Pride before the Fall, 1961–89
We cannot outline the future of socialism.
What socialism will look like
when it takes its final form
we do not know and cannot say.
Lenin, 1921
Alas, we
Who wished to lay the foundations of kindness
Could not ourselves be kind.
But you, when at last it comes to pass
That it is possible to help one’s fellow man,
Do not judge us
Too harshly.
Brecht,
“To Our Descendants,” 1938
No one intends to build a wall.
Walter Ulbricht, June 15, 1961
East Berlin. August 13, 1961. As the sun peeks over the horizon on this beautiful Sunday morning, most East Berliners sleep on, but some rise for work; a few thousand of them are Grenzgänger, who cross town—quite legally—to work in the “other” Berlin, mostly as hotel and restaurant employees and in other service jobs made lucrative by the uneven exchange rate. Each day they make the trip to West Berlin—by foot, by bicycle, by S-Bahn and U-Bahn, showing their DDR identity cards and special work permits to the bored Grepos (Grenzpolizei, border police) stationed at the gates.
But this morning the Grepos are not bored; today, as the would-be commuters discover as they reach streets and subway stations along the East Berlin border, no Grenzgänger will cross.
“Die Grenze ist geschlossen!” people scream to each other in the early-morning stillness. “The border is closed!” No subway cars are running westward; Grepos guard the U-Bahn tunnels to prevent subway commuters from fleeing to the West on foot; Vopos turn back Grenzgänger at every checkpoint.
The SED has apparently found a way to secure its future and halt the flight of DDR and skilled labor—by walling them in.
WHO HAS THE YOUTH, HAS THE FUTURE!
As the Grenzgänger stumble home and the DDR capital—“die Hauptstadt der DDR”—awakens to the nightmare, it is as if a tremendous howl—the anguished wail of cornered, trapped, desperate animals—has gone up throughout East Berlin—as it soon will over the DDR. For almost a decade, East Germany’s 600-mile border has been sealed by barbed wire and 12-foot electrified fencing; just inside the fence is a strip of land about 50 yards wide that is cleared of brush, dotted with mines, and covered by machine guns in high watchtowers. And so, most aspiring refugees make their way to East Berlin, where many of the streets and subway stations along the city border are guarded casually, if at all. Here the task is comparatively easy: as everyone knows, one can often just cut through a back yard, or hop the subway and ride it for a stop or two, till it reaches the West. And so, the Grenzgänger, like most East Germans, have always thought there would be time to pack their bags hurriedly, if it came to that; they have always assumed the day of decision was theirs to choose, if necessary.
They were wrong—and now it is too late. Overnight, their world has changed, utterly.
It was an operation conducted, as bitter western columnists put it, with Red Prussian efficiency.1 Early Saturday evening, Vopos had been summoned, without explanation, to their barracks; Soviet troops, under the command of Marshal Koniev, had been placed on full military alert. By midnight, the operation—so secret that it bore no code name—had officially begun. The planning group, under Erich Honecker’s direction and including SSD chief Erich Mielke and General Heinz Hoffmann of the Ministry of Defense, issued envelopes marked “Top Secret” to all company commanders. SSD agents immediately took up posts at all major intersections between the Soviet and western sectors. At one A.M.NVA troops—most of them FDJ members and staunch DDR loyalists under the age of 25—arrived at scores of border points to unload barbed wire, concrete posts, stone blocks, picks, and shovels.
West Berlin had long been surrounded by a forbidden zone similar to that separating East Germany from its neighbors. Now, informed that the Warsaw Pact nations had finally decided to stop the West German exploiters and militarists by sealing the border, politically reliable factory brigades and Vopos worked diligently through the night to close all passageways in the circumference of West Berlin’s 103-mile border. At four A.M.West Berlin radio issued the first panicky news reports of the commotion in the streets.
The Iron Curtain had finally fallen. And 17 million people were now trapped behind it.
Among the Grenzgänger suddenly trapped were teachers and students from East Berlin who commuted daily to West Berlin schools and universities. (All West Germans and West Berliners who happened to be in the east were allowed to return to the west.) Forty of the 100 Grenzgänger teachers, and a few hundred of the 2,400 students, were visiting the west when the Wall went up; almost all of them decided to stay. The rest of the students were transferred to eastern schools, where new committees were appointed to eradicate western influences; the remaining 60 Grenzgänger teachers lost their jobs, in spite of the DDR teacher shortage. Politically suspect, they were required to take miserable jobs at bare subsistence level. But even worse off were the retired teachers who lived in the east but had taught in West Berlin—their West Berlin pension checks were not honored, and so they were completely dependent on the government.2
Yes, finally, believed the SED leadership, with their escape hatch finally sealed, DDR educators and students—and, likewise, the rest of the population—would cooperate with the government and accept that the DDR’s future and theirs were the same. Young people would begin to regard East Germany as their Heimat—since they now had no other choice.
Yes, now the DDR would become, as Christoph Hein later called it, “the fenced-in playground that was my home.” The West German media, however, would choose a more ominous term—“the Barbed-Wired State”—and dub August 13 Stacheldrahtsonntag (Barbed-Wire Sunday).
“August 13.” Like “June 17,” the date would go down in German history without any need to mention the year, let alone the allusion: Everyone knows the referent.
Ulbricht had long urged the Wall on his Warsaw Pact allies, who worried that such an expedient might trigger war and, in any case, would become a burdensome anti-socialist propaganda symbol. But Khrushchev’s tour, incognito, in a Mercedes-Benz limousine through prosperous West Berlin in late July finally convinced him that Ulbricht was right: the lifeblood of his showcase socialist state was flowing into—and then out of—Berlin, this open wound in the center of communist Eastern Europe. Nothing short of a Wall could staunch the hemorrhage, and failure to check it would mean the death of the DDR. “I will remove this splinter from the heart of Europe,” Khrushchev growled; at the Warsaw Pact meeting in Moscow on August 3–5, Khrushchev’s word prevailed.3
And so, under the capable direction of Erich Honecker, now the Number 2 man in the SED in charge of national security, the “splinter” was removed smoothly—and a concrete and barbed-wire bandage was expertly applied around the circumference of West Berlin. As Ulbricht would later boast: “The operation went off with less damage than a rock’n’roll evening at the Sportpalast.” Until just two hours before the midnight venture, no more than 20 top advisors had even known about the plan. Secrecy was vital: the word “wall” was never spoken (except by Ulbricht, whose June 15 slip at an international press conference went unremarked); indeed, not a single word about the operation had even been committed to paper until that Saturday evening.
August 13: Stacheldrahtsonntag. As morning wears into afternoon, wrecking crews are still tearing out rails and putting up concrete barriers and barbed wire. By four P.M., as temperatures soar into the low 90s, the incendiary materials for a potential conflagration are heating up along the barbed-wire boundary: Half a million Berliners, east and west, are massed along the sector line. The Vopos keep East Berliners well back from the ongoing construction; the West Berlin police restrain West Berliners, who are calling for action. A total estimated force of 533,000 East German troops and paramilitary police stands poised, waiting for trouble—from the east or west. But where are the 40,000 western troops stationed permanently in West Berlin for just such an emergency?
In their barracks. Pending orders from their national capitals, and to minimize the risk of unauthorized escalation, Allied military officials have confined soldiers to their quarters. From the western Allies’ viewpoint, there is little else that the West can do. Is interference with the Wall—which, after all, stands on the eastern side—worth the risk of World War III? No. The West will act to prevent a Soviet takeover of Berlin or to maintain free western access routes to the city. But the West has long considered East Berlin to be, in practical terms, part of the DDR.
