8
Transformation and the ‘Established Phase’, 1961–1988
At the time of Adenauer’s stunning election victory of 1957, and the SPD’s dispirited change of course at Bad Godesberg in 1959, it appeared that the CDU was in an almost unbeatable ascendancy. However, a mere decade later, in 1969, West Germany had an SPD Chancellor for the first time since the Müller cabinet of 1928–30. And, within three years of taking office, Willy Brandt had negotiated a series of agreements in his so-called Ostpolitik which fundamentally altered the relationship of the two divided Germanies. By this time, the climate on both sides of the Wall was quite different from that of the 1950s.
Adenauer’s position began to wane in the late 1950s, his authority in his own party being seriously weakened by the crisis in 1959 over his vacillating and ambivalent candidacy for the position of President. He was persuaded to stand, then ultimately withdrew, partly because he was unable to resolve to his own satisfaction the question of who should succeed him as Chancellor, and partly because he realized the Presidency’s lack of real power. But Adenauer delayed his departure from the national political stage too long; when he finally went, after having presided over West Germany’s phenomenal early resurrection from the ashes of the Third Reich, he departed under a cloud. In 1962 Adenauer was seriously discredited by what is known as the Spiegel affair. NATO autumn manoeuvres had revealed that West German civilian defences and conventional arms were essentially inadequate. It had been in the interests of West German industry in the 1950s to have a defence policy oriented towards potentially profitable nuclear armaments rather than conventional defence forces, which would have been manpower-intensive in a period of labour shortage. The weekly news magazine Spiegel published a highly critical article, which was in fact but one in a long series seeking to discredit Adenauer’s Minister of Defence, Franz-Josef Strauss, through accusations of improprieties, misconduct and corruption. Spiegel’s offices were raided (recalling methods employed by the Nazis) and eleven members of the journal’s staff were arrested and charged with leakage of defence secrets (one was even hauled back from holiday in Spain for this purpose). In the ensuing controversy the article itself became infinitely less important than issues relating to freedom of the press in a democratic state. Nor did the politicians always act with integrity: Strauss himself at first lied over his role in the Spanish arrest, and it was revealed that Adenauer and Strauss had seriously misled Parliament. After considerable pressure (including the refusal of FDP ministers in the coalition to work with Strauss), Adenauer was forced to accede to Strauss’s resignation and to confirm that he would himself retire in 1963. The ‘affair’ was thus significant, less for what Spiegel had actually printed, than for the sea-change in German politics which it helped to inaugurate.
Adenauer was succeeded as Chancellor by the mastermind of the economic miracle, Ludwig Erhard. Unfortunately, Erhard was less adept at politics than at economics – and even in the latter field his Chancellorship ran into difficulties. The FDP had been in alliance with the CDU/CSU since the elections of 1961 (when the CDU/CSU lost twenty-eight seats, the SPD gained twenty-one and the FDP gained twenty-six); this alliance was reconfirmed after the 1965 election (when the FDP lost eighteen seats, the CDU/CSU gained three and the SPD gained twelve). However, difficulties in the West German economy by the mid-1960s led to serious problems in attempting to balance the budget. In October 1966 Erhard’s proposals, which included higher taxes, were not accepted by the FDP, and the FDP cabinet ministers resigned. At the same time, increasingly vocal currents in the SPD were arguing that it was time to show that the Social Democrats were capable of taking governmental responsibility, rather than remaining permanently in opposition. A powerful government appeared all the more desirable because of a worrying rise in right-wing activities in the shape of the neo-Nazi NPD, as well as considerable criticism from left-wing quarters. Shades of Weimar appeared to loom on the horizon. In the event, responsible politicians decided to take effective action to ensure stable majority government: in November 1966 a ‘Grand Coalition’ between the CDU/CSU and the SPD was formed, with the CDU’s Kurt Georg Kiesinger (a member of the NSDAP from 1933 to 1945) as Chancellor, and SPD’s ex-Mayor of Berlin, Willy Brandt (who had an impeccable anti-Nazi record and was accused by some nationalists of having been a ‘traitor’ for having fought against the Germans in the Second World War), as Foreign Minister. This participation of the SPD in government opened a new period in West German political history.
Neoliberal economic policies were replaced by neo-Keynesian policies (a transition which had begun already under Erhard). The 1967 Law for Promoting Stability and Growth in the economy gave the government new tools to intervene in the economy. Tax concessions were reduced and a programme of investment in the economic infrastructure (particularly in expanding education and improving motorway and rail networks) was introduced. Co-operation among workers, employers and the state was encouraged in the so-called Concerted Action, which was held to be a means of dealing effectively with policy formation in periods of economic crisis. Particularly after 1969, when there was a coalition government between SPD and FDP, there was what has been termed a veritable ‘planning euphoria’, with a new Research and Technology Ministry established in 1972.
