This private perspective portrays the democratization of West Germany as an inadvertent process that grew only gradually out of positive personal experiences. At first, the surviving democrats had to battle widespread skepticism, withdrawal from politics, and remnants of Nazi ideology. The often-clumsy efforts at Allied reorientation produced a backlash among some of the defeated, making them unwilling to admit their responsibility. But a consensus that the Third Reich had been an abject failure, that war was to be avoided in the future, and that the Communist alternative remained inacceptable helped the new beginning. Only a minority were, like Günther Hagemann, willing to join political parties, even if most behaved like model democrats. The decisive factor in the long run was rather the stable space the FRG offered for professional development and private growth. In contrast to the dictatorships, the Bonn Republic provided a supportive environment. As Ruth Weigelt explained, “We were free, could make our own decisions, lived in a democracy, everything was well ordered and nobody (hardly anyone) was disadvantaged.”83
Reaching maturity also involved a constant effort to come to terms with the disturbing memories of an unmasterable German past. “What we did to each other as members of our nations and as soldiers, is unbelievable for normal people under regular circumstances,” Hans-Harald Schirmer summarized: “Both undemocratic and inhumane, German and Soviet dictatorships have created the preconditions for this human degeneracy with their ideological suppression of the individual.” Haunted by the Nazi crimes of their youth, many Germans could no longer develop “an unselfconscious relationship to the notions of patriotism and nation.” Carola Stern reflected on the continued irritation by the past that her generation has “become skeptical of promises of salvation.” Because so many people had lost their lives through politics, she believed “the only yardstick for political action … is the respect for human life.” Günter Krause concluded similarly, “I have experienced both highs and lows, the Nazi dictatorship, the terrible war and Communism, but the freedom of a democracy is the best, even if it is also a difficult time.”84
9
COMMUNIST DISAPPOINTMENT
On July 5, 1945, Germany’s surviving Communists held their first public meeting in Leipzig after the arrival of the Red Army. It was an “unforgettable reunion.” People who were thought missing or dead hugged each other and could not believe “you are alive, comrade!” Many had aged by decades in the Nazi prisons, their hollow faces deeply lined and their eyes protruding. Some still wore their striped KZ garb and caps, which hung from their emaciated bodies. “There was nobody who did not have tears in his eyes.” Even those who had survived torture were moved when recalling friends who could not be saved. Writer Bruno Apitz recited the Buchenwald poem: “They have driven us through mud and death / they have stomped and spit upon us / they have ground us down and crushed us / in winter’s ice and summer’s heat.” Elated survivors marveled, “What a triumph it is to be alive at this hour!”1 With the help of the Soviet Union, this so-called “founding generation” (Aufbaugeneration) of young adults set out to shape a better future with equality and justice for all.
Forty-five years later, this socialist dream lay shattered. Its incarnation, the German Democratic Republic, was foundering because it had disappointed too many of its citizens. The ex-dictator Erich Honecker was hospitalized in the Charite, the prestigious East Berlin clinic. For the visiting pastor Werner Braune, “it was a unique experience to see the once most powerful man of the GDR old and in pajamas. His health was bad. For the second time, he had been operated on for a malign tumor.” Yet Honecker still believed “socialism was an excellent idea in principle … only the new comrades in power who had gotten rid of him were bad people.” His physician, Professor Althaus, commented, “He has not yet understood that he has lost.” Evicted from his Wandlitz villa, Honecker was repudiated by his former followers who were trying to save their own skins. Ironically, he had to ask for asylum from the very institution against which he had fought—the Protestant Church.2 As a humanitarian gesture, Pastor Uwe Holmer took him in until he left for the Soviet Union.
People’s opinions of the GDR’s character are deeply divided according to their differing ideologies, experiences, and legacies. For supporters of the socialist experiment, such as Fritz Klein, the world wars and Nazi crimes were so heinous as to make it necessary “to choose that model of society which offered the prospect of overcoming the old order with its program and implementation.” But for Günter Krause and other victims of the SED regime, East Germany was an “illegitimate state” (Unrechtsstaat) without human rights, in which the Communist Party and its secret service, the notorious Stasi, suppressed its citizens arbitrarily and illegally. Most East Germans, like physician Klaus Hübschmann, tried to live a “normal life” between these extremes, for they appreciated the anti-Fascist commitment and social benefits of the regime, but they were frustrated by the narrow-mindedness of the party bureaucrats and resented the lower standard of living compared to the West.3 As a result of contrasting experiences, interpretations of the GDR remain bitterly contested to this day.
At the core of the dispute about the SED system are contradictory notions of “democracy,” toward which all victors at the Potsdam Conference had agreed to work. For Communist supporters such as Werner Feigel, the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was necessary since it “was directed against the exploiters,” acting in a Rousseauian sense “for the people.” Concretely that view legitimized the rule of the SED as “vanguard party,” which one had to approach submissively with petitions so as to “participate in the formation of the socialist order.” For Western-style democrats such as Paul Frenzel, democracy meant observing civil rights such as freedom of speech, constituting legal safeguards according to Montesquieu’s notion of a division of power. Frenzel was utterly shocked when a Stasi member told him how to supervise an election by voting in public and falsifying the result in private with extra ballots in order to approve “the anti-Fascist-democratic order.”4 Though both sides used the same term, they meant quite different things by it.
