A look back at how German unification appeared in 1993

I just came across something I wrote dated 11/08/1993 about the state of German unification at that time.

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A report in the 11/15/93 Business Week provides a good illustration of the wishful thinking about European competition so common in the American business press. The article, "Germany: Is Reunification Failing?" by several staff writers, talks about how eastern German economic performance has disappointed the Kohl government's early predictions of a fast transition for the eastern states.

Contrary to the optimists' hopes, the article accurately notes, industrial production in the old East Germany was far worse than the west had estimated, and environmental problems far more severe. Then, it offers its diagnosis of the policy failures in terms common to American economic policy disputes:

But west German leaders were also to blame. They exported their high wages, generous benefits, and stifling regulations to the east - just when this brand of capitalism was beginning to flag under global competition. They also wrongly assumed billions in public investment would spark a big private investment boom. Moreover, the privatization of old state-run companies didn't create a new entrepreneurial class as quickly as hoped. It often shut down factories and wiped out jobs. And western Germans argue that their new compatriots cling to an entitlements mentally developed under 40 years of communism.

This capsule version of the business press' conventional wisdom about German unification suffers from some serious defects, from the standpoint of American leaders evaluating Europe's competitive strengths:

1. "They exported their high wages, generous benefits, and stifling regulations to the east - just when this brand of capitalism was beginning to flag under global competition."

It seems to be a eternal conviction among business writers that well-paid workers are a bad thing for a country to have. But businesses in practice base their hiring on the reality that, if Worker X produces 10 widgets at $10/hour, and Worker Y produces 30 widgets as $20/hour, Worker Y will produce more bottom-line profit ford the company. Worker Y's labor-costs per widget is $.67. Workers X's cost per widget is $1, even though Worker X is paid 1/2 the salary of Worker Y.

In economists' terms, labor productivity (output of product per unit of labor input) is more important for profitability than absolute wages. Yet here we have America's leading business periodical pushing the simplistic notion that high wages are bad for the economy.

In fact, productivity has been more of a problem in eastern Germany than absolute wages. In new eastern factories, like Opel's state-of-the-art Eisenach plant mentioned later in the article, productivity is extremely high, in which case western-scale wages are economically justified. If Opel's expectations that the Eisenach plant can be 50% more productive than the best western German plant, even higher wages could be justified.

There is also the very practical reality that, if German workers in the east must expect drastically lower wages for the indefinite future, many of them will migrate to the west, exacerbating social and economic problems in old and new states alike. In fact, emigration from the old eastern states to the west has slowed dramatically, which has be counted as a policy success.

How relative wage rates affect a country's international standing is indeed a real issue for Germany, as it is for the United States. North Carolina is happy to have Mercedes Benz putting facilities there to take advantage of their relatively cheaper labor. Yet, do Americans really want to become like a Third World country, marketing ourselves as cheap labor? Germany, like America, is grappling with a dilemma of development: as the economy develops, unskilled labor tends to migrate to lower-wage regions and lower-wage countries.

This produces some very real economic and social problems. But do either Americans or Germans want to solve them by trying to turn their country into a low-wage haven for foreign investment? In any case, Germany's economy is heavily export-oriented and has been remarkably successful at it in the recent past. German capitalism has indeed "flagged" since 1992 - due to a serious cyclical recession. But for Americans to assume that Germany's brand of export capitalism is failing in international competition would be wishful thinking of a high order.

2. "They also wrongly assumed billions in public investment would spark a big private investment boom."

This notion is true in one sense, but over-simplified to the point of having little meaning. The huge transfers of public money to the new (eastern) German states have not produced as large an investment boom as expected.

The problem had to do with several major factors, including the law on property claims and the method of currency conversion (see below). There was a real problem with the public investment program, namely, most of it was not investment. Most of the transfers have been to subsidize consumption, like compensation to the large numbers of unemployed. A more .accurate conclusion would be that massive public subsidy of consumption has not produced an private investment boom. Had these same amounts been spent on public infrastructure or used to directly leverage private investment, there is every reason to think different results would have occurred.

3. "Moreover, the privatization of old state-run companies didn't create a new entrepreneurial class as quickly as hoped. It often shut down factories and wiped out jobs."

This statement is more puzzling than anything, suggesting that the writers confused Germany with other former Communist countries like Russia or the Czech Republic, where a new capitalist class had to be encouraged. German has plenty of successful companies and capitalists , and privatization could and did proceed at a very rapid pace in Germany.

But investment in eastern Germany has failed to meet early hopes. One of the most serious problems in this regard was the way the law on compensation for previous property owners was written. A company can scarcely risk large amounts of capital buying a factory to use or retool if they don't have clear title to the property. But the law governing post-unification property claims allowed former owners, not only from the pre-Communist period, but from the pre-Nazi period as well, to actually take possession of the property. The resulting long-range uncertainties over land titles has proved a major hindrance to outside investment in the east.

And privatization itself did not cause the massive layoffs. One of the Kohl administration's key mistakes in unification was to allow the old east German mark to be translated into the western mark in 1990 on a one-to-one basis. Economic studies at the time indicated that the Ostmark was worth only about one-third of the Deutschmark in the world market . Converting on a one-to-one basis meant that huge sections of east German industry became uncompetitive in world markets overnight. Converting the mark on a basis closer to market reality would have meant that many eastern companies could have sold their goods at much lower prices, and therefore continued to operate.

4. "And western Germans argue that their new compatriots cling to an entitlements mentally developed under 40 years of communism."

Much has been written on the mutual suspicions between "Ossis" and "Wessis" in the new Germany. The "Ossis" are accused of being lazy, undisciplined, unambitious, looking for handouts, etc. The "Wessis" are accused of being arrogant, greedy, and materialistic. It's a little reminiscent of Californians' contempt for the "Oakies" in the 1930s. No doubt, in a few years some German popular singer will be proclaiming, "I'm proud to be an Ossi from Jena" or something similar. And the Ossi/Wessi conflicts will be largely forgotten.

Americans in the wake of German reunification sometimes seemed to think that West Germany had annexed Bangladesh. In fact, eastern Germany was an industrialized country with a well-trained, highly literate workforce. When east German industry is modernized, unified Germany and the European Economic Community stand to reap the full competitive advantages of their strong human capital base.

The "bottom line" is that American business writers waiting for the United States' European competitors to self-destruct are indulging more in wishful thinking than in realistic economic analysis. And some stale cliches - low wages are good for the economy, government spending never helps private investment - add to the confusion.

Russia, Ukraine and parsing politicians' positions on foreign affairs

Wolfgang Münchau's Eurointelligence (How to think about Russia 03/10/2017) links to a nearly three-year-old article by Karl-Heinz Kamp at the Carnegie Europe center, Bad Idea, Vladimir! 04/04/2014, that looks at the standoff between Russia and NATO over Ukraine and Russia's annexation of the Crimea that year. He argues that from the Russian viewpoint, re-annexing the Crimea (which was part of Russia from 1783 until 1954), may have taken on more of a burden than a blessing:

In the context of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal to reestablish at least parts of Russia’s bygone empire, the annexation of Crimea looks like a smart move. Yet so far, the cost-benefit analysis of this illegal step seems to leave Russia in the red.

