-called Gauck Agency, charged with processing “100 miles of Stasi files,” surprised me on my birthday with a copy of my own Stasi records which he had serendipitously discovered among the Department XX dossiers. It was dated December 1, 1982 (Fig.  8.2). I had been urged to register at the US Consulate in East Berlin in the early 1980s to protect myself, should I encounter problems while researching church-related protests. Ironically, most of the information it contained derived from a conversation I had with a Consular official. This was the only place where I had revealed the names of persons I intended to interview, proving that either the Consulate was bugged or someone there had passed on details regarding my “research agenda.” I have never petitioned to see the full dossier involving my personal discussions with other GDR residents, despite having learned that at least two of them were IMs. After spending a week visiting acquaintances in Dresden in 1987, however, I learned that my host’s husband was pressured to start a romantic affair with me as potential recruiting tool; he was really not my type, and a chain smoker, to boot. On another occasion I was interrogated by Stasi agents while crossing over into East Berlin via Friedrichstrasse, carrying Daniela Dahn’s book on Prenzlauer Berg. A

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Humboldt University professor I had met at a German Studies Association conference had promised to take me on a personal tour of Prenzlberg; hearing that I had been detained, he made one phone call and got me out. Herr Rosen told me later that, as a student, he had cheered from a Humboldt University window as Soviet tanks rolled down the street in 1953. When students informed me that a disagreeable member of my department in St. Louis had referred to me in his classes as a “communist” (and a “Femi-Nazi”), I pointed out that—based on my Stasi file—I was the only person on campus who had been officially certified as an “antisocialist/anti-communist.” Two further “special units” deserve mention here, starting with the Main Department for Cadres and Instruction. Mielke’s Directive 1/82 mandated that all persons executing “politically significant” tasks be thoroughly vetted for “reliability” prior to their appointment. Those falling under Nomenklatura expanded to include everyone from Kombinat directors, journalists and “craftsmen” seeking business licenses, to NVA recruits and university applicants. Evaluations included reviews of an applicant’s first-degree relatives; west-contacts were particularly suspect. Because everything was archived, earlier infringements (e.g., visits from FRG relations) could produce negative consequences for promotion 20–30 years later. According to post-1990 interviews with ex-Stasi workers, everything “got crazier” in the late 1970s, driven by the “plan mentality,” as well as by mounting paranoia among SED rulers. It was “a paper war, like it usually is for Germans. Someone wants a concept, and a plan, and a report, and another report, and then another report. And then a file. And then the evaluation, so everything is nicely rounded. It was an alibi for you. It meant that you had done something.”19 “Operative” units at various levels were expected to recruit twenty-five new IMs per year, though “volunteers” were generally rejected as potential double-agents. Core staff had to analyze what had been gleaned from fifty to sixty monthly meetings with IMs, and orchestrate operations for thirty-five professional spies.20 Older Stasi elites had become so paranoid by the mid-1980s that they distrusted each other; roughly 200 set up their own secure telephone networks. District officials created their own photography labs to avoid processing by the central facility (also used to make pirate copies of James Bond movies and pornography videos for the Wandlitz crowd). Others planted “control letters” with oppositional content to make sure that agents monitoring the mail were sufficiently vigilant.

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Rank and file workers were required to attend heavier indoctrination courses at more frequent intervals to confirm their confidentiality and “absolute reliability.” Special units and “combat groups” (Kampfgruppen) had to participate in war exercises so realistic that female agents sometimes cried when told that their children “had already been put on planes to Moscow.”21 The MfS developed a 101-point checklist defining politically correct “personality profiles,” encompassing variables like dialect, pronunciation, haircuts, reaction speed, “judgment,” and sexual behaviors. In many cases agents had to seek permission to marry, had to renounce western relatives, and report behavioral changes among family members who failed to meet cadre standards.22 Often blackmailed into service, IMs were evaluated based on residential, workplace, and marital relations, west-­ contacts, hobbies, foreign language skills, literary preferences, physical fitness, and their “willingness to defend the USSR.” Denunciation by a jealous colleague could lead the Cadre Department to place its own agent in detention for investigation (a real career-killer), “like the way we had always imagined the Gestapo … It was totally schizophrenic, we could not lead any normal life.”23 The number of MfS employees nonetheless rose from 14,000  in 1957 to 174,000 by 1989. Average monthly earnings (pre-allowance and bonuses: 2000 Marks) exceeded those of average proletarians (M1300). A further special unit, instigated by Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, had few real security duties. The Commercial Coordination sector (KoKo) focused on accumulating hard currency, to quench the insatiable consumer thirst of party bosses, which sometimes took precedence over national defense. In 1984, for example, Moscow failed to deliver a promised shipment of machine guns for export, leading KoKo to raid the “Feliks Dzierzynski” arsenal to fill a hard-currency contract with an African arms-dealer. Wandlitz’s special Regimental Guard was deprived of Kalashnikovs for several weeks. Even less politically correct than the rulers’ privileged access to new cars, villas converted into private Datschen, their western appliances, yachts, and motorboats around the Berlin Müggelsee was their access to tremendous caches of stolen goods intended for average citizens. Eight kilometers outside Berlin, Mielke maintained an unusual “pirate’s cave” known as Objekt Freienbrink, a secret storage depot opened in 1984. In addition to confiscating possessions left behind by would-be emigrants (2000 Trabis, Wartburgs, Ladas), Stasi agents were used to purloin the contents of roughly twenty million FRG packages that “went astray” en

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route to friends and relatives in the east. Characterized as “the greatest organized postal robbery of all times,” KoKo deployed over 600 officers in Berlin alone to process an extraordinary array of mailed items—furniture, appliances, clothing, shoes, jewelry, radios, color TVs, foodstuffs, and even stamp collections. It brought in extra help for busy holiday periods (Christmas and Easter). Collaborators in the FRG would alter mailing labels, redirecting packages intended for West Berlin (zip code 1000) to East Berlin (zip code 10), adding “GDR” to the address with black markers. Only useless items (about 5%) were “returned to sender” to maintain the illusion of proper handling; most “lost package” claims went unanswered. Sorting agents easily spotted the addresses of core dissidents and critics, automatically removing FRG packages intended for Bärbel Bohley, Ingrid Köppe, Wolfgang Templin, Rolf Heinrich, Ibrahim Böhme (later outed as an IM), Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin, Volker Braun, and others.24 Although the Stasi “sorters” could not even pocket a western chocolate bar, they were ordered to remove DM6.5 million in cash from FRG envelopes, subsequently transferred to a special MfS State Bank account. Geriatric SED elites profited directly from “errant” mail deliveries of western medications, while KoKo also redirected other goods for immediate “resale” in the west.25 Once emptied, cardboard boxes were sent to a paper mill to be recycled as toilet paper (infamous for its harsh texture); perishable foods landed in a special bin to feed the wild boars maintained by an MfS General. Other Stasi agents were intermittently deployed to pen in assorted “wild animals” for elite hunting excursions. If Honecker and Mielke found their “kill” insufficient, they ordered guards “to obtain large numbers of frozen hares and other small animals from the deep freezes of East Berlin meat-packing firms, … arrayed in neat designs on the lawns of the chateau,” before the two posed for photographs.26 Younger, better educated Stasi cadres began losing faith in the leadership by the early 1980s: 96% of the HVA personnel possessed higher educational degrees, compared to alleged resistance fighters “who cultivated this prole attitude” and blocked their access to higher positions.27 They were also disheartened by their daily exposure to elite privilege and corruption: High-ranking Stasi and SED officials could count on a new car, every year, “not only for themselves but for the wife, the son, the daughter,” while field agents had to “calculate and document every penny” for simple operational expenses.28

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Many objected to the state’s refusal to dialogue with grassroots activists and those applying to leave. Over 1000+ members of the Central Evaluation and Information Group (ZAIG) issued countless reports on deteriorating public morale, most of which landed without deliberation in the Panzerschrank. Declassified materials reveal that Mielke did not resume sharing the most ominous reports with Politburo members until September 1989—for the first time since 1973. ZAIG evaluations stressed that the masses seeking to emigrate “were turning their backs on the GDR not out of fundamentally hostile attitudes” but out of long-standing frustration over “a host of unresolved problems in the work, housing and recreational domains.”29 Each day regulars, “societal actors” (GMS), and IMs brought “bad news, new discoveries, perhaps partly exaggerated, which now showed the top leadership to be wretched, senile men, who had been concerned above all for their own well-being, who were incapable of comprehending these numerous signals which had reached them, let alone to cope with them.”30 Uwe Krähke and his co-researchers concluded that “conformist younger officers were remarkably passive in the face of this gerontocracy,” however.31 Rather than initiate generational change, they waited for biology to kick in, hoping it would allow them to reform state security structures from within. Many were shocked when the doddering, 82-year-old Mielke declared to Volkskammer delegates on November 13, 1989: “I love … I love all, all people, I really love—I engage myself for them.”32 After being interned in the Berlin-Rummelsberg prison, he was interviewed by Daniela Dahn, then associated with Demokratischer Aufbruch. Arguably the most powerful man in GDR history, the former Stasi chief demanded that a telephone be put in his cell. According to his guards, he spent all day talking on it, even though it was never connected to a real line.33 Modrow’s brief effort to turn “the sword and shield of the party” into a new statecontrolled Office for National Security (AfNS) ended in early 1990, sending most Stasi workers to the unemployment line.

Opiate of the Masses: The SED and Religion, 1945–1970 When I traveled to Trier for the first time in 1984 with a group of Alexander von Humboldt scholars, I found it ironic that the Americans quickly set off to visit Karl Marx’s birth place, while our Polish and

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Hungarian colleagues headed for the Cathedral. The Jewish socialist got his start in Catholic Trier, not in Protestant Chemnitz; the socialist-atheist Honecker also grew up in Catholic-conservative Saarland; not in the “red bastion” of Saxony. Religion, Marx wrote in 1843, “is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”34 He predicted that religion would disappear under the new economic order but conceded that religious institutions would continue to garner popular support for generations to come. Indeed, the extraordinary moral vacuum induced by the Third Reich’s collapse left Soviet occupiers and the Ulbricht group little choice but to move slowly in fostering a new vision, invoking the “perfectibility of the human race” based on “scientific Marxism.” Communists could neither discount the anti-fascist resistance of prominent theologians executed by the Nazis, nor could they afford to lose Christian socialist voters during the first elections of 1946. They also needed denominational charities like Caritas (Catholic) and Diakonie (Lutheran), to help them meet the dire material needs of fractured families and refugees in the wake of World War II. Beyond engaging in serious soul-searching regarding their own roles under National Socialism, faith communities had to reinvent their postwar identities under the strictures of “godless” Communism. Given Pope Pius XII’s complicity with fascist regimes (e.g., his Concordats with Hitler and Mussolini), the Catholic Church opted to withdraw completely from politics, in exchange for maintaining direct ties with the Vatican, including travel rights to Rome.35 Openly repenting its failure to oppose Nazi atrocities, a major wing of the Evangelical Lutheran community (Confessing Church) assumed a paradoxical role over the next four decades, gradually abandoning the narrow path of religious life to supply a civil society alternative to the state. GDR leaders, in turn, later moved away from active persecution and harassment policies in favor of “peaceful co-existence” with the Protestant Church, to shore up its stability and legitimacy at home and abroad. Articles 41–48 of the 1949 Constitution accorded a curious degree of autonomy to religious institutions denied to other sectors like the media. Article 41 granted all citizens “full freedom” of religion and conscience, allowing them to exercise their faith, as long as it did not contravene the constitution or the state’s “party political goals.” Individuals were free to pursue religious instruction and counseling in schools, hospitals, prisons, and other public institutions; those who did so could not be barred from

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the civil service. The constitution also recognized the rights of so-called Free Churches, including Evangelicals, Methodists, Baptists, Mennonites, Old Catholics, Apostles of Christ, and Seventh Day Adventists, along with small Russian Orthodox and Jewish communities. It drew the line at Jehovah’s Witnesses, however, who refused to serve in the military and to “recognize” the state as a higher power. Looking back, one can discern three stages of church-state relations, the first extending from 1949 to 1969. Most state measures were directed toward the Protestant Church, predominant in the East. Religious institutions were initially exempt from land reform and the confiscation of major assets. Six universities continued to educate Protestant theologians and clerics, while small Catholic communities in Thüringen and areas populated by ethnic-Sorbs could train priests at the traditional seminary in Erfurt. When individual pastors began criticizing electoral manipulation in 1949, the SED confiscated church newspapers and launched campaigns against outspoken bishops. While Otto Dibelius in Berlin compared its Stalinist methods to Nazi practices, others like Bishop Moritz Mitzeneheim (Thüringen) sought accommodation with SMAD and SED officials.36 Following Stalin’s death, Moscow mandated a new, more tolerant course, but the June 1953 worker’s rebellion led Ulbricht to shut down churches, break clerical contracts and attack individual pastors. Junge Gemeinde (youth group) members were accused of sabotage, agitation, kidnapping, spreading militaristic propaganda and spying for west. Over 70 theologians were arrested, 3000 pupils were expelled and 2000 students were ex-matriculated from universities.37 Opportunistic clerics and Christians took shelter in the Christian Democratic Party, subordinate to the National Front. The east and west branches of the German Evangelical Church Synod assembled for the last time in Leipzig, July 7–11, 1954, the same year the state introduced an official “youth dedication ceremony” (Jugendweihe) to compete directly with religious confirmation. Attracting only 1% of youth in 1955, it soon became mandatory for those hoping to pursue higher education and professional careers. In 1958 Ulbricht used the Fifth Party Congress to introduce the “Ten Commandments of Socialist Morality,” an ethical code amounting to a trivialized, old-school version of “German virtues”: duty-consciousness, cleanliness, discipline, et cetera (see Chap. 10). Officials set out to replace other religious rites with new rituals, for example, “naming ceremonies” instead of baptisms.

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Not satisfied with reducing the Church’s institutional powers, the SED continued to wage war against it with campaigns urging citizens to abandon their parishes. The 1958 Lange Decree eliminated religious instruction from schools and tried to force church officials to sign “loyalty declarations.” Invoking the scientific nature of their own truth-claims, leaders exploited the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite launch in 1958, issuing a brochure proclaiming that “no evidence of God had been found in outer space.”38 Stressing Marxism’s “humanistic” elements, Ulbricht declared in 1961 that Christian teachings were compatible with his own (short-lived) notion of a “socialist human community.” Once the Berlin Wall was in place, Dibelius, who resided in the West, was barred from visiting his flock on the other side. Church-state tensions also arose on the youth front, dating back to 1952. Formed in response to a Free German Youth “request,” the Society for Sports and Technical Sciences introduced recreational and competitive events to promote paramilitary qua physical education for adolescents. Welcoming the formation of the National People’s Army in 1956, the FDJ then sponsored an “enlistment appeal” to males age 18–25, to safeguard the Republic against Western sabotage. Unable to meet voluntary recruitment goals, the SED resorted to universal conscription in 1962. Refusing induction carried a penalty of three years in prison, viewed by Lutheran officials as a violation of the freedom of belief warranted by the constitution. Drawing on a 1934 Confessing Church treatise, religious leaders issued “Ten Articles concerning Peace and Service of the Church,” stressing their obligation to provide legal protection for conscientious objectors and spiritual guidance for conscripts. In 1964, the SED responded to Church pressure by introducing a special military division, allowing would-be objectors to serve eighteen months (plus two years of reserve duty) as “construction soldiers.” The FDJ continued to serve as a conduit for “recruitment collectives” in elite high schools, to generate enthusiasm for military careers among eighth and ninth graders; these measures were soon extended to polytechnic schools.39 Meanwhile the SED instigated a new battle against ties to Protestants on the other side, pushing CDU-East members to denounce “west German NATO churches.” To counter the Ten Articles, the bloc-party published “Seven Statements,” exhorting eastern parishes to break with the western Synod in favor of the “two-state doctrine.” In 1964 rulers established a professorial chair for Scientific Atheism at Jena’s

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Friedrich-­Schiller University (eliminated four years later). Affirmed by an unusual public referendum, a new constitution enacted in 1968 heralded “new social relationships” between church and state. Article 39 continued to guarantee every citizen the right to profess religious beliefs (or not) and to engage in religious activities. Churches and other faith groups were still entitled to self-regulation, provided they adhered to constitutional precepts and existing laws. Subsequent developments suggested otherwise. In May 1968, the state demolished the historical University Church in Leipzig amidst strong public protest, while Christians sympathizing with Prague demonstrators, advocating for “socialism with a human face,” were accused of Dubc ̌ek revisionism, named after the liberalizing Czech prime minister.40 The obligation to adhere to GDR “constitutional premises” rendered links to FRG churches essentially illegal. In 1969 the Evangelical Church Union (BEK) was forced to sever all institutional ties with its western counterpart, the Evangelical Church of Germany (EKD). Shortly thereafter, the BEK issued its own proposal for mandatory “peace education” in grade schools and established an Office for Peace Research.41

From Peaceful Coexistence (1971–1979) to Church from Below (1980–1989) At war’s end, 82% of easterners were affiliated with the Protestant Church; by the time the state stopped collecting denominational data in 1964, the figure had dropped to less than 60%. Based on 1977 estimates, 7.9 million still considered themselves Lutherans, added to 1.2 million Catholics. Free Church members included 28,000 Methodists, 23,000 Baptists, 15,000 Old Lutherans, 25,000 Seventh Day Adventists, 14,000 Apostles of Christ, and 100,000 associated with diverse sects. Some 40,000–50,000 were employed by churches, for example, as charitable service workers, along with 6000 pastors/priests and 1300 members of religious orders.42 Despite adopting mandatory “atheist training” for cadres at the Eighth Party Congress, the SED hoped to accrue more financial support from western churches as a consequence of détente. Marking a new stage in their institutional relations through 1979, Bishop Albrecht Schoenherr sought to clarify the role of religion in GDR society, declaring at the Eisenach Synod in July 1971: “We do not want to be the Church against or the Church next to but rather to be the Church in socialism.” The

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following summer in Dresden, Bishop Heino Falke spoke of “improvable socialism,” urging Synod participants to measure SED actions against its humanistic promises, especially in relation to the treatment of Christians in their surroundings. In 1975, GDR leaders declared Zionism a form of racism and renewed their emphasis on the inculcation of “socialist personalities.” The state commemorated Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) for the first time in 1978.43 Gorlitz Bishop Joachim Fraenkel accused the regime of using anti-fascism to veil its own human rights violations. Small steps toward reconciliation led to a “spectacular meeting” between Honecker and Protestant leaders on March 6, 1978. Rulers confirmed the principle of equal opportunity regardless of personal beliefs. They granted the Church a right to offer independent TV and radio broadcasts, including live transmission of a Sunday worship service. The Politburo approved church construction projects (e.g., denominational kindergartens) in new housing districts and the importation of theological books. In June, however, Educational Minister Margot Honecker imposed military curricular modules for all ninth and tenth graders, coupled with obligatory, twelve-day training sessions for Abitur classes (military exercises for boys and paramedic instruction for girls). The state dismissed Church criticisms, arguing that pedagogically sound “defense preparedness” added credibility to its pursuit of peace policies while promoting physical development. Training boys to use small-caliber weapons purportedly built character, while girls would benefit from first aid and civil defense instruction: so much for gender equality.44 Significant parental and parish opposition signaled an end to the “spirit of March 1978.” On August 18th, Pastor Oskar Bruesewitz set himself on fire in front of the Zeitz Church, provoking division among the clerical ranks. Party authorities denounced him as mentally deranged after he died.45 The SED’s official “peace policies” ended the mutual accommodation phase in the face of creeping societal militarization. The final stage rested on “church from below” mobilization from 1980 to 1989. The quest for global peace was taken seriously by GDR citizens, but they could not ignore the SED’s contradictory response to home-grown peace movements. One joke from that period, cited at the outset, led the Humboldt University to fire the well-established Berlin researcher who allegedly started it, as conveyed to me by one of his colleagues. Following the NATO “Double-Track Decision” of 1979, Soviet SS-20 and NATO Pershing II deployments scheduled for 1984 led millions of average citizens to question the logic of superpower “defense” strategies premised on

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the potential destruction of both postwar states. Honecker himself invoked the term “security partnership” and called for a “coalition of reason” with the other Germany.46 Responding to SED sanctions imposed on fraternal Poland with the rise of Solidarność, Church authorities organized their first “peace decade” from November 9 to 19, 1980. They proclaimed the traditional Advent Repentance Day a “Disarmament Day,” appealing for better relations between their own parishioners and Polish Catholics. Local activists borrowed an FRG slogan introduced by Action Reconciliation/Peace Services, Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen (“make peace without weapons”). To avoid charges of western sabotage and infiltration, they designed their own sew-on badges, based on a Soviet memorial statue designed by Yevgeny Viktorovich Vuchetich that had been donated to the United Nations in 1957. Based on an Old Testament verse, it depicted a muscular male figure pounding his sword into a plowshare.47 The badge was an instant hit among adolescents, who quickly affixed home-made versions to their jackets and backpacks. In March 1981, Lutheran bishops issued a Pastoral Letter objecting to the communist inculcation of youth and assorted human rights violations. They staged a second national “decade,” November 8–18, 1981. On February 13, 1982, the Evangelical Lutheran Synod hosted a Dresden Forum, commemorating the anniversary of the 1944 fire-bombing. Despite state efforts to suppress advertising and delay trains, it attracted over 5000 adolescents, under the watchful eyes of the Stasi. Topics ranged from a discussion of Pastor Rainer Eppelmann’s “Berlin Appeal,” to sanctions against students and workers displaying swords-to-plowshare badges; as one declared, “I am 19 and have nothing left to lose.”48 Thousands more assembled at sites stretching from Jena to Brandenburg. In July 1982, the Conference of Church Directorates divorced itself from state “peace policies,” declaring the development, testing, and deployment of nuclear weapons a moral evil, “regardless of where or by whom.”49 Suspicious of autonomous mobilization, the Politburo sought to counter party-external opposition by rallying the FDJ with two new slogans of its own, Make peace against NATO weapons and Peace must be defended, peace must be armed. FDJ functionaries emulated the headbands, badges and T-shirts of unofficial groups, even staging rock concerts and candlelight marches “like in Bonn,” ironically expanding the movement’s youth base, even among former NVA conscripts.50 Holding their first silent demonstration in November 1982, members of the Jena Peace Circle,

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led by Roland Jahn, were forcefully deported to the Federal Republic in June 1983. The SED did allow church groups to participate in the Olaf Palme Peace March (September 1987), beginning in Stralsund and ending in Dresden. Participants from the FRG, GDR, and Czechoslovakia carried banners opposing school militarization and calling for a bona fide “civilian service” for conscientious objectors Hoping to exploit the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s birth to attract hard-currency-bearing tourists, party ideologues suddenly “discovered” the progressive-revolutionary elements of Protestantism, along with its strong “work ethic.” Honecker personally chaired the organizing committee for Luther Year 1983. The state helped to renovate religious memorial sites, restored chaplains’ access to prisons and nursing homes, and encouraged meetings between ecclesiastic and Marxist-Leninist historians. Disaffected adolescents began turning to dissident pastors, perceived as trustworthy, and open to their concerns.51 Groups banned from official stages and youth clubs used church premises to stage alternative concerts, readings, and theatrical performances. Sympathetic pastors granted activists access to their (state registered) typewriters and mimeograph machines, to print flyers advertising tree-planting actions, bike-riding protests, and peace education seminars. One brave pastor in Prenzlauer Berg, Hans Simon, allowed 200 peace and ecology groups to set up mailboxes in the basement of the Zion Church, the former parish of anti-Nazi activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose execution Hitler had personally ordered in 1945. Their engagement gave rise to the first Environmental Library in 1986, which published a newspaper (Umweltblätter). The Library soon included a café, a gallery, an archive, and a film room. On October 17, 1987, activists hosted a concert by a GDR punk band, Die Firma, and west Berlin’s Element of Crime. Attracting 2000 people, it was crashed by 30 rightwing skinheads “made in the GDR”; local police refused to intervene to halt the attack. One month later Stasi agents raided the Library, but the arrest of alleged ring-­ leaders triggered solidarity actions at other church sites. More local activists, religious, and secular, joined a campaign to “observe” the fraudulent communal elections of May 1989. Individual pastors, like Christoph Wonneberger (Leipzig), Ursula Meckel (Zeitz/Thale), and Ruth Misselwitz (Alt-Pankow/Berlin), actively supported these mobilizations from below, occasionally pleading with their supervisors to win the release of young people charged with anti-­ state agitation. Church officials walked an ever finer line, negotiating with

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the state while trying to cap increasing activism among its own clerics and diverse secular groups seeking refuge within parish walls. Peter Wensierski’s detailed study of Leipzig shows that some clerics later heralded as “heroes,” like Christian Führer at the Nikolai Church and Superintendent Friedrich Magirius, actually sought to muzzle or exclude autonomous youth groups in the face of state pressure, until they could no longer control the numbers. Church-internal tensions were further exacerbated by conflicts between committed “remainers” and hundreds of would-be “exiters” who joined weekly peace prayers in hopes of being arrested, then bought out by the FRG.52 In September 1989, the Synod finally declared its support for democratization. Like many civil society activists who joined national and local Round Tables after November 1989 to debate the country’s future course, eastern religious leaders were bitterly disappointed to see their own movement undercut by a western institutional take-over. Initiated in January 1990, tense meetings between the BEK and the EKD quickly proved that “it was an illusion, to think that we understood each other.”53 Several spoke of a “surprise attack” against GDR church representatives by their western “brothers.” Pastor Axel Noack tried, in vain, to convey that GDR church life had been driven not only by force and oppression but also by theological responsibility. Rostock pastor Fred Mahlburg noted remorsefully, “Doesn’t ‘accession’ (Beitritt) mean: some are being questioned as to their long-developed identities, while others see their fundamental identities confirmed?” Easterners objected to a lack of EKD self-criticism regarding its own Ostpolitik: west German parishes had often avoided contacts with less “accommodating” Christians and dissidents, in favor of those who supported “system stabilizing détente and peace dialogues.” Dissident pastor Friedrich Schorlemmer, from the Luther city of Wittenberg, complained about the EKD’s “deeply shameful, unqualified rejection” of civil society and human rights activists who had courageously put their own lives on the line.54

(Re)Marginalized Voices: Pastors and Politics, 1990–1998 Reflecting on BEK and EKD asymmetries twenty-five years later, Church historian Katharine Kunter found it “a tragedy” that Eastern parishes began to hemorrhage at the very point when they had finally “found their

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place in the middle of society,” alongside the democratic opposition.55 Eastern Protestants lost their ability to pursue ecclesiastical reconciliation, in part, because they could not find new actors to engage in a mutual-­ discovery process. Many GDR clerics who had been active in ecumenical assemblies dropped out in order to pursue new careers in politics and public life. One exception was “Red Kasner,” Angela Merkel’s father, who ran a popular Pastoral College for theologians in Templin (Uckermark), dating back to 1957. A “strict Protestant and disciplined Prussian,” Horst Kasner allegedly reported to the Stasi, but his good relations with state officials (e.g., Klaus Gysi) also allowed his daughter to pursue university studies in Leipzig, a privilege denied to other clerical offspring.56 Though he opposed unification, he quickly joined the CDU-East, supporting Lothar de Maizière until the latter was charged with IM activity. Joining the SPD, Merkel’s mother presided over the County Council, then held a seat on the Templin City Council. The Chancellor’s brother, Marcus, allied himself with the Greens. Because their constitutionally guaranteed status granted churches a modicum of free expression, either from the pulpit or by way of their publications, Protestant clerics and theologians had more opportunities for voice than most citizens, allowing them to hone their critical thinking and public speaking skills. Though confined to small physical spaces and limited as to the topics they could address, their sermons and seminars allowed for moral reflection, empathy and “authenticity” sorely lacking among SED rulers. This helps to explain why so many pastors felt comfortable entering politics after 1990. As the first to head the new BEK in the 1960s, Manfred Stolpe had played an active role in anchoring the “Church in socialism”; he credited the Helsinki Accords with laying the groundwork for the 1978 meeting.57 Following unification, he became the longest serving GDR citizen to hold the post of Minister President (SPD, Brandenburg). The other new Länder were dominated by CDU-West transplants into the new millennium, including Kurt Biedenkopf in Saxony and Bernd Vogel in Thüringen. Re-elected twice, Stolpe was forced to resign in 2002, due to revelations that he had “cooperated” with the Stasi for twenty years. Chancellor Schröder immediately appointed him Minister for Transport, Construction and Urban Affairs, a portfolio he held through 2005. Ironically, the agency responsible for outing him was headed by another pastor from Mecklenburg, Joachim Gauck. The son of a former Nazi and Soviet Gulag survivor, Gauck was tasked with processing “100 miles of Stasi files” from

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1990 to 2000. In 2012 he was elected Federal President, serving until 2017, next to the pastor’s-daughter-turned-Chancellor, Angela Merkel. Other dissident-clerics who moved into politics got their start in the freely elected Volkskammer in March 1990. Markus Meckel served as Foreign Minister until August, when the SPD withdrew from de Maizière’s interim Cabinet. He participated in the Bundestag Commission investigating the SED dictatorship (below) but lost a subsequent bid to chair the SPD-East, turning to German-Polish reconciliation and NATO relations. Pastor Reinhard Höppner (SPD) served as Volkskammer Vice President, moving on to become Minister President of Sachsen-Anhalt (1994–2002). Catholic theologian Wolfgang Thierse (SPD) rose to national prominence in the Bundestag, winning a direct mandate in 1990; though not an active regime critic prior to 1989, he became an outspoken proponent of East German interests. As Bundestag President, 1998–2005, he imposed a DM 6.5 million fine on Helmut Kohl and the CDU, added to a DM 41 million “repayment,” for violating campaign finance laws.58 Angela Merkel’s open letter (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) calling for Kohl’s resignation in 1999 launched her rise to power, first as opposition leader, then as Chancellor. Her CDU election-victory reduced Thierse’s SPD standing to parliamentary Vice President until his retirement in 2013. Theologians Hans-Jürgen and Ruth Misselwitz opted for a division of political labor. Born in 1950, Hans studied in Jena and Berlin, then worked as a biochemist at the Central Institute for Cardiology and Circulation, 1974–1981. Resisting a second call-up for military duty after completing his obligatory NVA service, he lost his university job, leading him to pursue theology studies, although his engagement in church ministry was limited. In 1981, he joined his pastor-wife and other dissidents in founding the Pankow Peace Circle and later the eastern Social Democratic Party. After the Wall fell, Hans served as Parliamentary State-­Secretary under Foreign Minister Meckel, leading the GDR delegation to the Two + Four Treaty talks. From 1991 to 1999 he directed the Brandenburg Center for Political Education, after which he returned to party politics, serving as Thierse’s chief of staff. He moreover directed the Forum East Germany (Aufbau Ost) until 2010, chaired the Pankow SPD and acted as secretary for the SPD’s Fundamental Values Commission until he retired in 2015.59 The daughter of two pastors, Ruth (Zützen) Misselwitz, born in 1952, switched from nursing to theological studies at the Humboldt University and Pastoral Seminar in Gnadau. In 1981 she was appointed Pastor of the

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Alt-­Pankow parish in Berlin. In addition to creating the Pankow Peace Circle with Freya Klier and Vera Wollenberger, she co-founded “Women for Peace,” which organized its own march, attracting 400 women in 1982. In the late 1980s she helped forge links among peace, environmental and human rights initiatives, through the underground network “More Justice in the GDR,” inter alia. In 1989/1990 she moderated the BerlinPankow Round Table and sought to “work through” the past by interviewing former Stasi officers. During the Balkan war, she co-founded the East-West European Women’s Network, providing assistance to Bosnian refugees, chaired a Citizens’ Committee against rightwing radicalism, helped to reform the International Youth Encounter Center at Auschwitz and supported the Beit Ben Yehuda Encounter site in Jerusalem. From 2001 to 2010 she chaired Action Reconciliation/Peace Services in Berlin; she retired as lead minister at the Alt Pankow Church in 2017. Tensions between East/West churches were not limited to the Evangelical Lutheran hierarchy. Following unification, grassroots ties were fractured by partisan differences among religious activists, undermining their ability to counter Western dominance. One case involved the Samaritan Church (Friedrichshain/Ostberlin) and the Zufluchtsgemeinde (Refuge Community, Spandau/Westberlin). Spandauer parishioners were proud when their “partner,” pastor Rainer Eppelmann, became the first Minister for Disarmament and Defense after the Volkskammer elections, which they viewed as a reward for their respective peace campaigns. Westerners were shocked, however, when Democratic Awakening (DA) merged with the CDU (which had pushed for NATO deployments); they construed Eppelmann’s new party identity as a betrayal of their shared ideals. Serving as Saxony’s Minister of Justice and then Landtag member until 2009, Church lawyer Steffen Heitmann (CDU) also produced friction. His controversial statements about women’s roles, the Holocaust and foreigners derailed his efforts to advance to the national level. At the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, he wrote an open letter to Merkel, holding her responsible for an “uncontrolled stream of refugees.” He quit the CDU, claiming: “The harm to our people is foreseeable … I have never felt so alien in my country, not even in the GDR.”60 Most church activists welcomed Merkel’s beneficent, humanitarian gesture. Like other groups, GDR religious activists who expected to benefit from democratic rights and freedoms saw their fortunes rise, then fall in the rush to unity. Long-standing regime critic Friedrich Schorlemmer continued to tend to his flock at the Schlosskirche, where Luther’s “95

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Theses,” hammered to the door in 1517, had given birth to the Protestant Reformation. A cofounder of Democratic Awakening, he was one of many hoping to chart a new course for the eastern state, combining the equality ideals of socialism with the freedoms of democracy. When new DA members began shifting toward the CDU, pushing for rapid unification, he joined the SPD. Schorlemmer headed the SPD caucus in the Wittenberg City Council from 1990 to 1994, then returned to writing and lobbying on behalf of eco-peace causes as Director of the Protestant Academy of Saxony-Anhalt.61 Having survived one national tragedy, he decried the new one precipitated by unification: Almost daily they find new victims. Victims who were perpetrators, perpetrators, who are victims. Perpetrators who declare themselves victims, victims who are declared perpetrators. … The West Germans confront us now as masters of the treasury and as judges. We East Germans have ever less of a say…. We are like foreigners in our own land, in this internally and externally destroyed accession territory.62

The Helsinki Factor: Loyalty as Dissent Reacting to the increasing militarization of GDR society, twenty-four prominent regime critics banded together on January 24, 1986, to form the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (IFM). Egon Bahr’s “shuttle diplomacy” on behalf of Ostpolitik had culminated in several bilateral treaties between the Federal Republic, the Soviet Union and its East European allies, allowing both German states to join the United Nations in 1973. GDR leaders were obliged to ratify the 1948 UN Declaration of Human Rights, in exchange for diplomatic recognition by 115 non-fraternal states and access to the international stage. This opened the door to human rights activism, pushing the regime to uphold new international treaty commitments. Marking a shift from Cold War hostilities to a new spirit of rapprochement, the first Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) assembled foreign ministers from thirty-five countries in July 1973.63 The emissaries charged several committees with drafting a formal agreement; the latter met in Geneva from September 1973 to July 1975, focusing on three substantive areas, known as “baskets.” Under the Helsinki Final Act, Basket I covered military security, territorial integrity, sovereign equality, peaceful dispute resolution, and confidence-building

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measures. Basket II foresaw the expansion of cultural exchanges, along with greater economic and scientific cooperation. Basket III emphasized human rights, including family reunification, the right to emigrate and freedom of the press. Intent on flaunting its international recognition and the correctness of its “peace policies,” the GDR joined the Warsaw Pact nations in publishing the full text of the Accord in Neues Deutschland (August 2, 1975). Citizens drew immediate conclusions as to its significance for their own lives: over 120,000 applied to exit the GDR in 1976.64 Over the next decade, dissidents throughout Eastern Europe would often cite passages from the Final Act, sometimes word-for-word, when facing detention and arrest.65 The 1972 Basis of Relations Treaty (Grundlagenvertrag) also came at a price. FRG visiting rights opened the door to personal contacts between peace and human rights activists from both sides, despite Honecker’s 1971 exhortation that socialist youth learn to “hate their enemy with the same passion and conviction with which they love and trust a friend.”66 From 1971 to 1973, the number of FRG visitors rose from three to six million annually. West Berliners and journalists served as critical contacts, smuggling various items in and out, including banned books, tape recorders, artistic works, and opposition appeals. In May 1983, Petra Kelly, Gert Bastian, and three Green Bundestag members were briefly arrested after unfurling a swords-to-plowshares banner at Alexanderplatz. Meeting personally with Honecker in October, Kelly wore a sweatshirt with the same logo.67 While some dissidents got their start within parish walls, those who did not identify with Christianity found the Church’s “buffer role” too constraining, leading them to form the IFM. Largely confined to East Berlin, some had been forced out of their occupations, including a few SED members. The core group, consisting of Bärbel Bohley, Ulrike, and Gerd Poppe, Peter Grimm, Werner Fischer, Martin Böttger, Wolfgang Templin, Ibrahim Böhme, and Ralf Hirsch, issued an open appeal on January 24, 1986, complete with their names and addresses. Their independent paper, Grenzfall, was soon declared illegal; a few were deported for participating in the January 1988 Liebknecht-Luxemburg demonstration. Focusing on democratization, the treatment of prisoners and broader human rights themes, they reached out to western Greens, Czech Charter 77 members, Polish Solidarnos ́ć supporters and Hungarian activists.68 In November, the IFM circle staged a “Romanian night” at the Gethsemane Church during

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a visit by Nicolae Ceaușescu, highlighting gross human rights violations and catastrophic economic conditions in that country. IFM cofounder Bärbel (Brosius) Bohley was born two weeks after the Soviet Army occupied Berlin in 1945. Her father’s stories of atrocities on the eastern front converted her to pacifism, although her later experiences with war victims in ex-Yugoslavia led her to accept that “human rights must be defended, also with weapons.” Bohley studied painting and graphics at the Art Academic in Berlin-Weißensee from 1969 to 1974, then worked independently despite her membership in the state’s Union of Visual Arts (UVA). She was awarded a two-week trip to the Soviet Union in 1976 but was appalled by the conditions she witnessed there, though she vehemently opposed a capitalist take-over by way of unification in 1989/1990. Together with Ulrike Poppe, Bohley spent six weeks in solitary confinement in the Hohenschönhausen prison in 1983, for pursuing contacts with female peace activists in the FRG and the UK. Her affiliation with the Women for Peace Network resulted in the loss of travel privileges, the right to exhibit her work or to pursue artistic commissions, as well as her expulsion from the UVA. In 1988 she was arrested again in conjunction with the Luxemburg demonstration, but was quickly sent off on a “study abroad” trip due, in part, to the intervention of Berlin Bishop Gottfried Forck. To the consternation of her hosts, she hated her time in exile and arranged to be smuggled back into country six months later via Prague. On September 9, 1989, Bohley joined Jens Reich, Katya Havemann, Jutta Seidl, and Sebastian Pflugbeil in “hammering out” a manifesto that called for open discussion of the GDR’s socio-economic problems; they named their “citizen action group” New Forum. The SED’s refusal to grant it official recognition on September 21 triggered a rapid increase in the number of Monday-night protestors, ultimately resulting in Honecker’s resignation on October 18th. Speaking at the mass rally in East Berlin on November 4th, Reich proclaimed that “dialogue [with the government] was not the main course, but only the appetizer” in bringing the taste of democracy to the East German state. He urged his compatriots to “rediscover language” and demand for themselves the freedoms outlined in the GDR constitution. Bohley later reported: “When I saw that [Egon Krenz’s] hands were trembling because the people were booing [when he spoke], I said to Jens Reich: So now we can go, now it is all over. The revolution is irreversible.”69

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Bohley helped to lead the peaceful occupation of MfS headquarters in September 1990. After reviewing her file, she accused Gregor Gysi of having spied for the Stasi as a GDR lawyer who had represented many dissidents, including herself.70 Despite a 1993 court order, she repeated the allegation in 1995, then spent a few days in jail for refusing to pay a fine. She served for a time on the local city council but was otherwise marginalized by unification. Her second marriage to Dragan Lukic led her to Croatia in 1996, where she worked with Bosnian war victims. Diagnosed with lung cancer in 2008, she returned to Berlin, dying two years later at age sixty-five. Counting among the post-unification “winners,” Marianne (Radtke) Birthler belonged to a contingent of church activists who turned to secular groups in the late 1980s. Born in 1948 in Berlin, Birthler completed her Abitur and then worked for a state company involved with camera and film exports until 1971. She spent 1972–1982 as a housewife in Schwedt, while undertaking courses to qualify as a pastoral assistant and religious instructor; she then secured a position at the Elias Church in Berlin, as well as a job as youth advisor in the city’s Central Rectory Office. In 1986 she helped to create the Task Force on Church Solidarity, leading to her affiliation with the IFM as of 1988. She served on the Central Round Table through March 1990, then assumed a seat in the Volkskammer until unification.71 In November 1990 Birthler joined Stolpe’s SPD-Green Cabinet in Brandenburg as the Minister for Education, Youth and Sport but resigned two years later after learning of his Stasi connection. She succeeded Joachim Gauck in 2000 as the Federal Commissioner responsible for processing MfS files but resigned, in turn, in 2011, following revelations that fifty-three former Stasi employees were holding jobs in her Agency. A member of Bündis 90/the Greens, she declined Angela Merkel’s invitation to stand as the CDU’s candidate for the Federal Presidency in 2016. Lacking a direct affiliation with the IFM, Jens Reich nonetheless became a prominent activist in academic circles. Born to Catholic parents in Göttingen in 1939, he spent part of his childhood in Poland, then Halberstadt. He learned English during the Nazi years by listening to BBC Radio with his Austrian mother (under the covers, by his account), while his father served as medical specialist on the eastern front. Bombed out of its home in Dresden, the family witnessed the last days of the war in Plauen. Reich studied medicine at the Humboldt University, then worked as a practicing physician in Halberstadt until 1964. Completing a second

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degree in biochemistry in Jena, he joined the Institute for Molecular Biology (Berlin-Buch) in 1968 but refused to report on colleagues for the Stasi. In 1970 he initiated the “Friday Circle,” consisting of thirty intellectuals focusing on deteriorating conditions in the GDR; not surprisingly, it became a target of Stasi surveillance. He was nonetheless named Professor of Biomathematics in 1980, but demoted to Scientific Assistant and stripped of his travel privileges in 1984, when he refused to break off contacts with West Germans. His eldest daughter legally emigrated in 1987. Reich did not participate in the Central Round Table initiated in December 1989, serving instead as a key spokesperson for New Forum during the interim rule of Hans Modrow. On February 7, 1990, New Forum and Democracy Now forged an electoral coalition with other small groups under the name of Bündnis ’90 (Alliance ’90). The latter garnered only 2.9% of the vote, but Reich occupied one of its twelve Volkskammer seats, along with Birthler and Gerd Poppe. The Independent Women’s Union joined the alliance for the first all-German elections in December. Reich chose not to run, as he told me later, because “standing as a candidate for Parliament myself, I found it difficult to bring myself to stare into a television camera and say the same short sentence twenty times over. I felt like a chimpanzee.”72 In contrast to other FRG parties, western Greens allowed Bündnis ’90 to chart its own path with its own candidates; only eight secured Bundestag mandates. After unification, Reich was re-appointed Director of Biomathematics at the Institute for Molecular Biology. Nominated by the SPD in 1994, he fell short of a majority for the Federal Presidency, then served as a personal advisor to Chancellor candidate Rudolf Scharping. Appointed to the National Ethics Council in 2001, he retired from the IMB in 2004. He continued on the Ethics Council until 2012 and led a research project at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, also directing his energy to university reform. His first book, Rückkehr nach Europa (Return to Europe), is a montage of personal and political reflections, seeking to locate Germany’s place in Europe, following its emergence from “the oyster shell” of demarcation. The second, Abschied von den Lebenslügen (Farewell to a Life of Lies), addresses the responsibility of intellectuals before and after the dissolution of the GDR.73 Constituting the GDR’s “middle generation,” most secular dissidents openly opposed rapid unification. Identifying with its anti-fascist origins, socialist ideals and decades of anti-capitalist inculcation, they hoped to

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pursue a “third way” rooted in democratic socialism or at least genuine social democracy. Emulating the approach adopted by Polish Solidarity activists to ensure a peaceful transition, a wide assortment of GDR groups convened a Round Table in Berlin’s Bonhoeffer House on December 7, 1989. They later relocated to a Pankow conference center formerly used by Wilhelm Pieck, where they gathered around a rectangular table “with sharp corners,” an apt metaphor for their often politically charged discussions.74 Individual delegates (192 total) rotated in and out, depending on the issues, but the moderators remained the same: Senior Church Counselor Marin Ziegler (BEK), Monsignor Karl-Heinz Ducke (Catholic Bishops’ Conference), and Pastor Martin Lange (representing twenty-one “free” churches). The seventeen participant organizations included former bloc-parties, New Forum, IFM, Green groups, Democracy Now, Democratic Awakening, the Independent Women’s Organization, labor unions, and a Sorbian representative. The Central Round Table sought to shape policies, not to decide them. According to their mission statement, Participants in this Round Table are meeting out of a deep concern for the crisis engulfing our land, for its autonomy and its long-term development. They demand transparency regarding the ecological, economic and financial situation of our country. Although the Round Table cannot exercise parliamentary or government functions, it seeks to present recommendations to the public for overcoming this crisis. It demands that the Volkskammer and the government inform and involve them in a timely fashion regarding significant legal, economic and finance-political decisions. It understands itself to be a mechanism for political control in our country. It plans to continue its activities until the execution of free, democratic and secret elections.75

Group representatives stressed their reliance on a “culture of political debate,” respecting the opinions of “those who think differently.” They committed themselves to a shared search for constructive solutions, while fostering trust through close ties to citizens. Communal governments and professional associations formed Round Tables of their own. Across 16 sessions involving 160 hours of deliberation, Round Table participants considered over 100 pieces of draft legislation. Among the most significant were the Electoral Law, a new party law, a Social Charter, and a draft constitution, with a Preamble penned by Christa Wolf.76 Interim premier Hans Modrow (SED) initially displayed little interest in

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their deliberations. Despite his December promise, he did not immediately dissolve the state security apparatus and actually failed to attend most sessions, sending poorly prepared officials in his stead. His attitude shifted in late January, at which point he sought to forge a “grand coalition” with groups who had already lost confidence in his commitment to structural transformation. The next two months witnessed growing unrest, ranging from rowdier demonstrations calling for unification to physical assaults on various Stasi headquarters. The Round Table ended its work on March 12, 1990. Following their devastating electoral defeat on March 18th, Bohley admitted that IFM, New Forum, and other Round Table activists had been out of touch with the aspirations of average citizens, eager to have the Kohl government take charge of everything in the east, at ruthless speed: “They have been extremely arrogant in the west in how they have moved in.”77 EKD member Richard Voss (Hildesheim) spoke of a “cold execution, covered over with the hackneyed language of the economically and politically powerful.” He continued: “My heart is with those who have once again been pushed to the sidelines: with Wolfgang Ullmann und Konrad Weiß, Bärbel Bohley und Wolf Biermann, Christof Ziemer und Heino Falcke.”78 The next chapter would prove even more disappointing, not only to those who had long put themselves at risk in hopes of transforming their own state but also to millions of average citizens whose identities would likewise be immediately relegated to the trash-bin of history, much to their surprise.

Prosecuting the SED Dictatorship The last thirty years have given rise to a wide assortment of “truth and reconciliation” tribunals following periods of great national trauma, such as the end of apartheid in South Africa. As Jennifer Yoder observed, “by putting the past in ‘its proper place’—out in the open for all to confront if they wish, a society may more confidently and peaceably face the present and future challenges of democratization.”79 On the surface, Eastern Germans were ideally situated for “coming to terms” with their own past. They found themselves in a land with a strong commitment to the rule of law, freedom of speech, judicial independence, and international human rights norms. Equipped with ample financial resources and qualified legal-­ administrative personnel, their new country had helped them to secure a massive body of MfS files testifying to egregious abuses of power by the SED state, although the evidence was distorted by the incomplete nature

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of those files. Vladimir Putin reported that the night the Wall fell, his Dresden KGB office was ordered to destroy as many secret police records as possible: “We burned so much that the oven almost exploded.”80 When the citizen committees finally took charge in Lichtenberg, they found three thousand sacks of shredded documents; most of the electronic data bases were also destroyed prior to their transfer to a central location. The problem was that Easterners’ decision to jettison their own state in favor of FRG accession meant that the search for historical “truth” was transferred to a completely different institutional context, commandeered by legal-political experts unfamiliar with their real-existing life conditions. Initially treated as heroes, prominent dissidents soon became pawns in the short-lived, highly partisan “processing of GDR history.” Trust is admittedly a scarce commodity among citizens long subject to authoritarian rule, but in this case, East Germans had good reasons to be suspicious of Western motives. The first Bundestag Commission of Inquiry (1992–1994), Working through the History and Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in Germany, overlapped with the assault on GDR authors. Its task was to supply a “political-moral evaluation” of forty years of GDR history, though the experts concentrated almost exclusively on the oppressive features of the party-state. The Commission’s work was partisan from the start. It consisted of twenty members, reflecting the Bundestag’s composition. It included twelve CDU/CSU members, six Social Democrats, two Liberals, one Bündnis ’90/Green and one (non-voting) PDS delegate; only seven were women.81 Additional members consisted of twelve party-appointed “experts,” all male, heading specialized work groups. Chaired by ex-pastor Rainer Eppleman (CDU), the Commission conducted forty-four open and thirty-seven closed hearings; they relied on 327 “witnesses and scholars,” a disproportionate number of whom were also men: university professors, regime critics, and devout Christians, though the latter had comprised less than 10% of the total population.82 Conducted across eight locations (ten each in Bonn and Berlin, five in eastern cities, and one in Buchenwald), the “open meetings” were never meant to solicit citizen input. Most hearings took place during normal working hours, automatically excluding Easterners lucky enough to still hold jobs. Experts generated over 750 academic papers, relying on concepts, data, and methodologies unlikely to appeal to normal mortals. Totaling 15,378 pages, the Commission’s “findings” filled thirty hardback

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volumes (eighteen in paperback). Twenty-five years later, used copies were available online for €120/$126, suggesting that they were way too expensive for anyone but lawyers and journalists when first published by Nomos in 1995. The Commission’s failure to produce concrete results for SED victims, much less a societal catharsis, led lawmakers to stage a second inquiry from 1995 to 1998, Overcoming the Consequences of the SED Dictatorship in the Process of German Unity.   83 The result was a further fourteen-­ volume report (15,000+ pages), equally devoid of efforts to present a balanced picture. One outcome was the creation of a federal foundation (Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED Diktatur) focusing on opposition and “victim consultation,” but ignoring the experiences of the silenced majority. In August 2007, foundation members persuaded the Bundestag to extend reparations beyond political prisoners, to others facing mental or physical health problems as a consequence of regime persecution. Bundestag inquiries were supplemented by 50,000 preliminary criminal investigations, involving mostly lower-level officials. The Kohl government established a Central Investigative Office for Governmental and Unification Criminality (ZERV) in 1991. It drew 130 investigators from various West Berlin police departments; the Länder sent only twelve agents to assist, while some federal agencies and local bureaucracies refused to cooperate at all.84 One division concentrated on economic crimes linked to unification (e.g., post-1989 money laundering); half of those suspects were FRG citizens. Although Treuhand officials had “systematically ignored pricing mechanisms in sales” in exchange for assurances that many GDR workers would keep their jobs based on “future investment” plans, no effort was made to prosecute new owners who reneged on their contractual agreements (see Chap. 11). In fact, FRG companies bought up functioning enterprises largely as a way to secure subsidies, intent on eliminating eastern competition among milk and beer producers, for example.85 By 1993, FRG prosecutors had conducted 180 trials, resulting in 170 East German convictions, despite the problematic ex post facto application of Western law. By 1999, another 22,000 investigations triggered 880 trials, ending in 211 convictions; only 21 individuals landed in prison.86 The investigation of 4000 GDR judges and prosecutors led to 52 indictments, but only a dozen convictions.87 Stasi and postal workers who had routinely misdirected and robbed packages from the west were exonerated because they had not personally enriched themselves.88 The most sensational cases

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involved the “Order 101” (Mauerschützenprozesse); the identification of 4000 “border incidents” involving 2641 suspects led to roughly 300 indictments. Eventually thirty-five border guards were convicted of carrying out “shoot to kill” commands issued under GDR law; only one went to prison. FRG judges allowed these convictions based on the argument that such orders had violated international human rights norms. Young military “perpetrators” were rendered victims of the larger political game. Most of the criminal master-minds who had dominated the country for decades escaped punishment. Of 213 high-ranking officials, only three were tried and sentenced for seventy-four cases of “attempted and completed manslaughter.” A further 1600-page indictment against seven Politburo members generated fifty-two trials, resulting in seven final judgments.89 Honecker (extradited from Moscow after the USSR collapsed), as well as Mielke, Stoph, and six of ten military officers were declared unfit for trial, although Mielke was eventually found guilty of a 1920 (!) police murder. Wolf and Krenz had their sentences overturned on appeal.90 Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski made off like the bandit he was, by sharing information with the FRG intelligence agency (BND). Truth, in this case, was relative: he knew too much about corruption on the part of powerful western business moguls who had traded with KoKo. Professor Wolfgang Vogel was less fortunate, although he enjoyed a positive international reputation, having been interviewed by Playboy in 1970; he was personally credited with arranging the 1979 Honecker-­ Schmidt summit. As a lawyer, Vogel had “negotiated” for 350,000 clients who solicited his services after applying for emigration; most were required to dispose of their properties before exiting. He moreover facilitated the “buy-out” of 34,000 prisoners, leading some in Bonn to consider him for a Bundesverdienstskreuz (Federal Order of Merit award). After unification he faced fifty-three charges of extortion; two guilty verdicts resulted in a two-year suspended sentence. While the Volkskammer had mandated “compensation over restitution” with regard to property claims, Kohl reversed the policy after unification, excluding Nazi properties subject to SMAD land reform (properties over 100 hectares). One reason why former clients turned against Vogel after 1989 was because of exponential increases in the market value of their former holdings, in the popular tourist area of Rügen, for instance. East Germans could own their houses but not the land on which they stood. Some 2.3 million applications for “restitution” and 250,000 for “compensation”— many submitted by western “inheritance communities” (offspring of the

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original owners)—involved real estate that had come in to family hands by way of Nazi expropriations. Jewish claimants were granted special standing.91 Millions of Easterners with access to only 700 lawyers—unfamiliar with western property law—were forced to defend their long-term residency rights in the face of 60,000 FRG jurists, charging fees the former could not pay. Nearly 2000 cases had yet to be resolved by 2015.92 Criminal law does not in and of itself provide an adequate channel for determining “accountability,” much less secure the retributive justice needed to restore the dignity of all who suffered under an authoritarian regime. It is not surprising that average East Germans felt that the western half of the Cold War divide was “more intent on punishing the other side than in establishing a foundation for truthful reconciliation.”93 The Gauck Agency conducted extensive background checks for new administrators and parliamentarians, albeit only for easterners, despite a high probability that some FRG citizens had also spied for the GDR.  According to McAdams, the number of dismissals meted out to persons testing “Stasi-­ positive” fell between 42,000 and 55,000.94 Definitions of “culpability” varied from Land to Land. Private employers were more interested in technical know-how, irrespective of former IM roles. Federal judges grew increasingly skeptical over time regarding the accuracy (“the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”) of Stasi files. While some dissidents like Eppelmann, Birthler, Jahn, the Poppes, and Vera Lengsfeld-Wollenberger joined a second tier of elites, most disappeared from the national stage by 2004.95 Others like Lothar de Maizière were forced out by allegations of Stasi collaboration. A few who made the initial cut were alienated or embittered by their subsequent marginalization and exclusion. One interesting case involves Angelika Barbe, who befriended me in the early 1990s. Born in Brandenburg, Angelika (Mangoldt) Barbe encountered difficulties in school in the late 1960s after her parents were declared “negative and hostile” for boycotting elections. Passing an exam for skilled manual workers (Betriebsschlosser) with “distinction” in 1970, she nonetheless completed the Abitur, then studied Biology at the Humboldt University. She worked in plant-conservation in Potsdam, then as a biologist with the Hygiene Inspectorate in Berlin-Lichtenberg until 1979, after which she pursued studies in behavioral biology while raising her three children. In 1986 Barbe joined the Pankow Peace Circle; she moved on to another group with the Poppes, Reich, and Birthler in 1988/1989, resulting in

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Stasi surveillance under the rubric, “Operation Hysteria.” An SDP cofounder in October 1989, she served as its deputy spokesperson, then deputy chair. Securing 21.9% of the vote in March, the SPD (renamed) acquired 88 of 400 seats, landing her in the Volkskammer. Barbe served one term in the Bundestag but lost favor among party gatekeepers. Pitted against Gregor Gysi (PDS) in an East Berlin district, she found herself politically unemployed in 1994. She switched her allegiance to the CDU in December 1996, along with six other ex-dissidents (including Lengsfeld), opposing the SPD’s purported willingness to coalesce with the PDS. Ironically, the SPD had been the only FRG party to bar former SED members from joining in 1990; Kohl secured his electoral majority with the help of the Blockflöten parties. While working as a senior hospital administrator in Prenzlauer Berg, she joined other marginalized dissidents in establishing a Berlin Citizens’ Office to further “evaluate the consequences of the SED dictatorship.” In 2001 Barbe joined the national executive board of the Association of Victims of Communist Tyranny (UOKG), serving as its deputy chair till 2007. Neither her GDR biography nor my interactions with her in the early 1990s substantiate Barbe’s later self-characterization as a uniquely fierce “resistance fighter”; she had filed an application to emigrate but withdrew it in late 1989. Having interacted with her on multiple occasions, I can imagine how devalued she must have felt, having been marginalized by the SPD-West—as an SDP cofounder—only to be pushed aside a second time after she shifted to the CDU. Assisting at the Saxony State Center for Political Education until 2017, she took a further right turn, abandoning the CDU for the AfD. She was unsuccessful in her bid to secure a seat on the Curatorium of the German Institute for Human Rights, following her nomination by rightwing populists in 2020. Barbe’s verbal assaults on Chancellor Merkel for “blatantly violating” the Basic Law imply an inability to accept that fact that another eastern woman who (by her own admission) had never participated in dissident groups, became the Poster Girl for what other GDR citizens could have achieved. Barbe’s “open letters” and speeches now read like an AfD campaign brochure: she accused Merkel of breaking German law by bailing out profligate debtor countries during the Euro-crisis, while tolerating Islamic polygamy, child marriage, and terrorism. During the Covid pandemic, she compared the 2020 Law on Protecting the Population under National Epidemic Conditions to the 1933 Nazi Law on Alleviating the

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Need of People and Reich, more commonly known as Hitler’s “Enabling Act.”96 The comparison is rather curious, given that the AfD itself is currently under surveillance by the Federal Office for Constitutional Protection, for embracing outspoken neo-Nazis and attracting other extremist groups like the Identitarians. One lesson Easterners derived from the way in which politicians “processed” the SED dictatorship was that some victims “mattered” more than others, namely those whose experiences could be used to reinforce pre-­ existing FRG values, identities, and policies. As Lothar de Maizière observed, “perhaps two percent [had been] victims, and perhaps three percent perpetrators. But 95 percent were just ordinary people,” trying to secure a good life for themselves and their families.97 There was no “inquiry” into the positive impact of state-subsidized women’s rights, including reproductive choice, that had allowed the GDR’s female citizens to reconcile family and full-time employment. There was no assessment of the ways in which the FRG’s Freikauf policy expanded the GDR prison population, once the SED recognized it as a source of capital accumulation. There was no investigation into the harmful effects of mass unemployment and corruption linked to Treuhand privatization practices. Opening the process to consider these policies would have derailed the new narrative espoused by CDU/CSU politicians that “internal unity” had been quickly achieved, due to western generosity. Survey data pointed in the opposite direction: By 1996, Germans on both sides felt they had grown farther apart, voiced by 62% in the new states, 30% in the old Länder.98 Dominated by western elites, these limited efforts to reckon with forty years of Cold War history were formulated in absolute western right-­ versus-­ eastern wrong terms. In reality, both states had fostered non-­ recognition (Alleinvertretungsanspruch) and demarcation (Abgrenzung). Both governments had consistently warned their populations of the existential threat posed by the other, hardly grounds for mutual trust after 1990. In the spirit of victor’s justice, “the entire GDR past, the society’s whole set of experiences, and in some ways the individual’s sense of identity were all cast in doubt and, in the extreme, interpreted as being of no value.” The search for corrective justice was perceived as another FRG exercise bent on proving to easterners “why they were wrong historically and ideologically.”99 It is no wonder that Easterners’ corresponding lack of faith in FRG institutions has persisted for three decades.