Within easy earshot of the Vopos and workmen fortifying the barbed-wire wall, dozens of West Berlin students holler: “Hangt Ulbricht!” (“Hang Ulbricht!”). “Der Spitzbart muss weg!” “Ivan muss weg!” Jeering at the DDR work crews, the students chant rhythmically: “K-Z Wäch-ter! K-Z Wäch-ter!” (“Concentration camp guards!”). And they mock Moscow’s latest technological triumph—the first manned space mission, flown by cosmonaut Gherman Titov:
Keine Butter, keine Sahne,
Aber auf dem Mond eine rote Fahne!
[No butter, no cream,
But a red flag on the moon!]
One placard sums up the feelings of many older Berliners: “Ulbricht = Hitler.”The drawing cleverly makes the appropriate adjustment to Ulbricht’s goatee. One East Berlin escapee tells an RIAS reporter: “The DDR has become a worse Gestapo state than the Hitler regime.”
All day long, East Berlin radio has been repeating the Party hymn ad nauseam:
Die Partei, die Partei
die hat immer recht!
[The Party, the Party
It’s always right!]
To the rhythm of this background music, “troublemakers” have been dispersed by tear gas bombs and water hoses; the SSD has arrested thousands.
At the rapidly ascending Wall of Protection, itself protected from East German protesters by a wall of Vopos, all is socialist brotherhood. Courteous blue-shirted boys and girls from the FDJ and JP line Unter den Linden—on which new linden trees, planted a few years ago, are growing—gratefully bestowing flower bouquets and refreshments on the sweating comrades at “the front.” And indeed, sections of East Berlin still evoke the war front of 1945—street rubble from the Battle of Berlin remains everywhere, miles of it still not cleared away, 16 years after the war’s close. The once-ubiquitous 10-foot portraits of Stalin and Pieck are, however, gone at last; only those of Lenin, along with a few of Ulbricht, remain. But the red signs still proclaim: “Der Sozialismus siegt!” (“Socialism is winning!”).
At “the front,” the hard-working “victors” take a break. NVA soldiers leave their mounted machine guns and thank the children for the soft drinks and pastries. Whereupon the Blueshirts, honoring the heroic “fighters for peace,” burst into the theme song for the day: “Die Partei, die Partei! / Die hat immer recht!”
As construction continues in the days to come, the East German government consolidates its victories—material and psychological, military and political. In his frequent radio broadcasts, Ulbricht explains that many lives are being saved by the construction of the “anti-fascist wall of protection.” West Berlin had become a den of terrorists serving imperialist intelligence forces. DDR citizens were, in effect, being kidnapped by “slave traders,” West German recruiting agents who “lured” them across from East Berlin (which Ulbricht refers to as “Free Berlin” and “the Democratic Sector”) into the West, where they were forcibly inducted into the West German army or forced to work in western munitions factories. “IT’S GREAT HOW EVERYTHING WORKED OUT!” headlines Neues Deutschland. “Thank you, Comrades of the People’s Army, thank you, Comrades of the Battle Units! . . . When peace is endangered, Walter Ulbricht does not hesitate.” Proudly, Ulbricht quotes Izvestia, which raves that “millions” welcome the border closing as a blow to western spies and saboteurs. Ulbricht’s words anticipate the official Party line that will soon be worked out to explain August 13. DDR schoolchildren will later learn about this day in their 10th-grade history books:
When other developments endangering peace in Central Europe arose in 1961, especially along the open border between the DDR and West Berlin, the DDR was forced to seal off its borders. . . . The measures taken on 13 August 1961, in coordination with the USSR and the Warsaw Treaty countries, removed this threat to peace and put an end to direct attempts to disrupt the country’s political and social life.4
But in the meantime, the JP and FDJ rally to defend Ulbricht’s Wall. JP leaders offer soccer balls and track suits to children who inform on attempted escapees. FDJ schoolboys climb on rooftops, tearing down any antennae used to watch West German TV, so that East Germans “blinded by enemy propaganda” can come to their senses.5 “Anyone listening to western radio or TV is a traitor,” editorializes Leipzig’s Sächsische Zeitung.”6 Thousands of FDJ university students go into the fields to “enlighten” farmers about the political necessity for the Wall. FDJ leaders call for two million immediate army volunteers and recruit 48,000 new volunteers for the NVA before the close of August—no conscription exists in the DDR. By September, the NVA will expand by 70 percent to 170,000 men, and Ulbricht will reopen three Soviet occupation-era forced-labor camps for young men who refuse to “volunteer” for service.
Overnight, the torrent of East German refugees drops to a trickle—an elderly couple crawl on their hands and knees across a cemetery, as Vopos string barbed wire 20 yards away; a young family swim across the Teltow Canal, four-year-old son perched on his father’s shoulders. The escape total on Stacheldrahtsonntag numbers no more than a few hundred, however, and no more than a few dozen on August 14. The minimum penalty for attempted escape is imprisonment: 3 to 10 years of hard labor, usually accompanied by retribution visited on one’s family.
Yes, to the East German government it is “der antifaschistische Schutzwall.” “The Anti-Fascist Wall of Protection.” In the months to come, the Wall will ultimately snake for 28 miles through the heart of Berlin, slashing its way across main highways and back alleys, inflicting its schizophrenia on whatever it traverses. “Protecting” East Germans “for their own good,” it amputates proud squares, desecrates graveyards and gardens, deforms entire street fronts into sickly concrete slabs, divides families and friends.
The West Germans call it “die Schandmauer.” “The Wall of Outrage.” Khrushchev and Ulbricht may have gotten away with building it, the West concedes. But, as the Warsaw Pact allies feared, the political cost is enormous: Almost every nation outside the communist sphere condemns the Wall, which now stands as a tremendous propaganda symbol to be exploited by the West, a graphic admission of the moral and economic bankruptcy of communism, of its utter failure to survive except by threat and terror.
So be it: The apparent admission of failure is a price Ulbricht willingly pays to save his dismal little satellite on the Elbe. Now the East German work force is captive; Party orders can be enforced with maximum repression—and without concern about stampeding millions into fleeing drüben. Now, at last, the DDR population level will stabilize. So DDR planners can, at long last, really plan: They can calculate accurately their economic outlays and manpower levels, free from worry that—tomorrow or next week—half of the skilled workers and the technical elite—and the youth—will hop the S-Bahn and head west.
The Wall has saved the DDR, which has lost more than 4 million citizens since 1945; but it has also upped the ante. For in walling in the population it has also walled out the endlessly cited alibi with which the government has rationalized away all failures: the emigration problem. Treating massive emigration as a cause rather than effect of their policies, SED officials have always fallen back on it as an “explanation” for their every blunder.
And so, “after the Wall,” now what? The phrase, once so common as a marker of events in the 1960s and ’70s, possesses a different, hopelessly overdetermined resonance in the wake of the events of 1989. But in 1961, “after the Wall” means depression for the DDR populace and gritty determination for SED leaders. “After the Wall,” the Party has no excuses; it is up to SED planners to prove what they can do. Now that the Party has built the Wall, can it finally “build socialism”?
For the world battle between capitalism and communism is to be fought out—in microcosm—on German soil. “We will bury you!” Khrushchev once declaimed, with his typical bombast, promising that communism would soon outdo capitalism—not only in space technology but economically and every other way. Ulbricht has often said the same about the long-term superiority of DDR socialism to BRD capitalism. “After the Wall” he finally has a chance to prove it.