Before the Anschluss, Moscow controlled the whole of Ukraine through the compliant regime of former president Viktor Yanukovych. In the future, Russia will be able to sway only parts of a country that is on a slippery slope toward disintegration. Unwittingly, Putin added another source of instability to his already shaky Russian empire.

The downsides, of course, have a lot to do with the reaction of NATO countries. Kamp describes the lines of confrontation:

However, what looks like a negative cost-benefit analysis for Russia raises concerns in many NATO member states. Since Putin appears too smart to strike a bad deal, it is fair to assume that Moscow assesses costs and benefits differently from the West. If that is the case, Russia might be ready to take even bigger risks than just occupying Crimea to score points at home. The long-standing axiom that Russia would never dare commit an act of aggression against a NATO member because the repercussions would be too dangerous for Moscow could prove hollow.

Baltic governments anxiously ponder the scenario of Russia stirring up unrest among ethnic Russians in their countries to have a pretense to “protect” its citizens abroad. For instance, how would NATO react if Russian forces occupied a 30-mile-wide strip of Estonian border territory as a “safe haven” for ethnic Russians and provided them with Russian passports? Would it send in the NATO Response Force and start a major war over 30 miles of land? Doing nothing would mean the end of NATO as a functioning alliance. [my emphasis]

This is a real dilemma, even if our neocons and "humanitarian hawks" see it as an opportunity, adding the Baltic states to the NATO alliance in 2004 was a reckless move. Or at minimum, not well considered.

Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia were also added to the alliance in 2004. Albania and Croatia followed in 2009. But unlike former Warsaw Pact members Albania, Bulgaria and Romania, the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were directly incorporated into the old Soviet Union. It's not hard to understand that, whatever the moral or legal claims may be, the closer NATO's borders get to the border of Russia, the more concerned any Russian policymaker would be about it.

The post-World War II Western decisions about policy toward Russia are still debated today in the historical sub-field of Cold War Studies. The post-1989 Western policies toward Russia will no doubt be debated for a long time, as well. But in 2017, we are where we are.

Kamp links to a Reuters report from 2014 that discusses the position of three former German Chancellors on Russia and the Ukraine/Crimea crisis (Erik Kirschbaum, Putin's apologist? Germany's Schroeder says they're just friends 03/27/2014):

[Gerhard] Schroeder is hardly alone with his criticism of the West. Two other former chancellors, Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl, have also questioned the treatment of Putin and Russia.

Schmidt, a Social Democrat like Schroeder, has called sanctions against Russia "dumb", saying in the latest edition of Die Zeit: "It would be better, in the interest of peace, to sit down and talk instead of threatening sanctions."

Kohl, a Christian Democrat (CDU) like Merkel, told Bild newspaper in mid-March: "The upheaval in Ukraine was not handled intelligently. There's also been a lack of sensitivity with our Russian neighbours, especially with President Putin."

Schröder does have an obvious financial interest in defending Russian foreign policy positions. But that doesn't necessarily mean his advice is bad on the topic. Especially since two other former Chancellors were expressing similar concerns in 2014. It's worth noting that Schröder's Foreign Minister, former Green leader Joschka Fischer, also worked for Russian energy interests after he left office. But he was far more critical of the Russians' actions in Ukraine in 2014. In fact, he leans toward the hawkish side on NATO affairs in general. (See: Ralf Neukirch,
The Eternal Rivalry of Joschka Fischer and Gerhard Schröder Spiegel International 02/15/2010)

The following also notable, in light of current news in the US. A green Member of Parliament is quoting as calling the former Chancellor as basically a Russian stooge:

"Schroeder is spreading the Kremlin's propaganda and everyone should understand that he's now a paid spokesman for Russia," said Manuel Sarrazin, who sits on the European affairs committee of the German parliament for the opposition Greens.

"He's in the service of Russia with a big conflict of interest," Sarrazin told Reuters.

Kirschbaum's report also refers to a TV report, "An ARD TV investigation, called 'The dubious activities of the ex-chancellor on Putin's behalf', said Schroeder took part in a secret meeting at the Russian embassy in Berlin on March 4, three days after Putin announced his right to invade Ukraine."

It's worth mentioning here that Chancellor Willy Brandt had to resign in 1974 after it was discovered that one of his closest staff, Günter Guillaume, was exposed as an East German spy. But he really was a spy. It wasn't a matter of him having some undisclosed meeting with an East German diplomat during a political campaign.

My point here is that we need to take conflicts of interest into account in the position officials or major public figures take on foreign policy. For instance, our ExxonMobil Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, was previously the CEO of a company that once had a deal for $500 billion worth of business with Russia, a deal that was put on indefinite hold by the Obama Administration's sanctions on Russia over Crimea. It would be foolish to disregard that aspect of his experience.

But having political positions that match up to those of a foreign government or political group isn't a sign of corruption or treason. Though either could lead to that result. Foreign policy is largely about deciding which countries to favor and which to oppose. And on which issues.

And Germany has its own particular national interests with Russia: "Berlin's economic links with Moscow are much stronger than those of other big Western powers. Germany is the biggest buyer of Russian natural gas exports, and its government has tended to tread more carefully than the United States, Britain or France."

Europe and the US, holding hands and jumping off that proverbial cliff together

The failure of the ruling elites on both sides of the Atlantic is really staggering. And the economies in both places are staggering toward another recession as a result. This PBS Newshour report (08/16/2011) features two authorities on EU matters, Scheherazade Rehman of George Washington University and Heather Conley of the conservative-leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Both are well-informed on EU issues. But Conley seems to have a definite agenda to trash the EU as incompetent. Rehman, on the other hand, has more substantial things to say, such as her explanation early on of why austerity politics in some EU countries winds up damaging the German economy.



Robert Reich in How Austerity Is Ushering in a Global Recession 08/17/2011 writes:

We all know about the weaknesses in Europe's "periphery" – Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Italy. But the drop in Europe's core [essentially Germany and France] is dizzying. ...

But chalk up a big part of Europe's slowdown to the politics and economics of austerity. Europe – including Britain – have turned John Maynard Keynes on his head. They've been cutting public spending just when they should be spending more to counteract slowing private spending.

The United States has been moving in the same bizarre direction. Cutbacks by state and local governments have all but negated the federal government's original stimulus, and no one in Washington is talking seriously about a second. The pitiful showdown over increasing the debt limit has produced the opposite: a Rube-Goldberg-like process for capping spending rather than increasing it, and a public that's being sold the Republican lie that less government spending means more jobs.

Joschka Fischer Europe's Sovereignty Crisis 07/31/2011 Project Syndicate (Original in German here) praises the recognition (as it stood at the end of July) on the part of Chancellor Angela Merkel's German government that there needs to be more substantially unified economic policymaking on the part of eurozone countries. As Fischer puts it, with "Europe" referring to the European Union or, as it's often called, the "European project":

If the euro is to survive, genuine integration, with further transfers of sovereignty to the European level, will be unavoidable. This historic step cannot be taken through the bureaucratic backdoor, but only in the bright light of democratic politics. The EU's further federalization enforces its further democratization.

