There is an occasional tendency to view the past with a certain sense of nostalgia and even benevolence. “Things couldn’t possibly have been as bad, certainly, now things are worse than ever before.” Etc. Unfortunately, this has recently also affected the GDR, the so-called German Democratic Republic (former Socialist/Communist East Germany) – especially when it comes to stories about “normal life.”
Of course, some of the people in the GDR also had “normal” lives – why not? After all, you had to adjust somehow in this country. People live, love, have children, work, go on vacation, etc. All of these are, of course, banalities – even in the worst of circumstances, life has to happen somehow.
But that is irrelevant and distorts the objective view of the nature of the GDR system.
From the beginning, the GDR was designed as an inhumane system. Their leaders sought to suppress any human aspirations for freedom, democracy, decency and truthfulness. The lives of the people in the GDR didn’t count for anything: they only counted as a mass of people, the revolutionary “new Soviet man” in direct continuity with the Nazi system.
The SED (Socialist Unity Party) was created by the criminally forced merger of the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) and the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), thereby destroying the real political left – social democracy. The consequences of this decision can still be felt today, and the SPD still has a difficult time in the former East.
All other parties were also banned or changed – the so-called “bloc parties” CDU-East (Christian Democratic Union), LDPD (Liberal Democratic Party of Germany), DBD (Democratic Farmers’ Party of Germany) and NDPD (National Democratic Party of Germany) were only pro forma part of the so-called “National Front,” including the Cultural Association, the FDJ (Free German Youth), the only legal trade union FDGB (Free German Trade Union Confederation), the Women’s Federation and the Farmers’ Support Organization.
This construct – already by name (“Nationale Front”) – shows the continuity to the Nazi era: The integration of the forced youth organization (similar to the Hitler Youth), a women’s league (similar to the Bund Deutscher Mädchen), and single trade union followed as a natural continuation of the idea of human beings as part of a mass instead of individuals allowed to organize themselves. The establishment of the NDPD as a national German party with former NSDAP (Nazi Party) members can also be read as a continuity to the Nazi era – while in the Federal Republic such parties were always viewed as suspect. Of course, the SED also accepted former Nazis into its socialist party. In doing so, the GDR revealed its propagandistic stance of being an “anti-fascist state” as an utter absurdity.
Nothing about the GDR was democratic. Anyone who wanted to climb up the ladder had to join the SED – a party that criminally oppressed people, created the surveillance state, and prevented people from leaving this criminal state, sometimes by murder. The Stasi (State Security Service) acted as the new GESTAPO.
The number one instrument of power was the lie – the defamation of democracy, freedom, bourgeoisie, social democracy, the West, etc. Anti-Semitism was widespread, immigrants were consistently discriminated against in xenophobic terms, everything non-German was subsumed under a meaningless (because impractical) banner of “international brotherhood” as something still foreign. Ordinary Germans were hardly ever able to interact with Russians, Vietnamese, Angolans or Mozambicans – their worlds remained largely separate. It’s no wonder that there still seems to be more xenophobia in the East than in the West – after all, from 1933 to 1989, this was consistently the case and structurally baked into the system.
The GDR was also extremely belligerent and supported political and military repression not only at home but abroad. As a political agitator within the Soviet system, the East German state worked to aggressively crush the Prague Spring and the uprising in Hungary, demonized the Solidarity movement in Poland, and even, ironically, Gorbachev’s glasnost (openness) and perestroika (transformation) efforts. Even the Soviet Sputnik magazine (the Soviet Reader’s Digest, a brand now revived as a Putin propaganda rag) was virtually banned in recent years when it opened up to reform ideas. In my Russian language lessons at school, this had led to involuntary comedy.
The core moment of the GDR, however, has been the suppression of the popular uprising on June 17, 1953 – 70 years ago today – and the building of the wall and border fortifications on August 13, 1961. The building of the wall transformed the GDR into a quasi-free-range prison, which could only be left by regular non-connected persons for occasional vacations to Eastern Bloc states (usually Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary – for a select few maybe even the USSR), and when you finally reached retirement age.
A country that brutally suppresses the democracy movement in its own country and then locks up its own people in the country is an unjust state. A party leading this country is a wrong party. Members of this party are responsible for this injustice.
There is nothing to gloss over here, and we are still living with the consequences today: a poor understanding of democracy among those who were probably already SED-affiliated back then; structural xenophobia, pandering towards Putin, anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, affinity towards the AfD (Alternative for Germany, the new right-wing extremist party).
The GDR was a criminal state in continuity with National Socialism. It was not democratic, not left-wing, not progressive, and certainly not anti-fascist nor peace-loving. One could live in it, even had to, because leaving it was not possible.
On this June 17th, therefore, we should resist the temptation to whitewash this intolerable system and its representatives and apologists in any way.
No more dictatorship.
see also: German version
Erratic Attempts 