So: Can the German communists compete? And, production quotas and living standards aside, what can they do—cheaply, quickly, and yet effectively—that will alter their international image as a nationwide concentration camp? August 26, 1972, just 11 Augusts later: Success—or, at least, the Schein of Success.
At the Twentieth Olympiad in Munich, on the soil of the class enemy, along with 1,200 athletes representing 124 nations of the world, DDR athletes triumphantly enter Olympic Stadium—which has just been built on the spot where Chamberlain landed in 1938 to meet Hitler. Before one hundred thousand spectators and more than one billion TV viewers, the cream of DDR youth—the nation’s Olympic team—steps smartly to the sound of “On the Elbe.” Just weeks previously, The Times of London predicted—in light of recent international performances—that the world was about to witness the birth of “the golden age of DDR sports.” And the SED midwives in DDR athletics know it. Boasted one East German sports official to a West German newscaster before the Games: “Tell the maestro to practice our national anthem. He’ll be playing it often.” Crowed another, referring to the once-scorned DDR flag: “We’ll show them what a hammer and compass are.”
Only hours after the opening parade, the first DDR Olympians mount the victory stand, standing tall as their national anthem, “Arisen from Ruins,” is played for the first time at an Olympiad by—oh, Sweet Victory!—a West German orchestra.
German youth! The best hope
of our People is embodied in you.
You will become Germany’s new life
and the sun, more beautiful than ever,
will shine over Germany,
will shine over Germany.
For the first time in history, the DDR’s own flag—the black-red-gold with hammer and compass—billows in the wind inside an Olympic stadium, waving acknowledgment to the desolate past and greetings to the ever brighter future.7
Conceding this historic first, taking place over the energetic protests of the BRD, some West German media commentators speak condescendingly of the First German Workers’ and Peasants State—perhaps better termed, they suggest bitingly, the First German Sports State. The new spirit of détente notwithstanding, some sportscasters still embrace the Cold War Querelle allemandes, referring patronizingly to the “so-called” DDR; or to the “East Zone,” or even the “Soviet Zone”; DDR visitors in Munich are indeed called Ostzonler (East Zoners). (The term Ossi will not emerge until 1989/90.) A few sportscasters speak provocatively of the “Arbeiter- und Mauerstaat” (Workers’ and Wall State) and hail the first West German medal winner as “the champion of the nation”—long after several DDR medalists have mounted the victory stand.8
But whether the West Germans like it or not, the DDR will prove itself without a doubt first in German sports. In the next 15 days, “Arisen from Ruins” will salute DDR medal winners 66 times. The DDR will far outdistance the fourth-place BRD (40) as it finishes third, behind only the USSR (99) and the United States (94) in the medal sweepstakes—leaving the rest of Europe departing Munich “with less than even Neville Chamberlain got,” as two American reporters joked.9
And indeed, the East German sports machine is awe-inspiring. From the first day of the Games, the military discipline and the athletic achievements of the little nation on the Elbe astound the world. In their Olympic quarters, House 44, the DDR Olympians rise each day at dawn, with military precision, to the sound of reveille—the only team in the Olympic Village to do so. Later each day, the hammer and compass are hoisted time and time again—more frequently, in fact, than even those of the United States and the USSR, each of which is almost 200 times larger and 15 times as populous.
The victories belong, overwhelmingly, to young athletes who are both under the age of 25 and faithful FDJ members, and thus the DDR’s athletic success seems also to represent a triumph of SED youth and education policy.
Perhaps the most notable DDR victory in Munich is that of Wolfgang Nordwig, a former mechanic studying at the University of Jena, who sets a new Olympic mark in the pole vault with a leap of 5.5 meters, defeating 1968 Olympic victor and future “Breakfast of Champions” hero, the American Bob Seagren. The Breakfast of Champions proves no match for the Factory of Champions.
And the Factory produces in almost every sport. Most impressive is DDR rowing, which produces such consistent success that the West Germans refer to “the great assembly line of DDR boating.”10 East Germany is the only nation to have its crews reach the finals in all seven Olympic boating classes—and not only that, but also to win medals in all seven classes (three golds, a silver, and three bronzes). A post-Games West German review of the Munich Olympics will sum it up as a feat “without comparison in recent decades.”11
But the DDR proves almost as strong in the Olympic showcase events: track and field and swimming. In the javelin, 22-year-old Ruth Fuchs, the reigning world record holder, breaks all Olympic marks with the second longest throw in history; her 18-year-old teammate Jacquelin Todten places second. Renate Stecher, 24, world record holder in the 200-meter dash, glides to victory, as does Roland Matthes, 25, who garners gold medals in both the 100- and 200-meter backstrokes. Probably the 400-meter freestyle in women’s swimming, however, furnishes the most delicious frisson of satisfaction for DDR sports functionaries and the loyal fans back home: Monika Zehrt of Saxony captures the race in 51.08 seconds, almost shattering a world record; a close, indeed heartbreaking second is Rita Wilden of the BRD. The Schadenfreude owes to the fact that Wilden, also a native Saxon, is a “renegade” who committed Republikflucht along with her family when she was a little girl, leaving the DDR shortly before the Wall went up.
Yes, now the whole world knows what a hammer and a compass are. It is indeed a sweet moment for East Germany, both athletically and politically. As two decades of Cold War struggle on and off the playing field gives way to détente and a historic treaty of BRD-DDR cooperation to be signed this December, the DDR is now on the verge of gaining official diplomatic recognition from all the major powers of the globe—an acknowledgment of its legitimacy that West Germany had fought throughout the 1950s and ’60s by every means: from the Hallstein Doctrine, which broke relations with states that recognized the DDR, to a BRD-inspired campaign by NATO countries to refuse visas to DDR teams and to cancel international awards ceremonies if DDR athletes triumphed.12 Only recently has the BRD let up, as the Social Democratic Party under Willy Brandt and the SED under Erich Honecker have begun to pursue détente in the form of Deutschlandpolitik, exhibiting a flexibility and pragmatism absent in the Cold War battles fought by the older generation under Adenauer and Ulbricht. One key to the DDR’s diplomatic breakthrough has been its triumph in their marathon of “Olympolitics”13 and the international prestige gained by its sports program. Three times smaller than Poland, five times smaller than France, the DDR is nevertheless the ruling sports power of Europe.
“Diplomacy through Sports,” the West German media sneeringly, if accurately, term the DDR’s political uses of athletics. But the tactic has worked: The heroes on the playing fields have compensated for the corpses on the mine fields, as DDR Olympic medals have made the international community forget—or, at least, overlook—the barbed-wire fences, the automatic firing devices, the watchtowers, the guard dogs, the death strip separating east from west. In head-to-head competition, year-in and year-out, the DDR has become such a Sportmacht that western athletics can no longer plausibly ignore its existence. This time—in its athletic program, if seldom elsewhere—DDR planning has worked brilliantly.
With the same organizational genius and a monomaniacal single-mindedness that erected the Wall, the SED leadership began, decades earlier, to draft doctors and chemists and biologists and mathematicians to assist the campaign for elite athletic performance. Obsessed with medals, Olympic functionaries shrewdly concentrated their early efforts in areas where the competition was thin, such as women’s events and newly instituted Olympic sports (bicycling, wrestling, rowing, skating). And as the medal counts mounted, the DDR gradually gained official recognition from international sporting associations. From there it set about getting its sports functionaries placed in executive positions in almost every important athletic association, posts that could then be used as a base for pursuing larger political goals.14 After the sports breakthrough, international diplomatic recognition was just a matter of time.