If the eurozone is to endure, a majority of its citizens, especially in Germany and France, must embrace the euro as their currency. This is not a technocratic issue, but a profoundly political and democratic one. To paraphrase Bill Clinton: "It's the sovereignty, stupid!" Therefore, the first step must be to ensure a strong role for national parliaments in this process.

In Germany, there has been a broad consensus for a stability union, but not for a transfer or liability union. This is particularly true for Merkel’s electorate. From now on, governments will have to fight for majorities supporting the euro. This is good, because only then will a reliable democratic consensus on Europe's future be reached. The German chancellor and the French president will have to present their policies openly and fight for further integration and the single currency.

The outcome will decide their fate and continuance in office. Whether they succeed is anything but certain, given the current state of European public opinion. But if they do not even try, their defeat – and that of Europe – is certain.

The EU is square up against two key weaknesses in its structure up until now. The euro as it's currently structured puts countries at risks of attacks from the bond markets, as we've seen with Greece, Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Italy and leaves them without the option of allowing their currencies to float downward against others. And while EU membership was initially popular, the leading parties in Germany and France have tended to treat EU business as more of an elite affair and have failed in recent years have to build a strong popular base supporting "Europe." The economic slump has brought both those problems to a critical point.

Merkel and French President Nicolai Sarkozy on Tuesday came out with a new promise to promote a more unified economy policy. But it was largely cosmetic, and did not include a commitment to the concept of euro-bonds that would allow eurozone countries to borrow against the credit-worthiness of the whole eurozone, though it did say they might consider it someday. It also did not include any recognition that the loan principal of Greece and maybe Portugal and Ireland will have to be written down, i.e., recognized as bad debt that will never be paid.

Stefan Kaiser's report, Wirtschaftsregierung: Der Preis für den Pakt, notes that the "true economic government" that Sarkozy and Merkel promised has meant for Merkel what amounts to establishing an EU-wide commitment to fiscal austerity in good times and in bad, the very policy that has pushed Europe to the brink of another recession.

David Case in Merkozy's baby steps won’t save Europe Global Post 08/17/2011 also discusses the weakness of the German-French proposals of this week:

Apparently aware that the announcement was underwhelming, even by the standards of a European August, Merkel struggled to defend it — particularly the decision not to embrace euro bonds.

"People always seem to have the feeling that there is one method that will spring us out of the crisis and in this context there seems to be that the last resource we have is euro bonds," Merkel said, according to Bloomberg. "I don't think Europe has come to its last resource and I don’t think we can solve the problem with a single big bang." Rather, "we need to work steadily and step by step to win back confidence. I don’t think that euro bonds will help us now with this."

The EU is still trying to skate with stopgap measures, avoiding major political choices on economic union and on recognizing the reality of bad debts by Greece and possibly others. And they are compounding all their problems with austerity economics:

For now, the euro zone contagion is migrating from the periphery to the core economies. In Spain and Italy, interest rates are rising and the governments are tottering toward a possible debt trap. In France, investors are dumping shares in banks, which hold a fortune in dubious debt, and the government’s credit rating is rumored to be at risk of a downgrade (although credit agencies deny this). And the economy of Germany, the motor of the euro zone, is stalling, reporting only 0.1 percent growth in the past quarter.

Tags: eu, european union, germany, joschka fischer, robert reich

Philosophy in East Germany (DDR) and the democratic opposition

A significant part of the history of the democratic movement within Communist East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or DDR after the German initials), has to do with philosophical disputes, which made people like Robert Havemann and Ernst Bloch significant symbols and leaders for those who wanted the DDR to take a more democratic direction. Their role is not as well known as the famous workers' revolt of 1953. But it is important.

In the early years of the Soviet occupation and then the DDR (Communist East Germany), general guidance on the direction and boudnaries of philosophical teaching and publication was set by three journals: Aufbau (1945-1958); Einheit (1946-1990), a Party journal of the SED, the East German Communist Party; and, Neue Welt (1946-1954), an English-language Soviet journal that gave definitive statements of current Soviet thinking on the topics covered.

A literary-philosophical journal called Sinn und Form began publication in 1949 and continues today. The Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie (DZfP) under the editorship of Wolfgang Harich began in 1953 also continuing until today was the main professional journal for philosophers in the DDR.

Wolfgang Harich (1923-1995)

As Hans-Christoph Rauh explains in Anfänge der DDR-Philosophie: Ansprüch, Ohnmacht, Scheitern (2001; Hrsg: Volker Gerhardt und Hans-Christoph Rauh), the emphasis in philosophy was on Marxism-Leninism as established by the Soviet Party line. The occupation and the founding of the DDR were during the height of Stalin's power, and his approved version was considered definitive. This is often referred to as Stalinism, though in the context of the philosophical disputes I find the term to be more confusing than helpful. The philosophy of Marx and Engels, known as dialectical materialis - abbreviated among DDR philosophers as "Diamat" - was taken as the fundamental description of society and even all of science. ("Hismat" referred to "historical materialism".) V. I. Lenin was credited with updating Marxism for the age of imperialism, which Lenin dated from the turn of the 20th century with two events in particular, the Spanish-American War and the Boer War. Stalin was said to have achieved the insight that socialism in the age of imperialism could be established in one country, where earlier Marxists had assumed that at least all of Europe would have to make a transition to socialism for the revolution to succeed.

It was more contemporary Soviet versions of Marxism that were taught in East German schools and universities in the early years, with particular emphasis given to Stalin's Foundations of Leninism and a philosophical section of the 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) Short Course which Stalin took credit for writing himself, called Dialectical and Historical Materialism. The actual original texts of Marx and Engels were available but not used so much in the teaching or popularization of the official philosophy.

This reverence for the Marxist-Leninist outlook encompassed not just social theory but the natural sciences, as well. And since physics and other hard sciences had advanced considerably since the 19th century, that presented problems of its own in philosophy. How significant the repercussions were for science and technology themselves in the DDR, I've not seen estimated yet anywhere.

But it was problematic because the classical Marxist texts on the philosophy of science were scarce, since they had concentrated heavily on history, social theory and the politics of the moment. The two most significant ones were Friedrich Engels' Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (1877-78), better known simply as Anti-Dühring, and Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy (1909).

Eugen Karl Dühring (1833-1921) is mainly remembered today because his was the target of intense polemics by Engels in Anti-Dühring and by Friedrich Nietzsche in various places. I've read a couple of articles about Dühring's influence at the time that were interesting enough that I intend to do a separate post about him some time. He was influential in a school of thought known as "national economy". And his influence in the worker's movement was strong enough that Engels felt it necessary to do the series of articles on him that became Anti-Dühring. As the years went on, Dühring became more and more of a sectarian crank and a rancid anti-Semite.

In refuting various theories of Dühring's, Engels made some sweeping claims about the application of dialectical materialism to physical science. He continued that process in a fragmentary work first published in the 1920s as Dialectics of Nature, though portions were published earlier. As it became part of the official canon on which the Soviets were insisting in postwar East Germany, this theory implied among other things the infinite existence of matter. But Einstein's theory of relatively showed that the universe of spacetime did indeed have a limit. A philosophical framework that prevented scholars from fully exploring the theory of relativity had obvious problems. The dogmatic insistence on the applicability of "Diamat" to the natural sciences was problematic in other respects, as well, such as the insistence of a "reflection" theory of knowledge based on Materialism and Empirio-Criticism which viewed human knowledge as a strict reflection of objective physical reality.