The supply of refugee labour had dried up with the building of the Berlin Wall. The West German economy in the 1960s became increasingly reliant on cheap ‘guest workers’ (Gastarbeiter), who were encouraged to come to Germany from the Mediterranean countries. While in 1960 foreigners represented 1.1 per cent of the workforce, by 1973 they constituted nearly 10 per cent. These foreigners were brought in with little thought for their future status or the well-being of their families. They were in the main simply seen as a supply of labour which could be exploited in low-paid, unskilled, temporary and frequently dirty or dangerous jobs which unionized German workers were unwilling to take on. Moreover, they had incurred no previous costs to Germany by way of education or training, and their tax and insurance contributions helped the German welfare system considerably. In so far as thought was given to the future of these workers, it was by and large simply assumed that young men would come and work for a few years, without dependents, and would send money home to their families, to whom they would eventually return. In the event, however, many families came and settled, and inevitably, too, many children of Gastarbeiter were born in Germany, which was more ‘home’ to them than an unfamiliar country which they rarely visited. The Gastarbeiter were to find that they were less than welcome guests in West Germany when oil crises and world recession in the 1970s and 1980s were accompanied by rising unemployment and economic difficulties. By the time of German unification, there was a very substantial Turkish population where members of the second and third generations were still not treated as equal citizens, while relatively little had been done to help members of the first generation to integrate by, for example, mastering the German language. It was difficult for people designated as short-term residents to feel fully at home in the land in which they lived and worked. A subtle racism, exacerbated by restrictive citizenship laws that meant that few immigrants were able to obtain a vote and influence politics, thus persisted even in the new democratic Federal Republic of Germany.
After the startling rates of economic growth experienced in the 1950s the German economy began to come into line with the performance of other Western economies in the 1960s. It also began to be Westernized in other ways. With a change of generations, younger entrepreneurs began to adopt American attitudes and patterns of industrial organization.1 Importantly for the firm anchoring of the new democracy, economic elites found that they could use the political system to their advantage – in contrast to the Weimar Republic, when it was viewed as a hindrance. Under the form of corporatism which developed in West Germany, employers’ organizations, unions and the farming lobby were able to meet and hammer out compromise policies which then informed the legislative process in the Bundestag. From one point of view, this could be argued to be a less than democratic influence on the parliamentary decision-making process; from another, it could be seen as an efficient means of policy-formation which sought the views of a range of organized interests in advance of any detailed legislation.
West Germany became, visibly, a very different place in the course of the 1960s. Old, ruined town centres were rebuilt, with modern buildings and pedestrian shopping precincts. Transport was improved, with rapidly expanding networks of autobahns bringing formerly isolated communities into a more modern, fast-moving society. Fewer people were working on the land, and in the old heavy industries: more were beginning to work in the service sector and in new electronics and other high-tech industries. The image of affluence was spreading: the ‘typical’ West German was no longer an emaciated ex-POW, a person lacking an arm or a leg, a prematurely aged widow in black, but rather a bloated, cigar-smoking businessman, an efficient banker or industrialist, or a fashion-conscious, smartly dressed woman. The ‘toytown’ image of new, freshly painted housing, clean streets, pleasant facilities, was developing. The charge that Germany was an ‘economic giant, but a political dwarf’ might have been partially justified; but new generations were growing up who would radically change the face of German politics. The passage was to be a stormy one.
As we shall see further (in Chapter 11), the 1960s was a decade of political polarization: it saw increasing antagonism between comfortable conservatives and the idealists of an emerging New Left. This was partly also a polarization of generations: between the older generation who had lived through the Third Reich, with their baggage of compromise and expediency and their rationalizations and repressions, and younger people who challenged the role, conduct and values of their parents’ generation. Numerous factors were involved in the cataclysmic clashes of the 1960s: wider trends in the Western world (the emergence of a youth culture characterized most succinctly by the slogan ‘make love not war’); the expansion of higher education; political issues such as American involvement in Vietnam; and in the German case the reaction against the lack of effective parliamentary opposition during the Grand Coalition, necessitating – so it seemed – the development of extra-parliamentary opposition. The clashes came to a head with the shooting of a student on a demonstration in Berlin in the summer of 1967, and the year of student revolt in 1968. In the following years, left-wing protests diversified and became more sectarian; one notorious group was to be the terrorist Red Army Faction, active throughout the 1970s.
East Germany in the 1960s
By late 1961 Ulbricht appeared to have secured the future of his form of communism in East Germany. Mass dissent had been suppressed; revisionists had been purged from the SED; the building of the Berlin Wall had ended the damaging drain of skilled manpower to the West; and the lack of effective intervention of Western powers, both in 1953 and 1961, indicated that no one was willing to make an international issue, involving violent confrontation, of the German question. Although not formally recognized as a legitimate separate state by the Federal Republic of Germany – whose ‘Hallstein doctrine’ also meant refusing diplomatic relations with any other country which did recognize the GDR – to all intents and purposes East Germany was now an established state. It was moreover one of considerable economic and military importance to the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. And to many people in East Germany, after the building of the Berlin Wall it seemed that they would simply have to make the best of a life to which there was no longer any alternative.
