From the oppositional stance of Katharina’s family in Chapter 5, in Chapter 6 we move to the Party-loyal family of Robert, who remains a defender of socialist ideals to this day. Robert, who was a 15-year-old schoolboy when the Wall fell, was absolutely content in the GDR system. He felt no envy of West Germans, whom he had learned suffered from high crime and unemployment rates. After the Wall fell, he felt anger at the way everything from East Germany was dismissed as inferior. He believes the West would do well to learn from the policies used in the GDR. Chapter 8’s subject, Mirko, was, like Robert, born into a so-called ‘Red’ (socialist supporter) family. Indeed, Mirko’s father was a Stasi informer. For much of his childhood in Dresden, Mirko played the role of a good son, taking on ever-more exalted positions in the government-led youth movement. By his mid-teens however, he had had enough. From the age of 15, he was no longer prepared to toe the Party line and conform in his views and appearance to the state’s dictates. Luckily this period of rebellion coincided with the end of the regime, and Mirko faced no serious consequences. As a result of his anti-communist epiphany, he now works with young people to show how damaging the impact of extreme politics can be. In Chapter 8 we learn about Peggy from Frankfurt Oder, who was a 10-year-old schoolgirl when the Wall fell. She had a wonderfully happy childhood in communist East Germany, and remains nostalgic for many aspects of her old life that were simply swept away with reunification. Life was safe and secure in the GDR in contrast to reunited Germany where she has far more worries about money, work, and housing.
Born in the GDR straddles the historical caesura of 1989, focusing on how young East Germans fared in 1989 as their familiar world was all but erased and replaced by a capitalist society. There was extreme and rapid external change to life in East Germany in the days, weeks, months, and years after the Wall fell. What follows asks whether these changes were mirrored internally within these young East Germans? Did they experience a ‘revolution of the mind’ as they left behind the distinctive GDR culture built up over four decades of socialism or were the values with which they grew up not so easily cast aside?65 The complex legacy of Germany’s second dictatorship comes under the spotlight in the stories that follow, weighing continuity versus change, unity versus division, and loss versus gain.
1
Petra ~ Shaping the Change
Every German has a story to tell about what they were doing on the night that the Berlin Wall fell. Some Berliners did not make it to bed that night as they danced atop the Wall that had divided Germany. Others slept through it, oblivious to the entire affair. Petra Bläss, who had been campaigning for reforms within the GDR, somewhat ironically remained at home when she heard the news. Though she was keen to see what was going on at first hand, her ailing mother was staying overnight, and, having recently suffered from heart problems, could not face negotiating again the four flights of stairs up to Petra’s top-floor flat. Instead, Petra hung out of the window to see the Kastanien Allee below thick with traffic as East Berliners drove towards the border crossing on the Bernauer Strasse.1
In the week leading up to 9 November, Petra had been glued to her black-and-white television as never before, desperately hoping to learn more about what was afoot. Alongside a million other East Germans, Petra had joined the demonstrators at Alexanderplatz on 4 November with the aim of improving life in the GDR. Many of the protestors carried banners, making demands such as ‘freedom, equality, sincerity’ and ‘privileges for all’. Above all, those who joined the demonstration were seeking free elections, freedom of the press, the resignation of the government, and unrestricted travel.2 Petra was one of many who hoped that with reform and peaceful revolution in the GDR, it would be possible to have a new socialist republic, offering the ‘socialism with a human face’ that many of the speakers that day demanded.3 For Petra, the fourth of November, not the ninth, was the most memorable day of that autumn and the potential for change through peaceful demonstration seemed immense. Looking back on the events of that day, the East German novelist Stefan Heym commented that ‘it was like a window had been opened’. At the time, though, it was not clear what all of this would come to. At this stage, reunification was not on the agenda.
When Petra got home from work at around 6 p.m. on 9 November, she switched on the television and caught the start of the press conference in which the SED spokesperson and Berlin Party chief Günther Schabowski vaguely indicated that travel restrictions to the West would be eased. Schabowski talked about the Party’s desire to simplify migration, and said that until the East German parliament officially passed such legislation, there would be interim measures to allow East Germans to travel freely to the West. But before it got to the crucial moment where Schabowski famously responded to a journalist’s question by saying that the new travel arrangements would come into effect ‘immediately’ and ‘without delay’, Petra had to leave as she was meeting her mother and some friends to go and see Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at the Komische Oper.4 As they all had something to eat before the performance, Petra and her friends discussed the rumour circulating that the border would be opened up. No one in the group took it seriously and they felt that it must be a joke. None of them had an inkling that a tired and stressed Schabowski had, in his own words, ‘only read the damn thing [the SED press release] through once and diagonally at that’ and had therefore inadvertently hastened the easing of border controls dramatically.5
The performance of Orpheus and Eurydice finished at around 9.30 p.m. and there had been no whisper at any point about what was afoot outside. As Petra’s mother was staying with her that night, they said goodbye to their friends and made their way from the theatre to Friedrichsstrasse to catch the S-bahn back to Prenzlauer Berg. Petra remembers saying to her mother, ‘Something’s up. I can feel it in the air.’ No one was shouting from the rooftops that the Wall was open, but somehow the atmosphere was different. The S-bahn was fuller than normal. Petra said to her mother that she would turn on the radio as soon as they were back. Once they were home, Petra discovered what had happened and recalls shouting through to the next-door room to tell her mother that the Wall had fallen.