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Loyalty, Voice, and Retributive Justice The relationship between victims and perpetrators is fraught with its own dialectic, as the so-called Stockholm Syndrome implies.100 Unification invoked a need to address not one but two German dictatorships. While the populations of East and West shared most Third Reich experiences, they were socialized to accept very different interpretations of Nazi history after 1945. The next four decades were shaped by opposing ideologies, defining the terms of their material existence as well as their respective responses to national division. The approaches used to reckon with the two German pasts differed just as significantly. Unconditional surrender in 1945 subjected all surviving residents to a decade of “victors’ justice,” but those experiences varied tremendously from one occupation zone to another. The Nuremberg trials were intended to “reveal the truth” and punish the guilty, as well as to expose a vanquished population to a democratic understanding of “the rule of law.” Prosecution for “crimes against humanity” laid the foundation for an internationally normed culture of human rights, as reflected in the 1948 United Nations Declaration, solidified later through new international tribunals and courts. Although ideological differences shaped their understanding of who was to blame for Nazism, neither German state completely abandoned efforts to hold guilty parties responsible once the occupying forces departed in 1955.101 As posited by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, I would nonetheless argue that rulers in both states failed to “look inwards” for fascism’s root causes. The Nuremberg verdicts, and resentment against mass internments under the occupational forces, provided an external substitute for deeper national soul-searching, a process cut short in any case by new Cold War priorities. Over time, the mitigation of East-­ West tensions, coupled with the Helsinki Accords, impelled national governments to worry almost as much about external as internal legitimacy. The extent to which international norms had trickled down to local levels helps to explain the relatively peaceful transitions witnessed across Eastern Europe, with the noteworthy exception of Romania. Initially declared “heroes,” Easterners perceived the historical processing that occurred after 1989 as an attempt on the part of West Germans to declare themselves the winners of a revolution in which they had played no part. As occurred in relation to GDR writers, alternative voices were quickly lost or subsumed in the cacophony of western media. Easterners wanted

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to tell their stories, but their counterparts returned to business as usual. Any attempts to highlight positive features of life on the other side were dismissed as Ostalgie or ingratitude across the board. Strange as it seems to reflect on voice and loyalty dynamics among the state security agents who made life miserable for millions, personal interviews suggest that some had joined the Stasi out of a commitment to socialist and anti-fascist ideals.102 What began as principled loyalty for some was perverted by top party officials who insisted on party loyalty to shore up their personal privileges. The 1980s revealed significant generational differences between geriatric elites and younger, better educated officers producing the regular field reports. Many were shattered by revelations following unification, not only because they lost their livelihoods but because they felt betrayed by the corrupt behavior of SED elites whom they had sworn to defend. Paradoxically, their purported proximity to the levers of power seriously limited the forms of voice at their disposal; exit was not an option, without dire consequences. Their efforts to convey the breadth and depth of popular discontent, rooted in deteriorating living standards outside the capital city, were taken no more seriously by Politburo members than the demands of dissidents. Although we certainly cannot characterize them as “victims,” one needs to recognize Stasi forces as the Kopfgeburt (mental offspring) of Stalinist-trained leaders who refused to trust the working class in whose name they claimed to rule. Thousands undoubtedly joined the state security services for opportunistic reasons, for example, higher wages, access to better apartments, health, and vacation facilities. Some just wanted to exercise power over others, no matter how petty or senseless their actions might be.103 Though smaller in number, female collaborators were more likely after unification to out themselves to the persons they had harmed, hoping to understand their own behavior as well as to seek forgiveness. Men were more likely to self-justify their spying, claiming to have been trapped by “the system” (e.g., Sasha Anderson).104 Once powerful, most agents were reduced to outcasts after 1990. Pastors, theologians, and activists affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church encountered a different set of dilemmas in relation to voice and loyalty. The resistance activities of the Confessing Church, coupled with Christian social teachings, initially placed Protestant leaders on the right side of history with regard to the GDR’s founding narrative. Heightened Cold War tensions marking the 1960s confronted eastern bishops with a new loyalty problem, however. To preserve its ability to

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function as an autonomous moral voice, the Church was forced to cut its historical ties to the western faith community, becoming the “Church in socialism.” Institutional loyalty was nonetheless conditional, despite SED efforts to equate anti-fascist ideals with its own right to rule. Hoping to serve as a moderating force within the godless state, Protestant clerics encountered another identity conundrum as younger Christians began clamoring for a “Church from below,” willing to support their burgeoning protest causes. When the Lutheran hierarchy failed to take advantage of (ostensible) opportunities for voice, courageous pastors individually opened their doors to alternative voice streams. Having contributed to the peaceful revolution of November 1989, many Church activists abandoned parish sanctuaries for the halls of parliament, rendering them temporary “winners.” As one of its first acts, the freely elected Volkskammer acknowledged the misery that had been inflicted on people throughout the “Stalinist-dominated part of Germany.” On April 12, 1990, VK delegates sought “forgiveness” for the persecution and humiliation inflicted on the GDR’s own Jewish citizens after 1945, as well as for the suffering caused by the regime’s role in crushing the Prague Spring.105 Those who remained true to their parishes were also brushed aside in the rush to unity, by their western Synod counterparts. As Pastor Christof Ziemer declared at the 1991 Ecumenical Council in Erfurt: We have unity without having undergone the necessary process of deep renewal, and are therefore stuck in a crisis that simply overwhelms us, internally and externally. The state of our souls is correspondingly desolate: The pent-up rage over having been abused by the powers of yesteryear, and finding ourselves once again dependent and unfree through the more subtle domination of money, often administered by the old potentates, the hardly concealable fear of being denounced due to our own pasts and being sucked into an imponderable future, the spiritual vacuum that the old regime has left behind and which now manifests itself as a massive identity crisis for many—all these things define the latent insecurity and aggressiveness of our collective consciousness.106

Secular dissidents were also caught in the double bind of loyalty in relation to anti-fascist and socialist ideals. As the offspring of World War II survivors, they identified with GDR “peace policies” but were willing to risk their own liberty and livelihoods to counter the creeping

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militarization of society. They had witnessed the events in Prague (1968), and the imposition of martial law in Poland (1979), yet they believed change was possible. Their loyalty to the idea of a second German state was not tied to the experiences of its founders, however, in contrast to Aufbau-­generation writers. They legitimized their use of voice by invoking the vocabulary of international human rights, but their efforts to “speak truth to power” rarely captured the imagination of workers in the provinces. As Detlef Pollack reflected: They knew this land, they had agitated against this state, this political system had given meaning to their lives, and they ultimately derived the reason for their political engagement from this system … they could not divorce themselves emotionally from the object of their efforts, which had given them so many small successes and which had dealt them even bigger disappointments.107

Round Table participants and secular dissidents faced the same national conundrum as their Aufbau predecessors in one respect: they recognized division as the price Germans were obliged to pay for Nazi atrocities, but they were not willing to accept capitalist subordination as the cost of democratization. Their sense of betrayal was two-fold: they lost their country, and the “democracy” that followed bore little resemblance to the grassroots participatory model outlined in their draft constitution. In the oft-cited words of Bärbel Bohley, “we wanted justice but we got the rule of law instead.” Theorists ranging from Alexis de Tocqueville to Robert Putnam associate trust and reciprocity with social capital formation deemed essential for sustaining liberal democracy. Andreas Lichter, Sebastian Siegloch and Max Loeffler sought to assess the longer-term impact of intensified police surveillance on the “civic capital” and the economic fates of easterners after unification. Presuming that its decentralized nature produced regional differences in Stasi surveillance, they generated a complex, quasi-­experimental model to test whether a higher “spying density” rendered citizens less trusting of strangers, resulting in stronger “negative reciprocity.” Using longitudinal analysis, they hypothesized that individuals exposed to greater “spying density” are less willing to engage in cooperative behavior and less interested in political participation. They related these variables, in turn, to a persistently negative impact on Easterners’ economic performance more than twenty-five years after unification.

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The multifaceted statistical techniques utilized in their study are way above my pay-grade, but its “findings” clearly perpetuate negative western stereotypes that surfaced after unification. The researchers devote an entire section to describing GDR conditions dating back to the Soviet Occupation, going so far as to incorporate dummy variables to account for “long-term cultural differences” between Prussia and Saxony during the Weimar period. Based in Bonn and Mannheim, Lichter et al. gave no indication that they had visited Berlin-Lichtenberg, Eberswalde, Bitterfeld, Greifswald, Hoyerswerda, or even Leipzig-Ost before and after the Wall fell. They incorporated a wide assortment of “proxy” and “control” variables, so many in fact that their models virtually ruled out the limited choices confronting people in everyday life. I argue that studies of this nature do more harm than good when it comes to forging a new, allGerman identity, for several reasons. First, like the Bundestag inquiries, this study concentrated solely on the repressive elements of the SED regime, leading these analysts to “misunderestimate” the alternative forms of civic capital that had fostered trust and reciprocity via channels unfamiliar to westerners. Though rudimentary by FRG standards, home-grown networks of church, peace, and ecology groups, artistic/literary circles, human rights activists, and even amateur historian clubs helped to instigate the collapse of an authoritarian regime.108 As demonstrated earlier, the Small Gardeners’ Union, Volkssolidarität, and other GDR associations engaged several million members each. In 1990, FRG politicians eliminated ninety mass organizations that had served as the main-stay of Eastern “social communication” and community interaction for four decades. Given few chances to familiarize themselves with new modes of interest mobilization, their post-1990 experiences with industrial privatization, property reclamation, and mass unemployment have understandably undermined whatever initial faith Easterners placed in western democratic institutions. Secondly, the real-life experiences of dissidents after unification clearly refute their findings regarding “spy density” and political participation. The individuals profiled in this chapter were all subject to intense Stasi surveillance, including periods of interrogation and imprisonment. Some were subject to Zesetzung, a form of psychological warfare that one victim, Jürgen Fuchs, described as “an assault on the human soul.” He and others imprisoned at the same time died of cancer a few years after unification, presumably the result of deliberate radiation exposure.109 Vera Lengsfeld learned from her Stasi file that her own husband had reported on her

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activities, dating back to 1982. Yet, all were eager and willing to engage in a wide range of political processes to transform “their” Germany into a genuinely democratic republic, despite years of Stasi harassment. Their political careers ended due to western marginalization, not because they were incapable of “cooperative behavior.” Indeed, their Round Table participation proved just the opposite. Third, Lichter and his colleagues sought to link Stasi surveillance with GDR “personality traits,” which they used to “predict economic outcomes such as educational attainment and wages.” Most regime critics secured higher educational degrees before they joined peace or human rights groups, but many were forced into self-employment after being expelled from state professional associations. The researchers’ nod to differences in educational attainment neglects the fact that after unification, GDR “skill certifications” and various technical degrees were not recognized as such by FRG employers. This impelled the “best and brightest,” mostly younger residents to migrate for jobs, leaving behind retirees, sick/ disabled citizens, and the long-term unemployed. Thirty years later, western students who study at universities in the eastern states are still quick to leave the region after graduation. The real issue here is not educational attainment, but the maldistribution of human capital. Fourth, turning to personality traits, these non-psychologists highlight what they label “Big Five” traits—extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness, and agreeableness; they do not consider empathy, solidarity, altruism, or other positive traits potentially linked to collectives and “niches.” Ignoring very different East-West perceptions of what constitutes “agreeable behavior,” they determine that only a “lack of agreeableness” has a negative impact on civic capital, depriving individuals of the entrepreneurial spirit that “should” have moved them to pursue self-­ employment.110 Lichter and company offer no detailed assessment of the post-1990 context, for example, the asset-stripping nature of Treuhand privatization policies that eliminated four million jobs almost overnight. They neglect to mention that “state ownership of the means of production” left average citizens with no personal property that could be used as collateral to secure start-up loans from westernized banks. They likewise fail to mention the 2.3 million western property claims that eliminated easterners’ “99-year leases” on homes and Datschen as a potential source of collateral.

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Despite annual government reports attributing ongoing structural inequalities to inadequate direct investment, these economists continue to fault the old regime for the lack of wage growth decades after unification: Translated into monetary terms, a one standard deviation increase in the spying density decreases monthly gross income by €108 (€84 conditional on working)… we infer from our data that counterfactually abolishing the Stasi is equal to a decrease of 2.84 standard deviations in the spying density on average. The East-West gap in GDP (wages) over the period 1991–2010 is 72% (39%). Taking our estimates at face value, the Stasi can account for up to around 50% of the East-West gap in economic performance.111

As late as 2020, eastern workers still had not reached full wage parity, due to concrete decisions taken by the western employers who secured over 80% of former GDR industrial assets (see Chap. 11). Government experts correlate the persistent wage gap with limited productivity increases, which owe to insufficient corporate investment. Lichter and Company end their analysis with another curious suggestion, that an eastern “lack of initiative” may be transferred from one generation to the next, as if it were a genetic predisposition. They admit that “effects are indeed smaller across outcomes (although statistically significant in most cases) for the children (sic) generation (born 1974 or later),” admitting that the “negative effects of Stasi surveillance on civic capital might be even smaller for the generation born after reunification.”112 The real question is: why has a democratically elected government failed to resolve so many “eastern” problems over a span of thirty years? Those who were fifteen or younger when the Wall fell are already in their forties— their educations, apprenticeships, and working lives were all “Stasi-free.” One wonders what western scholars hope to achieve with this type of study, beyond circumventing the need to come to terms with their own past. A real data-driven analysis would have commenced with a review of the fifteen federal reports on the “the State of German Unity,” dating back to 1991, along with subsequent investigations regarding the (lack of) “comparable worth” regarding East-West living conditions.113 Loyalty is not a static quality. Like voice it can evolve over time to encompass different forms, values, and objectives associated with the state. By the 1980s, SED elites had shifted from a loyalty paradigm based on anti-fascist, socialist ideals to one based on “my party, right or wrong.” Failing to grasp the extent to which many of their own citizens had

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embraced a commitment to GDR “peace policies,” SED rulers undercut the potential remedial powers of voice at many levels. Loyalty to a cause was replaced by demands for loyalty to a cult. The fates of “victims and perpetrators” were often intricately intertwined as a result: the more oppressive and intrusive Stasi operations became, the more diverse the voices seeking to defy state powers grew, while still adhering to the system’s earlier ideals. Untangling these complicated relationships would have been difficult under any circumstances, once the Wall fell. Lustration, property compensation (instead of restitution), and reparation policies might have been used to slowly build trust in FRG political institutions, had these processes incorporated significant East German input, in place of a direct take-over by West politicians pursuing their own agendas. Many observers, myself included, saw the pre-emptive, one-dimensional processing of the “second German dictatorship” as a chance for the old-FRG to make up for its own inadequacies in reckoning with the nation’s first dictatorship the late 1940s. It had little to do with efforts to foster “internal unity” and a shared national identity. Article 1 of the Basic Law declares, Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority. The Bundestag inquiries regarding the “SED dictatorship” did little to generate a sense of retributive justice which “necessarily links prosecution of wrongdoing to the fate of victims”; its purpose is to restore their dignity and trust through a societal recognition of moral injuries. Dignity, John Borneman writes, is “preserved by transforming a situation of constraint into one of freedom.” Like guilt, it “is always a quality of individuals and cannot be derived from any group or collective character.”114 The only way to restore the dignity of Eastern Germans, and thus affect genuine reconciliation, is to ensure significant social empowerment to previously marginalized groups.

Notes 1. Richard Popplewell. 1992. “The Stasi and the East German Revolution of 1989,” Contemporary European History 1 (1), 40. 2. A. James Mc Adams. 1985. East Germany and Détente. Building Authority after the Wall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2–3. 3. Ariane Riecker, Annett Schwarz and Dirk Schneider. 1990. Stasi Intim: Gespräche mit ehemaligen MfS-Mitarbeiter. Leipzig: Forum Verlag, 52, 147.

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4. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (I),” Der Spiegel, February 4, 1990, 51. 5. Helmut Müller-Ensberg. 1998. “Garanten äußerer und innerer Sicherheit,” in Matthias Judt, ed., DDR Geschichte in Dokumenten. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 439. 6. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (II),” Der Spiegel, February 11, 1990, 50–82, 132. Also, Jürgen Helfricht. 2019. “Wladimir Putin in Dresden. Sächsische Heimatblätter 2: 172–176. 7. Roland Weidmann and Martin Erdmann, eds. 2018. Anatomie der Staatssicherheit: Geschichte, Struktur, Methoden—MfS Handbuch. Berlin: Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen Deutschen Demokratischen Republik; also, Daniela Münkel, ed. 2016. State Security: A Reader on the GDR Secret Police. Trans.: Miriamne Fields. Berlin: BStU. 8. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (I),” 82. 9. Jens Gieseke, ed. 2011. Die Stasi, 1945–1990. Munich: Pantheon Verlag. 10. Weidmann and Erdmann, Anatomie der Staatssicherheit. 11. Müller-Ensberg, “Garanten äußerer und innerer Sicherheit,” 439. 12. Philipp Springer. 2019. “‘Die Genossinnen arbeiten doch am zuverlässigsten’: Frauen im Ministerium für Staatssicherheit.” Einsichten und Perspektiven: Bayerische Zeitschrift für Politik und Geschichte (3): 12–23. 13. Belinda Cooper. 1998. “Patriarchy within a Patriarchy: Women and the Stasi.” German Politics and Society 16 (2), 3–4. 14. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (II),” 129. 15. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (II),” 129. 16. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (II),” 132. 17. “Eine Perverse Kombination,” Der Spiegel, June 18, 1990. 18. Müller-Ensberg, “Garanten äußerer und innerer Sicherheit,” 440. 19. Riecker, Schwarz, and Schneider, Stasi Intim, 74. 20. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (I),” 59. 21. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (II),” 136. 22. Uwe Krähnke, Anja Zschirpe, Matthias Finster, et al. 2018. “The District Leadership Cadre of the Stasi: Who were these Men and why did they not crush Mass Protest in 1989?” German Politics and Society 36 (4), 15. 23. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (II),” 135; further Rieker et al., 81ff. 24. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (III),” Der Spiegel, February 19, 1990, 107. 25. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (III),” 106–107. 26. Popplewell, “The Stasi and the East German Revolution,” 49. 27. Krähnke, et al., “The District Leadership Cadre,” 21. 28. Riecker, et al., Stasi Intim, 80. 29. Daniel Niemetz. 2020. Staatsmacht am End. Der Militär- und Sicherheitsapparat der DDR in Krise und Umbruch, 1985–1990. Berlin: Christoph Links, 149.

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30. Popplewell, “The Stasi and the East German Revolution,” 61. 31. Krähnke, et al., “The District Leadership Cadre,” 22. 32. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XBEqyu5Mck. 33. “Schild und Schwert der Partei (II),” 128. 34. See Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. 35. John Cornwell. 1999. “Hitler’s Pope,” Vanity Fair (October). https:// archive.vanityfair.com/article/1999/10/hitlers-­pope. Pope John XXIII’s overtures to Soviet leaders allowed seven GDR bishops to participate in the Second Vatican Council. Catholic bishops took a unified stance against the legalization of abortion and the obligatory Jugendweihe, but Pope Paul VI’s stance against the Vietnam War helped to improve relations with the SED.  Following a six-day visit by Vatican Foreign Minister Casaroli in 1975, authorities allowed 150 Catholics to undertake a “Holy Year” pilgrimage to Rome in 1977. 36. Ehrhart Neubert. 1998. “Kirchenpolitik,” in Judt, DDR Geschichte, 365. 37. Neubert, ‘Kirchenpolitik,” 366. 38. Neubert, ‘Kirchenpolitik,” 372. 39. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1984. “Swords to Plowshares: The Church, the State and the East German Peace Movement.” Studies in Comparative Communism 17 (2): 123–135. 40. Bernd-Lutz Lange. 2006. Mauer, Jeans und Prager Frühling. Berlin: Aufbau, 227–245. 41. Arnim Brux. 1980. “Wehrerziehung im Bildungssystem der DDR.” Deutschland Archiv 134 (10): 1097–99; Gisela Helwig. 1979. “’Als Held wird man nicht geboren’.” Deutschland Archiv 12 (2): 233–35. 42. Reinhard Henkys and Ernst-Alfred Jauch, 1985. “Kirchen.” In Zimmermann, DDR-Handbuch, 715, 717, 720. 43. Neubart, “Kirchenpolitik,” 376. 44. Hans-Jürgen Roder. 1978. “Fragwürdige Friedenspolitik—Zur Einführung von obligatorischem Wehrunterricht in der DDR.” Deutschland Archiv 11 (8): 800–805. 45. Ursula Mecke. 1990. “Ihr könnt uns nicht verstehen: Notizen aus der (DDR-)Provinz.” Deutschland Archiv 23 (6): 925–931. 46. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1987. “Peace and the National Question: A Study of the Development of an ‘Association of Responsibility’ between the two Germanys.” Coexistence: A Review of East-West and Development Issues 24: 245–270. 47. Micha 4:3 reads: “And he shall judge among many peoples, and shall rebuke strong nations afar off; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into sickles; and nation shall no more lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn to war any more.” 48. Wolfgang Büscher, Peter Wensierski, and Klaus Wolschner. 1982. Friedensbewegung in der DDR.  Texte 1978–1982. Hattingen: Scandica

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Verlag, 178–180; Klaus Ehring and Martin Dallwitz. 1982. Schwerter zu Pflugscharen. Friedensbewegung in der DDR. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 49. “Evanglischer Kirchenbund in der DDR verurteilt Atomwaffen,” Der Tagesspiegel, July 7, 1982. 50. Mushaben, “Swords to Plowshares,” 130. 51. Wolfgang Büscher and Peter Wensierski. 1984. Null Bock auf DDR: Aussteigerjugend in Deutschland, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 165–176. 52. Peter Wensierski. 2017. Die Unheimliche Leichtigkeit der Revolution. Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 113–130, 142–150. 53. Katharina Kunter. 2015. “Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume—Die Evangelische Kirche und die Wiedervereinigung Deutschlands 1990.” Frankfurt Stadtsynode, July 1, 3. 54. Kunter, “Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume, 7–8. 55. Kunter, “Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume, 15. 56. Volker Resing. 2009. Angela Merkel. Die Protestantin. Leipzig: St. Benno Verlag, 29ff. 57. Manfred Stolpe. 1992. Schwieriger Aufbruch. Berlin: Siedler, 105–107. 58. “CDU-Spendenaffäre: Thierse fordert 6,5 Millionen Mark Strafe für illegales Finanzgebaren,” Der Tagesspiegel, July 19, 2000. 59. Hans-J. Misselwitz. 1996. Nicht länger mit dem Gesicht nach Westen. Das neue Selbstbewußtsein der Ostdeutschen. Berlin: Dietz. 60. “Heitmann tritt aus CDU aus: Scharfe Kritik an Merkels Flüchtlingspolitik,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 2, 2015. 61. Friedrich Schorlemmer. 1992. Wörte öffnen Fäuste. Die Rückkehr in ein schwieriges Vaterland. Munich: Kindler. 62. Friedrich Schorlemmer. 1991. “Versöhnung kann es nur in der Wahheit geben.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 2, 1990. 63. The Warsaw Pact had proposed the idea in 1966, to stabilize the postwar order. Follow-up conferences were held in Belgrade (1977–78), Madrid (1980–83) and Ottawa (1985). 64. McAdams, East Germany and Détente, 154. 65. Gwyn Prins, ed. 1991. Spring in Winter: The 1989 Revolutions. Manchester UK: Manchester University Press. 66. McAdams, East Germany and Détente, 132; Wilhelm Bruns. 1989. Von der Deutschland-Politik zur DDR-Politik? Opladen: Leske + Budrich. 67. Petra K.  Kelly. 1983. Um Hoffnung kämpfen. Bornheim-Merton: Lamuv, 93ff. 68. Hubertus Knabe, ed., 1990. Aufbruch in eine andere DDR. Reinbeck: Rowohlt; Hagen Findeis, Detlef Pollack and Manuel Schilling. 1994. Die Entzauberung des Politischen. Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt. 69. Steingart and Ulrich Schwarz. 1994. “Wir waren abgedriftet,” Der Spiegel, November 7, 1994, 40.

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70. “Gregor Gysi und der lange Stasi-Schatten,” Deutsche Welle (2013), https://www.dw.com/de/gregor-­gysi-­und-­der-­lange-­stasi-­schatten/ a-­16591957. 71. Findeis, Pollack, and Schilling, Die Entzauberung des Politischen, 35ff. 72. Personal interview with the author. 73. Jens Reich. 1991. Rückkehr nach Europa. Zur neuen Lage der deutschen Nation. Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag; Reich, 1992, Abschied von den Lebenslügen. Die Intelligenz und die Macht. Berlin: Rowohlt; Reich. 1991. “Reflections on becoming an East German dissident, on losing the Wall and a country.” In Spring in Winter, 65–97. 74. Regarding internal conflicts among opposition groups, see Wolfgang Rüddenklau, ed., 1992. Störenfried, DDR. Opposition 1986–1989. Berlin: BasisDruck. 75. Helmut Herles and Ewald Rose. 1990. Vom Runden Tisch zum Parlament, Bd. 5. Bonn: Bouvier, 4–5. 76. Arbeitsgruppe “Neue Verfassung der DDR” des Runden Tisches. 1990. Verfassungsentwurf für die DDR, Berlin: BasisDruck. 77. Findeis, Pollack, and Schilling, Die Entzauberung des Politischen. 78. Kunter. “Erfüllte Hoffnungen und zerbrochene Träume,” 16. 79. Jennifer Yoder. 1999. “Truth without Reconciliation: An Appraisal of the Enquete Commission on the SED Dictatorship in Germany.” German Politics, 8 (3), 60. 80. Natalija Geworkjan and Andrei Kolesnikow. 2000. Aus erster Hand. Gespräche mit Wladimir Putin. Munich: Heyne. 81. Deutscher Bundestag, Drucksache 12/7820, May 31, 1994, 9. 82. Deutscher Bundestag, Schlußbericht der Enquete-Kommission. “Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur im Prozeß der deutschen Einheit,” Drucksache 13/11000, June 10, 1998, 326–336. 83. Deutscher Bundestag, Materialien Der Enquete-Kommission. Überwindung der Folgen der SED-Diktatur Im Prozess der Deutschen Einheit (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999). 84. John Borneman. 1997. Settling Accounts: Violence, Justice and Accountability in Postsocialist Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 60–61. 85. Matthias Krauss. 2019. Die grosse Freiheit ist es nicht geworden. Berlin: Das Neue Berlin. 86. “DDR Unrecht: Signal an der Täter,” Der Spiegel, January 11, 1999. 87. Yoder, “Truth without Reconciliation,” 67. 88. Borneman, Settling Accounts, 71. 89. Borneman, Settling Accounts, 65. 90. A.  James McAdams. 2001. Judging the Past in Unified Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 35ff; Hansgeorg Bräutigam.

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2004. “Die Toten an der Berliner Mauer und an der inner-deutschen Grenze und die bundesdeutsche Justiz.”Deutschland Archiv 37 (6), 969. 91. McAdams, 124 ff; Borneman, 93. 92. Statistics from the Bundesamt für zentrale Dienste und offene Vermögensfragen (BADV), https://www.badv.bund.de/DE/Offene Vermoegensfragen/Statistik/start.html. 93. Yoder, “Truth without Reconciliation,” 69. 94. McAdams, Judging the Past in Unified Germany, 73–74. 95. In 1991, Vera (still) Wollenberger, a former SED member turned thirdway proponent, had accused the West-Greens of being too “value-­ conservative.” She favored better treatment of foreigners, stronger environmental regulations, shutting down nuclear energy plants and demilitarization—all policies rejected by Kohl. She defected to the CDU in 1998. “Nicht alle Linken aussperen,” Der Spiegel, April 15, 1991, 26ff. 96. Angelika Barbe. 2020. “Freiheitsbeschränkung wie in der DDR,” The European, November 18. 97. Cited in Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2017. Becoming Madam Chancellor: Angela Merkel and the Berlin Republic. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 56. 98. Mushaben, Becoming Madam Chancellor, 48 ff; Jan Delhey and Petra Böhnke. 1999. Über die materielle zur inneren Einheit? Wohlstandslagen und subjektives Wohlbefinden in Ost- und Westdeutschland FS III 99–412. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum. 99. Yoder, “Truth without Reconciliation,” 75. 100. Dating back to a 1973 bank robbery, the Stockholm Syndrome is the label now applied to cases in which kidnapping victims or hostages begin to identify psychologically with the agendas and demands of their captors. 101. Melissa Eddy. 2021. “Why Germany Prosecutes the Aged for Nazi Roles It Long Ignored,” New York Times, February. 9, 2021. 102. Rieker, et al., Stasi Intim. 103. For a satirical, fictionalized account of Stasi daily life, see Thomas Brussig. 1996. Helden wie wir. Berlin: Verlag Volk & Welt. 104. Cooper, “Patriarchy,” 22. 105. Herles and Rose, Vom Runden Tisch zum Parlament, 393–395. 106. Cited in “Einheit, die WIR meinen,” Dokumentation des Ökumenischen Informationsdienstes Nr. 2 (Erfurt, 1991), IV. 107. Detlef Pollack. 1998. “Wie alternativ waren die alternativen Gruppen in der DDR?” Forschungsjournal Neue Soziale Bewegungen 11 (1), 101. 108. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2001. “Die Lehrjahre sind vorbei: Reforming Democratic Interest Groups in Eastern Germany.” Democratization 8 (4): 95–133. 109. Peter Wensierski. 1999. “In Kopfhöhe ausgerichtet,” Der Spiegel, May 17, 1999.

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110. Andreas Lichter, Sebastian Siegloch and Max Loeffler. 2020. “The Longterm Costs of Government Surveillance: Insights from Stasi Spying in East Germany.” Journal of the European Economic Association, 31. 111. Lichter, et al., “The Long-term Costs of Government Surveillance,” 36. 112. Lichter, et al., “The Long-term Costs of Government Surveillance,” 28. 113. See the reports by the Federal Commissioner for the East Länder, and/ or the Federal Ministry for Economics, Jahresbericht der Bundesregierung zum Stand der Deutschen Einheit, published every two years, dating back to 1991. 114. Borneman. Settling Accounts, 144, 111.

CHAPTER 9

From State Paternalism to Private Patriarchy: East German Women

As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses For the people hear us singing, bread and roses, bread and roses. As we come marching, marching, we battle too, for men, For they are in the struggle and together we shall win. Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes, Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses. As we come marching, marching, un-numbered women dead Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread, Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses, too. As we go marching, marching, we’re standing proud and tall. The rising of the women means the rising of us all. No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes, But a sharing of life’s glories, bread and roses, bread and roses. James Oppenheim, “Bread and Roses,” 1911

Despite women’s strong presence in countless opposition groups and among Round Table participants, unification quickly morphed into a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_9

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triumph of the Fatherland.1 Women’s exclusion from the negotiating table at all levels rendered accession a thoroughly male-normed process, despite vast differences in the gender regimes that had taken root in the two German states after 1945. In July 1990, Helmut Kohl promised to turn the new Länder into “blossoming landscapes in which it paid to live and to work again,” insisting that no one “would be worse off than before.”2 He then personally relegated women’s rights to the back burner, especially legal abortion, so as not to derail the bilateral negotiations. Eastern women were nervous about unification from the start: 58% of the men surveyed “strongly” favored unity, compared to 41% among women; 20% of the female respondents were outright opposed, versus 8% among males.3 Article 31 of the Unity Treaty subsumed women’s rights under “family protection,” reflecting CDU/CSU notions of women’s proper role in society. Instead of seeing their lives improved, women were immediately blown away by a gale of purported “creative destruction,” as industrial production plunged by 60%, and GDP fell by 40%. The number of regularly employed workers declined from 9.7 million in 1989 to 5.3 million in 1992. Having comprised 49% of the total GDR workforce in early 1989, women accounted for 59% of the unemployed by 1993.4 They were also hit with the elimination of key support services helping them to reconcile career and family, along with the recriminalization of abortion. Within months, eastern women qualified for the title of Unification’s Biggest Losers. One could argue that the dialectic is alive and well or, alternatively, that “the goddesses work in strange ways.” In any case, GDR women have experienced not one but two reversals of fortune over the last three decades. Since 2005, women on both sides have benefitted significantly from the great leap forward in gender equality orchestrated by Germany’s first female eastern Chancellor. Supported by “a few good women” during her four terms as national leader, Angela Merkel managed to re-instate many of the gender rights that her peers had taken for granted prior to 1990. She then added a few more equality policies under EU auspices, turning unification into a triumph of the Motherland. This chapter begins with the SED’s claim to have resolved “the Women Question,” based on socialist theories articulated by Friedrich Engels, August Bebel, and Clara Zetkin, in particular. Neither Marx, Ulbricht nor Honecker practiced what they preached with regard to equality, indicating that “private property” is not the only factor driving sexism. Their personal lives certainly did not qualify them as effective role models for a new

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type of “socialist man” they hoped to engineer. Their image of the new “socialist woman,” by contrast, was rooted in an unquestioning acceptance of the double burden. We follow this line of inquiry in greater detail, considering socialist policies adopted through the 1970s, the aim of which was to aid female workers in reconciling family obligations with paid employment. Next, we assess the reproductive dimensions of these policies, as well as their failure to eliminate gender discrimination in key domains through the 1980s. The fourth section deconstructs the highly gendered consequences of unification, inducing a re-domestication of women’s status, rights, and opportunities. This chapter concludes with a treatment of the positive Turn-around, or more accurately, the fundamental transformation of the all-German gender regime, instigated over a sixteen-year period by one Easterner recognized by millions as “the World’s Most Powerful Woman.”

Gender and Ideology: State Paternalism It is somewhat paradoxical that a topic which received so little attention from the “great men” of socialist theory ultimately generated an extraordinary transformation of East German social structures prior to 1989. It is equally ironic that those changes helped to foster a paradigm shift in West German “relations of production” after 2005. Historical materialism asserts that human interactions are structured in such a way as to provide for the survival of the species. Work is the process by which humans “create value” out of the manifold elements comprising their physical environment. Although class conflict was seen to emerge out of “the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others,” most socialist philosophers were gender-blind when it came to judging the sexual division of labor as anything more than a by-product of the exploitative nature of private property. 5 The authors of The Communist Manifesto (1848) accused the prototypical bourgeois capitalist of treating his wife as “a mere instrument of production,” but Marx’s earlier writings painted women in no more flattering or autonomous terms. Viewing marriage as “a form of exclusive private property,” he opined in 1844: “Just as women pass from marriage to universal prostitution, so the whole world of wealth, that is the objective essence of man, passes from the relationship of exclusive marriage to the private property owner, to the relationship of universal prostitution

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with the community [of women]… The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in his relationship to woman as prey and servant of communal lust.”6 In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels held that “the first division of productive labor was between a man and a woman for child breeding.” Physical and material necessity established the first social structure, the family, but this alone did not explain women’s total subordination over time. They were not the only leftist theorists to espouse this position, as the later writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone attest.7 Following Marx’s death, Engels made some effort to set the historical record straight, drawing on anthropological evidence to prove that women had once been more than just collateral damage: “That woman was the slave of man at the commencement of society is one of the most absurd notions that have come down to us … Woman occupied not only a free but also a highly respected position among all savages.”8 The relations of reproduction created the foundation for subsequent production modes, but the value-creating dimensions of the latter owed to a further twist in the historical process. Women’s subsequent enslavement by men purportedly derived from the establishment of private property. Friedrich Engels had good reasons to reflect on women’s everyday subordination as more than the simple by-product of the “ineluctable forces of history.” Twentieth-century scholars have shown that Marx made no effort to reconcile theory and praxis within his own household.9 In fact, Richard Ebeling characterized him as “a pretty bad person,” who regularly engaged in “malicious, mendacious behavior,” financial exploitation of his closest friends (especially Engels), and even binge drinking. He subjected his wife (Baroness Johanna “Jenny” von Westphalen) and his three surviving daughters (out of seven children) to a life of penury, moving them from place to place in search of revolution and/or to escape political authorities. He fathered an illegitimate son with the family maid, Helene Demuth, who had joined the Westphalen household at age eleven to assist Jenny, pregnant for the first time in 1845. After Engels’s wife died, Marx pressured him to “recognize” Henry Frederick Demuth as his son, to protect his own reputation. Marx then sent the boy to live with a working-­ class family, providing no monetary support. He was rumored to have had a subsequent affair with Helene’s much younger half-sister who also worked in the household. Anna Maria Creutz (“Marianne”) died “suddenly and unexpectedly” at age twenty-seven in 1862, possibly as the result of a botched abortion. Volker Elis Pilgrim claims that her demise left

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Marx a broken man, unable to complete volumes two and three of his seminal work, Das Kapital. 10 A leading figure in the social-democratic movement, August Bebel moved beyond women’s victim status, describing the conditions under which they, too, could emerge as part of a revolutionary force. Writing in 1879, he recognized industrial capitalism’s growing interest in female workers, socialized to expect less and to tolerate poor treatment. Men’s wages were insufficient to support their families, while new machinery meant that physical strength was no longer the sine qua non of factory life. Bebel addressed the socio-cultural roots of woman’s oppression, stressing education as a vehicle for improving her condition. While he ultimately viewed the elimination of private property as the key to equality between the sexes, he antagonized orthodox socialists with his disdain for the institution of marriage and support for the decriminalization of homo­sexuality. Bebel presented a positive, multi-dimensional vision for women’s lives under socialism: In the new society woman will be entirely independent, both socially and economically. She will not be subjected to even a trace of domination and exploitation, but will be free and man’s equal, and mistress of her own lot. Her education will be the same as man’s, with the exception of those deviations that are necessitated by the differences of sex and sexual functions. Living under normal conditions of life, she may fully develop and employ her physical and mental faculties. She chooses an occupation suited to her wishes, inclinations and abilities, and works under the same conditions as man. Engaged as a practical working woman in some field of industrial activity, she may, during a second part of the day, be an educator, teacher, or nurse, during a third she may practice a science or an art, and during a fourth she may perform some administrative function. She studies, works, enjoys pleasures and recreation with other women or with men, as she may choose or as occasions may present themselves. In the choice of love she is as free and unhampered as man. She woos or is wooed, and enters into a union prompted by no other considerations but her own feelings…. Here socialism will create nothing new, it will merely reinstate, on a higher level of civilization and under a different social form, what generally prevailed before private property dominated society.… But it can be accomplished only by means of a transformation that will abolish the rule of man over man, including the rule of the capitalist over the

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laborer…. Class rule will forever be at an end, and with it the rule of man over woman.11

Clara Zetkin embraced a multifaceted approach to women’s role in building socialism, linking domestic and international developments (suffrage, anti-war movements), while recognizing the need for gender-­ specific forms of mobilization. She helped to introduce International Women’s Day, first commemorated in 1911; her friend Rosa Luxemburg, by contrast, remained fairly indifferent to “women’s issues.” In 1891 Stuttgart publisher Heinrich Dietz personally recruited Zetkin to serve as editor-in-chief of Die Gleichheit (Equality), a post she held for twentyseven years. Promised full financial support and complete editorial freedom, Zetkin turned the newspaper into the voice of international women’s movements. Appearing every two weeks, it offered reports on working conditions, the nature of female employment, international trends, female suffrage campaigns, social legislation, trials/court verdicts, bureaucratic barriers, police efforts to inhibit movement activities, women’s role in public offices and universities, as well as a mother and child section, added in 1906. Zetkin defied censorship rules by leaving big spaces blank, indicating where and how much had been cut. Social Democratic executives removed her as editor in May 1917, a preview of things to come: The vanguard role of German women was subordinated to the “leading” Russian women’s movement, spearheaded by Alexandra Kollontai. Die Gleichheit ceased publication in 1922. Following the 1918 November revolution at home, Zetkin joined others in co-founding the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). From 1920 to 1933, she occupied a Reichstag seat until the collapse of the Weimar Republic. She simultaneously served on the executive committee of the Communist International (Comintern) from 1921 to 1933, despite having opposed Stalin’s effort to split a united labor front against fascism. Presiding over the solidarity organization Rote Hilfe, she advanced to a seat on the KPD Central Committee, held from 1927 to 1929. As the Reichtag’s senior member, she delivered the opening address in August 1932, calling for workers to unite in the struggle against fascism. When Adolf Hitler assumed power in January 1933, he outlawed the KPD, forcing her into exile in Moscow, where she died at age seventy-five. Issued in 1920, Zetkin’s Guidelines for the Communist Women’s Movement drew on thirty years of theory and praxis. She critiqued Marx, Engels, and even Bebel for failing to address women’s special needs. Her

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words are worth quoting at length, given the superficial approach to equality adopted by the SED after 1945. Similar male-normed thinking would drive the elimination of women’s rights following unification. Comrades, in discussing and making decisions on these questions, the conference was guided by an overriding principle: There is no special Communist women’s organisation. There is only a movement, an organisation of Communist women inside the Communist Party, together with the Communist men … This principle of common organisation and work … was carried out so narrow-mindedly, so pettily, with such a mechanical application of the principle of equality, that it did not unleash and fully engage women’s energies in the service of the revolution. We Communists are revolutionaries of the deed, of action. We do not in the slightest lose sight of the common interests and struggle of proletarian men and women. However, we are alert to the given, specific conditions that Communist work among women must deal with (sic). We do not forget the social conditions that still hinder women’s activity, political awakening, and political struggle in many ways—acting through social institutions, family life, and existing social prejudices. We recognise the impact that thousands of years of servitude has (sic) left in women’s soul and psychology. That is why, in addition to all that the organisation has in common, it needs special structures, special measures, to link up with the masses of women, bring them together, and educate them … When the War ended, the women were the first to be thrown out of the factories and other employment. Why was that? Because starving women are less feared than men, because of women’s political backwardness. In addition, they falsely claimed that women’s needs were taken care of by the fact that they could, of course, always take to the streets as a prostitute or contract an arranged marriage. The trade-union bureaucracy betrayed the interests of employed women a third time by failing to take up the struggle against the crying injustice that unemployed women are fobbed off with less compensation than unemployed men—if they receive anything at all.12

The GDR’s 1949 Constitution made short shrift of equality between the sexes: Article 7 proclaimed Men and women have equal rights. All laws and regulations which conflict with the equality of women are abolished. Articles 30–33 afforded special protection to marriage and family, so that women can reconcile their obligations as citizens and producers with their duties as wives and mothers.13 The 1968 Constitution took a more expansive view but tethered equality to the development of socialist society. Article 19 specified:

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(1) the German Democratic Republic guarantees all citizens the exercise of their rights and their participation in the management of social development. It guarantees socialist legality and legal certainty … (3) free from exploitation, oppression and economic dependence, every citizen has equal rights and many opportunities to develop his (sic) abilities to the full extent and to develop his (sic) powers freely for the benefit of society and for his (sic) own benefit in the socialist community.

Article 20 embedded equal rights in a broader socio-economic framework: (1) every citizen of the German Democratic Republic, irrespective of his (sic) nationality, race, ideological or religious creed, social origin and position, shall have the same rights and obligations. Freedom of conscience and belief are guaranteed. All citizens are equal before the law. (2) Man and woman have equal rights and equal legal status in all areas of social, state and personal life. The promotion of women, especially in vocational training, is a social and governmental task….

The SED further included a vision of sex-equality in its official program, albeit devoid of a specific time-table: The abilities and talents, the best moral characteristics of the free human being will blossom and reach full development. With this even the last remnants of the unequal position of women in daily life will be eliminated. Family relationships will finally be free of material calculations and will be based completely on mutual love and friendship.14

Like Marx, leading communist men engaged in free love long before that right was extended to women. Walter Ulbricht married seamstress and KPD-member Martha Schmellinsky in 1920, who gave birth to a daughter the same year. A 1921 arrest warrant forced Ulbricht underground, causing the marriage to fall apart. They divorced in 1949. Following his death, Alain Picard (born 1952) revealed that his (unmarried) grandmother, Rosa Michel, had spent “the most wonderful time of her life” with the GDR leader, which ended bitterly when he left her. A member of the French CP, Michel had worked for the Communist International in Moscow; her intimate affair at the Hotel Lux (for exiles) with the married Comrade began in 1925, resulting in a daughter (born 1931). Ulbricht ended the affair in 1935, but kept in touch until he died.15

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Ulbricht found yet another love at the Hotel Lux, Charlotte (Lotte) Kuhn, who had fled to Moscow with her husband, Erich Wendt, where she worked as a Comintern instructor. Her spouse was arrested in 1936 during the Stalinist purges; she divorced him that year, after she was interrogated. A member of the Central Committee, she became Ulbricht’s personal assistant in 1947. Despite his marital status, they adopted Maria Pestunowa in 1946, an orphan born to a Ukrainian slave worker, renaming her Beate. The adoption was finalized in 1950, although the two did not marry until 1953. Despite her privileged life—the best schools, great vacations, unlimited access to scarce goods—Beate described her life as “a golden cage … without love.” At fifteen she was sent to Leningrad to complete high school; pursuing Russian and History at the university, she fell in love with the son of an Italian CP functionary, Ivanko Matteoli. In 1963, she broke off her studies, returned to Berlin and married Matteoli, despite parental opposition. After the birth of their daughter Patrizia, the couple tried to return to Leningrad. Hours after Ivanko left, her father had Beate’s passport seized, and their communications were intercepted for two years. The Ulbrichts returned her passport only after she agreed to a divorce; she fled immediately but never found her husband. After a second, abusive marriage, she returned to Berlin, where Lotte demanded and secured custody of her two children. Beate was found murdered in her apartment in December 1991, shortly after releasing her memoire. Though certainly more interesting than his official biography, Erich Honecker’s love life also remained a taboo topic until after his death. He met his first wife, Charlotte Schanuel, while serving time in prison for his underground activity. Arrested in 1935, the trained roofer was sent on work-release to repair bomb damage at the Barnimstraße prison where she worked as a Nazi guard. They married in 1946, though she died two years later. His second marriage also contravened “socialist morality.” Not yet a widower, he had begun a relationship Edith Baumann (three years older) during a 1947 trip to Moscow. In a 1990 interview he claimed, “I was very needy back then … Besides, she was a very skilled typist.”16 Honecker was the first chair of the Free German Youth, Edith Baumann his deputy chair. When she became pregnant in December 1949, the two comrades dutifully married.

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Erich nonetheless traveled back to Moscow that month as part of the GDR delegation celebrating Stalin’s 70th birthday. So did twenty-two year-old Margot Feist, who headed the Young Pioneer Organization “Ernst Thälmann.” Honecker was reportedly fascinated by Margot not only because she was a “pretty young girl,” fifteen years his junior, “but also because she was very active in the party.” Returning to Berlin, his nightly after-work visits to her apartment were an open secret. Unwilling to abandon the battlefield, Edith wrote to Ulbricht, complaining that Erich never returned home until after 1 am. Sie urged the SED chief to have a power-talk with him and to send the competition off to work in the provinces. Although their careers were at risk, Honecker responded that he was not prepared to leave Margot, even if it meant returning to his job as a roofer. Wilhelm Pieck intervened on their behalf, causing the Politburo to deliberate their “wild marriage” in summer 1952; the leadership permitted Feist and Honecker to vacation together in the Soviet Union, but demanded a resolution. Erich still resided with his wife and daughter, but Margot was already “quite pregnant.” Baumann agreed to a divorce in January 1955. The entrance hall for wedding number three was reportedly strewn with rose petals. Three years later the happy couple moved to Wandlitz. Their official biographies list their wedding date as 1953. Edith Baumann advanced to candidate membership in the Politburo in the 1960s. When she died in 1973, SED General Secretary Honecker led her funeral procession. Neither Ulbricht nor Honecker felt bound by their marital vows across multiple affairs, yet both grew increasingly obsessed with extracting personal fidelity oaths from various segments of the GDR population, for example, church officials, Stasi agents, Jugendweihe participants. Though unable to relate to his own children, Ulbricht denied abortions to women raped by Soviet soldiers in postwar Berlin. His “Ten Commandments” would later exhort GDR citizens to “live purely and fairly and respect your family.” Both men would order brutal crackdowns against youth whose musical/dancing tastes, clothing, and search for alternative life-styles they deemed decadent, deviant, and hostile to the state. Women would bear the double burden of work and family, coupled with lower wages and limited political opportunities through 1989. Clearly “private ownership of the means of production” was not the only force responsible for their inequality.

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Equality without Emancipation: Double Burdens and the “Right to Work” By the time the Wall fell, even female party loyalists were frustrated by the fact that the socialist state had yet to provide the abundance of material goods needed to improve living standards for all, “especially women.” Nor had it transcended “old habits and attitudes” of the patriarchal sort, allegedly leftover from capitalism. The SED’s primary goal, from the start, was to remedy a literal manpower shortage, the consequence of two world wars. Its second concern was to replenish the population, given the flight of over three million workers prior to 1961. Party bosses failed to note the antagonistic contradiction between their own attachment to traditional gender roles and the push to integrate women into industrial production, however. As late as 1983, Volkskammer delegate and CC candidate Inge Hiebliger found it necessary to critique the lop-sided nature of the state’s Kinder, Küche, Kombinat policies: “It is incompatible with the principle of equality between men and women when women alone are left to deal with the problem of how to manage job, qualification and their tasks as wife and mother.”17 Perhaps her earthly impatience, and that of average citizens, was fueled by the fact that, thanks to godless communism, only 14% of East Germans believed in life after death.18 As the feminist wordplay invoking the dual meaning of gleich proclaims, Lieber gleich berechtigt als später—better to have equal rights/rights now rather than later. German Communists who had spent the war years in Russia evinced little trust in women’s political potential, despite proof to the contrary among their own comrades. Returning from exile in Moscow, Elli Schmidt observed that male comrades would address female audiences, starting with the question, “Is it not a fact that Hitler came to power only because a large proportion of women succumbed to the poison of Nazi propaganda?”—at least until one participant shot back in 1947: “If women had carried the guns, we wouldn’t have fought for Hitler down to the last man.”19 Self-righteous functionaries viewed women as “apolitical at best, retrograde at worst; religious and under clerical sway; and blinkered by short-term, family-bound concerns.”20 Party men were irritated by their stronger interest in “the food question” than in ideological mobilization. Coping with hunger, exhaustion and high infant mortality, roughly 300,000 women nonetheless organized themselves into 6000 anti-fascist committees, which set up soup kitchens, sewing centers, shelters for

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orphans and refugees, opened kindergartens, aided veterans, then treated typhus, tuberculosis, and sexually transmitted diseases blamed on women, not on marauding soldiers. Fearing their autonomy, party bosses required the anti-fa committees to merge with the new Democratic Women’s League in Germany (DFD) in November 1947, having already sabotaged their non-partisan, all-female candidate slates, referred to by some as “whores’ tickets.”21 Following the logic of Bebel and Zetkin, the first step in fostering equality between the sexes centered on women’s integration into the paid labor force, a phase lasting from 1949 to 1962. The initial SMAD Order No. 253 (1946) mandated equal pay for equal work, anchored in GDR law by 1950. The problem was securing equal work. Although only 10% of all occupational fields were closed to them for “health” reasons (like mining), females would remain concentrated in branches where they earned less than men with the same qualifications through 1989. Women were disproportionately employed in retail/trade, postal/communication services, textile production, agriculture/food sectors, child-care, laundry, and later in banking, insurance, medicine, and data processing. Issued in 1947, SMAD Order 234 contradicted the equal pay mandate by introducing higher “achievement” wages to impel workers into priority industries like chemical production. Contravening socialism’s promise of a classless society, it granted special benefits to skilled, technical, and political workers, including access to better food: these groups were entitled to “A” meals with “superior calories” at no extra cost, while unskilled workers, mostly female, were assigned inferior “B” rations with low caloric value (mostly potatoes). Communist activists like Schmidt complained openly to Ulbricht and Pieck regarding the “cursed” starvation-rations allocated to defenseless housewives and single mothers unable to work for pay, compounding their hardships.22 Had the all-powerful state valued women’s work equally, it could have simply mandated the same wages for all, rather than rewarding industrial and white-collar workers more than those providing the everyday goods and services needed to sustain men for such jobs. According to Donna Harsch, SMAD and SED policies “effectively buttressed the real and symbolic value of male over female labor” from the start.23 Meanwhile Soviet occupiers stripped the zone of heavy machinery, dismantled 1000 factories and asserted ownership over 200 more, extracting reparations for reconstruction back home. Eastern women nonetheless

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began to resuscitate German industries prior to men’s release from prisoner of war camps. In December 1945 they comprised 59% (9.5 million) of the Soviet zone residents.24 They were trained as bricklayers, carpenters, electricians, glaziers, painters, and plumbers; they learned how to drill, lay cables, and cut molds, often outperforming men in sectors requiring precision work. The second half of 1946 saw dramatic increases in the number of women in the coal industry (20%), iron and steel production (48%), metallurgy (50%), and shipbuilding (81%). In Saxony, the East’s most industrialized region, they accounted for nearly 45% of the workforce.25 Another 40,000 were enrolled in crash courses to serve as “new teachers,” after 71% of the 39,000 surviving educators were summarily dismissed as Nazi Party members. Demographic imperatives also paved the way for limited political advances. By 1946, there were 50 female mayors in Berlin-Brandenburg and 20 in Thüringen; a year later, there were 180 mayors in the SMAD zone, as well as 2127 women in state and local governments. Some 23,000 women were elected to workplace councils (20%), rising to 30,000 by 1947.26 Returning male prisoners found their self-­ esteem shattered not only by war experiences but also by the shock of reuniting with independent wives. Divorces rose accordingly, up 200% in 1947–1948, spiking again after 1955 when the last war prisoners were released.27 In 1950, women were accorded an independent right to pursue paid employment even if it required physical separation from the family. FRG women, by contrast, had to secure their husbands’ permission to engage in paid labor until 1977.28 The SED Women’s Secretariat and the Women’s Section of the Free Trade Union Federation (FDGB) closely monitored the progress of female workers, finding little evidence of efforts to implement Order 253. Local party secretaries, factory managers, union and work council leaders used technical loopholes to circumvent the equal pay mandate.29 Created by the SED to raise their productivity, the Democratic Women’s League was tasked with developing workplace facilities to help female workers juggle their double burdens. The feminization of industry led to the “factory-­ fication” of many basic services. Industrial conglomerates opened “shopping avenues,” although these, too, were plagued by chronic shortages and long lines for low-quality goods. Home to large-scale chemical production, Saxony established 613 sewing rooms, 102 shops, 146 shoerepair kiosks, 127 hair salons, and 36 laundries, all on-site for use before and after work.30 Workplace access to these services was all the more necessary, given the average forty-eight hour work-week, including Saturdays.

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DFD women nonetheless encountered stiff opposition from FDGB men who saw them as rivals and resented their shopfloor presence. Union bosses, factory managers, and even local party officials were reluctant to waste resources on child-care, but had few qualms about building sports centers and club facilities (e.g., in Merseberg), to incentivize male workers. Harsch confirms that both older and younger SED men (like FDJ functionaries) opposed the idea of working wives and did not welcome women assuming male roles. Shopfloor sexism assumed many different forms, including deliberate wage cuts for women and outright harassment.31 The FDGB did away with its Women’s Section in 1948. Working-age women outnumbered their male counterparts by a ratio of 136: 100, comprising 63.8% of the 25–40-year-olds in 1950; only 44% held jobs, compared to 97% among men.32 Labor shortages were compounded by a greater male tendency to flee to the west between 1950 and 1961, including 40,000 farmers, 23,800 doctors, 40,200 engineers, and 170,000 researchers/teachers.33 The SED initially sought to draw in the female labor reserve through propaganda and negative sanctions. In 1948 rulers eliminated various widows’ pensions to force able-bodied women under sixty (without young children) to fill the gap. Their growing industrial presence was not matched by enhanced opportunities to improve their abysmal working conditions. Wages were so low in Silesian textile factories that many women reportedly resorted to prostitution to cover basic expenses. Poisonous glue used in one elastic factory resulted in black-out spells and serious weight losses (eight to sixteen pounds) among factory girls over a three-month period. Local authorities responded by supplying them with an additional half-liter milk ration.34 Rather than mobilize collectively, women were more inclined to seek better jobs, moving from unskilled to semi-skilled sectors via on-the-job training. The first Five-Year Plan (1951–1955) called for doubling production, requiring more workers. Although 52.5% were employed by 1955, women were routinely assigned to non-productive or repetitive assembly line work. Machines were modified to account for physical strength, but bigger investments to raise productivity rarely followed. Light industries were often denied fuel and raw materials, exacerbating a dearth of basic goods. Feminized industries continued to pay the lowest average wages among all state factories. FDGB bosses had few qualms about denying women with equal qualifications regular access to bonuses, promotions, and non-wage benefits. Jobs reclassified at higher wage levels were suddenly declared “too hard” for women, unless they agreed to work

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for less. Officials further exploited women’s cheap labor to benefit their own hard-currency needs: women at the Hoheneck Prison, for example, produced nylon stockings for an FRG firm, despite chronic shortages at home. “Old habits and attitudes” prevailed at all levels. Female activists negotiated with management for rooms to set up kindergartens, borrowing furniture and pushing plant directors to hire staff. By 1947, Leipzig had 74 centers for 5563 children. The Buna kindergarten accommodated 150; open 24 hours a day, it had five accredited teachers and a doctor on-call around the clock. The gigantic Leuna works followed suit. The 1950 Law for Protection of Mothers and Children supplied cash benefits to single mothers or those with three or more children. Still, the share of working mothers grew faster than the number of care-places, the main reason why many dropped out. By 1952 Saxonian factories could accommodate 75,000 children, but those younger than fourteen numbered 1.2 million.35 One campaign to ease women’s double burden proved especially controversial, involving the monthly “paid housework day” (HAT). Introduced by the arms industry in 1940, it aimed to draw middle-class wives into the labor force while spouses were engaged in total war. The provision was extended to single mothers when it was codified in 1943. Individual factories, for example, in Sachsen-Anhalt, (re)adopted the practice in 1945 as a recruitment tool, inducing a patchwork quilt of eligibility criteria. Opposed by the SMAD, Order 234 tried to hinder its spread by granting the right only to women in “independent households” with husbands. In 1950, the SED forced the FDGB to recognize the housework day as incompatible with the goals of the Five-Year Plan. Though the DFD sided with the party, female workers protested its discriminatory nature, which granted the benefit to married women, even childless ones, while denying it to single mothers and widows with offspring over sixteen. The issue flared up several times between 1952 and 1957, resulting in a barrage of petitions to the FDGB as the labor shortage worsened, due to westward flight. Inequality among women was the core issue, although the system was a long way from ensuring their equality with men. Hoping to scuttle it, some union leaders insisted that “equality” required that the benefit be extended to single men, who were highly unlikely to engage in serious house-cleaning. Single women had more time to participate in shopfloor committees, which eventually enabled them to secure backing from lower-level functionaries. Higher-ups argued that the HAT would not “solve the woman question” but offered no alternative. The SED

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tried to ignore the issue, leaving it up to factories to sort it out, so as not to alienate desperately needed female workers. With or without a formal right, women developed the habit of leaving work, often at mid-day, to secure goods and services that the state had yet to deliver in mass quantities. Conscious of their growing bargaining power, women learned they could wrangle small concessions from the state as long as they were framed as work rights, not as political demands. The Leipzig Institute for Market Research undertook its first study on the unequal division of labor in 1965. It determined that women spent 37.7  hours per week (79.4%) attending to “uncreative, mind-numbing, wearisome” household chores, compared to 5.5  hours (11.6%) among men.36 Women regularly complained to officials about “morning and evening marathons” to day-care centers and shops, costing them “much time, effort and energy,” as well as depriving them of “relaxation, vocational qualification and many other things.” Shift work and the vagaries of public transportation forced 30% to deposit their children at 6 am in special locations before school started, where they stayed until 4–5 pm. Officials encouraged work collectives to hold “discussions” with women and their spouses once a year, hoping that plant managers might “influence the husbands to support their wives with comradely consideration and aid in their qualification.”37 There are no records indicating how many actually did. Glorifying the image of the working mother, the state gave no thought to the harm inflicted on children subject to prolonged institutional care. It provided “week-long” care facilities for shift workers, focusing only on their material needs; in 1958, some 23,570 were lodged in weekly homes, while another 9000 in “long-term” care rarely interacted their mothers. A new generation of social workers stressed the negative impact of these arrangements on their emotional, linguistic, and cognitive development.38 The share of children in public care rose from 8% to over 60% by the 1970s; the average cost ranged from 80 cents to M1.40 per day for centers open from 6 am to 7 pm. Costs were always deducted from mothers’ accounts, despite their lower wages. Those with three or more offspring qualified for extra vacation days and reduced work-hours. Single mothers received priority access to subsidized child-care and paid leave for sick children. By 1980, 92% of worker offspring enjoyed age-appropriate placements in nurseries, kindergartens, and before/after school-care programs.39

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Proclaiming the onset of a “scientific-technical revolution,” GDR authorities recognized the need to enhance women’s workplace qualifications. As of 1949 only 5% of its founding mothers had completed formal vocational training. The Politburo’s 1961 Communiqué on “Women, Peace and Socialism” called for measures to overcome the skills gap, as well as efforts to move females into leadership positions. The Eighth Party Congress promised to improve the quality of life, beginning with new housing construction; a third stage, commencing in 1972, stressed the “unity of economic and social policy.” Rulers embraced manifold social policies to counter a dramatic drop in birth rates in the early 1960s, despite a lack of contraceptives. Working hours (43.75 hours) were cut to 40 hours per week without wage losses for women with three or more children, though many would have preferred part-time options. The Ninth Party Congress approved further family-friendly policies in 1976, “so that women with equal rights as members of socialist society [could] properly fulfill their duties as workers and as mothers.”40 Paid maternity leave was extended to twenty weeks (at average net wages); a forty-hour week soon became the norm for mothers with two children. Women delivering a second child were entitled to a “Baby Year” (eighteen months for three or more), compensated at sick-pay level. The result was a temporary increase in births in 1977. The Baby Year option was extended to all mothers in 1986; men could share in the latter, albeit only on an unpaid basis.41 By the time Honecker assumed power in 1971, women had become significantly more than an industrial reserve army, comprising 54% of the population and 49% of the total workforce. They remained disproportionately concentrated in the lowest wage groups (57% vs. 22% of males), although 80% were certified skilled laborers by 1984.42 An estimated 25% were overqualified for their positions, perpetuating the gender pay-gap (Table  9.1).43 Even Margot Honecker criticized prejudiced “economic functionaries” for women’s failure to advance in the technical domains. Although 200 of 289 skilled occupations were open to them, 60% of female tenth graders were steered into sixteen to twenty-eight categories between 1982 and 1987.44 The share of young women completing tertiary degrees rose from 19% in 1950, to 35% 1970, to 52.5% by 1984; nearly 50% of all university students, and 74% of the technical college enrollees were female in 1983, but only 7% of the university professors. The medical field, especially, witnessed gradual feminization: 49% of the doctors (but not the

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Table 9.1  Women’s employment across major economic sectors (as a proportion of total employment), 1970–1985 Economic Sector Industry Crafts Construction Agriculture/Forestry Transportation Post/Telephone Retail Trade Other Productive Branches Non-productive Branches % of Total Workforce

1970 (%)

1980 (%)

1984 (%)

1985 (%)

42.5 40.1 13.3 45.8 25.5 68.8 69.2 53.7 70.2 48.3

43.3 38.0 16.2 41.5 27.4 70.0 72.8 55.1 72.9 49.9

41.9 37.4 16.3 39.4 27.0 69.3 72.8 55.0 73.2 49.4

41.7 37.2 16.5 39.1 26.9 69.1 72.6 56.1 73.1 49.3

Source: Hildegard M. Nickel. 1989. “Sex-Role Socialization in Relationships as a Function of the Division of Labor.” In Marilyn Rueschemeyer and Christiane Lemke, eds. The Quality of Life in the German Democratic Republic. Amonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 53

chief-­residents), 52% of the dentists, and 64% of eastern pharmacists were women. They also accounted for 54% of all judges.45 By the time the Wall fell, 91% of all females (15–64) were in vocational training or were duly employed. Yet 23% polled in 1990 said they could not remember when they had last found sufficient free time to pursue continuing education in their fields.46 During this stage, the SED also called for greater female participation in leadership roles, but the practice again diverged from the theory with regard to political power-sharing. Assessing the period 1971–1986, Gerd Meyer developed a four-tier representational pyramid, confirming the usual “law of increasing disproportions”: the higher the rung on the power-ladder, the smaller the number of women decision-makers.47 The bottom tier centered on the working class. Comprising roughly half of all laborers, women displayed significant technical competency along with high levels of societal engagement in mass organizations. By 1980, 54.6% of FDJ members were young women, 50% of whom exercised functionary roles. However, only two moved on to lead the Young Pioneer Organization (ages 6–14): Margot Feist (1949–1952), then Helga Labs (1974–1985). Females also comprised a clear majority among FDGB members and 48% of its elected functionaries. Johanna Töpfer became its Deputy Director (1968–1989) and was one the few to serve in the Volkskammer Presidium.