The heaviness of the hand of official authority appears in a much less abstract way in the editor's declaration in the 4:5(1)/1956 edition of DZfP:

Die Auslieferung des vorliegenden Doppelheftes 5/6/1956 hat sich leider verzogert, da es sich nach der Inhaftierung des früheren Chefredakteurs und Mitherausgebers der Zeitschrift Harich als notwendig erwies, eine neue Redaktion zu bilden und die Arbeitsweise der Redaktion grundlegend zu verändern.

[The distribution of the present double edition 5/6/1956 has been interfered with because after the arrest of the previous chief editor and co-publisher of the journal, [Wolfgang] Harich, it turned out to be necessary to build a new editorial team and to change the work methods of the editorship in a basic way.]

Yes, having the editor imprisoned can cause all sorts of problems with publication!

Die Umbildung der früheren Redaktion war schon seit längerem dringend erforderlich, da Harich als Chefredakteur nicht gewillt war, die Zeitschrift in übereinstimmung mit ihrem ursprünglichen gesellschaftlichen Auftrag zu leiten und zu gestalten. Im Gegenteil, er ver-suchte besonders seit dem Friihjahr 1956 immer offensichtlicher, die Zeitschrift in den Dienst seiner antimarxistischen, revisionistiso.hen und direkt konterrevolutionaren Bestrebungen zu stellen.

[The resructuring of the previous editorial team had already been urgently required for a long time, because Harich as chief editor was not willing to lead and shape the journal in conformity with its original social mission. On the contrary, he attempted, especially since early 1956, ever more openly to place the journal into the service of his anti-Marxist, revisionist and directly counter-revolutionary efforts.]

Further translation: Harich was considered to be too friendly to "reform Communist" efforts like those that were taken to have encouraged the Hungarian revolt of 1956. It was true that in comparison to the prevailing SED line, Harich was more reform-oriented. But he was a Communist, Marxist-Leninist philosopher and remained so decades later when the SED and the DDR came to an end.

This is part of the challenge and the fascination of the history of the democratic movement within the DDR. Few of the activist groups and individual leaders who were prominent in the opposition that lead to the democratic revolution of 1989-90 became immediately prominent in the electoral politics that led to the unification of Germany in the 1990s. Opposition took the form of reform socialist, environmentalist, peace and religious groups. For most people, it seems counterintuitive that committed Communists could have played a major role in reform. But it shouldn't be surprising. After all, Mikail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union was the former head of the KGB and a committed Communist himself. His goal was not to bring down the Soviet Union. It was to reform it and democratize it.

Tags: ddr, east germany, wolfgang harich

Was war die DDR?

Rolf Hosfeld's Was war die DDR? Die Geschichte eines anderen Deutschland [What was the DDR? The history of another Germany] (2008) is a history of the German Democratic Republic (DDR, or Communist East Germany) from 1945 until 1989. The main focus is on the Walter Ulbricht years from 1945-73. He emphasizes the theme of relations with the Soviet Union.

Hosfeld spells out the fateful response of the Sozialischtische Einheitspartei (SED) - effectively the East German Communist Party - to the famous workers' revolt of July 1953, prompted by the increasing of work quotas which effectively meant a lowering of workers' salaries. That incident was actually far more widespread in the DDR than most observers and historians in the West realized until after the fall of the Wall. It wasn't limited to Berlin; cities all over the DDR were affected by it.

The SED had been trying to squeeze the workers' income to invest in industry and infrastructure. After the uprising, against which the SED found itself unable to proceed effectively was crushed by Soviet intervention, the Party decided that consumer needs must be subsidized sufficiently to prevent a recurrence. The subsidies on food supplies, rent and consumer goods weren't nearly enough to match the standard of living in the West, which was widely known in the DDR. But they were enough to chronically deprive East Germany of the investment that might have made their economy competitive over the long term. They were never able to do so. By 1989, when the Wall fell, the economic infrastructure was in far worse shape than even the most skeptical Western observers generally expected.

Hosfeld's book details various twists and turns in the economic and political changes of SED policy over the four decades of the DDR's existence. It gives a feel for how differences in opinion on economic, political and cultural matters expressed themselves within the limited confines of the SED dictatorship. Hosfeld also discusses the collaboration and disagreements between the SED and the Soviet leadership, which again took place with the confines of Soviet domination.

That is, until 1989 when the Michael Gorbachev basically cut the East German leaders loose. Then-Party-leader Erich Honecker and his supporters were so disturbed at the prospect of political liberalization in the DDR that they began banning Soviet articles on the changes taking place in the USSR.

Hosfeld's history of the democratic opposition in the 1980s is fairly cursory, almost like a postscript. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November, 1989.

Tags: ddr, deutschland, east germany, rolf hosfeld

Bettina Röhl on Karl-Heinz Kurras and the Stasi revelations

Der Tod des Demonstranten (Death of the Demonstrator)- a memorial to Benno Ohnesorg by Alfred Hrdlicka, 1971: photo in Berlin 1990

I posted earlier about the story that came out in the German press last week about how Karl-Heinz Kurras, the West Berlin policeman who shot and killed Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967, had been an East German spy and an illegal member of the East German Communist Party (SED) since 1967. Ohnesorg’s death is generally understood as having been a decisive event in spreading the militant German student movement throughout West Germany, when it had been primarily a West Berlin phenomenon prior to that. And the movement in response became even more militant and, in part, violent.

In her blog post Tod von Benno Ohnesorg: Staatsmord aus Ostberlin?, journalist Bettina Röhl Die Welt 22.05.2009 gives some quirky interpretations of the history of that event and its aftermath. I’ve laid out my understanding of the Ohnesorg killing and its repercussions in my earlier post, so I won’t do another overall recap here. She argues that the biggest impetus to the spread and increased militance of the student movement after June 2 was due to the resignations of West Berlin's Mayor and Police President, which signalled to the extra-parliamentary opposition (APO), i.e., the militant left opposition, that state authorities were weak. In other words, she argues that insufficient authoritarianism by West German officials let the student movement flourish that otherwise could have been restricted.

In doing so, she makes contradictory arguments about the power of the student movement, which she heavily implies was essentially a creation of East Germany. In one place, she argues that the movement would have developed pretty much the way it did, violence and all, without Ohnesorg’s killing. Yet she also argues that if the public had just known then about Kurras' Stasi (East German Security) ties, that the movement couldn’t have gotten any traction from the killing.

But the West German state hardly showed itself to be weak in dealing with protesters, then or later. On the contrary, their training in crowd control was based on a scenario of crowd actions in support of an act of Soviet/East German military aggression against West Berlin. In the situation of the late 1960s, the overly aggressive police tactics had the effect of polarizing the situation in university cities all over West Germany, including conservative Bavaria. The Ohnesorg killing became a symbol of that, but it became a symbol because police excesses were real.