There was even something of an upturn in the East German economy in the 1960s, although interesting experiments in the economic sphere were not given long enough to prove themselves. There had been discussions in the later 1950s by certain GDR economists such as Professor Fritz Behrens and Dr Arne Benary about possible economic reforms, but in 1956–7 they had been officially attacked and denounced as ‘revisionists’. In 1962 discussion started in the USSR of ideas officially associated with the name of Liberman. At first, these Soviet discussions were merely reported without comment in the GDR; then they were taken up for discussion there too. On 15 January 1963, at the Sixth Congress of the SED, Ulbricht suddenly revealed reform proposals which showed the influence of the Liberman debate. The spring of 1963 saw small-scale experiments; these were discussed in the Central Committee of the SED in June 1963; and on 11 July 1963 the Council of Ministers approved the ‘Principles for the New Economic System of Planning and Management of the National Economy’. This was defined as ‘the organic combination of (a) scientifically based leadership in the economy, and (b) scientifically grounded central state planning of the long term, together with (c) the comprehensive use of material interest in the shape of the consistent system of economic levers’.2
Plate 6 Schoolchildren on their weekly ‘day in industry’ in the ‘people’s own factory’, with which their school is twinned, admire the progress board in the ‘competition for fulfilment of the plan’.
The New Economic System (NES) differed somewhat from comparable experiments in other Eastern European states in the 1960s. It did not represent a simple adoption without alteration of the Liberman principles in the USSR: profit was not to be the only economic indicator. Overall central state planning was retained; the NES in the GDR did not imply a form of market socialism along Yugoslavian lines, nor the sort of economy introduced in Hungary and attempted in Czechoslovakia. The state retained the functions of forecasting, long-term planning and overall control of the economy. There was, however, some devolution to intermediate and lower levels of economic organization, and increased flexibility. At the top stood the Central State Planning Commission (Ministry of Planning) and eight industrial ministries, which retained overall control. At the intermediate level there were eighty so-called Vereinigungen Volkseigener Betriebe (VVBs), which were organizations combining clusters of individual enterprises and which were given considerable powers of decision-making. These VVBs had general directors who co-ordinated the production of all the individual enterprises – the Volkseigene Betriebe (VEBs). Profit was to become the main criterion of performance of each production unit; hence enterprises had to manufacture products of a quality which could be sold, and to keep a close eye on production costs. Profits were to be reinvested, but there was to be a certain flexibility in reinvestment, with stimulation of research and development technology. Bonus incentives and wage differentials were introduced. Banks were given an entrepreneurial role: credit was to be given to encourage the technologically advanced sectors of industry. Market research accompanied the so-called scientific–technical revolution.
In many respects this all seemed very promising. Along with the introduction of the New Economic System went the development of what has been called an ‘achievement-oriented career society’.3 Since the building of the Berlin Wall, aspiring young technologists and managers could no longer leave to seek more promising careers in the West. The New Economic System and the stress on the application of technical expertise in production appeared to offer prospects of advancement and professional fulfilment in the East. The 1960s saw members of the technical intelligentsia increasingly being solicited for professional advice, and enjoying a relatively high social and political status. At less elevated social levels a new generation was coming to maturity who had achieved upward social mobility through state policies to sponsor the children of workers and peasants. Many of these felt they had something of a stake in a system which had facilitated their rise.4
It nevertheless remained the case that professional technical advice was not able to outweigh entirely political considerations: the introduction of the economically unfavourable Soviet trade agreement of 1966–7, for example, was a result of political pressures which over-rode economic considerations. It was also clear that there were considerable intrinsic difficulties which the New Economic System would have to overcome before it could function smoothly. Three sets of price reforms were required in the period 1964–7. There was a failure to develop an adequate long-term plan, despite the emphasis on forecasting. The lack of managerial and business administration expertise among managers, who had not been used to bearing such responsibilities, was soon revealed; yet they were not given enough time or opportunity to acquire relevant training and experience. The fixed pricing system continued to cause problems, and all sorts of dislocations in the economy emerged. There were problems associated with the hoarding of raw materials to overcome log-jams in the supply of materials from other countries in the socialist bloc. Even the introduction of wage differentials and the profit incentive did not seem to be working very well, particularly when the range of consumer goods on which income could be spent was rather limited and of inferior quality.
Many of these problems might have been overcome, had the New Economic System been given time to develop. But external political developments intervened. In particular there was a change of political climate in the USSR, and following the upheavals of the Prague Spring and the subsequent invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and the Polish troubles of 1970, a recentralization process started throughout the Eastern bloc countries. Although Ulbricht had made it quite clear throughout that, unlike the Czechoslovakian reform communists, he had no intention of allowing political decentralization or democratization to be a concomitant of economic decentralization, the Soviet Union was no longer willing to countenance further experiments in this line. Already in 1967 changes had been inaugurated with the Economic System of Socialism (ESS) which superseded the New Economic System, and in the late 1960s a process of recentralization began. The New Economic System was quietly dismantled with none of the fanfare which had accompanied its inauguration.