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Women were somewhat successful in advancing to the second tier, but their ability to move up the ladder still fell short of parity, ranging from 25% to 40%. Societal engagement allowed those with higher qualifications to assume mid-level leadership responsibilities at best. Researchers suggest that the state used statistical manipulation to show that it was living up to its promises, by expanding the job categories deemed “leading” or supervisory. Female SED membership rose from 28.7% in 1971 to 35.5% in 1985, enabling about 18.6% to share responsibility in party organs at the communal/county (Kreis) level. Women held one-third to one-half of the higher-level positions across some economic sectors, mostly in light industries. They occupied 36–42% of the seats in communal/regional assemblies and held 30% of the mayoral offices (Table 9.2). Visibility did not translate into real political influence, however. These were largely rubber-­ stamp organs, the main function of which was to motivate the masses to carry out orders from above. Proof of individual loyalty and activism at the first two levels, coupled with formal “cadre” training, should have allowed women to rise to the third tier, but their presence at the national level constituted a small minority, ranging from 5% to 20%. Although they were guaranteed a share of Volkskammer seats by way of recognized caucuses (National Front, DFD, FDGB, FDJ, Kulturbund), women’s share of SED caucus seats never exceeded 19%, with the exception of the first legislative session (23.8%). Most women (76%) served less than two full legislative terms between 1954 and 1971. In 1963, 108 of 137 female delegates were newly elected (partly due to a shift in party course). By 1986, only 2% had occupied seats since 1950, compared to 10% of male delegates. In 1981, nearly 60% of 162 female parliamentarians were SED members, but only 22 were part of the SED bloc; the rest represented mass organizations.48 Women were noticeably absent from committees dealing with foreign affairs, defense, heavy industry, construction, transportation, budget, and finances. Only one female was traditionally included in the VK Presidium. Between 1950 and 1963 only four women served as VK committee chairs, reduced to zero from 1971 to 1981 (though they held five of thirteen “deputy” offices). Nor did women lead the National Front parties. Their main base was the DFD (128 mandates between 1950 and 1990), the only group known for never having submitted draft proposals of its own.49 Women exercised little, if any, power at the highest level, charged with running the party, the state, and the economy. Only 37.5% of the Higher

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Table 9.2  GDR women in political leadership positions, 1971–1985 Position

1971 Total

SED Members and candidates Central Committee: Members Candidates Department heads Party Control Commission CC Secretariat Politburo: Members Candidates State Council All Ministers Presidium Planning commission Volkskammer Plenary Presidium Local Mayors

W %

1976 Total

W %

1981 Total

W %

1986 Total

W %

1.9 28.7 million

2.04 million

31.3

2.17 million

33.7

2.29 million

35.5

189

13.2

202

11.9

212

11.3

206

11.7

135 54 40

13.3 13.0 7.5

145 57 40

13.1 8.8 7.5

156 56 40

12.2 8.9 7.5

156 51 41

13.5 5.9 7.3

n.a.

20

16

18.8

15

13.3

15

13.3

10

0

12

8.3

10

10.0

12

8.3

23 16 7 24 41 18 14

4.3 0 14.3 20.8 2.4 0 0

28 19 9 24 41 15 14

22.2 0 22.2 20.8 2.4 0 0

25 17 8 27 45 16 13

25.0 0 25.0 18.5 2.2 0 0

25 21 4 n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a.

8.0 0 50 n.a. n.a. n.a. n.a.

500 12

31.8 16.7 18.1 (1970)

500 13

33.6 15.4 23.4 (1977)

500 13

32.4 n.a. 7.7 n.a. 25 (1980)

n.a. n.a. 28 (1984)

n.a. Not available Source: Adapted from Gerd Meyer. 1986. “Frauen in der Machthierarchien der DDR oder: Der lange Weg zur Parität.” Deutschland Archiv 19(3). March, 307–308

Party School graduates were female, warranting “political cadre” status and thus access to nomenklatura positions.50 They were most likely to be found serving on union/industrial councils or as plant managers. The few exceptions included Hanna Wolf, who headed the SED Academy “Karl Marx” (1950–1983), Deba Wieland, who became General Director of ADN (1953–1977) and Helene Berg, who led the Central Committee’s Institute for Opinion Research (1974–1978). Women were naturally selected to manage the DFD.

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Women did not encounter equal opportunity regarding the ship of state. Only four women held ministerial portfolios on the State Council over forty years. Elizabeth “Else” Zaisser (who spent the war years in Moscow) served as Minister for People’s Education for one year, until her husband was ousted from the Politburo after the 1953 uprising. Greta Kuow headed the German Reserve Bank, 1950–1958. Another Moscow veteran Elli Schmidt (married to Anton Ackermann) established the Democratic Women’s League, became a CC candidate member, then served a short term as Minister for Trade and Provisions; she, too, was ousted in 1953.51 Hardliner Hildegard Benjamin enjoyed a fairly long run as Justice Minister from 1953 to 1967. Outlasting them all was Margot Honecker (1963–1989), the fearsome Education Minister, responsible for intensifying the ideological regimentation of youth. Women’s ability to shape policies by way of top Central Committee posts was likewise limited. Their representation at this level never exceeded 15%, dating back to 1950; they averaged 11–12% (24–25 of 189 members) between 1971 and 1981. Only four new “candidates” (male and female) were added after 1976. The average age of female CC members rose from 54.4 in 1971 to 59 in 1985, suggesting stagnation. Roughly, half exercised party functions involving organizational or ideological matters. Only four women served as CC department chairs. Elly Glöckner headed the Women’s Department in 1960, followed by Inge Lange in 1961; Irene Köhler was responsible for Parties and Mass Organizations. Ursula Ragwitz led the Cultural Department (1976–1989), while Gisela Trautzsch Glende ran the Politburo Office. Lange was the only woman to ascend to the CC Secretariat as of 1973.52 Despite their intense loyalty and decades of party service, no woman ever acquired formal voting rights at the highest level as a full member of the Politburo. The extended “candidacy” periods of women dating back to the 1950s speaks volumes about their token status. Following Elli Schmidt’s brief candidacy, not even Margot Honecker managed to enter the magic circle, though she joined the Central Committee in 1950, becoming a full member in 1963. Erich’s second wife, Edith Baumann, had been granted a candidate seat at the Politburo table along with Luise Ermisch, both from 1958 to 1963. They were followed by Margaret Müller (1963) and Inge Lange (1973) whose respective “candidacies” ended with the collapse of the regime itself. Women’s postwar integration into the paid labor force may have been a necessary condition, but it clearly was not a sufficient one for securing

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equal power across socialist society. Primarily concerned with economic reconstruction and ideological mobilization, SED rulers displayed no interest in ending the gendered division of labor. Their token efforts to end sexism rested on the socialist formula, “add women, day-care and stir,” granting women more rights only to the extent that they were prepared to assume double duties. The regime orchestrated a radical break with the past concerning their roles in materialist production but never liberated itself from maternalist thinking in the reproduction arena. Indeed, its reliance on women’s paid and unpaid labor to hold up more than “half of the sky” became more pronounced over time. Denied voice by way of official channels, over-worked yet underpaid women cultivated other forms of expression, once they recognized the state’s dependence on their contributions. Rather than humbly submit to productivity demands, women registered their discontent or actively resisted policies complicating their working lives. Knowing that factory bosses would have to scrounge for new workers if they left, they leveraged their status as wives and mothers to secure reduced shifts or time-off for housework, despite opposition at higher levels. They also exercised voice by way of countless “Dear Erich” letters and personal petitions (Eingaben). Article 3(4) of the 1949 Constitution granted citizens the right to file complaints with the people’s representative bodies, while Article 21 foresaw their right to “help shape” socialist society. Citizens soon began sending letters directly to President Wilhelm Pieck, impelling authorities to adopt a statutory order in February 1953 to ensure “more respect” for worker grievances. Authorities were obligated to address petitions within specified time frames; a second order was issued in 1961, guaranteeing protection for the sender and establishing annual/quarterly reporting requirements. The 1968 Constitution defined Eingaben as “suggestions, concerns, or grievances”; it added Article 103, allowing organizations and communities as well as individuals to petition state or economic bodies. Article 104 rendered the Council of Ministers responsible for all complaints against central authorities, while lower-ranked officials were tasked with handling complaints at those levels.53 They used “grievance books” to record them, occasionally turning submissions over to the Stasi if they were deemed too hostile toward the system. Eingaben became a vehicle for private negotiations between women and the state, giving rise to a “petitioning culture,” despite official efforts to limit complaints to predefined topics. As the nation’s daily consumers, female workers hit the state at its most vulnerable point: its failure to

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deliver an adequate supply of foodstuffs, children’s clothing, labor saving devices and even women’s underwear. One of the most frequently articulated complaints read: “why do I go into so many stores starting out with the question ‘do you have …?’.”54 Some women kept journals of the chronic shortages they encountered. Following Inge Lange’s “Dear Comrades” letter, the SED was forced to import four million pairs of women’s underpants (cost: DM6 million).55 Reviewing the records for 155 counties from 1970 to 1989, one study determined that “grievance density” was highest in Berlin, despite its privileged position in the supply chain. Annual totals ranged from 779,000 to a million petitions, producing a “response rate” of 46–82%. Petitioners utilized party semantics, implying that their authors were politically loyal and economically engaged, in addition to being “caring mothers.” Despite their exclusion from political decision-making, women’s workplace consciousness shaped their successful fight for self-determination regarding reproductive labor beginning in the 1960s.

Revenge of the Cradle: Reproductive Rights and Wrongs The years 1945–1948 subjected women not only to the traumas of hunger, homelessness, and disease but also to the “timeless misogyny of war.”56 The Soviet Army moved into East Prussia between January and March 1945, looting supplies, torching villages, and raping countless women and girls. A second wave of revenge rapes followed as Russian soldiers moved into German cities. Between April 24th and May 3rd an estimated 110,000 women were sexually assaulted in Berlin, between 500,000 and 2 million in other occupied areas.57 While some victims were also brutally murdered as “payment” for Nazi atrocities, many others committed suicide. Mass rape unleashed a wave of illegal abortions, either self-induced (“with soapy water”) or undertaken by sympathetic midwives and physicians. Though outlawed under Paragraph 218 of the 1871 Criminal Code, the “assembly line of terminations” witnessed in urban areas led even Berlin’s Protestant Bishop, Otto Dibelius, to grant general absolution to women and doctors. Over 3000 “Russian children” were born in Mecklenburg, 90% of whom landed in orphanages or foster care. Top-­ level KPD/SED and SMAD officials refused to confront the problem, to uphold the image of Soviet troops as liberators. Their indifference and

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denial cost them dearly in the 1946 elections: 1.4 million female voters in Berlin (among only 900,000 males) limited the SED to an embarrassing 19.8%. The Nazis had reinforced Paragraph 218 with “eugenic” arguments, outlawing terminations for Aryan women. Their heinous sterilization experiments on non-Aryans (Blockhouse 10 at Auschwitz) contributed to postwar moral revulsion, but this was not the only factor driving Communist opposition to abortion after 1945. KPD/SED functionaries were beholden to Stalin’s 1936 ban and a desire to repopulate the workforce. Ulbricht vehemently opposed abortion, except in cases of venereal disease (blamed on women, as usual). The sexual violence inflicted on women during military occupation rendered some authorities open to an “indication” model, for medical or ethical reasons; the latter included rape, infused with racist undertones. Protestant Dean Heinrich Grüber admitted: “we decided to undertake further measures to help the women. We suspended §218 of the Criminal Code during this period, with its ethical indication, because we did not want to burden German prisoners who would return to find a foreign being among their own children (my emphasis). In our judgment that would have only sewn hatred and enmity.”58 Women’s well-being was secondary to husbands’ potential dishonor. Contending with the physical aftermath of war, district officials developed their own rules to deal with mass rapes. Saxon-Anhalt accepted medical and ethical grounds, while Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thüringen adopted medical, ethnical, and social indicators. Women had to petition “termination commissions” in which senior physicians, trained during the Third Reich, regularly challenged women’s veracity regarding rape charges. Thousands turned to private solutions, however. As Doctor Barbara von Renthe-Finke later reported, “We did not talk about it much. At first. Women came to me in the practice, and it was done quickly. There were many colleagues who did the same. One helped the women. They were not registered, not reported, nothing. We simply carried out these terminations, and no one asked about it.”59 Women gained some security after professional Soviet administrators replaced field commanders, confining soldiers to guarded camps as of 1947–1948. Physician Max Zetkin (son of Clara) also opposed abortion, emphasizing the state’s right to determine the destinies of mothers and children, as long as it guaranteed them an acceptable quality of life. The SED rejected a social (hardship) indicator, however, because it would have highlighted its failure to improve living conditions for decades.

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Not surprisingly, fertility rates plunged, due in part to serious malnutrition causing thousands of women to stop menstruating. Nor were they likely to relish the sexual advances of spouses physically and psychologically damaged by war. To counter high infant and maternal mortality rates among those who did become pregnant, the SED approved the Law for the Protection of Mothers and Children in 1950, establishing an extensive network of clinics supplying (socially insured) pre- and post-natal care. Women were entitled to five weeks of paid leave prior to delivery, six weeks thereafter (eleven weeks after 1956). They moreover received a baby-­ bonus to cover diapers, clothing, et cetera: M50 for first and second births, M100 for the third, M250 for the fourth and M500 for a fifth child. Insured mothers received a monthly child benefit, paid through tenth grade: M20 for the first two, M50 for a third, M60 for the fourth and M70 for the fifth child. The subsidy was extended to single mothers but not to adoptive/foster mothers or to those in “wild” (common-law) marriages. Eliminating rationing in 1958, the state increased the birth-bonus to M500 for first two, M700 for the third, M850 for a fourth and M1000 for a fifth child.60 Ignoring contradictions between scientific Marxism and biological essentialism, “social hygienist” Rudolf Neubert denigrated “childless couples who preferred a dog,” construed as “the nadir of the false development of human narcissism.” The former NSDAP member and Wehrmacht physician insisted in The New Marriage Book (1957) that women limiting themselves to one child were steeped in “self-deception”; only two were “worrisome,” but three children would bring them fulfillment. Producing four to six children, he claimed, would make their lives “really varied, cheerful and complete. Today it is best to have three to six children.”61 His own wife suffered a mental breakdown after the war, leading him to call his oldest daughter back home to attend to siblings and his household.62 Working women used female shopfloor and union meetings to criticize the state’s blatant baby-production goals against the backdrop of Third Reich policies. State authorities also sought to encourage early marriage as of 1950. Young adults were happy to oblige under a system that afforded them few opportunities for sowing wild oats, seeing the world or experimenting with their personal identities. Marriage promised better access to apartments in the face of persistent housing shortages. The leap into family life moreover allowed them to end their dependence on parents through special interest-free loans of 5000 Marks, available to those twenty-five or

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younger. They could repay the debt through reproduction (abkindern): the first child “cancelled” M1000, a second another M1500 and a third the remaining M2500 obligation. The GDR witnessed its biggest birth-wave from 1950 to 1955, and again from 1959 to 1965 (Table 9.3). Maternal mortality fell from 20.6 per 10,000 births in 1950, to 13.7 in 1955, to 4.3 by 1970; infant mortality likewise declined from 131.4 per 1000 births in 1946, to 72.2 in 1950, down to 18.5 in 1970.63 In 1982 the state would extend the 1000-Mark bonus to all mothers, paid in increments to ensure that they underwent pre-and post-natal exams; midwives were squeezed out of the picture, with a push toward hospital-births. Each working parent was entitled to a monthly tax deduction (M50) for dependents; “child-rich” families also received rent and energy subsidies.64 Despite a new ideological emphasis on fostering “socialist personalities,” SED leaders displayed no interest in transforming the domestic roles of men. The 1950 Mother and Child Law also had a darker side, embedded in Article 11. Abortion was restricted to cases threatening the life/health of the mother, adding a eugenic indicator (hereditary condition) in place of “ethical” grounds. Several female activists who had opposed Paragraph 218 under Weimar joined the other side in 1950, like Käthe Kern, leading the Mother and Child Department in the Health Ministry. Ulbricht continued to reject a social indication, despite a dearth of effective contraceptives. Decisions were rendered by a “termination commission” now consisting of three physicians, one DFD member and a representative from the Mother and Child division. Far removed from industrial Table 9.3  Number of live births per woman, 1955–1989 Year

Total births

First child %

Second child %

Third child %

Fourth child+ %

1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1989

303,866 293,280 92,985 236,929 181,798 245,132 215,734 198,922

40.9 41.2 37.3 44.3 58.6 53.9 48.5 45.9

29.6 27.7 29.5 28.8 30.7 35.5 37.0 37.9

15.1 15.1

14.4 16.0 16.0 12.8  4.4  3.2  3.9  4.8

14.1  6.3  7.4 10.6 11.4

Source: Gunnar Winkler, ed. Frauenreport 1990. Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft, 24, 28

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worksites, senior gynecologists narrowly defined eugenic conditions, faulted female promiscuity and asserted that “every abortion debased the general health of any woman and, worst of all, could cause infertility.”65 In fact, husbands generally filed the appeal-petitions. Legal abortions fell dramatically from 26,400  in 1950, to 5000  in 1956, to 700  in 1962. Researchers infer that 70,000–100,000 nonetheless resorted to illegal procedures, especially older, widowed, and divorced women. Unlawful estimates for the early 1960s range from 40,000 to 100,000, resulting in 60–80 deaths per year. Abortion moved to the back burner, until the Berlin Wall cut off access to western physicians. Regime efforts to increase human reproduction while simultaneously intensifying women’s workplace productivity allowed “supplicants of the 1950s” to morph into “claimants of the 1960s.”66 The Central Committee formed an eleven-member task-force (only two women) to revisit the issue in 1963. Chairing the Women’s Commission, Inge Lange favored liberalization. Generational change helped to shift the framing; younger women submitted their own petitions, emphasizing their employment circumstances (shift work), party activism, housing problems, and marital tensions. Comprising 36% of the doctors, females with working-class roots replaced absconding male physicians. They joined workers in critiquing the bureaucratic backwardness of termination commissions and their disparate outcomes across the districts (liberal Berlin vs. restrictive Brandenburg). In 1965, officials added new grounds for approving terminations, making life a bit easier for women over forty or under sixteen, for those whose fourth pregnancy ensued less than fifteen months after the third, for women with five or more offspring, and for pregnancies resulting from rape, incest, or abuse. Though contraceptives were not free, abortion was covered by insurance. The GDR was the fifth country to produce the Pill, yet it exported all but 3% of its Ovosiston, reserved for cases in which pregnancy posed a health-threat; it would not become more widely available until the mid-1970s. Poorly manufactured condoms forced women to seek abortions as their birth control of last resort. Liberalization brought a stark increase in authorizations, from 2.7 per 1000 live births in 1965, to 40.7 in 1967, reaching 89 in 1971. Over 21,000 took place between 1966 and 1970, sought by roughly 3% of women of child-bearing age; 70% of the applicants were between twenty and thirty-five.67 In December 1971, the Politburo issued a new law regulating “the interruption of pregnancy,” submitted to the Volkskammer on March 9,

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1972. The outcome included fourteen no-votes and eight abstentions, the only non-unanimous vote in GDR parliamentary history. Health Minister Ludwig Mecklinger declared to the plenary, “Providing this legislative regulation allowing a woman to decide for herself the timing of a pregnancy and delivery was a special demand of the revolutionary workers’ movement. It regards the fulfilment of this demand as an important step in the process of socially liberating women …”68 Timed to coincide with International Women’s Day, the statute granted women an exclusive right to end a pregnancy during the first trimester at no cost, though later terminations remained subject to medical indication; it also eliminated charges for contraceptives. Hospitals established special units, but individual doctors and religious hospitals could refuse to perform the procedure. Catholic and Protestant bishops issued messages from the pulpit expressing “deep consternation” and rejecting its contents. The number of legal abortions rose from 40.5 (per 1000 births) in 1965 to 577  in 1972, leveling out around 275 by 1980.69 One of the Panzerschrank items shared with me at the Central Institute for Youth Research was a 1972 survey conducted among 5366 adolescents shortly after legalization. The sample included eighth to tenth graders, students from technical universities in Magdeburg and Ilmenau, chemical apprentices and young workers. Although more females claimed to know its exact contents, males were more inclined to approve of it “without reservation” (22% vs. 38%). Only 15% of the sample completely opposed the law, 40% among those professing religion (who tended to want three or more children). More than half of the respondents rejected the idea that the law would contribute to immorality, but even 27% of the FDJ functionaries expressed reservations along these lines. Roughly half of the students, apprentices and workers (49–53%) agreed that “the law offers new proof, that der Mensch [the individual] stands at the center of socialist society”; three-fourths (77%) agreed that the law would “stabilize marriages and families.” Ironically, respondents were not asked about the law’s significance for women per se. Stranger still was the question as to whether young adults would “make use of the law themselves,” as if some might deliberately engage in unprotected sex in order to take advantage of it: 9% of the young women said yes, while 46% noted it would “depend on the circumstances,” in contrast to 12% and 55%, respectively, among males. Given the SED’s indifference to postwar rape victims, it is strange that rulers would seek approval (and gratitude) from youth for such a law at the point when they should have been happily

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fantasizing about “first loves” instead. Working women, age twenty-five to forty-five, would have comprised a more appropriate sample. Despite their obsession with enhancing women’s reproductive potential, GDR leaders were quite prudish when it came to matters of human sexuality, their own affairs notwithstanding. The constitutional equality mandate implied a rejection of the bourgeois-patriarchal family but not a commitment to the fundamental transformation of gender relations. Women were to be liberated from their traditional dependence on “men” as husbands, fathers, and breadwinners in exchange for subordination to the male-dominated power of the state. Ulbricht’s Ninth Commandment, You shall live purely and decently and honor your family, ostensibly exempted adultery, divorce, and cohabitation at the top. Although the founding fathers favored “orderly marriage” as the main vehicle for ensuring biological reproduction, their policies, in fact, undermined traditional family structures. Given their belief in women’s primal need for maternal fulfillment, it is ironic that neither Ulbricht’s two wives nor Honecker’s three wives produced the “desired” 3+ offspring. Margot cared little for primal bonds, as demonstrated by her orchestration of 2000 forced adoptions, involving children seized from “asocial” or dissident parents in the 1970s and 1980s.70 As Maxi Wander’s interviews show, the persistence of “old attitudes” owed not only to traditional sexual mores but also to sexual ignorance.71 Dr. Neubert addressed human sexuality in relation to marriage, but he, too, assigned women a secondary role. Asserting that masturbation was natural for males, he claimed that “properly nourished” women who exercised often (“having been taught by their mothers to empty their bladders and intestines regularly”) would have no need for self-pleasure. Analogous to Alex Comfort’s advice to western housewives, Neubert urged women to greet their “hard-working” spouses at the door (after their own ten-­ hour factory day), wearing “a pretty dress” (hard to come by in normal GDR shops). Husbands would encounter a “tidy house” (despite their abysmally cramped quarters) and a “nice dinner” (prepared with whatever wives could find in stores after work). After packing the children into bed (never mind the homework), the happy couple would take “a thirty-­ minute stroll” (never discussing her problems), then return home to a “pleasantly relaxed yet exciting” tryst in bed—presumably after she set the alarm for 5 am, in order to deliver her children to day-care the next morning on her way to work.72

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The lop-sided sex ratio witnessed after World War II put older women at a distinct marital disadvantage. Men not only earned more, they were also in short supply, leading them to pursue second marriages with younger single women (the “ideal socialist worker”). Traditional housewives lacked employment skills, initially leading local judges to sympathize with those seeking alimony. In 1955, the state replaced the “guilt principle” with “irreconcilable differences,” however, putting abandoned women at even greater risk. New socialist judges ruled that even if an unfaithful husband were at fault, that was “no excuse for an ex-wife … to lead an idle life”—as if raising three or more children left time for idleness.73 State efforts to push married women into paid employment led to multiple unanticipated consequences: for starters, economically independent women were no longer prepared to stick it out with uncaring, lazy, or abusive husbands. The number of divorces peaked at 49,860  in 1950, then declined to 23,290 in 1959, rising again in the mid-1960s, by which point women had become the prime initiators (Table 9.4). Fortunately, women were already entitled to keep their own surnames, a right denied to FRG women until 1991. New policies promoting early marriage produced a further divorce surge after 1970. As planned, loans repayable via multiple births led a new generation to “tie the knot” at younger ages. For males, the average age fell from 27.3 in 1952 to 24.5 in 1970; the marrying age for females dropped from 23.8 to 21.9. The stress of early births and cramped housing among younger couples contributed to rising divorce rates, as did older women’s exhausting efforts to combine work and children, while chasing after scarce goods.

Table 9.4  Divorces initiated by women and men, 1960–1989 Year

Divorces, total

Women

%

Men

%

1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1987 1989

25,640 26,576 27,407 41,632 44,794 51,240 50,640 50,063

14,153 15,839 17,331 27,402 30,233 34,924 34,882 34,566

55.1 59.6 63.5 65.5 67.5 68.2 68.9 69.0

11,487 10,737 10,015 14,230 14,561 16,316 15,758 15,497

44.8 40.4 36.5 34.5 32.5 31.8 31.1 30.9

Source: Adapted from Gunnar Winkler, ed. Frauenreport 1990. Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft, 111

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Roughly 38% of all unions ended in dissolution by the late 1980s, though men were more likely to remarry.74 Family represented the one sphere relatively free from state intervention, but even here SED functionaries could not resist the temptation to intervene. Work brigades and shopfloor committees were surprised by orders to interject themselves into the private lives of co-workers to mediate conflictual family relations as of the 1960s. The primary reasons for divorce indicated that “socialist marriages” were no different and no more egalitarian than those in capitalist societies: male infidelity, alcohol abuse, domestic violence (never openly discussed), disproportionate household burdens and sexual incompatibility topped the list. Adhering to conventional marriage as a guarantor of human reproduction, the SED was forced to admit the need for individual therapy, superseding its assumptions that the “socialist order” alone would ensure domestic harmony. By 1969, it had established 210 family/sex counselling centers, leading many to turn to Eva Schmidt-Kolmer (or Masters and Johnson) instead of Dr. Neubert.75 A second unexpected outcome of women’s paid employment was a dramatic decline in marriages; demographers registered a low of 7.6 per 1000 residents in the mid-1960s, followed by another big drop between 1977 and 1982.76 Honecker discovered that letting women make their own choices by way of new support policies worked better than negative sanctions in stabilizing birth rates, but most women now stopped at two children. “Positive pronatalism” generated another surprise outcome, however: a spike in out-of-wedlock births (Table 9.5). Despite free contraception and mandatory sex education in schools, the share of children

Table 9.5  Children born to unwed mothers (% of all live births) Year

Live births, single mothers

As proportion of all live births

1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1989

39,200 34,700 28,000 31,900 29,600 56,400 77,000 66,900

13.1% 11.6%  9.8% 13.3% 16.1% 22.9% 33.8% 33.6%

Source: Gunnar Winkler, ed. Frauenreport 1990. Berlin: Verlag Die Wirtschaft, 28

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born to unwed mothers grew from 17.3% in 1978 to 32% in 1983. Financial independence allowed women to define their own sexual needs, likely to cause consternation among FRG men after unification: In May 1990 the Bild Zeitung issued a glaring, front-page headline (three-inch font) declaring that “GDR women have more frequent orgasms” than their western counterparts, based on a ZIJ survey. Despite the anti-religious nature of the regime, homosexuality was another topic the Politburo had problems addressing, given the Nazi legacy. Although it denied surviving homosexuals membership in the Association for the Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN)/Victims of Facism (OdF), the SED had considered abolishing Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code in 1951. Ulbricht and company shifted course after the June 1953 uprising, however, using it to discredit and imprison Justice Minister Max Fechner.77 Commensurate with the new constitution, rulers revised the Criminal Code in 1968, replacing §175 with §151. Homosexual relations among consenting adult males were no longer punishable, but GDR media published “scientific findings” that homosexuality could be prevented through hormonal therapy at young ages.78 As of 1972, teachers received curricular guidelines noting, “one should not make friends with homosexuals or seek their company, but one should not denigrate them.”79 Influenced by the west-TV airing of Rosa von Praunheim’s film (Not the Homosexual is perverse, but the Situation in which He lives) and the rise of LGBT groups on the other side, GDR activists showed up with a banner declaring “We homosexuals in the Capital City welcome participants in the X.  World Games and support socialism” in 1973. Although the Interior Ministry denied associational status to mobilizing groups, homosexuality was mentioned for the first time in the official 1977 sex-­education text as one of “multiple possibilities”; it devoted a full chapter to the topic in 1984. A 1980 ZIJ survey found that half of its respondents rejected same-sex relations; homophobic tendencies were stronger among young males.80 Churches began opening their doors to some twenty gay and lesbian groups in 1982. Post-unification polls revealed that among those over 30, 49% of lesbians and 42% of gay men had been married, while 40% and 53%, respectively, had children. Various universities were tasked with finding ways to improve conditions for gays and lesbians after 1985; Prenzlauer Berg became the site of the first Counseling and Information Center.81 In 1988, the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden produced an educational film on The Other

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Love, along with a brochure with advice for parents and teachers. The same year the FDJ created an internal gay-lesbian group, to counter church-based mobilization, though some of its members also sought to network there. It is not surprising that the male-dominated Ministry for State Security continued to see “hostile-negative forces” at work, inspired by western LGBT groups attempting to undermine the socialist order. In this domain, as well as in relation to women’s rights, the GDR nonetheless proved to be more progressive than its western nemesis. The Federal Republic would not strike §175 from its Criminal Code until 1995.

Private Patriarchy and the Re-domestication of Eastern Women The 1990 Volkskammer elections offered the first sign of things to come: not one of the twenty-four parties competing in the free elections of March 1990 had a female leader; only 82 of its 400 new parliamentarians were women. No official sources offered sex-disaggregated figures; my count derives from a list I hand-copied at the VK press office in June. Virtually all the “socialist achievements” that had transformed women’s identities in the GDR were eliminated within the first three years of annexation, some in violation of the Unification Treaty per se.82 The list included several policies for which western feminists had been campaigning since the early 1970s. Well acquainted with FRG activists, I was able to observe interactions between East and West women at various conferences throughout the 1990s. It was clear that they spoke “different languages,” based on their diverging experiences. Neither group was really prepared to “come to terms” with the nation united.83 Like most citizens in the old Länder, FRG feminists knew little about the GDR, but that did not stop them from deeming their Eastern step-­ sisters “theoretically naive” for expecting a male-dominated state to act on their behalf.84 GDR women were less confrontational vis-à-vis men, in general, and had learned not to voice loud criticism of male leaders, in particular, given the political risks involved. Consisting largely of professionals and academics, FRG feminists were internally divided along liberal, socialist, and autonomous lines.85 Many were too busy critiquing patriarchy, and each other, to pursue pragmatic, single-issue coalitions with working-class mothers on the other side. Eastern women were soon hit by mass unemployment and the loss of social services, turning them into unification’s immediate “losers.”

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Terminology was not the only factor triggering cultural misunderstanding between the two groups. While GDR women married and started families at early ages, even while attending university, their western counterparts waited longer to do both. Among the former, 91% were in paid training or labor (73% full-time) by the time the Wall fell; nearly 92% had children, over 80% of whom were cared for outside the home, if they were not enjoying the Baby Year. Female employment in the old states ranged from 48% to 54%, but only 65% embraced motherhood; of those, merely 10% held full-time jobs. The FRG provided care facilities for less than 3% of all toddlers. The normal school day ended at 11:30 am, in the expectation that stay-at-home mothers (59%) would provide a warm lunch for their offspring. Although conservatives insisted that eastern women could now “choose” between work and family, three-fourths wanted to balance the two. Despite the availability of modern appliances, women’s share of household labor increased in many areas. They were on their own again regarding meal preparation, up from 57% (1988) to 73% (1991); their share of after-dinner clean-ups also rose from 40% to 55%, added to solo house-cleaning, up from 66% to 72%.86 State child-care centers were not subject to privatization, but Kohl made new communal governments liable for DM350 billion in old GDR debt, forcing most municipalities to shut down care facilities. This exacerbated female joblessness, hitting 340,000 single women with small children especially hard; they had comprised 34.3% of all eastern mothers, compared to 19.6% on the other side. Seven years into unity, 41% of married mothers described their lives as “good,“ compared to 18% among solo moms; 89% of the former and 77% of the latter characterized paid labor as “very important“ for their identities, with 56% and 79%, respectively, wanting to work full-time.87 The “birth benefit” was cut from 1000 Marks to DM150, though rents rose 200%–500%. Two million FRG residents sued to “reclaim” properties expropriated by the regime after 1949, then often resold them to speculators who engaged in many dirty tricks to force out long-term inhabitants.88 Marriage loans were abolished in favor of breadwinner-centered tax-splitting, to discourage married women from seeking paid work. Charged with liquidating or privatizing 40,000 enterprises, the Treuhandanstalt (TH) created 4200 positions, managed largely by western men. Although 59% of TH employees were female prior to its dissolution, women held only 10% of its top positions. With the exception of Birgit Breuel, who took charge following Detlev Rohwedder’s

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assassination, there were no women directors and only thirteen department heads. While Breuel was characterized as “cool, unapproachable, unfeminine,” a twenty-nine year-old press-speaker, a thirty-two year-old department head from Munich, a twenty-six year-old “speech writer” from West Berlin, a nineteen year-old secretarial apprentice from East Berlin and a smiling twenty-four year-old US lawyer who saved the jobs of forty workers in “ her little sausage factory” were all described by the Bild Zeitung in May 1992 as “young, pretty and dynamic.”89 Nearly 72% of the 4.1 million who had labored at those production sites lost their jobs. By the time the Treuhand ceased operations in 1994, West Germans had acquired 80% of the privatized enterprises, some for as little as one D-Mark. Lacking capital and collateral sources, Easterners secured merely 6% of the “people’s own” assets.90 By 1995, women accounted for 63.7% of the jobless in the new Länder.91 In addition to losing child-care, many found West employers loathe to recognize their skilled-labor certifications in non-traditional branches. They excluded women from the banking, insurance, and engineering sectors, where they had been a major presence (Table 9.6). Already a scarce commodity, women were displaced even more by university “evaluation committees,” dominated by FRG men, who were to assess their “scientific” qualifications. Many tenured academics saw their positions passed on to other western men, even before such “vacancies” Table 9.6  East-West unemployment rates, 1990–1996 (socially insured workers)

WEST total Men Women EAST total Men Women East-Women in: Temporary ABM jobs Early retirement

1990

1991

1992

1993

1994

1995

1996

7.2 6.3 8.4 – – –

 8.3  5.8  7.0 10.3  8.5 12.3

 6.6  6.6  7.2 14.8 10.5 19.6

 8.2  8.0  8.4 15.8 11.0 21.0

 9.2  9.6  9.2 16.0 10.9 21.5

 9.3  9.3  9.2 14.9 10.7 19.3

10.1 10.4  9.9 16.0 13.7 19.9

–

65,000

160,000 121,000 147,000 134,000 162,000

460,000 705,000 834,000 826,000 650,000 374,000 186,000

Source: Gunnar Winkler, ed. 1997. Sozialreport 1997. Daten und Fakten zur sozialen Lage in den neuen Bundesländern. Sozialwissenschaftliches Forschungszentrum Berlin-randenburg,e.V. 130; and Karl Ulrich Mayer, Martin Diewald and Heike Solga. 1999. “Transitions to Post-Communism in East Germany: Worklife Mobility of Women and Men between 1989 and 1993.” Acta Sociologica 42(1), 38

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were openly advertised. One of the surviving Humboldt professors, feminist-­sociologist Hildegard Maria Nickel, was forced to climb the academic ladder all over again, reduced to an Assistant Professor. Only one woman made it onto a short-list among twenty-five professorial chairs up for grabs in Leipzig; she was not hired. Of the 5000 staff members fired en masse there in September 1992, 2000 were female.92 Despite Unity Treaty guarantees of equitable allocation, only one-third of the federally funded ABM (job-creation) places went to women. Most over fifty-five were sent into early retirement. Eastern women were moreover stripped of their rights to free contraception and legal abortion. The Unity Treaty mandated the passage of a mutually binding abortion code no later than December 31, 1991, effecting its own compromise until an all-German parliament could agree on new statutes. The interim solution, personally imposed by Kohl to avoid derailing the unity train, relied on an “operative site” principle as opposed to a more restrictive “residency” principle. Women in the old Länder remained subject to Paragraph 218, while women who moved to/lived in the new states could exercise reproductive choice through the first trimester.93 Within a year, the Bonn government had financed forty-nine church-­ based but only twenty public counselling centers in the “godless” east. On June 25, 1992, the Bundestag approved a tri-partisan Group Resolution, combining the trimester concept with mandatory counselling, by a vote of 357 to 283 (527 men and 135 women). The euphoria following the 1992 vote quickly faded; 248 conservatives (215 of whom were men) rushed to the Constitutional Court to block its implementation. The justices issued their verdict on May 28, 1993, marking the onset of the Pentecost holiday when Germans were unlikely to cancel travel plans to protest. Declaring abortion “illegal but unpunishable,” the Court obliged officially certified advisers to “help [women] to make a responsible and conscientious decision” to continue their pregnancies, outlining the forms of aid available to them. Knowing only the woman’s age, marital status, number of children, citizenship, and number of previous abortions—but nothing about her employment circumstances—counselors were to render judgments as to whether “the burden which grows from carrying the child through birth … is so heavy and extraordinary that it exceeds the reasonably imposable boundaries of sacrifice.” If a counselor determined that she had not grasped the message, any woman could be required to return for further “advice.”94

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Responding to the reversal, Reinhard Höppner, the pastor turned Minister-President of Sachsen-Anhalt, opined: We had good experiences in the GDR with the law on pregnancy termination. It could have been put to good use in the new regulation of §218 mandated by the Unity Treaty. The Eastern law produced no higher per capita abortion rate than did the old law in the West. More mothers died over there… None of the arguments presented carried weight. Experiences-­ East lost against traditions-West. Women in the East have never comprehended this. The balance is shameful.95

Experts predicted the rise of “abortion tourism,” given EU freedom of movement. Following the Constitutional Court’s refusal to nullify Paragraph 218 in 1974, 61,000 FRG women had sought abortions in the Netherlands in 1975, as did 44,000 in 1978.96 One particularly egregious post-unity case involved “Katherin K.,” who was stopped at the border between the Netherlands and Germany in 1991, prior to the 1993 Court ruling. FGR guards searched her car for “feminine hygiene” items, taking her to a nearby Catholic hospital for a forced vaginal examination. She was charged with undertaking an illegal abortion, until it was revealed that she had fled from Jena in 1988—had she just returned to her home-town, the process would have still been legal under the interim system.97 The way in which abortion was regulated distorted eastern perceptions of the balance of power between legislative and judicial institutions in their new republic, contravening their own vision of democracy. Reflecting a CDU-dominated policy environment hostile to many gender rights, the ruling deeply divided the women’s movements. Devastated by the Court’s recriminalization and frustrated by their own culture clash, east and west feminists returned to their separate niches, feeling betrayed on both sides. Dresden activists assessed the signed “counseling protocols” mandated by the High Court three months after a revised law took effect in 1993. That study revealed that 58% of the local abortions were sought by women aged twenty-four to thirty-six; another 20% involved individuals between thirtyseven and forty-five. Over 78% already had one or more offspring; 32% were widowed or divorced. A parliamentary inquiry in Saxony, based on 1991–1995 records, found that 40% of those seeking abortions in 1993/1994 did so for financial reasons; 40% had lost their jobs, 38% had completed their families, and 20% faced a housing crisis. The primary reasons offered in 1995 were financial problems (49%), job loss (37%), overburdened lives (35%), and partner conflicts (22%).98

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Not surprisingly, eastern birth rates plunged by 40% after 1990, while sterilizations rose by 500%. In Leipzig, for example, the number fell from 5961 in 1989 to 2546 in 1993 (internal City Council report). Western analysts referred to this as a “birth strike,” predicting that the total population would plunge from 82.5 million to 69 million by 2050. Drawing on FRG fertility patterns as the norm, they misinterpreted the eastern data.99 I offer a different explanation: In 1987, GDR women who were twentyfive or younger accounted for 60% of all live births, 75% up to age twentyseven. Roughly 90% had completed their families by age thirty, with only 8% adding a third or more children.100 In the old Länder, women twentyfive or younger—excluding foreign residents—accounted for only 31% of births, 49% up to twenty-seven; this means that over 50% in the old Länder were just starting their families as they approached thirty. Fertility rates also diverged: over 90% of GDR women were mothers, compared to 60% among Baby Boomers in the old states. Eastern births peaked between 1959 to 1965, reaching a low point in the early 1970s but rising again in the mid-1980s.101 In short, this was no “birth strike.” Unification coincided with the end of a twenty-year GDR birth cycle, as indicated by the sterilization data: 90% involved women thirty-six or older, over 60% of whom had two or more children.102 Eastern women born prior to 1970 would have already established their families; those born later had not. Only nineteen or younger when the Wall fell, those enjoying “the blessing of late birth” were the first to pack their bags to see the world or to seek jobs in the western states. Roughly 4.2 million citizens (of 16.4 million) abandoned the east after 1989, 52% of whom were female. As late as 2015, better educated eighteen to twenty-nine year-olds comprised 47% of the out-migration group. Those who might have reproduced in the early 1990s were gone, representing a “fertility-potential loss” of 1.2 million women.103 In 2007, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern initiated a public campaign to find wives for its “abandoned” rural men, equivalent to the Norwegian bachelor farmers in Lake Wobegon. Surveys consistently show that an overwhelming majority of eastern women still view paid employment as a core component of their personal identities and that they are more likely to want children than their step-sisters. Although they have adapted to the western practice of “later, fewer,” the average easterner still produced her first child a year earlier (28.6) than her western counterpart (29.8) as late as 2016.104 Despite their ostensible desire to protect “unborn” life, FRG conservatives displayed little concern for the surge in domestic violence after

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1990.105 Freedom of the press introduced eastern citizens to pornography, “adult” video shops and sexist advertising.106 The infamous Beate Uhse Center close to the Ku’damm became a major tourist attraction for those visiting West Berlin. Publications marketed for the east (e.g., Super Illu) featured nude female photos, a practice long favored by male Bild Zeitung readers. As late as 2019, the Federal Transportation Ministry launched a campaign on bicycle safety featuring a woman wearing only a bike helmet and lacy underwear.107 Already overwhelmed by mass unemployment and old GDR debt, communal officials bore brunt of domestic abuse problems, as reported by Office of Equal Opportunity staff in Erfurt. Given their exclusion from the SED halls of power, women were unlikely to display intense loyalty to socialist ideology or “the system,” but that does not mean they were anxious to jettison the policies that had enabled them to develop independent socio-economic identities. Their skepticism regarding rapid unification owed partly to the way in which their peers were presented on West-TV. They clearly craved more/better consumer goods, but they also knew about the FRG’s high unemployment rates and its failure to strike Paragraph 218 from the Criminal Code, despite the raucous reproductive rights campaign of 1972–1974. They hoped to gain access to “the finer things” of FRG life without sacrificing the security and support of GDR rights and entitlements. For women, unification conveyed one core lesson: more freedom equals fewer rights. They would continue to rank as unity’s biggest losers for over a decade, until one of their own took charge of the ship of state in 2005.

Deutschland einig Mutterland: Gender Policies under Angela Merkel Given her eastern socialization, one can understand Angela Merkel’s hesitation to view women’s paid employment and subsidized child-care as radically feminist demands. Nor she was looking to exchange one ism for another after thirty-five years “in the waiting room of democracy.”108 As a professional physicist, she was used to operating in a man’s world. Largely avoiding gender debates during her first two campaigns, she admitted in 2013 that she had experienced discriminatory treatment as an eastern woman in the alpha-male environment of two CDU/CSU Cabinets. Catapulted onto the national stage as the Minister for Women and Youth in 1990, she found herself between warring fronts, pitting feminists against patriarchs, Westerners against Easterners, industrial barons against citizen

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initiatives, and neo-Nazi youth against leftist anarchists in the streets of Berlin. She was immediately pressured from all sides to support/reject legal abortion, since few activists realized that Kohl had already shifted that legislative portfolio to the Justice and Health Ministries. Merkel’s proclivity for learning-by-doing, coupled with positive relations with the women she appointed to her own Cabinets, transformed the gender playing field in surprising ways between 2005 and 2021. She did so, in part, by leveraging a number of EU mandates, leading East-­ women to realize that West Germans were the ones lagging behind. Sweden, Denmark, Finland, France, and the Netherlands already supplied many of the family work reconciliation policies that they had lost through unification. Merkel’s first grand coalition adopted the General Equal Treatment Law in 2006 (rejected by Schröder), adding a federal office to monitor discrimination. In 2008, Merkel’s first government granted every child three or older a right to a nursery or day-care place; the policy was extended to cover one year-olds in 2013. As of 2015, parents were given three options, allowing them to split or share thirty-six months of paid leave after births or adoptions, all the way up to a child’s eighth birthday. Improved leave- and care-options do not “cause” women to reproduce, but they can affect the timing of such decisions. Beginning in 2017, Germany witnessed its largest birth-boom since 1964. In 2017 Berlin Health Minister Dilek Kolat had to convene an emergency summit to address a mid-wife shortage, while easterners decried a dearth of pediatricians. The new policies also began to modify gender roles, in stark contrast to the SED’s “social achievements”: the share of men taking advantage of parental leave rose from 3% in 2009 to 36% by 2015. In Jena, for instance, 57.8% of parents utilized the “partnership bonus,” compared to 16.1% Berlin and 12.4% in Hamburg. The state now spends about €265 million per year on family subsidies.109 Roughly 60% of parents with children under three believe that men and women should share family and household responsibilities; 78% (east) and 57% (west) favor “reconciliation” measures. Merkel moreover accorded priority status to increasing female participation in STEM/MINT fields, declaring in 2013 that real equality will only be achieved “when both men and women change their roles and behaviors.” Prior to the Covid pandemic, total female employment had risen over 10%, with women once again comprising 49.3% of the eastern workforce. The gender pay-gap persists, but westerners lag even farther behind (7% among easterners, 22% in the west). Although they had not

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achieved wage parity by 2016 (85% of west earnings), eastern women enjoy higher pensions, due to more years of full-time work. Those stuck in part-time jobs would rather work full-time, but they did see a 7% pay increase under the 2015 minimum wage law. Employment among all mothers rose from 60% to 67% between 2006 and 2016, and from 32% to 44% for those with children under two; 43% of eastern mothers work full-­ time (36+ hours per week), compared to 20% in the old Länder. Among single mothers, 80% work at least 28 hours per week, versus 59% in the west. By 2017, unemployment had declined significantly (7.6% east, 5.3% west), but men still fare better than women. Easterners perceive EU mandates on family–work reconciliation and advancing women in STEM fields as a return to familiar GDR policies; for western women they herald the arrival of new rights. Initially opposed to “quotas,” Merkel voted for a CDU “quorum” in 1994, following her exposure to the barriers women faced in her own party. Rejecting the corporate boardroom quotas demanded by labor minister Ursula von der Leyen in 2011, she reversed her position following the Euro-crisis created by male-dominated global finance, accepting mandatory 30% targets in 2014 (though she blocked a tougher EU regulation). Despite her vote against the “Marriage for All” act in 2017, she allowed CDU parliamentarians to vote their conscience, legalizing gay unions, added to a liberal transsexual-rights law. Angela Merkel freely admits that she has changed a great deal since 1990. The question is whether she has also helped to alter the power structures. Her first three cabinets were over 40% female. In 2013 she appointed her former Family/Labor Minister to serve as the nation’s first female Defense Minister. In 2019, Ursula von der Leyen became the first woman President of the European Commission; trained as a physician, she is the mother of seven children. In 2018, Merkel proudly reported that women managed 50% of the Cabinet portfolios and half of all Federal Chancellor’s Office (FCO) departments. Compared to the nineteen births occurring there during Schröder’s last thirty-five months in office, fortynine FCO workers gave birth during Merkel’s first thirty-two months, most of whom returned after leave. The number of female Minister-­ Presidents rose from one (pre-2004) to six (2017), two of whom lead eastern Länder. The CDU appointed its second female Chair, added to three female co-chairs leading the SPD, Linke and the Green (three east-­ women in 2019).

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Women’s share of Bundestag seats rose from 31.8% (2005), to 33.4% (2009), to 37% in 2013. It fell to 30.9% in 2017, after rightwing populists crossed the 5% threshold. The parties most opposed to gender policies evince the smallest female delegations, viz., the AfD, the FDP (Liberals), and the CSU. Eastern females outnumbered their western counterparts at the state level through 2004, but their presence declined further in 2019, when the AfD increased its double-digit share of votes in state elections (Table 9.7). Male AfD supporters outnumber females almost two to one, concentrated between the ages of 34–59 (Chap. 11). Thirty years after unification, Ines Haertel became the first-ever easterner to assume a seat on the Federal Constitutional Court, following Table 9.7  Women in state parliaments, 2012 (pre-AfD), and 2022 (with AfD presence) State EAST Brandenburg Mecklenburg-­ Vorpommern Saxon-Anhalt Saxony Thuringia WEST Berlin Baden-Württemberg Bavaria Bremen Hamburg Hessen Lower-Saxony North Rhine-Westphalia Rhineland-Palatinate Saarland Schleswig-Holstein

2012 total

Female members

%

2022 total

Female members

%

88 71

35 21

39.8 29.6

88 71

28 17

31.8 36.7

105 132 88

34 40 33

32.4 30.3 37.3

97 119 90

27 33 28

27.8 27.7 31.0

151 138 187 83 121 118 152 181 101 51 95

51 25 58 34 48 30 48 49 42 17 35

33.8 18.1 31.0 41.0 39.7 25.4 31.6 27.1 41.6 33.3 36.8

160 154 205 84 123 137 137 195 101 51 69

53 46 56 31 54 47 39 66 32 19 26

36.1 29.9 27.3 36.9 43.9 34.3 28.5 33.8 31.7 37.3 37.7

Source: 2012 Data: Cornelia Hippmann. 2012. “Gleichberechtigung in der Politik? Über Karrierechancen und -schwierigkeiten ostdeutscher Frauen in der Politik.” ISSN 2192-5267. Freie Universität Berlin (November), 11. As of April 2022: Beate Dörr, Annick Poirot and Laura Ilg. Frauen in den Länderparlamenten Landeszentrale für politische Balding, Baden-Württemberg, https://www.lpb-­bw. de/frauenanteil-­laenderparlamenten

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contentious negotiations in 2020. Supported by Merkel and three eastern state leaders, Haertel was born in Staßfurt (Sachsen-Anhalt) in 1972. After studying in Göttingen, she became a Professor of Public, Administrative and European Law in 2014, specializing in data protection and digitalization regulation in Frankfurt (Oder). For the first time, women outnumber men, nine to seven, on the nation’s top judicial body, the institution that routinely scores the highest level of trust among eastern citizens, despite the abortion debacle.110 It was not unification per se but rather the combined efforts of female decision-makers who rose to the top after 2005 that brought about a positive “reversal of fortune” for those who had been most heavily burdened by the chronic deficiencies of the regime. It took a female eastern Chancellor to rectify many of the wrongs inflicted on working women by “the triumph of the Fatherland.” Gender policies adopted over the last two decades have “restored” many familiar rights for women; more importantly, they have also begun to transform the roles of men, thanks to the efforts of a childless female physicist.

Winning Women Far from resolving “the Women Question,” the SED’s ritualized embrace of economic determinism rendered socialist rulers gender-blind when it came to grasping the sexual division of labor as anything more than a by-­ product of exploitative private property. As a result, GDR policies continued to rely on “the organized expropriation of the work of some for the benefit of others.” Orthodox socialists viewed women as a mere subset of the proletariat, albeit one with a few “special needs” that would prove very costly to the state. Women’s work was absolutely essential to eastern reconstruction in the aftermath of war, yet Ulbricht and his minions remained oblivious to the antagonistic contradiction between their own attachment to traditional gender roles, on the one hand, and their drive to integrate women into industrial production, on the other. They replaced private patriarchy with state paternalism, stripping men of their breadwinner roles by imposing double and triple burdens on women. At no point did they look to more deeply rooted cultural assumptions concerning women’s “place” in society, nor were they interested in equal power-­ sharing. They welcomed women as supporting actresses, but gave them no chance to write the script for socialist transformation.

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Women had become significantly more than an industrial reserve army by the time Honecker replaced Ulbricht in 1971, but the SED’s voracious appetite for their labor did nothing to level the gender playing field in the private sphere. Bread became plentiful, but roses were confined to token celebrations of International Women’s Day. Aside from their occasional exhortations that men become better socialist partners, Old Guard rulers made no effort “to unburden our working women” beyond increasing their access to washing machines, steam cookers, sewing machines, and other household devices. The message conveyed to men was that they would not have to take on extra domestic chores when their wives entered the labor force because new products and appliances would make women’s home-care activities “fun.”111 As Harsch observed, their motto was Woman as worker, full steam ahead. Woman as mother, naturally, but when it came to long lines, turning poor quality ingredients into edible meals, bribing drivers to deliver coal, fixing up dingy apartments, and producing tasteful clothing, female workers were on their own, resulting in nichebased survival strategies.112 Despite their own preferences for western luxury goods, aging Politburo members failed to grasp the centrality of consumption in defining women’s loyalty to socialism, which was conditional at best. Recognizing themselves as essential economic actors led GDR women to expect more and better rewards for their decades of double-duty. Unable to exercise voice at the top, they turned to other voice mechanisms below, linking the public and private spheres of production, reproduction, and consumption. Perceiving maternal benefits as socialist entitlements, not as gifts from Father-State, eastern women became “exacting consumers” who began to demand better foodstuffs, services, appliances, and cosmetics. As “conscientious reproducers,” they mobilized for contraception and abortion rights to control their own fertility; evolving as “scrupulous mothers,” they rallied to improve the availability and quality of care facilities for their children. Economic autonomy transformed them into “picky wives who left abusive, deadbeat or just plain unsatisfying husbands,” while persistent labor shortages rendered them “selective trainees” who could eschew occupations deemed dirty, difficult, or hostile to women. Though deprived of equal pay, bonuses, and promotions, they moreover became “fussy workers” who learned to manipulate factory bosses into accepting part-­ time work and time-off for shopping.113 Co-dependency required the state to invest heavily in maternal benefits, which ate up the capital needed to modernize industries in ways that might

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have reduced persistent labor shortages even after the Wall eliminated physical exit for professionals, proletarians, and peasants. Forced to respond to women’s petitions, especially around the holidays, party official resorted to unplanned imports, which began to surpass exports. Between 1970 and 1988, social policy expenditures rose 60–70%, coupled with a 40–50% increase in personal consumption. The Politburo resorted to short-term western loans at the expense of long-term industrial and technological investments; the latter declined from 16% of national income to 9.9% by 1988, despite East Germany’s reputation as the world’s eighth largest economy.114 By the time the Wall fell, it was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Dictated by conservative western men to resource-poor male “negotiators” on the other side of the table, the terms of unification forced women to exit the labor market, with major socio-psychological consequences. In the State of Workers and Peasants, job-sites constituted the core of social networks. Colleagues celebrated birthdays, undertook cultural outings and helped each other to secure scarce commodities; factories often guaranteed access to vacation resorts and health clinics. Losing one’s job meant losing all those things at once. According to a survey commissioned by Minister Angela Merkel in 1991, 89% of the east-women defined an ideal life as one in which “both partners are employed, and both care equally for children and the household.” While 31% said their lives were better in united Germany, 38% felt they were worse off.115 Three decades later, East-women still embrace paid employment as a core component of their identities; many mothers in part-time jobs would prefer to work full-time. In 2016, 39% of West-women still viewed external care for small children as harmful, compared to only 15% on the other side. Nearly 80% of the eastern centers offered all-day care in 2019; the western share rose from 32% in 2006, to 45% by 2019.116 It took a childless, eastern physicist-­ turned-­Chancellor to re-instate child-care guarantees and expand parental leave. Compounding their “loser” status, unification subjected women to shock therapy regarding reproductive rights. Legalized abortion, coupled with free contraception, had served its purpose in the GDR, producing a dramatic decline in maternal and infant mortality. As a member of the Independent Women’s Union stressed, the Netherlands registered the lowest termination rate across Europe, despite having the most liberal law.117 The discretionary power accorded to “counselors” once again reduced women to supplicants, considered too immature to make their

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own moral decisions. Their prospects for exercising real political voice were also cut short by western men who rushed to fill various power vacuums in the east, especially across state governments, top administrative offices, and universities. This does not mean that women wanted to return to the old regime at any point, given the conditional nature of their loyalty. They clearly value democracy, freedom to travel, better healthcare, and cleaner environments. My core objection, then as now, rests with the deliberate exclusion of women and their needs from all negotiations, a pattern that continued across the first two decades of unity. Kohl and Company chose neo-liberal austerity policies over the constitutionally grounded social-market economy mechanisms that had produced the FRG’s own “economic miracle” within ten years of unconditional surrender. Thirty years later, the East still lags behind, as documented in multiple government reports.118 One of the biggest changes effected by unification, precipitated in large part by Merkel’s unanticipated rise to power in the CDU, is that attitudes regarding the state’s constitutional obligation to pursue gender equality have taken hold in the old Federal Republic. Western feminists toned down their rejection of government intervention in gender domains because they were no longer ruled by Father State but rather by Mutti Merkel through 2021. Women utilizing child-care facilities are no longer disparaged as “raven mothers.” EU-inspired reforms pursued by Merkel and her minister-mom sidekick, Ursula von der Leyen, produced real changes, dramatically expanding the rights of all women in united Germany. It is impossible to determine whether the socialist regime would have survived, had the Old Guard accorded women their fair share of seats around the Politburo table, along with access to other levers of power. For all their talk of “scientific Marxism,” GDR leaders refused to abandon male privilege, much less to deconstruct their own paternalistic thinking concerning women’s roles. That makes it all the more ironic that one eastern woman managed to pull off in less than sixteen years what SED leaders could not achieve in forty: an incipient, fundamental transformation in the roles of men. Moving from the losers’ dug-out to the playing field of winners, East-women have lent credence to the dual meaning of the adage, Ohne Frauen ist kein Staat zu machen, roughly translated: no state can be built without women/without women there is no effective order. So what is the state of the gender union, thirty years later? Unification lived up to its reputation as “the triumph of the Fatherland” through the

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first fifteen years, despite a looming demographic deficit in the old Federal Republic. Although Kohl promised that no one “would be worse off than before,” conservatives delivered a series of monumental blows to eastern women. The reintroduction of many familiar family-work reconciliation policies during the Merkel years generated a veritable Baby Boom as well as a significant increase in female labor market participation, notwithstanding the hardships that the ongoing Covid pandemic has inflicted on working women everywhere. Although it has taken three decades, Deutschland einig Mutterland has replaced the outdated vision of a united, difficult Fatherland, allowing German women on both sides of the former Wall to emerge as ultimate winners of unification.

Notes 1. Brigitte Young. 1999. Triumph of the Fatherland: German Unification and the Marginalization of Women. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 2. TV address on July 1, 1990, https://www.kas.de/en/static-­contents-­ detail/-­c ontent/fernsehansprache-­v on-­b undeskanzler-­k ohl-­a m-­ 1.-­juli-­1990. 3. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1995. “Second-class Citizenship and its Discontents: Women in the New Germany.” In Peter H. Merkl, ed., The Federal Republic at Forty-Five: Union without Unity. New York: New York University Press, 84. 4. Gunnar Winkler, ed. 1995. Sozialreport 1995. Berlin: Sozialwissens chaftliches Forschungszentrum. 5. Catharine A. MacKinnon. 1982. “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” Signs 7 (3), 516. 6. Karl Marx. 1844. “Private Property and Communism.” Reprinted in David McLellan, ed. 1977. Karl Marx: Selected Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 87–88. 7. Simone de Beauvoir. 1952. The Second Sex. Trans. H.M.  Parshley. New York: Alfred Knopf; Shulamith Firestone. 1970. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution. New York: William Morrow. 8. Friedrich Engels. 1884. The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. 9. Mary Gabriel. 2011. Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution. Boston: Little, Brown. 10. Helene outlived her employers and was buried next to them. Engels revealed the real father to Marx’s daughters on his deathbed, purportedly leading to their suicides. See Volker Elis Pilgrim. 1990. Adieu Marx. Gewalt und Ausbeutung im Hause der Wortführers. Reinbeck: Rowohlt.