The asymmetrical effect of division on East Germany has politicized GDR life stories more strongly than narratives of the West. During the Cold War, the Germans found themselves on the fault line between the two opposing blocs of NATO and the Warsaw Pact, in which “armed military formations of immense size confronted each other in a terrible reality.” While “the West clothed its ideology in the exercise of rights, the East saw its role as proclaiming slogans of peace.” Horst Johannsen recalled the ensuing process of alienation between the sides: “Due to the differing social and living conditions, there were no longer similar forms of action and concepts in the East and West,” which resulted in even the common language being divided. “Though people struggled in many ways against this development, they could not escape their dependence on the state.”5 Whereas FRG memoirists enjoyed the luxury of focusing on their private lives, the memoirists of the smaller and less legitimate GDR continually had to confront intrusive SED policies.
SOCIALIST HOPES
Idealist supporters considered the German Democratic Republic “the better Germany” because its socialism tried to realize “the dream of a just society” and of living in peace. The East German leadership drew upon the long-held Marxist traditions of the radical wing of the labor movement in striving for greater equality. At the same time, the Communists claimed the mantle of anti-Fascism because they had resisted the Nazi tyranny more consistently than any other party. As junior partner of the mighty Soviet Union, they vicariously adopted the Bolshevik Revolution and shared in the victory of the Red Army according to the slogan “To learn from the Soviet Union is to learn how to be victorious.” By contrast, the Federal Republic’s claim to be the successor state of the Third Reich and the considerable continuity of personnel laid the Bonn government open to charges of neo-Nazism. Searching for “a just, harmonious, as well as peaceful society” Gerhard Joachim therefore “quite consciousl
y chose Socialism … and logically joined the party.”6
The appeal of this “grand vision” for the Weimar cohort was, however, somewhat undercut by the nature of the Soviet occupation, which hindered its implementation. The “brutal encroachments of members of the Red Army” so alienated German civilians that the Russian soldiers had to be segregated in their own bases. Though economic exploitation through dismantling factories and exacting reparations was understandable as compensation for Wehrmacht destruction, it shocked even workers who were fascinated by the Soviet experiment. Moreover, the Soviet secret service (NKVD) frightened the populace by engaging in “a new wave of arrests and secret incarceration” in special camps without legal recourse. At the same time, the Stalinist political style according to Walter Ulbricht’s motto “it must look democratic, but we have to control everything” disillusioned bourgeois collaborators.7 Even the Soviet officers’ impressive support of a cultural rebirth and their occasional personal conviviality could not make up for such negative impressions.
To obtain a pliant tool for the social revolution, the German Communist Party (KPD) pressured the more moderate Social Democrats (SPD) to join them in a common workers’ party in the spring of 1946. Many workers welcomed this effort, which promised to overcome the split of the labor movement that had opened the door for Hitler’s seizure of power. Some SPD members were therefore willing to follow this invitation in order to create a “common anti-Fascist front” that would be strong enough to prevent a revival of Nazism and create a better socialist society. But the veteran West German leader Kurt Schumacher resolutely opposed the merger: he considered the KPD undemocratic. This inspired most of the SPD members to reject the offer in the West, while the Communists often used force in order to squelch resistance in the East. Apologists such as Günter Manz still claim that “the concept of compulsory merger does not dovetail with the facts.” But for critics such as Albert Leithold, “the dictatorship of the proletariat turned out to be the oligarchy of a bloody-minded clique of functionaries.”8
The social transformation of East Germany began with the structural approach to denazification that punished whole strata in order to establish the rule of “the working people.” Not really interested in individual guilt as in the West, the SED used plebiscites “to dispossess the monopolies, big capitalists and nobles which had always started, financed and profited from wars, creating a peoples’ property for the first time in Germany.” Concretely that meant taking factories, banks, and large businesses away from their owners and turning them into “people’s-owned enterprises” called VEB. In the countryside, a land reform “confiscated holdings of over 100 hectares” according to the slogan “Junkers’ land into peasants’ hand,” creating many small farms. All teachers who had been Nazi members were summarily dismissed, “fueling an enormous demand for instructors,” who often arrived without any training. While many dispossessed elites fled to West Germany, this upheaval opened new career doors for young socialists.9
The gradual establishment of state socialism required a complicated planning system to “control the commanding heights of the economy.” Proud of the achievements of the successive Five Year Plans, the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) officers insisted upon the practical adoption of their own ideological model. Its key point was the substitution of economic planning for market competition by ignoring cost and price relationships and giving political allocation decisions priority. During the initial rebuilding after the war, this system of policy decisions worked fairly well, since reconstruction of infrastructure, factories, and housing was labor-intensive and raw material–dependent. But in the long run, bypassing supply and demand fostered the establishment of a “bureaucratic apparatus which developed a certain life of its own remote from the realities.” When “planning goals and numerical indicators alone governed the whole economy,” the result was inefficiency and scarcity, disillusioning even engaged supporters of socialism.10