Meanwhile, account had been taken of the changed realities of political life in the GDR. In 1968 a new constitution was proclaimed and presented as a ‘socialist’ replacement of the earlier ‘anti-fascist’ constitution of 1949. This new constitution of the ‘socialist state of the German nation’ held that power no longer derived simply from ‘the people’ but rather from the ‘working people’ under the leadership of the Marxist–Leninist Party. Thus the leadership of the SED was for the first time explicitly enshrined in the constitution. Its leading role was justified ideologically by the notion that Marxist–Leninist theory alone provided a guide to the laws of history, and that that party was thus uniquely placed to lead the people through the necessary – and sometimes uncomfortable – transitional stages to achieve the final goal of history, truly communist society. Other amendments ensured that ‘liberal’ aspects of the 1949 constitution, such as the right to strike, and rights of free speech and assembly, were effectively abolished or formally restricted by clauses further empowering the party to decide what was or was not permissible under socialism. The differences between Ulbricht’s conception of developed socialist society, and other Marxists’ vision of the transition to the perfect communist society (the ultimate stage of human history) were marked – not to mention the differences between official ideology and non-Marxist views.
But for the time being, whatever criticisms people might privately harbour about the East German state, dissenting voices – as that of Robert Havemann – remained largely isolated and subdued. Many who were not committed Marxists now felt they had to try to work within socialism, and to confront and make the best of the constraints within which they had to operate. During the 1960s less emphatic attention was paid by the state to trying to convert people ideologically, or to repress them with overt coercion, and there was a realization of the need to achieve a ‘minimal consensus’ or at least to ‘neutralize’ those of different views.5 New modes of ‘dialogue’ were introduced, as for example with certain church leaders – who were, however, regarded with suspicion by many Christians as not genuinely representative of church views.6 However forced and limited such attempts at ‘dialogue’ were, they indicated a degree of willingness to accept lack of wholehearted commitment so long as people were prepared to conform and not undermine the system. Limited concessions were made: while conscription was introduced in 1962, in 1964 a form of alternative service was made possible for those whose consciences would not allow them to bear arms. But the course was a rocky one: a brief period of seeming cultural liberalization was again followed, from 1965, by a renewed clampdown in the cultural sphere. Whatever the gestures towards economic improvements, career incentives, and less overt repression, East Germany in the 1960s was a place which many of its citizens would not freely have chosen to live in, had they had the choice. And at the beginning of the 1970s, with the normalization of relations between the two Germanies, it increasingly looked as if the initially impermanent division was one which was there to stay.
Ostpolitik and Mutual Recognition
The relations between the two Germanies were transformed by the so-called Ostpolitik of Willy Brandt’s SPD-led government after 1969. Against strong conservative opposition, Brandt pushed through negotiations which regularized relations between the two Germanies, entailing mutual recognition and an amelioration of conditions for furthering human contacts between the two parts of the divided nation. These efforts were criticized, both at the time and subsequently, as a form of ‘appeasement’ towards communists, from which the latter benefited while giving very little, if anything, in return. The argument ran that the boundaries produced by aggression were being accepted, that money was being sent which in improving people’s conditions merely served to prop up an illegitimate state, and that supposed concessions on the human rights front were basically ignored in practice. Against this, supporters of the policy saw it as merely a realistic acceptance of an essentially unalterable situation, and as a means to improve relations and make the borders more permeable for individual human contacts, by a policy of ‘little steps’.
The groundwork had already been laid when Brandt was Foreign Minister in Kiesinger’s government. In the West German elections of September 1969 the CDU/CSU won a total of 242 seats, the SPD 224 and the FDP 30. The FDP had taken a somewhat leftwards move when at the end of 1967 Walter Scheel had replaced Erich Mende as leader. After three weeks of bargaining, in 1969 a coalition was formed between the SPD and the FDP, with Willy Brandt as West German Chancellor. This marked a major step in West German political history: after two decades of conservative dominance, a Social Democrat was in charge of government in a social–liberal coalition.
Brandt was also in many respects a unique individual for West Germany to have as Chancellor. Born illegitimate, as a young man Brandt had opposed Nazism, fled Nazi Germany and fought in the Norwegian resistance. With his modest social origins and anti-Nazi record he marked a real break with the compromised pasts of the former NSDAP member, Chancellor Kiesinger, and of President Lübke (who resigned early and did not stand for a second term of office because of stories about his role in the construction of Nazi concentration camps, or slave labour barracks). A former Mayor of Berlin, Brandt also had experience of divided Germany’s position in the front line of Europe, and had been forced to witness the construction of the Berlin Wall. A man of strong moral convictions, Brandt was arguably more successful in his foreign policies than he was on the domestic front. Whatever the controversies surrounding the end of his chancellorship in 1974, as well as the end of his period chairing the SPD (in 1987), Brandt’s moral stature introduced a new chord to the difficult politics of post-Nazi democracy.
Brandt’s period in office is chiefly noted for his drive to achieve some sort of ‘normalization’ of relations between the two states in divided Germany. This initiative coincided with a period of détente between the superpowers, in which it suited both the Americans and the Russians (who both had preoccupations in Asia) to defuse the previously volatile situation in central Europe. Preliminary meetings were held between Willy Brandt and East German Prime Minister Willi Stoph in Erfurt in the GDR (where the East German public greeted Willy Brandt with notable enthusiasm) in March 1970, and in Kassel in West Germany in May 1970. In August 1970 West Germany signed the Moscow Treaty with Russia, which guaranteed the inviolability of the Polish-German border, underlining the USSR’s dominance in the region; and in December 1970 West Germany formally recognized this border with Poland in the Warsaw Treaty. In 1971 the ageing Ulbricht, who was far from being a convinced supporter of Ostpolitik, was prematurely removed from office and replaced as leader of the SED by the more obliging Erich Honecker. In September 1971 the erstwhile allies of the Second World War were able to reach agreement in a Four-Power Accord on Berlin, in which they regularized certain arrangements with regard to Berlin’s status and agreed to resolve future disputes by negotiation rather than resorting to force. The way now seemed to be clear for a treaty on the relations between the two Germanies.