“TO LEARN FROM THE SOVIET UNION / MEANS LEARNING TO TRIUMPH!”
But the more difficult planning lay far beyond diplomatic strategy. So what accounts for the DDR Sportwunder (sports miracle)?
The “essential recipe for success” is the role of the schools.15 Nursery school teachers scout for talent over a three-year period; by school age, the coaches are ready to step in, with some schools sponsoring Spartakiads, or mini-Olympiads, for children as young as five. “In the spirit of Socialism, Peace, and Friendship and for the honor of the German Democratic Republic and the Glory of Sport” runs the Spartakiad oath that the children recite before competitions. Topperforming 2nd- and 3rd-graders eligible for the sports schools receive a 10-day battery of tests from doctors, psychiatrists, and coaches; computers measure abilities ranging from endurance to lung capacity, after which experts assign children to sports based on their physical aptitudes, regardless of the child’s preferences. Parents must sign releases that grant the state complete charge of their children, whom they may visit twice a month; in exchange for this waiver, savvy parents often extricate special state favors such as bigger apartments.
In the sports schools, academic classes are organized around 35-hour-per-week training schedules, which feature a coach/pupil ratio of 1 to 3. (In the West, it is at least 1 to 20.)16 Every pupil receives a monthly stipend in exchange for a promise to “fulfill the plan” developed for him or for her; steadily rising sports achievements satisfy the student’s responsibility as a citizen to meet the “class contract” and “work norm.” Students who fall short are said to “have no perspective any more”; they are dismissed, and return to a common 10-year polytechnic school. Sports school graduates who continue to “fulfill the plan” and have the “perspective” to win an Olympic medal skip military service; they receive special KStellungen (Kader-Stellungen, cadre positions) as university students or in big industrial firms like VEB 7. Oktober. The positions are only a facade to preserve their amateur status; athletes show up for a few days or weeks per year to hoist a few beers with the students or workers. DDR athletes live together and are not permitted to listen to western radio or watch western TV; the Party controls their access to all information.17 For all these reasons, they are among the country’s most loyal citizens.18
“Bei uns,” remarks the editor of Sportecho, “ist immer Olympia”: “Here it’s always the Olympics.”19 Indeed, the Olympiad is more than just a Game in the DDR; it is what the whole country is oriented toward, what the populace waits for and identifies with—since for so many years nothing else has brought international respect or recognition. Although the regime’s emphasis is clearly on creating a sports elite, it has also managed to promote popular identification with its athletes—who are the DDR’s version of movie stars. So sports are an especially important dimension of DDR youth policy: Not only are almost all DDR Olympians in their teens and 20s, but they are also held up as role models for DDR youth.
All this testifies to both the overall failure and success of the SED: before the late ’60s, the DDR seemed to most of its citizens to have so completely failed in everything except sports that many citizens could identify only with DDR sports; but communist ideology and planning have also played a role in the SED’s success in fostering a national sports consciousness. Whereas western organizations such as the American Council for Physical Fitness issue unheeded pleas for a few more push-ups and sit-ups, SED leaders have aggressively promoted sports, not only in the schools but also in prestigious sports clubs, organized by profession, such as those sponsored for soldiers (Vorwärts), civil servants (Einheit), farmers (Traktor),miners (Aktivist), textile workers (Fortschritt), and academics (Wissenschaft). (The most successful club, with hundreds of medals won by its members in Olympic and other international competitions is Dynamo. Sponsored by the SSD and the Vopos, its president is Erich Mielke, chief of the secret police.) And so, the population has become not only a nation of spectators but also of participants.
Not just polytechnical but also physical education is an integral part of the SED program for “the new human being.” Lenin was a fitness fanatic and a keen sportsman: a walker, a marksman, a skater, a mountaineer, a cyclist, and a fisherman. (Here too, der Spitzbart imitates the Master, doing a program of calisthenics and jogging every morning.) For as Ernst Thälmann, then head of the KPD, touted the political value of physical education in 1930: “Bodily training and bodily tough ness enable proletarians to develop special capacities for resistance and defense that are invaluable in the class war.”20
After the erection of the Berlin Wall, the Party promotes sports primarily for economic reasons. Just as elite sports has brought socialism its due international prestige, mass sports will strengthen the economy: “regular participation [in mass sports] raises production” by maintaining workers’ health and energy levels, the FDGB (Freie Deutsche Gewerkschaftsbund, Free German Labor Union) reminds its members in Rule 1 of its “Ten Rules for an FDGB Functionary.”21 Calling on Lenin’s inspirational example, Chairman Ulbricht issues a constant stream of slogans in the 1950s and early ’60s promoting the collectivization of physical education:
Für Frieden und Sozialismus
Für Gesundheit und Lebensfreude
Jeder treibt Sport!
[For Peace and Socialism
For Health and Joyful Living
Everyone plays sports!]
Das ganze Dorf treibt Sport!
[The whole village plays sports!]
Mein Urlaub—kein Urlaub vom Sport!
[My vacation—no vacation from sports!]
Jeder Mann an jedem Ort
Jede Woche einmal Sport!
[Everybody in every place
Play sports once a week!]22
By 1968, the SED has upped its expectations to “Jede Woche mehrmals Sport!” (“Play sports several times a week!”). The FDJ and other youth organizations have pushed both elite-level competitiveness and mass participation. By the 1970s, 97 percent of 10th-graders and 82 percent of 5th-graders can swim. Indeed, 3.3 million DDR schoolchildren—80 percent of the nation—are participating in the national Spartakiad, whose championship events are held biennially in Leipzig with all the trappings of the real Olympics (village, torch, doves, etc.), making the Spartakiad another invaluable venue for spotting athletic talent. Amazed by the commitment of DDR coaches, teachers, and students, one American sportswriter writes home: “As a talent search it’s the New York Yankees scouting system in its heyday—but run by tough Teutons. . . .”23
In the Olympic swimming hall at the Munich Games, one group draws special attention to itself: the 2,000 DDR tourists. The only national group to carry flags, they wildly brandish the hammer and compass, rooting for their national heroes. These, the first DDR tourists ever to visit West Germany, have been meticulously selected by the SED—though not all of them are Party members. Carefully segregated from the other Olympic tourists, the Ostzonler travel together in groups and are quartered in two small villages 100 km from Munich (ironically, the very locale where the first All-German Ski Championships were scheduled for 1953—before their cancellation in the aftermath of June 17). Probably on Party orders, the Ostzonler studiously avoid all contact with West Germans.24 As one Bavarian native remarked, after a frustrating attempt to engage a DDR citizen in conversation: “It’s as if, whenever we meet, we have the Wall standing right between us.”25
And it was true: Even as the Cold War mentality faded, the intra-German rivalry on the playing field remained intense, above all on the DDR’s side. The struggle against the class enemy had moved from the streets of Berlin to the stadia and swimming pools of East Germany. Or as one DDR athlete who defected in the early 1970s put it, in a statement much-quoted in the BRD press: “The ideological stance in [DDR athletics] is that, if we finish next to last, then West Germany must be last.”
“You are diplomats in warm-up suits,” SED officials told DDR Olympians. In indoctrination pep talks at Munich—“political drills” for the Games—athletes chant the prescribed slogan:
Schlagt die Imperialisten und den Klassenfeind auf eigenem Boden!