The increasing ideological and social division of Germany led eventually to the founding of an independent Eastern state called the German Democratic Republic. In the fall of 1949 pressure by German Communists finally overcame Stalin’s hesitation over whether to prefer a united and neutralized Germany or a Soviet client state. With a “people’s congress movement” that even gathered some support among workers in the Federal Republic, the Socialist Unity Party created a country of its own, still in the hope that the larger West would eventually follow its lead. To “young anti-Fascists” such as Gerhard Joachim, the returned resistance fighters served “as a moral legitimation for the new state against the old Germany, the FRG, so to speak the successor of the Third Reich.” While “a large number of people were taken in by the new development,” skeptics like Horst Johannsen understood that thereby “the SED took over unlimited power and opened the fatal path to that centralism” that established a new leftist dictatorship.11
The party’s youth organization, the Free German Youth (FDJ), used many of the same methods as the HJ, albeit to instill a diametrically opposed ideology. While the uniforms and parades were similar, the emphasis on Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and the construction of “a new social order and future economic organization” were not. Many apolitical youths tried to ignore the ideological “red light radiation” in order to enjoy the FDJ hikes and dances. Policeman Werner Feigel just “felt good among the young friends.” When belonging became compulsory for admission to higher education, Klaus Hübschmann and other 1920s children “eventually just became FDJ members.” Gerhard Baucke was especially “interested in joining in” because the FDJ organ Neues Leben gave him a chance to publish some of his first poems and essays on the situation of the young, written “by me and about me.” For Fritz Klein, membership was a deeply held intellectual conviction: “I wanted to join in what now had to be done.”12
With many older men dead or incapacitated, collaboration with the SED opened unusual career opportunities for the Weimar cohort. If they were reliable “cadres,” they could advance quickly by enrolling in correspondence courses or attending a party school. For instance, the working-class lad Werner Feigel joined the people’s police to have a secure job and defend socialism against the class enemy. Having been trained in business, Paul Frenzel rapidly became head of a local bank and advanced to the central financial administration in East Berlin. Making just enough political compromises, Klaus Hübschmann used his intellectual ability to train as a pediatric physician and headed a children’s clinic at a young age. After being sent to a party school, Gerhard Joachim became a cultural functionary in order “to participate in the democratic renewal of our culture.” As one of the first German students to learn a Marxist interpretation of history, Fritz Klein was entrusted with the editorship of the leading professional journal while still in his thirties.13
During the initial years of the GDR, memoirs mention considerable resistance among those people who did “not want to become an accomplice of a despised political system.” Paul Frenzel reported that old SPD members who vowed to prevent “the merger with the KPD” had to be forced to join or purged from the SED. Agitators, such as Horst Sindermann, the head of the party paper Neues Deutschland, were shouted down when they tried to explain the loss of the Eastern territories to an audience of refugees. When public protest became too dangerous, many people resorted to private grumbling among friends or making fun of Walter Ulbricht’s Saxon accent. Quite harmless jokes about scarcity (such as “if you introduce socialism to Africa, the Sahara is going to run out of sand”) already carried the risk of imprisonment. After the bourgeois parties had been cowed, specialists such as Klaus Hübschmann could only invoke professional competence or withdraw into private life. When all these stratagems failed, one might, like Karl Härtel and about three million others, flee to the West through the still-open border in Berlin.14
A central conflict involved the Protestant Church, the only quasi-public organization in the GDR that remained independent. While a militant minority
of SED atheists hoped to get rid of religion entirely, many Protestants were conservative nationalists who wanted to maintain ties to the West, whose financial support they needed. The key battleground was youth. The party tried to convert the young to socialism through “youth consecration,” a secular coming-of-age ceremony intended to replace religious confirmation. When the Church Youth fought back, the party forced the young to submit to its Jugendweihe as prerequisite of education. Pastor Werner Braune reported an endless stream of harassment, discrimination, and outright violence, insisting, “At no time did GDR leaders and the SED view the Church and Deaconry as partners.” Since Lutheranism insisted on obeying the state, a sort of accommodation as “a church in socialism” was eventually reached, but on the ground, the battle remained unresolved.15
To win the class struggle, the SED launched a combination of repression and propaganda in order to convince its reluctant population. With printed media and radio, the party indoctrinated its own cadres so that they could “reeducate” the populace and “keep down” the overthrown capitalists. The key instrument of this reorientation program was the “people’s police.” Gerhard Joachim explained, “We were, so to speak, the eye that was watching everywhere.” Werner Feigel saw the policemen (Vopos) as “working-class children who are responsible for the safety of the people.” In practice, this meant fighting against the economic sabotage of the dispossessed owners as well as against efforts of subversion from their putative allies in the West. The people’s police were tasked with “the complete control of all activities” and securing the “implementation of all legal orders.” That meant a constant surveillance of public space and oftentimes even private homes.16 Instituting a Stalinist dictatorship of the proletariat, the SED tried to convince the workers of Socialist superiority by building showy streets like the Stalinallee in Berlin (image 26).
Broken Lives Page 37