There was, however, a problem of serious opposition to Ostpolitik in West German conservative circles. To them it appeared to be an unconstitutional acceptance of the permanent division of Germany, given the explicit commitment in the Basic Law to work towards German reunification. Some FDP members defected from the coalition to vote with the CDU/CSU, and CDU leader Rainer Barzel moved a vote of no confidence in Brandt’s chancellorship. This was lost by two votes, and various rumours were rife concerning scandalous bribes and corruption. In September 1972 Brandt made the second use of this constitutional measure, engineering the dissolution of Parliament and the calling of new elections by instructing SPD members to refrain from supporting his government in his own vote of no confidence. This tactic duly succeeded, and elections were called for 19 November 1972. The elections were fought largely on the Ostpolitik issue, and saw an unprecedented 91 per cent turnout. It was clear that the electorate were more interested in recognition and improvement of German–German relations than in taking a principled stand on reunification. For the first time, the SPD won more seats than the CDU/ CSU, with 229 and 225 respectively – and this despite a vilification campaign partially funded by far-right circles determined to oust Brandt from the Chancellorship. The FDP rose from thirty to forty-two seats; and the NPD, which had loomed so alarmingly in recent local state elections, revealed its essential irrelevance on the national scene by polling only 0.6 per cent and failing to gain national representation. With a slightly more comfortable parliamentary margin Brandt was able to go back into Parliament and conclude, in December 1972, the Basic Treaty between what West Germany now recognized as the ‘two German states in one German nation’. This Treaty was ratified (again in the face of considerable opposition) in May 1973. In September 1973 both Germanies were accepted as full members of the United Nations.
Although the Hallstein doctrine (of breaking off diplomatic relations with states which recognized East Germany) was renounced with the signing of the Basic Treaty, West Germany still refused to view East Germany as a completely foreign state. There was to be, for example, an exchange of ‘representatives’ rather than ‘ambassadors’; and East Germans leaving for the West still could automatically claim West German citizenship. Constitutionally, West Germany viewed the border between the two Germanies as in principle no more than a border between two West German Länder – although in practice, of course, this highly fortified frontier was of a very different order. The West German constitutional commitment to reunification was not abandoned, but the focus switched to working for an increased permeability of the two states, with improved human contacts and communications between citizens of each Germany, to keep alive the sense of a shared national identity. By contrast, in East Germany, as the physical barriers changed, so there was a conscious policy of cultural Abgrenzung and stressing of differences in GDR national identity from the identity of the West German capitalist state. In the period after mutual recognition relations between the two Germanies developed a certain dynamic of their own, but so too did the divergences between the two Germanies become more apparent. Until late 1989 few thought that the issue of reunification would return to become a serious question of contemporary politics. Rather, it was simply a sacred cow to which lip-service could be paid while recognizing the reality, and likely permanence, of division.
West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s
Recognition of the division of Germany meant a twofold development: on the one hand, the two Germanies diverged further as societies, as their common historical past receded ever further; on the other hand, they in some ways came closer together, as communications between the two states improved, and as the dynamic of inner-German relations developed in ways sometimes at odds with the interests of the superpowers.
Willy Brandt remained Chancellor of West Germany until 1974. In this year, a serious spy scandal became the immediate occasion for his resignation. One of his senior aides, Günter Guillaume, was revealed as an East German spy. Brandt was forced to resign – although many suggested that there may have been additional personal or health reasons behind this decision. Brandt was succeeded by Helmut Schmidt, a smooth Chancellor with excellent English, a certain distrust of and independence from American policy, and a generally conservative approach within Social Democracy. Schmidt’s chancellorship, in coalition with the FDP (with elections in 1976 and1980) was confronted with difficulties on several fronts.
The left-wing movements of the 1960s had partly dissolved, and partly diversified. While many former radicals became mainstream citizens, others retired into retreatist subcultures or sectarian squabbles; but a few became terrorists. The Red Army Faction, or Baader–Meinhof gang (named after two of its prominent members, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof), organized a series of physical attacks on the West German ‘system’. These began with offences against property – such as the bombing of department stores, as a statement against capitalist materialism – but developed into the systematic murdering of individuals prominent in economic and political life. Just as the Federal Republic appeared to be gaining a new reputation as a politically stable, ‘model’ democracy, which could begin to develop more of an independent role on the international political stage, a small minority of people were challenging the very essence of the system and provoking it into measures which would justify their criticisms of repression. While their acts of assassination could in no way be justified, new controversies flared as some liberals attempted to criticize the state’s responses to the terrorist threat. With wider (and initially unrelated) measures to weed out ‘radicals’ from public service employment, there remained a degree of uneasiness about the nature of West German democracy.
