Life in East Germany, aka, the German Democratic Republic

Florian Huber has written a companion volume to a German documentary series on the former East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR from its German name): Meine DDR: Leben im anderen Deutschland [My DDR: Life in the other Germany] (2008).

The "my DDR" part of the title reflects the approach of the book, which is to tell the 40-year story of the DDR (founded 1949, dissolved 1989) by following portions of the lives of a wide variety of DDR citizens, some famous, others not. There is Janet Oldinski, who was looking forward to a career and life as a citizen in the DDR, who was no dissident. In July 1989, she was in an autobile accident and was in a coma for months. When she was able to refocus on the outer world and resume her studies in Leipzig, the DDR was in full disintegration. I don't know if her particular story inspired the German comedy film Goodbye, Lenin, whose plot is based on a similar idea.

I found this an interesting and engaging way to relate the general history of Communist East Germany. The country was led by the Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED), which was technically a fusion party of Communists (KPD) and Social Democrats (SPD) and Christian Democrats, but which functionally was a Soviet-line Communist Party. Well, Soviet-line until Mikhail Gorbachev became the chief Soviet leader. The SED didn't want anythng to do with his policies of glasnost and perestroika.

Political and economic policies varied over the four decades of the country's existence. Americans have such a comic-book idea of what dictatorships are about that we find it hard to even recognize genuinely dictatorial claims of our own government when they are put forth, e.g., the torture policy, and Cheney's "Unitary Executive" theory. But dictatorships also have to have a social basis to survive for long. And they have to pay attention to public opinion, if only to keep it mostly passively hostile.

Janet Oldinski got a big surprise when she recovered from her coma

Communism as a system of thought had its origins in the radical-democratic movements of the 19th century. Unlike fascism in its German, Italian, Spanish and Austrian variants, which represented a rejection of the whole concept of democracy back to and including the French Revolution. So Communist governments, no matter how authoritarian their actual style of rule, could never forgo either the theory or the outer forms of democracy. And that was also true of the DDR, where the SED was always more resistant than most other "Soviet bloc" countries to reform movements that represented either political liberalization or liberalization in the economy, the latter meaning allowing more capitalist-type businesses.

But in Meine DDR, the reader gets a sense of how elements of democratic thought survived. Organized activity like hiking clubs have long been popular in Germany and Austria, and still are. The DDR provided plenty of those, like the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend), the SED's youth organization that not only provided the best outlet for young people for sports and organized social events like dances. It was also a virtual prerequisite for being able to get a university education. So the FDJ gave young people experience in interacting in an organizational context. But it also was a primary instrument for non-violent coercion of the population to conform to the official policy of the SED regime. The SED didn't have to hold a gun to people's heads to get compliance, though obviously "non-violent coercion" is not the same as freedom.

Huber provides a great quote from SED head Walter Ulbricht, the main leader of the DDR during its first two decades, at the time they were preparing to formally establish the DDR on Soviet orders: "Es muss demokratisch aussehen, aber wir müssen alles in der Hand halten." (It has to look democratic, but we have to control everything.)

Janet Oldinski circa 2003

And the stories in Meine DDR show some of the many ways they attempted to maintain this policy until the very end.

(Not to draw forced analogies. But don't kid yourself. Dick Cheney's notion of government can pretty much be summed up with the same quotation.)

In days where the American Republicans have just led the most massive nationalizations ever undertaken outside the Communist world, it's probably worth noting the difference between nationalization of the social-democratic and (current) American Republican Party type, and expropriation. The current financial bailout in the US and EU countries, like the federal bailout of Chrysler during the Carter administration, involved the government buying all or part of a company. But the companies remain organized as public corporations, and the government shares can be sold to other investors or repurchased, thus re-privatizing those portions of the economy without changing the business form of the companies.

Communist governments have tended to rely on expropriation, which involves the state seizing control of private assets without compensation at current market levels. The best-known case of large-scale expropriation of capital assets in the US, although it's not usually described as such, was the freeing of the slaves by Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. That removed the enormous capital investments planters had invested in the physical bodies of the slaves from their possession without compensation. Pre-war emancipation schemes had generally involved some form of "compensated emancipation", i.e., having the government reimburse the slaveowners all or part of their capital investment when slaves were freed. Bob McElvaine, years ago when I was one of his history students at Millsaps College, said that the inflation-adjusted amounts of capital expropriated by freeing the slaves was even larger than the amounts confiscated by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.

The DDR relied on expropriation and the state ran most of the economic enterprises. Meine DDR is not focused on economics as such. But it does give the reader a sense of the economic issues the DDR faced in competing with the West and in maintaining the SED's political control. For instance, after the workers' uprising of 1953, which quickly spread across the entire country and was kicked off by an increase in production quotas, the SED leadership was always fixated on providing enough consumer benefits to the people to keep them satisfied enough to not repeat the 1953 experience.

SED leader and Communist hardliner Erich Honeker

As we see in Meine DDR in part through the experiences of a not especially ideological young man named Edgar Most, who eventually became one of the most senior finance officials in the country, the SED's economic strategy tended to favor subsides of rents and consumer goods to the expense of vital long-term investments. As time went on, the DDR's inability to compete in the increasingly globalized marketplace became more and more a detriment to the SED's ability to maintain power indefinitely.

Political repression was certainly part of the SED's program of maintaining control, as well. Through media reports and the film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen), many people from the Western side of the Cold War have at least heard something about the operations of the Stasi, i.e., the Staatssicherheitsdienst, the secret police. Meine DDR adds more stories to the Stasi's history.

It's not primarily the purpose of Meine DDR to tell the story of the democratic opposition as such. For many citizens, even those who weren't in comas during key months of the final acts of the drama, the breakup of the DDR seemed to come as a sudden event, completely unexpected. Huber gives the reader both a sense of how they experienced it, as well as some idea of how the democratic opposition functioned, especially in the later 1980s. And he writes (my translation):

Die DDR ging nicht an einem bestimmten Tag oder Ort zu Ende. Für jeden ihrer sechzehn Millionen Einwohner wurde der Untergang durch ein anderes Ereignis, Erlebnis oder eine persönliche Entscheidung spürbar. Jeder nahm auf seine Weise Abschied von der eigentumlichen Republik, die langer überlebt hatte, als selbst ihre Grander zu hoffen gewagt hatten, und die sich vierzig Jahre unübersehbar in das Leben jedes Einzelnen hineingedrängt hatte, im Schlechten wie im Guten.

[The DDR did not come to an end on a particular day or place. For every one of its sixteen million inhabitants, its downfall was evidenced by a different occurence, experience or a personal decision. Every person took leave in their own way from the curious Republic, which had survived longer than even its founders had dared to hope. And which for forty years had unmistakably pushed itself into the lives of every single person, for worse or for better.]

But Huber does give us some sense of the democratic opposition, particularly the role that the Protestant Christian churches played in it. Though he doesn't go into great detail about the kinds of issues - peace and disarmament, environmentalism, conscientious objection to military service, emigration - around which they organized.

In another post, I'll comment on two of the more memorable stories from Meine DDR of people who were active in the opposition.

Tags: ddr, east germany, janet oldinski