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11. August Bebel. 1879, reprinted 1910. Women and Socialism. New York: Socialist Literature Co. 12. Clara Zetkin. 1921, reprinted 2016, “Report on Communist Women’s Movement” (July 8, 1921), in John Riddell, ed., To the Masses: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International, 1921. Chicago: Haymarket Books: 779–790. 13. Ursula Enders. 1984. “… damit sie hre Pflichten als berufstätige Ehefrau und Mutter immer besser vereinbaren kann.” In Lebensbedingungen in der DDR. Köln: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 38. 14. Inge Hieblinger. 1984. “The Advancement of Women in the GDR.” In Arthur W. McCardle and A. Bruce Boenau, eds. East Germany. A New German Nation under Socialism? Lanham MD: University Press of America, 248. 15. See Sonja von Behrens’s documentary film, Liebhaber und Diktator—Das geheime Doppelleben Walter Ulbrichts, first aired March 4, 2018 on ZDF. 16. See the film by Ed Stuhler and Thomas Grimm, Die Honeckers privat, broadcast on MDR in 2003. See https://www.mdr.de/zeitreise/ artikel92510.html. Honecker’s marriages are not mentioned in his 482page autobiography, Aus meinem Leben beyond one photo, 453. 17. Hieblinger. “The Advancement of Women,” 250. 18. Detlef Pollack. 1996. “Zur religiös-kirchlichen Lage in Deutschland nach der Wiedervereinigung: Eine religionssoziologische Analyse.” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 93 (4), 593. 19. Cited in Frank Thomas Stössel. 1985. Positionen und Strömungen in der KPD/SED 1945–1954. Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 83–84. 20. Donna Harsch. 2000. “Approach/avoidance: Communists and Women in East Germany, 1945–9.” Social History 25 (2), 157. 21. Donna Harsch. 2007. Revenge of the Domestic: Women, the Family, and Communism in the German Democratic Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 9. 22. Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic, 18, 56. 23. Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic, 34. 24. Elizabeth H. Tobin and Jennifer Gibson. 1995. “The Meaning of Labor: East German Women’s Work and the Transition from Nazism to Communism.” Central European History 28 (3), 317. 25. Gareth Pritchard. 2019. “Female Labor and Power in East Germany, 1945–1948.” Central European History 52 (3), 13. 26. Pritchard, “Female Labor and Power,” 16. 27. O.  Jean Brandes,. 1950. “The Effect of War on the German Family.” Social Forces 29 (2), 171. 28. Gisela Helwig and Hildegard Marie Nickel, eds. 1993. Frauen in Deutschland, 1945–1992. Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 10.

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29. Pritchard. “Female Labor and Power,” 18. 30. Harsch. Revenge of the Domestic, 168; Pritchard, “Female Labor and Power,” 20. 31. Harsch. Revenge of the Domestic, chapter 3. 32. Wolfgang Zank. 1987. Wirtschaft und Arbeit im Ostdeutschland 1945–1949. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 137ff. 33. Henrik Bispinck and Damian van Melis, eds. 2006. “Republikflucht”: Flucht und Abwanderung aus der SBZ/DDR, 1945 bis 1961. Oldenbourg: Wissenschaftsverlag, 255ff. 34. Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic, 155–156. 35. Pritchard, “Female Labor and Power,” 21–22. 36. Gisela Helwig. 1982. Frau und Familie in beiden deutschen Staaten. Köln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 99; Ulrike Enders. 1986. “Kinder, Küche, Kombinat—Frauen in der DDR.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B6-7. February 8, 37. 37. Hieblinger. “The Advancement of Women,” 255. 38. Eva Schmidt-Kolmer. 1959. Verhalten und Entwicklung des Kleinkindes. Berlin: Akademie Verlag; Schmidt-Kolmer. 1977. Zum Einfluß von Familie und Krippe auf die Entwicklung von Kindern in der frühen Kindheit. Berlin: Verlag Volk und Gesundheit. 39. Helwig. Frau und Familie, 93–97. 40. Enders. “Kinder, Küche, Kombinat,” 43. 41. Enders. “Kinder, Küche, Kombinat,” 31. 42. Irene Dölling. 1989. “Culture and Gender.” In Marilyn Rueschemeyer and Christiane Lemke, eds., The Quality of Life in the German Democratic Republic: Changes and Developments in a State Socialist Society. Amonk NY: M.E. Sharpe, 32–33. 43. Helwig. Frau und Familie, 41, 43; Hildegard Marie Nickel. “’Mitgestalterinnen des Sozialismus’—Frauenarbeit in der DDR,” In Frauen in Deutschland, 239ff. 44. Gunnar Winkler, ed., 1990. Frauenreport 1990. Berlin: Die Wirtschaft, 43–45. 45. Enders. “Kinder, Küche, Kombinat,” 33. 46. Winkler, Frauenreport ’90, 54. 47. Gerd Meyer. 1986. “Frauen in den Machthierarchien der DDR oder: Der lange Weg zur Parität.” Deutschland Archiv 19 (3): 294–311. 48. Rita Pawlowski, ed. 2008. Unsere Frauen stehen ihren Mann. Frauen in der Volkskammer der DDR 1950–1989. Ein biographisches Handbuch. Berlin: Wissenschaftsverlag. 49. Meyer. “Frauen in den Machthierarchien,” 299. 50. Meyer. “Frauen in den Machthierarchien,” 296–297.

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51. Schmidt was one of a few to criticize Ulbricht directly: “The quick fixes, the lies, the running away from people’s worries, the threats, the boastings—that has brought us to this point: for that, dear Walter, you bear more culpability than anyone, and that is what you will not admit, that without all that June 17 would never have happened.” See “‘Walter, Du hast schuld’,” Der Spiegel, June 11, 1990. Rehabilitated in 1956, she directed the Institute for Clothing Culture from 1954 to 1967. 52. Meyer. “Frauen in den Machthierarchien,” 307. 53. Fabian Class, Ulrich Kohler, and Marian Krawietz. 2018. “The Potsdam Grievance Statistics File. New data on quality of life and political participation for the German Democratic Republic 1970–1989.” Historical Methods 51 (2): 92–114. 54. Henrik Eberle. 2007. Mit sozialistischem Gruß! Briefe, Akten und Absurdes aus der DDR. Bergisch-Gladbach: Bastei Lubbe. 55. “Ich frage nach wie vor umsonst,” Der Spiegel, May 26, 2015. 56. Harsch. Revenge of the Domestic, 3. 57. Ingrid Schmidt-Harzbach. 1984. “Eine Woche in April, Berlin 1945.” Feministische Studien 3 (2): 51–65; Helke Sander and Barbara Johr, eds.1992. BeFreier und Befreite: Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder. Munich: Verlag Antje Kunstmann. For a critique of Sander and Johr, see Atina Grossmann. 1995. “A Question of Silence: The Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers.” October 72: 42–63. 58. Schmidt-Harzbach. “Eine Woche,” 60. 59. Schmidt Harzbach. “Eine Woche,” 60. 60. Gunnar Winkler. 1989. Geschichte der Sozialpolitik der DDR, 1945–1989. Berlin: Akademie. 61. His biography does not indicate how many children he fathered. Rudolf Neubert. 1957. Das neue Ehebuch: Die Ehe als Aufgabe der Gegenwart und Zukunf. Rudolstadt: Greiffenverlag, 270–271. 62. Mitteilungen für Hellerau, Issue 87 (May 2011), 4. 63. Winkler. Frauenreport ’90, 25, 165–166. 64. Helwig. Frau und Familie, 59. 65. Donna Harsch. 1997. “Society, the State, and Abortion in East Germany, 1950–1972.” American Historical Review 102 (1), 61. 66. Harsch. “Society, the State, and Abortion,” 84. 67. Winkler. Frauenreport ’90, 168–170. 68. Classified Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung document, VVS LR 8-62/72 (Leipzig) July 1972, 7. 69. Winkler. Frauenreport ’90, 167–169. 70. “Files Show East Germans Forced Adoptions.” New York Times, May 24, 1991.

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71. Maxi Wander. 1979. “Guten morgen, du Schöne.” Frauen in der DDR. Protokolle. Darmstadt: Luchterhand. 72. Cited in Harsch, Revenge of the Domestic, 225–226; Alex Comfort. 1972. The Joy of Sex: A Gourmet Guide to Love Making. New  York: Crown Publishers. 73. Harsch. Revenge of the Domestic, 219. 74. Winkler. Frauenreport ’90, 109–111. 75. Harsch. Revenge of the Domestic, 290, 298; Eva Schmidt-Kolmer and Heiz Schmidt. 1962. “Über Frauenarbeit und Familie.” Einheit 17 (12); William Master and Virginia Johnson. 1966. Human Sexual Response. Toronto: Bantam Books. 76. Winkler. Frauenreport ’90, 106. 77. Günter Grau. 1996. “Im Auftrag der Partei. Versuch einer Reform der strafrechtlichen Bestimmungen zur Homosexualität in der DDR 1952.” Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 9 (2): 109–130. 78. Ursula Sillge 1991. Un-Sichtbare Frauen. Lesben und ihre Emanzipation in der DDR. Berlin: LinksDruck. 79. Christian Könne. 2018. “Schwule und Lesben in der DDR und der Umgang des SED-Staates mit Homosexualität.” Berlin: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, February 28. 80. Kurt Starke. 1994. Schwuler Osten. Homosexuelle Männer in der DDR. Berlin: Ch. Links; Kurt Starke und Walter Friedrich. 1986. Liebe und Sexualität bis 30. Berlin: VEB Verlag der Wissenschaft. 81. Günter Amendt, ed. 1989. Natürlich Anders: Zur Homosexualitätsdis­ kussion in der DDR. Köln: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1989. 82. For personal reflections, see Gerda Szepansky, ed. 1995. Die still Emanzipation. Frauen in der DDR. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer; Angelika Griebner and Scarlett Kleint. 1995. Starke Frauen kommen aus dem Osten. Berlin: Argon, 1995. 83. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1999. “Collective Memory Divided and Reunited: Mothers, Daughters and the Fascist Experience in Germany.” History and Memory 11 (1): 1–34. 84. Katrin Rohnstock, ed. 1994. Stiefschwestern: Was Ost-Frauen und West-­ Frauen voneinander denken. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. 85. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1989. “Feminism in Four Acts: The Changing Political Identity of Women in the German Federal Republic.” Peter Merkl, ed., The FRG at 40. New York: New York University Press: 76–109. 86. Jutta Gysi and Dagmar Meyer. 1993. “Leitbild: Berufstätige Mutter— DDR-Frauen in Familie, Partnerschaft und Ehe.” In Helwig and Nickel, Frauen in Deutschland, 142, 159. 87. Winkler, Sozialreport 1997, 234–235, 237, 241.

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88. Theresa Hörnigk shared her nightmare experiences of being forced out, after she and her spouse had spent years foraging for scarce renovation materials, like a porcelain sink, to upgrade their spacious apartment in Berlin. 89. Marcus Böick. 2018. Die Treuhand. Idee-Praxis-Erfahrung, 1990–1999. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 677–679. 90. Jörg Roesler. 2005. “Die Treuhandpolitik.” In Hanes Bahrmann and Christoph Links, eds., Am Ziel vorbei: Die deutsche Einheit—Eine Zwischenbilanz. Berlin: Ch. Links, 96, 102. 91. Winkler, Sozialreport 1995, 96. 92. Birgit Bütow. 1993. “Ausgrenzungen von Frauen bei der Neugestaltung des Hochschulwesens in Sachsen.” In Marlies Arndt, Magdalene Deters et  al. Ausgegrenzt und mittendrin: Frauen in der Wissenschaft. Berlin: Sigma, 50–51; also, Brigitte Young. 1993. “Deutsche Vereinigung, Der Abwicklungsskandal an den ostdeutschen Universitäten und seine Folgen für Frauen.” Feministische Studien 11 (1): 8–20. 93. “Dritter Weg: Abtreibung,” Der Spiegel, 31/1990, 23ff. 94. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1997. “Concession or Compromise? The Politics of Abortion in United Germany.” German Politics 6 (3): 69–87. 95. Reinhard Höppner. 1997. Keynote address at the Legal-Political Congress of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung in Mainz, April 20. 96. Mushaben, “Concession or Compromise?,” 75. 97. “Abtreibung: Betrachtung vor Ort,” Der Spiegel, March 3, 1991. 98. Maria Werner and Margarete Thomas. 1993. “Erste Erfahrungen der Schwangerschaftskonflikt Beratungsstellen.” Frauenbericht Dresden: 96–98; Kleine Anfrage: Gründe für Schwangerschaftsabbrüche, Sächsischer Landtag, Drucksache 2/2935, March 19, 1996. 99. Wolfgang Weiβ. 2005. “Die Schrumpfung der Städte. Abwanderung aus dem Osten und die sozialen Folgen.” In Am Ziel vorbei, 194–207. 100. Gysi and Meyer. “Leitbild: Berufstätige Mutter,” 139, 143. 101. Winkler. Frauenreport ‘90, 23–24. 102. Irene Dolling, with Daphne Hahn and Silke Scholz. 1998. “BiomachtBipolitik,” Potsdamer Studien zur Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung 2. Unversität Potsdam. 103. Winkler. Sozialreport 2017, 268. 104. Gunnar Winkler. 2018. Friedliche Revolution 1989 bis 2017. Berlin: Trafo, 254. 105. “Frauenhäuser: Mit frischer Kraft,” Der Spiegel, January 13, 1991. 106. MDR report, “Die ersten Sexshops in der DDR,” rebroadcast on February 23, 2021. https://www.mdr.de/zeitreise/erste-­sexshops-­ ddr-­100.html. 107. “Peinlich, altbacken, sexistisch,” Der Spiegel, March 22, 2019.

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108. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2017. Becoming Madam Chancellor. Angela Merkel and the Berlin Republic. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, chapter 2. 109. Joyce Marie Mushaben, 2018. “The Reluctant Feminist: Angela Merkel and the Modernization of Gender Politics in Germany.” Femina Politica 27 (2): 83–94. 110. Anne Hähnig, Martin Machowecz und Heinrich Wefing. 2020. “Eine Richterin als der ultimative Kompromiss.” Die Zeit, July 1. 111. Annette Kaminsky. 2001. Wohlstand, Schönheit, Glück: Kleine Konsumgeschichte der DDR. Munich: C.H. Beck, 78ff. 112. Harsch. Revenge of the Domestic, 167. 113. Harsch. Revenge of the Domestic, 239. 114. Ulrich Blum. 2011. “An Economic Life in Vain—Path Dependence and East Germany’s Pre- and Post-Unification Economic Stagnation.” IWH Discussion Paper 10. Halle Institute for Economic Research. 115. Bundesministerium für Frauen und Jugend. 1991. Frauen in den neuen Bundesländern im Prozess der deutschen Einigung. Bonn, 20, 50. 116. Bundesbeauftragter für die neuen Bundesländer, Jahresbericht der Bundesregierung zum Stand der deutschen Einheit 2020. Berlin, 189–190. 117. Eva Maleck-Lewy. 1995. “Between Self-Determination and State Supervision: Women and the Abortion Law in Post-Unification Germany,” Social Politics 2 (1), 66. 118. Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat, 2019. Unser Plan für Deutschland—Gleichwertige Lebensverhältnisse überall. Berlin: July.

CHAPTER 10

The Anti-political Identities of East German Youth

We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. No dark sarcasm in the classroom Teachers leave them kids alone. Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone! All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall. All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall. Pink Floyd, The Wall (rock-opera) 1979.

In May 1978, the Free German Youth was called upon to stimulate a discussion among adolescents regarding their “love for the socialist fatherland.” Focusing on their personal occupational wishes and relationships, the first round of responses published in Junge Welt were so unsettling to party bosses that the editors followed up with articles by hand-picked adults like Anna Seghers and Egon Krenz. Their remarks were published a few weeks later in Neues Deutschland, then reprinted in Junge Welt on October 3. The Socialist Unity Party terminated the campaign shortly thereafter.1 The GDR’s founding fathers failed miserably when it came to grasping women’s need to define their identities in ways that differed from those of working men, starting with their preference for fashionable attire and affordable cosmetics. The Old Guard would prove just as incapable of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_10

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comprehending the real identity needs of its youngest citizens. Deeply distrusting any form of mobilization it could not directly control, SED leaders drew on two erroneous assumptions in formulating national educational and youth policies. The first entailed the faulty premise of eternal childhood, persistently projected onto the adult population. Despite decades of party-regulated socialization, leaders refused to believe that the masses “born into” the GDR had attained the proper level of socialist-­ revolutionary consciousness more than three decades after its founding. At the same time, they insisted on treating children of all ages as political carbon copies of themselves, that is, as little grown-ups willing to adhere to the same rigorous standards of ideological purity as state functionaries. As a result, their treatment of young citizens became more oppressive, and ever more counter-productive over time. Socialist elites displayed little sensitivity to, much less tolerance for, the vagaries of the life-cycle which render adolescents curious, critical, rambunctious, rebellious and hungry for experimentation, irrespective of their homeland. Under the iron-fist of Margot Honecker, the educational system subjected children of all ages to propaganda overkill after 1964. Her relentless campaigns, coupled with the militarization of school curricula, provoked increasingly negative reactions among teenagers during that identity-hungry phase of the life-cycle when curiosity and rebellion against authority are most likely, natural and perhaps justified. The harsher the negative sanctions she deployed in hopes of instilling an unquestioning “love for the socialist fatherland,” coupled with efforts to impose one-­ size-­fits-all cultural tastes, the more GDR adolescents sought to exit the system in search of alternative life-styles. Teachers were among the first to articulate this dilemma in their reactions to Christa Wolf’s 1989 indictment of the educational system. Wolf criticized the party for branding every teacher who tried to counter the pedagogical and psychological “deformation” of her students a political enemy; adolescents, in turn, suffered from “permanent schizophrenia.” Schools “raised our children to accept untruth, thereby damaging their character”; successive generations were “bullied, deprived of voice and stripped of courage, with rhetorical and picturesque Schaumschlägerei (hot-air boasts), served up pseudo-problems that were solved by the system with a flick of the wrist.”2 The result was that countless optimistic, well-qualified young adults were the first to run to embassies and borders in summer 1989 in hopes of exiting. Wolf received over 300 responses to

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her Wochenpost essay, ranging from bitter, depressed, or laudatory, to self-­ righteous, angry, and denunciatory. One need not undertake a comprehensive psycho-analysis of SED ruling elites to find an explanation for their behavior in the humble origins of Politburo members themselves, starting with Ulbricht, Honecker, and Mielke. Always stressing their (long-abandoned) proletarian roots, geriatric rulers felt a constant need to compensate for their own lack of formal education vis-à-vis successor generations. Having struggled through the war years and the Stalinist aftermath, the all-male leadership recalled its own youth as an era of heavy sticks, few carrots. Their own experiences were exceptional in many respects, given the life-or-death nature of the fascist and communist regimes that shaped their life courses. They nonetheless continued to apply the same spare the rod, spoil the child philosophy long after their own socialist achievements had rendered those methods obsolete. They sublimated their personal inferiority complexes by way of an ad absurdum search for the enemy-within. Because young Germans of the 1970s and 1980s differed so radically from those socialized in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the leadership’s ideological qua pedagogical rigidity produced an adverse chemical reaction. As already reported, the state’s obsession with human reproduction resulted in policies promoting early marriage and childbirth. Accelerated “birth cycles” and longer eastern life-spans meant that the system was bound to reach a saturation point in relation to social mobility. The SED’s shift to a class-based (re)allocation of educational and professional opportunities in the early years supplied unprecedented paths to social mobility among the cohorts helping to build “the state of workers and peasants.” The Aufbau generation had yet to retire by the time its better educated offspring were ready to enter the workforce, starting in the late 1960s. Because higher educational attainment leads to rising occupational aspirations, the failure to rotate older cohorts out of power in favor of new political, economic and scientific elites led to a generational bottleneck. Members of the Born-into Generation nonetheless witnessed significant improvements in their wages and living standards, mitigating their sense of relative deprivation once Honecker pursued better housing, quality consumer goods, and a degree of political liberalization after Ulbricht’s abdication. The same would not hold true for members of the third generation as of the 1980s. Positive pronatalism swelled the ranks of those expecting to move up the social ladder after the mid-1970s, but the Politburo’s adherence to

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Marxist-Leninist determinism, and fear of genuine scientific freedom, inhibited industrial experimentation and innovation beyond the margins. In 1973 SED officials announced a cut-back in university enrollments, hoping to redirect the occupational aspirations of its youngest cohorts into areas of greatest industrial need. The new emphasis fell on intensified “career channeling” and cultivating socialist personalities, willing to bend to the needs of the collective at the expense of self-actualization. Political correctness replaced proletarian status as a primary criterion for admission to higher educational institutions, with the result that high-status jobs were increasingly reserved for elite offspring. Top-down opposition to social innovation and real workplace participation resulted in economic stagnation and serious underemployment among skilled workers, which the SED downplayed as “temporary displacements” brought on by rationalization and automation. Positive pronatalism qua demographic acceleration held significant consequences for the political system as a whole. For starters, cohorts born after 1950 were influenced by different events and experiences with respect to key historical reference points. Personal recollections of the war years had provided GDR founders with a degree of legitimacy with which older citizens, but not their children, could easily identify. Secondly, the material expectations of subsequent cohorts naturally rose over time, based on improvements witnessed after the 1960s. Despite official promises of a better life just around the historical bend, youth coming-of-age in the 1980s encountered declining living standards, urban decay, and environmental degradation. Thirdly, younger citizens invariably manifest greater impatience and stronger desires for independence than those who have already settled into adult life. Adolescents world-wide place little value on parental tales of “walking 10 kilometers in the snow to/from school, uphill both ways.” They are sooner driven by a desire for immediate gratification. Indeed, it must have been pretty hard for any eastern teenager to identify with a state in which planners turned a “cow” into a Schwarz-Buntes-Milchrind-Raufutterverzehrende-Grossvieheinheit— literally, “a black or colored, milk-producing, raw-fodder eating large-­ animal unit.” Nor did most appreciate being forced into party-political activities, military instruction, and unpaid industrial or agricultural labor at ever earlier ages. This chapter first describes GDR-youth policies geared toward the cultivation of all-sided socialist personalities, addressing the uniform polytechnical school system, the changing nature of higher education and

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supplementary agents of socialization like the FDJ and the Jugendweihe. It then considers the impact of economic stagnation, urban decay, and western media influences on the rise of new youth subcultures from the 1960s to the 1980s. Next, we address the extent to which Margot Honecker’s intensified ideological regimentation led to growing alienation even among the SED’s “reserve army,” FDJ activists, as reflected in surveys conducted by Central Institute for Youth Research during the GDR’s final years. It is difficult to classify the last East German generation as “winners” or “losers” in the wake of unification, much less thirty years later, insofar as those who were teens when the Wall fell are now forty-somethings themselves. Those who abandoned the eastern Länder in the early 1990s generally fared better than those who stayed behind. To assess the nature of youth “loyalty” after 1989, I review Zentralinsitut für Jugendforschung surveys as well as two longitudinal studies continued after unification, to determine which, if any, of the values espoused by socialist leaders have persisted over time. I end with a cautionary tale regarding the East Berlin cultural experiment known as Tacheles and youth’s role in creating the “revolutionary situation” of 1989.

Redefining Class Consciousness: The Uniform Socialist Education System Neither Nazis nor Communists were the first to realize that “to win youth is to control the future.” Regardless of ideological persuasion, rulers have historically relied on schools to convey the values they deem essential to national consciousness formation. Youth’s willingness or ability to internalize officially mandated values are often countered by factors beyond state control, like parental religious beliefs, shifting economic conditions or unique historical breaks. Beyond the explicit goals enshrined in government-­imposed lesson plans lies an “implicit curriculum,” structuring relationships, norms, and behaviors inside and outside formal educational institutions.3 Communist Party functionaries in Moscow were already deliberating educational reform prior to Nazi capitulation, including a purge of fascist teachers and radical curricular changes. Ulbricht was quick to designate himself Deputy Minister President for Youth Questions, as well as to reopen schools and universities in the Soviet occupation zone.

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Three-­ fourths of the instructors hired under Hitler were immediately fired, but those trained prior to 1933 were rapidly approaching retirement, leading to a hasty recruitment of “new teachers.” Required to master the fundamentals of Marxist-Leninist and DIMAT (dialectical materialism) pedagogy along with their other crash courses, many were deemed so incompetent by parents that the state stopped using the label “new teachers” in 1952. Turnover rates among school faculty ran 25–40% per year; nearly 17,000 quit by 1951. Given their proletarian/agrarian roots, many opted for higher paid factory work. The 1946 Law on the Democratization of Schools posited an equal right to education for all. Educational policy loomed large at each of ten subsequent SED Party Congresses between 1947 and 1981, coupled with nine Pedagogical Congresses. Underlying the system across three main reform stages were five core principles: (1) All institutions and organs involving youth were to utilize formal instruction and civics training as instruments for a socialist “restructuring” of society. (2) Instructional materials and methods were to derive from the recognition of politics, economics, and pedagogy as reciprocally related. (3) Technical training, political-ideological education, scientific and party-related activities, school, daily life, formal instruction, and productive labor were seen as interconnected, comprising a unified whole. (4) The ultimate educational objective, fostering the “all-sided developed personality,” was rooted in interwoven subgoals, especially the inculcation of socialist morality, fidelity to Marxism-Leninism, love of work, patriotism, and internationalism. (5) Marxism-Leninism was deemed all encompassing, manifesting theoretical, practical, cognitive, and emotional dimensions. Its influence extended from kindergarten through advanced education with the aim of apprising every individual of the correctness and invincibility of this ideology.4 Private schools were outlawed, rendering the state completely responsible for instruction at all levels. Officials eliminated the traditional, hierarchical secondary tiers that had limited access to the Gymnasium and university studies to bourgeois offspring. They replaced it with a uniform, mandatory eight-year requirement, which raised the share of tertiary

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students of working-class or rural background from 19% to 36% by 1949. The “anti-fascist democratic” reform goals of the 1940s were soon displaced by the Sovietization of curriculum and pedagogy in the 1950s. Ulbricht expected educational experts to groom a new generation that would “think like Lenin, act like Stalin, work like Stakhanov.”5 The SED established a USSR-inspired athletic association, the Society for Sport and Technology (GST) in 1952, to promote paramilitary training, shooting techniques, and hand-to-hand combat skills, as well as physical fitness for labor. Pioneered by Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife), polytechnical education was incorporated into all East German schools (POS) in September 1958. Teacher-trainees were obliged to spend a “practical year” working in factories or agriculture as part of their certification. Appointed Educational Minister in 1964, Margot Honecker oversaw the shift to a universal polytechnical model. The 1959 Law on the Socialist Development of the School System was replaced by a statute on the Uniform Socialist Educational System, adopted February 25, 1965. It aimed “to train and educate all citizens as well-rounded and harmoniously developed socialist personalities … capable of performing valuable labor, engaging in continuous learning, participating… in planning for society, assuming responsibility and leading healthy lives, using free-time in sensible ways, pursuing sports and cultivating the arts.”6 Mandatory school attendance commenced at age six, ending after tenth grade with formal written and oral examinations. By 1976 most sixteen year-olds (83%) were channeled directly into vocational education. Those permitted to continue on to the Extended Secondary School (EOS) could complete two types of Abitur: 5% entered a three-year technical-Abitur program, while a small contingent (12%) moved on to academic studies at universities. By the end of tenth grade, students would have completed five years of biology, four years of physics, three years of chemistry, one year each of astronomy and geology, three years of algebra and geometry, and a year of trigonometry.7 Known as “the Lilac Dragon” for her hair-tint, Minister Honecker refused to leave pedagogical questions to the educational experts (for a photo, see https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/07/margothonecker-the-purple-witch-of-east-germany-dies-aged-89/). Bundestag President Wolfgang Thierse later described her as “the most hated person” in East Germany, next to Stasi Chief Erich Mielke. She allegedly established prison-like institutions for delinquent children, including a camp at Torgau known as “Margot’s concentration camp.”8

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In 1970 Madam Honecker expanded the obligatory “Introduction to Socialist Production” course with a weekly “instructional day” in factories or in agricultural settings for seventh to tenth graders, perceived by many parents as a return to unpaid child labor. She insisted that every teacher “learn to accept the fact” that pupils’ direct participation in factory work imparted proper moral behavior, stamina, thoroughness, discipline, a sense of responsibility, pride in accomplishment, and collectivity. Ninth and tenth graders spent three hours per week, helping to produce everything from textiles, garden tools and ball bearings to bicycles. At the VEB Carl Zeiss Jena, 11,000 pupils produced goods worth three million Marks in 1975; they raised production output by 18% in some areas, even reducing the share of rejects and the need for spare parts.9 While she asserted that collectives “speak with pride of ‘their’ school and ‘their’ children,” other sources and interviews suggest that neither group was happy with factory days: teens found it boring, while work brigades objected to slowdowns in production that might cost them bonuses. Speaking at the Eighth Pedagogical Congress in 1978, Minister Honecker criticized the quality of social science education, noting that neither adolescents’ historical knowledge, their grammar, spelling, foreign language skills nor their athletic performance were meeting her expectations. Addressing the “controversial question” as to whether it was “possible and practical” for students to “make use of electronic pocket calculators in school,” she insisted they could serve as an aid at best, not as a replacement for basic mathematical acumen.10 To instill a “competitive spirit” and offer positive reinforcement, the state supported a host of extracurricular activities, for example, sports, linguistic, and mathematic “Olympics.” Angela Merkel’s stellar performance in the Russian Olympiade secured her a two-week trip to Moscow in the early 1970s, for instance. Other annual youth events included the “Master of Tomorrow” science and technology fairs, as well as voluntary community “clean-up” and recycling campaigns. Her most controversial policy, noted earlier, centered on the 1978 introduction of mandatory military instruction, four double-­periods for ninth and tenth graders, contradicting her claim that GDR schools had eliminated “everything reactionary,” teaching all children instead “to work in word and deed for peace and human happiness.”11 Admission to the Expanded Secondary School depended on the collective judgment of teachers, school directors, FDJ functionaries, “parental activists,” and local party officials. Criteria for advancement included not

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only academic performance but also personality traits, commitment to class “collectives,” extracurricular societal engagement and “positive world views” regarding the role of the SED. Despite a growing need for scientific-technical experts, the number of EOS classes (leading to Abitur) actually declined from 4265 in 1955 to 2314 by 1973, while the number of POS classes rose from 75,992 (1960) to 104,237 (1973).12 Occupational choice contracted further in the early 1980s among those already relegated to industrial or agricultural production. All who completed tenth grade were guaranteed training and a job, but only 50% landed in their preferred fields, with few prospects for changing occupations later on. As one apprentice noted: “I already know at age 18 how my life will look at 50, and that is absolutely oppressive.”13 Comparable restructuring efforts occurred at the tertiary level. Given their Nazi affiliations, roughly 905 professors were expelled from the six historical universities located in the Soviet zone (Berlin, Leipzig, Jena, Halle, Greifswald, and Rostock). By 1946, 54% of their replacements were SED members, although Ulbricht and company treaded lightly, at first, around an internationally acclaimed group of “good” (albeit critical) Marxist professors, including Ernst Bloch, Hans Mayer, Wolfgang Harich, Jürgen Kuczynski, Frits Behrens, Robert Havemann, and Martin Strauss. The shock of Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin in 1956, Polish unrest and the Hungarian uprising produced a crisis of confidence among the intelligentsia, particularly among academics. University reforms imposed in 1958 were to counter “revisionism and dogmatism,” forcing out many “good Marxists.” Both the quality of instruction and student qualifications began to decline as more professors headed west, due to politicized Verschulung (rote learning) requirements. Research was transferred to party-loyal academies or industrial research and development centers, which not only paid better but also allowed for double-dipping (collecting salaries for other functions). Changing workforce needs aligned with the New Economic System induced further reforms, addressing problems of a curricular, technical, and structural nature, 1963–1965. The SED declared “science” a production force in its own right in the struggle against capitalist imperialism, resulting in a new emphasis on mathematics, cybernetics, chemistry, physics and operations research in 1966/1967. Academic Senates were replaced with “scientific” and “social councils.” Only a small group would be admitted to advanced-degree, research programs, however; doctoral dissertations were largely pursued through the academies.14

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The Prague Spring precipitated a third round of ideological reinforcement measures in 1968, although academic researchers experienced a status upgrade relative to industrial R&D centers to mitigate “red vs expert” tensions. “Research planning” targeted rationalization, but industries were reluctant to develop new products and processes, since innovation costs were not incorporated into pricing systems.15 In the academic domain, the number of classroom hours devoted to Marxism-Leninism exceeded the hours spent on disciplinary specialization, ending with formal exams in both areas. Would-be teachers, for example, spent 299 hours in M-L classes, compared to 134 mastering pedagogical methods, 116 in psychology, and 250 hours of instruction in their major and minor fields (1974/1975 figures).16 “Distance learning” (Fernstudium) and evening college offerings grew so quickly that remote enrollees almost matched the share of “direct students” (40%). Article 3, section 1 of the 1949 Constitution, warranting freedom of research and teaching, disappeared from its 1968 replacement.17 Like EOS applicants, university aspirants were hand-selected by loyal teachers and local party functionaries, based on their Abitur grades, class background, FDJ membership, and societal engagement. Female applicants were exempt from GST training, but males were expected to demonstrate the right stuff prior to admission by “voluntarily” extending their military service beyond the eighteen-month legal conscription period for up to three years. By 1980 the six traditional universities were complemented by eighteen technical universities, three medical academies, five specialized schools (forestry, agriculture, law, economics), ten teacher-­ training colleges, and eleven art schools.18 Female admissions to tertiary institutions rose from 6700 (out of 31,512) in 1951, to 25,213 (of 99,860) in 1960, peaking at 68,327 (among 153,559) in 1973.19 The Five Year Plan for 1976–1980 reduced the total number of entrants to 158,000, compared to 185,640 for 1971–1975.20 As of 1954–1955, 55% of the higher-ed enrollees had working-class roots; middle-class students received no state aid but could shed their “bourgeois” status by working for two years in factories, mines, or the military. The structure of higher educational opportunity began to shift in the 1960s, reflected in the class backgrounds of those admitted to tertiary institutions: the children of farmers and industrial workers lost their privileged status to party and intelligentsia offspring. The share of adolescents from real proletarian families who entered Fachhochschulen declined from 51% (1960) to 39.5% (1966), while children of white-collar employees rose from 31.4% to 44.5% (Table 10.1).

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Table 10.1  Class backgrounds of students in higher education, 1960–1966 Technical Colleges (Fachhochschule) Workers Employees Coop-Members (Agricultural) Intelligentsia Self-employed Others

1960 51 31.4 8.6 4,1 3.9 1.0

1966 39.5 44.5 7.4 5.0 2.4 1.2

Direct Studies 52.6 21.2 10.3 8.8 5.1 2.0

Universities (Hochschulen) 1960 1966 Direct Studies Workers Total: 39.1 Employees (W/E/C) 23.5 Coop-Members (Agricultural) 73.5 61.9 Intelligentsia 17.8 30.1 19.7 Self-employed 8.7 7.9 10.5 Others n.a. n.a. n.a. Source: Adolf Kruppa, Wirtschafts-und Bildungsplanung in der DDR (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campa, 1976), 140.

By the 1981, most students received a monthly stipend of M190 (Berlin: M205), enjoyed cheap dormitory accommodations (M10 per month), and subsidized Mensa meals. Over time stipends came to include “premiums” for societal engagement and academic achievement, as well as subsidies for mothers. Though slated for essential scientific-technical jobs, students were expected to put their studies on hold for “voluntary” activities, like working extra shifts at factories, unloading winter coal from freight trains, helping with summer harvests, and cheering party elites at holiday parades. Those seeking financial assistance had to swear to “go wherever needed” after graduation, as follows: I hereby commit myself to faithfully executing my studies at the […] University in the service of the GDR; I will acquire a high degree of knowledge and ability, and live according to the basic precepts of socialist morality and ethics. I commit myself to the conscientious execution of all of the laws and regulations of our worker and peasant state, along with university requirements, to fulfill all of the adult responsibilities entrusted to me, to engage energetically in the socialist construction of our Republic and to work for its active defense. I oblige myself to serve our socialist state loyally, following the completion of my studies, and to participate in its societal and economic advancement. I consider it my duty, after completing my studies, to actively work for our GDR wherever I can be of greatest use.21

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Yet even with these rigorous ideological criteria, the SED paradoxically stopped trusting its privileged students the moment they enrolled; potential denunciation by zealous FDJ functionaries or Stasi IMs meant that even peers who dared to protest the poor quality of cafeteria food faced the Damocles sword of ex-matriculation. As understood by the Politburo, the ideal socialist personality was committed to learning only those things the state wanted her to know, in preparation for a pre-programmed life of compliance and “adaptation” (Anpassung): In school, one adapted to everything, in order to be able to complete the Abitur; with the Abitur in hand, one conformed in order to get a chance to study; having secured a study-place, one conformed in order to get an elite job (Planstelle); having secured the good job, one adapted further in order to keep it.22

One of the few student protests to emerge centered on the 1968 destruction of the (intact) University Church in Leipzig, where Bach and Bartholdy had performed. Officials noted particularly “hostile behaviors” in conjunction with their demands that students participate in summer harvests or extra military training. Young adults abandoned FDJ activities to start their own (suspect) student clubs and cabaret groups. Beyond reading literature coming out of Poland, they also listened to foreign radio stations and rock music. Angela Merkel reportedly contributed fifty hours of “free FDJ labor” in order to transform the bombed out Moritzbastei in Leipzig into a new student club; she later worked as a bartender, serving home-made cherry whiskey, while studying physics there.23 Authorities paradoxically complained that universities and other higher educational institutions harbored “many opponents among the ranks who are working under advantageous conditions, that begin with their admission to studies. [This situation] is partially warranted by the irresponsible selection of newly matriculated elements (my emphasis), devoid of correct class standing, whose entry to the universities, academies and technical colleges has exhibited hostile, negative and seriously criminal orientations that are apparent to the defense- and security organs.”24 In fact, the ones who lacked “correct class standing” were the sons and daughters of SED functionaries themselves. All others were subjected to extremely rigorous selection criteria and processes controlled by party-loyalists. Their privileged status rendered most university students the least likely to protest GDR participation in the Prague invasion or to lead the charge in the 1989 demonstrations.25

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Not-so-free “Free-time”: FDJ and the Jugendweihe German efforts to pull adolescents into ideological camps did not begin with Hitler Youth. Erich Honecker had joined the Communist Youth League (Young Spartakists) at age ten. In March 1946, he became the First Secretary of the new Free German Youth organization, a post he held until 1955. Initially a “non-partisan, democratic group,” the FDJ’s 1949 Constitution made no mention of the SED, although in 1951 it embraced the motto, To learn from the Soviet Union is to learn victory. The revised 1952 statute paid homage to “untiring care and generous support of youth through the party of the working class, the Socialist Unity Party and the government of the German Democratic Republic.” By 1976, the organization had subordinated itself to SED leadership, characterizing itself as “its active helper and combat reserve.” One in eight FDJ activists was simultaneously an SED member by 1978. Political grooming began at an early age. Emerging out of the FDJ in 1948, the Young Pioneer Organization “Ernst Thälmann” appealed to pupils six to fourteen, easily identified by their red neck-bandanas. School-­ based units were led by female teachers who had completed special training at the central Pioneer Institute for Continuing Education in Droyßig. Beginning with 180,000, its membership increased four-fold within a year, eventually encompassing 90–99% of all primary- and middle-school pupils. The Pioneer phase ended with the Jugendweihe. Purportedly voluntary, FDJ membership rose dramatically from 200,000 after 1946 to one million in mid-1950, peaking at 2.3 million in late 1951. Numbers fluctuated according to birth rates; 50% of those aged fourteen to twenty-five were enrolled in 1961, rising to 70% in 1978, then over 90% of all eighth to twelfth graders by 1981.26 FDJ engagement became a necessary if not a sufficient criterion for accessing higher education. Although she did not participate in the Jugendweihe, Angela Kasner (Merkel) joined in 1968, serving as an FDJ Secretary while attending the University of Leipzig. Also affiliated with a church group, she claims that her FDJ functions were limited to organizing cultural events. Monthly dues reflected the ability to pay, ranging from 30 cents to 5 Marks. Following the precept of “democratic centralism,” the FDJ was hierarchically structured, starting with “Basic Organizations” (GOs) in schools, universities, workplaces, and military units. Local entities, in turn, were subordinate to county and district levels, topped by a Central Council, with full and candidate members and a secretariat. Higher levels managed

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specialized departments, covering international contacts, youth research, cadre training, culture, propaganda, sports, legal issues, apprentices, workers, students, rural youth, etc. Its official representative body was the Delegate Conference, but many served in other elected organs once the legal age was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen in 1950. Enjoying full voting rights and reserved seats, thirty-three of the FDJ Volkskammer delegates were eighteen to twenty-five in 1967, with another thirty-three under thirty; 561 of 2840 District Council members were younger than 30, as were 73,000 volunteer firemen.27 Accorded a central, avant-garde role under the Third Youth Law of 1974, FDJ functionaries were responsible for representing the interests “of all German youth,” which is not to say that they got to define those interests. School GOs adopted an annual Kampfprogramm (“battle plan”), including guest lectures, discussions, school outings, sports, and paramilitary competitions (e.g., grenade distance-throwing, target-shooting), supplemented after 1978 by a Day of Defense Preparedness under the auspices of the National People’s Army (NVA). Not content with her control of the educational process, Minister Honecker fixated on regulating youth recreational activities as well. The FDJ’s real drawing card was its power to allocate access to its summer camps, affordable vacation trips (through its travel agency, Jugendtourist), and highly prized exchange programs with other socialist states. It had its own publishing outlets (Neues Leben, Kinderbuchverlag), issued its own newspapers and magazines (Junge Welt, Trommel, Junge Generation, Pionierleiter) and paperback series (nl-konkret). It organized “singing clubs,” hobby workshops, poet seminars, and other cultural events. By the early 1980s, it managed 15,000 club-houses and 5000 discos, finding itself increasingly forced to compete with underground venues relying on taped western music. When the state finally conceded to youth demands for rock music, it required FDJ “record-entertainers” to pass an official exam, to ensure that its 6000–8000 disc-jockeys qua “cultural functionaries” abided by the boundaries of censorship. The “optimal mix” of 60% East, 40% West music was often ignored. Nor did the Educational Minister have any qualms about exploiting youth labor beyond weekly “school production days.” FDJ collectives bore responsibility for specific production projects (Jugendobjekte) in industry and agriculture. In the 1950s, youth “donated” 500,000 hours

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to building Leipzig’s Central Stadium, capable of seating 120,000 spectators. Others participated in the construction of Schönefeld Airport, 1959–1969, while a later group helped to lay a natural gas pipeline, 1974–1978. As the number of youth brigades grew from 15,685 (1971) to 28,065 (1976), FDJ “initiatives” were credited with saving 45 million work-hours, generating one billion Marks in profit. They collected 307,319 tons of scrap, renovated 6659 apartments, cut agricultural fodder costs by 13.8 million Marks, and recruited 11,370 new technicians.28 Roughly, 30,000 students “contributed” 150,000 hours of labor to liberating the Moritzbastei ruins from 40,000 cubic meters of rubble between 1974 and 1982.29 “The totality of societal relations—economic, political, ideological,” Honecker opined, “should affect the education of individuals and commensurately, education and instruction should actively influence societal processes … it is a very lively process, that often unfolds in contradictory ways.”30 The burdens inflicted on FDJ activists pursuing higher education were even heavier, characterized by some as “factory-like norms for intellectual workers.” In addition to their usual 25 hours of in-class lectures (excluding electives), functionaries participated in 16 hours of political instruction, on top of 10–20  hours of homework each week throughout the 10-month academic year. Their summer vacations were filled with internships and “volunteer” stints in factories or the fields through July. Serving as the SED’s “active helper and combat reserve” was an exhausting, full-­ time job, devoid of pay. No wonder even this ideologically loyal group grew measurably tired of the “leading role of the party” by the mid-1980s. For less energetic or ambitious youth, there was the Jugendweihe, a rite of passage allowing citizens coming-of-age to dedicate themselves to the goals of the workers’ state. Prior to securing its power base, the SED had welcomed the idea of a “school graduation” ceremony, leading to assorted versions across the Zone. When 185 adolescents from Charlottenburg, Neukölln, Friedrichshain, and Köpenick assembled at the Marmorpalast along the (US-controlled) “Kudamm” in June 1949, the SED began to back-track, banning the practice in February 1950, due to its alleged ties to Free Masons/Free Thinkers. By March 1954, the Jugendweihe was back on the Politburo agenda, as a means of distracting young Christians from Lutheran confirmation rites. In July it allocated a significant sum (1,100,000 Marks) for personnel and program-preparation costs, instructional materials, receptions, and gift-books—all at no cost to parents—in hopes of attracting 100,000 eighth graders (31.5%).31

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A committee including Anna Seghers, Johannes Becher, and Stefan Hermlin issued the first Call to Youth Dedication on November 9, 1955. The Politburo proclaimed: “the German democratic school has the task of educating patriots, who are true subjects of the Homeland, the People, the Working Class and the Government.” Open to all “irrespective of religious affiliation,” the ceremony would emphasize values of the “new man”: love of homeland, active engagement in building the country, raising work-productivity, affirming the new against the reactionary old world, struggling for peace, and defending democratic achievements “through honesty and comradely behavior.” Falling short of its goals, the 1955 dedication wave attracted 52,322 teens (17.7%), who participated in 1120 ceremonies in front of 450,000 guests.32 Though rooted in “scientific Marxism,” the ceremony soon acquired the character of a political religion, with its exclusive “understanding” of evolution and the universe. As noted earlier, Ulbricht went so far in 1958 as to issue his own “Ten Commandments of Socialist Morals and Ethics” (Box 10.1) during a period of intensified attacks against church youth groups as “the last organized enemy of the GDR.”33 Authorities began to require ten  hours of instruction, focusing on ten themes, broadly summarized as the creation of the cosmos; origins of life on Earth; the significance of labor; human efforts to conquer nature through science/ technology; society’s evolutionary stages; creative powers and struggles of the masses; the “new era” in history; human relationships and women’s position in society; and the role of art/culture in the lives of “our people.” The party drew on 137,800 volunteers to render instruction more “interesting” and pedagogically effective. All participants received a gratis copy of the book, Cosmos-Earth-Mankind, revised 22 times by 1989.34 A 1967 ZIJ survey showed that only 75% of participating teens actually attended these lessons. Most criticized the long-winded key-note speeches by SED officials (e.g., ideologue Kurt Hager), who evinced little sensitivity toward questions occupying youth themselves. Those officiating stressed the (unpopular) “need” for military instruction or the significance of German-Soviet friendship societies. One speaker in Frankfurt/Oder bored them with detailed urban renewal plans for Oderstadt! Others stressed “the tasks of the Jugendweihe in preparation for the (fill in the blank) Party Congress.” Some of the 5200 local preparation committees seemed to exist only on paper, raising questions about the fraudulent use of funds.35

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Box 10.1  The Ten Commandments of Socialist Morals and Ethics

(1) You shall always campaign for the international solidarity of the working class and all working people and for the unbreakable bond of all socialist countries. (2) You shall love your fatherland and always be ready to deploy all your strength and capabilities for the defense of the workers’ and the farmers’ power. (3) You shall help to abolish exploitation of man by man. (4) You shall do good deeds for socialism, because socialism leads to a better life for all working people. (5) You shall act in the spirit of mutual help and comradely cooperation while building up socialism, and also respect the collective and heed its critique. (6) You shall protect and enhance state owned property. (7) You shall always strive to improve your performance, be frugal and strengthen socialist discipline at work. (8) You shall raise your children in the spirit of peace and socialism to be well educated, highly principled and physically hardened people. (9) You shall live purely and fairly and respect your family. (10) You shall show solidarity with those who fight for their national liberation and those who defend their national independence. SED General Secretary Walter Ulbricht, July 1958 Modified for the third time in November 1968 (Box 10.2), the dedication-­oath outlined the parameters of the all-sided socialist personality, urging teens to equate (more accurately: subordinate) their search for personal happiness to a duty to foster the goals of the collectivity. The 1968 version was bombastic, militaristic, and ideological in tone, identifying “patriotism” with an explicit acceptance of the party’s role as a constant source of counsel and direction. There was no room for youth input. Ostensibly voluntary, participation fluctuated, encompassing 150,000 of 200,000 eastern fourteen-year-olds in spring 1990. Not surprisingly, the number declined to 85,000 (38%) in 1991. The ceremony enjoyed a brief resurgence in some areas in the early 1990s, enrolling 70,000 in Rostock in 1993, and 95,000 across the new states in 1996. This suggests a degree of youth backlash against the debilitating loss of apprenticeships, secure jobs, and the elimination of “youth clubs” in the wake of unification.36

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Box 10.2  The Jugendweihe Oath (February 17, 1955)

Dear young friends! Are you ready to commit all of your strength to the building of a happy life for working people and for progress in the economy, science and the arts? Then answer me: Response: Yes, we pledge! Are you ready to devote all of your strength to achieve a unified, peace-loving, democratic and independent Germany? Then answer: Response: Yes, we pledge! Are you ready to live in the spirit of friendship among peoples and to use all of your strength, in order to defend, to the utmost, and to secure the peace, together with all peace-loving peoples? Then answer: Response: Yes, we pledge! We have heard your pledge! You have set yourselves a lofty goal. We, the community of all working people, promise you our support, protection and help. Forwards, united in strength! Revised Pledge 1968 Dear young Friends, Are you ready, as young citizens of our German Democratic Republic, to work together with us, true to the constitution, for the great and noble goal of socialism, and to fight with honor to preserve the revolutionary inheritance of the people? Then answer: Response: Yes, we pledge! Are you ready, as true sons and daughters of our Workers-and-­ Farmers-State to strive for higher education and culture, to become masters of your field, to learn steadfastly, and to use all of your knowledge and talents for the realization of our great, humanistic ideals? Then answer me: Response: Yes, we pledge! Are you ready, as worthy members of the socialist community, always to behave in comradely cooperation, with mutual respect and assistance, and always to unite your path to personal happiness with the struggle for the happiness of the people? Then answer: Response: Yes, we pledge! (continued)

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Box 10.2  (continued)

Are you ready, as true patriots, to deepen our firm friendship with the Soviet Union, to solidify the brotherhood of all socialist countries, to fight in the spirit of proletarian internationalism, to protect the peace and to defend socialism against every imperialistic attack? Then answer: Response: Yes, we pledge! We have heard your pledge. You have set yourself a great and noble goal. With celebration we take you into the great community of working people, which has established the socialist society of the GDR under the leadership of the working class and its revolutionary party, united in will and in deed. We extend to you a great responsibility. We will assist you at all times, with advice and action, to creatively shape the socialist future. Source: Andreas Meier, Jugendweihe-Jugendfeier: Ein deutsches nostalgisches Fest vor und nach 1990 (Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998), 200–202. To these formal agents of socialization, I would add the strong “cohort effect” generated by two SED-sponsored festivals, the real intent of which was not to give free rein to the voices of youth but rather to enhance the GDR’s international image. Decades later, some of my interview partners stressed the impact these events had on their own political consciousness, especially when viewed against the backdrop of the 1968 Prague Spring. The first centered on three German youth festivals (Deutschland Treffen) “hosted” by the FDJ, which featured a wide array of lectures, discussions, and cultural activities. The inaugural May 1950 gathering attracted 700,000 from both parts of Germany, after which 30,000 FRG youth were denied re-entry by their own officials, alleging that they might have contracted contagious diseases. FDJ Secretary Honecker came to their rescue, organizing tents, food, and sleeping bags until officials in Bonn rescinded the ban two days later. His status enhanced, he was elected to the Politburo in July. The second DT-celebration took place in June 1954, one year after the workers’ uprising. Though constitutionally committed to unification, albeit under a socialist banner, the SED failed to inspire western leftists. With the CIA and FRG intelligence officers mobilizing behind the scenes, the West-FDJ was subsequently banned as “anti-constitutional.”37 The final Deutschland gathering brought half a million youth to East Berlin, May 16–18, 1964. East German musicians were permitted to play western tunes publicly for the first time, leading many to hope for further

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cultural liberalization. SED leaders interpreted the 30,000 who were waving GDR flags as they paraded past the tribunal as proof that the new generation had a “healthy relationship to their state.” The Youth Law approved two weeks earlier accorded them the right to participate in all sectors of society, declaring that “all questions of young people are to be answered patiently and in a convincing manner.”38 One outcome was the creation of a new radio program, Youth Studio DT 64, which aired daily on DDR III. Its purpose was to counter the decadent influences of western music featured on RIAS (Radio in the American Sector) and SFB-Beat (Sender Free Berlin). A further experience redirecting the consciousness of Born-into cohorts was the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students, held July 28–August 5, 1973. Dubbed “the red Woodstock,” it served as a test-case for a “controlled opening” to the outside world under the new premier. Its 1542 events attracted five million visitors, including 25,646 guests and 1700 organizations from 140 countries. Intent on presenting Eastern youth as “happy and optimistic,” authorities left nothing to chance. In early July, Stasi agents began rounding up groups that might convey a different impression. The state dissolved 917 “criminal associations,” of whom 1824 (of 5258 “members”) were arrested; 25,927 juveniles were subject to “control measures,” including detention for 2720. Over 50 allegedly promiscuous women (HWGs, “frequently changing partners”) were relegated to homes; 477 adolescents were held in psychiatric clinics, 639 in work camps, and 1163  in “special” children’s facilities. Among young workers, 637 had their IDs confiscated, 327 had their camping permits revoked, and 574 were denied “vacation days.” While 19,779 were hauled in for “discussions” to prevent them from traveling to Berlin, 2577 encountered Stasi surveillance, and another 2293 were imprisoned.39 Renewed demarcation after the festival dashed youth’s hopes for liberalization, although the 1974 Youth Law obliged filmmakers, publishers, radio, and TV stations to improve the “attractiveness” of youth programming. The state established a fund “to encourage youth initiatives” but only under FDJ auspices. The number of youth clubs rose from 4327 in 1976 to 6915 in 1982, but partial to “home-baked, prudish, and laughable tastes” themselves, SED rulers embarked on a collision course with its youngest citizens over the one form of voice they valued most: music. SED leaders grew incapable of distinguishing between “love for the socialist fatherland” and love for themselves.

