Born in the GDR

by Vaizey, Hester

  Nor has greater access to the Western consumer world made East Germans happier people, Peggy contends. Certainly in the wake of reunification, the new range of choices open to East Germans was often as much a source of anxiety as it was pleasure. As one girl who was two years older than Peggy later explained,

  Throughout my childhood I had worn cast-off clothes sent by Western relatives through the post. Now I could go into shops like H and M, where the choice was abundant. Before, I'd never had to think about what suited me or what was appropriate to wear. With a complete absence of criteria for what to pick, I was overwhelmed.30

  Another of Peggy’s contemporaries, Angelique L. from East Berlin, who was 15 when the Wall fell, had a similarly stressful recollection of how her mother simply burst into tears in the ‘Europa’ shopping centre, so bewildered was she by the choice of so many pairs of shoes—and bags to match.31

  Another aspect of life in reunified Germany causes Peggy concern. In her eyes, a private market economy for housing simply is not fair.32 ‘Why’, she asks, ‘should someone with rich parents have more choice about where they live?’ She rails against inherited privileges. She and her husband live in accommodation provided by the state—a flat they were allocated as students when they were expecting their first child. They are fearful, she explains, that they will be cast out from their home if the state sells their flat. They live in the Prenzlauer Berg area of Berlin, which has become increasingly trendy with West Berliners and expats alike. If Peggy’s family did have to leave the flat, they could never afford to stay in the area. This worry, this fear of losing one’s home, she says, is far greater and more ever-present than the level of fear most people experienced due to the Stasi in the GDR.

  Reflecting on life in reunited Germany, Peggy explains that she is happy that her children do not have to watch what they say and that they do not have to lie to conform to the state’s ideological dictates. Nevertheless she points to many downsides in the capitalist model. Her children, she says, dislike going to the bank with her, because they have to walk past the homeless people begging outside. Peggy, by contrast, first saw a homeless person when she was 14, in Hamburg. She is sorry that her children have to see this. It does not sit well with her that people are left to languish and sleep rough, while others focus on the accumulation of money and goods and foreign travel. ‘Things felt more equal in the GDR’, Peggy says. She is keen to foster such values in her children. To this end, whenever she gives her children treats in their packed lunches for school, she makes sure that there is enough for every child in the class, so that no one feels left out.

  Peggy is conscious that East Germans are often typecast as nostalgic for the GDR, harking back fondly to a time that no longer exists, safe in the knowledge that it is never going to be a viable alternative to the current reality. She knows that West Germans, too, regret that things are no longer as they were. In her eyes, though, their reality has changed far less than hers. When she goes home to Prenzlau, hardly any of her family members are doing the same jobs as when the Wall fell, and none of the shops that were there still exist. Though Peggy believes she was lucky to still be a child at the time of the Wende, since she was able to grow used to the changes at a younger age than people of her parents’ generation, she still misses the noises and smells of shops like HO, Konsum, and Kaufhalle, and wishes she could go into them just one more time. The past has been blotted out, and, in Peggy’s view, this past was not nearly as bad as Western politicians would lead us to believe.

  When 10-year-old Peggy learned that the GDR had collapsed, her first reaction was concern that her family would be affected by what she perceived to be Western problems, such as homelessness. Yet while she feared the West in some respects, there were also aspects of it that seemed attractive, such as the tasty-looking biscuits advertised on Western television. Peggy’s initial mixed feelings about the West have extended into her adult life. On the one hand, she sees many good aspects of the current set-up, in particular much greater freedom of expression, and she is keen to emphasize that she does not have exclusively positive memories of the GDR, but on the other hand she also believes that the East German system had many advantages—not least feeling fairer. Ultimately though, Peggy concludes, ‘I am very pleased to have experienced both living in the GDR and the fall of the Wall, because it means I am familiar with two types of political system. This therefore gives me a differentiated perspective on capitalism.’

  Interpreting the End of East Germany

  ‘People here [in the GDR] saved for half a lifetime for a spluttering Trabant. Then along comes the smooth Mercedes society and makes our whole existence, our dreams, and our identity, laughable.’1 Less than a year after the Berlin Wall fell, the GDR ceased to exist. And with this development, as East German psychotherapist Hans Joachim Maaz effectively shows, GDR citizens were challenged to make huge adjustments. German reunification on 3 October 1990 may have been marked with celebrations and huge firework displays, however divisions between East and West were far from surmounted. For all that joining a democratic system opened the door to new opportunities that had been unavailable to them under SED rule, GDR citizens lost a specific culture and way of life that many sorely missed. And so, though the incorporation of the East German states into the West German confederation led to wide-reaching practical changes in their daily lives, the period was also marked by notable continuities in the social and mental make-up which had developed under four decades of socialist rule.

  Since the GDR has been erased from the map, two extreme characterizations of East Germany have come to dominate popular consciousness. There is the damningly negative Stasi-centred depiction on the one hand, and a rosily positive picture of a socialist utopia on the other. The final chapter of this volume seeks to accomplish two things: first, to offer a general explanation of why the end of East Germany has prompted such contrasting memories of it, and secondly, to review the eight individual accounts of life before, during, and after reunification, with the aim of better understanding these contrasts.