"Enteignet Springer" (Expropriate Springer) became a popular slogan of the student movement shortly after Benno Ohnesorg's death

Her self-contradicatory argument that the APO would have been undercut by the immediate knowledge that Kurras was a Stasi agent is essentially based on the notion that the APO admired the East German version of socialism, which for the most part wasn’t really the case. APO activists expressed solidarity with protest movements in Poland and Czechoslovakia and were generally critical of East German "Stalinism“. She also ignores the ham-handed pugnacity of Social Democratic Mayor Heinrich Albertz in the immediate wake of the killing, as well as the hysteria of the Springer press. On the latter, she is explicitly in denial, writing that they were "die einzige, die damals einen kühlen Kopf bewahrte" (the only ones who kept a cool head back then). That’s imaginative, for sure, but it‘s astonishing revisionism that could only be defended by defining "cool head“ as something like "recklessly irresponsible“. (Die Welt was then and is now a Springer paper.)

Her post also carries a tone of what we in America would call "culture war" polemics, i.e., she still wants to discredit the DHF's (darn frigging hippies, in the nice version) of those days while imagining that their malign influence is present all over the place in present-day German culture. She talks, for instance, about the "die 68er-Ideologen und auch das gigantische Millionenheer der Mitläufer von 68" (the Sixties ideologues and also the gigantic army of millions of fellow-travelers of the Sixties) who are supposedly resistent to facts about that period. DFH's, in other words. And historians of the period who don't share her dismissive atitude toward the DFH's are acting as "security guards" to protect some DFH conventional wisdom about the 1960s.

Having fairly recently read a number of accounts of the period - not least of them Röhl's own highly informative book on the subject, which shows a level of care in narrative and analysis that is missing in her blog post - I don't know who she may be talking about there. I've reviewed here two 2008 books on "1968" by leading German historians Norbert Frei and Götz Aly. Neither strikes me as some DFH ideological position paper. On the contrary, most of the analysis I've seen from German writers on that period seem to take a critical view of events, especially on the ideology and practice of violence.

Röhl also paints with a very broad brush in her post when she writes:

Indes war die Propaganda der APO eine ganz durchsichtige Angelegenheit: Die 68er-Bewegung, die damals noch APO-Bewegung hieß, baute auf dem Tod von Ohnesorg ihre Legende auf, dass der Staat derjenige war, der zuerst Gewalt angewendet hätte, auf die die friedliche Massenbewegung nur reagiert habe.

[In this way, [Ohnesorg's shooting] was a very obvious opportunity for the propaganda of the APO. The Sixties Movement, when then was still called the APO Movement, built up on the death of Ohnesorg their legend that it was the state that first introduced violence, to which the peaceful mass movement only reacted.]

Here she seems to be so intent on denigrating the APO that she manages to simultaneously exaggerate and minimize the significance of the Benno Ohnesorg shooting. Sure, his death became an element of the APO's propaganda. Just as the events of that day became an element of the Springer press' hysterical campaign against the student movement - a cool-headed hysterical campaign, according to Röhl. But it became a widespread symbol for the APO because the image and the context resonated strongly with so many young people given how they saw the police acting.

And I'm not sure what it means to say that the APO "built up on the death of Ohnesorg their legend that it was the state that first introduced violence". However emotional a turning point the Ohnesorg may have been for many APO activists, for those among them who advocated some form of political violence, I don't get the impression that "who shot first" was a particularly important question.

A video accompanying the following article addresses some of these issues: Stasi-Fall Kurras: Birthler weist "rätselhafte" Vorwürfe zurück Die Welt 26.05.2009

Other related links:

Dutschke-Sohn fordert neue Suche in den Stasi-Akten von Einar Koch Bild-Zeitung 26.05.2009

Der Fall Benno Ohnesorg: Jetzt spricht die Frau des Todes-Schützen Bild-Zeitung 26.05.2009

Tags: 1968, benno ohnesorg, ddr, deutschland, east germany, german politics, karl-heinz kurras, stasi

Other links on Benno Ohnesorg's murder by Stasi agent Karl-Heinz Kurras

These are a variety of links with mostly no commentary by me on the Curious Case of Benno Ohnesorg and His Killer Karl-Heinz Kurras, Stasi Agent:

Stasi-Debatte: Vorwürfe gegen die Birthler-Behörde Frankfurter Rundschau 25.05.2009

Given the notorious role the Springer press in general and the Bild-Zeitung in particular played in inciting fear and hatred against young political activists in the 1960s, there something weirdly ironic about citing Bild's articles on the revelations that Benno Ohnesorg's killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, was a Stasi agent. But here's one link, Der Ex-Innenminister zum Fall Benno Ohnesorg: War es ein Auftragsmord, Herr Schily? 24.05.2009.

Bild's Web site has an aggregator page of at least some of its articles on the Ohnesorg case: Alle Infos zum Fall Benno Ohnesorg.

Der Fall Karl-Heinz Kurras: "Soll ich mich deshalb schämen?" von S. Höll Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.05.2009

The current issue of Der Spiegel makes the story its cover feature:


Fall Kurras: Ohnesorgs Todesschütze gesteht SED-Mitgliedschaft Die Zeit 24.05.2009

Ohnesorg-Todesschütze: "Mein Fall ist längst verjährt" Frankfurter Rundschau 24.05.2009

Benno Ohnesorg: Mit einem Schuss in die Geschichte von Uwe Schlicht Die Zeit24.05.2009

Fall Kurras: Neue Details: "Ich komme wegen der Schießabteilung" Süddeutsche Zeitung 23.05.2009

Birthler-Behörde: Stasi-Spitzel erschoss Ohnesorg Die Zeit23.05.2009

Studentenbewegung 1967: Zu Besuch bei Ohnesorgs Todesschützen von Uwe Soukup Die Zeit23.05.2009

Stasi-Spitzel: Schuss mit Fragezeichen von Steffen Hebestreit Frankfurter Rundschau 22.05.2009

Stasi-Vergangenheit: Erneut Strafanzeige gegen Kurras gestellt Die Zeit22.05.2009

Taumeln von einer Lüge zur anderen: Ohnesorg und die DDR von Willi Winkler Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Vielleicht war es nicht die NS-Vergangenheit von Wolfgang Kraushaar Frankfurter Rundschau 22.05.2009

Der Stasi-Kurras: Ohnesorg, die DDR und die 68er von Heribert Prantl Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Oskar Negt über Karl-Heinz Kurras: "Eine gespenstische Wende" Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Karl-Heinz Kurras: Stasi-Agent tötete Ohnesorg Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Karl-Heinz Kurras: Strafanzeige gegen Ohnesorg-Todesschützen Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Benno Ohnesorg: Die Geburt der 68er von Michael König Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Kurras: "Können die uns nicht endlich in Ruhe lassen?" Süddeutsche Zeitung 22.05.2009

Neue Berichte: Ohnesorg von Stasi-Spitzel erschossen" Süddeutsche Zeitung 21.05.2009

Tod Benno Ohnesorgs: "Die Polizisten haben geprügelt wie blöd" Süddeutsche Zeitung 30.05.2007 (Interview mit Friederike Hausmann)

Benno Ohnesorg: Der Tod des Träumers von Willi Winkler Süddeutsche Zeitung 30.05.2007

Der 2. Juni 1967 und Ohnesorgs Tod: "Zynischer ging's nicht" Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.06.2007

Spätes Bedauern in Berlin: Polizeipräsident legt Kranz für Ohnesorg nieder von Oliver Das Gupta Süddeutsche Zeitung 02.06.2007

Tags: 1968, benno ohnesorg, ddr, deutschland, east germany, german politics, karl-heinz kurras, stasi

Wow! And, wow! New wrinkle on a notorious event in recent German history

Friederike Dollinger (now Friederike Hausmann) with the dying Benno Ohnesorg, who had just been shot in the head by a West Berlin policeman who was secretly a Stasi agent (June 2, 1967)

I'm really surprised at this one. The West Berlin policeman Karl-Heinz Kurras set off a long wave of violence when he murdered a 26-year-old student named Benno Ohnesorg on June 2, 1967. A photo of Ohnesorg bleeding out from his head wound is one of the most famous images of recent German history. It was a crucial turning point in the student movement in West Germany.