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“Leave Us Kids Alone”: Finding Voice Through Music Had Margot Honecker followed her own counsel, the GDR might have witnessed a lot less youth mobilization from below, the combined forces of which ultimately caused the socialist house of cards to collapse in 1989. Speaking at the Eighth Pedagogical Congress (October 1978), she asserted: “every generation is confronted with changed conditions of life … Young people gain their social experiences here and now … That requires understanding by the elders for the young … We must take their subjective experiences seriously, the positive and also the negative. However, we must explain the social context to them.”40 Researchers at the new Central Institute for Youth Research in Leipzig had already offered that advice a decade earlier: Nothing is more erroneous than to observe youth with the eyes of yesterday. When one assumes that 50% of all 16 to 20 year-olds will own a Moped or motorcycle by 1973, for example, then it is utopian to think that they will, en masse, want to spend their weekends hiking with their guitars … the shaping of young lives will change faster and more fundamentally than in years past. That will find its expression especially in the realm of recreational time.41

The formative experiences of adolescents in 1959 differed significantly from those of 1949; those born-into the GDR would encounter even bigger experiential gaps between 1969 and 1979, due to scientific-technical advances and the five-day work-week. Youth’s need for recognition, autonomy, honesty, transparency, and unregulated fun mirrored the optimism that transcended national borders through the 1960s. The Ulbricht government did anything but attend to the voices of youth, however. Over the next decade, the SED felt almost as threatened by “longhairs in Leipzig” as by revisionist conservatives in Bonn. Jazz, “beat” and rock ’n roll music served as primary voice channels for Born-into cohorts. Rushing to reestablish broadcasting networks to foster their own political ideologies, the Soviet Union and the United States had been quick to recognize the power of music in reestablishing a sense of normalcy amidst the ruins of defeated Germany, although the initial emphasis fell on classical music.42 By the late 1950s, new broadcasting sources, social venues, and youth clubs would lead ideologues to devote

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more attention to popular genres. Helma Kaldewey documents the SED’s up-and-down responses to jazz as “the people’s music,” dating from its roots in the Weimar period to its formal embrace as a “national treasure” in the 1980s. Given its growing popularity among members of the Aufbau generation (e.g., the FDJ’s Bessie Smith Club, created in 1959), the Party moved to “clarify” the position of jazz in socialist society by way of a Central Committee resolution in 1961–1962. Claiming that Germany had long assimilated jazz elements like Dixieland rhythms and fox-trot dancing into its own popular music, authorities accorded first jazz, then “swing” a limited role “within the manifold offerings in our cultural space.”43 With jazz already flourishing in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest, the SED took the bold step of allowing Louis Armstrong to stage twenty-one concerts in five cities (Berlin, Leipzig, Erfurt, Magdeburg, Schwerin) between March 20 and April 8, 1965. They included his rendition of the Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht classic, Mack the Knife, providing a symbolic platform for denouncing capitalist gangsterism as well as American racism. Although it quickly infiltrated their ranks with Stasi informants, officials allowed prominent musicians to travel to international jazz festivals, recognizing them as a source of hard currency and national prestige. Made-­ in-­the-GDR jazz fit the mold of selecting the positive elements of German history (folk songs) and blending them with socialist modernity. Accepting the musical preferences of the next generation, along with its penchant for sexually suggestive dancing and disorderly attire, was another thing altogether. Church and state were curiously unified in opposing the songs and gyrations of Elvis Presley and beat music in the 1950s and 1960s. One official proclaimed: “Pop music (Schlager) is at present one of the most dangerous political phenomena of decadent, imperialist culture. Insofar as it pretends to offer unpolitical content, it helps imperialist ideology to present itself in a disguised way, in order to influence the consciousness of broad social strata at higher levels than would be possible through direct, reactionary political agitation.”44 Boogie-woogie was denounced as “cultural barbarism,” causing the state to send “dance regulators” to halt intuitive, unrestrained, over-heated dancing (known as hotten), based on excessively fast music.45 The arrival of rock and roll in East Germany amounted to a case of “non-love at first sight.”46 Shocked by violent outbursts that followed a Rolling Stones concert in West Berlin in September 1965, SED district leaders in Leipzig tried to rein in the “rowdy” musical tastes of its youngest

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citizens. It withdrew the performance license of The Butlers, inspired by The Beatles, on charges of “tax evasion”—although Neues Deutschland had praised the group a year earlier. In mid-October it banned fifty-four of fiftyeight registered local bands (called “guitar groups”). The Leipziger Volkszeitung wrote: “They have long, disorderly hair, partially stiffened by dirtiness, they gesticulate during their appearances as if they were apes, force out indecipherable sounds … their long, matted hair, which is the external manifestation of their mental orientation, narrows their horizons so significantly that they cannot see how abnormal, unhealthy and unhuman their movements are.”47 “Clean, self-conscious, proud,” morally correct socialist youth participated in “singing clubs,” not “hootenannies.” Another LV reporter characterized rock-fans as “bums” (Gammeler) with “pimples on their noses and blackheads on their faces … with their long filthy manes, ragged twist-pants. They stink ten meters into the wind.”48 They were allegedly work-shy, asocial, unhinged, driven by base instincts, ecstasy, and spastic body movements. Despite their working-class origins, the Beatles and western rock groups were but vehicles for ideological diversion. Youth caught wearing pants too wide or too narrow, mini- or maxi skirts, carrying colorful plastic bags, chewing gum, or using Anglicisms could face expulsion from schools and universities. Two Leipzig teens nonetheless posted home-made flyers, urging beat-­ fans to assemble at Wilhelm-Leuschner-Platz to protest the ban on October 31, 1965. Officials pushed teachers to threaten students with sanctions, generating broader publicity for the event: the 2000–2500 who showed up comprised the largest demonstration since the 1953 workers’ uprising. Riot police deployed high-pressured water-hoses to disperse protestors, but their made-in-the-GDR technology proved dysfunctional, triggering laughter among the crowd. Uniformed officers responded with dogs and bayonets, using tactics so brutal than even stand-by NVA soldiers were shocked. Of the 267 arrested on-site, 97 were sentenced, without a trial, to six weeks of hard labor in the coal mines.49 §215 of Criminal Code was expanded to include “rowdiness.” Bitten by police dogs while observing the protest, Erich Loest memorialized the event in his 1977 novel, Es geht seinen Gang (roughly, “business as usual”). City officials erected a memorial pillar at the site after unification. The party’s eventual acceptance of rock music occurred in three stages, moving from “aversion and recognition” (1964–1972), to “euphoria with restrictions” (1973–1982), to “anarchy with consequences” (1982–1989).50 By the early 1970s, even FDJ loyalists were

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clamoring for rock-bands and dances of their own: “We hear and read all day about potato and grain harvests, plan fulfillment, etc. We would like to hear something else while dancing in the evening.”51 Unable to suppress new cultural currents conveyed through West-TV, radio, and homemade cassettes, rulers tried to domesticate them, even inviting FDJ-leader Horst Schumann to demonstrate “the twist” at an SED meeting. Authorities sought to meliorate rock’s spontaneous, aggressive, “anarchic vitality” by toning down its electro-acoustic effects. They conceded that although officials had been “distracted” by the strong, imperialistic nature of western music and media in its early years, the GDR had successfully evolved, finding its own path to modern dance and musical entertainments: “Today original compositions with German texts can be taken for granted, contributing to the special profile of GDR Rock.”52 The Butlers were relicensed as the Karl Renft Combo in 1971. Though Ulbricht had once described “the perpetual monotony of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ as spiritually dead and ludicrous,” Beatles songs were reinterpreted as working-class indictments of capitalism, sung by “basement children of the deteriorated industrial harbor city Liverpool.”53 According to a 1970 ZIJ survey, 73% of young workers relied on western stations for music and news. Embracing the logic, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, the SED sought to tame the “Trojan horse” of western ideological diversion and perversion: Rock music is a cultural phenomenon without precedent. Its undeniable audial impact and the number of its adherents forces us to react. In the first instance there is a need to satisfy the consumption demands. Beyond that we must use its attractiveness to bring our arguments to the people, whereby arguments and music usually go hand in hand … It is not sufficient to relate to rock music in ways that are limited to the emotional ties of the consumers of this music.54

The FDJ served as the primary delivery vehicle for music-with-a-message, averaging 60,000 dances per year in 6915 youth clubs, featuring up to 16,000 amateurs participating in 5000 bands by the early 1980s.55 Cultural authorities insisted that young musicians utilize their “mother tongue,” meaning the ideologically sanctioned language of their authoritarian fathers. They underestimated the ability of young audiences to read between the lines, though the bands’ criticisms of real-existing socialist

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society became harsher and less veiled as music forms evolved from beat and rock to punk and heavy metal. The generation most subject to “all-sided” socialization encountered repressive tolerance at best. The Stasi’s own obsession with reading between the lines of musical texts dated back to Biermann. Efforts to address societal problems in clear language were suspect from the start. As Karl Winkler noted in his autobiographical account, “Alcoholism is a problem, but if one writes a song about it, or even hints at the hopelessness of youth, he’s already an enemy of the state.”56 Indeed, disaffected youth soon afforded another source of western currency. The youth prison population consisted largely of those eager to be bought out, after failed attempts to “flee the Republic.” By the early 1980s, authorities transported adolescents from local jails to the Stasi prison in Karl Marx Stadt every 10–14 days. From there it was only a matter of time before they would be bussed to Cottbus, where 250–300 per year were deported to the FRG. The price for an “unskilled worker” at the time was DM10,000, versus DM30,000 for a technical worker, or up to DM50,000 for an engineer. The son of two SED loyalists, Winkler wrote to his mother before he was deported to the west: “we are the generation that you will come to miss. If you don’t pay attention, you will be very lonely.”57 To generate a politically correct version of rock ‘n roll, the state had to embed youth music into its already outdated, inefficient framework of production and reproduction technologies. To render “our socialist community more pleasant, beautiful with new experiences,” GDR bands required sound and recording systems, electric guitars (VEB Musima), keyboards (Trowa, Tracton, Exquisit), a record company (Amiga), and new music-school courses. Dancing became another area worthy of socialist cultivation; one annual festival in Karl Marx Stadt registered a total of 25,000 dance events which featured 650 “amateur” bands, attracting five million visitors across the district. Two special schools offered modern dance music classes (Friedrichshain, Leipzig) as of 1963, producing many early GDR rock stars, until they were forced to close in 1978. The FDJ initiated an annual TV “Rhythm” concert, bringing the best new rock productions to a national audience; it began with 10 groups and 40 titles in 1971, ending with 189 titles performed by 50 groups in 1979.58 By 1983, Olaf Leitner had compiled over 500 pages of GDR rock-­ history, including musical criticism, song texts, and a lexicon of 107 officially licensed bands, ranging from Albatros to (Petra) Zieger and the Smokings.59 The Puhdys, Kreis, Elefant, Electra, and City I were eventually

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allowed to perform in the West, including the United States. Licensed bands were paid according to four group rankings, averaging M2000–3000 per performance; the Puhdys, by contrast, received M15,000, but the state immediately deducted 20% in taxes for professionals, 10% for amateurs.60 The group Karat saw one of its tunes, Über sieben Brücken musst du gehen (You must cross seven bridges) turned into a European hit, after FRG star Peter Maffay adopted it for his own album. Wolf Biermann’s step-daughter, Nina Hagen (trained to sing opera), acquired an international reputation in Punk, New Wave, and Hard Rock circles after she exited the GDR, first in Hamburg, then Los Angeles. Obsessed with controlling technology, and facing heavy international debt, cultural authorities repeatedly cut funding for made-in-the-GDR musical and film entertainment, which only increased the demand for western audio-visual equipment that young people could not afford to buy in Intershops. Cassette recorders became a favorite Jugendweihe gift. The rise of private media outlets in the FRG after 1980 fueled competition and regular technological upgrades, rendering stereo recording and transmission the norm on that side of the Wall. The poor sound quality of GDR-youth radio proved useless for personal recording, while the stiff, censorship-conscious style of their own radio hosts impelled ever more teens to rely on RIAS, SFB, and Radio Luxembourg. DT 64 increased the number of hours devoted to youth music from two to eight to twenty hours per day by 1987: too little, too late. GDR-rock failed to halt the demand for western music and block-­ buster films (aired on FRG-TV), forcing the SED into a concessionary spiral in hopes of securing youth loyalty. To mark Berlin’s 750th anniversary, the FDJ sponsored an open-air “peace concert” in Treptower Park featuring Bob Dylan and Tom Petty, attracting 100,000 fans in September 1987. In July 1988, Bruce Springsteen drew 160,000 ticket-holders to the Weissensee race-track venue (with many outside-listeners), reportedly the largest concert in GDR history. US Embassy officials failed to persuade New Jersey’s working-class hero to cancel the event once they learned its purpose was to celebrate the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.61 Despite these concessions, young East Germans grew increasingly disgruntled over relentless state efforts to define every last centimeter of their all-sided socialist personalities. On October 7, 1977, an East Berlin concert following a military parade for the GDR’s 28th birthday turned into another violent protest. Roughly 20,000 youth, aged sixteen to

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twenty-­one, assembled at the base of the TV-Tower for a performance by the GDR rock-band Express. Almost all were FDJ members; half were apprentices and workers with no record of “negative-decadent behavior.” Hoping for a better view, some climbed up an airduct which soon collapsed, seriously injuring those who landed on concrete. Unaware of the accident, the crowd resisted police efforts to clear space for an ambulance. Despite their FDJ affiliations, they began chanting “down with the bullpack …, out with you pigs,” “down with the GDR,” “away with the Wall,” and “What is Germany’s biggest shame? The Honecker gang [is to blame].” Throwing stones and trash cans, they even beat and stripped individual police. The ensuing four-hour battle resulted in 468 arrests, 83 injuries, and 3 deaths; 68 police were wounded, 2 died that day, 2 more days later. Leaders initially tried to blame western saboteurs, but an internal Stasi report issued in November attested to its spontaneous nature, rooted in pent-up anger over the Biermann expulsion. One in eight detainees had parents who either worked for the Central Committee, were employed in SED district offices or state ministries, were high-ranking NVA officers, GDR diplomats, journalists, or party secretaries. Among the SED’s purported “active helpers and combat reserve,” sixty-four were imprisoned for four months, others up to three years; twenty-three served six weeks, and sixteen received probation. Minister Mielke directed his Stasi troops and parents to exercise more control over their children’s “unregulated recreational activities.”62

From Voice to Exit: Normalos, Avantis, Gruftis, Punks, and Skins Like older cohorts and societal groups, young citizens developed their own forms of voice and exit. By the early 1980s, the state’s refusal to “leave the kids alone” induced increasingly alienated youth to turn away from the system by way of diverse subcultural affiliations. Wolfgang Büscher and Peter Wensierski attributed the mushrooming of alternative scenes to economic stagnation, exacerbating youth discontent on both sides of the Wall.63 Despite a constitutional right/duty to work, GDR officials encountered unemployment bottlenecks, impelling them to open special labor offices in Berlin and Neubrandenburg, paying young job-hunters 8–10 Marks per day to support their searches. Unofficial estimates ranged from

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2000 jobless in Schwerin to 30,000 non-workers in Berlin. Too many were channeled into dirty, difficult, or boring jobs beneath their levels of formal qualification. Surrounded by urban decay and environmental degradation—visible to all but Wandlitz elites—many turned their backs on the GDR, choosing internal emigration even in the face of likely criminalization. Reviewing ZIJ data and other GDR sources from earlier decades, I discerned four youth subgroups pursuing their own voice and/or exit variations, which I classified as Accommodationists, Materialists, Mobilizers, and Drop-outs, respectively. The first group consisted primarily of FDJ activists and university Anpasser, “true believers” of sorts who pursued journalism, law, social, or economic sciences. Career-oriented medical students, natural science, and art majors often deliberately selected less politicized fields to avoid ideological work. Attuned to the rules of the game, their ranks included the offspring of party officials, some with Jewish background; family connections ensured them better consumption and travel options, in exchange for political acquiescence. Rita Kuczynski encountered many such individuals during her time at the University and later at the Academy. Most deliberately chose not to exercise voice, beyond their attraction to rock music (sanctioned or not); their privileged position led few to pursue exit, beyond the dissident children of certain party loyalists (e.g., Thomas Brasch, Monika Maron). Major student surveys including FDJ and SED members nonetheless testified to a “complicated reciprocal relationship” between their theoretical orientation to core socialist values (Grundüberzeugung) and their lack of commitment to acting on those beliefs (Handlungsbereitschaft) as early as 1970.64 The Materialists consisted of apprentices and young workers, whose acceptance of socialism was instrumental at best. Those with specialized skills (plumbers, electricians, mechanics) or access to scarce goods (like construction materials) could eventually improve their physical circumstances by eschewing politics while participating in the informal economy, by providing paid services to acquaintances on evenings and weekends. These were niche-dwellers, many of whom would later see their Datsche as an alternative sphere. This group also included so-called Poppers, politically disinterested “preppies”; fastidious dressers, they fixated largely on discos and dancing. Young Materialists were the first to take advantage of an unexpected exit option in 1989, heading for the “green border” between Austria and Hungary or besieging FRG embassies in Prague and Warsaw, hoping to find a consumers’ paradise on the other side. They

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were ill-prepared for the culture-shock of mass unemployment that followed, once they discovered that their “special skills” were completely outdated. The Mobilizers included young Christians and eco-peace activists who accepted certain socialist ideals but rejected most regime practices. Focusing on local conditions, they became more vocal in rejecting the contradiction between the SED’s “peace policy” rhetoric and militarization activities in schools. Lutheran pastors supplied safe spaces for them to exchange ideas and resources about real problems. Music served as a crucial form of voice among these kids, in addition to their samizdat publications. Rainer Eppelmann allowed them to stage their first “blues mass” at his Samaritan Church on June 3, 1979. It drew 450 guests, including many “blue-shirts” (FDJ), despite Bible readings presented every 20 minutes; the second event attracted 600. The third blues mass in late 1980 took place in the Erlöser (Savior) Church in Lichtenberg; it was offered four times in a row to accommodate roughly 6000 attendees.65 While some became the flower children of the East—long-haired, blue-jean types preaching the gospel of peace, love, and vegetarianism—others pursued simple consciousness-raising projects like tree-plantings and bikerides-­ for-the-earth. The Council of Ministers responded with two resolutions in 1982 and 1985, respectively, outlawing “the Collection and Evaluation … of Information over the Condition of the Natural Environment in the GDR.” Evincing both Mobilizer and Drop-Out tendencies, Avantis (Avant-­ gardists) did their best to ignore the socialist state, resembling their generational predecessors, the literati of Prenzlauer Berg. Their cultural pursuits included music-making, self-produced plays, and generating their own outlets for poetry and art. They embraced the mottos, Aufgestanden in Ruinen (“standing up amidst the ruins,” a wordplay on the GDR anthem) and Ruinen schaffen ohne Waffen (“create ruins without weapons”), mocking failed SED urban and peace policies. Some continued to live outside the system after the fall of the Wall, joining forces with their western Anarcho and squatter-counterparts. One of their most noteworthy projects was the creation of the “Art and Culture-Center Tacheles e.V.” They occupied a set of veritable ruins located in the Scheunenviertel of Berlin-East in February 1990: it consisted of five floors with limited back-wall sections, no functional plumbing, and life-endangering stairways. Although the building’s deteriorated condition owed more to GDR

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neglect than to war-time destruction, Michael Douglas purportedly used the site as a backdrop for a post-1990 World War II movie. Also deliberately provocative in appearance and evincing Drop-out tendencies, the Gruftis emulated UK and FRG groups known as Gothics or New Romantics. The name derives from poverty-stricken people of the eighteenth century who had nowhere to sleep but in abandoned cemetery plots or crypts.66 They dressed somberly (sewing their own formal clothes), further adorned with ratted hair, thick black eyeliner, and deathly pallored cosmetics. Their preference for black, in contrast to “socialist grey,” pitted their affinity for dark-medievalism against pseudo-modernist socialism. Rejecting party propaganda heralding a collective utopia, they reflected on imminent existential threats, for example, nuclear war between the superpowers and environmental catastrophes. Though few seemed to believe in life after death, they rejected official atheism and scientific Marxism in favor of random forms of mysticism. Most came to the Grufti scene by way of music originating in Punk culture. Their favorite bands included Cure (UK), Sisters of Mercy (UK), Christen Dead (USA), Rosengarten (GDR), and Revenge (GDR); they frequented their own special dance clubs. According to interviews, most were working-class youth with skilled or semi-skilled jobs, rendering them Prolis (proletarians) by day, Gruftis by night. Their search for peace and quiet led some to favor late-night cemetery visits, in contrast to far-right Skins who vandalized grave sites. A few allegedly like to sleep in coffins, but the deficiencies of socialist production usually led to chronic wood shortages, limiting even that supply.67 They preferred to self-isolate from other groups, using parties by candlelight to search for personal meaning in their prefabricated lives. Unlike rightwing groups who engaged in open aggression toward perceived weaklings, they turned their aggression inward, admitting to periods of depression and occasional suicide attempts. Though many had failed or faked their way through hypocritical school civics courses (Staatsbürgerkunde), many interviewees felt run over by the rapid unfolding of unification.68 Both the Politburo and the MfS failed to differentiate among various “negative-decadent” groups, refusing to consider the socio-psychological and overly regulated sources of their discontent dating back to the 1960s. In May 1966 Mielke had issued an MfS directive targeting “beat-fans” for evincing decadent and amoral orientations; those guidelines served as the one-size-fits-all basis for all subsequent “delinquency” assessments.69 Any youth group acting outside the narrow confines of FDJ membership constituted an “insecurity factor.” Every measure to root out “internal

10  THE ANTI-POLITICAL IDENTITIES OF EAST GERMAN YOUTH 

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enemies” began with the assumption that heinous western forces, not the debilitating conditions of real-­existing socialism, were responsible for their subversion. Stasi agents at all levels faced a double bind: they had to constantly prove that the state had enough enemies to justify personnel and budget increases, while also demonstrating that they had such groups “under control.” Their job descriptions excluded efforts to grasp the motives of the kids themselves. They could only “interpret” their behavior within an all-or-nothing ideological framework, ignoring economic failures and the system’s repressive nature per se. There was no love lost between the FDJ and youth groups branded as “asocials.” Some Drop-outs sought occasional refuge at church concerts, while FDJ members blocked these so-called grungy, long-haired types from entering other popular meeting spots, like the Mokka-Milch-Eisbar in Karl Marx Allee. Many wound up as housing-squatters, limited to no-­ skill jobs. The full-time Drop-Outs or Refusniks were beset with ideological polarization; their ranks extended from anarchists (Autonomen), anti-fascists (Anti-Fa), and left-wing Punks, to Heavy Metal fans, soccer Hooligans, and neo-Nazi Skinheads. All were designated “asocial elements,” official parlance for those deviating from the socialist-personality norm requiring “betterment.”70 Their collective rejection of socialist values, behaviors, and appearances rendered them enemies of the state, and thus subject to charges of (somehow apolitical) rowdyism, agitation, or rioting (Zusammenrottung). Initially known as Provos (provocateurs), Punks constituted the ultimate Drop-outs, often displaying self-destructive behavioral patterns or seeking refuge from the “people’s police” within Church walls.71 They constituted the most colorful element of the GDR’s grey youth landscape: the rainbow of their trademark “cock-combs” and “Iroquois” hair-styles usually involved water colors applied on weekends. The buttons attached to their jackets were not the Nazi insignia favored by Skinheads but rather miniatures of Lenin or Marx (“I got it from the FDJ,” one told me). Punks constituted a special class of niche-dwellers who rejected the masses not for their socialist-revolutionary consciousness, but for their descent into passive, bourgeois mediocrity. They preferred beer-drinking life on the streets to consumption-obsessed people who hid in their datschas, engaging in “garden-gnome culture” (Spiesser mit Gartenzwergkultur). Their favorite bands used names mocking SED slogans, for example, Vorbildliche Planerfüllung (Exemplary Plan-Fulfillment); thirty such

440 

J. M. MUSHABEN

musical groups fell under MfS observation between 1983 and 1985. The fact that most Punk bands were barred from recording in state studios or denied airtime on youth radio was viewed as a badge of honor. While their western counterparts identified with the motto No future, Eastern punks rebelled against “too much future” being dictated by party bosses.72 These Easterners were “no future” kids in a literal sense, however, since Stasi surveillance and repeated criminal detentions put an end to their educational or occupational prospects. Bahnhof Lichtenberg became a core hang-out spot for “unhygienic, unaesthetic, non-working bums”; many arrested for vagrancy were sent off to coal mines to learn the proper socialist-­ way-of-life. Prenzlauer Berg was another polit-ideological “hotspot” for Stasi agents seeking them out. The shift from Hard Rock to Heavy Metal comprised a slippery slope into more aggressive expressions of voice and exit. In 1981, the SED had allowed the British groups Girlschool and Angelwitch to appear on a popular youth TV program, construing its negative texts as evidence of a western working-class rebellion against capitalist injustice. The regime moved to rein in a growing Heavy Metal fan base at home, however, stressing that the GDR had officially eliminated all sources of class discontent. Stasi agents characterized their attire as uniformed, fascist, and militaristic, adorned with skulls, Reich-flags/eagles, and other suspect symbols, while their musical texts glorified violence in nationalistic, sexist tones. By the mid-1980s the MfS began to keep records on the proliferation of tattoos (often acquired in prison), which were deemed a form of self-­mutilation. FDJ activists were “encouraged” to engage in discussions with Heavy Metal fans to win them back for socialism, an unrealistic proposition. Authorities nonetheless continued to crack down on Heavy Metal fans. One Rostock band, Crystal, topped the charts in 1988 with its song Bergringrennen, based on a public brawl that erupted during a motor-­ cycle race in Mecklenburg. Authorities responded by banning such musical performances and denying race-track admission to those not conforming to socialist dress-codes.73 Unable to find expensive leather jackets, boots, and metal studs at home, many went to Budapest to buy them, or made their own T-shirts and insignia. What they could not hear on DT 64, they recorded via Western stations or contraband Czech albums. Genuine Metal fans were not overtly political; they kept copious records of bands, album covers, and cassettes, and produced underground magazines analyzing changing sounds and texts. The sense of belonging mirrored in

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these Notgemeinschaften disappeared after the Wall fell, once fans could directly access western recordings and paraphernalia. Heavy Metal was also the music of choice among Rowdys and Hooligans. The latter included fanatical soccer-club fans, who cared more about the prospects of a good fight than about their team’s athletic achievements. Chanting Nazi slogans was a common occurrence at soccer games between BFC Dynamo and FC Union Berlin. From 1978 to 1979, the MfS recorded 188 cases of vandalism of a fascist nature; agents registered 960 incidents in 1986/1987, rising to 1099 the next season.74 Problems inherent in large-scale crowd control afforded many opportunities for collective violence along primitive lines, a phenomenon not restricted to the east. In 1990, for example, French fans battled those from Belgium, England, Germany, Italy, and Scotland. Following the 1998 World Cup match in France, German fans inflicted brain damage on a local policeman, leading officials to bar traveling rowdies from entering the country for future games. Even more troubling, yet curiously ignored were male groups who openly rejected “anti-fascism.” Displaying few qualms about taking on the state, Skinheads comprised the “monster faction” among East German subcultures. On October 17, 1987, the police failed to intervene as 30 Skinheads (including six Westerners) viciously attacked 300–400 Punks at the Zionskirche concert, shouting Sieg Heil and anti-Semitic slurs. The MfS subsequently identified roughly 800 males whose “external appearance and behavior” indicated Skinhead affiliations. Always ready for a fight, their physical attacks were somewhat random but directed primarily against foreigners or hapless minorities. The shaved-head vanguard was dominated by white males eighteen to twenty-five, often recognized at their job-sites for their stellar work ethic and discipline. In contrast to other subcultures, they did not shy away from NVA conscription. Their treatment of women, including their own girlfriends (“Skin-Brides,” deemed guilty by association), was often misogynist.75 As they formalized their networks, they began recruiting “Baby Skins.” Trying to study youth extremism prior to 1989, social scientists like Wolfgang Brück encountered many party taboos. Empirical research was prohibited outright or destined for the Panzerschrank, because “that which is not permitted cannot exist.” Article 6 of the 1949 Constitution decreed: The German Democratic Republic, true to the interest of the people and to the fulfillment of international obligations, has eradicated German militarism and Nazism within her territory. Stressing that little was known about their social origins, Brück differentiated between youth who copied

442 

J. M. MUSHABEN

skin fashions or migrated to the scene from Punk and soccer groups (Red-­ Skins, Fan-Skins), from those embracing primitive rightwing ideology, engaging in criminal acts, or mobilizing and “holding the reins” (Lucifer ante portas). He dared to mention the role of NVA service and alcohol abuse in fostering their interest in military virtues, weapons, and hypermasculinity. Instead of physically excluding them from clubs and discos, he urged FDJ leaders to develop re-integration strategies for those attracted to Skin cliques out of personal frustration with school, home, and workplace conditions.76 In April 1988 Interior Minister Nedwig commissioned a three-part study regarding the “political nature” of GDR Skin groups, directed by criminologists at the Humboldt University. The first stage, determining their territorial distribution, was completed in November. The second phase involved a detailed review of court records and sentences, linked to the sociological background of indicted individuals.77 The third part was to draw on qualitative interviews with incarcerated extremists to determine their personal motives. The deputy police director charged with supervising the study was suddenly fired, replaced by a Colonel who insisted that such interviews were “unnecessary,” insofar as those convicted “had already been interrogated by the criminal police,” who had found “no proof” that Skinheads were politically motivated. The MfS expressed no interest in pursuing the study further.78 As Ingo Hasselbach noted in recounting his years a leading neo-Nazi, the best recruitment sites for rightwing extremists were GDR prisons. According to one small survey, 85% admitted to having had previous police encounters or arrest records; half of those were skilled laborers, a third were apprentices.79 The charges ranged from physical assault, rowdyism, and resisting authorities, to defiling state institutions or symbols—but not anti-fascism per se. The state’s reaction was paradoxical at best: it consistently overrated the dangerous nature of youth rebellion, for which it imposed the highest possible sentences, while simultaneously denying that the problem was ideological in nature. Born in 1967, Hasselbach was largely raised by his grandparents; his father, mother, and step-father were all accredited SED journalists/editors. Initially attracted to the Hippie and Punk scenes at 13, he claimed he “was happy to belong to a group of young people, who were no longer willing to be told what to do.” He was soon stealing up to fifteen bottles of schnapps a day, consumed with his best friend.80 Completing a masonry apprenticeship in 1983, he was “fired up” by the music of the Sex Pistols, UK Subs, Plasmatics, Hansaplast, and

10  THE ANTI-POLITICAL IDENTITIES OF EAST GERMAN YOUTH 

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later Böhse Onkelz, inducing his group to attack tourists and police at Alexanderplatz. He was first convicted of rowdyism in 1985. Wedded at twenty, Hasselbach and his wife secured a 7000-Mark “marriage credit,” but he landed in prison for nine months the same year, having yelled, “The Wall must go” at a 1987 Friendship Festival honoring the Soviet Union; his older cellmate had hacked his wife to death. Divorced eighteen months later, he co-founded two neo-Nazi groups, the “Lichtenberger Front” and “Movement January 30.” In 1988 he was placed on probation (ten months) for “insulting” the GDR, then was re-­ incarcerated in August 1989 for attempting to flee the Republic via Czechoslovakia—just when others began occupying FRG embassies. He escaped to the West three days before the Wall collapsed. Once there, he joined leading western Nazis like Michael Kuhn and Christian Worch in creating the National Alternative Party (NAP). In February 1990, he mobilized other Neo-Nazi comrades in occupying a string of houses (Weitlingstraße) in Berlin-Lichtenberg, indicating that squatting was no longer the sole province of leftist or autonomous radicals. Detained for another six months for distributing fascist materials in 1990, he was elected NAP chair, leading him to forge ties with like-minded extremists in the United States, Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, and Denmark. Shocked at seeing himself evolve into a “rat catcher” in a French documentary film (Wir sind wieder da) in 1991, he participated in a social street-worker project, which led him to quit the NAP. Over the next two years he nonetheless took part in street battles against leftists and militant Anti-Fas. After two more trials and the likewise shocking arson deaths of two Turkish children and their grandmother in Mölln, he officially exited the movement in February 1993. His first book was an attempt to reconcile with his biological father, who had abandoned him at an early age. His second described the repeated death threats he received from his former comrades over the next several years.81 Not all Skins were hard-core neo-Nazis. Their affiliations began with shared musical tastes, then descended down the slippery slope of “fashion statements” until they discovered a sense of belonging/comradeship, and finally, political conviction.82 Interviews with sixty-five young radicals in East Berlin suggested that adherents were not limited to underprivileged elements.83 Their trademark “bomber jackets” cost 800–900 Marks on the black market. Brück concluded that 40–50% of all youth had some exposure to rightwing groups (e.g., in dance clubs), based on four ZIJ studies involving 3000 tenth and twelfth graders.84 Although 65–72% of the

444 

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respondents personally rejected Skinhead ideology, 25–31% expressed some “understanding” for these groups, in part because they had openly rejected the socialist state years before the peaceful revolution of 1989.85 My aim here is not to suggest that all eastern youth were radicalized. Like their parents, countless third-generation Normalos “arranged” themselves within the system, using whatever connections and loopholes they could to fill in chronic consumption gaps inflicted by the command economy. Their musical tastes nonetheless bound them to a larger youth culture, allowing them to give voice to their frustrations with the ever-present state. High alcoholic consumption at early ages (beer, wine legal at sixteen) offered a further, if temporary form of exit. Radical subculture elements were exceptional insofar as they went public with their discontent. Those adolescents who felt they had nothing left to lose deliberately broke with the ideological taboos imposed by geriatric leaders. By the mid-­1980s, the SED had clearly lost the hearts and minds of most youth. Having internalized the motto, to learn from the Soviet Union is to learn victory, even FDJ functionaries were hard pressed to comprehend its Sputnik ban, a Soviet publication describing glasnost and perestroika campaigns. As ZIJ surveys attest, socialism’s “combat reserve” gradually joined its alienated peers in rejecting the leading role of the party.

Writing for the Panzerschrank at the Central Institute for Youth Research Created in 1966, the Central Institute for Youth Research in Leipzig employed a new generation of social scientists trained in “modern methods,” including survey research.86 Motivated by the FRG’s creation of a German Youth Institute in Munich (1963), the Politburo accorded the ZIJ an unusual degree of autonomy, free from direct control by the Central Committee or Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. It quickly became a thorn in the side for the lilac-haired Educational Minister, piqued by its “differentiated, realistic” portrayals of political consciousness among school-aged youth, students, and workers. Margot Honecker soon refused to review ZIJ data, testifying to a growing gap between GDR rulers and the targets of their socialist-personality policies. Findings were channeled to select CC ministers, the state Youth Minister, and the FDJ leadership. Employing 80–100 workers in the 1980s, its budget peaked at 2.5 million Marks, most of which went for salaries. Its research counterpart in Munich employed fewer scholars, but its budget was almost ten times larger.87

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After completing his Ph.D. at the Humboldt University, ZIJ Director Walter Friedrich orchestrated the first major study of university living conditions in 1969, forging collaborative relations with higher educational institutions in Karl Marx Stadt, Halle, Leipzig, Jena, and Dresden. Conducting over 400 studies (including 17 multi-year panel studies) in twenty-four years, ZIJ researchers relied on anonymous questionnaires, covering an expanding range of topics under the auspices of 14 specialized departments. Starting in 1967, the Central Institute published its own journal, Jugendforschung, shut down after only sixteen issues, thanks to Margot Honecker. After 1974 the ZIJ sporadically issued an Information Bulletin on Youth Research for special “subscribers.” All book publications had to run a multi-level censorship gamut. Often attacked by the Educational Minister, the ZIJ’s long-term director reportedly enjoyed a close relationship with Egon Krenz, the Politburo member responsible for Youth Affairs and the FDJ. As of the early 1980s, researchers engaged in a frenzied effort to compile a secret report, innocuously labeled the Urlaubsbericht (Vacation Report); it was personally delivered to Krenz each year on the day that First Secretary Erich Honecker and his ministerial wife departed for their summer holidays. In early 1989, the head of the Office for Youth Affairs in the Council of Ministers prohibited all ZIJ personnel from discussing the deteriorating political climate outside the Institute. The muzzle was removed in October, too late to reverse the course of GDR history. Like most of my GDR trips, the time I spent as a visiting scholar at the ZIJ Leipzig was an eye-opening experience. Despite its reputation as a “methodologically” advanced center, the conditions I encountered there in spring 1990 were fairly primitive. During the chilly weeks of May, I had to wear two sweaters (no heat on the top floor) and occupy a broken chair in a workspace normally shared by three people—with no phone, no xerox machine, and no individual typewriters. Researchers relied on a typing-­ pool, enabling the state to censor/control the dispersal of potentially controversial documents. As noted at the outset, the Institute’s unisex “water-closet” on our floor afforded interesting insights into prewar German plumbing techniques. Gunther, Rudolf, and Winfried, my three local hosts who comprised the Section on Youth and Politics, were nonetheless kind, entertaining and willing to share personal ZIJ experiences and insights. Adapting quickly to a likely capitalist take-over, both ZIJ administrators and those at the Academy of Sciences in Berlin required me to pay an

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“organizational use fee”—in West Marks—prior to the introduction of the Currency Union. My costs ranged from DM60 per week at the ZIJ, to $100 for “tuition,” plus DM50 per night for lodgings at the desolatelooking Academy. ZIJ reports were routinely “classified” as of 1970. The materials I reviewed bore the labels “confidential” (vertrauliche Dienstsache), “restricted access” (vertrauliche Verschlusssache) or “top secret” (geheime Verschlusssache). The degree of “secretiveness” was reflected in the number of sometimes barely legible carbon copies (2–8) noted on the title page. Each questionnaire had to pass muster with relevant ministerial or party officials, who could strike individual questions or formulations as potentially inimical to the state. My hosts revealed that on rare occasions they could append “unapproved” survey items on a separate page, distributed only at locations where they enjoyed the absolute trust of institutional authorities. Those sheets would be immediately removed from classrooms and analyzed separately for “internal discussion.” Interpreting surveys conducted under the auspices of an authoritarian regime naturally requires caution. Because collaboration was limited, few were “nationally” representative, but authors included methodological caveats regarding regional differences. A second problem involved the politically loaded nature of the questions and limited response options, reflecting the ideological constraints imposed on researchers. It was striking how many young people used “official speak” even when asked about their own experiences. Third, although all responses were anonymous, students might have been concerned about the teachers watching over them while completing the surveys. Finally, there were problems of interpretation, verification, and sharing the results. ZIJ staff were sometimes allowed to lecture on their findings to closed audiences. Most striking about the data is their clear confirmation of deep-seated alienation among all groups, despite the methodological and ideological limitations. Most surveys, encompassing diverse social groups (students, apprentices, workers, FDJ members), were executed before or after significant events like Party Congresses, youth festivals, or international turning points. The 1960s registered generally positive orientations among fourteen to eighteen year-olds regarding SED policies and socialist values. Two-thirds agreed that the SED represented the interests of youth in 1963, perhaps in response to the Politburo’s “Communique on Youth Problems” which promised them “greater freedom regarding their ‘lifestyle’ choices, provided they were committed to building socialist

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society.”88 A clear majority still identified with the GDR through the 1970s, reflecting their approval of Ostpolitik, UN membership, the World Youth Games, and the Helsinki Accords. Females across the board were more positively disposed toward socialism, having directly benefited from new policies of the early 1970s. The 1980s brought a negative trajectory, indicating youth’s declining faith in socialism and the party (Tables 10.2 and 10.3). GDR rulers consistently ignored the empirical evidence, frustrating the experts. One of my ZIJ hosts shared a self-authored “think paper,” admitting that he had “written [it] for the Panzerschrank” in 1988, since the Director immediately blocked its distribution for house-internal discussion. The essay began by noting that Lenin himself had recognized youth’s path to socialism would not replicate the experiences of their fathers (and Table 10.2  Trust in the SED (in %) The SED enjoys my trust… Apprentices 1970 1974 1986 1989 (spring) Young workers 1970 1974 1986 1989 (spring) University students 1970 1973 1986 1989 (spring) SED members 1970 1986 1989 (spring) Non-members 1970 1986 1989 (spring)

Completely

With qualifications

Not at all

24 47 26 10

53 36 53 37

23 17 21 56

23 45 26 21

52 43 52 35

25 12 22 44

32 53 45 24

48 41 48 40

20 6 7 36

87 81 48

13 19 44

0 0 8

20 22 8

55 58 37

25 20 55

Source: Peter Förster, “Die Entwicklung des politischen Bewußtseins der DDR Jugend zwischen 1966 und 1989,” in Friedrich, et al., Das Zentralinstitute für Jugendforschung, 1966–1999 (Leipzig), 140–141

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Table 10.3  Identification with the SED (in %) The SED possesses my trust…

Entirely

Somewhat

Hardly

Not at all

Apprentices

1970 1986 1989

24 26 10

53 53 37

17 15 31

6 6 22

Workers

1970 1986 1989

23 26 21

52 52 35

20 16 21

5 6 23

Students

1970 1986 1989

32 45 24

48 48 40

16 6 28

4 1 8

Intelligentsia

1970 1986 1989

-42 21

-49 61

-8 9

-1 9

FDJ Functionaries

1970 1986 1989

37 48 25

48 43 40

12 8 22

3 1 13

FDJ Members

1970 1986 1989

23 28 13

53 54 38

19 13 30

5 5 19

Non-Members-FDJ

1970 1986 1989

13 14 4

49 57 38

25 20 19

13 9 39

SED Members

1970 1986 1989

87 81 48

13 19 44

0 0 5

0 0 3

Non-Members-SED 1970 1986 1989

20 22 8

55 58 37

19 15 32

6 5 23

Source: Data courtesy of the Central Institute for Youth Research (Leipzig).

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mothers). The Born-into Generation (ages thirty to fifty) comprised the educator pool, but, as Christa Wolf attested, this group was “blocked” in its efforts to engage honestly with students. As a result, “the mistakes of the past are playing themselves out to the extent that under the current conditions, the negative experiences receive more confirmation [or revaluation] than the positive ones.” The author hastily emphasized, there were “naturally many successes,” but one could no longer ignore that “the shine of the Mercedes star, from Quelle to the ARD, directly radiates into the brains of our citizens [who] find no protection against its blinding effects in their own media and stores.”89 FDJ campaigns relied on language, work-styles, achievement principles, control mechanisms, and even loyalty oaths that merely copied the party line. Never-ending commands to “further sharpen the ideological class struggle” ignored “the dynamism and capability of youth” and its special capacity for social renewal. Only movement at the top would enable the FDJ to prevent others from “knocking on the wrong doors.”90 The breaking point for many regarding trust in the state and/or the FDJ seems to have occurred around age fourteen, ironically following their participation in the Jugendweihe. Male apprentices and young workers were the first to jettison Marxism-Leninism. Among the tenth graders polled in 1969, 60% expressed an unqualified “love for the socialist fatherland,” plunging to 9% by 1989. The share of teens claiming a “complete identification with GDR” fell from 71% in 1972, to 49% in 1984, to 18% in fall 1988; those declaring “not at all” rose from 7% in 1978 to 43% in May 1989 (overlapping with fraudulent communal elections). The segment convinced of their “secure future in the GDR” declined from 75% in 1987, to 63% in 1988, to 57% in 1989. While 25% of regional youth rejected the ways in which the state exercised power in 1981, 49% shared this feeling in 1988, rising to 85% by October 1989.91 Correspondingly, 22% of the vocational-ed enrollees rejected an M-L world-view in 1981; 46% did so by 1985 (Table 10.4). Roughly 8% harbored doubts about the future “triumph of socialism” in the early 1980s, growing to 58% by 1988.92 After years of “adapting,” university students were among the last to lose faith in the system. By early 1989, 78% still ascribed to Marxism-Leninism, but only 36% were prepared to devote their professional lives to socialism; merely 10% felt “attached” to the SED.93 In 1973, 43% among males, 31% among females, and 55% of young workers had said they were open to unification, falling to 2% if completely capitalist. By the late 1980s, 89% sympathized with

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Table 10.4  Identification with Marxism-Leninism I believe in Marxism-Leninism

Entirely

Somewhat

Hardly

Not at all

FDJ Functionaries

1975 1979 1988

66 49 21

30 43 52

4 6 20

0 2 7

FDJ Members

1975 1979 1988

49 36 9

39 48 47

6 12 30

4 4 14

Non-FDJ Members

1975 1979 1988

25 20 3

45 50 31

13 17 40

17 13 26

SED Members

1975 1979 1988

84 72 39

14 27 57

2 1 3

0 0 1

Non-SED Members

1975 1979 1988

45 28 9

43 53 46

8 13 31

4 6 14

Source: Data courtesy of the Central Institute for Youth Research (Leipzig)

peers who wanted to abandon the GDR.  Among the likely reasons for exiting, 42% stressed the lack of consumer goods, 27% noted restrictions on travel, and 25% cited a lack of personal freedom. While 41% identified with FDJ goals in 1975, only 18% felt the organization represented their interests by 1988 (Table 10.5). Politburo members should have been jolted even more by the negative shifts among the “combat reserve” respondents themselves. Asked whether their personal experiences with socialist democracy afforded a real ability to “plan with, work with, govern with,” 33% of all participants responded “hardly” or “not at all”; 36% among FDJ members shared this negative view, including 23% of the functionaries. Indeed, by 1988, only 15% of young SED members still believed in socialism “without reservation.” They complained that their ability to shape even school activities was blocked by the same “formalism, rigidity, and bureaucracy” witnessed in other domains.94 By then FDJ and young party loyalists were also voicing “the end-is-near” sentiments.

451

10  THE ANTI-POLITICAL IDENTITIES OF EAST GERMAN YOUTH 

Table 10.5  Identification with the goals of the FDJ FDJ political goals are also my goals

Agree entirely With qualifications Hardly Not at all

FDJ Functionaries

1979 1987 1988 1989

42 34 29 14

50 54 55 63

6 10 13 19

6 2 3 4

FDJ Members

1979 1987 1988 1989

26 17 13 8

59 53 61 54

13 23 21 32

2 7 5 6

Non-Members: FDJ

1979 1987 1988 1989

10 13 5 7

44 39 33 28

28 25 41 39

18 23 21 26

SED Members

1979 1987 1988 1989

56 53 47 26

40 42 49 64

4 4 4 9

0 1 0 1

Apprentices

1979 1988 1989

37 16 4

47 60 52

12 19 37

4 5 7

Workers

1979 1988 1989

29 20 15

53 55 53

15 20 22

4 8 10

Students

1979 1988 1989

35 28 15

53 60 62

10 11 20

2 1 3

Through the Looking Glass: Unification and Normative Loyalty Cohorts born after 1968 displayed significantly less loyalty to the regime and its political goals, but that does not mean that they rejected all socialist values shaping their collective consciousness. Although most had lost faith in Marxism-Leninism and the SED per se, adolescents were far from elated over the sudden disappearance of the only country they had ever known. Four ZIJ studies assessed their changing attitudes toward die Wende between November 1989 and December 1990. Surveying 1300–1770

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participants (15–24), researchers detected rising levels of pessimism and disappointment among the very groups that should have been most enthusiastic about unification.95 The segment of those who “strongly favored” unification rose from 14% in November to 43% in June (anticipating the Currency Union), then fell to 39% right before unification day. While 88% desired a “better, reformed socialism” in November, compared to 5% who favored a “capitalist path,” attitudes shifted as new groups began dominating the protests. By February 54% still preferred reform, but 31% supported a capitalist transformation. Polled again in June, 70% thought unification was proceeding “too fast.” By late September, 39% supported unity “without reservation,” though males significantly outnumbered females in this category; 62% of the latter feared negative consequences for their own social security (47% for males). Young women and girls were more likely to label themselves “GDR citizens,” as were university graduates. Many identified with their own regions (Saxony, Mecklenburg), reflecting years of resentment toward the privileged status of Berliners. Only 40% believed that their FRG compatriots were willing to make personal sacrifices to achieve unity.96 West Germans, for the record, had no chance to vote for/against Kohl until December 1990, by which point unification was a done deal. Ironically many young easterners resorted to physical exit just as it became possible to “plan with, work with, and govern with” new leaders: 344,00 moved to the old Länder in 1989, another 350,000 in 1990. Those willing to stay “in any case” fell from 69% (November) to 33% just before the Unity Treaty took effect. Too many FRG politicians and citizens erroneously assumed that East Germans would immediately jettison their own values, behaviors, and political orientations, to embrace “the western way of life.” As stressed earlier, they failed to distinguish between systemic loyalty, involving the officially mandated “GDR identity,” its institutions and policies, and what I label normative loyalty, reflecting personal identities, value preferences, and behaviors shared with families, friends, and work colleagues (peer culture). Despite their unhappiness with restrictive, propagandistic educational processes, even radicalized youth internalized many socialist ideals, indicating the deeply rooted nature of loyalty. Voice and exit behaviors, by contrast, tend to be context-specific and thus subject to greater change over time.

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During a return visit to the ZIJ, I copied roughly 300 open-ended responses linked to the Wende surveys, assessing respondents’ participation in the 1989 protests, how they viewed the turn of events, and whether their “expectations” had been fulfilled. Most lived outside the capital, in Leipzig, Eisenach, Neustadt, Mühlhausen, Eisenhüttenstadt, Gera, Bautzen, Potsdam, Neubrandenburg, Schwerin, and Finsterwalde, inter alia. The overwhelming majority expressed disappointment and fears of things to come, such as unemployment, higher rents, far-right radicalism, drugs, and AIDS.  Ironically, their knowledge of the problems afflicting capitalist countries derived not only from SED propaganda but also from their exposure to western media reports. Focusing on substantive themes, I have compiled a limited selection of “typical” responses in Box 10.3.

Box 10.3  Typical Responses: ZIJ Surveys, 1989

**  Before the turn-around, I mostly believed what the teachers said: the GDR was peace-loving, socialism was good, with many achievements, capitalism was bad. I went to the demos to see if they were really anti-state. I was initially euphoric, until some started to roar for a united Germany. Although I know now how betrayed we were, and our land no longer exists, it is still my home… I am attached to this country… I am not convinced that the FRG is ideal…. I am afraid I will one day sit in an apartment surrounded by a glittering façade, behind which there are people who are so greedy for money that they forget more important interactions among humans…. **  I am a passionate Skin-sympathizer… but I am not a fascho; on the contrary, I totally reject all fascist practices. I became a Skin out of protest. For me friendship, comradery, unity, discipline, hard work and honesty are the only ideals…. Now there are these [foreigner] types who take away so many jobs, with no work ethic (except for the Vietcong). I therefore demand “Foreigners out!” in a future Germany. All people should stay in their own place of origin. **  I experienced the Wende with mixed feelings. My joy that the Germans were finally breaking out of their apathy was soon crushed…. the same dogmatism as ever, people just don’t understand how to accept diverse opinions.… My hopes for an orderly, well-reflected growing (continued)

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Box 10.3  (continued)

together have not been fulfilled. Instead a rushed sell-out. We will remain second-class citizens and have to stoop again, to at least have the right to vote but not to change things… People’s freedom has been taken away again, it’s now the law but practically non-existent…. **  I have to say, better this turn-around than no turn-around, but I am extremely disappointed. I saw this Wende as OUR Wende, and still don’t see why we should staple ourselves to the Federal Republic…. No capitalist is going to pour money into us (as a dear brother or sister perhaps?) that he won’t pull back out again in double or triple amounts. **  Through early November all of the demonstrators wanted a third way…,. then the revolution collapsed into a German demo. Whoever owned a German flag, had the tallest flagpole or dressed like a “real German,” whoever could shout the loudest against the Stasi, though he never had anything to do with it, or who denounced 40 years of oppression, although he was only 30, he is now the king here. Once again people at the top set the tone, shifting from one extreme to another. Now the two-thirds society will become our reality. **  I see our east-CDU as human camouflage for [the new] Big Brother. The people have betrayed themselves. We now see the development of an egotistical consumer society everywhere. Me-me-me thinking is everywhere. I can’t exclude myself…. **  Revolutionaries have turned into plastic-bag fetishists, consumption made everybody forget the transformation. Democracy was not the greatest achievement of the fall, only the DM100… now the elbows will be in charge, consideration for others is no longer a usable virtue…. **  Despite all the failures of the past, we still have our own land, a home rooted in our hearts. I am happy to live in this land: here is where I have my friends, family, memories. I don’t understand, even now, how one could just throw it away, sell out our homeland. I am disappointed beyond measure. **  I am ashamed for my people, ashamed of being a German, to live in a land, that has simply gone berserk. Blind, deaf, D-Mark machines. After they have thrown up the bananas, then they will return to reason…. They wanted democracy, so did I, but what they elected is a new dictatorship, a hidden one that is even more dangerous…. (continued)

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Box 10.3  (continued)

**  When they said that German states with equal rights would finally be able to unite, I was in favor of it…. Now not only the problematic things will be thrown overboard, but also the real achievements and other things worth preserving… For me what unification now means is an annexation into the FRG and D-Mark territory, which was not what we wanted three-quarters of a year ago. **  I was disappointed that the Eco-freaks, who rarely see anything in realistic terms, were the ones who brought about the transformation… I trust the experience of our west German friends to successfully transfer their system to us. I see a few small problems of adaptation ahead, since we are not used to a merit society. But this will resolve itself shortly. **  In the future I will certainly migrate to the People’s Republic of China or Albania. Things will go downhill here (millions of unemployed). **  I have great hopes of initiating a socialist revolution, since there are also progressive forces (DKP) in the FRG. Otherwise I see a dark future ahead for our socialist Fatherland, since the big monopolists of the FRG want to swallow up our fatherland… (the first socialist state on German soil) into their capitalist, inhumane system. Red Front! Venceremos! Please take this seriously!

The first group likely to count among unification’s “winners” are those who quickly headed west for higher educations and better paying jobs. Those younger than fourteen (prior to ninth grade) also benefited, insofar as educational reform allowed greater numbers to complete the Abitur, though they also faced new competition for university admission, along with higher living costs during their studies. By contrast, early school-­ leavers who stayed behind experienced blunt-force trauma. They not only lost guaranteed apprenticeships and jobs but also bore direct witness to sudden unemployment, marital break-ups, and mental strains experienced by their parents. While the GDR had relied on major industrial conglomerates to provide skilled vocational training, the FRG depended on small- and medium-­ size firms. Eastern factory closures quickly produced 28,900 “bankruptcy apprentices,” forcing the Kohl government to create special training programs outside of regular workplace settings. Because firms were more

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likely to hire the persons they had instructed themselves, externally schooled individuals had a harder time finding jobs. Between October 1991 and September 1992, 138,300 eastern applicants jockeyed for 80,000 training slots. With the help of federal subsidies, 71% eventually secured apprenticeships; another 17,900 went back to school. Females faced outright discrimination insofar as many western employers would only take male trainees: comprising 65% of the “market disadvantaged” applicants, young women accounted for 67% of those who returned to the classroom. Of the 45,000 youth forced to move to the old Länder for training, 55% were female: a majority were channeled into lower paid “service” occupations rather than technical fields. Comprising 18% of all Germans aged sixteen to twenty-five, Easterners accounted for 30% of youth unemployment by February 1993.97 Unification was marked by more than massive financial transfers and political take-overs by FRG parties. The rapid infiltration of rightwing radical groups by better organized westerners confirmed youth fears and intensified hostility toward foreigners. They acquired an antipathy toward Turkish migrants by way of western media, though none lived in the east; the GDR had relied on contract workers from Cuba, Vietnam, and Mozambique instead.98 By February 1990, 29% of male youth, 37% among females, felt “personally very threatened” by far-right radicalism; only 9% saw “little threat.”99 Officials registered 1483 physical attacks during the first year of unity. For the record, three-fourths of the arson attempts occurred in the old Länder. In 1991, the Federal Interior Ministry reported 2368 xenophobic assaults, followed by 2582 physical attacks (out of 7121 rightwing offenses) noted by the Office of Constitutional Protection in 1992. In 1993, united Germany saw 1814 violent acts, including eight fatalities, directed against “foreigners,” Jews, and “political opponents,” among 8109 crimes classified as rightwing.100 Attacks occurred in towns stretching from Aalen (Westphalia) to Zwickau (Saxony). In September 1991, 150 male radicals battled police in Hoyerswerda after bombarding 70 residents in an asylum hostel with Molotov-cocktails. Described as a town of 70,000 “with no disco, no cinema, and bars that close at 10pm,” these Saxonians had lost 5000 jobs when the Schwarze Pumpe coal mine ceased operations. In August 1992, another hostel with 315 refugees was fire-bombed in Rostock-­Lichtenhagen (Mecklenburg), where it took 1000 police to subdue 500 Skinheads who joined the battle; many of the 195 arrested hailed from Hamburg, Kiel, and Berlin. Both events were followed by “copy-cat” actions across

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multiple eastern and western cities.101 In November 1992, three members of a Turkish family were burned alive and nine more injured when their home was set alight in Mölln (Schleswig-Holstein). In May 1993, a similar arson attack in Solingen (North-Rhine Westphalia) resulted in five deaths and nine injured relatives, including a six-month old infant. One year later, hordes of inebriated radicals chased African residents through Magdeburg (Sachsen-Anhalt) on Fathers’ Day, destroying bars and property along the way. Many extremists were already known to police. Of the 11,515 individuals indicted for rightwing offenses by 1993, 60% were minors, over 95% were male. The Kohl government ascribed the unprecedented wave of far-right violence across united Germany to youth’s socialization under the “SED dictatorship,” discounting Mölln and Solingen. He refused to attend memorial services there, claiming he did not want to be a “Funeral Chancellor.”102 Pre-1981 studies by Peter Dudek, Wilhelm Heitmeyer, and others nonetheless prove that right extremism was not limited to the East.103 The Bundestag’s decision to eviscerate the nearly unqualified right to asylum enshrined Article 16 of the 1949 Basic Law offers a partial explanation for the sudden decline in far-right violence after 1993. This is not to argue that right extremism in Germany has abated; some groups have merely evolved in more “socially acceptable” directions (see Chap. 11). This raises the tricky question: What remains of the “socialist personalities” of GDR-youth, decades after unification? Two longitudinal data sets shed some light on the “loyalty” orientations of those who were teens in 1989/1990. One study, Youth in Brandenburg, drew on seven surveys conducted between 1991 and 2010. Given the changing sample composition, these data capture small changes across successive youth groups.104 Researchers found a high degree of value consistency with regard to their personal “life goals” (normative loyalty) across two decades, focusing on family relations, health, recreation/sports, media usage, personal willingness to engage in politics, risk-taking behaviors, right extremism, xenophobia, and aspects of school life. Not surprisingly, this study revealed that GDR-youth, like their FRG counterparts, wanted to lead healthy, peaceful, and productive lives, irrespective of political ideology. Most remembered their childhoods as happy, secure periods.105 East-West differences regarding their personal goals were sooner a matter of degree. Entering adulthood, both groups were surrounded by mounting “political vexation” (Politikverdrossenheit), resulting in a high percentage of eastern “non-voters” (30%) as of 2009.

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Optimism and pessimism rise and fall with changes in the economic landscape: mass unemployment, affecting East-citizens across the board, induced (justifiably) mounting skepticism regarding the benefits of capitalism. One of the more persistent normative differences identified in these surveys centered on their stronger desire for children, coupled with greater positive support for women’s paid employment. A second longitudinal study, Youth in Saxony, likewise found participants “adjusting” themselves to united Germany just as they had formerly “arranged” themselves with conditions in their homeland—a human response, not one that is socialist or capitalist at its core. Initiated by ZIJ researchers in 1987, this sample (n = 1,407) drew on forty-one schools in Leipzig and Karl Marx Stadt. The initial pool consisted of eighth graders (thirteen to fourteen, born in 1973), who were questioned again in 1988 (ninth grade). In 1989, 587 tenth graders agreed to participate in a third wave. The sample size naturally declined over time as some moved away, changed their names, their domiciles, and/or faced personal crises, although some rejoined the study at various points. New questions were added after 1990, assessing their adaptation to unification, recollections of the GDR, East-West differences, attitudes toward democracy, and national belonging, allowing us to distinguish between systemic and normative loyalty orientations. To capture the longer-term influence of GDR socialization, I concentrate on the 2007 and 2017 surveys, marking the twentieth and thirtieth “anniversaries” of the original study. As previously noted, youth’s attachment to the “socialist fatherland” deteriorated rapidly between 1987 and 1989, registered in the first three waves of the Saxony study. Many nonetheless voiced growing dissatisfaction with the rapid pace of unification, as well as growing uncertainty about their own futures under a new system (Table 10.6). Table 10.6  Political orientations of youth, 1987–1989 Year

My future is secure in the GDR

I feel politically bound to the GDR

I believe in the future of socialism

Marxism-Leninism is helpful for my life

1987 1988 1989

97 95 94

88 74 67

87 79 63

54 39 25

Source: Data provided by Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung

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Seventeen years into unification, 383 participants (56% female, 46% male) were willing to revisit these attitudes as 33–34 year-olds. One year prior to the global financial crisis, only 65% were employed, although 92% had completed vocational training, and one-third had pursued tertiary educations; 11% were self-employed. More than three-fourths (78%) lived with partners, though only 45% were married, and 4% divorced; 74% of the women were mothers. By then one-fourth (26%) of the sample resided in the western states, another 3% lived abroad.106 While 80% had viewed die Wende positively in 1992, 71% still felt that way in 2007; 50% emphasized their new freedom to travel. Having personally experienced western democracy under the Kohl and Schröder governments, only 33% were “perfectly” satisfied with the political system, though 89% had “absolutely no trust” in rightwing parties. Many had lost interest in societal engagement, given their limited chances to effect change in a system overwhelmingly dominated by western elites. Indeed, 85% deemed bankers and corporations the actual power-holders, reflecting even greater discontent with real-existing capitalism. Still embracing “work” as a central component of their lives, 71% had experienced unemployment, 40% more than once. Merely 7% thought capitalism guaranteed freedom for all, only 28% saw it upholding human rights. Reflecting a mixture of systemic and normative loyalty, 74% agreed that “not everything we learned about capitalism in school was wrong”; 62% concurred with the old Stabu lesson that “capitalists exploit their workers.”107 Further systemic and policy comparisons seemed to make the GDR look better every year, especially regarding social security: the new system offered little child-care or support for families at the time. Interpersonal relationships and solidarity took a back seat to selfish individualism and competition; crime was also a growing problem. A clear majority still viewed socialism as a good idea that had been poorly executed. By 2007, many had lost their optimism regarding their personal futures, reflected in a noteworthy decline in the number of children they desired. Analysts found a clear correlation between respondents’ dashed hopes in regard to 1989, their encounters with joblessness, and reactivated sentimental ties to the GDR (Fig. 10.1). A strong majority took their status as “Germans” for granted, but few embraced the Federal Republic as their fatherland (Table 10.7): while 13% among men, 8% of the women identified “completely” with the idea, 18% and 26%, respectively, said “absolutely not!” Most evinced a double-­ identity; Saxonians were well known for their strong regional accents and

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Fig. 10.1  Wende attitudes, unemployment and GDR affinity. (Source: Peter Förster, et  al. Folgen der Arbeitslosigkeit, 1. https://wiedervereinigung.de/wp-­ content/uploads/2019/09/Förster-­2008-­Folgen-­der-­Arbeitslosigkeit-­Bei-­den-­ Mittdreißigern-­i m-­O sten-­i st-­d ie-­B ejahung-­d er-­Wende-­a bgestürzt-­d ie-­ Identifikation-­mit-­der-­DDR-­hat-­aber-­zugenommen.pdf)

Table 10.7  Dimensions of personal identity (in %) How do you feel, regarding your identity? I feel like … A German A Saxonian A citizen of the ex- GDR An East German A citizen of the Federal Republic A European A “winner” of German unity

Completely Somewhat (1 + 2)

Not really

Absolutely not

70 67 58 62 40

25 23 32 27 43

(95) (90) (90) (89) (83)

 4  8  7  8 15

 1  2  3  3  2

36 15

45 34

(81) (49)

16 38

 3 13

Source: H. Berth, P. Förster, E. Brähler, M. Zenger and Y. Stöbel-Richter: 30 Jahre Deutsche Einheit

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local pride. Less than half perceived themselves as unification winners, with or without qualification. Nearly twice as many men (62%) placed themselves in the “more or less” category, compared to 38% among women. Eighteen months into Merkel’s first term as Chancellor, only 15% expressed “trust in government,” while 85% stressed the opposite. Only half were convinced that easterners and westerners “belonged together” and would thus “grow together.” The thirtieth wave involved forty-four to forty-five year-olds, 56% of whom were female; 55% were married, 33% single, 10% divorced, and 81% had children. Of the 323 participants, 18.6% were workers, 62.2% white-­ collar employees, 7.7% self-employed, and 7.7% housewives/husbands; only 1.2% were civil servants. Roughly 22% lived in the old states, 2.5% abroad; the former were clearly more satisfied and doing better than those in the eastern Länder. The 2016/2017 and 2020 (pre-Corona) panels produced surprising results regarding the eventual attainment of economic parity and internal unity. While the 1990 participants had expected to achieve both goals by 1998 (Fig. 10.2), those polled three decades later moved the goal posts out another twenty years, projecting convergence in the 2040s!108 As the longitudinal data reveal, new opportunities and “life-style” changes do not lead most people to jettison values and orientations acquired at young ages, just because the negative sanctions and propaganda have disappeared. These studies confirm earlier theories advanced by Karl Mannheim, Archie Brown, and Barrington Moore, Jr. regarding the “staying-power” of socialization, even under authoritarian conditions. Evaluating the staying-power of “loyalty” likewise requires us to distinguish between official and personal sources of identity in a given community, something most post-Wall western analysts failed to do. These studies moreover confirm that the socialist transformation of women’s roles has proven to be especially resistant to change—regardless of the SED’s own motives and despite the conservative-patriarchal paradigm inflicted on young women in united Germany through 2005. By 2010, women could see themselves as “winners,” given Merkel’s (restored) child-care guarantees and expanded parental leave options (Table 10.8).

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How long will it take until East Germans are as economically well off as westerners? How long will it take until internal unity is achieved?

