Two misconceptions are frequently found in accounts of democratic and dictatorial regimes. The first is that the former are essentially based on the active support of the majority of the populace; the record of Weimar democracy should serve to indicate the shortcomings of such an approach. The second is that the latter are effectively based on coercion, repression, and that, if they are indeed brought down by revolution, then this is based in the popular (and usually material) discontent of the masses. Both misconceptions deflect attention from a factor of far greater significance in regime stability or instability: the question of dissent and opposition. Clearly dissent and opposition must be viewed in connection with other factors, including the international situation, and the cohesion and strategies of response of ruling groups. We shall see in due course the particular combination of factors which together served to bring down communist rule in the GDR in 1989–90. In this chapter the focus will be on the ways in which dissent and opposition in the two Germanies developed in the period from 1949 to the beginning of 1989.
The political systems of the two Germanies were obviously very different in the degrees to which they tolerated the expression of dissenting views. Although there were some limits on freedom of expression and political organization in the Federal Republic, people could express their views openly so long as they were not directly hostile to the democratic values of the constitution. The restriction on permissible views and activities was greater in East Germany, and ‘dissent’, as defined by the state, therefore covered a far wider range of opinions. What is interesting about both Germanies is that, in contrast to the unstable Weimar Republic, they were – for forty years, much longer than the twenty-seven years of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich put together – relatively successful in incorporating and defusing dissent, and ensuring that it did not develop into serious, potentially destabilizing, opposition to the regime. This began to change in the GDR in the 1980s. While the effective challenge posed to the communist regime in 1989 was in large measure only made possible by the radical changes in the Soviet Union and its European and global policies, the character of the ‘gentle revolution’ was crucially shaped by the ways in which movements for reform had been developed in the preceding decade.
The nature of ‘dissent’ and ‘opposition’ in East Germany changed over time, as a result of a variety of factors. Very crudely, one might propose a dual form of periodization as follows. On the one hand, there was a development from a rejection of the system as a whole, in the 1950s, to more qualified attempts to reform and improve the system from within, by the 1980s. At the same time, there was a development through three distinct phases: from widespread opposition in the 1950s, to mass accommodation combined with isolated intellectual dissent in the 1960s and 1970s, to a proliferation of principled dissent in the 1980s which was able, finally, to join with popular disaffection to challenge the regime (weakened for other, external reasons) in late 1989. We shall deal with this final phase of revolution in Chapter 13, below; here, it is important to establish the earlier currents of development.
It is also important to have in mind at the outset the varieties of disagreement with the regime. We shall look at each of these in more detail in a moment, but it is worth introducing the range covered by the terms dissent (disagreement with prevailing orthodoxy) and opposition (working actively to transform the situation).
From the – actually rather limited – June Uprising of 1953 until the upheavals of 1989, there were no mass protests which might warrant the term ‘opposition’. There were individuals opposing Ulbricht’s and Honecker’s policies from within, although these posed little serious challenge from the late 1950s to the 1980s; there were also expressions of a range of coherent worldviews which differed explicitly from official Marxist–Leninist ideology and which might be categorized as ‘dissent’ in one form or another. These views included the humanistic Marxism of a number of intellectuals pursuing what has been called the tradition of the ‘Third Way’; the religious views of the relatively large number of practising Protestants and the smaller group of Catholics living in the GDR; and, eventually, the diffuse but unorthodox views of a growing number of peace activists, environmentalists and adherents of an ‘alternative’ culture in the 1980s. Although the regime tried frequently to downplay dissenting views and denounce them as Western-instigated or inspired, none of these three broad groups (each of which contained many differences of opinion) could be simply interpreted as supported by or supporters of the West. Frequently they were as critical of the consumerist materialism and social inequalities of capitalist society as they were of the bureaucratic authoritarianism of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the East. They were generally seeking, not to abandon the East for a presumed Utopia in the West, but rather to transform the East into more desirable directions from within. There were also, of course, considerable numbers of disaffected GDR citizens who simply wanted to leave; and even larger numbers who engaged in a variety of demonstrative acts, such as minor unofficial strikes (downing tools, walking off the job), daubing graffiti, making political jokes.
The ways in which the regime responded to dissenting groups and individuals to a considerable degree determined the sort of political impact they were able to have. Equally, however, the extent of impact of dissent depended on the relative strength and strategies of the regime at different times.
The mass strike of 1953 was largely an affair of industrial workers in particular cities and towns; it had very little bourgeois, peasant or intellectual support. Its failure may be partly attributed to its lack of clear leadership and organization, and partly to the fact that the East German regime was at this time able to rely on the support of Moscow in suppressing it, if necessary by force. Lacking a broad social base, lacking an organizational network and facing the prospect of forceful suppression, it remained merely an expression of discontent with no real prospect of success. As we have seen, the consequences were in fact very much the opposite of any intended outcome, with the exception of the retraction of the raised work norms – which had been the immediate cause of the strike. Until 1961 there in any event remained the escape hole through Berlin; thereafter, many workers simply came to terms with and made the best of their living conditions in the East. From 1953 until 1989 very little was heard of ‘the masses’ in the context of explicit challenges to the East German regime. The constant splutterings of protest in strikes and acts of industrial sabotage were kept sufficiently quiet for Westerners to be unaware of this widespread working-class discontent. Similarly, the protests – predominantly on the part of young people, but by no means limited to students and intellectuals – against the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 were suppressed rapidly, before they could attract much attention in the West. Research since 1990 has revealed that popular discontent was on a far more extensive scale than previously imagined. However it remained largely isolated, spontaneous and easily suppressed – until crucial changes in both the character and context of dissent in the 1980s.1
After the exclusion of ‘Third Way’ Marxists from the higher ranks of the SED in the purges of the 1950s, Marxist intellectual dissenters had in turn had very little popular support: they remained isolated figures, producing varying diagnoses of East Germany’s ills and proposing assorted solutions which found little general resonance. Their lack of widespread popularity, beyond small circles of intellectuals, becomes comprehensible if one devotes a moment of attention to their ideas.