  With the end of the GDR, revelations emerged showing just what a difficult time nonconformists had had there: the Stasi had observed and photographed people’s movements, secretly searched their homes, listened in to their telephone conversations, and even collected smell samples in jars, the idea being that trained sniffer dogs could tell where a person had been.

  Without a doubt, the most sensational details of the Stasi’s activities stick in the mind. Mario’s story, for example, revealed the various psychological techniques used on political prisoners to get them to confess and to divulge the names of other ‘political deviants’—be it sleep deprivation for days on end leading to disorientation and confusion, or being locked in a pitch-black van, hunched with no room to stand and barely room to sit. This is the stuff newspaper headlines were made of in the aftermath of reunion.

  figure 29 Smell samples collected from political ‘enemies’ by the Stasi.

  © Stasi-Museum Berlin, ASTAK e.V. Foto: John Steer.

  With 91,000 full-time employees and 173,000 informal ‘helpers’ in 1989, the Stasi far exceeded the Nazi’s 7,000-strong Gestapo in scale. Even discounting the approximately 10,000 elite troops who served in the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment charged with protecting the SED, and the 47,000 guards who patrolled the borders of the GDR, it is beyond question that there were large numbers of East Germans who acted as informants for the Stasi.2 Such meticulous surveillance meant that in the forty years between the creation of communist East Germany in 1949 and its collapse, the Stasi had collected more paper files than had been collected in the whole of Germany from the Middle Ages to the end of the Second World War.3

  Homing in on the Stasi and the dictatorial elements of life in the GDR served to quash the discussion of anything positive that took place under SED rule. And it no doubt aided ruling politicians in reunified Germany in their objective of discrediting the socialist approach and presenting themselves in a comparabl
y favourable light. Whatever the motivation for the media focus, it has helped to establish Stasi-centric memories of the GDR.

  If fear and constraint dominated daily life and the GDR was a dictatorial Stasi-state, it follows logically that the collapse of communism should have been a relief to those who had lived there and that the transition to the more liberal, Western way of living should have been relatively easy. However, most East Germans reject this Stasi-centred characterization of their old homeland.4 Many claim that they had no idea of the extent to which the Stasi was intertwined with daily life, and therefore they do not remember the GDR in this way. Furthermore, following reunification many East Germans mourned the loss of their homeland, suggesting that the relationship between the GDR and its people was complex and not uniformly antagonistic.

  So why might the GDR not have felt like a Stasi-state? Focusing on the role of the Stasi in the GDR can lead to the impression that ordinary East Germans had very little control over their lives under SED rule. But rather than being passive victims, many East Germans felt like active citizens, making a positive contribution towards the GDR’s collective goals. One of the SED’s oft-used slogans was ‘work together, plan together, govern together’, and citizens were invited to air their views in the GDR, be it in public meetings or through letters of complaint. This contributed to the stability of the system. SED officials did of course have ulterior motives for offering ordinary citizens the chance to voice their grievances, since it gave them insight into the issues affecting ordinary people’s lives and allowed them to shape policy in light of what they had heard. Such opportunities for expression may have been conditional on ordinary Germans not challenging the fundamentals of the system such as the basic tenets of communist ideology or the existence of the Wall, but in many ways these conditions were irrelevant to how most East Germans felt about the SED. In their eyes, they had been offered platforms for discussion which led them to trust the regime and made them feel listened to.5 Contrary to ‘top-down’ characterizations of the GDR which focus on the Stasi, citizens had some say in how day-to-day life in the GDR developed. This is one of the reasons why many East Germans do not recall the GDR as a dictatorship, but as a country in which they could lead a perfectly ordinary life.6

  Acceptance rather than hostility characterized the relations between most East Germans and the communist government in the GDR. For though there were no free elections and the people were walled in, once the division was accepted as permanent in the years after the Berlin Wall was built, East Germans pragmatically got on with making the best of a situation they had no expectation of changing.7 Cooperation, at the very least in the form of passive conformity, was therefore key to SED rule. Driven by a range of motivations, from a desire to improve socialism, to wanting to be promoted at work, to material advantages such as holidays, many East Germans altered their behaviour in a way that helped the state maintain power. Petra, for example, joined the SED, believing it to be the only course of action to help improve the status quo, while Carola’s father joined for pragmatic reasons after years of resisting, in the expectation that the socialist system would be the prevailing set-up in the long term. It is therefore rather more helpful to see the state as ruling through society rather than against it.8 All of this helps to explain why later, after the Wall fell, even East Germans who had felt ambivalent towards the SED regime while living under it, felt more of an attachment to it than they had done at the time. They had lived in a socialist state and grown used to its modus operandi.9 Only in reunited Germany did the depth of this affiliation to the communist state become apparent. If the relationship between the East German state and its people was characterized more by compromise, bargaining, and shared interests, it is undertandable that so many East Germans later rejected the labelling of the GDR as a Stasi-state, with all of the antagonistic implications inherent in such a term.10