[Defeat the Imperialists and the Class Enemy on Their Own Home Turf!]26
“The best answer to the reactionaries in Bonn who claim sole representation of Germany,” Ulbricht had declared in 1960, “are DDR sportsmen on the victory stands of the European Games and of the world.”27 By 1971, Honecker, now SED chief, could tell Party members: “Our state is respected in the world . . . because of the excellent performances of our top athletes.” A sports elite—cadres of athletes “running for socialism,” “swimming for socialism,” “rowing for socialism”—had brought world respect to socialist Germany.28
History had seemingly validated the already-quoted, oft-repeated, early postwar statement of the young FDJ chief, Erich Honecker: “Sports is not an end in itself for us, but a means to our end.”
And the end had justified the means. The DDR emerged from the 1972 Games a clear winner in Olympolitics as well as athletics, having further burnished, and by now, substantially refurbished, its image—doing so, as it were, in record time.29
The DDR: from Stacheldrahtsonntag to Sportwunder. After the Wall went up in 1961, the DDR economy did indeed experience the sharp economic upturn that Ulbricht had predicted, which—along with the embrace of détente by Moscow, Washington, and Beijing—made the historic agreements in the early 1970s between Bonn and East Berlin possible. But DDR sports served as a key Leninist transmission belt toward DDR recognition; the DDR’s international sports triumphs gradually made it inevitable that such a Sportwunder would be recognized by its capitalist inferiors. Within little more than a decade, this small nation transformed its reputation from that of a national concentration camp to a national sports stadium, from that of the Barbed Wire State to the Olympia on the Elbe.
The Wall and the Sports Factory of Champions: those were the two features of the DDR known for decades throughout the world. The SED leadership bet that the triumph of the latter could expunge the treachery of the former; but it was a losing gambit. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall / That wants it down,” wrote Robert Frost. No matter how many medals the Factory produced, the DDR populace never ceased to want “it” down—the Wall and, ultimately, the Party and government that erected it.
“The fenced-in playground that was my home.” Once again, Christoph Hein’s characterization of the DDR shortly “after the Wall,” i.e., after November 1989, comes to mind—though nobody, even ironically, viewed the DDR as a “playground” in the 1960s. And in the context of the DDR’s sports gamble, the metaphor evokes a quite complex set of impressions. For the playground surrounded by barbed wire and concrete included not just guards and dogs within its walls, but also the world’s leading “diplomats in warm-up suits,” whose accomplishments became more and more impressive as the decades passed—the periodic reports of state-administered doping of athletes notwithstanding. Beyond their athletic, political, and diplomatic achievements was their decisive contribution to the DDR national identity. Partly because of the DDR sport successes beginning in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1980s, a feeling of distinctive national consciousness, if not patriotism or pride toward the “socialist Fatherland,” emerged among East Germans, at least among non-dissidents.30
In hindsight, however, this period amounted to a long, prelapsarian moment of Pride before the Fall of the Wall. For the SED’s calculated tradeoff—medals for the Mauer—would ultimately pay off only temporarily: a shady, bargain-basement international facelift had been conducted by the government at the price of suppressed popular outrage about the Wall around the playground. And so a frustration would slowly grow until the People finally razed it—Wall and playground altogether.31
For just as the sports elite, coddled from their earliest years in the special sports schools, contributed to the sense of national consciousness and socialist identity, so also did the privileged athletes provoke national anger and indignation,32 especially as socialist sports morality gave way to state and individual profiteering from western trade and advertising contracts.33 And just as the sports schools were only one example of the DDR turn toward special schools for the gifted, so too was the sports elite only one category of the educational and technical elite—whose privileges likewise invited both popular admiration and disgust.34
The rise—and the fall—of the DDR is mirrored in these shifting relations, in the ever intensifying dynamic between collectivism and elitism, ideological orthodoxy and economic aspirations, the pieties of the old Marxist religion and the imperatives of the new “technical-scientific revolution.” By the 1970s, the Party was coming, more and more, to emphasize the latter halves of the dynamic, a policy choice that finally fueled contradictions whose explosive potential, by the late 1980s, no Leninist two-stepping or dialectical dancing could contain.
At the crossroads of these byzantine contradictions stood the biggest nationalized Factory, DDR education. With everything, finally, firmly in place—until 1989—the highlights of the picture can be sketched in quicker, broader strokes than heretofore. But each of them reflects a key moment in three decades of East German education “after the Wall,” comprising a narrative that constitutes, once again, another history of the DDR in microcosm.
A revolutionary is a comrade with a heart of fire and a brain of ice.
Lenin
You say you want a revolution
Well you know. . . .
You better free your mind instead.
Lennon and McCartney
“I’m 20!” announced the DDR in 1969, celebrating its emergence from troubled adolescence with 100,000 posters of a gorgeous, glowing Fräulein proclaiming the same. To prepare for the birthday party, the German Military Publishing House in East Berlin printed a 380-page poetry anthology titled “You, Our Darling!” JP students cleared and cleaned the streets under the slogan, “More beautiful cities and communities—join us!” Jubilee week, which featured more than 700 political and cultural meetings, culminated on October 7 with the “Rally of Young Socialists,” as tens of thousands of long-haired boys and mini-skirted girls—“the children of the Republic”—paraded through East Berlin streets. Under the beaming presence of Leonid Brezhnev and comrades from 84 nations, one SED functionary after another extolled the DDR as a paradise for its “young revolutionaries”—“The Land of Learning,” “The Land of Youth,” “The Land of Sports.”35
For the ’60s was the decade of youth in the DDR just as throughout the West. In fact, to establish that the State and DDR youth had the same interests, the Party had already, with the passage of the 1964 Jugendgesetz, introduced special slogans proclaiming its new trust in the young guard:
Vertrauen und Verantwortung der Jugend gegenüber!
[Trust and responsibility to the youth!]
Die Jugend hat das Wort!
[The youth have the word!]
Unfortunately for SED ideological purity, however, most DDR youth had begun to repay this official trust in western notes. To them, the word—or the Word—was: rock’n’roll.
Before the Wall, a vibrant club scene had grown up mostly on the western side of divided Berlin, featuring combos from the West that played jazz, blues, and the hottest new rock’n’roll. “Teens and Twens” from East Berlin would slip over to West Berlin on weekends to enjoy the night life, stepping and swaying and rockin’ ’round the clock. After the Wall, even the few western-style clubs in East Berlin were closed; frustrated DDR youth resorted to private dance parties with rock’n’roll smuggled in by western relatives and friends, and to practicing in their bedrooms the new dances they saw on forbidden West German television.
In 1961/62 a new dance craze swept the world, not excepting East Germany: Der Twist. “You should see my little sis,” sang Chubby Checker—an unlikely can didate for cultural subversion—“she really knows how to dance / She knows how to Twist.” Hip DDR disc jockeys surreptitiously slipped Twist records into their officially approved late-night programs; DDR youth twisted the night away.
SED officials sprang to the barricades. At a 1961 conference for school officials, a Party dance spokesman argued that the wild gyrations of the Twist disclosed its paramilitary purposes, for it was being “used as an instrument of the imperialists in West Germany in order to prepare young people for war.”36 In June 1963, Horst Schumann, Honecker’s successor as FDJ chief, fretted that the Twist had turned into “the king of dances” among East German youth; it was a measure of the distance of middle-aged apparatchiks from everyday teen life that Schumann merely suspected that DDR “boys and girls in reality believe something quite different” from the old communist slogans. Hostile to western imports and still reeling from the fight against the Hotmusik and jitterbug, bewildered SED commissars were still rhapsodizing about the supposedly socialist virtues of the “Leipzig Lipsi,” which had proven a dud. The FDJ Central Committee officially declared the Twist an anti-communist weapon “disseminated by the American secret services to [infect] us through the ether.” To the official music magazine Melodie und Rhythmus, the Twist was “NATO music” revealing “the rotting character of the Bonn state.” It was degenerate imperialist hip-weaving, the “outgrowth of capitalist decadence, the erotic death throes in the decline of a condemned, decaying world.” An alarmed Ulbricht declared at an FDJ conference that “Western bacteria” in the form of rock’n’roll had “invaded” the minds of DDR youth.37
But soon the SED leadership gave up trying to enforce its rock’n’roll quarantine; though der Twist remained officially taboo for a while, its music was widely admitted into the DDR under the false classification of “foxtrot.” Instead, the Party tried a homeopathic remedy: If you can’t beat the new beat, reasoned SED leaders, then dance to the music.