Wolfgang Harich, who was arrested with others in 1956, elaborated an authoritarian vision of a ‘utopia of an ascetic police state’.2 His views, which emphasized discipline, sacrifice, regimentation, a puritanical society concerned with ecology rather than economic growth, did not accord with the materialistic concerns of the working classes in the 1950s. He did however argue for an extension of democracy and the rather inconsistent programme of his group reflected the flurry of hurried thinking which took place in the aftermath of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which denounced Stalinism to a surprised world.3
Robert Havemann, who was a Professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin and Director of the Physical-Chemical Institute from 1950 to 1964, did enjoy large and enthusiastic audiences at his lectures on general philosophical and political questions in 1963. However, his ideas and popularity were too much for the authorities, and he was removed from his positions in 1964 and his activities were increasingly restricted. He spent the closing years of his life under virtual house arrest. (He had been imprisoned by the Nazis in Brandenburg Prison, along with Erich Honecker, and it has been suggested that he received relatively lenient treatment as a result of Honecker’s sympathy for a former anti-Nazi prison comrade.) Havemann was a committed communist who opposed both the Stalinist perversion of communism and what he saw as a certain legacy of Nazism in the GDR. He placed great hopes on the reforming Czech leader Alexander Dubcˇek, and the Prague Spring of 1968, only to be disappointed as Warsaw Pact tanks joined Soviet forces in suppressing the Czechoslovak reforms. Havemann was in favour of the extension of democracy, freedom of the press, and felt market mechanisms were the most efficient means of running the economy. According to Havemann, since under capitalism the market (which was in any event regulated and manipulated, not ‘free’) served the interests of capital, why should it not serve the interest of the whole community under socialism? Havemann viewed contemporary socialism as a case of an only half-completed revolution: the state, rather than the people themselves, had replaced capitalists and landowners; it was a dictatorship of functionaries rather than rule by the people. Havemann argued for a combination of economic democracy and democratic socialism, which he felt went together.4
These views were not shared by a critical intellectual of the 1970s, Rudolf Bahro. Working quietly in East German industrial bureaucracy, he secretly wrote a major analysis of the shortcomings of East German socialism, entitled The Alternative in Eastern Europe, parts of which were published in Der Spiegel in 1977. On 30 June 1978 Bahro was sentenced to eight years in prison, but left for West Germany after a deal arranging this in 1979. In West Germany he became a prominent member of the Greens in the early 1980s. Bahro’s critique of ‘actually existing socialism’ arguably aroused more interest in the West than the East.
In contrast to Havemann, Bahro was not in favour of attaching liberal or market features to a modified form of socialism (thus differing also from Czech and Polish reform communists). Bahro argued against what he saw as unnecessary consumerism, and in favour of a ‘transformed structure of needs’ – again something which found little support among the East German working classes. For Bahro, the main problem in socialist societies was domination by the state and the bureaucracy. Marx and Engels failed to give adequate consideration to the problem of the state; and the fact that the first communist revolution took place in pre-capitalist tsarist Russia, which required a revolution from above for rapid industrialization, meant that tsarist bureaucracy and autocracy were simply replaced by communist bureaucracy and Leninist party dictatorship. Bahro also diagnosed problems with the mental and physical division of labour. Bahro’s prescriptions included: a redivision of labour so that no one would be stultified in their development; general education for all; the spread of information and discussion of alternatives; increased participation in the formation of the ‘general will’; and a new ‘League of Communists’ which would, through public debate, reflect the emancipatory interests of all society. Bahro argued against consumerism and the definition of ‘progress’ as economic growth, and in favour of small-scale associations, with society as an association of communes. There would in Bahro’s vision be a National Assembly arising from a Federation of Free Associations in which all could participate. While Bahro’s analysis of the problems of bureaucracy and the authoritarian state had much to recommend it, few considered Bahro’s prescriptions to be plausible, workable, or likely to command much popular enthusiasm.5
In the event, neither Bahro nor earlier dissenting intellectuals in the GDR appeared to command much popular support. Very different mass political orientations were, however, to emerge in the 1980s.
To understand the proliferation of principled dissent in the 1980s it is important to analyse the role of the Protestant churches. These both provided the umbrella for the spreading of dissent, and significantly shaped the character of that dissent. Yet the churches’ role was by no means a predetermined or preordained one: it only developed gradually, in the context of significantly changing relations between church and state in the GDR. To some extent, it was the state that made possible what ultimately proved to be the essentially subversive role of the church; but the state only responded to certain of the overtures and activities of a church which was redefining its role. The development is a complex and nuanced one, which can only be briefly sketched here.6
The area covered by East Germany was, historically, predominantly Protestant and in 1950 it was estimated that there were approximately 14.8 million Protestants in the GDR. From 1964 official censuses did not include statistics on religion, but in 1978 the churches estimated that there were 7.9 million Protestants and 1.2 million Catholics in the GDR. Of these, perhaps one half were actually professing, personally committed Christians. The state’s policies towards Christianity changed markedly over time.