Now the 81-year-old Kurras is admitting that he was a secret member of the East German Communist Communist Party (SED) and spied for East Germany!

Der Fall Karl-Heinz Kurras: "Soll ich mich deshalb schämen?" von S. Höll Süddeutsche Zeitung 24.05.2009 reports that Kurras initially denied it last week when documents from the archives of the Stasi (East Germany secret police) were published showing his role. But now he admits it straightforwardly. He denies getting paid for his spying, though. Höll reports that a new charge against Kurras over the shooting of Ohnesorg is unlikely, since he was acquitted in two trials related to the killing already. He also reports that there is no indication that the Ohnesorg shooting was somehow ordered by East Germany.

Whether or not those trials were genuinely fair ones from the victim's viewpoint, it's clear that there was no good reason for Kurras to shoot Ohnesorg to death. The incident took place after the second of two demonstrations against the Shah of Iran, who was paying a state visit to Germany. There was a politically active community of pro-democracy Iranian dissidents in West Germany who were highlighting the human rights abuses of the Iranian regime. One of them was a young intellectual named Bahman Nirumand who had fled Iran in 1965 and had published a book in 1967 called Persien: Modell eines Entwicklungslandes oder Die Diktatur der freien Welt [Persia [Iran]: Model of a developing country or the Dictatorship of the Free World]. Nirumand criticized the support of the Western democracies for the Shah's brutal government, and his book was one of the most influential books for the activist German students of the 1960s.

Stasi expert Helmut Müller-Enbergs on discovering the Kurras Stasi files: "Ich bin vom Stuhl gefallen." ("I fell out of my chair.")

The German authorities had made a spectacularly ill-advised decision to allow a group of thugs run by the Iranian secret service, the SAVAK, to act as guards to the Shah. During a peaceful demonstration during the daytime of June 2, the SAVAK thugs had attacked a few hundred anti-Shah demonstrators while the Berlin police looked passively on and let it happen. Then the police moved in themselves against the student demonstrators, arresting some of them but none of the SAVAK attackers.

This raised the emotional temperature for a second demonstration already planned that evening outside the Deutsche Oper, where the Shah and his wife were attending a performance of Mozart's opera, The Magic Flute. The demonstrators were more militant, and a few tomatoes and paint balloons flew, injuring no one but embarassing the Berlin officials. Erich Duensing, the chief police official (president), had directed the police to proceed aggressively against the demonstrators, beating them with clubs (men and women alike) and firing water cannons at them, like in the infamous photos from Birmingham, Alabama, of a few years before. The demonstrators were in full flight when Kurras shot Benno Ohnesorg in the back of the head in a parking garage.

Ohnesorg was a 26-year-old literature student who apparently wasn't taking part in the demonstration at all. Nor was he armed or threatening the police in any way. The reaction was intense. Part of the problem, aside from the bad judgments of the moment by German officials and police, was that the Berlin police weren't really trained to deal with street demonstrations at that time. Their training for emergency situations was predicated opposing street actions coordinated with a Soviet invasion of the city. Which also meant that city officials were also pretty clueless about how to respond to such an event as the Ohnesorg shooting. So the Social Democratic Mayor of West Berlin, Heinrich Albertz, said the demonstrators were to blame for the death, adding, "Die Geduld der Stadt ist am Ende." (The patience of the city is at an end.") Not especially diplomatic in a situation where a cop has just made a very questionable fatal shooting, in a situation that was already tense because of blatant police misconduct.

This video shows the report on the German channel ZDF about the Kurras revelations, including footage of the fatally wounded Benno Ohnesorg with Friederike Hausmann:



The Springer press empire, which included the sensation-oriented Bild-Zeitung, accused the demonstrators of acting like Hitler's SA Brownshirts back in the day. Bild on the day after the Ohnesorg murder declared, "In Berlin gab es bisher Terror nur östlich der Mauer. Gestern haben bösartige und dumme Wirrköpfe zum erstenmal versucht, den Terror in den freien Teil der Stadt zu tragen." ("In Berlin up until now, there was Terror only east of the Wall. Yesterday, malicious and dumb crazies attempted for the first time to bring Terror into the free part of the city.") Again, it was the demonstrators they were accusing of Terror, not the police and the SAVAK thugs. A particularly awkward comparison to place against state terror in Communist East Berlin. And even more ironic in retrospect, knowing now that the killer was an East German agent.

Protests grew against the police and the Springer press, as well. Within a few weeks, the slogan "Enteignet Springer!" (Expropriate Springer!) became popular among left-leaning student demonstrators. It's generally assumed among German historians that the killing of Benno Ohnesorg touched off "1968" or "the Sixties" in West Germany, insofar as that meant a mass political movement among the young (though it was not only young Germans who were outraged by the Ohnesorg shooting). As historian Norbert Frei describes it in 1968: Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (2008), the fate of Benno Ohnesorg, shot down by a cop because he looked like a student who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, was one in which it was easy for many students to imagine themselves.

The shooting didn't create the student or youth movements, they were already under way. But, referring to the SDS, the leading militant political group among German university students (not to be confused with the American SDS of the same time), Frei writes that at their national conference in Frankfurt a few weeks later, "nobody was talking about tomatoes any more." The Ohnesorg shooting marked a militant and violent turn in the student movement.

Wolfgang Kraushaar writes in Vielleicht war es nicht die NS-Vergangenheit von Frankfurter Rundschau 22.05.2009 that Ohnesorg's death was "the spark that ignited the student revolt". There had been something like a student revolt at the Freie Universität in West Berlin before that, he writes, but the Ohnesorg killing and the general official misconduct around the demonstrations on June 2 created such a shock and outrage among univerisity students and other young people that activism took off among them all over West Germany.

Karl-Heinz Kurras, Stasi agent and killer of Benno Ohnesorg, in 1967

When Karl-Heinz Kurras was acquitted on November 21, 1967 of murder in the Ohnesorg case, the chief judge in the case indicated that he was unhappy with the outcome of the case in words that retroactively take on a new meaning in light of the revelations that Kurras as an East German spy: "Kurras weiss mehr, als er sagt, und er macht den Endruck, als wenn er in vielen Dingen die Unwahrheit sagt." ("Kurras knows more than he's saying, and he gives the impression that he is speaking falsehood in many things.") The judge was more perceptive than he knew.