Terrorism was not the only domestic problem for the Schmidt government. The 1970s saw energy crises, occasioned by the spiral-ling of oil prices internationally. The attempt to replace oil by nuclear power had political implications, and Schmidt’s relatively right-wing form of Social Democracy came under attack from left-wing Social Democrats. Nuclear power was not the only issue provoking protest: the stationing of nuclear missiles in Germany became a major bone of political contention in the late 1970s, with the USA in 1979 deciding to station nuclear missiles in Europe (including Britain). Protest movements in favour of peace and disarmament, as well as about environmental concerns and the dangers of destruction from methods of production, began to proliferate.
While the Schmidt government was having problems with its left-wing and grassroots, it was also experiencing strains with its more right-wing coalition partner, the FDP, largely because of problems in the economy. An ageing population, in which relatively fewer people of working age were having to support the pension schemes of relatively more retired people who were living longer, gave rise in any case to problems in relation to the benefits system; these were exacerbated by the general economic recession which set in during the 1970s. Although the West German economy performed relatively well in comparison with, for example, the British, there was nevertheless some increase in unemployment and inflation, giving rise to serious frictions in the coalition over the budget. In 1982 the FDP decided to switch its allegiance away from the SPD to the CDU/CSU. In a constructive vote of no confidence, Schmidt was voted out as Chancellor and Helmut Kohl of the CDU/CSU voted in.
There was considerable unease in the country that a small party, commanding only a minimal fraction of the popular vote, should be able to change so radically the complexion of the government without reference to the general will of the people. After considerable debate and consideration (including reference to the constitutional court at Karlsruhe) a new vote of no confidence was engineered which the new Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, arranged to lose, such that the President could dissolve Parliament and call new elections in the spring of 1983. The election was won by the conservatives, and the coalition of FDP with CDU/CSU was confirmed in office. This change of government in 1982–3 was generally known at the time as die Wende, the turning-point (although the term was subsequently reappropriated for the far greater historical turning-point of 1989–90): after thirteen years of social-democratic government, Germany entered a new phase of conservative dominance, confirmed by a second election victory in the 1987 elections.
With the accession of the CDU government came a jettisoning of Keynesian economic policies. Once the budgetary deadlock of the SPD–FDP government had been broken, the CDU–FDP government introduced measures to control inflation and stimulate investment while allowing unemployment rates to remain relatively constant at an uncomfortable figure of around 8–10 per cent. This was exacerbated by the continuing problem of the now very much less than welcome Gastarbeiter. Although the overall proportion of foreign workers fell slightly to around 8 per cent in 1980, in some areas – such as the traditionally working-class Kreuzberg district in Berlin – they constituted as much as 50 per cent of the inhabitants. Furthermore, in the course of the 1980s a stream of ethnic German refugees came into the Federal Republic from Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union – even before the stream became a flood, with hundreds of thousands of East Germans entering West Germany in the summer and autumn of 1989. While the budgetary deficit was successfully cut, growth rates in the 1980s remained relatively low (around 2.5 per cent in 1984). Nevertheless, with low inflation, the West German economy certainly performed a great deal better than the British economy in the 1980s. There was a continuing shift in emphasis away from the old heavy industries of the Ruhr to a new stress on the microelectronic industries, concentrated notably around Stuttgart, Frankfurt and Munich. Furthermore, West Germany was at the fore-front of initiatives with respect to closer European economic and monetary integration in the context of the European Community. While Mrs Thatcher’s British government dragged its feet with respect to European union, Germany played a key role. This was of course to be complicated by the reopening of the German question in late 1989, only two years before the projected institution of a single European market in 1992.
During the 1980s the SPD was provoked into considerable rethinking of its position. This re-evaluation was related to the fact that some people who formerly supported the SPD, as well as many new young voters, were switching their allegiance to the new ecological and environmentalist party, the Greens. In 1983 the Greens gained national representation, and even held the balance of power and participated in government in some Länder. They had, however, their own internal dissensions, with splits between ‘realists’ (Realos) and ‘fundamentalists’ (Fundis), as well as differences of aims and emphasis between the ‘green Greens’ (ecologists), ‘brown Greens’ (right-wing defenders of the German Heimat) and ‘red Greens’ (anti-growth socialists of a ‘small is beautiful’ persuasion). The conservative and free-democratic government parties were also not without their own problems. They were beset by a series of scandals, ranging from serious allegations of financial corruption in party finances (in the so-called Flick Affair which necessitated the resignation and trial of certain prominent politicians), through the puzzle of the murky election campaign and mysterious death in 1987 of the CDU Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein, Uwe Barschel, to the series of more mundane political banana skins to which Helmut Kohl was prone. At the same time, widespread, vocal concern for such issues as the ‘death of the forests’ due to acid rain, the implications of the national census, the scandals relating to nuclear waste disposal, and American and Soviet policies towards nuclear weapons in Europe, continued to dominate the public agenda in the 1980s.