Under Ulbricht, Christians suffered considerable harassment and personal difficulties, and there were violent attacks on Christian beliefs. Mention has been made (see Chapter 7) of the persecution of members of the Junge Gemeinde and the uses of the Jugendweihe to discriminate against Christian children in school. But the organization and material possessions of the churches had survived the transition from Nazi to communist Germany relatively unscathed, and church institutions continued to play an important role in society which could not be easily extinguished. Although attempts were made during the 1960s to improve dialogue between Christians and Marxists, the real transformation in church–state relations came in the 1970s.
After giving up a common organizational framework with the West German churches and setting up their own East German Bund der Evangelischen Kirchen (League of Protestant Churches) in 1969, East German Protestants were able to pursue new avenues in line with the famous 1971 formulation of Bishop Schönherr that they wanted to be ‘a Church, not alongside, not against, but rather within Socialism’. In the course of the changed, post-Ostpolitik situation of the 1970s, it became clear to Honecker that there were advantages to be gained by the state from closer cooperation and better relations with the church.
A frank discussion between church and state leaders in 1978 (the so-called Spitzengespräch, or summit talks) regularized relations between church and state on a relatively harmonious footing. Official policy was now that Christians and Marxists should work ‘hand in hand’, together striving to achieve a better society in the interests of humanity.
In the 1980s the churches played a considerable role in social welfare activities in the GDR – running well-equipped and well-staffed hospitals, homes for the elderly and the handicapped, nursery and day-care centres, and the like. Additionally, there were certain legitimizing and stabilizing functions from the state’s point of view. Official toleration of Christian views and stress on a harmonious partnership between Christians and Marxists helped to incorporate and harness the energies of an important minority of the population; it also looked good to human rights activists in both West and East. Partnership in certain projects with the church, such as the restoration of ecclesiastical buildings of historic importance (the most well known being the Berlin Dom), or the celebration of religious–historical anniversaries (such as the Luther quincentenary of 1983) brought much needed foreign currency to the state in the form both of West German subventions and increased tourism. It also arguably helped to create a common, all-encompassing sense of national identity, defusing a potential symbolic opposition between church and atheist regime, society and alien state, as in the rather different configuration in neighbouring Poland. The church, for its part, was interested in maintaining good relations with the more powerful state, in order to be able to pursue its specifically religious activities, as well as engaging in wider social and pastoral care. In the new partnership the church was allowed increased use of the media for religious broadcasts, and was able to build new churches and operate community centres in new housing estates. It is difficult to evaluate the overall effects of church activities in the reduction of social tensions and alleviation of social problems, in addition to the more tangible contribution made by church institutions and funds to the welfare system, but it may have been considerable.
However, this partnership – in which the state was undoubtedly the dominant partner, with the final word on the conditions and parameters, but in which the church was increasingly important – was not without risks on both sides. The church constituted the only relatively independent organization which was permitted in the GDR; as such, it provided space, both literally and metaphorically, for the free discussion of all sorts of dissenting ideas. Church buildings were made use of for unofficial peace demonstrations, and for concerts by singers with songs critical of the regime. Many of those using the church as an institutional meeting-ground were far from being Christians themselves. Thus, the state risked permitting a haven for the development of dissident views within a strong organizational framework.
On the other hand, there were also associated risks for the church; and on balance, in the early 1980s the responses of church leaders to radical unrest in fact served to moderate potential opposition and operated in the interests of the state. The church was afraid of being ‘hijacked’ by non-Christians, some of whose aims were congruent with those of the church – as in the question of working for peace – but whose radical actions threatened to jeopardize the fragile balance of church–state relations to the detriment of the church’s overall position in the GDR. (It might be added that, in the course of the later 1970s and 1980s, these also included a significant number of Stasi informers, some of whom played a role in pushing dissident groups into more extreme actions.) The church leadership thus stepped in on a number of occasions to influence strategy and tactics of dissenters, or to withdraw its protection if it felt actions were becoming too extreme. The church acted as a moderator between the regime and dissenters, often attracting bitter criticisms from the latter for being too conservative and cautious in its approach. Moreover, when any particular case of church pressure on the regime to influence policy, prior to 1989, is investigated, it appears to have made only moderate impact if any; for example, the introduction in 1964 of alternative service without weapons in the Bausoldaten units may have been a positive result of church pressure, but, despite raised expectations in the wake of the church–state agreement, church opposition to the introduction of military education in schools in 1978 had no effect.
While church–state relationships in the early 1980s arguably promoted a stabilizing ‘safety valve’ for the regime, there was a delicate and interesting balance involved here. In the course of the 1980s dissenting views proliferated, in conjunction with wider movements.
Mention has been made of the unofficial peace initiatives in East Germany. The decision by the Americans and the Soviet Union to station nuclear missiles on German soil gave renewed impetus to peace movements on both sides of the border, whose activities and profiles reached a peak at the time of the actual stationing of nuclear warheads in 1984. The ‘new Cold War’ of the early 1980s, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and fostered by the right-wing, crusading anti-communism of the Reagan administration, aroused widespread fear of nuclear catastrophe. These fears were hardly alleviated by the quite unrelated nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl reactor in the USSR in 1986.