At the time of the Wende, Petra was studying for a PhD in German literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She was a member of a lively academic community, where students and professors alike were involved in discussions about how to make socialism workable in a modern society. Aged 22, Petra had joined the SED, buoyed by the hope that Gorbachev’s more liberal brand of socialism in the Soviet Union might be workable in East Germany too. In any case, Petra points out, given the fact that there were no political parties with real power in the GDR other than the SED,6 joining the Party was the only option there was to influence political developments.7 At SED meetings within the university, she explains, they discussed concrete problems relating to teaching and research, as well as the future of socialism. Being a member of the Party did not mean that Petra was slavishly devoted to the SED leaders, however. Quite the contrary, in fact. She often found their political speeches rather crude and uninspiring. But in her experience, there was not a contradiction between being a member of the Party and simultaneously critical of it.
figure 2 Thousands of people rushed to the Berlin Wall in the days after it opened.
© Robert Wallis/Corbis.
Campaigning to improve the lot of women in East German society was one of Petra’s key concerns in the late 1980s. She joined the Independent Women’s Association (Unabhängige Frauenverband, UFV) in the autumn of 1989 when it was founded. The founding members were critical of what they called Muttipolitik in the GDR. Ninety-eight per cent of adult women worked in East Germany at this time, in accordance with communist ideology which presented looking after the home and being in paid employment not as alternatives but rather as two of the core functions expected of women.8 Symptomatic of this was the song sung by children in kindergartens across the GDR, which contains the lyrics ‘When Mummy goes to work early’.9 Nonetheless, Petra and
the other members of the UFV felt that patriarchy still endured in the GDR, and that the politicians who made decisions which influenced women’s lives were still overwhelmingly elderly men. In their view, there was much to be done in the fight for gender equality.
The travel restrictions placed on GDR citizens also affected Petra. While studying for her PhD, for example, she was offered a job as a lecturer in GDR literature in Rome, but because of the government’s rules she was unable to go. She found this missed opportunity a bit disappointing, but ultimately, she says, she did not dwell on it, as she had plenty of other things going on in her life at this time. Equally, although Petra enjoyed receiving postcards from her West German stepbrother when he travelled around the world, she never really minded that she could not go to these places herself. Others, by contrast, were jealous when Western visitors regaled them with stories of their travels. They were disappointed only to be able to learn about far-flung places from books and other people, frustrated that they would never themselves set foot in non-Eastern bloc territory. Thomas J., for example, a schoolboy from Berlin, later recalled feeling very hemmed in by the travel limitations. He vividly remembers sitting in the classroom on a winter’s day in the 1980s, watching birds flying freely out of the window and feeling deeply sad that they could go wherever they wanted while he would never be allowed beyond Eastern Europe.10
Petra realizes that her experience was not identical to that of everyone else who lived there, but she overwhelmingly remembers her time growing up in the GDR as a contented one.11 Crucial, she believes, in explaining how people remember the GDR, is what age and stage they were at, and whether they were able to do a job that they found fulfilling. Petra was able to study German literature—the subject of her choice—for eight years, and remembers being surrounded by fantastic and inspiring academics. Although there was an exhibition in West Berlin at the Hamburger Bahnhof on the exact topic of her dissertation—war and peace in literature—which she could not attend because of the strict travel restrictions, she found this only a minor frustration in the overall context of the stimulating environment in which she worked. She is aware that Christians who felt persecuted or musicians who were restricted in their choice of song lyrics might have different memories of the system, as would those, for example, who were put under pressure to inform for the Stasi. Petra knew that the Stasi existed and that there were probably informants among her circle of acquaintances at university, but she never encountered this herself and never felt that she had to watch what she said.
