Category Archives: Germany

From Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment, by Stephen Kotkin (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 32; Random House, 2009), Kindle pp. 70-74:

Born in 1949 following mass rapes by the Soviet army and almost toppled in its fourth year of existence by mass popular revolt, the German Democratic Republic, a rump abutting another German state, lasted four decades. That was not quite as long as Wilhelmine Germany (1870-1918) but longer than the Weimar Republic (1918-33) or the Third Reich (1933–45). Over time, the GDR’s Leninist technocratic image—as a “Red Prussia”—developed a wide following both inside and outside the Soviet bloc. In 1980, the World Bank judged East Germany to be tenth highest in the world in per capita income, above Great Britain. But in the period after World War II, particularly from the 1970s, the formula of Communist-party monopoly and state planning failed to maintain competitive economies, including in the supposed great success, the GDR, as Jeffrey Kopstein has pointed out. East Germany’s infamous State Security Service (Stasi) managed to produce files on 6 million people, more than one third of the country’s total population (16.4 million). But the political police had no answer for a prosperous West Germany, which, in the 1950s, took off on a multidecade economic miracle to become, after the United States and Japan, the world’s third most powerful economy.

East Germany’s populace, no less than the regime, understood that comparisons with West Germany were the basis of the GDR’s legitimacy. Either socialism was superior to capitalism, or it had no reason for being. This logic—starkly evident in the case of the two Germanys—held for the entire bloc. And the bloc being a bloc, the fate of each national Communist regime depended on the fate of the others. When it announced its second Five-Year Plan (1956–60), the GDR committed itself to overtaking West Germany in per capita consumption of key food products and consumer goods by 1961. Rash? Announced or not, some form of a consumer competition was inescapable. In 1961, however, rather than outconsuming West Germans, East Germans were completely enclosed: on top of the already existing 857-mile inner German-German border, a new wire fence was hastily erected some 90 miles across Berlin. The next year, a second, inner fence went up, creating a no-man’s-land, “the death strip,” patrolled by self-firing machine guns triggered by movement. These barriers were soon concretized. Still, East Germans could continue to make direct comparisons with life in West Germany from their own living rooms—just by watching West German television. In Albania the populace could watch Italian TV and in Estonia Finnish TV—rare windows. But in the GDR, Western TV was accessible in the inhabitants’ native tongue (except in a poor-reception area around Dresden, dubbed “the valley of the clueless”). North Koreans have never had anything like that vis-à-vis South Korea. West German TV offered East Germans a “nightly emigration”—and a frustrating tease.

Samizdat (self-publication) in the GDR was virtually unknown, and antisocialist dissidents were relatively few, a circumstance often attributed to the supposed lack of a strong sense of nation and nationalism. (As we shall see in the next chapter, Communist Romania is said to have lacked dissent because of a too-powerful sense of nation.) In fact, even when they were critical, intellectuals in East Germany exhibited a high degree of loyalty. The East German novelist Christa Wolf (born Christa Ihlenfeld in 1929), who after a brief stint as an informer fell under extended Stasi surveillance, openly criticized the East German leadership, but like most East German intellectuals, she hoped not to undo but to revivify the antifascist, anticapitalist cause. There was no anomaly in an intelligentsia committed to the socialist cause. True, many East German intellectuals were apolitical. And repression was omnipresent. “We were always afraid of being denounced,” recalled one person critical of the regime. But for most, West German consumerism was not their idea of better socialism. Even the hideous Wall was accepted by some of them. “I took it to be an evil, but a necessary evil for the existence of the GDR,” said one socialist intellectual, adding that “whoever wants to tear down the Wall must also be clear that he is at the same time tearing down the basis of the existence of the GDR.” Those deemed antisocialist could apply to leave or be expelled, blunting opposition domestically. As for intellectuals who refused to leave, in many cases they also refused to campaign for freedom of movement (human rights)—if leaving was betrayal, why defend the right to betrayal?

This dynamic—leave or stay—turned out to be the crucial mobilizer in 1989, when the GDR was suddenly struck by mass demonstrations, to near-universal shock, in Leipzig. As throngs of East Germans—eligible for automatic citizenship upon arrival in West Germany—clamored for exit, others massed to voice the sentiment “We’re staying.” The period from the time this agitation erupted, in autumn 1989, to the time the regime disappeared was astonishingly brief. Before a momentous peaceful demonstration on October 9 in Leipzig, the country counted fewer than 100,000 total protesters at all events, but the total would rise to 4 million by November 9, when the Berlin Wall was breached. And yet, this was mass mobilization without mass organization. The best-known organized social movement outside the regime, New Forum, was announced only in late September 1989. Though loyalist, New Forum was immediately declared “hostile to the state” and illegal by the Stasi and found no counterpart inside the ruling party—such as the reform Communists in Hungary—to negotiate with and to bolster its fledgling organization. New Forum’s activists had no offices or telephones. Its name was sometimes evoked at marches, but it was overwhelmed by events. “Social movements in the GDR evolved largely spontaneously,” argues the scholar Steven Pfaff, adding that “detestable, poorly performing authoritarian states are commonplace; it is revolutions that are unusual.” When does popular acquiescence to dictatorship vanish? When does the uncivil society lose its nerve?

The Communist establishment could not emigrate: it had no exit.