Many East Germans were sufficiently unconvinced by the state’s peace propaganda to risk their futures by demonstrating against Warsaw Pact weapons as well as those of NATO. Unofficial peace demonstrations also included prominent intellectuals, writers and other established figures, and there were links with West German peace activists. Despite the fact that the regime claimed a monopoly over organized activities and ‘movements’ in the GDR, unofficial peace initiatives included a petition signed by over two hundred people, the ‘Berlin Appeal’ of 1982; an international writers’ and scientists’ meeting on peace held in East Berlin; and the ‘Swords into Ploughshares’ armband movement, in which peace demonstrators wore on their sleeves an armband (originally printed as a bookmark) bearing the symbol of the statue donated by the USSR to the United Nations building in New York referring to the quotation from Isaiah. Large gatherings also took place in church buildings, and the church extended some protection towards many non-Christian peace activists – although it was also rather annoyed by some people using peace demonstrations as a means of rapid exit to West Germany, since one of the regime’s forms of punishment was instant exile to the West.
Alternative views also began to be expressed in the GDR in relation to such matters as ecology; there was for example an unofficial ‘environmentalist library’ in East Berlin. Evidence of environmental pollution was becoming daily more apparent, and anger mounted at a regime which pursued production targets with no apparent concern for human health and well-being, indeed without even a willingness to recognize the existence of a problem.
With frustration mounting, there was increased criticism of the lack of freedom of speech and real democracy in the GDR. Unofficial banners with officially disapproved slogans from Rosa Luxemburg were displayed at the official demonstrations on the anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s and Karl Liebknecht’s death on 17 January 1988. (Such notions as ‘Freedom is always the freedom to think differently’ were unacceptable to a regime which felt it alone should be doing the thinking.) And apart from the most well-known dissenters in the cultural sphere, there was a sizeable and perhaps growing ‘alternative culture’ in East Berlin, including visual artists, musicians and others, who were following the process of Gorbachev’s glasnost with great interest.
With these growing currents of discontent, there was a differentiation of political views within the Protestant church, and more time was devoted to discussion and debate. Even before the revolutionary autumn of 1989, groups were involved in, for example, non-violence training, and were adopting increasingly active strategies to pressurize for reform from within. When the peaceful demonstrations started in the autumn of 1989, the effects of this focus on non-violence were plain to see, as was the wider context of a movement for reform partially sponsored and sheltered by the church. But in addition, dissident groups were now organizing outside the framework of the Protestant church.7
To discuss the role of the Protestant churches in fostering or containing dissent is not to exhaust the issue of the social role of religion in the GDR. Many people with religious commitments of whatever sort found simple solace in belonging to a community that was to a degree resistant to the demands and encroachments of the all-pervading ideology propagated by the state.
This was probably particularly the case for most of the million or so Catholics. The much smaller Catholic Church in the GDR maintained a relatively low profile, although there were signs in the 1980s that it was taking more social tasks upon itself.
The surviving Jewish community in East Germany was tiny – perhaps a few hundred – but they too were becoming more visible, with the renovation of the Oranienburgstrasse Synagogue in East Berlin and the appointment of an American Rabbi to come to work with them.8 After the early anti-Semitism of the Ulbricht regime (in 1952–3, at the time of the Slansky trials, and until the death of Stalin) the official East German line was to tolerate Jews while opposing political Zionism. The regime did not, however, recognize any responsibility for Nazi crimes or the need to make restitution to the Jews until the end of 1989. One side-effect of the relatively repressive nature of the GDR regime was that popular anti-Semitism was rather forcefully suppressed (with only isolated incidents) until after the 1989 revolution.
It might be added that there were, in addition to the main Protestant churches, also very small numbers of other Protestant sects, such as the sixty or so Quakers, who were in the main disproportionately active in a range of social concerns. Religious dissent certainly played quite an important role in searching for the limits of freedom and the bounds of possible discussion and action in the GDR.
It may seem a little odd, in the context of discussion of dissent and opposition in a communist regime, to include mention of the official carriers of that regime. But a further, important feature of the 1980s, which has been adumbrated in the previous chapter with respect to the SED, was a process of differentiation within the SED itself. Up until the mid-1980s the SED tended to follow Moscow’s lead rather closely; but Glasnost evoked only the most stiff and dismissive of official responses, at least from SED leaders, up to 1989 (such as the remark that, just because a neighbour puts up new wallpaper, there is no need to redecorate one’s own house). However, some elements in the GDR were placing considerable hope in the new directions taken by Soviet domestic policies – and these included many grassroots members of the SED itself, and even some of the regional leaders, whether privately or openly.
After some years of fluctuating degrees of liberalization (varying with the sphere of endeavour) the regime itself in Honecker’s later years became more repressive. Rattled by the heightened public pro- file and activities of dissenters, the leadership brought out the Stasi in more evident manner than for many years. This was illustrated in the fairly harsh treatment of the demonstrators of 17 January 1988 (including about eighty arrests, and the exile to West Germany of singer Stephan Krawczyk and his wife Freya Klier, among others). While the ultimate ‘safety valve’ of shipping uncomfortable subjects to the West remained, it was clear that Honecker was no longer prepared to tolerate a limited ‘letting-off-steam’ within the GDR. It was clear that in the forty years of its existence the GDR had neither succeeded in converting everyone to the official point of view (no transformation of consciousness, no development of socialist personality, had been an automatic result of the transformation of the mode of production or of the education system); nor had it found an effective means of dealing with those who persisted in developing alternative views.
The regime’s new repression, far from stamping out dissent, served only to galvanize the minority of active dissenters in the GDR into further, focused political activity. There was still no mass support for activities which remained relatively dangerous, with serious penalties by way of state reprisals. But in clear contrast to the workers’ protest of 1953, by 1989 there was a network of people working within the system for clearly formulated aims of reform, in connection particularly with the expansion of human rights. Their chance was to come when the regime was subjected to a crisis originating elsewhere, with the effective dismantling of the Iron Curtain in Hungary in the summer of 1989 and the clear unwillingness of the USSR to use force to sustain a crumbling, reform-resistant, hard-line East German regime.