After people had stopped dancing on top of the Berlin Wall to celebrate the opening-up of the inner German border, a daunting question needed to be answered: what would happen next? With the collapse of communism in Poland and Hungary earlier in the year firmly in mind and with the intention of preventing anarchy and violence, the government quickly set up so-called ‘Round Table’ discussions with a range of parties and interest groups, such as the Green Party and the recently formed group of dissidents the New Forum, to consider the future. The first of these discussions took place on 7 December and over the next few months they tackled issues such as drafting a new constitution, dissolving the Stasi, and arranging the first free elections in the GDR.12 In the autumn of 1989 East German protestors had aligned themselves with the New Forum in the hope of fixing the breakdown of communication between the SED state and society; ultimately, they sought to achieve justice, peace, and democracy within the GDR. However, soon after the fall of the Wall, on 28 November, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl announced a ten-point programme for ‘confederation’ between the two states,13 proposing a free market economy, free elections, West German investment in the GDR, and a federation of states—a precursor to reunification. Reunification was never amongst the aims of the East German protestors, and many among their number expressed a desire to merge more slowly with West Germany, voicing fears that the GDR would be swallowed up by a rapid reunification with the Federal Republic. In spite of this, Kohl’s proposal soon gained in popularity.14
For the first time in GDR history, on 18 March 1990 East Germans participated in free elections. The results of these elections fundamentally shaped the future of their state, as the Christian Democratic Union, which was strongly in favour of rapid reunification, won with 40 per cent of the votes.15 In preparation for these elections, an Electoral Commission was set up with fifty members, each of whom represented one of the participating political parties. In a surprising turn of events, 25-year-old Petra was thrust into the limelight: she was selected to be the delegate for the Independent Women’s Association on this commission and, shortly after joining, was elected to be its chairperson by the majority of other delegates. She is keen to emphasize that this was not part of some grand plan for her career but was, rather, entirely unforeseen. ‘It was a real accident that I ended up running it,’ she explains, recounting why she was given this gargantuan responsibility:
It was partly due to the fact that I was free when I was needed. It was also completely clear that I had not had a political career in the GDR. I told the Secretary of the Electoral Commission that I had been a member of the SED Party for two years at university during the Gorbachev era, but no one was interested in that. They were just interested in the fact that I had been part of the Bürgerbewegung [citizens’ movement]. They did not want to choose an older person, for fear that bad things would come out about them later.
In this period of uncertainty, she explains, ‘normal people like you and me were suddenly thrust into positions of responsibility’. Petra was responsible for delivering free elections—one of the key demands of the demonstrations. ‘If I’d really thought about it,’ she says looking back, ‘I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night because I would have felt so overcome with the scale of responsibility.’ At the time, though, there was little space for reflection.
With her focus now on politics, Petra abandoned her PhD. After the elections, she took up a job working for the GDR’s second television channel, and was responsible for a live politics programme. As plans took shape for the new Germany, Petra was able to make programmes free from censorship—a sharp contrast with the ideologically filtered offerings of previous decades. Petra’s involvement with the plans for reunification was not confined to her day job. When she left work, Petra joined discussion groups with the Independent Women’s Association, the Greens, and the New Forum, and sought to determine the best way for the two countries to merge. ‘It was an absolutely crazy time’, she recalls.16 She was most concerned with defending and preserving the rights and benefits that women had in the GDR, in light of the fact that far more women worked there than in the West and were used to having freely available childcare, as well as the fact that abortion laws were far more liberal in the East.17 Petra was outraged, for example, when the first draft of the reunification treaty mentioned only in one short, dismissive sentence that ‘the needs of women and the disabled will be taken care of’.
figure 3 Petra Bläss as a delegate of the Independent Women’s Association on the East German Electoral Commission in 1990.
© Ullstein bild—ADN-Bildarchiv.
Unlike many East Germans, then, who felt like they had no say or involvement in how the new Germany was formed (including those who had taken to the streets and campaigned for change18), Petra was at the heart of decision-making and used her position to try and protect women’s rights and social justice. Ultimately though, she was disappointed that drafts of the reunification treaty were much less of a merging of the two existing constitutions of East and West than she had hoped. So when the communist party re-formed as the Party of Democratic Socialism (Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus or PDS) and approached her to stand as an MP in the first elections in reunited Germany, she accepted. Petra was one of a small minority of East Germans who had secured a place to study at university in the GDR, which might explain why she stayed committed to the same path ideologically when most other GDR citizens jumped ship. A year after joining the
newly formed Independent Women’s Association in late 1989, she was elected as an MP in the first united German parliament. Since the communists only received 2.4 per cent of the vote across Germany, Petra was one of only seventeen out of 662 MPs who were representing the PDS.19
When Petra made her political debut, she was 26 and had very little experience of working in national politics. Adding to what was already a huge challenge was the fact that the other politicians in the Bundestag were extremely hostile to the PDS MPs. In the preceding Cold War climate, the Western capitalist system had been derided in the East, but communism had been vilified in Western propaganda. The majority of representatives in the Bundestag therefore could not abide having anything to do with the former East and appeared to reject the notion that there was anything to be learned from the GDR’s approach to things. As representatives of the PDS, Petra recalls, ‘we were shut out, we were the evil ones’. When she took to the podium and made speeches, Christian Democrat MPs called out, ‘Forty years of Stasi and SED!’ One of her PDS colleagues, Gerd Riegel, found this constant hostility hard to bear, and took his own life. Petra, on the other hand, continued to represent the PDS in parliament until 2003 when she decided that she no longer wanted to be bound by loyalty to one particular party and instead wanted to focus on the actual issues that she felt were important. Political categories, she feels, can sometimes be unhelpful. Since then, she has used her experience in parliament to act as a political consultant.
Born in the GDR Page 4