Despite Kurras' acquital, both police president Erich Duensing and Mayor Heinrich Albertz wound up resigning their posts after the details of the Ohnesorg killing became public.

According to Höll's report, Kurras provided intelligence reports to East Germany on the West German police and the West German Verfassungsschutz, an internal security agency. The Stasi reduced their contacts with him after the Ohnesorg murder. But the files show a Stasi contact as late as 1976. He provided information to the Stasi about East German refugees and planted microphones in offices. He wasn't just passing on office gossip.

I hate to speculate. But who can resist speculating about a spy story? One obvious speculation is that the East Germans could have put him up to shooting somebody at that demonstration to cause trouble. Or, he could have seen himself as a convinced Communist - which he presumably did if he wasn't taking money for his information - a made a similar calculation on his own, although that seems more far-fetched. But there's apparently no evidence of either, so far.

Then it's always possible that the West German authorities somehow greased the skids for Kurras' acquitals on charges related to the Ohnesorg murder because he was working as a double agent, or because they were secretly aware of his spying activities and were using him to feed misinforation to the Stasi. But there is no evidence in the public record of that either, so far as I know.

Still, it is a remarkable coincidence that a policeman whose shooting of student played such a key role in the politics of West Germany in the 1960s turns out to have been a secret Communist and a spy for East Germany!

Kraushaar recalls something I don't recall seeing described before. Benno Ohnesorg's funeral procession of over 100 cars had to pass through East German territory to get from West Berlin to Hannover, where he was buried. Normally, the East German officials required cars to wait for hours to pass. The funeral convoy was waved through. Along the way, young people greeted the convoy along the highway, and East German soldiers along the route even paid honor to the deceased. As Kraushaar says, these unusual occurences looked like an act of state by the East Germans. At a minimum, it meant that East Germany wanted to make the incident as much of a pain as they could for the West German government. Kraushaar cautions that this is not to say that it was some kind of genuine act of solidarity by the East Germans. The leaders of the East German SED regime generally weren't interested in the "anti-authoritarian" goals of the western student movement except as it further their own state goals. Some twenty years later, they were rejecting Michael Gorbachev's brand of reform Communism as way too liberal for their liking.

But he also cautions that there is no evidence of an East German order to Kurras to shoot somebody. And he warns that we may never know. Since Kurras is still alive and apparently lucid, he himself could reveal for the first time what his motive in the killing was. But, as Kraushaar notes, there is no statute of limitations on murder, so by talking openly about his motives, Kurras could open himself to another prosecution on the Kurras killing. So it's unlikely to happen.

Tags: 1968, benno ohnesorg, ddr, deutschland, east germany, german politics, karl-heinz kurras, stasi

Uwe Holmer, East German dissident

Uwe Holmer and his wife in their younger years

This post is a belated continuation of comments on Florian Huber's book Meine DDR (2008) that I began in Life in East Germany, aka, the German Democratic Republic 12/14/08.

Uwe Holmer's story is one of those in in the book that particularly caught my attention.

Holmer was a veteran of the Second World War. After his wartime experiences, he resolved to always follow his conscience in the future. He began studying theology in Jena in 1948. Religion was not formally welcomed in Communist East Germany (the DDR). But it was grudgingly tolerated, though church members had some serious personal restrictions placed upon them, at some periods of the DDR's history more burdensome than others.

Holmer soon became an active promoter of the Protestant Junge Gemeinde, the church youth organization which the ruled SED (Communist Party) saw as a competitor to the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ) youth organization.

Because Holmer was an early internal opponent of the SED regime, he gained attention at the highest levels.

Erich Honecker

Erich Honecker became the top leader of the DDR - First Secretary of the SED - in 1971, General Secretary in 1976, when he also became formally the head of state (Chairman of the State Council, or State Soviet if you prefer). He was also in charge of planning and building the Berlin Wall. But in 1946-55, he was head of the FDJ. So Holmer came to his attention early.

Margot Feist (born 1927) became Erich's second wife. She became a senior official in the im Ministerium für Volksbildung (Ministry of Education) in 1955, two years after her marriage to Erich. (Their daughter Sonja was born in 1952, when Erich was still married to his first wife Edith.) Margot became deputy minister for Education in 1958, and Minister of Education in 1963, in which role she served until a week before the opening of the Berlin Wall in 1989, when the DDR was coming completely undone. (The Wall was opened on Nov. 9, 1989.) She herself did not have a college education. (For more on the First Lady of the DDR, see Margot Honecker: Die meistgehasste Frau der DDR Die Welt 16.04.2007.

Margot Honecker

According to Huber, Margot Honecker personally made sure that none of the Holmers' ten children were allowed to attend university or enter an Abitur program, the latter being the college-track high school education in American terms (more-or-less).

Holmer also attracted the unfavorable attention of the authorities by his solidarity with farmers who were unwillingly being forced into collectivized farms.

Honecker found himself forced to resign his leadership position in the DDR in October 1988, when the opposition movement was in full swing and the DDR was seeing its possibilities of survival rapidly decreasing. In January 1990, Honecker at age 77 was arrested on charges of corruption and abuse of office, but held only one day because of his poor health.

But his fellow Party members didn't want him and Margot to keep living in their home in a neighborhood where many other SED members lived. The Evangelical [Protestant] church agreed to give him a place to live.

And the place he would up living was in Lobetal, near Berlin - with Uwe Holmer and his family. They lived there for just over two months, from January 31 to April 3, when Erich went back to the hospital. During their time with the Holmers, they attracted occasional protests, and there were a couple of times they all had to evacuate the house due to bomb threats. But otherwise, their stay was uneventful. Their daughter Sonja came by to visit them regularly bringing groceries and a newspaper.

Huber writes:

Mit den Worten der Bibel hatte Holmer es stets genau genommen. Vergebung war ein zentraler Wert seines christlichen Glaubens, und davon war kein Mensch auszunehmen. Auch nicht die Honeckers, die ihm beide viele Jahre lang das Leben schwergemacht hatten. "Hier braucht ein Mensch Hilfe, dem können wir uns nicht versagen. Jesus hätte ihn auch nicht abgewiesen." Doch es war auch die Freude über die politische Wende, die Uwe Holmer für diese Geste stark gunug machte. Der Pfarrer und seine Familie zögerten nicht, das berühmteste Ehepaar der DDR bei sich aufzunehmen.

[Holmer had always taken the words of the Bible literally. Forgiveness was a central value of his Christian faith, and no person was excluded from that. Not even the Honeckers, who had made life hard for both of them for many years. "Here a person needed help, we couldn't fail him. Jesus would also have not have turned him down." But it was also the joy over the political change that made Uwe Holmer strong enough for these guests. The minister and his family did not hesitate to accept the the most famous married couple of the DDR.]

I picture it as like being asked to have Dick Cheney and his wife Liz stay in your guest room while they are waiting for Saudi Arabia or Paraguay or somewhere to approve their request for asylum. I just don't think I'm that good of a Christian. It would take a road-to-Damasacus type vision to get me to that point, I'm afraid.

Holmer talks about the Honeckers' stay in this interview, Frau Honecker schickt noch Briefe by Marijke Engel Berliner Zeitung 28.01.2000.