Clearly, given the pluralistic political system in West Germany, there would be far less ‘dissent’ in terms of views at odds with those of the regime. Commitment to democracy is commitment to a system of rules, a manner of decision-making, and not to a substantive worldview. A variety of ideologies and belief-systems can coexist peacefully, within a relatively broad range – although West German democracy, with the experience of Weimar in the background, was clearly constituted to exclude the possibility of tolerating those who sought to overthrow the very conditions for toleration.
Given these circumstances, alternative substantive religious and political views would not be perceived in any sense as ‘dissent’, but rather as variety within a pluralist society. Ironically, the lack of immediate salience of religion in the Federal Republic led to a greater degree of secularization there than obtained in the GDR. The churches had initially experienced a wave of popular interest, as people sought solace and a means of interpreting their situation in the confused conditions after the defeat of Nazi Germany. The churches themselves – although experiencing, in different ways, difficulties with self-representation concerning their often ambivalent roles in the Third Reich, and dragging their feet somewhat over the issue of denazification – nevertheless remained powerful and widely respected institutions. They gained and sustained a considerable public role in the formation of policy and even in the proportions of politicians of different confessional persuasions on different bodies. While the powerful institutional voice remained, over the following decades the pertinence of religion for many lay people began to decline. While Catholics continued to vote disproportionately for the CDU, and Protestants for the SPD, even these ties began to wane. So too did church attendance rates. At the level of everyday ethics and morality, secular views began to prevail over the dicta of church leaders (as, for example, in increasing popular Catholic disregard for official views on contraception). In contrast to the heightened salience of the churches in the GDR – and in contrast to the importance of religiously grounded ethical and moral principles in resisting the encroachments of the Nazi tyranny – in the tolerant society of the Federal Republic for many people religion lost some of its immediacy, its urgency as a guiding principle in everyday life. Religion, like politics, could relatively easily be ignored by the non-committed.
To point to tolerance of a diversity of views is not to suggest that, simply by virtue of the political system, the Federal Republic did not face problems of political dissent. As mentioned above, however, awareness of the collapse of Weimar democracy ensured that problems of dissent and opposition were treated with considerable wariness. A combination of reasons led to a considerable degree of success in containing, and limiting, potentially destabilizing dissent. Such success could not have been foreseen in the political circumstances of the late 1940s and early 1950s; nor was it always easy to devise means of dealing with opponents of democracy without at the same time threatening the nature of that very democracy, as we shall see.
In its origins and early years the Federal Republic placed more constraints than the Weimar Republic on potential attacks on the system by reactionary elites. The Army was initially dissolved, and was circumscribed and firmly subjected to parliamentary control when it was refounded ten years after the end of the war. This was in notable contrast to Weimar. While West German denazification of the civil service and judiciary left a great deal to be desired in terms of the continuity of personnel, and while former Nazis gained relatively easy re-entry into political life under Adenauer, this was paradoxically a stabilizing rather than destabilizing phenomenon. Sufficiently constrained by the system not to be able to attack it openly, former Nazis were also sufficiently accepted by and incorporated into the new system not to want to attack it. Since the system appeared to be delivering the goods, both materially in terms of economic recovery and to some extent symbolically in terms of West Germany’s acceptance into Western alliances as a valuable military and economic partner, these potential dissenters were in fact quite willing to accord the system a certain passive support. Many of those who had joined the NSDAP in the heyday of the Third Reich had in any case done so for a range of reasons, including the simple pressure to conform. Less than ideologically committed to the Nazi worldview, their transition to a new conformity in a new polity was relatively easy. ‘Mitläufer’ will turn in whatever direction the wind is blowing, and in the first decade of the Federal Republic there were few strong reasons for former passive Nazis to stand out by opposing the new state. Rather, they mouthed its slogans of democracy and freedom with the rest. Thus in contrast to the early years of the Weimar Republic, the Federal Republic did not suffer sharp revisionist attacks on the new political system.
Right-wing dissent continued among a minority, however, and grew with the economic recession of the mid-1960s. The permitted neo-Nazi party, the NPD, had considerable electoral successes in Land elections in the later 1960s. It won fifteen seats in the Bavarian Parliament and eight seats in Hesse in 1966, and in 1967 made gains in the local state elections in Schleswig-Holstein, Rheinland-Pfalz and Baden-Württemberg, where it succeeded in polling nearly 10 per cent of the vote. However, despite arousing considerable fears, the NPD was never able to break through the 5 per cent hurdle to achieve national representation.
While manifestations of right-wing resurgence or extremism worried liberal intellectuals in the Federal Republic, it was left-wing dissent that attracted wider popular disapproval and even hysteria. The 1960s in the Western world saw a general resurgence of left-wing ideas and movements; in the German context certain unique features were evident, arising both from the particular problems posed by the Nazi past and from certain circumstances in the present. A generation was growing up within an affluent, highly materialistic society – a society which appeared to be suffering from a form of collective amnesia. There was a fairly widespread uncertainty, too, about the status of Germany itself, which in a famous phrase appeared to be an ‘economic giant, but political dwarf’. There were a number of factors involved in the emergence of left-wing dissent, some general to the Western world, some specific to West Germany.