Fig. 10.2  Achieving economic parity and internal unity. (Source: Förster, et al. Folgen der Arbeitslosigkeit, 21)

“Be careful what you pray for …” Compared to the deprivations of war and reconstruction, the first two decades of life in the GDR offered unprecedented educational and occupational opportunities to the offspring of underprivileged classes. Improved living standards accorded socialist leaders a degree of grudging legitimacy among the Aufbau generation. Despite the stabilizing impact of the Berlin Wall, persistent labor shortages, coupled with new benefits for women, continued to offer a degree of social mobility for the Born-­ into cohorts through the early 1970s. Improved life expectancies, marriage incentives, and early childbirth nonetheless gave rise to a new kind of demographic bottleneck, limiting social mobility and occupational choice for the third, Blocked generation, born after 1968. Never-ending fears of a resurgent “1953” led Politburo members to pacify increasingly consumption-hungry easterners at the expense of

“I have a secure future in the GDR/Eastern Germany” (in %) 1987 1988 1989 1992 1993 1996 1998 2000 With reservations 20.5 29.4 32.4 33.5 37.4 20.4 16.4 15.7 Completely 74.9 63.2 57.1  7.8  7.0  2.8  4.4  4.3 “There were more good things than bad things in the GDR.” 1993 1996 2000 2003 2006 2009 2012 2015 More bad sides  5.6  6.2  5.8  8.1  5.0  8.2  8.9  6.5 More good sides 12.0 15.0 12.3 17.9 17.4 15.9 13.0 13.4 “Socialism was a good idea.” 2004 2005 2006 2008 2010 2014 2015 2016 Sooner disagree  8.7  9.9 13.7 9.2 15.0  8.5 12.6 17.3 Sooner agree 69.6 72.7 65.0 64.7 60.4 63.8 67.2 53.1 “I am satisfied with the economic system and the political system of the Federal Republic.” 1993 1995 1998 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 Economic system 31.0 43.8 28.8 35.7 26.5 26.8 33.0 33.0 Political system 23.8 33.0 21.2 33.2 21.5 22.1 27.2 39.0 Normative Subjective Loyalty Elements “I am happy to have lived in the GDR.” 2000 2002 2004 2005 2007 2009 2011 2012 With reservations 26.4 27.1 23.2 29.7 19.1 17.1 22.8 23.93 Completely 53.3 56.7 61.1 59.6 71.3 70.2 62.4 64.4 Identification as a GDR Citizen and/or as an FRG Citizen 1990 1992 1993 1995 1998 2001 2004 2007 GDR Citizen 85.1 76.7 78.4 80.3 79.1 79.5 86.2 89.9 FRG Citizen – 74.0 74.6 82.2 80.7 86.4 84.2 83.1 2004 10.8  2.2 2020  9.6 17.0 2020 20.5 48.3 2015 53.7 46.6

2020 22.0 67.4 2014 91.5 86.0

2002 13.1  1.4 2018  8.9 19.4 2018 17.3 52.4 2011 39.1 45.0

2018 23.5 61.7 2010 91.1 89.3

2016 92.2 84.4

2018 51.8 38.9

2006 9.8 2.1

2020 91.3 85.9

2020 40.1 34.8

2008 16.0  4.3

2020 30.0  8.1

(continued)

2018 29.7  6.4

Table 10.8  Attitudes reflecting systemic versus normative loyalty; systemic, policy-oriented loyalty elements

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2020  4.1 28.4 2018 72.7 27.3 2020 27.6 72.4 2020 38.1 34.1 27.9

2018  6.5 36.4 2016 77.7 22.3 2018 26.8 73.2 2018 40.8 31.8 27.4

2020 76.3 23.8

Source: Compiled from H. Berth, P. Förster, E. Brähler, M. Zenger and Y. Stöbel-Richter: 30 Jahre Deutsche Einheit aus sozialwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Ausgewählte Ergebnisse der 31. Welle der Sächsischen Längsschnittstudie 2020 (Dresden). https://wiedervereinigung.de/wp-­content/ uploads/2020/10/30_Jahre_Deutsche_Einheit.pdf

“My personal experiences with the new social system were sooner positive/sooner negative.” 1994 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 Sooner positive  6.2  6.3  4.8  5.7  5.6  8.3  8.9  8.0  5.2 Sooner negative 26.1 25.2 31.7 27.1 22.5 18.8 20.1 22.5 26.6 Self-evaluation as a “winner” or “loser” of German unification. 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2012 2014 2015 Winner 44.2 47.1 49.4 53.8 58.0 67.7 63.6 73.4 77.2 Loser 55.8 52.9 50.6 46.2 42.0 32.3 36.4 26.6 22.8 “There are more sources of division than commonality between the people of East and West.” 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2009 2014 2015 More division 55.6 55.6 56.2 50.7 46.1 43.6 29.0 24.9 23.1 More commonality 44.4 44.4 43.8 49.3 53.9 56.4 71.0 75.1 76.9 “Many West Germans treat East Germans as second-class Germans.” 1995 1998 2000 2002 2003 2005 2006 2008 2009 Disagree 21.6 22.3 23.6 22.7 27.9 24.2 27.3 25.3 24.8 Undecided 25.6 25.0 28.9 26.5 24.6 25.3 30.7 30.9 30.3 Agree 52.8 52.7 47.5 50.8 47.5 50.5 42.0 43.8 44.9

Table 10.8 (continued)

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critical industrial investments, resulting in a mounting foreign debt crisis. Rather than use Ostpolitik and international recognition to encourage innovations at home, SED leaders opted to secure their power base by relentlessly stressing an amorphous capitalist-imperialist threat, assuming this would bind successor cohorts closer to party goals and “socialist achievements.” The presence of an affluent German state next door constituted their greatest existential threat, but this did not stop the top party and MfS elites themselves from becoming ever more addicted to FRG goods and currency, a contradiction not lost on average citizens. Oblivious to youth psychology and the naturally rebellious forces of puberty, intransigent SED rulers refused to let kids be kids, having discovered youth’s value as a crucial “socialist production” factor. This led Education Minister Margot Honecker to introduce “courses” exploiting adolescents for industrial and agricultural production, starting in ninth grade. Heavy-­handed efforts to “cultivate love for the socialist fatherland” became part of a larger strategy to intensify youth’s “willingness to defend the GDR,” resulting in classroom militarization, for example, sending in NVA recruiters, requiring grade-schoolers to solve military “logistic” problems in math class, and to throw dummy-grenades as physical-fitness training. The stop-and-go nature of SED support for youth exchanges via international festivals, coupled with declining opportunities for social mobility, led to mounting alienation among younger cohorts through the 1970s and 1980s. Easier access to western media, and thus to FRG peer culture, led eastern adolescents to push for self-determination and social recognition. The more the state sought to regulate their free time to forge “all-sided socialist personalities,” the more adolescents withdrew into alternative, subcultural spaces. The need to shore up popular legitimacy forced the SED to accept and/or emulate elements of western entertainment culture in erratic waves. Identity-seeking youth turned to music, both as a form of voice and as a weapon against the petty-bourgeois consumerism favored by officials. Indifferent to the real sources of their discontent, the state used its version of repressive tolerance to stop teens from creating cultures of their own. Rather than deter them, each crack-down inspired adolescents to try harder to escape the surly bonds of socialist regimentation. The more “sticks” the state applied, the more politicized youth push-back became. Music was their common bond, the only form of voice they could exercise above and below ground. When voice failed, they resorted to

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“internal emigration.” Repeat offenders could count on real exit, physical deportation to the FRG, after a few years of incarceration.109 Aging GDR leaders conflated “love for the socialist fatherland” with their own need to feel loved and appreciated. Some clearly failed to win the hearts and minds of their own children, turning them into “negative” dissidents. Their emphasis on M-L pedagogy notwithstanding, party bosses ignored Lenin’s advice regarding the three essential conditions for achieving a socialist revolution. Noting that “it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change,” Lenin had warned his comrades: “it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to rule in the old way.” At the point “when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual,” there will be “a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in ‘peace time’, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves into independent historical action.”110 Visiting East Berlin on October 7, 1989, to commemorate the GDR’s 40th anniversary, Gorbachev offered similar advice to intransigent SED Politburo members: “I believe that danger awaits only those who do not react to life.” His comment was somewhat misquoted in subsequent media reports as “he who comes too late will be punished by life itself.” Having unwittingly met Lenin’s three conditions, and already quite skilled in “reading between the lines” of Gorbachev’s statement, youth protesters lit the revolutionary fuse in Leipzig that ultimately brought down the Wall. The fate of Tacheles serves as a fitting metaphor for the dashed hopes of young GDR rebels following unification. Originally intended as a shopping arcade in 1907/1908, the Friedrichstrasse Passage exhibited modern architectural features, including a pneumatic tube system for circulating mail and materials within the building. Having spent seven million Marks on construction, the investors filed for bankruptcy six months after the grand opening. For a short period Wolf Wertheim rented the structure for a new department store (the family store-chain was later “aryanized” by the Nazis). The building was auctioned off before World War I and renamed the House of Technology, for use as a product show-room by the General Electric Company. The NSDAP set up offices there in the 1930s, later joined by the SS, who held French prisoners of war in the attic. Although its second cellar was intentionally flooded during the Battle of Berlin, the building suffered only moderate damage.

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Still under Soviet occupation, the Free German Trade Union Federation moved in, as did Rundfunk- und Fernmelde Technik (Radio and Telegraph agencies), an art school, a foreign trade school, and an NVA military unit in 1948. Major parts of the structure were allowed to deteriorate so much that officials slated it for demolition in 1969. Initial deconstruction was delayed until 1980; the rest was scheduled for demolition in April 1990. In February 1990 young eastern and western artists/squatters moved into “what remained,” calling it Tacheles. One of its spokespersons, Jochen from Stuttgart, translated the Yiddish term as “empty your pants-pockets” (metaphorically, “free yourself from material encumberments”). Despite its ruinous appearance, the residents set up studios, workshops, galleries, a nightclub (Heavy Metal, Punk), and a cinema. The back-yard featured an open-air exhibition of metal sculptures, constructed from rubble, abandoned vehicles (like the half-buried bus), and other “recyclables.” A major real-estate firm, the Fundus Group, bought the site from the Berlin government in the mid-1990s but offered squatters a ten-year lease in 1998 for the nominal rent of 1 DM. After Fundus filed for bankruptcy, the HSH Nordbank paid off one group to leave; the rest (forty to sixty artists) departed peacefully in September 2012. The “sculpture park” remained open until March 2013, earning money for Nordbank. Several artists sought to keep the spirit alive with the creation of a Tacheles-3D online art gallery and Mobile Atelier Projects. A New York firm bought the property in 2014, commencing with new construction in September 2019: 439 Am Tacheles will become an 850,000  m2 luxury apartment complex with shops and internal courtyards, marking the ultimate triumph of capitalism.111 Although East German youth did not get what most had “prayed for,” a free, socially just, and ecologically sensitive state of their own, those born in the 1970s and 1980s have emerged as winners of unification in the long run. Longitudinal surveys conducted over the last thirty years nonetheless demonstrate that various components of normative loyalty have survived Western efforts to impose new political, economic, and educational institutions without significant East German input. The backlash may have been long in coming, but it arrived with a vengeance after 2014—in the guise of the rightwing Alternative for Germany party which has taken root in the eastern Länder.

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Notes 1. Klaus Machnow. 1978. “Vaterland—das ist Volksbildung plus Rentenerhöhung,” Deutschland Archiv 11 (12): 1249–50. 2. Christa Wolf. 1990. “Das haben wir nicht gelernt” reprinted in Petra Gruner, ed., Angepasst oder mündig? Frankfurt/Main: Luchterhand, 9. 3. Judith Torney-Purta and John Schwille. 1986. “Civic Values Learned in School: Policy and Practice in Industrialized Nations.” Comparative Education Review 30: 30–49. 4. Ministerium für Volksbildung, 1973. Gesetz über das einheitliche sozialistische Bildungssystem. Berlin: Staatsverlag der DDR. 5. Alexey Stakhanov was a Soviet miner who became a “socialist labor hero” in 1935, when he extracted a record amount of coal, first 102 tons, then 227 tons of coal in a single shift. It was later alleged that he achieved this under pre-arranged conditions, including assistance from fellow miners. 6. Hartmut, Vogt. 1985. “Einheitliches sozialistisches Bildungssystem,” in Hartmut Zimmermann, ed., DDR Handbuch. Köln: Wissenschaft und Politik, 318. 7. Margarete Siebert Klein. 1980. The Challenge of Communist Education: A Look at the German Democratic Republic. Boulder: East European Monographs, 46, 52. 8. “Margot Honecker, widow of former East German leader, dies in Chile,” Deutsche Welle, May 6, 2016. 9. Klein, The Challenge of Communist Education, 65. 10. Margot Honecker, “Our School’s Mission in Society,” Eighth Pedagogical Congress of the GDR, October 18, 1978, reprinted in Arthur W. McCardle and A. Bruce Boenau, eds., 1984. East Germany: A New German Nation Under Socialism?. Lanham: University Press of America, 282–283. 11. Honecker, “Our School’s Mission,” 268. 12. Siegfried Baske. 1976. Bildungspolitik in der DDR, 1963–1976. Wiesbaden: Haarassowitz, 464; Adolf Kruppa. 1976. Wirtschafts- und Bildungsplanung in der DDR. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 100–101. 13. Barbara Bertram and Leonard Kasek. 1991. “Jugend in Ausbildung und Beruf,” in Walter Friedrich and Harmut Griese, eds., Jugend und Jugendforschung in der DDR. Opladen: Leske + Budrich, 67. 14. Werner Hartkopf. 1975. Die Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 15. Gert-Joachim Glaeßner and Irmgard Rudolph. 1978. Macht durch Wissen: Zum Zusammenhang von Bildungspolitik, Bildungssystem und Kaderqualifizierung in der DDR. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 112ff. 16. Klein, The Challenge of Communist Education, 92.

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17. Marianne Usko. 1974. Hochschulen in der DDR. Berlin: Gebruder Holzapfel, 19. 18. Hans-Jürgen Schulz, ed. 1980. Das Hochschulwesen der DDR: Ein Überblick. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaft, 31. 19. Baske, Bildungspolitik in der DDR, 468. 20. Schulz, Das Hochschulwesen der DDR, 15. 21. Stefan Wolle. 2008. Der Traum von der Revolte: DDR 1968. Berlin: Christoph Links, 125. 22. Peter Eisenmann. 1991. “Die Jugend in den neuen Bundesländern. Sozialistische Bewußtseinsbildung und ihre Folgen.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 27 (June 28), 8. 23. Andrew Demshuk. 2020. Bowling for Communism: Urban Ingenuity at the End of East Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 110. 24. Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 127. 25. Rita Kuczynsk. 2006. Mauerblume. Ein Leben auf der Grenze. Munich: Claassen; also, Bernd-Lutz Lange. 2006. Mauer, Jeans und Prager Fruhling. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. 26. Arnold Freiburg. 1985. “Freie Deutsche Jugend.” In Zimmermann, DDR Handbuch, 454. 27. Harry Miller. 1969. “Jugend und Demokratie,” ZIJ Jugendforschung (11). Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaft, 47–48. 28. Honecker, “Our School’s Mission,” 302–304. 29. Demschuk, Bowling for Communism, 102, 108. 30. Margot Honecker. 1977. “Die Jugend auf die kommunistische Zukunft vorbereiten.” Die Einheit 32 (5), 528. 31. Andreas Meier. 1968. Jugendweihe-Jugendfeier: Ein deutsches nostalgisches Fest vor und nach 1990. Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 195ff. 32. Meier, Jugendweihe, 198, 203. 33. Karl Wilhelm Fricke. 1984. Opposition und Widerstand. Koln: Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, 79 34. Meier, Jugendweihe, 207–213. 35. Meier, Jugendweihe, 214. 36. Meier, Jugendweihe, 7–8. 37. Hans Hielscher. 2020. “Deutschlandtreffen der Jugend: Polit-Party zu Pfingsten.” Der Spiegel, May 31. 38. Matthias Judt, ed. 1998. DDR-Geschichte in Dokumenten. Berlin: Christoph Links, 217. 39. Wolle, Der Traum von der Revolte, 234–237. 40. Honecker, “Our School’s Mission,” 270, 274. 41. Walter Friedrich and Heinz Süße. 1969. “Einige Aufgaben und Probleme der sozialistischer Jugendarbeit.” ZIJ Jugendforschung (11). Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaft, 33–34.

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42. Abby Anderton. 2019. Rubble Music: Occupying the Ruins of Postwar Berlin, 1945–1950. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 43. Helma Kaldewey. 2020. A People’s Music: Jazz in East Germany, 1945–1990. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 160. 44. Olaf Leitner. 1983. Rockszene DDR.  Aspekte einer Massenkultur im Sozialismus. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 41. 45. Kaldewey, A People’s Music, 96. 46. Lange, Mauer, Jeans und Prager Frühling, 58. 47. Lange, Mauer, Jeans und Prager Frühling, 120–121. 48. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 49. 49. Lange, Mauer, Jeans und Prager Frühling, 122–23. 50. Michael Rauhut. 2002. Rock in der DDR, 1964–1989. Paderborn: Bonifatius Druck. 51. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 68. 52. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 58–59. 53. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 42ff. 54. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 20. 55. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 16. 56. Karl Winkler. 1983. Made in the GDR.  Jugendszenen aus Ost-Berlin. Berlin: Oberbaumverlag, 7. 57. Winkler, Made in the GDR, 6. 58. Leitner, Rockszene DDR. 59. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 57, 65, 428–457. 60. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 148–149. 61. Steffen Gerth. 2008. “Stars and Stripes über Ost-Berlin,” Der Spiegel, July 19, 2008; also, Hartmut König. 2017. Warten wir auf die Zukunft. Autobiografie. Berlin: Neues Leben. 62. Andreas Förster. 2017. “DDR vor 40 Jahren: Vom Rockkonzert zur Straßenschlacht.” Berliner Zeitung, October 7, 2017. 63. Wolfgang Büscher and Peter Wensierski. 1984. Null Bock auf DDR. Reinbeck: Rowohlt, 24–25; Norbert Haase, Lothar Reese and Peter Wensierksi.1983. VEB Nachwuchs: Jugend in der DDR. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 64. Kurt Starke. 1980. Jugend im Studium: Zur Persönlichkeitsentwicklung von Hochschulstudenten. Berlin: Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaft, 81–91. 65. Leitner, Rockszene DDR, 92–94. 66. For interviews, see Manfred Stock and Philipp Mühlberg. 1990. Die Szene von innen: Skinheads, Grufties, Heavy Metals, Punks. Berlin: Linksdruck, 53. 67. Stock and Mühlberg, Die Szene von innen, 65. 68. Stock and Mühlberg, Die Szene von innen, 68, 73ff.

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69. Zur politisch-operativen Bekämpfung der politisch-ideologischen Diversion und Untergrundtätigkeit unter jugendlichen Personenkreisen in der DDR, MFS-Nr. 365/66, May 15, 1966. 70. Gunter Rose applied this term to “welfare mothers” when we toured an East Berlin housing project in 1988; he claimed that such women purportedly bore multiple children to collect more benefits—an ironic admonition, given that this was what SED policies hoped to promote! He complained that such mothers “failed” to raise their offspring as “socialist personalities,” inferring they were responsible for mounting juvenile delinquency. 71. Büscher and Wensierski, Null Bock auf DDR, 20. 72. Hermann Giesecke. 1981. “Wir wollen alles, und zwar subito”: Ein Bericht über jugendliche Aussteiger. Wiesbaden: Hessische Landeszentrale für politische Bildung. 73. Caroline Fricke. 2012. “Heavy Metal in der DDR-Provinz.” In Rolf F.  Nohr and Herbert Schwaab, eds., Metal Matters. Heavy Metal als Kultur und Welt. Münster: LIT, 367–377. 74. Walter Süß. 1993. “Zur Wahrnehmung und Interpretation des Rechtsextremismus in der DDR durch das MfS.” Berlin: Bundesbeauftragte für die Unterlagen des Staatssicherheitsdienstes der ehemaligen DDR, 18. 75. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1996. “The Rise of Femi-Nazis? Women and Rightwing Extremist Movements in Unified Germany.” German Politics 5 (2): 240–275. 76. Wolfgang Brück. 1988. “Das Skinhead-Phänomen aus jugendkriminologischer Sicht.” ZIJ Leipzig: March. 77. Loni Niederländer. 1989. “Das politische Wesen der Skinheadgruppierungen und ihre Sicherheitsrelevanz,” VVS 6065-5/89. Berlin: Humboldt Universität/Sektion Kriminalistik. February 28. 78. Süß, “Zur Wahrnehmung und Interpretation des Rechtsextremismus,” 34–35. 79. Gunhild Korfes. 1990. “Rechtsextremistische Orientierungen in der DDR Jugend: wie sind sie entstanden?” In Jugend und Rechtsextremismus in Berlin-Ost. Berlin: Magistratverwaltung für Jugend, Familie und Sport, 11. 80. Ingo Hasselbach, with Winfried Bonengel. 1994. Die Abrechnung. Ein Neo-Nazi steigt aus. Berlin: Aufbau, 16ff. 81. Ingo Hasselbach. 1996. Die Bedrohung: Mein Leben nach dem Ausstieg aus der rechten Terrorszene. Berlin: Aufbau. 82. For an extensive list of rebel bands, posters and texts, see Klaus Farin and Henning Flad, eds. 2011. Reaktionäre Rebellen: Rechtsextreme Musik in Deutschland, Berlin: Verlag Thomas Tilsner; Max Annas and Ralph Christoph. 1993. Neue Soundtracks für den Volksempfänger: Nazirock, Jugendkultur & Rechter Mainstream. Berlin: Edition ID-Archiv.

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83. Gunhild Korfes. 1990. “Rechtradikalismus in der DDR,” Vortrag auf dem “Friedenshearing” zum Thema “Rechtsradikalismus, Faschismus und Neufaschismus,” Friedensheft (6), 26. 84. Wolfgang Brück. 1988. “Skinheads im Meinungsbild Jugendlicher” 74/88. ZIJ Leipzig: November. 85. Brück, “Skinheads,” 6, 15–16. 86. The center arose under the new Scientific Council on Youth Research, headed by Klaus Korn; ironically Korn had been expelled from the FDJ and SED in 1952 but was readmitted to the Humboldt University in 1954. 87. Walter Friedrich, Peter Förster and Kurt Starke, eds. 1999. Das Zentralinstitut für Jugendforschung Leipzig, 1966–1990: Geschichte, Methoden, Erkenntnisse. Berlin: Edition Ost, 38–39. 88. “Kommuniqué des Politbüros des Zentralkomitees der SED zu Problemen der Jugend in der DDR,” Neues Deutschland, September 21, 1963. 89. Rudolf Dennhardt. 1988. “Von der uni(n)formierten Jugend zur Einheit der Jugend,” unpublished manuscript. December, 5–6; further, 1988. “Einige Gedanken zur Arbeit des Jugendverbandes.” July. 90. Dennhardt, “Von der uni(n)formierten Jugend,” 8–9. 91. Peter Förster. 1999. “Die Entwicklung des politischen Bewußtseins der DDR Jugend zwischen 1966 und 1989.” In Friedrich, et  al., Das Zentralinstitute für Jugendforschung, 84–85, 88, 90. 92. Walter Friedrich. 1990. “Mentalitätswandlung in der Jugend der DDR,” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B 16–17 (April 13): 25–37. 93. Ulrich Heublein. 1992. “Gesellschaftsbild und gesellschaftlich-politische Einstellungen ostdeutscher Studierenden zur Zeit der Wende.” ZIJ Leipzig: October, 7–8. 94. Förster, “Die Entwicklung des politischen Bewußtseins,” 103, 101, 136. 95. Peter Förster and Günter Roski. 1990. DDR Zwischen Wende und Wahl. Meinungsforscher analysieren den Umbruch. Berlin: LinksDruck. 96. Walter Friedrich and Peter Förster. 1991. “Ostdeutsche Jugend 1990,” Deutschland Archiv 24 (4): 352–355. 97. Elisabeth M. Krekel-Eiben and Joachim G. Ulrich. 1993. “Berufschancen von Jugendlichen in den Neuen Bundesländern.” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B 19 (May 7), 15–17. 98. “Das Profil der Deutschen: Was sie vereint, was sie trennt,” Spiegel Spezial 1 (1991), 47; Irene Runge. 1990. Ausland DDR: Fremdenhaß. Berlin: Dietz Verlag; Landolf Scherzer. 2004. Die Fremden. Berlin: Aufbau. 99. Karl-Heiz Heinemann and Wilfried Schubarth, eds. 1992. Der antifaschistische Staat entläßt seine Kinder: Jugend und Rechtsextremismus in Ostdeutschland. Köln: PapyRossa Verlag; Harry Mueller. 1989. “Völker

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im Urteil der Jugend: Eine historische vergleichende Studie zur nationalen Stereotypen 1968/1989,” Nr. 2496. ZIJ Leipzig (May 1989). Also, Peter Ködderitzsche and Leo A. Müller. 1993. Rechtsextremismus in der DDR. Göttingen: Lamuv; Burkhard Schröder. 1993. Rechte Kerle: Skinheads, Faschos, Hooligans. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 100. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1998. From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes toward the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany. Boulder CO: Westview, 329–333. 101. Ingrid Mueller-Muench, 1998. Biedermänner und Brandstifter: Fremdenfeindlichkeit vor Gericht. Berlin: J.  H. W.  Dietz; Burkhard Schröder. 1997. Im Griff der rechten Szene: Ostdeutsche Städte in Angst. Reinbeck: Rowohlt; Andreas Borchers. 1992. Neue Nazis im Osten: Hintergrund und Fakten. Weinheim: Beltz. 102. Kohl’s spokesperson claimed he had “more important things” to do than to promote “condolence-tourism.” See “Anschlag von Solingen 1993: Kanzler Kohl weigerte sich, zur Trauerfeier zu gehen,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 29, 2013. 103. Peter Dudek. 1985. Jugendliche Rechtsextremisten: Zwischen Hakenkreuz und Odalsrune, 1945 bis heute. Köln: Behnka Buch; Wilhelm Heitmeyer. 1987. Rechtextremistische Orientierungen bei Jugendlichen. Weinheim/ Munich: Juventa; Heitmeyer et al.1992. Die Bielefelder Rechtsextremismus Studie: Erste Langzeituntersuchung zur politischen Sozialisation männlicher Jugendlicher. Weinheim/Munich: Juventa. 104. Dietmar Sturzbecher, Andrea Kleeber-Niepage and Lars Hoffmann, eds. 2012. Aufschwung Ost? Lebenssituation und Wertorientiereungen ostdeutscher Jugendlicher. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. 105. Regina Rusch, ed. 1992. Plötzlich ist alles ganz anders. Kinder schreiben über unser Land. Frankfurt/Main: Eichborn Verlag; Ute Gelling und Friederike Heinzel. 2000. Erinnerungsreise: Kindheit in der DDR. Baltmannsweiler: Schneider Verlag; Jürgen Böhm, Joachim Brune. et  al. 1993. Deutsch Stunden: Was Jugendliche von der Einheit denken. Berlin: Argon; Jochen Schmidt and David Wagner. 2014. Drüben und Drüben: Zwei deutsche Kindheiten. Reinbek: Rowohlt. 106. Peter Förster. 2008. Folgen der Arbeitslosigkeit: Bei den Mittdreißigern im Osten ist die Bejahung der Wende abgestürzt. Ergebnisbericht zur 21. Erhebungswelle, 2008. 107. Förster, Folgen der Arbeitslosigkeit, 96, 110, 115. 108. H. Berth, P. Förster, E. Brähler, M. Zenger and Y. Stöbel-Richter. 2020. 30 Jahre Deutsche Einheit aus sozialwissenschaftlicher Perspektive. Ausgewählte Ergebnisse der 31. Welle der Sächsischen Längsschnittstudie 2020 (Dresden).

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109. For their adaption problems on the other side, see Horst-Günter Kessler and Jürgen Miermeister. 1983. Vom ‘Großen Knast’ ins ‘Paradies’? DDR Bürger in der Bundesrepublik. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 110. Vladimir I.  Lenin. 1914–1915 (reprinted 1964). “The Collapse of the Second International.” Collected Works, Vol. 21: August 1914–December 1915. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 213–214. 111. See the architects’ conceptualization at https://amtacheles.de/en/ and https://www.herzogdemeuron.com/index/projects/complete-­ works/426-­450/439-­am-­tacheles.html.

CHAPTER 11

No Country for Old Men: Second-Class Citizenship and its Discontents

Sergei’s hand does not shake. He knows that he must kill now, he Sergei, who loves so tenderly, who can intimately cultivate friendship. He is not an evil, or cruel fellow, but he knows that these betrayed and maliciously incited soldiers sent by the world’s parasites have been mobilized in bestial hatred against the beloved Soviet homeland. And he, Sergei, kills, so that the day comes more quickly, when people in the world won’t have to kill each other anymore … The most valuable thing that a human possesses is life. It is only given to him once, and he must use it in such a way that he does not later feel excruciating regret over senselessly wasted years, so the shame of an unworthy, meaningless past does not oppress him, and so that he can say when dying: I have devoted my whole life, my whole strength to the most wonderful thing in the world—the struggle to liberate humanity. And he must hurry up and live. Because a dumb illness or any tragic accident can abruptly put an end to life. Nikolai Ostrowski, Wie der Stahl gehärtet wurde (1932–1934)1

After declaring that it had resolved the Women’s Question with the introduction of socialism, the GDR became a country in which a small clique of aging men exercised monopoly control over all political, economic, and socio-cultural institutions. Though oppressed in equal measure when it came to fundamental freedoms, male citizens were not subject to a major redefinition of their gender roles, with one significant exception: Female participation in paid labor and new social policies that accorded women an unprecedented degree of economic independence deprived men of their traditional breadwinner function. The fact that women continued to bear © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. M. Mushaben, What Remains?, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18888-6_11

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primary responsibility for children and the household left men more time for personal leisure as well as for collective engagement in parties and unions. They thus managed to secure faster promotions, higher pay, and bigger bonuses, even as their family financial burdens declined. This makes it all the more puzzling as to why the group whose identity was least affected by the “triumph” of the western Fatherland subsequently developed the strongest feelings of relative deprivation, gradually leading a sizeable contingent to ally themselves with diverse rightwing populist forces. As Monika Maron observed, “it was not former prisoners from Bautzen or Hoheneck, emigrees or dissidents” who had the most trouble adjusting to unification. It was actually “the conformists, and yes-­men who made themselves comfortable in between their built-in living room furniture and colored televisions, [who had] traded tires for batteries, raised their hands high when votes were cast, and lined up at four in the morning to get a spot for a vacation on the Baltic Sea, all the while cursing and complaining but never really fighting.…” The question she raises points to the central paradox addressed in this chapter: why are the very people who were quiet conformists in those days, working-class men who had also disproportionately favored unification, “now the ones who decry West Germans as the thieves of their life histories?”2 Excluding a few Socialist Unity Party elites who faced criminal prosecution and countless others who were outed as Stasi agents and informers, what has led a core group of East German men who fancied themselves the initial winners of unification to perceive themselves as its ultimate losers thirty years later? While many scholars have analyzed the transformation of women’s roles following the installation of socialist systems in Eastern Europe, few have evaluated the ways in which those new gender regimes disrupted the traditional identities of men. The template for “the new man” was the classic industrial worker, “disciplined, creative and strong—but also intelligent and cultured.”3 Committed to life-long, gainful employment on behalf of the collective, he was expected to identify, above all, with his occupation, his factory, and the proletarian milieu. Adding another group to the model, working women, gave rise to antagonistic contradictions between male dominance and female emancipation.4 In fact, the overwhelming majority of individuals honored as “Heroes of Labor” were male, accounting for 90% of all title recipients from 1950 to 1954 alone.5

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Women could emancipate themselves, to a degree, by subordinating themselves to male norms (“Mommy works like a man”). The presumption that men would continue to bear only secondary, if any day-to-day responsibility for their families was hardly revolutionary. The National People’s Army faced even fewer challenges to the ageold, hegemonial masculinity paradigm. Hoping that many would pursue military or security-related careers, the state began grooming young males at fourteen. It used the Society for Sport and Technology (GST) to draw them into sixty camps, exposing then to sophisticated technical equipment, physical fitness competitions, and specialized training in diving, aircraft-gliding, flying planes, and shooting. Those born in 1963/1964 were the first group subject to mandatory military instruction (Wehr-­ kundeunterricht), introduced for ninth and tenth graders in 1978.6 Rather than intensify their willingness to defend the GDR in the wake of Ostpolitik and the Helsinki Accords, these measures triggered an unprecedented degree of peace activism. Many subsequently allied themselves with religious groups in pushing for a bona fide alternative-service option, without weapons, for conscientious objectors. This chapter begins with background on the National People’s Army and its efforts to foster a special type of masculinity, the socialist soldier personality, clearly at odds with other core components of GDR socialization, like its official “peace policies.” I then review two surveys from the 1980s, indicating that military conscription was far from effective in fostering loyalty or in binding young men more closely to SED goals. Next, I address the immediate impact of unification on male industrial workers, focusing on Treuhand privatization measures. I argue that the Kohl government’s blatant disregard for the human dimensions of unemployment produced a clash of East-West male cultures that continues to fuel eastern perceptions of “second-class citizenship.” I then analyze men’s disproportionate attraction to far-right parties, which I relate to the psychology of aging and the “Unhappiness-Curve.” Finally I explore misogynist trends among Alternative for Germany (AfD) politicians, interpreted here as a reaction against women’s economic and political gains after 2005. I conclude with reflections on the significance of “gender variables” in future efforts to mediate conflicts over voice, loyalty, and identity among eastern men.

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The Double Bind of Military Machismo Routinely presented as role models for youth, socialist heroes like anti-­ fascist Ernst Thälman and over-achiever Adolf Hennecke (the GDR’s “Stakhanov”) were chosen by SED rulers to embody the moral rectitude and proletarian work ethic of the fledgling East German state. They were also used to establish the parameters of ideological masculinity, dictated by new political elites who presented themselves as “steeled” by their own anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. As Sylka Scholz observed, the emerging pantheon of war and workplace heroes was moreover utilized to legitimate male dominance across the entire political system.7 Having recently survived two world wars, Germans on either side were unlikely to welcome the formation of yet another national army. Stalin nonetheless ordered Ulbricht to add “militarized units” to regular police forces at the onset of the 1948 Berlin blockade. Remilitarization measures were secretive at first, given the SED’s vehement importuning against western rearmament and the 1949 birth of NATO; in fact, the Warsaw Pact was not created until 1955. Mounting Cold War tensions led Soviet occupiers to demand the formation of a People’s Army, albeit “without a to-do.”8 Neither the 113,000 members of the NVA’s predecessor, the Barracked People’s Police (Kasernierte Volkspolizei, KVP), nor the forty units of Bereitschaftspolizei (equivalent to SWAT teams) were a match for the thousands of strikers and protestors who took to the streets in June 1953. The Ulbricht regime survived largely due to the rapid deployment of 500,000 Soviet troops. Shocked at having been caught off guard, the new Stasi Chief Mielke purged the KVP of politically suspect elements and initiated a massive expansion of state security services. Regime-loyal workers formed Kampfgruppen (combat groups) at the factory level; they were to serve as defenders of the last resort in the event of a foreign invasion, comparable to the Nazi Volkssturm units. The formal creation of the National People’s Army was delayed until March 1956, six months after the Bundeswehr was established. Modeled on the Soviet Army (“brotherhood in arms”), the NVA was organized into four branches, consisting of Ground Forces, a Navy, an Air Force and Border Guards. Its stone-grey uniforms curiously emulated those of the former Wehrmacht, including jackets with four pockets, gun-colored piping and half-calf Knobelbecher boots. Its ethos and training regimens were otherwise unexceptional. Roughly sixty of

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eighty-two higher command positions were initially occupied by former Wehrmacht officers, who were gradually dismissed or sent into retirement after 1957.9 Although some recruits were willing to extend their service out of anti-­ fascist/socialist conviction through the 1950s, the state’s efforts to inspire more young men to defend the Fatherland usually fell short, leading it to introduce compulsory conscription in 1962. Males aged eighteen to twenty-six were required to serve for eighteen months, remaining available for “reserve” duty until they turned fifty. Well-connected individuals could meet their obligation by serving in police units. Those with no ties to the west who were willing to fire a weapon (under shoot-to-kill orders) were assigned to the Border Guard, subject to continuous Stasi vetting and surveillance. After 1960, men aspiring to university educations or elite positions could be pressured into signing up as non-commissioned or short-term officers for three to four years. A desire to improve relations with Church authorities in 1964 led the state to form special “construction units” to accommodate those who rejected service with a weapon on religious grounds, totaling 15,000 by 1990. More often than not, construction-­soldiers (Bausoldaten) encountered “grueling and humiliating” treatment. Their circumstances improved somewhat between 1975 and 1982, overlapping with détente and the mushrooming of local peace initiatives.10 Women could volunteer for duty in the 1950s, but they were largely restricted to administrative, medical, or communication functions. A new Military Service Law adopted in 1982 opened the door to other functional domains, just about the time when women were given new uniforms, including skirts and assorted caps, to highlight their femininity.11 Declining birth-rates as of the early 1970s made it harder to secure the desired troop strength (190,000), leading authorities to establish 3500 “planned posts” for women in the mid-1980s. Die NVA produced its one-­ and-­only propaganda film regarding “ambitious” female soldiers in 1987. As of 1989, 190 were found among the officer ranks, largely in the medical domain. Born in 1936, Frau Oberst (Colonel) Dr. Ursula Schenderlein qualified as the “most decorated” among them. Dresden and Leipzig reportedly each had one female Lieutenant Colonel. Very few continued to serve in the Bundeswehr after unification.12 Conscription served as a rite of passage for 2.5 million young men, though few could live up to the heroic-soldier images presented in socialist realist films, novels, or artworks. The socialist soldier personality posited

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an ideal of masculinity rooted in military virtues associated with Prussian traditions: obedience, self-discipline, decisiveness, extraordinary courage, physical strength, comradeship, and self-sacrifice. He moreover displayed a strong will (despite absolute obedience!) and, of course, an unshakeable commitment to “victory.” New elements included the soldier’s love for the socialist Fatherland, total devotion to the working class and the SED, as well as a willingness and ability to execute all commands flowing from the party and the state. All this was infused with a spirit of internationalism and socialist brotherhood, along with a hatred of imperialism and its “mercenaries.”13 Most adolescent males perceived the conscription period as a radical break with their personal lives. Craving liberation from parental constraints, young men encountered a state intent on stripping them of their individuality, starting with close-cropped haircuts and ill-fitting uniforms. Forced to wear uniforms even during brief leave periods, many complained about their lack of vacation time, knowing that they would have been entitled to longer, more frequent time-off periods as apprentices and factory workers. The majority had few opportunities to demonstrate their technical competence; many who signed up for three years to improve their job prospects down the road feared they might even lose the occupational know-how they had already acquired. Interviews with former recruits indicate that many sought to survive the shock to their identities by pursuing free-time activities connected to their “real lives,” writing letters, playing musical instruments, or pursuing sports; joggers were at least allowed to shed their uniforms for a few hours “on the run.” On the positive side, forming close emotional ties to other men was considered a legitimate form of male bonding, including physical intimacy of a non-­ sexual nature. Many reported later that they found new “best friends” after living in close quarters. Another source of discontent was the frequent deployment of conscripts, along with other security personnel, to coal mines and industrial sites to mitigate chronic production shortfalls. Daniel Niemetz attributes the state’s inability to assert control over the mass demonstrations of 1989 to a serious lack of both proper equipment and protest-management expertise on the part of military and police forces, whose training was often cut short by economic re-assignment. During a January 1989 visit to Sweden, Honecker suddenly announced a new “disarmament” initiative, throwing the entire NVA into a state of chaos just months before

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citizens took to the streets. In addition to significantly reducing overall troop strength, tank, and fighter-plane contingents, the plan would have deployed another 15,000 soldiers to “support the fulfillment of economic tasks”—beyond the 5000 NVA comrades already reassigned to industrial production. Six divisions were to select one full regiment each in which basic training for conscripts would be limited to three months, followed by fifteen months in “productive labor for the people’s economy,” at wages well below what they would earn as full-time factory workers.14 Given these conditions, it is not surprising that the SED regularly failed to meet its enlistment targets. In 1987, it only attracted 50% of the longterm career officers, 66% of the short-term enlisted officers, and 47% of the cadet applicants foreseen by “the Plan.”15 The NVA’s approach to turning “boys into men” reflected traditional misogynist and homophobic tendencies, contravening the regime’s rhetorical and constitutional homage to the equality of women and men. Interviews infer that bawdy, sexist jokes were a regular feature of free-time exchanges. New arrivals were subject to violent hazing and exploitative harassment by so-called Entlassungskandidaten with only six more months of service; many “candidates for dismissal” were EOS graduates who had enlisted for three years to secure university places. The punishments they inflicted on new arrivals, especially those viewed as “soft” or “weak,” involved senseless cleaning games, relegating them to “women’s work” to reinforce their inferior worth and full subordination. Although the GDR legalized homosexuality among consenting males in 1968, military authorities issued surreptitious guidelines to circumvent the law, routinely dismissing gay men as unfit for military careers.16 Young men thus “steeled” were then expected to re-enter society as caring partners, loving fathers, dedicated workers, and socially engaged citizens. One could argue that civilian life marked a return to marginalized masculinity, after eighteen months of hypermasculine “performativity.” Post-unification analyses indicate that the National People’s Army was the last place, short of prison, that conscripted youth were likely to acquire an unshakeable love for the socialist Fatherland. Many former conscripts would continue to experience the psychological after-shocks of soldiering well beyond unification. The NVA’s increasingly negative reputation was hard to reconcile with SED propaganda espousing GDR “peace-policies,” with which many citizens identified. Two noteworthy Central Institute for

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Youth Research studies, issued in 1973 and 1986, respectively, provide a very sobering picture of youth’s willingness to “defend the Fatherland” (Wehrmoral). The dates are significant, insofar as they not only captured adolescent attitudes before and after the introduction of military training in schools (1978) but also mirrored big changes in the international context, extending from Ostpolitik to Gorbachev’s proposal for nuclear disarmament. The first survey, initiated in March 1971, covered 3172 males from Berlin, Cottbus, and Karl Marx Stadt, about to commence their basic military training. Researchers then polled 3131 reservists from same districts after they had completed 18 months of service (November 1972), 996 of whom were in the initial sample. Drawing on thirty survey items, they concluded that political-ideological consciousness was far from “satisfactory” in all domains. The sons of block-party members and the self-­ employed, as well as those assigned to naval and border guard units, were among the most skeptical regarding “the leading role of the working class and its party,” the superiority of the socialist military alliance, and the aggressive, “diversionary” nature of the imperialist enemy. While the authors were pleased that the contingent identifying with “Germany as a whole” fell from 30% to 16% after training, those embracing the GDR as their Fatherland only rose from 65% to 68%. Their “heartfelt” commitment to friendship with the Soviet Union increased from 7% to 18%, but those who considered the Soviets “indispensable” for the victory of socialism in the GDR declined from 28% to 8%. Half believed that “internalionalism is good, but in principle, every country ought to deal with its own problems.” Two-thirds of the FDJ members were willing to defend the GDR “without reservation,” compared to 40% among nonmembers. One-fourth to one-­half of the reservists were less committed to making the ultimate sacrifice, but even moderately “positive” orientations reportedly faded within a few years.17 Despite the state’s portrayal of FRG imperialism as more aggressive than even its US counterpart, only 43% felt after their service that western TV and radio broadcasts should be banned. Half of the SED members, 44% of FDJ members, and one-third of the reservists attributed FRG “aggressiveness” to its “imperialist social order,” but another third blamed “historical experiences.” Prior to training, 36% rejected the idea that Bundeswehr soldiers were their enemies, given that the latter were “also

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forced into uniforms and did not want war” (Table 11.1). Indeed, 50% of the easterners sampled had only enlisted “because it was the law” (“I am going because I have to”). Only 59% of SED members and 45% of the FDJ group felt that military service derived from their “obligation as socialist citizens.” Attitudes voiced by those who had completed their service were even less encouraging: merely 4% of the reservists claimed they “had learned a lot,” only 3% “enjoyed the experience.” One-third, including 25% among FDJ members, “clearly rejected” the idea that the time had been well spent or “valuable for society”; only 23% felt that military duty had strengthened their class consciousness. Many more, including 55% of the SED group and 41% of FDJ members, stressed the personal problems they encountered as a result of their NVA duties, for example, broken relationships, family crises, interrupted job-training, loss of earnings. Despite the heavy ideological elements injected into their training, 40% continued to view their Bundeswehr peers as enemies “only if they attacked the GDR or other socialist states.” Though not mentioned by the authors, the first survey period marked the high point of Ostpolitik, the Helsinki negotiations, and preparations for the World Youth Games, probably leading Table 11.1  Perceptions of the Bundeswehr and willingness to defend the GDR (in %)

The Bundeswehr soldier is my enemy, because he is willing to fight for German imperialism and to defeat socialism is my enemy, if he attacks the GDR or other socialist states is not an enemy, because he is also a German I do not see him as an enemy because he was also forced into uniform and does not want war To defend the GDR … I would risk my life under any circumstances I would risk my life under certain conditions I would risk my life only under orders, if it cannot be avoided Very limited willingness, if no personal value No willingness to risk my life to defend the GDR

Pre-training (1971)

After duty (1972)

8

38

39 14 36

40 3 14

13 (FDJ: 38%) 28 36 43 24 19 7 7

3 1

Source: Zur Entwicklung politisch-ideologischer Grundüberzeugungen und der Wehrbereitschaft junger Wehrpflichtiger, VVS LR 8-36/73 (Leipzig: February 1973), 30, 36

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conscripts to wonder why they would need to defend the GDR “to death” in a new era of peaceful coexistence. More qualitative in nature, the second study exploring the impact of GST paramilitary training testified to greater polarization and increasingly negative views of the NVA itself. Conducted May through September 1985, this sample of sixteen to nineteen year-olds involved 1187 apprentices and 427 EOS pupils spread across nine districts. Apprentices, especially, feared that they would not be able to master the physical and psychological demands of military training, or to get along with harsh commanders. A majority expected to encounter “physical stress, harassment, oppression, being bossed around, stinking toilets, no money, being humiliated, no women, no alcohol.” Although alcohol consumption was forbidden, Niemetz reports that heavy drinking was responsible for 50% of all disciplinary hearings and punishments meted out by military superiors.18 Many expressed fears regarding “sadism among soldiers” and inhumane treatment by older officers, having learned about this taboo topic through conversations with former conscripts. Denounced as politically irresponsible and “detrimental to socialist relationships” by those at higher ranks, the abusive treatment of rookies was quietly tolerated by their immediate superiors as necessary for instilling discipline and order.19 Conscientious objectors in construction units faced even worse conditions in isolated locations with poor food rations. EOS students accepted their obligation to serve but were equally frustrated concerning the time “wasted” in the NVA. One seventeen year-old from Gera calculated: “I am now in Grade 11. The time until I can make money: 2 years of EOS, 3 years in the army, 6 years of studying = 11 years. So my professional life will begin at age 28!” A Leipzig apprentice noted: “Military service in the NVA is totally senseless. If it comes to war, little armies like this will play no role. The war will be decided by the superpowers. The stress of army service is, militarily speaking, completely worthless.” Another declared: “It makes me vomit. If there weren’t negative consequences for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t do it.”20 Others simply responded: Null Bock auf NVA—zero interest in the NVA. Surveyed in the wake of massive anti-nuclear mobilizations against Pershing II and SS-20 deployments, many feared the outbreak of nuclear war, being accidently shot during maneuvers or being forced to kill someone else. These fears derived from a steady diet of histrionic “state security” warnings about a superlative western threat usually devoid of concrete references. The report recommended that commanders “convey with

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certainty that perfect mastery of weapons technology, and the willingness to defend socialism against every aggressive act are the best means of deterring the potential adversary from aggression, so that it would not be necessary to shoot at other human beings.”21 Meeting at Reykjavík in October 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev declared their willingness to eliminate all medium-range (500–5500  kilometers) nuclear weapons in Europe. They signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) on December 8, 1987, which foresaw the destruction of 2692 short-, medium-, and intermediate-range missiles by June 1991, depriving the NVA of its primary Cold-War combat mission. One local commander in Leipzig who solicited the opinions of police on high alert in October 1989 quickly established that, beyond their lack of equipment and training for quelling riots, many were unwilling to put themselves on the line for SED policy failures. Military and police families, like everyone else, complained regularly about chronic consumer shortages; as a result, neither soldiers nor police “SWAT teams” (Bereitschaftspolizei) could fathom the need to bludgeon their friends or relatives participating in demonstrations. “Why do tens of thousands have to take to the streets, to make the party and state even move…? Why wasn’t anyone up to now ready to discuss problems honestly and to seek common solutions, instead of muzzling or criminalizing everything?” In fact, “not one single member of the armed forces grabbed a weapon in 1989/1990, in order to protect this state and his own professional existence.”22 Bearing witness to dialectical forces, the last GDR defense minister was not only a civilian but also a former Bausoldat turned Lutheran pastor, Rainer Eppelmann.

The Treuhand Versus the “Heroes of Labor” Based on postwar experiences in the western zones, conservative CDU/ CSU politicians expected the introduction of the D-Mark in July 1990 to generate an equivalent “economic miracle” in East Germany, albeit without the protectionist measures that had shielded the fledgling FRG economy from brutal competition through the 1950s.23 Political expediency, not financial acumen, dictated the terms of the Currency Union, as well as the nature of Treuhand practices, resulting in widespread regional dependency closely allied with the “free” market. Within two years more than one-third of eastern per capita income and half of the new Länder budgets relied directly on transfer payments from Bonn.24

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Openly opposed by Bundesbank President Karl Otto Pöhl, the one-to-­ one exchange rates set by the Kohl government plunged the GDR economy into an unprecedented depression, leading the experienced ex-Economics and later Finance Minister to resign in protest.25 Eastern companies that had long relied on the state for capital accumulation were obliged, virtually overnight, to pay all workers and suppliers in D-Marks. Customers from fraternal socialist states were also immediately billed in D-Marks, causing export contracts to collapse.26 Obsolete industrial assets, low productivity, and poor-quality products made it impossible for GDR firms to suddenly offer their goods to hard-currency customers at prices covering their outlays. By December unemployment shot up to 1.1 million (12.5%), while GDP fell to 71.5% of its pre-July 1990 value, plunging further to 55% by mid-1991. Within a year, the workforce had declined by 2.23 million (25%).27 Official jobless rates did not include the tens of thousands subjected to short-term “layoffs,” herded into occupational retraining programs (Arbeitsbeschaffungsmassnahmen, ABM) or sent into early retirement. Though they accounted for only 36.3% of the newly jobless, men were allocated two-thirds of the ABM slots and disproportionately favored by FRG employers in sectors where GDR women had prevailed. Supported by the Central Round Table, the interim Modrow government had established an Agency for Fiduciary Administration of the People’s Property (Treuhandanstalt) on March 1, 1990. Its purpose was to convert the legal status of the “people’s own industries” into joint-­ stock holding companies “in the interest of the common good.” At issue were 8000 conglomerates, 17.2 billion square meters of agricultural land, 19.6 billion m2 of forests, 25 billion m2 of residential properties, 40,000 small stores and restaurants, 14 major department stores, thousands of bookstores and pharmacies, as well as hundreds of cinemas and hotels, accounting for two-thirds of all GDR workplaces.28 Following the March 18th elections, the new CDU Prime Minister Lothar de Maizière redefined the Treuhand’s functions, turning it into a privatization authority, duly legislated by the freely elected Volkskammer on June 17, 1990. As defined by law, the Treuhand was “to promote the structural adaptation of the economy to the requirements of the market, influencing the development of companies capable of renovation and their privatization, to render them competitive enterprises.”29 East Germans were eager to become the owners and managers of the “people’s own” property.

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FRG auditors quickly moved in to review company documents, conservatively estimating the total value of GDR assets at DM180–250 billion, compared to Modrow’s figure of DM900 billion. The former concluded that one-fifth of the existing enterprises were profitable, one half could be renovated, but one-third “could not be saved.” According to Wolfgang Seibel, the Treuhand structure that emerged was an institutional hybrid of questionable constitutionality. Kohl needed to avoid appearance of a “centralized” state dictating the parameters of privatization. He also sought to circumvent Bundestag control over budgetary issues by making the Treuhand directly accountable to the Finance Ministry, in consultation with the Economics Ministry. This ensured later that the Treuhand, not the conservative-liberal government, “became the scapegoat for the disastrous consequences of the decision implicit in the Currency Union, subjecting east German enterprises to the competitive forces of the world market with one fell swoop.”30 Appointed the first TH president shortly after a private meeting with Rudolf Seiters in the Federal Chancellor’s Office, Rainer Marie Gohlke resigned less than six weeks later in 1990 over disagreements with his top administrator, Detlev Rohwedder. Unlike the four million who would soon lose their jobs, thanks to the Treuhand, Gohlke walked away with a DM3 million severance package. His successor, Rohwedder, immediately jettisoned the Volkskammer’s joint-stock mandate, declaring “the privatisation of assets is the best way of reorganisation (sic) for profitability.”31 Known as a brutal down-sizer at Hoechst, he had eliminated the jobs of two-thirds of the female workforce. Having thus restored its “profitability,” he was designated “Manager of the Year” in 1983. Accepting a salary of DM800,000 (a DM500,000 pay-cut), Rohwedder considered very little in the east worth saving.32 Bonn blocked potential labor union opposition by promising a financial assistance package for job creation and structural development on March 8, 1991. The holding agency’s special status allowed it to borrow independently on the open credit market, first DM30 billion in 1992, then another DM 8 billion. By the time of its dissolution, it had accumulated a total debt of DM250–260 billion, passed on to taxpayers with no parliamentary oversight. Birgit Breuel (CDU) took over following Rohwedder’s assassination on April 1, 1991.33 The Treuhand became a job-creator of sorts, starting with 144 employees and ending with 4200; roughly 80% of the

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initial hires were GDR ministerial and planning bureaucrats, concentrated in one of 15 district offices. The top positions were occupied by FRG ministerial elites and western corporate managers “on loan” from major companies, hoping to steer the best properties in their own direction. The Treuhand blocked easterners’ efforts to create job-generating small businesses, subjecting them to more rigorous business-plan criteria and collateral requirements than outsiders. Privatization turned into a fire-sale for West Germans. FRG companies bought up GDR enterprises at bargain-basement prices, then shut them down to eliminate the competition.34 Some companies that only existed on paper were able to buy whole factories for one D-Mark. Others divided up major sectors among themselves (media, energy), while a few were granted outright monopolies: the Steigenberger Hotel owners got a great deal on the entire Interhotel network, for example. On October 3, 1990, the Treuhand moreover assumed control of properties and assets of the block-parties and mass organizations. Staff were barred from selling a third of the agricultural land, however, so as not to “disrupt” western prices.35 The agency further received 7423 applications for the return of businesses nationalized in 1972, of which 381 were returned to former owners within several weeks.36 Rather than list them publicly, the TH engaged in “discrete” bargaining regarding the sale of the largest 1000 firms. The first 3000 buyers pledged to invest DM76 billion, but instead of assuming the costs themselves, they demanded subsidies to clean up the environmental messes. Roughly, 150 FRG managers were randomly appointed to the supervisory boards of privatized companies, including some who had been “chased out” of their own firms due to incompetence.37 Buyers who failed to preserve jobs were never fined the DM100,000 per workplace mandated by their contracts; instead, they were allowed to “renegotiate” their purchase prices retroactively. Others were permitted to carve out the “filet” sectors for themselves, like Carl Zeiss Jena, then dump the rest.38 In March 1991, 70,000 Leipzigers took to the streets again to protest “electoral fraud” and joblessness, as did 30,000 chemical workers in Leuna and Trabant workers in Zwickau.39 One particularly heinous scandal involved of the “sale” of the Kaligrube Bischofferode, the third largest potash exporter world-wide. The quality

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of its “white gold” (used for fertilizer) surpassed that of deposits mined in the old FRG, and the firm’s productivity had tripled over a three-year period. Experts deemed its inventory large enough to supply processing plants abroad for another fifty years. When one potential buyer, Johannes Peine from Niedersachsen, promised to pour DM60 million of his own money into modernizing the mines, Bonn intervened to have all his credit cancelled, causing him to lose DM73 million, his house, his land, and all of his other business operations—sending another 400 to the unemployment line.40 The western firm Kali + Salz AG Kassel received the subsidies; it promptly shut down eight of ten mines, including the Roßleben site, with an estimated 100 years of reserve deposits. Despite a hunger strike by 100 miners, the remaining workforce was reduced from 1546 to 700, though Bischofferode continued to deliver potash to Austria, France, the UK, and Scandinavia. Documents surfaced in 2014 revealing a secret deal between Kohl, “K  +  S,” and BASF in the Chancellor’s hometown of Ludwigshafen.41 By 1994, over 40,000 enterprises had been liquidated or privatized, resulting in job losses for 72% of the 4.1 million who had labored there. West Germans assumed ownership of 85% of the “productive” companies, controlling 51% of the firms, 64% of the sales volume, and 68% of the remaining workplaces. East Germans secured less than 6% of the “people’s own factories,” foreign investors roughly 10%.42 Over 2.3 million FRG men moved eastwards to occupy top political, administrative, and economic posts. Adding insult to injury over the lower pay accorded easterners performing equal or equivalent work, westerners received extra “hardship” bonuses and generous subsidies for five years, despite their higher salaries, to compensate them for weekend commutes back home. The term Buschzulage implied their standing as modern colonialists, forced to live in primitive “bush country.”43 Easterners referred to their Treuhand experiences as Kohlonization, described in poetic terms by Volker Braun (Box 11.1).

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Box 11.1  “Eigentum”/ “Property” (Volker Braun) Das Eigentum              Property Da bin ich noch: mein Land geht in den Westen.       I am still here, though my country´s gone West. KRIEG DEN HÜTTEN FRIEDE DEN PALÄSTEN.  PEACE TO THE PALACES AND WAR TAKE

THE REST. Ich selber habe ihm den Tritt versetzt. I am the one who gave it a kick. Es wirft sich weg und seine magre Zierde. It is throwing away itself and its meager charms. Dem Winter folgt der Sommer der Begierde. Winter is followed by a summer of desire. Und ich kann bleiben wo der Pfeffer wächst. But I can remain, heading into hell-fire. Und unverständlich wird mein ganzer Text And my entire text becomes hard to decipher Was ich niemals besaß wird mir entrissen. What I never possessed is being torn away. Was ich nicht lebte, werd ich ewig missen. What I never experienced I shall miss always. Die Hoffnung lag im Weg wie eine Falle. Hope lay across the path like a trap, we fall. Mein Eigentum, jetzt habt ihrs auf der Kralle. My property, you grab now in your claws. Wann sag ich wieder mein und meine alle. When will I ever again say mine and mean us all.

Source: Volker Braun. (1990, published 1996) In Lustgarten, Preußen. Ausgewählte Gedichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag (my translation).

While Easterners struggled psychologically with the loss of their constitutional right to work, Westerners grumbled about the disbursement of DM211 billion in “transfer” subsidies. Breuel would claim in 2019 that the Treuhand had “invested” DM230 billion (115 billion euros), although it only generated DM70 billion in profitable sales. By comparison, Bonn had few qualms about pouring €200 billion into its own dying hard-coal industry.44 This led critics like Rudiger Frank to ask: Now, who benefited from all that investment? It was West German companies who expanded to the east. So that was a subsidy to West German industry. Infrastructure projects, highways, roads, telecommunication networks, who did that? West German companies, because all the East German construction companies were either bankrupt or bought up by West German competitors.45

FRG companies were moreover permitted to hire subcontracted laborers from Poland and Italy to build the new government center near the Brandenburg Gate, for lower wages than they would have been required to pay to jobless East Germans. Although they received some non-­ earmarked funds, local authorities were required to pay off DM350 billion

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in old GDR debts. Kohl turned debt-management and collection over to private FRG banks, allowing the latter to accrue windfall profits of DM16 billion by way of subsequent interest payments. Banks in Bonn were handed nearly DM70 billion in “free” credit assets.46 West German legal scholars, economists, and social scientists were even granted a monopoly over empirical research on privatization, under a federally financed study issued in late 1993, Treuhandanstalt—Das Unmögliche wagen (Treuhandanstalt—Dare the Impossible). These scholars enjoyed exclusive access to TH data, files, and personnel. One of the original team members, Wolfgang Seibel, grew increasingly critical, stressing the Treuhand’s “lightening rod” function; its purpose was to protect the CDU government against charges of culpability, bias, or corruption.47 Insiders who later wrote dissertations involving their activities presented much more favorable assessments. As defined by law, the Treuhand had to complete its tasks and dissolve itself by December 1994. With CDU support declining prior to new elections in October, there was some concern regarding the negative impact that imminent joblessness might have on the morale of its own employees. Lacking capacity, expertise, and resources, new state governments resisted pressures to saddle them with the remaining tasks, or with subsequent blame. Recognizing herself as a target of hatred, Breuel forced a smile in front of journalists and TV cameras on December 31, 1994, as she symbolically unscrewed the Treuhand name-plate from the entrance to the former GDR House of Ministries. Roughly, 2900 employees were eased into its successor organization, the Federal Agency for Special Unification Tasks (BvS) and its “partner organs,” charged with privatizing agricultural holdings and monitoring contractual compliance among new owners. The Bundestag investigated charges of overinflated Treuhand salaries, mismanagement, lack of oversight, and corruption in 1994, but beyond a few individual trials, no remedial action was taken.48 Based on their long-standing relationships with many GDR enterprises, professional archivists in the new Länder, along with privately contracted archive workers, amassed over “260 kilometers’” worth of shelved materials pertaining to TH activities.49 Some 500 truckloads of files were transferred to a private location outside Berlin, where, according to federal law, they remained classified for thirty years. Modrow’s economics minister and later Bundestag member, Christa Luft PDS, defined the Treuhand’s legacy as “the greatest destruction of productive capital in peace-times.” Ex-GDR State Bank manager Edgar Most spoke of “a total disgrace”

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(Schweinerei). Spiegel editor Dieter Kampe described it as “a Mecca for tricksters and con-artists, racketeers, speculators and careerists.”50 Westerner Franz Schuster, CDU interior minister turned economics minister in Thüringen, called it a “successful reconstruction.”51

A Clash of Male Cultures: Eastern Underlings, Western Bosses In 1994, lawmakers amended Article 72 of the Basic Law, which had granted the government special powers to ensure “equal” living conditions throughout the federal territory; it was replaced with a reference to conditions of “comparable worth.” Only 57% of eastern males were employed full-time in 1997; their losses were compounded by the fact that a significant proportion of GDR households had relied on dual-earners (48% of women still had jobs). The shift to a Red-Green government in 1998 did little to improve their circumstances. Schröder’s structural reforms (Agenda 2010, Hartz IV) hit eastern workers harder than westerners, given massive job losses, lower wages, and the end of job-creation measures (Fig. 11.1). In GDR times, misery had at least been shared more or less equally. Ten years into the Currency Union, the new states witnessed a clear division into “have” and “have-not” classes, with a poverty rate of 12.7%; 44% of the newly enfranchised faced “precarious” living conditions, 51.5% among women.52 Unification costs ran €70–80 billion ($118 billion) per year, totaling upwards of €2 trillion for the first twenty years, most of which went toward propping up personal consumption. Freedom, of course, is priceless. For millions of East Germans, the Treuhand was social Darwinism incarnate. Breuel admitted in a 2019 interview: “Naturally we made mistakes. That was very bitter.” Still persuaded that the means chosen were “fundamentally correct,” she confessed, It would not have been possible to expect a transformation of this magnitude among the people in West Germany. They would not have endured it. We had to demand a great deal from the people, and we did so… we did not have the time to occupy ourselves adequately with their biographies. That was, in part, very hard. They certainly suffered enormously and hated us for it.53

Only privatization, she claimed, could bring innovation and capital into the companies, resulting in “very economically successful regions.” Annual reports on the state of German unity tell a very different story. By 2020,

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493 20,0

3.500.000

18,0

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2,0 1980 1985 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 11/2019

0,0

Westdeutschland

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Quote Westdeutschland

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Fig. 11.1  Number and rate of unemployed workers in Germany, 1980–2019 (in  %). (Source: Silke Röbenack. 2020. “Der lange Weg zur Einheit—Die Entwicklung der Arbeitslosigkeit in Ost- und Westdeutschland.” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: October 15, https://www.bpb.de/themen/deutsche-­ einheit/lange-­wege-­der-­deutschen-­einheit/47242/der-­lange-­weg-­zur-­einheit-­die-­ entwicklung-­der-­arbeitslosigkeit-­in-­ost-­und-­westdeutschland/)

comparable worth had yet to be achieved. The east still accounts for most of what are now labeled “structurally weak” regions, lagging behind in investment, innovation and infrastructure.54 Wages still had not reached parity with western levels (82–85%) after thirty years of unity. As Anja Mayer (Die Linke, Brandenburg) stressed, the manner in which privatizations were executed not only meant job losses for millions but also “the dissolution and merciless devaluation of easterners’ entire lives.”55 While women were devastated by sudden unemployment and their loss of economic independence, they had other female identities to fall back on, as daughters, mothers, wives, and grandmothers. GDR masculinity, by contrast, was narrowly circumscribed in terms of two roles: soldier and worker. The one constant in the lives of men had been their elevated status as members of the working class. Though socialized to accept women’s equality, men had long enjoyed higher salaries and more promotions, engaged often in party or union activities, and escaped many domestic burdens. These conditions probably contributed to their sense of self-worth, despite subordination to geriatric leaders.