East Germany under Honecker
The period from Honecker’s taking office in 1971 up to the mid-1970s was in many ways promising. Ostpolitik had resulted finally in international recognition for the GDR, which was now able to take up formal relations with many foreign countries, including the USA. In the sphere of culture Honecker announced a policy of ‘no taboos’ under socialism, which helped promote a ferment of new cultural activity (or the release of previously suppressed energies). On the economic front, while the economy was recentralized and while political ideologists regained predominance over technical specialists, pragmatic consumer-orientation and concern with material satisfaction began to prevail. Utopian ideas of ‘jam tomorrow’, prevalent in the Ulbricht era, gave way to attempts to ensure more bread and butter, and even cake, today. The phase of ‘actually existing socialism’ was recognized to be a relatively long-lasting one, and not a brief transitional stage; moreover, it was one with certain social tensions which could not be resolved by being ignored or denied, but which had rather to be faced, examined, and dealt with in an appropriate manner.
Economically, after the recentralization which took place in Ulbricht’s last years as leader, further shifts took place under Honecker’s regime in the balance between overall central planning and direction of the economy on the one hand, and a flexibility of decision-making utilizing steering mechanisms at a more decentralized level on the other.
Following economic difficulties in the mid- and later 1970s, the 1980s saw the replacement of VVBs by combines. These linked production processes with technological research and development and with market research, in order to enhance overall efficiency and productivity. While ultimate control and supervision remained with the central state organs, both direct and indirect steering mechanisms, including the use of profit incentives, operated at the enterprise level.
Further changes also took place in the sphere of agriculture, with reorganization starting in the early 1970s. Larger, more specialized units were created, and specialization continued in the 1980s, with different units focusing on crop-farming or animal husbandry, for example. Planning and inter-farm co-operation was aided by co-operation councils, which operated at an intermediate level between district councils and individual farms. Farming in the GDR was relatively productive and advanced in its degree of mechanization: the visible contrast between serried ranks of tractors or combine harvesters moving in efficient formation across East German fields and the lonely horse-drawn carts and ploughs ubiquitous in the small (yet still quite productive) peasant agriculture of neighbouring Poland, was striking. East Germany achieved a high degree of agricultural self-sufficiency; its principal imports were grain and animal feed.
Despite certain difficulties the economy under Honecker was relatively successful, at least in comparison with certain of its East European neighbours. There were advantages and disadvantages in the GDR’s economic situation in the 1970s and 1980s. The GDR was heavily reliant on foreign trade, particularly for imports of fuel and raw materials. It was thus highly sensitive to world energy prices and was adversely affected by the energy crises of the 1970s. Although about 30 per cent of the GDR’s total foreign trade was with the developed market economies of the West, it imported a considerable proportion of its energy at unfavourable prices from the USSR, particularly oil, coal and gas. The main source of energy was lignite (‘brown coal’, which emits an unpleasantly dusty and characteristic smoke), although there were moves in the direction of developing nuclear energy supplies. Lignite supplied around 70 per cent of the GDR’s primary energy requirements in the mid-1980s. Conversely there were also advantages associated with the GDR’s reliance on foreign trade. Nearly a third of the GDR’s trade with developed Western market economies was with the Federal Republic of Germany, including West Berlin; and this trade was based on very favourable conditions. As a result of agreements between the two Germanies there were no trade barriers or external tariffs; hence the GDR was in practice a secret extra member of the European Economic Community (EEC). There were automatic credits for trade deficits, and the GDR was often able to overcome East European bottlenecks in supplies with efficient deliveries of material from West Germany. West Germany also made sizeable loans available to East Germany. The arrangements were favourable economically to the GDR, while the Federal Republic sought political gains (for example in ease of visiting, or for improved human rights) from its close economic links with the GDR. The Federal Republic was affluent enough to want to pay for improved relationships with the GDR and for improved conditions for its people (who were officially considered by the West German government to have ‘German’ citizenship, valid also in West Germany); the East German economy benefited sufficiently from its links with the West for the East German government to be prepared to pay the political price of some dependency. As a result of its unique links to West Germany, the GDR was able to weather relatively smoothly some of the economic storms experienced in the early 1980s by other East European economies.
In the 1980s the emphasis was on such fields as microelectronics, electrical engineering, computer production, in addition to traditional strengths in such areas as the chemical industry and vehicle manufacture. However, in all these fields the GDR lagged significantly behind Western developments, in both quantitative and qualitative respects. Moreover, it paid little attention to its serious pollution problems and the consequent adverse effects on public health and on the environment. While voices in West Germany were increasingly strident in their complaints about the death of the forests, the problems of pollution were downplayed in the infinitely more polluted East. The true extent of the problem was only revealed in Round Table discussions, after the East German revolution, at the beginning of 1990. There were also signs that despite its relatively good performance in East European terms, the GDR economy was in deteriorating shape: despite some difficulties with the statistics, it is clear that growth rates halved between 1984 and 1988, well before the deleterious effects of mass emigration in the latter half of 1989. But the implications of economic performance varied with political circumstances; until the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 most East Germans were prepared to put up with their situation, contenting themselves with the thought that things were not as bad as elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Honecker made a concerted effort to establish the GDR, not merely as a viable economic entity, but also as an accepted feature of the political landscape. The foundations had to a considerable degree been accomplished by Ostpolitik, but this opened new risks and opportunities. A new constitution introduced in 1974 was characterized by a determined emphasis on a GDR national identity, a symbolic separation from notions of Germany and German. The GDR was proclaimed to be linked in undying friendship with its partner (and big brother!), the Soviet Union. This special relationship was formally sealed by a friendship treaty between the GDR and the USSR in October 1975. At the same time, the role of the party became more prominent, against Ulbricht’s more pragmatic approaches. And with the new broom in charge, there initially appeared to be a promise of liberalization on the cultural front. International recognition could perhaps permit an easing of domestic repression, and coaxing as well as coercing people into having greater pride in what now seemed a securely established state.