The 1960s generally saw a major expansion in higher education; in Germany, because of the lack of a numerus clausus to restrict student numbers and access, universities rapidly became overcrowded and failed to respond adequately to students’ needs. Combined with the highly authoritarian, elitist atmosphere – many elderly professors had regained their chairs after only a brief period of ‘denazification’ – conditions were conducive to discontent. At the same time, the 1960s were a decade of youth culture – predicated on the existence of an affluent consumer society which sought to create a distinctive youth market, as well as simultaneously provoking a reaction against that very affluence which made youth revolt possible. Hippy, flower-power idealism prevailed; interest in eastern mysticism and asceticism went along with the purchasing power of the pop music market. Politically, the Vietnam War became a major issue, particularly for American youth. It had a heightened relevance too for young Germans, particularly in Berlin, dependent as it was on American protection; for here, the superpower that had been venerated as the ideological saviour came to be criticized as hypocritical and no longer a hero of freedom, peace and democracy.
A further general feature of the 1960s context was the revival of Marxist or marxisant thought in Western intellectual circles. In America and Germany particularly the thinking of the Frankfurt School associated with the names of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse enjoyed a renaissance. ‘Critical theory’ – which had, in the persons of its most eminent exponents, been exported to the USA in the Nazi period, becoming institutionalized in the New School of Social Research in New York – suddenly aroused widespread interest. In the USA the writings of the ageing Marcuse stimulated much of student thinking; in Germany a younger scholar, Jürgen Habermas, began to develop his own brand of neo-Marxist theory. Underlying the critical theorists’ critique of the heritage of the Western Enlightenment was the notion that there are no eternal ‘laws’ of society, which can be articulated in a ‘science’ of society built on unassailable generalizations. Rather, they asserted that society is made by people and can be altered by people: praxis, or action to change reality, is the true ‘test’ of a social theory. Theory is validated by altering society, not by replicating the results of previous research; and the theorist is a social actor, not simply a neutral observer. This approach lent a strong intellectual context and content to the left-wing politics of the late 1960s.
In terms of domestic German politics, the existence of the ‘Grand Coalition’ – the coalition of CDU/CSU with the SPD, 1966–9 – meant that young Germans in particular were highly concerned about the lack of a viable parliamentary opposition, and hence the need for an ‘extraparliamentary opposition’ (APO). The rise of the neo-Nazi NPD was disturbing; as were the implications of the emergency legislation, which had been under discussion since the late 1950s. There were failed attempts to pass an emergency law in 1960 and 1965; there were widespread fears of increasing the powers of the state at the expense of citizens (with memories of the misuse of Article 48 in the Weimar Republic), and the Emergency Law which was finally passed in 1968 was the subject of considerable public debate.
What finally sparked the explosion of left-wing unrest in late 1960s Germany was a specific incident. On 2 June 1967 there was a demonstration in West Berlin occasioned by the visit of the Shah of Persia. In the course of this demonstration a student, Benno Ohnesorg, was shot dead. The Axel Springer press, which controlled about 80 per cent of the popular daily newspapers, more or less blamed the students for bringing about this death by their provocative behaviour. At Easter 1968 the student leader Rudi Dutschke narrowly survived an assassination attempt by an individual who had apparently been spurred on by the hysteria evoked by the tabloid press. The student movement reached its height in the Western world in 1968, with near revolution in France when workers and students for a brief moment appeared to unite. The Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia aroused many people’s hopes for a humanization and liberalization in the communist bloc. But with the Soviet invasion of Prague in August 1968 hopes for a new form of democratic socialism in Eastern Europe were crushed, and the hopes of Western democratic socialists began to fade too. The League of German Socialist Students (SDS) began to dissolve, and was formally disbanded in March 1970. Henceforth left-wing dissent became more diversified and isolated.
At the time of the student unrest in the latter half of the 1960s West German society became polarized between an older, materialistic, relatively right-wing generation – denigrated as Spiessbürger – and young idealists putting into question the values of their parents. In intention non-violent, they attracted rabid criticism and wild hostility from the more conservative establishment, which in turn exacerbated left-wingers’ criticisms of the democracy which permitted their existence. Some even saw the Federal Republic as a repressive, quasi-fascist, regime (the word ‘fascist’ gained widespread and imprecise currency at this time); on this view, formal democracy was merely a meaningless facade for real intolerance.
The resurgence of a neo-Marxist writing, however, which sought to unmask and lay bare the true nature of ‘late capitalist society’, soon degenerated, as practised by some, into an arcane art form in itself, intelligible only to small bands of aficionados and not calculated to bring the mass of the working population to the barricades. However exciting and interesting for some intellectuals, theoretical developments such as Habermas’s ‘theory of communicative competence’ were all but incommunicable to most. Critiques of critiques proliferated, structuralist Marxists and action-theorists developed a veritable industry in mutual destruction; but there was precious little praxis in evidence on the part of most academic social theorists and the ‘late capitalist’ Western working class appeared to be proceeding in its materialistic pursuits relatively untroubled by accusations of false consciousness. Meanwhile, for those less given to the intricacies of theorizing, there was the possibility of dropping out, experimenting with communal forms of living and seeking to replace competitiveness with modes of co-operation. For all the avenues such explorations, both theoretical and practical, opened up, they did little to affect the nature of West German society more generally.
More disturbing, however, was one particular development: that of the active terrorism of the Red Army Faction (RAF, or Baader–Meinhof gang). While abstruse books can usually be relatively easily ignored, bombings and assassinations cannot. The RAF was formally established on 5 June 1970, although terrorist acts did not become a serious phenomenon until 1974. Like their leaders, Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, members were mostly middle class, well-educated, and belonged to the generation born into the chaos and disruption of the 1940s – the generation, as one analyst put it, of those without fathers and unable to mourn. Their guiding idea was that attacks on the state would serve to lay bare its true, repressive nature. At first, attacks were against property: arson attacks on department stores, bank robberies to keep themselves afloat. Then, however, began a series of murders of prominent individuals. In the course of the 1970s terrorism was to become a serious problem for West German democracy.