And so the Party set about producing its own Twist records, e.g., “Our Love,” “The Yodel Twist,” and “Seven Thousand Head of Cattle.” Now even the FDJ chief himself was photographed doing the Twist. “The Twist is fundamentally abused for anti-humanist ends in the West,” declared a Party rock’n’roll spokesman, “whereas here we have liberated this interesting new rhythm from such corruption,” testifying once again to “the renovating power of socialist society.” (No Party ideologue specified exactly how its socialist revisionist music—termed “rock around the Bloc” by one American historian—differed from its western counterparts, except to reiterate as a virtue the self-evident truth that it was not produced by a capitalist music industry.)38
Yet now an even more contagious epidemic hit DDR youth: Beatlemania. During 1960–62, the Beatles had made brief forays from their native Liverpool to play seedy Hamburg clubs, though they had not yet become known to the wider German public. Especially given the group’s recent presence in West Germany, however, East German teenagers were happily susceptible to the paroxysms of ecstasy that convulsed all of Europe during the Beatles’ first continental tour and the release of Meet the Beatles in autumn 1963. By mid-1964, even Neues Deutschland had embraced the Beatles as “four likeable boys,” whose “healthy naïveté” was a suitable model for DDR rock’n’rollers. For SED policymakers were now promoting a homegrown variety of western-sounding German rock’n’roll, as one feature of a native German version of the private life attractions that DDR youth identified with the West. The new beat was welcome, as it had always been, the Party announced: “It would never occur to anyone to prescribe to youth how they should express their feelings and moods in dance or tango rhythms. Whatever way young people choose is up to them.”39 Of course, the future would inevitably belong to the DDR and its vision for youth. As one SED leader rosily predicted:
In the future, people in the DDR will seldom sing western rock music. Rather, in both German states, they will sing rock music from the DDR, with texts that correspond to our lives and feelings.
But here again, it was not to be. The popularity of the Beatles only spread, further exposing the East German body politic to the new British (and American) invasion. Officially approved home-grown German rock’n’roll could not compete with the Beatles. And the Fab Four themselves were growing less “likeable” to DDR authorities (as they were to authorities all over the world). Irony and a dangerously anarchistic freethinking had crept into their sunny songs. The “healthy naïveté” of “Twist and Shout” had darkened into the brooding skepticism of “Nowhere Man.” By 1965, the Party was deploring “rock vagabonds,” who would hang out on street corners, holler unapproved slogans, and disturb the peace of decent DDR citizens. Especially frustrating for the SED were boys who adopted Beatle haircuts—or “Marx haircuts,” as DDR youth sometimes referred to their locks, impishly (and disingenuously) citing as their model the hirsute hero of their civics textbooks. Long-haired boys were pulled out of dances by Vopos and escorted to nearby police stations, where barbers trimmed their hair to acceptable lengths. Erich Honecker himself, now SSD chief, warned DDR youth against taking western rock “for the musical expression of the era of the technical revolution.” And Neues Deutschland now cautioned against the slippery slope that began with Beatle haircuts: “One of the main tactics of imperialism . . . is the supposition that DDR youth can be demoralized. . . . Moral subversion easily leads to political subversion. The transition is often completed very fast. . . . In Vietnam bombs are falling!”40
But there were guitar-toting guerrillas at home, too, and these the SED treated with much less respect. Explicitly subversive—and far more inflammatory and dangerous than the Beatles—were the provocative ballads of 29-year-old Wolf Biermann, a popular folk singer who had drawn 120,000 youths to an outdoor concert in 1964.41 Honecker attacked Biermann’s “so-called poems,” which reveal “his petty-bourgeois, anarchistic outlook, his sense of superiority, his skepticism, and his cynicism. . . . Biermann betrays basic positions of socialism with his poems and songs.”42 Other top functionaries condemned Biermann’s work as “American-style pornography” and “toilet-stall poetry.”43 Politburo candidate member Horst Sindermann, DDR press and radio chief, made the warning to Biermann and his followers more personally ominous: “Herr Biermann shouldn’t be surprised, if instead of the milkman, some other people one day are standing in front of his door.”44
By late 1965, FDJ chief Schumann was regretting the FDJ’s former laxity, admitting that he had provided “totally erroneous ideological guidelines” toward western lifestyles and music. The FDJ worried about the “damaging” effects of western rock music on youth, which, along with “negative” western TV programming, spread an “ideology of skepticism and doubt.” In a seven-hour Central Committee speech in December 1965, Erich Honecker linked the rise in DDR youth crime to the FDJ’s wrongheaded promotion of rock’n’roll, which “overlooked that the enemy exploits this type of music to drive young people to excesses through the use of exaggerated beat rhythms.” The General Secretary himself bemoaned “the eternal monotony of ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’ ” Western jazz and rock’n’roll, Ul- bricht now pronounced, represented “the culture of apes.”45
The hard anti-West line returned. “Zuverlässigkeit statt Kühnheit!” ran a new Party slogan: “Reliability, not boldness!” In 1967, already announced LPs of Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Dave Brubeck were canceled; American jazz could only be played on DDR radio in translation. Even once-approved anti-war American stars such as Bob Dylan and Joan Baez—indeed, even Pete Seeger, who had received the DDR Peace Prize and sung before ecstatic audiences during his March 1967 visit—disappeared from the airwaves. Although the American protest singers directed their songs against Washington and Wall Street, Minister of Culture Klaus Gysi feared that DDR youth might turn the rebellious lyrics against authorities at home, since they were incapable of distinguishing “the clear class border between socialism and capitalism.”46
And so, although DDR teens continued to adopt western dance fads and listen to jazz and rock’n’roll at home, it was back to Soviet folk songs and Young Pioneer marches on DDR radio and TV. As one American historian summed up the doublespeak imposed on teens at this time:
[M]ost young people lived in two worlds, the public and the private. In the public world they outwardly conformed, said the right things, and concentrated on promoting their own careers. In private, they regarded leading SED functionaries as peddlers of myths or half-truths, even cynics or hypocrites. Satisfaction in life came from cultivating the private life with its totally different value system.47
And the increasing feelings of hypocrisy and alienation on the part of East German youth were not misplaced: the 1960s were a decade of extreme tension between ideology and praxis, between rhetoric and action on the part of the SED leadership. “The basic principle” of socialist society, the Party reaffirmed in 1965, is: “Everything with the People, everything through the People, everything for the People.”48
But the People’s most urgent practical problem, of course, continued to be the DDR economy, whose collapse in early 1961 had both reflected and accelerated the mass exodus. The SED’s proposed solution had been a technical-scientific revolution, and it wanted its “young revolutionaries” to step to socialist marches, not rock’n’roll tunes: it wanted a nation of youth who would join its technicalscientific revolution, not the West’s decadent cultural revolution.