From the mid-1970s, however, it became apparent that tensions and strains had not been successfully resolved. In 1976 a renewed period of cultural repression was inaugurated with the exile of Wolf Biermann, a guitarist and singer who was refused permission to reenter the GDR after a permitted concert tour in the West. A number of writers, artists and intellectuals protested against this enforced exile, only to find repressive measures directed against them as well. In the later 1970s a number of GDR writers left for the West. At the same time the energy crises affecting Western economies were having a comparable impact on eastern bloc countries. Rises in the standard of living faltered and the East German economy appeared to stagnate. Moreover, in the late 1970s and early 1980s a new era of frosty relations and even a second Cold War appeared to be developing between the superpowers, the USA and USSR. Following the American and Soviet decisions to station nuclear missiles in Europe, the GDR regime had to agree, reluctantly, in 1984 to the stationing of Soviet nuclear missiles on East German soil. The one area in which domestic politics appeared to be becoming more relaxed and tolerant was in relation to the church. Following a meeting between leaders of the Protestant churches and the state in 1978, a new accord was reached which permitted Christians greater latitude of activity and practice in the GDR. The relative toleration of dissenting views, at least until the mid-1980s, may have made some contribution to the political stability of the GDR in the early 1980s, although in the longer term it clearly played a role in the growth of dissent leading up to 1989.7
The pragmatism and the odd combinations of repression and relative toleration which had characterized the Honecker era were by the mid-1980s looking vulnerable. The accession to the Soviet leadership in 1985 of Mikhail Gorbachev, with his ideas of perestroika and glasnost, changed the situation radically. Gorbachev’s responses to major economic and political challenges, at home and abroad, unintentionally opened up opportunities for reformist movements in other countries of the eastern bloc, particularly in Poland, with its growing Solidarity movement, as well as Hungary and Czechoslovakia. The initial official responses in the GDR to discussions unleashed by Gorbachev ranged from the cool and relatively dismissive to the formally friendly and assenting. Yet among certain groups in the East German population expectations were raised of a further democratization of East German politics and society. Instead, the events of late 1987 and early 1988 – with arrests and imprisonment or exile for certain activists – suggested the start of a period of renewed repression.
Meanwhile, relationships between the two Germanies had been developing with a certain dynamic of their own, partly independent of, partly related to, the dynamics of superpower relations. In the period of superpower hostility – partially provoked by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan – the two Germanies were nevertheless pursuing a form of mini-détente and rapprochement of their own. Yet a visit to West Germany planned by Honecker for September 1984 had to be called off at the last minute, following certain blunders in the West and pressures from the USSR. In the changed international context of 1987 when, under Gorbachev’s leadership, relationships with the USA had markedly improved, the postponed visit of Honecker was finally able to take place. The relationship between the two Germanies in the 1980s was designed to reduce tensions and improve conditions for all Germans. Favourable loan, credit and trade agreements were reached, benefiting the East German economy. There were improvements in travel and communications between the two states, although there was a 50 per cent drop in the number of visitors to East Germany after the compulsory currency exchange was increased following the Polish disturbances of 1980.8 In 1987 there was an amnesty of prisoners in the GDR. After a wave of officially sanctioned emigrations in 1984, 1987 witnessed an unprecedented number of permitted short visits to the West by East Germans. According to the official ‘Address on the state of the nation’ by Helmut Kohl, there were five million visits by East Germans to West Germany in 1987, of which approximately one million were by citizens under pensionable age, travelling on ‘urgent family business’. A few years earlier the figures had been 1.3 million visits by pensioners and only 40,000 family visits.9 (The concept of ‘urgent family business’ was also reinterpreted with some considerable elasticity.)
In the context of international negotiations on the stationing or removal of certain nuclear missiles from Europe, the two Germanies had very specific and unique interests in common. Both were particularly vulnerable as front-line states in a divided world. In both Germanies there were strong movements for a nuclear-free central European zone. But the events which were to change fundamentally the relationships between the two Germanies – and the very existence of the German Democratic Republic – occurred with the revolutionary upheavals of the autumn of 1989.
Before considering these dramatic developments, the following chapters will analyse in more detail the sociopolitical dynamics of the two Germanies, and assess the degree to which their societies and cultures had diverged. In this way, a deeper understanding can be gained of the conditions upon which each country’s stability was predicated for over forty years, the factors contributing to the ultimate demise of the East German communist state, and the nature of the two rather different Germanies which in 1990 were to em bark on a process of unification, with all its attendant tensions and difficulties.