The Baader–Meinhof gang assassinated a series of prominent individuals. In the particularly bad year of 1977 the banker Jürgen Ponto was shot by his god-daughter in his house near Frankfurt; the General State Prosecutor Buback was murdered, an act which was ‘justified’ as a response to his allegedly ‘causing’ the deaths of three terrorists, Holger Meins, Siegfried Hauser and Ulrike Meinhof; the employers’ leader Hanns-Martin Schleyer (who had held a high position in the SS) was kidnapped in Cologne on 5 September; and on 19 October, following the successful freeing of a hijacked airliner in Mogadishu by a special squad of the Federal Border Police, Schleyer’s body was found dumped in the boot of a car in Alsace; this was one day after three terrorists in Stammheim prison, Baader, Raspin and Ensslin, were found dead, having supposedly committed suicide on hearing the news of the outcome of the hijack. It was scarcely surprising, in view of such developments, that there was considerable public disquiet about terrorism, which tended to be equated quite simply with left-wing extremism. When a bomb went off at the Munich Beer Festival in 1980 it was some time before it was generally recognized that it had been the act of a right-wing extremist.
The response of the Federal Republic to extremism was extensive and thorough. Apart from the Emergency Law passed in 1968, there were other measures which had been on the agenda for some time but which gained a new meaning in the context of the 1970s. One such was the Decree concerning Radicals (Radikalenerlass) of 1972. Ironically, this decree sought simply to achieve a certain uniformity and consistency in existing practice, which varied across the Länder, and to avoid the insensitive proscribing of a list of organizations by emphasizing the need to look at each individual case on its own merits. In practice, the result was often tantamount to a witch-hunt, and severe restrictions on the freedoms of speech and association for those many individuals having or wanting jobs in the public service sector (which included over 50 per cent of university students) were imposed. A series of anti-terrorist measures followed later in the 1970s: terrorists were no longer permitted to share a common defence counsel, or to have contact with each other after they were imprisoned; it was even made possible for their contact with their defence lawyers to be broken. They were often subjected to particularly harsh conditions, including long periods of isolation.
By the late 1970s many who had no sympathy with the actions of the terrorists themselves were becoming highly critical of the measures taken against them. It was noted that many terrorists were serving longer sentences, under worse conditions, than had many former Nazis in the course of their denazification; and that much of the legislation impinged on Germany’s desire to be seen as a state of law, a Rechtsstaat, in explicit contrast to its disreputable recent past. The state’s response to terrorism was indeed so thorough that it gave rise to the criticism by some that, while certain measures were necessary to combat violence, the state’s radical response ran the danger of itself destroying the democracy it was attempting to defend. Yet this debate was muddied by the creation of the notion of ‘sympathizers’, as the right-wing press attempted to conflate criticism of the treatment of terrorists with support of terrorism itself. Nevertheless, the activities of terrorists began both to subside in volume and to take new forms in the course of the 1980s, and by the second half of the decade the state was officially recognizing that new approaches by means of dialogue to defuse tension should be explored – although not at the expense of continuing surveillance. Most people were surprised as well as aghast when the banker Alfred Herrhausen was murdered in late 1989. Until the revelation, in June 1990, that many West German terrorists had been given refuge – and even new identities – under the protection of the Stasi in East Germany, it had been thought that terrorists had scattered far afield and no longer constituted a serious threat. (The terrorist issue had of course developed international dimensions by the late 1980s, with the IRA’s frequent attacks on British military targets in West Germany, posing a rather different sort of challenge to international policing.)
The heritage of 1960s left-wing dissent in a more diffuse sense could be observed in such developments as the citizens’ initiative groups, the Green Party, and the influence of popular pressure groups and public opinion on the major parties seeking crucial marginal support among floating voters. Alternative lifestyles changed somewhat in nature, however: late 1980s house-squatting in West Berlin was a rather different phenomenon from the intellectual communes of the late 1960s. West German political theory continued to be abstruse and a matter of some public debate, as evidenced by several controversies; but there was perhaps a more widespread disaffection with Marxism.
If one wants to consider the implications of left-wing dissent for the development of West German democracy, the balance is a mixed one. Some aspects were undoubtedly supportive, in that a new political culture sustaining a participatory, rather than merely representative, democracy had been emerging since the 1960s: this was clearly the case in connection with the citizens’ initiative groups and the Greens. Some aspects were not only disturbing but also counter-productive and deeply anti-democratic, particularly the terrorist acts which provoked the state into becoming more the repressive beast it was accused of being. Equally disturbing was the way in which the press not merely reported, but actually helped to create some of the news, as in its reaction to the Ohnesorg death (as refracted in Heinrich Böll’s Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum). A particular climate of opinion was created and sustained which made life difficult both for those honestly searching for new views and supportive critiques, and for those prominent members of the establishment who found themselves having to live in ghetto-like conditions for their own security. Nevertheless, West German democracy as a system survived both the fears of the Right about the effects of terrorism, and the fears of the Left about undue restrictions on personal liberties, democratic freedoms and the survival of the German Rechtsstaat.