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Democracy’s equal opportunity promises led men in their forties and fifties to assume that they would continue to move up the career ladder in the new homeland. Years of exposure to successful male images on West-TV, coupled with CDU/CSU opposition to policies favoring “working women,” would allow them to escape the marginalized masculinities imposed by the old regime. It raised subliminal expectations that they would be recognized as “real men,” for example, as family breadwinners. Instead, they found themselves completely displaced by west German political, economic, and administrative elites on their home turf, a condition that would persist for decades. The direct transfer of western know-how was undoubtedly essential for the rapid transformation of GDR institutions in accordance with “the rule of law” in the early 1990s, but that does not explain why eastern citizens were still being denied their fair share of elite positions three decades later. Michael Bluhm and Olaf Jacobs determined that while easterners comprised 17% of the population, they occupied only 1.7% of 15,000 top-­level posts at the federal level as late as 2016.56 That year only three of sixty state secretaries hailed from the east, compared to six in 2004. Of 200 Bundeswehr generals and admirals, only two had eastern roots. Easterners’ hold on top positions in their own Länder governments dropped from 75% to 70% over twelve years, though their regional presence as state secretaries rose from 26% to 46%. Their ability to participate in judicial decision-­making was even more limited: in 2016, they occupied only 5.9% of all chief-justice slots, up from 3.4%. Their share of total judgeships increased minimally, from 11.8% to 13.3%. Almost thirty years into unity, twice as many westerners were still serving as rectors/provosts at higher educational institutions in eastern states; by 2020, eastern-born citizens occupied only one of seven director slots (15% vs. 24% foreigners) at key research institutions. The private sector also failed to deliver equal opportunity: Among the thirteen largest newspapers in their own region, their share of chief executives dropped from 36% to 9% after 2004, though their representation among lead editors grew from 42% to 62%. Easterners accounted for 33.5% of the CEOs in the 100 largest enterprises on their own turf, compared to 35.1% in 2004 their control of managerial posts declined by 12% as of 2016.57 Not a single DAX enterprise had its headquarters in the east. Among seven federal agencies located outside the old FRG, not one was directed by an eastern official. As late as 2021, they headed only two of sixty-three federal bureaucracies in the old states; only one of ten national

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agencies based in Berlin had an eastern boss. Four exercised leadership roles among the 133 departments comprising fourteen government ministries. Ironically the Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth (BFSFJ) has outpaced all the rest in terms of “intercultural opening,” where they have directed 20% of the departments. Indeed, five of ten BFSFJ ministers dating back to 1990 have had eastern roots, including Franziska Giffey. Charged with plagiarizing parts of her dissertation, she resigned in mid-2021 but was elected as Berlin’s first female “Reigning Mayor” later that year. The Foreign Ministry ran a distant second with 9%, while the “Homeland Ministry” controlled by Horst Seehofer (CSU) did not have a single eastern department head; he also had zero women among his eight state secretaries.58 Tasked with improving conditions in the “new states,” eleven different Federal Commissioners have come and gone over the last thirty years, suggesting the thankless, ineffective nature of this position. Objectively speaking, eastern men owe their persistent sense of second-­ class citizenship to the political and economic machinations of powerful western men. In 2017, then East-Commissioner Iris Gleicke characterized the Treuhand as “the symbol of a brutal, unfettered capitalism that had inflicted traumatic experiences on many, if not most east Germans.”59 The psychological impact on men resurfaced with a vengeance twenty-five years later, coinciding with the rise of the AfD. We now turn to the contradictions between voice, loyalty, and masculinity inherent in that development.

Backlash: Far-right Populism and the New Misogynists Like other FRG parties, the NPD (post-war Nazi Party), the Republikaner, and the German People’s Union (DVU) quickly moved into the east in 1990 but encountered little initial success. Feeling betrayed by the CDU, jobless Easterners veered back to the left, allowing the SED’s heir, the PDS, to establish itself as the protest voice of the new Länder. In addition to securing Bundestag mandates, the PDS scored double digits in the new states, rendering it the third largest party as well as a reliable coalition partner in some communal and state governments. In 1991 only 12% of ex-GDR citizens, in contrast to 27% in the old FRG, expressed sympathy for the far-right (Fig. 11.2).60

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Ost

1990 1994 1998 2002 2005 2009 2013 2017

1990 1994 1998 2002 2005 2009 2013 2017

50 45 40 35 30 25 20 15 10 5 0

Union

SPD

Linke

Grüne

FDP

AfD

Fig. 11.2  West/East vote shares in the Bundestag elections, 1990–2017 (in %). (Source: Kerstin Völkl, “Wahlverhalten in Ost- und Westdeutschland im Zeitverlauf (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, May 27, 2020), https://www.bpb.de/ geschichte/deutsche-­e inheit/lange-­w ege-­d er-­d eutschen-­e inheit/47513/ wahlverhalten-­in-­ost-­und-­westdeutschland)

Despite gradually improving economic conditions, the PDS-turned-­ Linke began losing its appeal for disgruntled voters around 2014 with the rise of a new party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD). Its merger with western leftists had undermined its earlier authenticity, while its participation in multiple state governments rendered it part of “the establishment.” The retirement of two outspoken defenders of eastern interests, Gregor Gysi, and Wolfgang Thierse (SPD), also led to the search for new champions among self-perceived underdogs, although AfD leaders rarely railed against conditions in the east, in contrast to Die Linke. Like its rightwing predecessors, the AfD was a west German creation, despite an ongoing tendency to blame everything that goes awry in the east on “the SED dictatorship.” Steeped in Politikverdrossenheit born of the Kohl years, Thilo Sarrazin, Berlin’s former SPD finance minister and Deutsche Bank executive, captured media attention in 2010 with his book, Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany abolishes itself ). That work echoed the racial qua ethnic genetics espoused by two US-American

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authors in The Bell Curve, published in 1994.61 His second book, Europa braucht den Euro nicht (Europe Doesn’t Need the Euro), appeared in 2012.62 These works gave rise to two reactive streams opposing Merkel’s stance— “there is no alternative”—to limited EU bailouts in response to 2008–2009 global financial crisis. The first stream surfaced in the west in February 2013, when Hamburg economics professor Bernd Lucke, joined by Alexander Gauland, Beatrix von Storch, and Hans-Olaf Henkel, demanded that Germany withdraw from the Eurozone. Rejecting bailout packages for Greece and Italy, they charged the CDU with backing the EU’s “surreptitious introduction of organized state insolvency” while ignoring the “common man”—as if professors, titled aristocrats, and the Federation of German Industries president qualified as common folk.63 Originally ordo-liberal in orientation, the AfD established regional branches in all sixteen Länder by May.64 Ironically, the bailout loans they opposed allowed German banks to accrue over 94 billion Euros in profits, based on their short-term, debt-servicing loans to “southern sinners”—four billion Euros more than they might have lost, had the Greeks simply defaulted on dubious FRG loans.65 Garnering 4.7% in the 2013 Bundestag elections, the AfD dropped its populist rhetoric, presenting itself as a single-issue party in 2014, thereby capturing 7.1% of German votes for the European Parliament. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, Lucke’s populist tactics unleashed a tide he could not contain. He was driven out of his own party in July 2015, when street protestors began hammering away at “uncontrolled migration,” at a time when migration was still very much under control.66 As Hans-Joachim Maaz observed, “they attack the foreigners but they mean the West Germans.”67 The second stream, taking root in the east, has been described as “populist, pernicious, and perilous,” giving voice to neo-Nazi ideologues despite forty years of official anti-fascism.68 It began with Monday night demonstrations in Dresden “where everybody gathers in opposition to everyone and everything”; protesters labeled themselves Pegida (Patriotic Europeans against the Islamicization of the Occident).69 Paradoxically, “Silicon Saxony” is doing well economically, but for twelve years its western Minister President, Kurt Biedenkopf (CDU), ignored signs of xenophobic activity, declaring in 2000 that Saxonians were “immune” to right extremism.70 Well before Merkel suspended the Dublin regulations in September 2015, party activists forged ties with Pegida leaders, denouncing open borders, Sharia law, transborder crime, and the putative collapse of the welfare system, all blamed on migration. Saxony became the

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primary bastion of AfD support, although foreigners account for less than 4% of its residents (national average: 10.5%).71 Pursuing state legislative seats, the new leaders, including Saxonian Frauke Petry, dropped the Euro question altogether in favor of “life-style” issues: opposing gay marriage, advocating three-child families, demanding law and order, as well as a return to nuclear energy (post Fukushima). The AfD has added unsavory, neo-Nazi characters, such as Thüringen’s Björn Höcke (born/educated in the old FRG), with a prior criminal record.72 Some have been charged with hate speech, like Akif Pirinçci, fined 11,700 Euros for calling refugees “Muslim garbage heaps.” He declared at a Pegida rally that “there are naturally alternatives [to refugee facilities], but the concentration camps are unfortunately no longer operating.”73 The Chancellor herself was called a cunt and a whore when she visited a refugee facility in Heidenau in August 2015—two weeks before she suspended the Dublin agreement, allowing for a mass influx of asylum-seekers.74 Xenophobic attitudes are a powerful predictor of rightwing support, despite the small presence of Muslims and/or refugees in the East.75 Petry was losing support well before party insiders accused her of “incredible stupidity” for declaring in a 2016 interview that it might be “necessary for the police to use firearms” to stop refugees at German border.76 Von Storch immediately zapped off an equally stupid tweet, declaring that women and children could also be shot. Public outrage led her to claim the next day that her mouse had inadvertently “slipped,” sending out the message. This begs the question: why did she type those words at all?77 AfD sympathizers denounced Merkel’s CDU as “too liberal, too unprincipled, too un-Catholic and too multicultural.”78 Scoring double digits in Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate, and Saxony-Anhalt in March 2016, the AfD then trounced the CDU in Merkel’s constituent state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. It garnered 14.2%, along with five direct mandates in Berlin, in districts heavy with Russian “re-settlers” (Marzahn, Hohenschönhausen).79 These electoral outcomes point to three troubling trends. First, the AfD has been curiously successful in drawing out non-voters, dubbed the east’s “third largest party” in 2009 (Fig.  11.3). This new form of exit reflects deep disappointment with the nature of FRG democracy, as confirmed by multiple polls. Though they now enjoy cleaner environments, better healthcare, higher pensions, freedom of assembly, and significant coverage by the “lying” mainstream media, Easterners are angry at being “ignored” by political elites whose electoral victories derived from their own refusal to

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Fig. 11.3  Non-voters and AfD voters, Bundestag Elections 2009 and 2017. (Sources: Städtische Statisktikämter, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/ s12392-­010-­0247-­7#Tab1; “Bundestagwahl: Wer sind die Waehler der AfD?” Stuttgarter Nachrichten, September 25, 2017)

participate in 2009 and 2013.80 By 2019, the AfD had secured seats in all sixteen state parliaments, indicating that rightwing populism is not just an “eastern” problem. Secondly, West Germans continue to blame the GDR “dictatorship” when, in fact, the far-right values espoused by AfD demagogues are the antithesis of those the SED tried to instill. Loyalty to socialism is clearly not the issue among non-voters and Wutburger (enraged citizens). Tageszeitung reporters found that twenty-three Bundestag members hired staff members with ties to far-right organizations like the Identitarian Movement.81 One “wing” representing 20% of the AfD membership is under surveillance by the Office for Constitutional Protection, but this has not undermined popular support for Höcke, Andreas Kalbitz, Albrecht Andreas Harlass, and Christian Lüth, drawing on Nazi vocabulary and symbols. Third, of particular interest here is the disproportionate support these candidates draw from middle-age men. In September 2017, the AfD garnered 12.6% of the national vote, averaging 21.5% in the east, with a high of 27% in Saxony. Roughly, 1.2 million who had shunned earlier elections

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sided with the AfD. Men between 40 and 59 were most inclined to choose far-right candidates; while 29% of East-men supported the right, only 17% of women followed suit.82 Despite securing a direct mandate, Petry declared the next day that she would not join the parliamentary caucus. Within a week she had quit the party which has already split four times.83 As of this writing, the AfD evinces the smallest share of female MdBs.84 According to 2017 exit polls, East-men aged thirty to fifty-nine were most likely to vote for AfD, suggesting it has become their new channel for voice. This raises an intriguing proposition that would be difficult to test empirically. The main actors behind the major waves of xenophobic violence between 1991 and 1993 were males between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.85 If one “adds” twenty-five to thirty years of life in united Germany, one arrives at the ages of forty-one to fifty-five. It is conceivable that today’s AfD sympathizers include many disaffected youth who protested and rioted against the refugees of the 1990s. Males who were so alienated from the system back then that they refused to vote through subsequent electoral cycles may have begun gravitating to the AfD after 2014 as a more “socially acceptable” channel for expressing the visceral antipathies they developed and manifested earlier. Those sentiments could have been rendered dormant during the intervening years by their need to pursue low-paid, undervalued forms of employment under western bosses after GDR firms disappeared. They might have been temporarily mollified by a dramatic decline in refugee admissions following the 1993 “asylum compromise.” While this certainly does not account for all AfD sympathizers, this group would constitute a demographic match for its core supporters today. Previously marginalized as family providers, it is not surprising that roughly 20,000 GDR men went underground in the western Länder after 1989 to escape child-support obligations.86 Perceiving themselves as unification’s losers, men who feel they have been left behind resent advances by women and minorities based on their higher educational qualifications. Never mind the 23% gender pay-gap and the fact that women are still grossly underrepresented in corporate boardrooms. The AfD’s stridently sexist campaign posters blame feminism, gay marriage, and migration for the “extinction of the German family,” although birth rates reached a forty-three year high in 2018. Not surprisingly, less than 5% among women over sixty-five or under thirty support the party. Women played no role in negotiating the terms of unification, but they were more likely to exit the East after 1990. Given Conservatives’

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elimination of social benefits that had enabled mothers to reconcile family and work, it is ironic that the ambitious women who relocated to the old states are now faulted for the persistence of moribund economic conditions in the places they left behind. Two-thirds of the females under thirtyfive who opted to “test the west” counted among the GDR’s best and brightest, leaving behind large pools of disadvantaged men and the elderly. The departure of 1.5 million (10% of the population) has allegedly deprived a frustrated male underclass of potential marriage partners in structurally weak regions. Some eastern towns are experiencing female deficits up to 25%, exceeding the share of “missing women” across the polar regions of Sweden and Finland.87 A female brain-drain in the new states translated into a brain-gain and baby-boomlet for the old ones, which were facing a looming demographic crisis in 1989/1990. The Berlin Institute for Population and Development determined that radical-right parties tended to secure more votes in depressed areas that were heavily affected by female flight before the refugee crisis. In 2007, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern residents gave 7.3% of their votes to the NPD. Despite a veritable export- and job-boom prior to the Corona pandemic, wage parity, technological investment, and other presumed benefits of unity still lag behind. AfD men like west-politician Alexander Gauland proclaim the need to “stop the gender madness” based on “the simple truth [that] men and women are different.” They characterize EU equality policies, “that whole gender mainstreaming thing (whatever that is), as a big folly.” Gauland decries “female forms” of nouns (*Innen)” as “the products of people who don’t have anything else to worry about.”88 The AfD blames foreigners for a loss of “German identity,” using the Nazi term, Űberfremdung. Its leaders moreover denounced Merkel’s “failing economic policies” amidst a pre-Corona job boom that had employers hustling for skilled workers. After Merkel announced her departure from the national stage, AfD leaders began invoking the slogan, Vollende die Wende (Complete the Turn-around), which former GDR human rights activists view as a perversion of their legacy.89 A further ideological current underlies male backlash not only in Germany but also in Poland, Hungary, and other east-bloc countries: Socialism proclaimed women and men equal (they weren’t), while denouncing “feminism” as a western plot. Because they benefited from socialist policies enabling them to reconcile work and family, women must have been “unindicted co-conspirators” in a communist-engineered plot to deprive them of their manhood. Rightwing radicals infer that a return

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to female subordination and minority exclusion will reduce their own sense of powerlessness in a world that is once again turning their lives upside down. As Jakob Augstein observed, “the AfD does not want Germany to stay the way it is. It wants Germany to go back to being what it was,” at least as its male supporters would like to re-imagine it.90

Relative Deprivation: Second-Class Citizenship and the “Unhappiness Curve” Prior to the Corona pandemic, pollsters noted that most AfD sympathizers described their personal economic situations as good but were thoroughly convinced that the country as a whole was “going to hell in a hand-basket.” Having mastered one major historical transformation that allowed them, temporarily, to view themselves as revolutionary heroes, middle-aged men see their ongoing exclusion from elite ranks as proof of their second-class citizenship. Surveys involving Pegida protestors found that a clear majority were middle-aged males, only 2% of whom were jobless; the general unemployment rate for Saxony was 8.4%. Initially one-­ third held academic degrees, suggesting they were hardly the down-and-out members of society; only 12% described their economic circumstances as bad.91 Reminiscent of 1989, protestors’ profiles, as well as the AfD’s base, began to shift in late 2015, encompassing less affluent participants as new leaders began voicing far-right themes. By 2016, Germany had not only recovered from the Euro-crisis but was also enjoying a new export- and job-boom. According to Philipp Adorf, “it’s not the economy, stupid” that precipitated a proletarian shift to the right, but as social-market economy guru, Ludwig Erhard, once observed, “fifty percent of economics is psychology.”92 Working-class males, forced to embrace a whole new system displaying little interest in their knowledge or experience, are tired of fundamental change. Rather than “expand their identities” in the direction of multiculturalism, they want to be taken seriously as Germans by “the other Germans” who still dominate all socio-­ economic and political institutions. East men reject the spurious assumptions that they have yet to shed their “SED dictatorship” mentality. Interdisciplinary projects have piqued my interest in the gendered “psychology of aging.” Neurological scientists have shown that male and female brains age differently, and that men’s brains shrink at a faster rate after forty, resulting in greater memory loss and ideological rigidity.93

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Completing a longitudinal study on happiness and the life-cycle involving 500,000 US-Americans and West Europeans, David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald concluded that psychological well-being follows a U-shaped (reverse bell-curve) trajectory through various stages of the life-­cycle.94 Citizens have benefitted from dramatic changes in their socio-economic security, physical mobility, and life-style choices since the early 1900s. Yet holding other factors constant (income, education, health), their perceptions of individual happiness persistently reach their lowest point at middle age. Reviewing other mega-data sets (e.g., Eurobarometer polls, World Value Surveys, US General Social Survey), Blanchflower and Oswald concluded that the pattern applies to many advanced industrial regions. While women and men both experience the “unhappiness” curve, there are distinctive differences in the length, intensity, and coping strategies observed between the sexes. Males are ostensibly prone to stronger feelings of relative deprivation, perhaps because more of them assumed that they could “have it all.” Men have lost their traditionally dominant status as better educated workers, respected breadwinners, upwardly mobile managers, and previously unchallenged national politicians—most of whom were unfettered by the private division of uncompensated household labor prior to the 1970s. Personal happiness declines at different ages for males and females, however. Although the two economists offer no concrete explanation, timing differences might owe to the onset of the “empty nest” syndrome, given that women frequently married older men at earlier ages prior to second-wave feminism. Coupled with the mood-killing forces of menopause, the feeling of no longer being needed often unleashed the discontent described by Betty Friedan in the Feminist Mystique, especially among better educated women. But women also develop alternative sources of identity as “girlfriends,” church or community volunteers, and grandmothers, leaving them less time for self-pity. Men are more likely to encounter such feelings in relation to their jobs, closer to retirement. The unhappiness curve tends to even out by 60+, perhaps because old age motivates people to derive emotional meaning from the lives they have led, rather than to seek new horizons—provided those lives have not been disrupted by extraordinary events like unification. Individuals approaching the end of the life-cycle purportedly “adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations.”95

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Having “worked like a man,” it is conceivable that eastern women who do sympathize with the AfD constitute the exception to the gender rule detected by Blanchflower and Oswald. Rural areas and communities stripped of industrial and mining jobs experienced significant population drains. Younger, better educated females were the most inclined to head west in search of good jobs. Their mothers, who had taken paid employment, free contraception, and subsidized child-care for granted, were suddenly robbed of their economic independence and career mobility when GDR enterprises collapsed. Women lost their jobs at higher rates and were less likely to be included in ABM/retraining programs. Beyond losing out on twenty-five more years of pension contributions that would have rendered them financially secure, those women were deprived of their other sources of identity. Unemployment shattered many long-term friendships with work colleagues, while the westward migration of their daughters eliminated the prospects of enjoying grandchildren close to home. The fact remains: women are only half as likely as men to protest their identity losses by way of far-right parties.96 This leads me to speculate as to what other factors might render middle-­ age males more inclined to support far-right, anti-migrant movements. The standard “testosterone” argument does not hold insofar as most German men do not evince highly aggressive tendencies. Rightwing extremism has more to do with thwarted expectations than with hormonal factors. Neuroscientific studies focusing on brain function nonetheless suggest that other biological factors may be at work in triggering racial hatred, anti-woman backlash and “a proclivity for violence above normal social levels.” Researchers have linked higher levels of male disorientation, fear, and anger over shifts in the existing gender regime and social hierarchy to a small part of the brain known as the amygdala, responsible for “threat” or “reward” as well as “fight or flight” processing. Y. Lui and his colleagues determined that “functional couplings” of the insula with both the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex are “largely involved in racially biased disgust perception through two distinct neural circuits.”97 Analyzing links between brain function and self-reported political attitudes, Ryota Kanai and Geraint Rees have further established that more liberal orientations are associated with “increased grey matter volume in the anterior cingulate cortex.” Conservative leanings, including strong religious beliefs and a preference for authoritarianism, seem to correlate “with increased volume of the right amygdala.”98

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Some have extended these neurological finding to the resurgence of white supremacy and a male willingness to engage in violence in the United States.99 Such deliberations are reminiscent of postwar studies on the authoritarian personality.100 Any attempt to reverse the surge in racial, anti-Jewish/anti-Muslim, and gender-biased hatred among far-right groups must begin with the recognition that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. One can no longer simply blame “the SED dictatorship.” This troubling phenomenon requires a multifaceted response, at many levels. While hardly representative of Germany as a whole, the June 2021 elections in Sachsen-Anhalt (2.2 million residents) once again testified to the power of western stereotypes in assessing the democracy credentials of easterners. Despite dire predictions of an outright AfD victory, the CDU managed to increase its vote share to 37%. The gender differences were striking: women were twice as likely to cast their ballots for the CDU (39%) than for the AfD (18%), while men were more evenly spilt, 31–29%, respectively.101 The rightwing party secured 30% of the vote among persons between thirty and forty-four (disproportionately male), but the more chilling aspect concerning this election was that the AfD drew its biggest share of voters (20%) from males who were twenty-nine or younger. Shortly before the election, East-Commissioner Marco Wanderwitz had characterized his compatriots as “dictatorship-socialized” people who still had not “arrived” in democracy. He declared that “a not insignificant (sic) segment of AfD voters is unfortunately permanently lost to democracy. For that there is no other solution than to build a firewall as high as possible.” A few days later, he added: “I am completely convinced that the AfD in the west will fall below 5% in the medium term. In the East that is completely out of the question.”102 He had apparently forgotten that Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, along with Sachsen-­ Anhalt, were the first to extend double-digit support to the AfD in 2016. He did not elaborate on the specific conditions that would enable western states to quickly rid themselves of far-right populist parliamentarians. For the record, the AfD’s share of Landtag seats in Niedersachsen rose to 11%, following the October 2022 election. If anything, the CDU Commissioner’s comments reveal the extent to which he had personally internalized FRG stereotypes regarding easterners as part of his own party-political socialization. He attributed their far-­ right affinities to their “dictatorial” socialization, though the AfD was a western creation. Admitting that 20% of AfD voters in Sachsen-Anhalt

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were under 30, he faulted the “problematic anti-democratic thinking patterns” they had inherited from their parents. This does not explain how Wanderwitz himself, already sixteen when the Wall fell, had avoided inheriting the same mental map from his parents in Karl Marx Stadt. He moreover offered no explanation as to why females did not evince the same authoritarian thinking patterns as their parents. Nor did he address the question as to why some schools—all of which have utilized western-­ liberal pedagogy and curricula since 1990—would prove less capable of instilling democratic values based solely on their geographic location, especially in relation to young males. Voters under the age of thirty-five had no exposure to SED media, mass organizations, or educational practices. As a lawyer, a Bundestag member and State Secretary in the Economics Ministry, Wanderwitz also seems to miss the irony that young AfD rebels reject exactly the class of political elites that he embodies. This type of political importuning on the part of established politicians ignores the real problems generating far-right sympathies: the representation gap noted earlier, the persistent wealth gap and major structural disparities. While the eastern unemployment rate is no longer double that of westerners, it is still 20–30% higher. Prior to the Covid pandemic, eastern paychecks amounted to 82–85% of normal FRG wages, but people “over there” must still work longer and harder for lower salaries: while average western laborers spent 1295 hours on the job in 2018, their compatriots put in 1351 hours, amounting to seven more eight-hour days per year.103 As of 2020, nearly half of western residents (49%) owned their dwellings, compared to 33% of their counterparts; this explains why 22% of private properties are inherited in the old states versus 8% in the younger ones (including Berlin). The average value of assets that can be passed on to the next generation stands at €52,000 in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and €64,000  in Brandenburg, in contrast to €176,000  in Bavaria and €173,000 in Hessen. These figures exclude the exceptionally wealthy (top 2% of the income pyramid). Private investment activity runs 60% higher in the west; in 2020, capital infusion in the east matched that seen in the old states in 2000. Their five state governments collect only 65% of the tax revenues generated in western rural “flatlands” (excluding the city-states). Their local governments can only avail themselves of 69% of the taxing-­ power of the western financial underdogs.104 Blaming voters for discontents still rooted in significant wealth, opportunity, and representational gaps between West and East is unlikely to build bridges or “win back” anti-democratic groups. Following the CDU’s

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ostensible victory (37%), Deutschlandfunk editor Birgit Wentzien opined: “So just close the file on the East again, according to the motto, ‘no drama’ and ‘finished’. … it is high time for Sachsen-Anhalt and this country to sift through the reasons why and to analyze the mistakes made within their own ranks. … To simply write off the AfD voters is behaving cynically. That means plainly giving up on democratic politics.”105

Working-Class Men: Winning the Battle, Losing the War In 1990, former Federal-President Richard von Weizsäcker urged Germans on both sides to “tell their stories,” but once they became aware of unity’s real cost, westerners displayed little interest in tales from the other side. As one eastern Bishop wrote to Helmut Schmidt, “We are constantly expected only to listen … Apparently it not worth hearing us when we say anything. But we just can’t take this permanent ‘know-it-all’ behavior and the humiliating treatment as immature losers (unmündige Versager).”106 According to Monika Maron, the more Easterners tried to “explain” parts of their lives, the more absurd they seemed. Treated as outsiders in the society they had hoped to join, “albeit just as they were,” East Germans were “were left alone with their biographies” and a need to find an explanation for their conformity.107 The simplest explanation—unlikely to be accepted by West Germans enjoying the sudden benefits of democracy and an economic miracle after 1949—was that “there was no alternative” for those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the Soviet occupation zone. As James McAdams argued, the average East German became a realist: On the one hand, he did not have to watch West German television (although it was one of his regular pastimes) to know that Erich Honecker and his Politburo colleagues would never live up to their promises of creating a world of socialist abundance and prosperity. He knew that he was destined to lead a life of hard work and low expectations. On the other hand, this East German recognized that there was nothing to be gained by openly voicing his dissatisfaction. Challenging his government’s authority would have been foolhardy. Moreover, it would have been futile. Given that none of the SED’s policies were likely to change in the foreseeable future, his safest bet was to make the most of what life had to offer, the city soccer club, a local pub, the market for Trabi parts, and above all, a carefree weekend at the family Kleingarten.108

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Although men had disproportionately favored unification, their experiences with the Treuhand—“the bad bank of privatization memories”— undermined their faith in the free market and the promises of conservative politicians. Unable to find the kind of “explanation” for their biographies that would secure their place and prominence in the capitalist west, some turned to the PDS as the only party loyal to eastern interests. Its gradual transformation into an “all-German” party (as Die Linke) led increasingly disgruntled men to look for other channels to voice their frustration at having been “left behind.” Studies exploring the link between hypermasculinity and far-right movements tend to be few and far between; analyses of masculinity before and after the collapse of Soviet-style regimes are practically non-existent. “Gender” continues to be erroneously construed as something that only pertains to women. Cross-cultural anthropological studies nonetheless indicate that the functional construction of masculinity is almost universally rooted in “procreation, protection, and provision,” deeply ingrained in the consciousness of hunters, herders, peasants, workers, and warriors who may have little else in common.109 Scholars concur that the cultivation of masculinity is embedded in explicit gender socialization processes, beginning in early childhood. Historically speaking, few political entities could afford the luxury of a masculinity construct more attuned to “nurturing” than to a courageous, aggressive defense of the homeland. David Gilmore argues that most societies depended on males trained from infancy to function as procreators, providers, and protectors in order to ensure group survival, which included securing the reproductive potential of its women. He infers that the need to preserve the social structure and community well-being leads men to sublimate their individual happiness for longer periods, for example, during military service. They are conditioned to view adulthood as “a series of conditional skirmishes on the playing field, in the boudoir and on the battlefield that may leave the outcome forever slightly in doubt” as to whether or not they have met the rigorous standards of manhood: these include physical prowess, unlimited courage, technical competence and the ability to secure their territory. Cults of masculinity, Beryl Lieff Benderly writes, “are directly related to the degree of hardiness and self-­ discipline required for the male role … Manliness is a symbolic script, a cultural construct, endlessly variable and not always necessary.”110 To become hegemonic, cultural norms of masculinity must be normalized, that is, supported by institutional power. The SED was gender-blind

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in many areas but certainly not in relation to the defense of the Fatherland. Its simultaneous need for women’s productive labor and their reproductive contributions led the state to adopt a host of social policies (free contraception, legal abortion, female employment, liberal divorce laws) that increasingly marginalized men’s traditional “procreator” and “provider” functions. Ever fearful of losing power themselves, GDR rulers exaggerated male “protector” roles by presenting the other Germany as a constant source of imminent sabotage, aggression, and capitalist exploitation, although thousands of FRG men filed for conscientious objector status after 1968. Because killing does not come naturally for either sex, “shame is the glue that holds the man-making process together,” as argued by Joshua Goldstein and confirmed by Tom Smith’s description of the treatment meted out to NVA conscripts.111 As the ZIJ surveys illustrate, mandatory military training did little to strengthen young men’s love for the Fatherland. Indeed, one of the greatest threats to SED stability was eastern youth’s attraction to western peace mobilizations and human rights campaigns as of the early 1980s. The refusal of FRG politicians to acknowledge the socio-cultural disruptions of unification, coupled with decades of economic disparity, laid the foundation for deeper, psychological discontent with the functioning of German democracy. Many who initially joined the Pegida protests (which spread to other cities) had already established a life for themselves in the GDR. Three decades later, they should have been able to look back on long, experience-rich employment histories, which would have enabled them to assume influential policy-making positions and shape public debates in their own Länder. The fact that so many were unable to do so because of the historical disruption of their lives in 1989/1990—resulting in unexpected domination by western elites—explains why they still find it difficult to identify with the Federal Republic, its political system, its rules of the game and its “discursive routines.”112 Rightwing radicals who surfaced after unification have evolved into AfD voters of the present. They are clearly not SED loyalists: if anything, their willingness to follow neo-Nazi demagogues like Höcke and their outright rejection of gender equality initiatives suggest a total break with socialist values. Riding the train of “identity politics,” national-populists claim that they are protecting their own rights to identity, like other societal groups. Having been forced once to jettison the lives and values they had carved out for themselves in the face of an oppressive regime, a core group of middle-age men are tired of fundamental, socio-cultural change. Expecting to emerge from unification as uncontested winners, they now

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see themselves as its losers, reduced to permanent second-class citizenship. The curiosity here, as suggested by the Sachsen-Anhalt elections, is that contemporary far-right rebels are not men completely socialized in the GDR (now well over fifty), but rather males under thirty who should have enjoyed significantly more opportunities under the new system. Demanding a full review of classified Treuhand files, Saxony’s Integration Minister Petra Köpping (SPD) made it clear that little had changed by late 2016: “No one took their concrete problems seriously. Nobody valued their life-stories. No one listened.” Köpping had to work her own way back up the ladder, as one of unification’s early “losers.” One man subsequently wrote to the minister: “If you find me a wife out here in the country, I won’t go to Pegida anymore.” Her reaction: “I don’t know if women are really happier. But I notice that men articulate their dissatisfaction more strongly.”113 It is not surprising that eastern men resent being perceived as inarticulate, “immature failures” who have been cast onto the rubbish heap of history. I concur with Köpping and others that it is high time for West Germans to examine their own role in precipitating such resentment, beginning with a comprehensive examination of the unjust, biased, and corrupt Treuhand practices, now that those records are being declassified.114 Germany was one of the last European countries to witness the rise of a far-right populist party capable of securing parliamentary seats at the national and state levels. Although it owes its founding to west German protests against the Euro, the AfD soon abandoned Eurosceptical mobilization in favor of a domestic Kulturkampf directly targeting Chancellor Angela Merkel. Despite the party’s virulent rhetoric against migration, Muslims, and other minorities, the AfD’s electoral victories in the east reflect deeper systemic discontents rooted in post-unification developments. Grounded in perceptions of relative deprivation and second-class citizenship, its supporters fault “gender madness,” policies seeking to level the playing field between women and men, for their ongoing domination by western male elites, although their personal material circumstances have improved substantially over the last thirty years. The fact that Germany was governed by a very effective eastern woman for sixteen years testifies to the fact that former GDR citizens could succeed, with a lot of hard work and a formidable “can-do spirit.” Merkel’s career trajectory proved particularly galling to male compatriots whose mobility came to an abrupt halt with the elimination of their workplaces.

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The first eastern chancellor worked her way into the system as anything, but a rich male industrial elite. In 1999, she took on Helmut Kohl and the entire FRG conservative establishment, steeped in a campaign finance scandal. Her courage and integrity quickly propelled her up the party executive ladder, while younger male rivals socialized in the west knocked themselves out of the running with land-based scandals of their own making.115 Only the strong survive in a political landscape already littered with the skeletal remains of small parties that arose to protest one post-1990 cause or another, like the Republikaner, the DVU, and the Schill Party. Fringe parties collapse quickly when they rely too heavily on a few dominant personalities, as Lucke, Petry, and Meuthen can attest. Many AfD politician are already embroiled in scandals, indicating that they are no better than the “corrupt elites” they wanted to displace.116 As Nikolai Ostrowski wrote, the gift of life must be used in ways that do not lead one to “later feel excruciating regret over senselessly wasted years, so the shame of an unworthy, meaningless past does not oppress him.” The FRG’s failure to mitigate countless eastern opportunity gaps over a span of thirty years has unfortunately left too many men feeling like they have exchanged one “unworthy, meaningless past” for another.

Notes 1. My translation, Nikolai Ostrowski, Wie der Stahl gehärtet wurde, first published in 1932. This book was required reading in GDR schools. 2. Monika Maron. 2006. “Historical Upheavals, Fractured Identities.” German Historical Institute Bulletin 38, 55–56. 3. Ina Merkel. 1995. “Modernisierte Gesellschafts-‘Bilder’ in den DDR-­ Printmedien der fünfziger Jahre.” In Wolfram Fischer-Rosenthal and Peter Alheit, eds., Biographien in Deutschland. Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 172. 4. Irene Dölling. 1993. “Gespaltenes Bewußtsein—Frauen- und Männerbilder in der DDR.” In Gisela Helwig and Hildegard Maria Nickel, eds., Frauen in Deutschland 1945–1992. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 5. Alf Lüdtke. 1994. “Helden der Arbeit“—Mühen beim Arbeiten. Zur mißmutigen Loyalität von Industriearbeitern.” In Hartmut Kaeble, et al., Sozialgeschichte der DDR. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 209. 6. Marlies Menge and Martin Lindner. 1987. “Spiel mit dem Krieg,” Die Zeit Magazine, March 29, 1987, 8–19.

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7. Sylka Scholz. 2008. “‘Sozialistische Helden’—Hegemoniale Männlichkeiten in der DDR.” In Sylka Scholz and Wertje Willms, eds., Postsozialistische Männlichkeiten in einer globalisierten Welt. Berlin: Lit Verlag: 11–36. 8. Tom Smith. 2020. Comrades in Arms. Military Masculinities in East German Culture. New York: Berghahn, 7. 9. Daniel Niemetz. 2006. Das feldgraue Erbe. Die Wehrmachteinflüsse im Militär der SBZ/DDR. Berlin: Links Verlag, chapter 3. 10. Smith, Comrades in Arms, 8. 11. Smith, Comrades in Arms, 13. 12. MDR. 2020. “Soldaten in BH2: So machten Frauen Karriere in der NVA,” aired November 22; ARD. 1997. “Der Dienst beim Klassenfeind: NVA-Frauen in der Bundeswehr.” Kontraste, aired March 27, https:// www.tierfreunde-­luebben.de/44143.html. 13. Sylka Scholz. 2004. Männlichkeit erzählen: Lebensgeschichtliche Identitätskonstruktionen ostdeutscher Männer. Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, 52ff. 14. Daniel Niemetz. 2020. Staatsmacht am Ende: Das Militär und Sicherheitsapparat der DDR in Krise und Umbruch, 1985–1990. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 27–28. 15. Niemetz, Staatsmacht am Ende, 25. 16. Smith, Comrades in Arms, 211. 17. Data stem from Gerhard Kuhn, with W.  Gerth and H.  Bonus. 1973. Zur Entwicklung politisch-ideologischer Grundüberzeugungen und Wehrbereitschaft junger Wehrpflichtiger während ihres Grundwehrdienstes in der Nationalen Volksarmee,” VVZ LR 8-36/73. Leipzig: ZIJ, 10, 14, 18. 18. Niemetz, Staatsmacht am Ende, 39; Smith, Comrades in Arms, 16. 19. Niemetz, Staatsmacht am Ende, 21–23. 20. Güther Roski. 1986. Fähig und Bereit zur Verteidigung des Sozialismus: Jugendliche zum bevorstehenden Dienst in der Nationalen Volksarmee, Hauptuntersuchung 1985. Leipzig: ZIJ, July, 13, 18, 19. 21. Roski, Fähig und Bereit, 15. 22. Niemetz, Staatsmacht am Ende, 99, 159. 23. See Helmut Schmidt’s “Forward.” 1991. In Peter Ralf and Christ Neubauer, Kolonie im eigenen Land: Die Treuhand, Bonn und die Wirtschaftskatastrophe der fünf neuen Länder. Berlin: Rowohlt. 24. “Millarden auf Jahre hinaus,” Der Spiegel, February 11, 1990. 25. “Einheit ohne Steueropfer,” Der Spiegel, April 1, 1990. 26. “Bonn bietet der DDR für Löhne und Gehälter Kurs von 1:1 an,” Der Tagesspiegel, April 24, 1990. 27. Wolfgang Seibel. 1999. “Politische Lebenslügen als Self-Destroying Prophecies: Die Treuhandanstalt im Vereinigungsprozeß,” Public 28.

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Berlin: Berlin-Brandenburg Institute für Sozialwissenschaftliche Studien, 61, 64. 28. Ralf and Neubauer, Kolonie im eigenen Land, 121–122. 29. Ralf and Neubauer, Kolonie im eigenen Land, 148. 30. Seibel, “Politische Lebenslügen,” 68–69. 31. Jörg Roesler. 1994. “Privatization in East Germany.” Europe Asia Studies 46 (3), 508. 32. Ralf and Neubauer, Kolonie im eigenen Land, 125. 33. Rohwedder had been a potential RAF target for over a decade. As an energy expert in the Economics Ministry, he had arranged secret weapons deals with apartheid rulers in South Africa, in exchange for uranium for FRG nuclear plants. 34. Rainer Land. 2013. “East Germany, 1989–2010: A Fragmented Development.” In Konrad H. Jarausch, ed. United Germany. Debating Processes and Prospects. New York Berghahn; “Aufbau Ost: Hammer der Zerstörung,” Der Spiegel, August 22, 1993. 35. “Ein Stuck Kriminalgeschichte,” Der Spiegel, December 30, 1990, 62ff; “Energie: Muß schnell gehen,” Der Spiegel, June 24, 1990; “Kauft nicht bei Wucherern,” Der Spiegel, July 15, 1990. 36. Marcus Böick. 2018. Die Treuhand. Idee—Praxis—Erfahrung, 1990–1994. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 266. 37. “Wer kennt einen, der paßt?” Der Spiegel, January 13, 1991, 90–91. 38. For case studies, see Ralf and Neubauer. 39. Ralf and Neubauer, Kolonie im eigenen Land, 133; “Von Kohl hintergangen,” Der Spiegel, March 24, 1991. 40. Hermann, Vinke. 2021. Ein Volk steht auf—und geht zum Arbeitsamt. Staatsholding Treuhand als Fehlkonstruktion—die Sicht von Betroffenen. Hamburg: VSA: 164–179. 41. Also, Dirk Laabs. 2012. Der deutsche Goldrausch. Die wahre Geschichte der Treuhand Munich: Pantheon. 42. Moritz Hennicke, Moritz Lubczyk, and Lukas Mergele. 2020. “Die Treuhandanstalt: Eine empirische Bestandsaufnahme 30 Jahre nach der Deutschen Wiedervereinigung.” Info Schnelldienst 73(9): 49–52. Also see the twelve-part series aired on MDR in 2022, Wem gehort der Osten,” https://www.mdr.de/nachrichten/deutschland/wirtschaft/treuhand/ wem-­gehoert-­der-­osten-­jubilaeum-­100.html. 43. Ruth Reiher and Rüdiger Läzer. 1996. Von “Buschzulage” und “Ossi-­ Nachweis”: Ost-West-Deutsch in der Diskussion. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. 44. Boick, Die Treuhand, 99. 45. Cited in an interview with John Feffer, “The Cost of Unification,” August 21, 2014, available at: https://johnfeffer.com/2014/08/21/the-costsof-reunification/; further, Paul Windolf, Ulrich Brinkmann, and Dieter

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Kulke. 1999. Warum blüht der Osten nicht. Zur Transformation der ostdeutschen Betriebe. Berlin: Edition Sigma. 46. Erik Gawel and Klaus Korte. 2015. “Regionale Verteilungswirkungen und Finanzierungsverantwortung: Bund und Länder bei der Strom-­ Energiewende.” In Thorsten Müller und Hartmut Kahl, eds. Energiewende im Föderalismus. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 155. 47. Wolfgang Seibel. 2005. Verwaltete Illusion: Die Privatisierung der DDR Wirtschaft. Frankfurt: Campus. 48. Bericht des 2. Untersuchungsausschusses des. 12 Deutschen Bundestages, Drucksache 12/8404 (Bonn: August 31, 1994). Friedrich Hennemann, head of the Vulkan Shipyard Association, channeled DM850 million in unspent “renovation subsidies” into Commerce Bank, before Vulkan went bankrupt; the money was not recovered. “Birgit Breuel war ‘schockiert’.” 1999. Neues Deutschland, October 28, 1999. 49. Böick, Die Treuhand, 33. 50. Dieter Kampe. 1993. Wer uns kennenlernt, gewinnt uns lieb. Nachruf auf die Treuhand. Berlin: Rotbuch, 21. 51. Böick, Die Treuhand, 14. 52. Peter Krause and Roland Habich. 2000. “Einkommen und Lebensqualität im vereinigten Deutschland.” Vierteljahreshefte zur Wirtschaftsforschung 69 (2), 325; Matthias Krauß. 2019. Die große Freiheit ist es nicht geworden. Berlin: Eulenspiegel. 53. “Birgit Breuel: Frühere Treuhandchefin räumt Fehler ein,” Die Zeit, July 21, 2019. 54. Bundesministerium des Innern, für Bau und Heimat, ed. 2019. Unser Plan für Deutschland—Gleichwertige Lebensverhältnisse überall. Berlin: July. 55. Breuel, “Frühere Treuhandchefin räumt Fehler ein.” 56. Michael Bluhm and Olaf Jacobs. 2016.Wer beherrscht den Osten? Ostdeutsche Eliten ein Vierteljahrhundert nach der deutschen Wiedervereinigung. Leipzig. 57. Bluhm and Jacobs, Wer beherrscht den Osten?, 6. 58. Bundesministerium des Innern. 2020. Abschlussbericht der Kommission “30 Jahre Friedliche Revolution und Deutsche Einheit.” Berlin, 72–76; “Horst Seehofer hat acht Staatssekretäre—ausschließlich Männer,” Der Tagesspiegel, March 28, 2018. 59. Commenting on the 130-page Abschlussbericht issued by the Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Energie. 2017. “Wahrnehmung und Bewertung der Arbeit der Treuhandanstalt.” Bochum: November 9; Horand Knaup and Andreas Wassermann. 2017. “Wiedervereinigung: Wie die Treuhand bis heute viele Ostdeutsche traumatisiert.” Der Spiegel, November 28, 2017.

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60. Roesler, “Privatization,” 512. 61. Thilo Sarrazin. 2010. Deutschland schafft sich ab: wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen. Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt; Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles A. Murray. 1994. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press. 62. Thilo Sarrazin, Europa braucht den Euro nicht: Wie uns politisches Wunschdenken in die Krise geführt hat. 2012. Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. 63. Lucke wrote most of the party’s 2014 “Political Guidelines.” See Simon T.  Franzmann. 2016. “Calling the Ghost of Populism: The AfD’s Strategic and Tactical Agendas until the EP Election 2014.” German Politics 25 (4), 461. 64. Nicole Bebuir, Marcel Lewandowsky, and Jasmin Siri. 2015. “The AfD and its Sympathisers: Finally a Right-Wing Populist Movement in Germany?” German Politics 24 (2): 154–178. 65. This was reported by a German MEP (SPD) in Brussels in June 2016. 66. Lucke formed a new party, the Alliance for Progress and Renewal, distancing itself from the AfD’s anti-Muslim and anti-migration appeals. 67. Hans-Joachim Maaz, cited in Sabine Rennefanz. 2013. Eisenkinder: Die Stille Wut der Wendegeneration. Munich: Luchterhand, 103. 68. “Populist, pernicious and perilous: Germany’s Growing Hate Problem,” Der Spiegel international, October 23, 2015. 69. “The Hate Preachers: Inside Germany’s New Populist Party,” Der Spiegel International, October 2, 2016; also David Patton. 2017. “Monday, Monday: Eastern Protest Movements and German Party Politics since 1989.” German Politics 26 (4): 480–497. 70. Hans Vorländer, Maik Herold and Steven Schäller. 2018. Pegida and New Right-Wing Populism in Germany. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 171; “King Kurt” was forced to abdicate due to a family financial scandal in 2002. See Heike Kleffner and Matthias Meisner, eds. 2017. Unter Sachsen: Zwischen Wut und Willkommen. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. 71. Kleffner and Meisner, Unter Sachsen, 10. 72. “AfD-Vorstand hadert mit Höcke,” Der Spiegel, December 18, 2015. 73. “Volksverhetzung: Strafbefehl gegen Autor Pirinçci wegen Hassrede bei Pegida,” Der Spiegel, February 7, 2017. 74. “Kanzlerin in Heidenau: ‘Wir sind das Pack’—Rechte pöbeln gegen Merkel,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 26, 2015. 75. The federal distribution key was developed in response to refugees fleeing war in former Yugoslavia. 76. Steffen Mack and Walter Serif. 2016. “Sie können es nicht lassen!” Mannheimer Morgen, January 30, 2016.

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77. “Beatrix von Storch: AfD Vize-Vizechefin will Polizei sogar auf Kinder schießen lassen,” Frankfurter Allgemeine, January 31, 2016. 78. Christoph Butterwegge, Gudrun Hentges and Gerd Wiegel. 2018. Rechtspopulisten im Parlament: Polemik, Agitation und Propaganda der AfD. Frankfurt/Main,36ff. 79. Christian Teevs. 2016. “Wer die AfD in Berlin gewählt hat,” Der Spiegel, September 18, 2016. 80. Christina Hebel. 2013. “Wie die Nichtwähler ticken,” Der Spiegel, June 17, 2013; Jennifer A.  Yoder. 2020. “Revenge of the East? The AfD’s Appeal in Eastern Germany and Mainstream Parties’ Responses.” German Politics and Society 38 (2): 35–58. 81. Hans Pfeiffer. 2020. “AfD: Radical Forces gaining Ground,” Deutsche Welle, March 25. 82. Florian Naumann. 2017. “Fast 13 Prozent bei der Bundestagswahl: Wer hat AfD gewählt?” Merkur.de, September 25, 2017. 83. Rejecting a coalition with the CDU and Greens, the FDP subsequently protested the Bundestag seating arrangements which placed it next to the AfD. “FDP will im Bundestag nicht neben der AfD sitzen,” Der Spiegel, October 4, 2017. 84. Hedda Nier. 2016. “AfD mobilisiert Nicht-Wähler,” March 14, https:// de.statista.com/infografik/4493/afd-­mobilisiert-­nicht-­waehler/. 85. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1996. “The Rise of Femi-Nazis? Women and Rightwing Extremist Movements in Unified Germany.” German Politics 5 (2): 240–275. 86. Hildegard-Marie Nickel. 1993. “Women in the GDR and the New Federal States.” In Nanette Funk and Magda Mueller, eds., Gender Politics and Post-Communism. New York: Routledge, 148. 87. “She goes west, he goes right: Lack of Women in Eastern Germany Feeds Neo-Nazis,” Spiegel International, May 31, 2007. 88. Bebuir, Lewandowsky and Siri, “The AfD and its Sympathisers,” 164–166; further, https://www.zdf.de/kultur/kulturdoku/wer-­hat-­ angst-­vorm-­genderwahn-­104.html. 89. Werner Schulz. 2019. “DDR Bürgerrechtler gegen AfD: Wende war nie der Begriff der friedlichen Revolution.” Deutschlandfunk, August 22, https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ddr-­b uergerrechtler-­g egen-­a fd-­ wende-­war-­nie-­der-­begriff-­der-­100.html. 90. Jakob Augstein. 2017. “Einigkeit und Rechts und Brechreiz,” Der Spiegel, October 2, 2017. 91. Vorländer, Herold and Schäller, Pegida, 79, 82. 92. Philipp Adorf. 2018. “A New Blue-Collar Force: The Alternative for Germany and the Working Class.” German Politics and Society 36 (4), 41;

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Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, 2018. Annual Report of the Federal Government on the Status of German Unity 2018. Berlin, 14. 93. Sandra Blakeslee. 1998. “Men’s Brains Shrink Faster Than Women’s, Researchers Say,” New York Times, February 13, 1998; Sandee LaMotte. 2015. “Men’s memories worse than women’s, especially with age.” CNN, March 17; Charles DeCarli. 2015. “A Call for New Thoughts About What Might Influence Human Brain Aging, Apolipoprotein E, and Amyloid.” JAMA Neurology 72 (5), May 1. 94. David G.  Blanchflower and Andrew J.  Oswald. 2018. “Is Well-being U-Shaped over the Life Cycle?” Social Science & Medicine 66: 1733–1749. 95. Blanchflower and Oswald, “Is Well-being U-Shaped…?” 1735. 96. Silvia Erzeel and Ekaterina R. Rashova. 2017. “Still men’s parties: Gender and the radical right in comparative perspective.” West European Politics 40 (4): 812–820; Eelco Harteveld and Elisabeth Ivarsflaten. 2016. “Why Women Avoid the Radical Right: Internalized Norms and Party Reputations.” British Journal of Political Science 48: 369–384; and Michael A.  Hansen. 2019. “Women and the Radical Right: Exploring Gendered Differences in Vote Choice for Radical Right Parties in Europe.” Austrian Journal of Political Science 48 (2): 1–16. 97. Y. Lui, W. Lin, P. Xu, D. Zhang and Y. Luo. 2015. “Neural basis of disgust perception in racial prejudice.” Human Brain Mapping 36 (12): 5275–5286. 98. Cited in Stephan A.  Schwartz. 2017. “America’s White Supremacy Crisis.” Explore 13 (5), September/October, 295. 99. Jonathon Morgan. 2016. “These charts show exactly how racist and radical the alt-right has gotten this year.” Washington Post, September 26, 2016. 100. H.D. Forbes. 1985. Nationalism, Ethnocentrism and Personality: Social Science and Critical Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 101. For election graphics, see “Wahlanalyse: Wer wen gewählt hat,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, June 6, 2021. 102. “Wanderwitz verteidigt Aussagen über Ostdeutsche,” Der Spiegel, June 2, 2021. 103. Bundesministerium des Innern. 2020. Abschlussbericht der Kommission “30 Jahre Friedliche Revolution und Deutsche Einheit.” Berlin, 74. 104. Abschlussbericht, 76. 105. Birgit Wentzein. 2020. “Wer die Wähler der AfD abscreibt, handelt zynisch.” Deutschlandfunk Kommentar, June 6. 106. Ralf and Neubauer, Kolonie im eigenen Land, 9. 107. Maron, “Historical Upheavals,” 53. 108. A. James McAdams. 2012. “The Last East German and the Memory of the German Democratic Republic.” German Politics & Society 28 (1), 32.

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109. David D. Gilmore. 1990. Manhood in the Making, Cultural Concepts of Masculinity. New Haven: Yale University Press; Annica Kronsell. 2012. Gender, Sex and the Postnational Defense: Militarism and Peacekeeping. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 110. Cited in Beryl Lieff Benderly. 1990. “The Importance of Being Macho.” New York Times, April 15, 1990. 111. Joshua S. Goldstein. 2001. War and Gender: How Gender Shapes the War System and Vice Versa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 269. 112. Vorländer, Herold and Schäller, Pegida, 159–160. 113. Anna Hähnig. 2017. “Integriert doch erst mal uns!” Die Zeit, April 24, 2017. 114. Petra Köpping. 2018. “Integriert doch erst mal uns!” Eine Streitschrift für den Osten. Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag. 115. Mushaben, Becoming Madam Chancellor, chapter 1. 116. Party co-chair Alice Weidel has been accused of hiding illegal campaign contributions from a rich Swiss industrialist, while Gauland is facing tax evasion charges. See “Verdacht auf Steuerhinterziehung: Immunität aufgehoben—was über den Fall Gauland bekannt ist,” Der Spiegel, January 30, 2020.

CHAPTER 12

The Dialectical Identities of Germans United

Ich hatte Angst vor Verlust und Angst vor Anpassung, immer abwechselnd. Angst davor, Ostdeutscher zu bleiben, Angst davor, Westdeutscher zu werden. In der Nacht, als die Mauer aufging, hatte ich zwei Gefühle im Herzen gehabt. Ich war enttäuscht, dass jetzt alle wegrannten, und ich fürchtete, dass sie die Mauer morgen wieder zumachen könnten. I was afraid of losing and afraid of adapting, always alternating. Fear of remaining East German, fear of becoming West German. The night the Wall came down, I had two feelings in my heart. I was disappointed that everyone was now running away, and I was afraid that they might close the Wall again tomorrow. Alexander Osang, Fast Hell 1 Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter. Friedrich Hölderlin, Andenken, 1803

When the Wall opened on November 9, 1989, Willy Brandt eloquently declared, “now that which belongs together can grow together.” I argued back then that while the former SPD Chancellor had been a brilliant statesman, his lack of demographic expertise rendered him overly optimistic regarding the fusion of two diametrically opposed cultures. By 1990, two-thirds of the West Germans and three-fourths of Eastern Germans

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had been born after World War II, meaning that most had never experienced a whole nation. Once the Wall fell, 16.4 million GDR citizens were expected to reassess everything: how they had “arranged” themselves with the SED regime or suffered as its victims, and how they might best adapt to a new world. Over 61 million FRG citizens were free to pursue business and politics as usual. While their ability to draw on a mutually traumatic history, a common language and a shared currency might have been necessary for restoring a single national identity, those factors have clearly not proven sufficient over a span of 30+ years. East and West Germans were exposed to four decades of antithetical propaganda that not only resulted in different interpretations of the history they had shared; their diverging socialization experiences also instilled many grounds for fear or distrust of people on the other side.2 As Marx asserted in the mid-1800s, each state’s economic base had determined the respective socio-cultural superstructure in which its population was embedded across three generations. The material conditions of their existence produced very different political cultures, sources of social capital, and patterns of communication, all essential to nation-­ building in the manner described by Karl Deutsch.3 Most West-citizens failed to recognize how much their own identities had changed since 1949. As my earlier research revealed, many continued to claim that “no German identity was a good national identity” into the late 1980s.4 While many GDR residents rejected the officially imposed version, they likewise developed new identities at the level of peer culture. As Mildred Schwarz observed, “the more problematic a nation’s search for identity has been in the past, the higher the degree of salience citizens will accord to their own identities—and the more sensitive they will be to external or contextual evidence confirming or refuting that identity.”5 Despite western conservatives’ declaration that “internal unity” had been achieved by 1995, 62% of Easterners, 30% among Westerners, felt that the two peoples had grown farther apart following the euphoria of 1989.6 By 2004, 73% of the former still identified more strongly with their own region than with the Federal Republic.7 By December 31, 2018, Germans had been unified longer than they had been separated by concrete barriers, yet the Wall in their respective heads has persisted, as have major wealth gaps between the two groups.8 Although the official unemployment rate fell from 17% in 1999 to 7.6% by 2017, unequal wages, a dearth of major industries, and domination by western elites across all

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sectors of society have continued to fuel eastern perceptions of secondclass citizenship.9 Yet neither western politicians, corporate managers nor media pundits ever thought to question why processing the period 1949 to 1989 should only be deemed an “eastern problem,” rather than one implicating both sides. Few FRG elites heeded the warning implicit in Brandt’s elaboration on his hopes for the German people during a Bundestag speech the day after unification. He declared on October 4, 1990: “Ensuring economic rejuvenation and social security do not lie beyond our capacity for achievement. Bridging over the cognitive-cultural inhibitions and spiritual-­ psychological barriers will be more difficult. But with recognition and respect for the self-perceptions of the compatriots who have long been separated from us, it will be possible to have grow together that which belongs together, without disfiguring scars.”10 While unification may have secured the basic physiological, sustenance, safety, and security needs posited by Abraham Maslow, the manner in which it was executed did little to address East German needs for belonging, esteem, status, independence, and, ultimately, self-actualization. Maslow anticipated the rise of a “new discontent and restlessness” in the face of a repressed “desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”11 While Brandt cautioned his compatriots about the possibility of “disfiguring scars,” Maslow warned that a fundamental thwarting of these needs could “give rise to either basic discouragement or else compensatory or neurotic needs,” or even severe traumatic neurosis.12 The fact that a significant minority in the East have turned to the far-right AfD to articulate their discontent seems to confirm this hypothesis. The group portraits presented in this book testify to the amazing resilience and capacity of human beings to make “lemonade out of lemons,” although lemons, oranges, and bananas were usually in short supply in the GDR beyond the Christmas holidays. My account offers an historical corrective to prevailing West German stereotypes of East Germans, all too quickly reduced to little more than “victims,” “perpetrators,” ingrates, or whiny types (Jammerossis). Many GDR citizens who saw themselves as the immediate losers of unification, like women and youth, have ironically emerged as winners 30 years later, while working-class men who imagined themselves as winners feel that they have been left behind—a perception shared among right-wing populist voters in many countries, including the United States. I share Jana Hensel’s general frustration in posing the question: why has it

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taken growing electoral support for the AfD, with ever more unsavory neo-Nazi elements, to attract the attention of western elites regarding significant wealth and opportunity gaps, whose roots lie in privatization policies dating back to Helmut Kohl, only to be exacerbated by Schröder’s Hartz IV “reforms?”13 Just as importantly, why are none of these elites seriously deliberating why eastern men are twice as likely to support the AfD, even though women faced the same socialization pressures under the old regime? As I have argued across multiple chapters, West Germans have yet to undertake their own historical “working through”—Aufarbeitung—of the many ways in which FRG policies helped to sustain the socialist regime next door. Declaring itself the sole, legitimate successor to the Third Reich, the western state did accept official responsibility for the Nazi past, reinforced by decades of reparation payments to former victims. It nonetheless took another generation, represented by the “68ers,” to raise questions of personal culpability and complicity vis-à-vis their own parents and grandparents. Blaming capitalist imperialism for the war-mongering Nazi regime allowed average East Germans to escape most questions of personal guilt or responsibility, although the GDR was more rigorous in expropriating fascist landowners and removing former NSDAP members from elite positions.14 While the western zones derived an economic boost from the Marshall Plan, east-zone residents watched helplessly as their major industrial assets were dismantled and shipped off to the Soviet Union, undermining their reconstruction efforts for almost ten years. Although FRG politicians occasionally referred to their different “starting points” in speeches commemorating events like June 1953, few West Germans regularly reflected on the disproportionate price of war—a lifetime of chronic shortages and authoritarian rule—paid by those unlucky enough to land in the Soviet occupation zone. At best, relatives on the other side sent occasional care-packages which reinforced their own sense of economic superiority. Revealing how little they actually knew about life on the other side, they continued sending flour, sugar, and used clothing (perceived by many recipients as condescending) long after the GDR had moved on to high-value goods. With few exceptions, the 68ers were likewise indifferent to the failures of real-existing socialism. As Peter Schneider wrote, the Wall itself “became a mirror for the Germans in the West which told them day by day who was the fairest in the land. Whether there was life on the other side of the death-strip is something that soon interested only pigeons and cats.”15 Nor did FRG leaders analyze the consequences of “buying out” GDR

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prisoners, the result of which was an increase in youth arrests as of the early 1980s. For victims, Freikauf amounted to a chance to exit, following a period of harassment and degradation; for SED perpetrators, it functioned as a new source of hard currency. More important for my analysis is the extent to which West Germans, in general, and political elites, in particular, have failed to recognize and respect “the self-perceptions of the compatriots, long separated” for over 30 years. By sticking to old stereotypes and avoiding real dialogue, FRG decision-makers have, in fact, inflicted “disfiguring scars.” The extraordinary pace of unification denied easterners a chance to assess their attachment to familiar elements of GDR culture, much less to voice their dissatisfaction with the path to unity dictated by neo-liberal, market-driven privatizers with no interest in their cognitive, cultural, material, and psychological experiences. Fixated on permanently discrediting “the SED dictatorship” in ways that rendered the FRG the victor of history, conservative elites hastily relegated GDR citizens to one of two classes, consisting of victims or perpetrators. The reality was much more complicated. The fact that the officially mandated GDR-identity was not widely embraced by the second and third generations contributed to the state’s rapid demise once the Wall fell. It is another thing altogether, however, to discredit the daily efforts of millions of average citizens who worked very hard, and often quite ingeniously, to make do with the cards that life had dealt them. Now that the 30-year ban on releasing classified documents has ended, easterners like Petra Köpping are calling for thorough investigations into the mistakes, unjust treatment, and corrupt practices that shaped the Nachwendezeit (post Turn-around era), lining the pockets of FRG companies and carpet-baggers. Though many in the old states may be loath to admit it, their identities have also been reshaped by post-­ unification dynamics, highlighting the significance of generational change on both sides of the former border. Despite SED efforts to present the working class as a uniform collective of socialist personalities, East Germans never comprised a homogeneous mass marching to the beat of a single ideological drum. Their subsequent efforts to cling to certain components of their earlier identities are a normal, natural, and necessary step along the way to finding a new all-German identity. The ability to look back on past dependencies helps individuals to understand the role that earlier relationships, personal, and institutional, have had on their own development, helping scholars like myself to disaggregate the permanent from the transitional elements of human identity.