Uwe Holmer in more recent years

The Honeckers were later flown to Moscow, where they became no longer welcome guests after the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1992, they were returned to then-unified Germany, where Honecker was again arrested on charges of ordering border guards to shoot to kill when people tried to escape the DDR borders. But again he was released on grounds of poor health. He joined Margot and Sonja in Chile, where he died in May 1994 of liver cancer.

Margot is still alive. She still lives in Chile. She was invited to Nicaragua in 2008, which she was honored with the Reuben Dario Prize for the "independence of culture". It was her first appearance in a public function since she arrived in Chile in 1993.

According to Huber, the Holmer still receives letters from her occasionally. In the 2000 Berliner Zeitung article linked above, he says Margot writes at least every Christmas.

All three posts on Meine DDR:

Life in East Germany, aka, the German Democratic Republic 12/14/08
Vera Lengsfeld, East German dissident 01/21/09 (this post)
Uwe Holmer, East German dissident 01/22/09

Tags: ddr, east germany, erich honecker, florian huber, margot honecker, uwe holmer

Vera Lengsfeld, East German dissident

Vera Lengsfeld Wollenberger, circa 1982

This post is a belated continuation of comments on Florian Huber's book Meine DDR (2008) that I began in Life in East Germany, aka, the German Democratic Republic 12/14/08.

One of the opposition activists Huber describes is Vera Lengsfeld. As Huber puts it, Lengsfeld set out to undertake seemingly everything in "dem Verbotskatalog der DDR: ausserparlamentarische Opposition, Gruppenbildung, Anfertigen einer Zeitung, Gründung eines Veriens oder einer Partei, Veröffentlichung eines Buches" (... the DDR's catalog of the forbidden: extra-parliamentary opposition, formation of groups, preparation of a newspaper, founding of a club or a party, publication of a book).

Lengsfeld's background was different from most dissident activists in that her father was a senior officer of the Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst, the secret police). She herself was able to attend university, where she studied philosophy. Born, in 1952, she joined the SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, e.g., the Communist Party) in 1975 out of conviction.

During her activist days in the DDR, she was married and went by her married name Wollenberger. After the fall of the DDR and the Stasi's files were opened, she discovered that her own husband had been an IM (Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter, i.e., spy) reporting on her to the Stasi. The marriage didn't last. She went back to her maiden name.

She became a dissident in the 1980s, when she had three children. Her father had to agree to have no contact to her and her mother asked her to stay away. Her emphasis in her work was on environmentalism, which was a major concern in the seriously industrially-polluted DDR, and for personal civil liberties. She co-founded the Pankower Friedenskreises (Pankow Peace Circle) in Berlin, which was one of the more significant opposition groups in the 1980s.

She was eventually arrested in 1988 for taking part in a state-sanctioned annual march honoring the martyred German Communist leaders Karl Leibknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Some opposition groups decided to participate, bringing their own unapproved signs. As did Lengsfeld, who the Stasi shortly before had characterized as one of the 60 "fanatischen und unbelehrbaren Feinde des Sozialismus" (most fanatical and incorrigible enemies of socialism). She was arrested, held in prison for a month, then expelled to Britain, where she settled in Cambridge.

While moving to England was a fate many East Germans might have welcomed, leaving one's home and family and friends behind isn't an easy thing. Plus, many of the opposition activists wanted to reform the DDR itself. Lengsfeld was one of them. She, like other activists, advocated a form of "reform communism" or a "Third Way" between the old Soviet-style model and Western capitalism. In fact, there was some tension between those who actively sought to emigrate to West Germany and the Third Way activists who wanted to stay in the DDR and democratize it, though both groups had common interests in resisting the SED government.

Lengsfeld actively sought to return to the DDR, which she was able to do on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall was first opened. She returned that very day to rejoin the activist opposition. But she found herself out of touch over the next few months with the rapidly-developed public demand for unification with western Germany, which formally occurred in October, 1989.

Huber describes how she gave a speech in Leipzig that year at the beginning of the Christmas season (which starts much nearer to December 25 in Germany than it does in the US!). She was heckled a bit during the demonstration as she talked about reforming the DDR, apparently not because the hecklers were defending the system but because they though her Third Way talk was not about unification with the rest of Germany. During that speech, Huber writes, "erfasste Vera Lengsfeld, wie wenig das Modell einer selbständigen, sich demokratisierenden DDR bei der Menge auf Gegenliebe stiess" (recognized how little positive reception her model of an independent, democratized DDR found among the audience).

She was elected the following year as a member of the one and only freely-elected DDR parliament, whose main task was to approve the dissolving of the DDR and the incorporation of the eastern states into the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD, previously "West Germany").

Vera Lengsfeld, circa 2008

But her later career in unified Germany didn't take the road of becoming a permanent Green Party activist, or a Social Democrat, or a member of the SED's successor party, the PDS (now merged into the Left Party). Instead, she served from 1990 to 2005 as a Member of Parliament, until 1996 affiliated with the Greens. Then she switched to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), today's Chancellor Angela Merkel's party.

And along with it, she become pretty much of a reactionary, it appears. She decided that the principle of equality - one of the basic "bourgeois" principles as in the "freedom, equality and brotherhood" of the French Revolution - leads directly to Stalinist Communism. Since various forms of that basic principle are defended by all the five parliamentary parties in Germany, that's a pretty extreme and eccentric position. Her Web site today features the "libertarian"-type slogan, "Freiheit and Fairness statt Gleicheit und Gerechtigkeit" (freedom and fairness instead of equality and justice).

Explicitly opposing the equality and even justice in general is, it's safe to say, a pretty unusual position. (Maybe she absorbed more of her father's Stasi values than she realized.)

And her concern for the environment seems to have, uh, slipped a bit. Of the 19 links she features on her Web site as of this writing, three are from climate-change denial sites, one of them sneering at the "fabrizierte Klimakatastrophe" (manufactured climate crisis) and no small-g green sites, it seems. From defying the East German Communist government over ecological activism in the 1980s to climate-change denial today. Wow!

In fact, from her list of Web links, she pretty much a dogmatic libertarian, which in German terms would be a "rightwing liberal", a concept which just doesn't translate in American political terms. "Free-market zealot" is probably the closest you could come. (But that's not that good a translation, either.) She says in the "links" section of her Web site that her favorite magazine is Novo. In the most current issue featured at Novo's Web site, the chief editor explains that the current world financial crisis was not caused by "neoliberalism" (free-market deregulation), but rather by too much regulation.

But still, she was one of many who fought for democratic rights in the DDR. And it's not surprising that she first affiliated with the Green Party. The Greens were the party in West Germany that was most emphatic about expressing solidarity with the democratic movements in East Germany. But she seems to have wound up today with her head stuck in some kind of ultra-conservative doctrine that would make her right at home with the Sarah Palin fans in America. Weird.

All three posts on Meine DDR:

Life in East Germany, aka, the German Democratic Republic 12/14/08
Vera Lengsfeld, East German dissident 01/21/09 (this post)
Uwe Holmer, East German dissident 01/22/09

Tags: ddr, east germany, florian huber, vera lengsfeld

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