Extremism was not limited to the Left. Extreme right-wing views both persisted among a minority, and developed in new forms among other groups in response to changing conditions. The issue of right-wing dissent is not merely one of inadequate denazification, but also of the development of new modes of extremism under new circumstances. There were, for example, at intervals throughout the history of the Federal Republic, incidents indicating the persistence of anti-Semitic attitudes, such as the daubing of swastikas desecrating Jewish graves; there was also a newer racial hostility to the foreign workers in Germany, the Gastarbeiter, in some ways echoing the older denigration of foreign workers in the Third Reich, but representing less a persistence of old attitudes than a set of new prejudices under new conditions.
A declining phenomenon was that of open reunions of former Nazis, such as the gatherings of former SS officers. Some of these were forbidden, such as a planned reunion in Harzburg in May 1985, while others were able to take place, such as a meeting in a hotel in Nesselwang, near the Bavarian border with Austria, in December 1985. Some former Nazis, in more muted but infinitely more effective manner, had a powerful influence on West German political life up to the end of the 1970s, as documented in Bernt Engelmann’s ‘factual novel’, Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz mit Stern. This shows the way in which economically powerful figures (whose rise to fortune started in the Third Reich) were able to sponsor and influence important political figures – including the former Prime Minister of Bavaria and leader of the CSU, Franz-Josef Strauss, and even the man who subsequently became Chancellor of West Germany in 1982, Helmut Kohl (whose willingness to accept financial support from dubious quarters was ultimately to discredit him after his fall from power in the late 1990s). By the 1980s many former Nazis had become rather elderly and pathetic figures, whose defence of Hitler and the Third Reich could hardly be said to pose a serious problem for West German democracy. Recalcitrant, unrepentant, but relatively harmless former Nazis included the former SS officers interviewed by Claude Lanzmann in his film Shoah, and the former leader of the Nazi women’s organization, Gertrud Scholtz-Klink, interviewed by Claudia Koonz at the beginning of Mothers in the Fatherland. There might well have been a sizeable readership for such extreme right-wing newspapers as Die Nationalzeitung, with its nostalgic advertisements for medals displaying former nationalist and military heroes, and its revisionist articles on such topics as the Holocaust, the treatment of Germans after the war, and German displacement from their eastern homelands. But while debates on such topics tended to be acrimonious, such views remained for the most part peripheral to mainstream West German political life. Only when sanitized variants of such views were taken up by respected academics, often sanctioned or even stimulated by mainstream politicians, did they become more problematic.9 Obviously, with the passage of time, the generation which had come to terms with, often even supported in principle, the Third Reich, was passing away.
In some ways more worrying from the point of view of West German democracy was the development of neo-Nazi organizations and movements which were supported by younger Germans – products of the post war era. Members of the many neo-Nazi groups in the 1970s and 1980s were predominantly young, relatively under-educated and unskilled, and perhaps unemployed. To a certain extent, this neo-Nazism amounted to the adoption of a political style, rather than an ideology: wearing distinctive clothing and using the swastika as symbols of their rejection of a system which appeared to be rejecting them. These groups were small in absolute numbers, and were on occasion dealt with quite severely by the authorities, as in the disbanding of the paramilitary Wehrsportgruppe Hoffmann.
A more widespread form of racialism was evident in hostility directed against foreign workers. Popular fears of unemployment when facing the competition of Gastarbeiter, dislike of foreign cultural styles, and resentment at the apparent ‘invasion’ of previously homogeneous communities, could be exploited by extremist organizations. The Gastarbeiter were targeted for attack by a new right-wing party, the Deutsche Volksunion, founded in 1987 and claiming to have a membership of seven thousand. Racial hostility also lay behind the rise to success of the right-wing Republican Party (led by Franz Schönhuber, a man who was unrepentantly proud of his former SS-membership) in the state elections in Berlin and Hesse (particularly Frankfurt) in the spring of 1989 and in the Euro-elections of June 1989. Such racialist attitudes, and the size of the vote for right-wing parties, were indicative of serious social tensions in the outwardly prosperous West Germany of the later 1980s, even prior to the strains occasioned by unification.
While right-wing extremism on the whole failed to catch the headline coverage of left-wing terrorism, it nevertheless continued to exert a considerable influence, particularly at times of social strain. And this influence was wielded not only through the small, self-professed extreme right-wing parties, which could never hope to capture a large proportion of the vote (however successful they might be locally on occasion), but also, perhaps more insidiously, by pressures exerted on the major parties, particularly of course the CDU and CSU. Minority pressure groups such as the League of Refugees and Expellees (Bund der Heimatvertriebenen) were able to exert revisionist pressures on conservative politicians, who were fearful of losing crucial marginal votes to the more right-wing parties. In the 1980s mainstream conservative politicians, in playing to the nationalist gallery, helped to create a climate in which the expression of more extremist views began to appear acceptable. And in 1990, when German unification was on the agenda, such posturing to the Right led to serious prevarications and delays on the part of Chancellor Kohl on the issue of guaranteeing Poland’s western border, the Oder–Neisse Line.
Yet, while there was a wide range of dissenting opinions of one form or another in the Federal Republic, there was nothing which remotely resembled the extent of anti-system opposition to parliamentary democracy in the Weimar Republic. The reasons for this are various, but one key factor has to do with the relative material success of West German capitalist democracy. For the Federal Republic’s first forty years there was no mass discontent to provide a popular basis for extremist parties or for the criticisms of intellectuals. On the other hand, it is quite clear that social tensions – particularly in relation to Gastarbeiter – and fear of the impact of immigrants (including, in 1989–90, East Germans) on unemployment and housing, could quite easily lead a substantial minority of West Germans to sympathize with or support right-wing views and groups.