SED leaders envisioned an economic revolution in which advanced technology would “build socialism.” Of course, first they would have to build an educational elite, from which what Milovan Djilas called the “new class” of scientists and technical experts would come. This new socialist intelligentsia would consist not of radical humanists or Marxist-Leninists, as in earlier eras, but rather of the best polytechnical Menschen, each making a specific technical contribution to the planned society.
But building an educational elite had posed ideological problems: the necessary introduction of special schools and schooling clashed with the idea of a uniform, common school system. As the “technical-scientific revolution” superseded the “workers’ revolution,” a gap widened between “the workers” and “the People,” a political embarrassment that smacked of the feared “revisionism” of the 1950s.
And so the SED leadership dropped the curtain on DDR education, which disappeared from public view after 1961, never to reappear until the fall of the Wall.49 SED leaders treated education as a national secret comparable to the military. As Freya Klier later wrote of this period:
Education simply ceased to have a public dimension. This whole area was gradually put under water—systematically, when Honecker gained power. By the end of the 1970s, the DDR school found itself in a taboo zone; the degree of public openness about it roughly approximated that for the National People’s Army. Forced course corrections occurred and had to be executed as inconspicuously as possible. The leadership didn’t want to let either the “class enemy” or its own populace see much in this eminently important area. What was public now became only that which was explicitly directed to the public.50
Even after the breakthroughs in détente between the BRD and DDR in the early 1970s, East German education remained largely behind the Wall, off-limits to unofficial eyes.
Thus, in the decade after the Wall’s erection—with the crippling refugee outflow halted, the SED’s top leadership stable and pliant under Ulbricht, and a wall of secrecy covering their activities from their own people’s view—SED educators could advance decisively toward their seemingly infinitely deferred goal of locking up their capture of “the citadel of learning.” During this fifth phase of DDR educational history (1961–71)—which corresponds to Ulbricht’s final decade in power, before Honecker’s accession in 1971—East German education entered yet another new epoch. Just as the “anti-fascist democratic” era of the 1940s had given way to the “polytechnic” era of the late 1950s, the 1960s would witness the rise of the “systematic” era, as West German educators came to call it. First die neue schule of the early postwar era—the “democratic school”—had been replaced by the “socialist school”; now would come the socialist system in education, i.e., the uniform socialist educational system, a comprehensive transformation of schools, universities, and technical training institutes into a smoothly running unit closely coordinated with industry and agriculture. And thus the final triumph of socialism in the First German Workers’ and Peasants’ State. Education would thereby “build” the socialist society: schooling and production would cooperate at all levels. “Polytechnics” would not be restricted to education; it would become a way of life.
And a drab life it would be, though even that would come as a welcome relief to the many East Germans who, after more than a decade of ceaseless turmoil, longed simply for a measure of quiet and stability. No more the militant maroon and the officious crimson of what hostile western journalists had called “Red Fascism” during the Stalinist era and “Red Prussianism” thereafter. Now, by the mid- 1960s, except for the occasional washes of western popcult brightening its monochromatic wall, “the DDR Way of Life” would weather and fade into its enduring color: the somber, washed-out gray of polytechnical socialism.
The impetus for the renewed commitment to polytechnics was a 1963 SED report that detailed the weaknesses in DDR polytechnical education and urged comprehensive reforms. The resulting debate within the Party led to the February 1965 “Law on the Unified Socialist Educational System,” the third and final DDR education act of the postwar era, which extended and superseded the legislations of 1946 and 1959. The 1965 Education Act stressed the importance of polytechnics “in the new socialist age” for pre-schoolers, schoolchildren, work-study apprentices, and university students. It heralded the emergent era of the “technicalscientific revolution”:
The most important goals in the comprehensive construction of socialism involve the mastery of the technical revolution, the development of the national People’s Economy, and the raising of production and worker productivity through the highest quality of science and technology. . . .
The sciences are experiencing an extraordinary upturn. They embrace more and more new regions of knowledge and pervade them utterly. The intervals between scientific discoveries and their industrial usage are increasingly shortening. Complete mechanization and automation, linked to . . . the application of electronics and cybernetics . . . are the basic characteristics of the present technical revolution. They place high demands on the education of human beings in socialist society. The requirements of science and the technical revolution, the conscious application of the economic laws of socialism, and the shape of socialist community, democracy, and culture define the development of the new, essential . . . human education of our time. . . .
These objective laws of the social development in the German Democratic Republic require unifying the educational system and the comprehensive buildup of socialism. They demand appropriate education and culture corresponding to the modern state of science and technology. This will enable human beings, above all in work, in the community of the working people, to educate one another to become [socialist] personalities, who will be loyal to their socialist Fatherland, the German Democratic Republic, and be ready to strengthen and defend it. Thus the technical revolution and the striving after an educated nation will, under the comprehensive construction of socialism, become a unity. . . .
To achieve these goals it is necessary to create a unified, socialist educational system.51
Steps toward the systematic integration of DDR education had already begun by the late 1950s, especially after passage of the 1959 Education Act. Nevertheless, the actual execution of educational transformation mandated by the 1965 Act entailed some considerable readjustment.
Under the new unified socialist educational system, the unity started young: Socialist education began in kindergarten, where children made beds and set tables together, working collectively rather than individually. Beginning with 1st grade, all children learned arts and crafts with paper, leather, wood, metal, and other materials; eventually they did weaving and learned electronics. DDR polytechnics included the teaching of horticulture and agriculture, with each individual contributing to the collective: e.g., each student tended a tiny plot of the school grounds—planting vegetables, sowing, watering, and weeding the little gardens. In the upper grades of the 10-year POS, a seventh of the school week was devoted to instruction in socialist principles of production; here teachers formally introduced the ideals of communist sharing for the developing socialist consciousness. By 9th grade, students spent at least one day per week in co-op programs as apprentices in industry and agriculture; now they also received intensive lessons in “socialist patriotism” and Marxism-Leninism. Gifted students had already entered, sometime between 1st and 6th grades, “special schools” for specific subjects—math, sports, music, dance, or foreign languages—whereby youthful talents were cultivated so as to best serve the state.
In this way, the SED set out to effect educational transformation without precipitating drastic political changes, and to adapt Marxist-Leninist ideology to the new economic imperatives without appearing to adopt bourgeois, class-oriented, “Western” policies promoting the privileged. Any new policy favoring a technicalscientific class would need to be reconcilable with the Marxist allegiance to the working class. And so the SED introduced a strictly delimited set of educational innovations allowing for openness to economic developments outside the DDR and Soviet bloc, but which did not tolerate political openness. Focusing on economic reform, the SED acted to preempt any revisionist challenge to its authority by dismissing overt political reforms. Former allegiances would never be explicitly repudiated, merely downscaled in emphasis, and sometimes quietly abandoned. And yet, as the inevitable result of altering their labor focus from increased worker opportunities to productivity gains, SED educators shifted their political priorities dramatically, from ideology to science and technology.
Fortunately for the SED leadership, Khrushchev—flushed with the success of the USSR’s technological advances symbolized by Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin—had already taken the lead; Ulbricht could, once again, lead by following. This shift in policy entailed an adjustment of DIAMAT philosophy. Classical Marxism- Leninism had posited a base/superstructure model of productive forces and relations: the institutions of the industrial economy formed the determining base, and all noneconomic institutions constituted the dependent superstructure. At the Twenty-Second Congress of the CPSU in October 1961, however, Soviet philosophers revalued science in Marxism-Leninist theory to a force of production, thus transferring it from the superstructure to the base. The use of atomic energy, the space flights, and the innovations in automation and cybertechnics signified the beginning of the new era, known throughout the Soviet bloc as the “revolution” in science and technology. This era, argued CPSU ideologists, corresponded to the postwar dawn of world communism, led by the USSR.