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My aim here was to introduce the reader to an array of subcultures, marked by diverging forms of accommodation, bargaining, social solidarity, and resistance. Like any government, the SED had to cater to a variety of citizen groups, some of which benefited more than others at various times, and in diverging ways. I began this work by contesting Hirschman’s proposition that it was “the opening up of previously unavailable opportunities” for exit or voice that fostered a sense of empowerment and enabled the masses to prevail over the regime. I contend that the foundation for this empowerment had already begun to take shape in East Germany as of the early 1980s. Growing discontent with the system led each group to cultivate its own modes of exit and voice, rooted in different types and degrees of loyalty to socialist ideals, if not to the regime per se. Exit and voice responses were highly differentiated, evolving over time. I argue that it was the convergence of already-existing, albeit inobtrusive (and often local) processes of “inward-migration” and ever less secretive channels of voice, added to processes of generational change, which ultimately transformed the political opportunity structure, leading to the fall of the Wall. In contrast to many post-unification studies invoking Hirschman’s original paradigm, this investigation has demonstrated that neither exit, voice nor loyalty ended with the physical emigrations or mass demonstrations of 1989/1990. Loyalty, in particular, shifted from an instrumental attachment to one more sentimental in nature, in the sense defined by Kellman. The costs and benefits of unification were neither spread equally nor randomly allocated across the new Länder. Though all five groups considered here faced immense personal qua transformational challenges after unification, many of the initial winners and losers have traded places since the 1990s, some more recently than others. After unification, exit and voice were no longer directed against unresponsive SED leaders but rather against the perceived flaws and failures of democracy in the formerly idealized Federal Republic itself. For some, professing loyalty to the new system is still a long way off. Rather than reiterate the conclusions reached in earlier chapters, I turn now to the voices of individuals pro-actively searching for a new, all-­ German identity, labeling themselves Third Generation East and the Nachwende (Post-Turnaround) Generation, respectively. I end with reflections on “the blessing of late birth,” and the possible emergence of a new, united German identity, perhaps in time for the 40th anniversary of unification.

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Caught in the Middle: Die Wendekinder While memory is inevitably selective, time, distance, and the chance to “share stories” can shed new light on the positive and negative elements of one’s upbringing and identity. I have always felt more “American” living in Europe than I ever did growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, or in my later hometown of St. Louis, Missouri. Heimat, as Günther Grass observed, is more often than not, a place one “comes from.” When I interviewed over 100 Bundestag members, civic activists, and FRG citizens of various ages for my first identity-book, many initially laughed when I asked them to describe their personal “German identities.” A surprising number nonetheless wound up extending our discussion time (in two cases, up to two days!), once they got started on the topic. Some reacted quite skeptically in early 1989 when I indicated that my next project would analyze GDR identities; a few, like Theo Sommer at Die Zeit, declared outright that “there was no such thing.” After unification, Christoph Dieckmann confirmed my position, however: “Of course there is an East German identity: every person wants to perceive her own life as indivisible. … The brain desires a home.”16 Efforts to cultivate eastern voices did not end with unification, testifying to the persistence of various types of loyalty among the newly enfranchised. Some members of the Born-Into Generation, such as Daniela Dahn (born 1949) and Friederich Schorlemmer (1944), took to writing system-oriented critiques of the west’s exploitative treatment of the new states.17 Others like Christoph Dieckmann (1956) and Alexander Osang (1962) wrote novels as well as journalistic accounts for Die Zeit, Berliner Zeitung, and Der Spiegel. The latter functioned as cultural “translators” between the east and west, based on personal experiences. Their books mixed autobiographical reflections with (sometimes fictional) portraits of their compatriots as they sought to adjust to life under a new system. 18 All four authors received various prizes along the way. Another voice from that generation, Wolfgang Engler (1952), opted for highly philosophical, post-mortem treatments of eastern efforts to come to terms with “the new modern.”19 Now over 60, these born-into authors now feel less inhibited about openly criticizing the politically driven western framing (“Stasi, Stasi, Stasi”) that precluded easterners’ ability to process their pasts honestly and individually. Osang reported that his own FRG editors often would not allow easterners to tell their own stories: they had to “tell them the way

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westerners wanted to hear them.” His interview partners were regularly disappointed at seeing the deeply personal experiences they had shared cut out of the final publication “in the name of good journalism.” His compatriots were forced to re-evaluate their collaboration with the regime “under false, distorted premises.” It is not necessary for them to cut themselves off from their own pasts; learning to live with “hard breaks,” seeing the positives and negatives, are normal components of a biographical mosaic.20 The last generation born-into the real-existing GDR, the so-called Wendekinder, consisted of over 2.4 million youth born between 1973 and 1985. Now in their 40s, most were still in school when the Wall fell; many of their “memories” are second-hand in nature, as conveyed by parents and older siblings. Ignored (at best) for many years, they now object as adults to their misrepresentation by mainstream media as a homogenous group that inevitably suffered under the impact of their “SED-dictatorial socialization.” Too young to have consciously experienced a system subject to party control, they recognize that its replacement has its own control mechanisms, dominated by the market. Those willing to speak out about their adaptation to the new conditions often complain that “one needs to think egoistically in order to achieve happiness.”21 Although history casts a long shadow for the older generations, the Turnaround cohorts reacted pragmatically to the past, preferring to take advantage of new opportunities. Many who moved to the old Länder to study or work after unification socialized with western peers, who frequently discussed their favorite TV shows, movies, books, or vacation sites. This left the newcomers feeling increasingly “clueless,” having grown up with different stories, games, and holiday trips. The self-defined, actively seeking voices of this hybrid-identities group include Claudia Rusch (1971), Sabine Rennefanz (1974), and Jana Hensel (1976), stemming from different family backgrounds.22 All three produced “coming of age” memoires, two of which coincided with the Ostalgie wave and the release of the hit film, Goodbye Lenin. The daughter of dissidents subject to constant Stasi surveillance, Rusch reflects on having grown up in the GDR as a perpetual outsider. Based on a summer encounter with a boy from France, she dreams of moving there some day. Well aware of the GDR’s deficiencies, based on her family’s interactions with the Havemanns and other like-minded critics, she is loath to forgive the systems’ crimes but impelled by unification to discover her loyalty to “the other GDR”: “Not only spies and careerists, but also

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our families and friends lived here. Not only were those who wanted to press us into their preconceived molds part of this country, but also those who woke us up.”23 A play on the conformist pressures exercised by the FDJ, the book’s title, My Free German Youth, reflects the ongoing influence that her no longer-existing country continues to exercise on her self-­ perception, despite her freedom of movement and new international friends—setting her apart once more. Raised in Eisenhüttenstadt, Rennefanz’s work, Eisenkinder (Iron-­ Children) describes not only the sense of abandonment but also the “silent rage” of Eastern adolescents left to fend for themselves while parents confronted unemployment, alcoholism, and broken marriages brought on by the GDR’s collapse. Raised in a political-conformist setting, the young Sabine’s mastery of FDJ-speak secures her a place in an elite school with the privileged offspring of party bosses. When her gifted class is eliminated in 1990, she rails against the change: “Kohl is no fellow-countryman, and my country no longer exists.” Enrolling at the University of Hamburg, she learns “the rules of the elbow society,” attempting to forget the GDR entirely. She is manipulated into joining a fundamentalist Christian group, which conveyed the feeling that she “belonged again,” like back in the days of the Young Pioneer or the FDJ. “In retrospect, everything made sense again. … I replaced one religion with another … but Jesus only came in a double-package, with the devil as a freebie. Good and evil, friend and foe.” She volunteered for missionary work in Karelien, Russia, where she was exposed to dire poverty—and evangelizing “handlers” more interested in saving souls than in feeding hungry bodies. As she later reflects, “I could have become an Islamicist, a Scientologist or a neo-Nazi. It was merely a question of who talked to me first.”24 Rennefanz eventually complete her studies at the Humboldt University and commenced work as a journalist, but her rage was rekindled when three members of the “Zwickauer Cell” of the National Socialist Underground—Beate Zschäpe (1975), Uwe Böhnhardt (1977), and Uwe Mundlos(1973)—were charged with 10 murders, 43 attempted murders, 3 explosions, and 15 bank robberies over several years. Because most of the victims were of Turkish or Greek origin, police and prosecutors had falsely assumed that foreign mafia were driving the violence. After establishing their eastern roots, Western media portrayed them as the inevitable by-­product of their authoritarian educations, under the rubric “if a problem arises in East Germany, it is immediately thematized as ‘typically East German’. If there is a problem in West Germany, it’s an all-German

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problem.” Rennefanz’s efforts to understand her own Gefühlsstau impels her to conduct personal discussions with/about others who have lost their way, including the mother of Mundlos, who committed suicide prior to his capture. Now a journalist at Der Tagesspiegel, Rennefanz concluded: “The rage grows smaller, when one talks about it. That is a beginning.” 25 Only 13 when the Wall fell, Jana Hensel likewise addressed the loss of orientation for those who were spared both the burden of the Nazi past and the immediate impact of turbo-capitalism on their occupations. Raised in an apolitical household, she recalls her childhood as a relatively happy period. For this group, unification initially meant access to supermarkets full of exotic foods, fancier clothes, Hollywood movies, unlimited music CDs, and better haircuts. “We were the sons and daughters of the losers, made fun of by the victors as proletarians tainted by the odor of totalitarianism and reluctance to work. We did not intend to remain that way.”26 Fueled by a desire to adapt rather than to resist, they learned English instead of Russian, traveled abroad, and opened bank accounts, often distancing themselves from their parents. But after a decade of attempted assimilation, unanswered identity questions caught up with them. Reviewer’s descriptions of Zonenkinder as a “bittersweet,” even ostalgic coming-of-age story do not do justice to the larger questions confronting Hensel’s generation, for whom “freedom” came at the price of losing familiar sights, sounds, smells, and spaces at an early age—the things upon which memory is based. Psychological and emotional attachments they associated with the “natural order” disappeared in short order, like the hulking Leipzig train station that had lost its earlier grandeur, subsequently turned into a glitzy shopping mall with rails. Despite her ability to study in Leipzig, Marseille, Berlin, and Paris, she feels shamefully insecure about all of the things she does not know; like many of her peers, she views her parents’ attempts to assimilate into a culture driven by excess with adolescent embarrassment, but eventually learns to navigate the world with confidence as an adult. Hensel is not pursuing a Proustian “search for times lost,” although she later deliberates in a 2009 collection of essays “why we East Germans should remain different.” 27 Instead she continues to question West Germans’ ostensible inability to “listen” and perhaps learn from others. This is reflected most recently in Die Gesellschaft der Anderen (The Society of Others), co-written with migration-expert Naika Foroutan.28 Presented as a long conversation, the two women explore parallels regarding the sources and types of “othering” they have experienced and the ways in

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which these perpetuate inequality and discrimination toward easterners and ethnic minorities in united Germany. Like Dieckmann and Osang, she now straddles east and west realities as a journalist for Die Zeit. The opportunity to “share stories” has enabled this group, cognizant of generational differences, to assume a critical stance regarding identities on both sides of the former border. As one noted, “when I am asked questions about the GDR, I can describe in abstract terms how the political system worked. When my parents respond, they are trying to secure recognition for the personal choices they had to make about their lives.”29 A young woman from Dresden (Jugendweihe class of 1988) summarized the feelings of many when interviewed in the late 1990s: “I am glad to have experienced the GDR but also that it has not gone on further. It is nice to be able to look in this manner at the system in which I now live from the outside, with the GDR image in the background, as a comparison. One still wants to distinguish oneself from the West Germans. But that makes it more difficult to accept being German as one’s own identity.”30

The Post-Turnaround Generation: Difference Still Matters Conditionless assimilation is not the same thing as integration, nor does it facilitate a process of growing together. What began as a democratic revolution in 1989 morphed into a neo-liberal Turnaround by 1990, solidifying a CDU/CSU power-shift that jettisoned “growing together” in favor of rapid annexation: Deutschland eilig Vaterland. Conservative political interests, rather than deliberative democracy or “constitutional patriotism” concerns, drove Kohl’s decision to annex GDR territory under Article 23 of the Basic Law. This directly contravened the desires voiced by country-wide Round Table participants for incorporation under Article 146, which foresaw the adoption of a new constitution, based on “a free decision by the German people” themselves—a draft of which they had already prepared prior to unity negotiations. Had FRG leaders spent less time blaming “the SED dictatorship” and more time admitting to “modernization deficits” in their own system, starting with women’s rights, they might have circumvented the rise of critical younger cohorts, hoping to rectify the lop-sided presentation of unification history—by revisiting identities they never knew they had. Some refer to themselves as members of the Nachwende or Post-Turnaround

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Generation. Concentrated in academic or media domains, they are not representative in a statistical sense, but they do constitute new voices responding to ongoing perceptions of second-class citizenship among Germans with eastern roots. In 2010, young activists invited 150 of their peers to come to Berlin for three days to recount their memories of life in the GDR, hoping to “remember without having to justify anything.” A second conference and a “tour” of the east followed in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Twenty years into unity they drew on different images when asked to think about the “new states.” Their responses ranged from “pretty landscapes” and “run-­ down bus-stops” to old “bathtub water-heaters.” They established working groups in 2014 to fill a perceived research gap regarding their own identities. The Forschungsgruppe “Generation 21” (FoG21) now has university bases in Bern, Bremen, and Rostock, linked to the Netzwerk 3te Generation Ostdeutschland (https://netzwerk.dritte-­generation-­ost.de/). One 2014 project centered on the lack of skilled laborers and underdeveloped leadership potential, seeking ways to eliminate barriers and activate regional economic potential. The goal is to promote positive images of the east, as well as a “welcoming culture” to attract post-unity exiters back to their home states. A further project, introduced in 2019, tackles the all-important topic of underrepresentation (Soziale Integration ohne Eliten?), to analyze and expand “career paths” for diverse groups of future elites. These projects are rooted in exhortations to older cohorts on both sides. First, they want their parents to help them recall the past, to break through the “uncomfortable silences” many adopted in response to FRG stereotypes—reminiscent of the western ohne-mich orientations after 1945. Driven by curiosity, they eschew simplistic good-versus-evil accounts. Second, they insist on western recognition that the Wall’s collapse also put an end to many things that FRG citizens took for granted. Third, they expect older generations to stop continuously drawing lines between “us” and “them”: rightwing extremism and structural unemployment are not only German but also European problems.31 Born in 1990 less than a week before unification, Valerie Schönian gave no thought to differences between east and west while growing up in Sachsen-Anhalt. She later exchanged east-west jokes while studying in Berlin and pursing a short-internship in Bavaria, never taking them seriously. “Jokes are not a problem when all sides agree and they take place

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eye-to-eye, on equal footing. … Identity becomes real” she observed, “when one talks about it. Or thinks about it.” Encompassing privileges and disadvantages, identity “emerges as a reaction to something.”32 Her search began when she moved longer term to Munich in 2014. For the first time she felt like she had landed in Westdeutschland, after a Bavarian friend summarized what she had learned about the GDR in school: “Once upon a time there was an evil state; thanks to us, the West Germans, the people had been rescued, and now everything is good.” Schönian interviews a wide assortment of older and younger compatriots, many of whom seem to have “made it.” The list includes her (reluctant) parents, academics, concert organizers, artists, normal mortals, and the CDU’s rising star, Philipp Amthor (born 1992), whose direct mandate in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern qualified him as the youngest person ever to enter the Bundestag. The same year, 2017, the AfD secured 23% of the second-ballot votes in his district. An arch-conservative fond of provocative language, he routinely refers to the SED dictatorship, but rarely mentions the East in the present tense. Denying east-west differences at the outset of their conversation, he winds up sharing a few personal experiences that attest to the opposite. Joining the protest demonstrations against Pegida, Schönian is further shocked into becoming a “cheerleader” for her hometown of Magdeburg (and Plattenbau), following a comment by another West-friend. The latter claimed that Pegida images “were causing her to fall back on very sinister clichés,” buried so deep inside her “that I think: “Shit-Easterners. You wimps, always feeling like you are being disadvantaged!” (Scheiß Ossis! Ihr Jammerlappen, dass ihr euch immer noch benachteiligt fühlt!).33 Others complain, erroneously, “we pay their Soli and look what they voted for. Really unbelievable.”34 It is quite striking that the reviewers dismissing works by Hensel and Schönian as ostalgic chatter (Zeitgeistgeschwätz) or erroneous, selfabsorbed nonsense are once again men writing for west-newspapers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine or the Süddeutsche. The response among eastern media, like MRD or Freitag, has been very different. Thirty years later, West Germans are still passing their own, ill-informed prejudices and Wessi-to-the-rescue images on to their children. As Newton’s Third Law of motion posits, “for every action (force) in nature there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

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The Blessings of Late Birth Addressing the Israeli Knesset in January 1984, Helmut Kohl referred to the “blessing of late birth” (appropriated from Günther Gaus), implying that Germans born after 1930 bore no direct responsibility, much less guilt for National Socialism. He reasoned that his own generation had been born so late that it had lacked the capacity to decide for itself, independently and self-consciously, whether to support or oppose Hitler.35 The Unity Chancellor had few grounds for self-exoneration, however, given westerners’ ongoing tendency to blame all problems involving Easterners on their “socialization under the SED dictatorship”—thirty years after it ceased to exist. Kohl and ten long-standing members of his Cabinet (dating back to 1982) were all between 15 and 25 at the end of World War II, rendering them direct products of the Nazi-controlled educational system. As Peter Schneider observed, “If it is true that a human being is emotionally and intellectually molded by childhood experiences, then no generation was more completely offered up to National Socialist indoctrination than the one for which Helmut Kohl claims the blessing of having been born too late. His generation was born too late only in the sense that it didn’t have to pay for its enthusiasms as did those who were a generation older.”36 One generation cannot exonerate itself, then turn around to fault another for having grown up under a much less barbaric regime on the other side. The electoral successes of the AfD since 2014 derive from the policies of the western-dominated Federal Republic per se. National identities are rarely de-and reconstructed in the space of a single generation, as the old Federal Republic’s experiences testified. It took the “68 generation” to raise questions of personal responsibility regarding both the passive complicity and outright collaboration of its parents with the Nazi regime. It also took that successor generation to internalize the precepts of “militant democracy,” civil disobedience, grassroots participation, and even gender equality. What are forty years in the course of world history, societal practices, and ideological victories? They amount to “nothing but a footnote in the history of civilization,” as Stefan Heym stressed, but for those “born late,” the eastern Wende- and Nachwende children, they encompass an entire life time.37 Peter Hacks was correct, having alleged decades earlier that “in the GDR there are fewer Communists than they say but also more than they think.” Although many had been at odds with the state, unification solidified their shared sense of peer identity by collectively subjecting them to

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radical changes in their life-styles, beliefs, and opportunities. The second stage involved learning to live with differences between East and West Germans, once both sides registered that they did not comprise an organic community based on history, language, and lineage. It has taken citizens of the old-FRG longer to recognize the need for structural changes on their own side, but the impact on their identities has been just as profound. It is high time for westerners to stop referring to “the new Länder,” a phrase implying that their compatriots are permanent juveniles, incapable of functioning in the grown-up world of democracy. What 30-year old male, including my son, would accept being labeled “boy?” It is the only system that millions of citizens born after 1980 have ever known. Ironically, Easterners with three decades of real-world experience with the system and its flaws have given rise to the same kind of “political vexation” evinced by FRG voters dating back to the late 1980s. My exhortation to West Germans to respond positively and pro-actively to the ongoing identity needs of East Germans is in no way intended as an exoneration of the repressive state-socialist regime. They must also address the “disfiguring scars” qua lack of regional investment inflicted by Treuhand privatization practices. Like Alexander and Margaret Mitscherlich, I believe that the first postwar generation failed to cultivate a genuine ability to mourn; their feelings of personal responsibility for fascism were all too quickly subsumed by rising paranoia over the communist threat from the east, on the one hand, and the compensatory consumption generated by their “economic miracle,” on the other. Successor generations, by contrast, have developed an authentic “ability to empathize,” as demonstrated by the outpouring of volunteers in response to the 2015 refugee crisis. Thirty years of hindsight, coupled with fifteen months of a Corona pandemic lock-down, have provided me with a formidable opportunity to re-evaluate many of my earlier impressions and “understandings” of life in the German Democratic Republic. Having concentrated on various “trees” in my earlier studies, this exercise required me to reassess the “forest.” This exercise, in turn, obliged me to look beyond the system’s well-­ known repressive aspects to contemplate the utter absurdity of many SED responses to social change. It also cast new light the ways in which FRG policies across four decades often sustained the latter. This project has led me to draw six broader conclusions. First, the SED’s aging leaders made no effort to escape the oppressive clutches of their own socialization under the influences of National Socialism and

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Stalinism, even after the Soviet Union undertook limited re-evaluations of that legacy, first under Khrushchev, then under Gorbachev. Second, having attended ideologically driven party-schools in Moscow, they remained relatively clueless when it came to planning and managing an entire industrial economy once they had eliminated “private ownership of the means of production.” Their own lack of real-world industrial experience forced many policy reversals over time that soon undermined public trust in their leadership. Political control always took precedence over scientific expertise, impeding innovation. A third conclusion centers on the extent to which official anti-fascism lost its legitimizing power among citizens born into the GDR, intensifying the existential challenge of a wealthier, democratic Germany next door. Ritualized self-heroization undercut authentic, social scientific efforts to grapple with the root causes of National Socialism. Anti-fascism dictated from above gave rise to antithetical, far-right tendencies among young cohorts denied all other forms of legitimate opposition; xenophobic tendencies were by no means limited to the eastern states, as demonstrated by the waves of violence that shook united Germany between 1991 to 1993 under the “Unity Chancellor,” Helmut Kohl. Fourth, SED leaders lost sight of their socialist-equality ideals, based on their own preferences for western capitalist goods, and a corresponding hunger for ever more hard currency. The price of occasional efforts to stabilize and legitimize the regime vis-à-vis workers-as-consumers was massive national debt, precluding long-overdue investments in industrial modernization. Fifth, and somewhat paradoxically, the very conditions that should have allowed GDR rulers to adapt to the positive changes their policies had produced caused them to become pathologically fixated on potential threats to their power from within, viz., the Berlin Wall and international recognition of their sovereign-state status. Aging leaders proved pathetically incapable of governing an ever more educated, socially diverse population with tastes of its own. Finally, and perhaps most damning of all, they remained persistently indifferent to the real needs and desires of the working class they claimed to represent, despite the thousands of detailed reports on local conditions routinely submitted by Stasi analysts—too many of which were immediately relegated to the Panzerschrank. Though most easterners are better off now than during the first post-­ unity decade, the fact that some still fall between the cracks owes more to western corporate take-overs and Schröder’s Hartz IV reforms than to

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Merkel’s refugee policy. Social media exchanges foster perceptions of relative deprivation that are not supported by the data. The same voters who reject migrants today will need these trainable youth to finance their pensions through 2050. Partisan de-alignment since the late 1980s, added to the proliferation of new parties since 1990, has accorded the AfD disproportionate electoral influence, leading to complicated coalitions. Internal factionalization and leadership battles—involving westerners like Gauland, Weidel, Meuthen, and Höcke, inter alia—have rendered rightwing populists incapable of developing their own program for eastern empowerment, despite recent efforts to evoke that language. The AfD’s electoral losses in 2021 suggest that like many protest parties preceding it, this one will eventually be displaced by one that can offer policy alternatives, or by one assuming even more radical positions. The CDU and CSU have learned that playing to the far-right does little to increase their respective voter bases. What remains? East–West differences will persist, of course, but they will be no more antagonistic than those between northern and southern, urban and rural regions. The first thirty years of unification have testified to the dialectical nature of identity formation. The west German thesis was forced to embrace its GDR antithesis, resulting in identities lost, found, and reconfigured. By the time of the 40th anniversary of unification, a new generation will have become the standard-bearer of a national identity synthesis. Having ended my earlier book on West German identities with a proposal for a new national anthem, the Kinderhymne (Children’s Hymn) composed by Bertolt Brecht in 1950, it seems quite appropriate to conclude my treatment of East German identities with an excerpt from another Brecht text, this one written in exile in 1939. Both expressed Brecht’s hopes for the real beneficiaries of “the blessing of late birth.”    An die Nachgeborenen           To those born after Ihr, die ihr auftauchen werdet aus der Flut   You, who will emerge from the flood In der wir untergegangen sind        In which we have drowned Gedenkt                 Be mindful Wenn ihr von unseren Schwächen sprecht  When you speak of our failings Auch der finsteren Zeit           Also of the dark time Der ihr entronnen seid.           From which you escaped. Gingen wir doch, öfter als die Schuhe      For we went forth, changing our country     die Länder wechselnd          more frequently than our shoes Durch die Kriege der Klassen, verzweifelt    Through the wars between classes, despairing Wenn da nur Unrecht war und keine That there was only injustice and no Empörung.                outrage.

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… Ihr aber, wenn es soweit sein wird     … But you, when at last the time comes Dass der Mensch dem Menschen ein Helfer ist   That man can aid his fellow man, Gedenkt unsrer              Should think upon us Mit Nachsicht.                With leniency.

Notes 1. Alexander Osang. 2021. Fast Hell. Berlin: Aufbau, 101. 2. Ute und Wolfgang Benz, eds. 2001. Deutschland, deine Kinder. Zur Prägung von Feindbildern in Ost und West. Munich: DTV, 2001. For linguistic differences, see Ruth Rreiher and Rüdiger Läzer. 1996. Von Buschzulage und Ossi-Nachweis: Ost-West Deutsch in der Diskussion. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. 3. Karl W.  Deutsch. 1966. Nationalism and Social Communication. Cambridge: MIT Press. 4. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 1998. From Post-War to Post-Wall Generations: Changing Attitudes towards the National Question and NATO in the Federal Republic of Germany. Boulder: Westview. 5. Mildred A.  Schwarz. 1967. Public Opinion and Canadian Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press. 6. Günther Rüther. 1995. Politische Kultur und innere Einheit in Deutschland. Sankt Augustin: Konrad Adenauer Stiftung. 7. Gunnar Winkler, ed. 2004. Sozialreport 2004. Daten und Fakten zur sozialen Lage in den neuen Bundesländern. Berlin-Brandenburg: Trafo Verlag, 13–15. 8. The lag persists despite the €156 billion (Solidarity Pact II) that has flowed into eastern states since 2005. For details, see Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, ed. 2018. Annual Report of the Federal Government on the Status of German Unity 2018. Berlin. 9. Collectively bargained wages cover only a third of all workers. Report of the Federal Government, 9–10. 10. Willy Brandt, cited in Texte zur Deutschlandpolitik, Reihe III 8b. Deutscher Bundes-Verlag, 1990, 758. 11. Texte zur Deutschlandpolitik, 92, 91. 12. Texte zur Deutschlandpolitik, 91. 13. Jana Hensel. 2019. “Wir sind raus aus der Nische. Über den ostdeutschen Rechtsruck.” Wie alles anders bleibt: Geschichten aus Ostdeutschland. Berlin: Aufbau, 103. 14. Devin O. Pendas. 2020. Democracy, Nazi Trials and Transitional Justice in Germany, 1945–1950. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 138ff.

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15. Peter Schneider. 1982. Der Mauerspringer—Erzählungen. Darmstadt: Luchterhand, 13. 16. Christoph Dieckmann. 2000. Das wahre Leben im falschen: Geschichten von ostdeutscher Identität. Berlin: Christoph Links, 64. 17. Daniela Dahn. 1994. Wir bleiben hier oder wem gehört der Osten? Reinbeck: Rowohlt; Dahn. 1996. Westwärts and nicht vergessen. Vom Unbehagen in der Einheit. Berlin: Rowohlt; Dahn. 1998. Vertreibung ins Paradies. Reinbeck: Rowohlt; Dahn. 1999. In guter Verfassung. Wieviel Kritik braucht die Demokratie? Reinbeck: Rowohlt; Dahn. 2009. Wehe dem Sieger! Ohne Osten kein Westen. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 18. Christoph Dieckmann, 2005. Rückwärts immer: Deutsches Erinnern. Berlin: Christoph Links; Alexander Osang. 2006. Das Buch der Versuchungen: 20 Porträts und eine Selbstbezichtigung. Berlin: Christoph Links; Osang. 1999. Ankunft in der neuen Mitte. Reportagen und Porträts Berlin: Christoph Links; Osang, Fast Hell. 19. Wolfgang Engler. 1992. Die zivilisatorische Lücke: Versuch über den Staatssozialismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp; Engler. 1995. Die ungewollte Moderne. Ost-West Passagen. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp; Engler. 1999. Die Ostdeutschen: Kunde von einem verlorenen Land. Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. 20. Fast Hell: Alexander Osang im Gespräch mit Jana Hensel, discussion sponsored by the Deutsches Haus, New York University, April 28, 2021. 21. See the interviews in Liane v. Billerbeck. 2000. Generation Ost. Aufmüpfig, angepasst, ehrgeizig? Jugendliche nach der Wende. Munich: Ulstein. 22. Their respective best-sellers include Claudia Rusch. 2003. Meine freie deutsche Jugend. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer Verlag; Sabine Rennefanz. 2013. Eisenkinder: Die Stille Wut der Wendegeneration. Munich: Luchterhand; and Jana Hensel, Zonenkinder. 2002. Reinbeck: Rowohlt. 23. Rusch, Meine freie deutsche Jugend. 100 24. Rennefanz, Eisenkinder, 143, 118. 25. Rennefanz, Eisenkinder, 249; further, Wolfgang Engler und Jana Hensel. 2018. Wer wir sind. Die Erfahrung, ostdeutsch zu sein. Berlin: Aufbau. 26. Hensel, Zonenkinder, 73. 27. Jana Hensel. 2009. Achtung Zone—Warum wir Ostdeutschen anders bleiben sollten. Munich: Piper Verlag. 28. Naika Foroutan and Jana Hensel. 2020. Die Gesellschaft der Anderen. Berlin: Aufbau. 29. Anja Görnitz. 2012. “Kommunismus und Identität. Über die Schwierigkeit, mit den Eltern ins Gespräch zu kommen.” In Michael Hacker, Stephanie Maiwald, Johannes Staemmler, et al. Dritte Generation Ost. Wer wir sind, was wir wollen. Berlin: Christoph Links, 26. 30. Cited in Billerbeck, Generation Ost, 26, 27.

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31. Hacker, et al., 2012. Dritte Generation Ost, 13, 14. 32. Valerie Schönian. 2020. Ostbewusstsein: Warum Nachwendekinder für den Osten streiten und was das für die Deutsche Einheit bedeutet. Piper Verlag, München, 94. 33. This excerpt appeared in Valerie Schönian. 2020. “Ja, ich bin Ostbewusst.” Die Zeit, March 21, 2020. 34. Schönian, Ostbewusstsein, 91. 35. “Verschwiegene Enteignung: Wer erfand die Wendung von der ‘Gnade der späten Geburt’?,” Der Spiegel, September 14, 1986. 36. Peter Schneider, cited in Mushaben, From Postwar to Post-Wall Generations, 52. Despite resolutions passed by the US Congress and the Bundestag, Kohl insisted in 1985 on taking President Reagan to the Kolmeshöhe cemetery in Bitburg, the final resting place of 49 members of the Waffen SS, responsible, inter alia, for the slaughter of 642 French villagers in Oradour-sur-Glane. 37. Hacker, et al., Dritte Generation Ost, 31.

CHAPTER 13

Epilogue: October 3, 2021

After sixteen years in office, Angela Merkel executed one of her last official duties as Chancellor by delivering a keynote speech at the Georg Friedrich Händel concert-house in Halle (Sachsen-Anhalt) on October 3, 2021. Marking the 31st anniversary of German unification, she addressed an assortment of national, state, and local leaders in a far-from-typical emotional tone under the motto, “Shaping a future together.” 1 The nation’s first eastern female leader reminded the audience that the freedom stemming from peaceful unification “didn’t just descend upon us—this freedom was hard-won.” GDR citizens themselves had risked everything to secure democratic rights, but many among the millions subjected to mass unemployment once the Unity Treaty was signed “found themselves at a dead end.” Since 1990 they have been forced repeatedly to prove themselves worthy of freedoms secured by way of their own courageous protests. Stressing that unification “is not a finished process,” Merkel cited examples of her own negative experiences along these lines, despite having been designated “the World’s Most Powerful Woman” fourteen times during her four terms as Chancellor. Her reflections confirm many of the findings of my study. The Chancellor reported that one essay, published by the conservative Konrad Adenauer Foundation in 2020, characterized her as someone who had come into the CDU “as a thirty-five year old… with the ballast of her GDR biography”; this naturally meant that she was not “a socialized

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CDU-species imprinted by the old-FRG.” As defined by Duden (the German equivalent of Webster), the term ballast implied that her life story was a “heavy burden… baggage of limited value, carried merely for balance… an otherwise unusable load” that could be thrown overboard later. “Making absolutely no difference, whether one brought good or bad experiences. Ballast.” She commented further on an article that had appeared earlier in the Welt am Sonntag, written by a journalist she deeply respected, in response to her remarks at a September 2015 press conference: And then she did something that none of her predecessors had ever done. She distanced herself in one breath from the Republic whose second servant she was. She said: ”If we have to excuse ourselves for showing a friendly face in this refugee crisis, then this is not my country.” For a moment there was a flash, showing that she was not a born-Federal Republican or European but rather a trained one.

The veteran Chancellor elaborated on her reaction: Not a born Federal-German but only trained as one? Not a born European but only trained as one? Are there really two kinds of Federal Germans, the Originals and the Acquireds who have to prove every day anew that they belong and who can fail the exam with a single sentence…, with a sentence I uttered as pictures went round the world of citizens in Munich and other places welcoming refugees with open hearts and friendly faces at train stations: Do I really distance myself from my country with one answer?

She continued, Or is the question, … who decides who understands the values and interests of our country, or who can only speak as a semi-skilled person or have to keep practicing until they know how to do it? What kind of image does that convey of unification…? What is my country? A land in which everyone can learn new things together. A land in which we “shape a common future.” A country in which experiences with ruptures in family biographies… can mean one has to or is able to start over again… it is our responsibility to know that every person needs chances, that each and every one belongs and must be able to feel that belonging.

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Mindful of West characterizations of her compatriots as Jammerossis, Merkel stressed that “depressing experiences are another part of the story that cannot be ignored, not least out of respect for people’s life stories.” East Germans should not have to witness their roots being used against them, “as if their history—by which I mean their lives in the GDR—was in some way a disgrace.” She cautioned her listeners, I am not telling you this here in order to complain. I am certainly the last person who has grounds for complaint—as much good fortune as life has accorded me personally. I am not telling you this as Federal Chancellor. Instead I am describing this as a citizen out of the East, as one of some 16 million people who lived their lives in the GDR. Democracy isn’t simply there…. we must work for it together, again and again, every day… We may argue in the future about exactly how, but… we need to listen to each other and talk to each other…. Tell your own stories and tolerate differences. This is the lesson of 31 years of German unity. We need to respect individual biographies and experiences as well as democracy.

Having allied herself with Kohl’s Christian Democratic Party in 1990, Angela Merkel was not perceived as a representative of East German interests, especially following the recriminalization of abortion and the elimination of many women-targeted benefits. She rarely sought to portray herself as such. Indeed, she only began to reveal in personal interviews after 2016 that she had faced disadvantages in the political arena from the start, as a woman and as an East German. Her first encounter with discriminatory rhetoric and stereotypes dated back to her early days in the all-German cabinet, where western politicians and pundits referred to her as Kohl’s Girl, Mutti, “Zone-Pigeon,” the Black Widow, and Ossi-biene mit der Pokermiene (East-bee with the poker-face). Angel Merkel’s thirty-five years in the East German “waiting room of democracy” nonetheless equipped her with a unique set of leadership skills. Her upbringing as a Protestant pastor’s daughter in a “godless” state, for example, fostered her strong commitment to human rights and freedom-of-movement norms. Her exposure to the socialist gender regime, combined with her GDR-typical antipathy toward confrontational, ideological positions factored into her leadership style. Used to operating in “a man’s world,” her work experiences as a professional physicist (with a PhD) shaped her preference for data-driven policy design and evaluation. Her need to fit into a new alpha-male party arena after 1990

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instilled a sense of empathy toward her compatriots, also subjected to radical east-to-west re-acculturation. These influences combined factored into policy substance, causing her to support and/or “appropriate” SPD and Green objectives in relation to energy, climate change, and work-family reconciliation policies. Learning how to leverage EU mandates after 2005, Chancellor Merkel built bridges between the two populations by grafting new policies onto old roots, building on Western environmentalism and Eastern childcare guarantees, for example. Her motives were mixed, focusing on equality, the looming demographic deficit, and the need to improve economic opportunities for offspring of migrant descent. Ironically, a substantial part of the GDR gender regime has become “the new normal.” Thanks to the (re)introduction of extensive child-care and parental leave guarantees, German birth rates have reached their highest levels since the early 1960s, evoking an urban mid-wife shortage in 2017. Bolstered by Social Democrats in three grand coalitions, Merkel moreover expanded occupational opportunities, cracked the corporate glass ceiling, and inspired a new generation of women of all political persuasions to seek electoral office, adding up to a great, substantive leap forward for equality throughout Germany.2 The eastern Chancellor has drawn on her own biography to persuade westerners that they, too, must adapt to rapidly changing socio-economic conditions. She combined rhetorical concepts such as fatherland and homeland, familiar to Easterners, with “the politics of small steps,” trusted by Westerners: “I can only say, if I am a political product then I am one [produced] by German unity, and I am proud that I am an all-German politician with east German roots; otherwise I am a product of my parents, and I am also proud of that.”3 A lack of personal identification with one’s country holds many consequences for system stability. This is the deeper significance of loyalty. In Merkel’s words: “If Germany can find its identity and stand by it, that will be good for democracy… A great deal of damage is done by what remains unsaid, concealed. We must develop a sense of our history as a whole, and then say: we are happy to be German.”4 Just as importantly, Merkel gave her western compatriots the right to identify emotionally with their own nation. She observed in 1993, “we Germans have a very cramped relationship to the question, whether we are allowed to love our homeland. Especially in the old federal states (sic). It does not help us to advance, to

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act as if we have no connection to our country and don’t even trust ourselves enough to say that we feel at home here.”5 Many of the policies adopted under her four governments can be construed as a direct repudiation of those promoted by her erstwhile mentor, Unity Chancellor Kohl. Her policies—including her country’s new status as a “welcoming culture” in relation to migration and asylum—have not only modernized the CDU but also the Berlin Republic as a whole, elevating Germany from the regional to the international stage. While Germany’s export- and job-boom prior to the Covid epidemic might have gone a long way to mitigate the unequal distribution of wages and opportunities across the two regions, it will take another decade of major investment to overcome the persistent “structural weaknesses” inflicted by Treuhand privatization decisions. Still missing is a full, historical accounting for the errors and abuses of the Nachwendezeit, as well as a dramatic push to increase easterners’ presence among national elites across all sectors. Having proven that East Germans are capable of achieving great things, Chancellor Angela Merkel received a sustained standing ovation following her October 3, 2021, speech. Whether her successors, the media, and West Germans, in general, will carry out her final wishes for the nationunited is a chapter yet to be written.

Notes 1. Rede, Bundeskanzlerin Merkel anlaesslich des Festaktes zum Tag der Deutschen Einheit am 3. Oktober 2021, Halle/Saale, https://www. bundesregier ung.de/breg-­d e/suche/rede-­v on-­b undeskanzlerin-­ merkel-­a nlaesslich-­d es-­f estakts-­z um-­t ag-­d er-­d eutschen-­e inheit-­a m-­3 -­ oktober-­2021-­in-­halle-­saale-­1964938. 2. Joyce Marie Mushaben. 2018. “The Reluctant Feminist: Angela Merkel and the Modernization of Gender Politics in Germany.” Femina Politica 27 (2): 83–94; Mushaben, 2022. “The Quest for Gender Parity: Angela Merkel and the Diversification of Electoral Politics in Germany.” German Politics and Society 40 (2), https://doi.org/10.3167/gps.2022.400203. 3. Cited in Marcus Mauerer, Carsten Reinemann, Jürgen Maier, and Michaela Maier. 2007. Schröder gegen Merkel. Wahrnehmung und Wirkung des TV-Duells 2005 im Ost-West-Vergleich. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 75. 4. Stephan Kornelius. 2013. Angela Merkel. Die Kanzlerin und ihre Welt. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 95. 5. Mushaben, Becoming Madam Chancellor, 309.

Index1

A Abgrenzung (demarcation), 42, 44, 64, 90, 97, 124, 280, 332, 340, 428 Abortion, 55, 165, 181, 209, 289, 350n35, 356, 358, 364, 377, 378, 380–382, 390, 391, 394, 397–399, 509, 541 “All-sided socialist personality,” 48, 70, 99, 137, 149, 153, 162, 263, 412, 425, 434, 465 Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, Alternative for Germany Party), 9, 22, 54, 67, 160, 192, 196, 218, 229, 234, 241, 244, 245, 339, 340, 396, 477, 495–502, 504–507, 509–511, 515n66, 516n83, 521, 522, 531, 532, 535 Anderson, Sascha, 282, 284, 290, 342 "Anti-fascist protection Wall," 89, 120, 166, 264

Aufbau Ost, 234–241, 326 Aufbau (Reconstruction) Generation, 165, 191, 210, 219, 268–272, 280, 344, 411, 430, 462 B Basis of Relations Treaty (Grundlagenvertrag), 97, 304, 329 Bausoldaten (construction soldiers), 319, 479 Bebel, August, 356, 359, 360, 366 Becher, Johannes R., 63, 65, 85, 261, 263, 271, 424 Biermann, Wolf, 43, 98, 124, 170, 172, 176, 194, 267, 268, 275, 279, 284, 287, 288, 290, 334, 433–435 Birthler, Marianne, 331, 332, 338 “Bitterfeld Path,” 263 Blocked Generation, 171, 462

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

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INDEX

Bohley, Bärbel, 242, 315, 329–331, 334, 344 Born-into Generation, 411, 449, 525 Brandt, Willy, 2, 89, 99, 205, 291, 304, 310, 519, 521 Brecht, Bertolt, 43, 71, 165, 177, 261, 263, 271, 272, 277, 278, 294, 430, 535 Breuel, Birgit, 388, 389, 487, 490–492 Brown, Archie, 23, 24, 57n5, 461 Bund Evangelische Kirche (BEK, Evangelical Church Union), 320, 324, 325, 333 Bundestag Commission of Inquiry (SED-Dictatorship), 335 Bündnis’90/the Greens, 7, 180, 218, 221, 331, 332, 335

D Dahn, Daniela, 282, 294, 312, 316, 525 Datsche culture, 128, 131–134, 314, 346, 436 De Maizière, Lothar, 7, 55, 155n37, 192, 238, 241, 252n90, 306, 325, 326, 338, 340, 486 Demokratische Frauenbund Deutschland (DFD, Democratic Women’s League in Germany), 88, 366, 368, 369, 373, 374, 380 Developed socialism, 90, 118, 123, 162, 163 Dialectical materialism, 56, 66, 68, 105, 123, 138, 161, 414 Die Gleichheit, 360 Die Wende (revolutionary Turn-­around), 36, 49–55, 67, 207, 451, 459 DT 64, 428, 434, 440

C Christian Democratic Party (CDU), 7, 78, 160, 173, 181, 182, 192, 218, 224, 227, 230, 233–242, 291, 292, 318, 326–328, 331, 335, 339, 340, 353n95, 356, 391, 393, 395, 400, 485–487, 491, 492, 494, 495, 497, 498, 505, 506, 516n83, 529, 531, 535, 539–541, 543 “Church in socialism,” 71, 305, 306, 320, 325, 343 “Coffee crisis,” 142, 186 Collectives, 11, 25, 28, 30, 33–35, 41, 51, 54, 73, 84, 117, 126–134, 153, 160, 164, 171, 184, 194, 207, 210, 211, 226, 245, 263, 265, 271, 275, 289, 293, 307, 319, 343, 346, 348, 370, 412, 416, 417, 422, 425, 438, 439, 441, 451, 476, 523

E Eighth Party Congress (1971), 44, 89, 124, 148, 161, 169, 266, 320, 371 Eingabe (petitions), 50, 135, 140, 167, 193, 210, 226, 376 Elections, 5, 7, 11, 22, 50, 52, 53, 70, 87, 88, 167, 175, 176, 180, 182, 193, 196, 216, 218, 223, 224, 229, 234, 236, 237, 241–244, 252n87, 306, 317, 323, 326, 327, 332, 333, 338, 378, 387, 396, 449, 486, 491, 496, 497, 499, 505, 510 Engels, Friedrich, 8, 116, 162, 356, 358, 360, 401n10 Eppelmann, Rainer, 242, 322, 327, 338, 437, 485 Erbe (legacy), Tradition (tradition), 94, 95, 103, 104, 110n82 Exit, voice, and loyalty, 15, 21–56, 159, 192 Expanded Secondary School (EOS), 416–418, 481, 484

 INDEX 

F Five-Year Plan, 117–119, 124, 138, 368, 369, 418 Forum Ostdeutschland, 234–241 Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ, Free German Youth), 3, 12, 14, 84, 99, 101, 119, 146, 150, 167, 168, 187, 191, 193, 259, 268, 319, 322, 368, 372, 373, 382, 387, 409, 413, 416, 418, 420–428, 430–440, 442, 444–446, 449, 450, 472n86, 482, 483, 527 Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund (FDGB, Free German Trade Union Federation), 87, 147, 186, 207, 259, 279, 367–369, 372, 373 Freikauf (prisoner ransom), 125, 172–176, 293, 340, 523 Friedrich, Walter, 12, 112n105, 445 G German Communist Party (KPD), 74, 76–78, 82, 168, 262, 274, 360, 362, 377, 378, 413 German Film Company (DEFA), 264–266 German Writers’ Union (Schriftstellerverband), 274, 279, 288 Gleichstellungsstelle (GSS, Office of Equal Opportunity), 229–234 Grass, Günter, 1, 271, 286, 288, 291, 292, 525 Gruftis, 435–444 Grüne Liga (Green League), 212–218, 221, 250n52 Guidelines for the Communist Women’s Movement, 360

547

H Hager, Kurt, 123, 163, 172, 264, 266, 267, 424 Hallstein Doctrine, 66 Harich, Wolfgang, 79, 271, 279, 417 Hasselbach, Ingo, 442, 443 Havemann, Robert, 242, 272, 311, 417 Helsinki Accords, 44, 72, 172, 177, 267, 325, 341, 447, 477 Hensel, Jana, 521, 526, 528, 531, 537n20 “Heroes of labor,” 120, 476, 485–492 Hirschman, Albert O., 15, 27, 36–41, 43–46, 48–50, 52–54, 59n41, 59n46, 59n47, 159, 188, 192–194, 196, 268, 274, 524 Historical materialism, 79, 123, 357 Hockauf, Frida, 124 Honecker, Erich, 67, 71, 79, 80, 87, 89, 90, 93, 95, 96, 102, 104, 105, 107n19, 107n32, 112n109, 118, 123–127, 134, 135, 138, 143, 146, 148, 150, 151, 161, 163, 169, 173, 178, 189, 191, 198n18, 219, 242, 266, 267, 272, 279, 288, 293, 303, 304, 307, 311, 315, 317, 321–323, 329, 330, 337, 356, 363, 364, 371, 383, 385, 398, 411, 421, 427, 445, 507 Honecker, Margot (Feist), 14, 50, 321, 364, 371, 372, 375, 383, 410, 413, 415, 416, 422, 423, 429, 435, 444, 445 Hooligans, 103, 224, 439, 441 Höppner, Reinhard, 224, 235, 240, 326, 391

548 

INDEX

I Independent Women’s Union (Unabhängige Frauenverband), 182, 332, 399 Initiative for Peace and Human Rights (IFM), 328–331, 333, 334 Instrumental attachment, 34, 59n46, 153, 163, 524 “Internal e/migration,” 164, 268, 275, 277, 282, 436, 466 Intershop, 117, 134–138, 143, 144, 186, 434 J Jahn, Roland, 323, 338 Jugendweihe (youth dedication), 146, 318, 364, 413, 421–428, 434, 449, 529 June 17, 1953, 84, 119, 279, 307 K Kader (cadres), 120, 163, 169, 305, 309, 310, 314, 315, 320, 373, 374, 422 Kelman, Herbert, 33, 34, 42, 59n46, 131, 153 Kohl, Helmut, 11, 18, 54, 55, 61n84, 153, 179–182, 209, 223, 228, 234, 235, 238, 242, 245, 280, 288, 289, 326, 334, 336, 337, 339, 353n95, 356, 388, 390, 394, 400, 401, 452, 455, 457, 459, 473n102, 477, 486, 487, 489, 491, 496, 511, 522, 527, 529, 532, 534, 538n36, 541, 543 Kombinate (industrial conglomerates), 84, 123, 143, 153, 182, 186, 236, 238, 241, 243, 311, 313, 336, 340, 346, 365, 389, 477, 485–492, 495, 508, 510, 533, 543

Kommerzielle Koordinierung (KoKo, Commercial Coordination), 126, 127, 135, 152, 170, 314, 315, 337 Krenz, Egon, 54, 176, 178, 191, 242, 279, 303, 330, 337, 409, 445 Kuczynski, Rita, 171, 199n29, 274, 436, 469n25 L Lange, Inge, 145, 375, 377, 381 Lenin, Vladimir, 23, 75, 76, 80, 86, 104, 116, 117, 167, 171, 415, 439, 447, 466 Leonhard, Wolfgang, 74–78, 82, 162 Literaturstreit (Literary Controversy), 285–293, 295 “Love of the socialist Fatherland,” 66, 92, 100–103, 144, 266, 268, 409, 410, 428, 449, 465, 466, 480, 481 M Maron, Monika, 282, 288, 436, 476, 507 Maslow, Abraham, 26, 28, 31, 127, 162, 521 McAuley, Mary, 25, 57n11 Merkel, Angela, 11, 55, 98, 189, 198n19, 218, 229, 238, 241, 284, 325–327, 331, 339, 356, 393–397, 399–401, 416, 420, 421, 461, 497, 498, 501, 510, 535, 539, 541–543 Mielke, Erich, 80, 83, 105, 169, 288, 305, 307, 313–316, 337, 411, 415, 435, 438, 478 Ministry for State Security (MfS), 78, 100, 121, 169, 176, 187, 190,

 INDEX 

279, 305–316, 331, 334, 387, 438, 440–442, 465, 471n74 Misselwitz, Hans-Jürgen, 235–236, 326 Misselwitz, Ruth, 277, 323, 326 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 32, 33, 58n35, 271, 293, 341, 533 Mitscherlich, Margret, 32, 33, 58n35, 271, 293, 341, 533 Modrow, Hans, 53, 181, 216, 242, 316, 332, 333, 486, 487, 491 Moore, Jr., Barrington, 23, 24, 98, 195, 461 N Nationale Volksarmee (NVA, National People’s Army), 88, 98, 175, 187, 309, 310, 313, 319, 322, 326, 422, 431, 435, 441, 442, 465, 467, 477–481, 483–485, 509 Nation/nationality, 2, 4, 8, 21, 23, 26, 27, 32–36, 42, 48, 52, 54, 59n46, 64, 66, 67, 70, 73, 80, 89–97, 103, 162, 177, 187, 224, 242, 243, 258–295, 329, 350n47, 362, 387, 520, 542, 543 New Economic System (NÖS), 122, 123, 151, 166, 264, 417 New Forum, 7, 53, 55, 73, 176, 180, 181, 306, 310, 330, 332–334 Nikolai Church (Leipzig), 175 Nischengesellschaft (niche society), 150 Normative loyalty, 451–461, 467 Notgemeinschaften (communities of need), 129, 131, 441 O Objekt Freienbrink (stolen goods depot), 314 Osang, Alexander, 519, 525, 529

549

Ostalgie, 15, 54, 161, 183–187, 196, 224, 246, 342, 526 Ostpolitik, 2, 44, 48, 67, 89, 96–100, 104, 123, 135, 163, 170, 310, 324, 328, 447, 465, 477, 482, 483 P Party of Democratic Socialists (PDS), 4, 6, 181, 210, 221, 224, 227, 238, 240–245, 280, 335, 339, 491, 495, 496, 508 Peace policies, 96, 101, 175, 191, 303, 321, 322, 329, 343, 348, 437, 477, 481 Peer culture, 24, 25, 27, 55, 57n11, 180, 206, 255–256, 452, 465, 520 Politburo, 3, 4, 14, 51, 53, 67, 75, 87, 88, 99, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 132, 138, 143, 145, 149–151, 161, 163, 170, 176, 178, 189–191, 229, 263, 264, 267, 271, 277, 303, 305, 307, 308, 316, 321, 322, 337, 342, 364, 371, 375, 381, 386, 398–400, 411, 420, 423, 424, 427, 438, 444–446, 450, 462, 466, 507 Pollack, Detlef, 49, 59n43, 203n112, 344, 351n68, 352n71, 352n77, 353n107, 402n18 Polytechnical school system (POS), 412, 415, 417 Poppe, Gerd, 329, 332, 338 Poppe, Ulrike, 329, 330, 338 Post-Turnaround Generation (Nachwendegeneration), 524, 529–531 Prague Spring, 45, 90, 98, 160, 167, 171, 194, 260, 275, 281, 282, 343, 418, 427

550 

INDEX

Prenzlauer Berg, 189, 265, 280, 282, 283, 290, 312, 323, 339, 386, 437, 440 Punks, 224, 284, 323, 433–444, 467 R “Real-existing socialism,” 72, 99, 110n84, 116–154, 229, 258, 274, 287, 439, 522 Reich, Jens, 7, 19, 55, 63, 79, 86, 330–332, 338, 340 Relative deprivation, 67, 411, 476, 502–507, 510, 535 Rennefanz, Sabine, 526–528 Rock music, 99, 127, 168, 169, 420, 422, 431, 432, 436 Round Table (RT), 19, 53, 180, 181, 224–229, 233, 242, 246, 305, 306, 324, 333, 334, 344, 346, 355, 529 S Schalck-Golodkowski, Alexander, 125, 126, 143, 173, 314, 337 Schmidt, Elli, 88, 365, 366, 375 Schorlemmer, Friedrich, 277, 324, 327, 328, 525 Schwarz, Mildred, 32, 520 Sentimental attachment, 42, 153, 161, 163 Skinner, B. F., 26, 29–31, 33, 189 Skins, Skinheads, 224, 227, 323, 435–444, 456 Social Democratic Party (SPD), 2, 6, 66, 76–78, 82, 180, 218, 224, 227, 230, 234–243, 262, 280, 281, 325, 326, 328, 331, 332, 339, 360, 395, 496, 510, 519, 542 Socialist realism, 260–268

Society for Sport and Technology (GST, Gesellschaft für Sport und Technik), 415, 418, 477, 484 Soviet Military Administration (SMAD), 66, 76, 77, 81–83, 85, 86, 108n52, 117, 132, 167, 259, 318, 337, 366, 367, 369, 377 Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED, Socialist Unity Party of Germany), 2–4, 12, 36, 41, 43, 44, 49–51, 53, 55, 63–68, 71–75, 79, 80, 82, 84, 86–93, 96, 97, 99, 100, 102–104, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 125, 128, 132–134, 136–138, 141, 145, 146, 149, 151–153, 160–165, 167–173, 175–178, 181, 183, 187–189, 191–195, 208, 212–216, 219, 225, 229, 232, 238, 242, 243, 258–262, 264, 266–268, 275, 277, 279, 283, 284, 287, 293, 294, 303–305, 308, 309, 313, 315–323, 325, 326, 329, 330, 333–336, 339, 340, 342, 343, 345, 347, 348, 353n95, 356, 361, 362, 364–369, 372, 373, 376–380, 382, 385, 386, 393, 394, 397, 398, 400, 409–413, 415, 417, 420, 421, 423–425, 427–430, 432–437, 439, 440, 442, 444, 446–451, 453, 457, 461, 465, 466, 471n70, 477, 478, 480–483, 485, 495, 496, 499, 502, 505–509, 520, 523, 524, 529, 531–534 Stalinism, 68, 74, 78, 79, 93, 112n108, 149, 271, 272, 293, 306, 534 Stalin, Josef, 74–79, 83, 86, 100, 104, 117, 161, 258, 261–263, 318, 360, 364, 378, 415, 417, 478

 INDEX 

State Security forces (Stasi), 11, 16n3, 48, 79, 88, 99, 121, 128, 133, 135, 150, 153, 169–173, 176, 179, 184, 189, 190, 200n55, 201n81, 215, 229, 238, 242, 277, 282, 284, 287, 289–291, 293, 300n99, 301n106, 303–348, 364, 376, 415, 420, 428, 430, 433, 435, 439, 440, 454, 476, 478, 479, 526, 534 Stolpe, Manfred, 235, 325, 331 T Tacheles, 413, 466, 467, 474n111 Thierse, Wolfgang, 236, 237, 326, 415, 496 Third Generation-East (Dritte Generation Ost), 9, 524 Treuhand, 54, 143, 153, 182, 186, 236, 238, 241, 243, 336, 340, 346, 389, 477, 485–492, 495, 508, 510, 533, 543 Turn-around (die Wende), 36, 49–55, 207, 451, 459, 526, 529 U ‘Überholen ohne einzuholen,’ 118, 120, 154n7 Ulbricht, Walter, 71, 72, 74, 76–79, 82, 83, 86–89, 100, 104, 105, 117, 118, 120, 122, 123, 151, 154n7, 161–163, 168, 169, 198n18, 260, 263, 264, 266, 271, 274, 279, 307, 317–319, 356, 362–364, 366, 378, 380, 383, 386, 397, 398, 404n50, 411, 413, 415, 417, 424, 425, 429, 432, 478 “Unhappiness curve,” 477, 502–507

551

Unity Treaty (Vertrag über die abschließende Regelung in Bezug auf Deutschland), 3, 13, 356, 390, 391, 452, 539 V “Vitamin B,” 129, 135, 148, 152, 153 Volkseigene Betriebe (VEBs, “people’s own factories”), 121, 124, 128, 143, 146, 198n9, 405n79, 433, 489 Volkskammer (VK), 4–7, 11, 54, 64, 86, 120, 138, 180, 181, 229, 242, 306, 316, 326, 327, 331–333, 337, 339, 343, 365, 372, 373, 381, 387, 422, 486, 487 Volkssolidarität (People’s Solidarity), 207, 218–224, 345 W Wandlitz, 102, 149, 152, 170, 171, 309, 313, 314, 364, 436 Welt-Jugendfestspiele (World Youth Games), 124, 447, 483 Wolf, Christa, 9, 55, 159, 176, 197n1, 255, 256, 260, 264, 271–281, 285–293, 315, 333, 449 “Women Question,” 309, 356, 397 Z Zentralinsitut für Jugendforschung (ZIJ, Central Institute for Youth Research), 3, 11–14, 50, 94, 102, 112n105, 164, 191, 382, 386, 413, 424, 429, 432, 436, 443–451, 453, 458, 509 Zetkin, Clara, 356, 360, 366