  However, to an outsider schooled in the virtues of democracy it may well seem counter-intuitive to think that the new opportunities presented to East Germans by reunification could be experienced as anything other than positive. After all, in reunified Germany, East Germans had far greater choice: about what they said, what they did, where they went, and what they ate. Since not all East Germans embraced these changes with open arms, they were unkindly called Jammerossis or ‘Moaning Easterners’ by some of their West German brothers and sisters. If we are seeking to immerse ourselves in their perspective, we should consider what gave rise to their sense of discontentment.11

  The Wende certainly brought many welcome changes for East Germans, such as the democracy that so many of the protestors in 1989 had been clamouring for, as well as greater individual opportunities and freedoms. However there were downsides to the transition that few anticipated.12 How keenly these were felt relative to the upsides varied from individual to individual. The Wende was hard on those who had felt life was satisfactory in the GDR. They had more to lose from the change because they were not unhappy with the status quo and did not feel stifled by the demands of the socialist regime. But the Wende was also hard on those who had longed for change, only to find that their high hopes were dashed when united Germany did not live up to expectations.13

  A number of key factors help to explain why some East Germans have negative feelings about reunification. The first of these is ideological: supporters of the East German government like Petra had believed in the socialist mission that everyone should work together as a society towards a better future. Reunited Germany, they found, was competitive and individualistic, and lacked the solidarity and the sense of joint mission that they had valued in the GDR: this they experienced as a loss.14 For different reasons, opponents of the GDR, such as Protestant agitators who had made it their mission to preach against the socialist government, also felt a loss of purpose.15

  Secondly, East Germans who had been reasonably content in the GDR felt let down by reunification due to the widespread unemployment which affected them after 1989: they noticed a loss of stability in their everyday lives as the GDR’s uncompetitive command economy was integrated into a competitive market economy. Even two decades later the unemployment rate remains nearly twice as high amongst East Germans as amongst West Germans, with East German women disproportionately affected.16 When the GDR was absorbed into the Western capitalist model, 98 per cent of its businesses were state-owned. This meant that after reunification around 8,000 state-run enterprises had to be privatized—a move that cost millions of jobs.17 Alongside these job losses, the difficulties of making East German industries run cleanly and according to new Western environmental standards increased businesses’ overheads and resulted in further job cuts. The town of Hoyerswerda is an extreme case in point: its population had swelled tenfold during the communist era due to the vibrant coal industry in the area. After the Wende, when West German laws to contain pollution were applied to the former GDR, demand for brown coal (lignite) fell. Consequently, the number of job opportunities in the area shrank dramatically, contributing to rapid depopulation, with the number of inhabitants falling by half in the twenty years following unification.18 (It was only in 2012 that for the first time in reunited Germany almost as many people moved from West to East as from East to West.19) In the former GDR as a whole, the unemployment rate among East Germans rocketed from 0 per cent in 1989 to 7.3 per cent in 1990, a figure that was kept artificially low by reducing the working hours of 20 per cent of the workforce.20 By 1992 this figure had risen to 15 per cent.21 And although a government report from November 2013 announced that East German unemployment had hit its lowest rate since reunification, this still amounts to 9.5 per cent of the East German population being out of work, as opposed to 5.8 per cent in the West.22 Unsurprisingly, a number of the protagonists in this book were affected by the widespread unemployment among East Germans: Robert, Peggy, and Mirko all recounted how their fathers experienced difficulties gaining employment after the Wende.

  Thirdly, for those East Germans lucky enough to find
work, the competitive environment of the West German workplace was also new, requiring different skills and a keener sense of individual responsibility. Employment in united Germany stood in stark contrast with how employment had worked in the GDR: as we saw in the cases of Lisa and Katharina, individuals often had more limited choice about what work they did, but it was guaranteed that everyone would have a job. Employment was both a right and a duty in the GDR, which called on every individual to make an active contribution to the socialist set-up.23 The long-term gains brought by reunification therefore quickly paled into insignificance for many families who were thrown into crisis by a lack of income and a much-reduced social security net. Indeed, as Mirko and many of the other interviewees remarked, it is all very well to have the freedom to travel or the greater access to consumer goods, but the reality is that these options are only available to those who have the money. These interviewees were not saying that the increased opportunities were negative per se, simply that the extent to which they are really available to all has been exaggerated.24 In this context it is unsurprising that many East Germans view their past lives in a favourable light.

  Fourthly, when they voted for rapid reunification, East Germans understandably assumed that they would gain Western standards of living pretty imminently.25 That this was not the case has been a further source of disappointment. In reality, many areas of former East Germany suffered very badly economically after 1990. West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl promised East Germans the same standard of living as the West within five years, but what transpired was less rosy. At the time of reunification the average East German salary was less than one-third of the average West German salary. Not only this, but the cost of living for East Germans rose after unification as the unsustainable communist subsidies of basic foodstuffs and rents were lifted.26 In Leipzig, for example, the cost of rents was between five and ten times greater in 1994 in comparison to 1989. And whereas the average family of four in East Germany spent 5 per cent of their monthly income on rent, the norm in West Germany was 20 per cent.27 Those who had hoped for a speedy adoption of a Western lifestyle after reunification are frustrated that people living in former East German territory remain consistently poorer than people living in West German territory even though so many years have passed.