Following the CPSU, therefore, the SED reclassified science as a force of production in the mid-1960s. Only socialism, declared Khrushchev and Ulbricht, could fully exploit the technical-scientific revolution. SED hard-liners and ideologists, accurately sensing that the rise of cybernetics meant their own loss of authority and status, resisted the scientific turn; but with Ulbricht’s enthusiastic endorsement, its advocates carried the day. The result was yet another formal change in economic policy: the SED introduced Soviet “Libermanism,” the New Economic System for Planning and Leadership of the People’s Economy, known as NOS, which made central planning more efficient by concentrating on individual and local needs and desires.
Conceived by Yevsei Liberman, a Soviet professor of economics, NOS constituted a sharp departure from classical Marxism-Leninism in its acceptance of economic incentives; in an earlier era it would surely have been branded as heretical “revisionism.” Liberman argued that workers and factory managers should be evaluated by the amount of profit they returned to the People, changing the Marxist maxim, as it were, to “From each according to his ability; to each according to his productivity.” Liberman argued for economic decentralization, the application of international business principles, more material incentives for workers, and greater consumer satisfaction. He urged assessing individual workplace and factory productivity, rather than evaluating entire industrial and agricultural sectors, and awarding workers bonuses on the basis of their productivity. He also sought to redesign state planning to produce what citizens wanted to buy, rather than fulfilling quotas by producing unsalable goods.
Thus NOS was another move toward economic, if not political, liberalization—indeed it took its inspiration from Lenin’s own liberal New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1920s. Libermanism revived the spirit of the New Course begun by Malenkov after Stalin’s death as well as in the DDR in June 1953—and abruptly canceled by Ulbricht after the events of June 17. Such policy reversals were by now familiar in the communist world: just as Stalin had junked Lenin’s NEP, so too had Ulbricht scrapped the New Course in favor of a return to Stalin’s heavy-handed Build Socialism campaign, and would now embrace NOS. And much as in the case of the Build Socialism campaign, Ulbricht instituted this newest economic panacea in a far more thoroughgoing, comprehensive fashion than did the Kremlin itself, which soon came to fear that Liberman’s decentralizing proposals might weaken the CPSU’s own authority.52
And so, East German education, under NOS, began the systematic development of a socialist intelligentsia of scientists and technical experts, which Ulbricht hoped would lead the DDR to an economic boom. The SED called for an expansion, by the end of 1960s, of the number of scientists by 250 percent and of engineers by 350 percent. Consequently, the prestige—as well as the total—of scientists, engineers, and economists rose sharply. More importantly, so did the economy: by September 1967, all DDR workers enjoyed a five-day week at higher living standards than ever before: after the Wall, weekly incomes rose almost 20 percent, with no inflation.53 The greatest success of the economic “revolution” was in the increased production of consumer goods. By 1969, 66 percent of DDR homes had TV, up from 5.1 in 1958; during the same period, percentages skyrocketed of households that possessed refrigerators (2.1 to 48) and washing machines (1.6 to 48): the output of the DDR, with only 17 million citizens, now exceeded the 1936 output of 67 million Germans. And all of this had been achieved not only amid the ruins of 1945 and without Marshall Plan aid, but indeed after paying the USSR roughly $30 billion in reparations (West Germany paid nothing) while enduring, until August 1961, the flight of four million able-bodied workers.54
These successes notwithstanding, the stress on technical expertise widened the gulf between the intellectuals and the workers, and the SED became a “party of the new type” in a way not publicly admitted: an elite, rather than a mass, party. The membership of the intelligentsia in the SED doubled to 20 percent during the 1960s; all Party secretaries of district and local committees and 93.7 percent of SED secretaries in large industrial firms possessed higher education and Party college degrees by the late 1960s.55 Indeed the majority of Party functionaries now came from intellectuals’ families: Germany’s First Workers’ and Peasants’ State had become the First Apparatchiks’ State.
Moreover, despite the growing status of educators, widespread unrest still prevailed, especially among teachers. The teacher exodus continued as the 1960s progressed—no longer leading, of course, to the West but rather to other occupations. Most teachers simply did not want to be Party propagandists, however much they might initially have been willing during their student years to promote socialism and atheism. Now teachers were leaving the profession not for better jobs in the West but rather because they wanted to be teachers—and could not be, given the Party’s priorities. Those faculty who remained often became “inner emigres,” accommodating Party regulations with robotic lifelessness. As DDR psychologist Hans Joachim Maaz later defined the plight of East German teachers in Der Gefühlsstau: “ ‘Teacher’: a diagnosis, not a profession.” Klier estimates that between one half and two thirds of DDR teachers left the profession between 1961 and 1987, largely due to the lack of academic freedom:56
The prescribed black-and-white program was “Seeing-Experiencing-Recognizing-Judging.” Peace, democracy, security, and solidarity were identifiable on this side of the Wall, and hatred of humanity, poverty and humanity were on the other side of the Wall.
To be a teacher, you had to be a cadre member. To get a high post, you didn’t need special knowledge or teaching ability, but rather a class perspective. That was also the case for positions in higher education, for editors of specialized journals. . . . The Party needed peace and reliability in the school staff, so that the [ideological] invasion of the schools could be most effective.57
This ideological “invasion” caused particular problems in an important area related to the technical-scientific revolution: the physical sciences. In a series of 1962 lectures, Robert Havemann, a physical chemist at Humboldt University, argued that Soviet and SED philosophers (dubbed “DIAMATniks” by DDR students), were clinging to positions of “vulgar materialism” and “mechanistic materialism” that already decades ago had “resulted in the discrediting of DIAMAT among scientists of the world.”
As had SED ideologists who theorized about the DDR technical-scientific revolution, Havemann took as his point of departure the Twenty-Second Party Congress of the CPSU in October 1961. But Havemann seized on an announcement in Moscow which Ulbricht had soft-pedaled, one that was much more dangerous to the SED: the second round of de-Stalinization launched by Khrushchev.58 To prevent ossification into dogma, maintained Havemann, Marxism-Leninism had to take account of modern developments in the natural sciences. Orthodoxy could only hurt the basic sciences, whose research and development required freedom of inquiry. Marxism-Leninism had no subject matter of its own; the dialectic was a method, and progress in its application depended on the results of other sciences. Havemann warned against ideological orthodoxies of all sorts, ridiculing Party ideologists as the “Central Administration for Eternal Truths.”
As dangerous as these criticisms were, Havemann was in a good position to deliver them: he had been a respected scientist as well as a Party member in good standing for three decades. Son of a conservative nationalist teacher, the 22-year-old Havemann had joined the KPD in 1932. During the war, he worked by day as a physical chemist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, then organized resistance groups by night. In 1943, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to death; he won a reprieve and was jailed in Brandenburg Prison, with a special laboratory set up for him—near Erich Honecker’s own Brandenburg cell—after his friends persuaded Reich authorities that Havemann’s scientific expertise was indispensable to the war effort. Liberated by the Russians in 1945, Havemann returned to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute—now in American-occupied West Berlin—and was promoted to director by American authorities, only to be removed in 1948 when he made pro-Soviet statements to the press. Before and after the founding of the DDR, Havemann stood loyal to “the better Germany”: Volkskammer representative (1949–63), Kulturbund member, and recipient of the second-class National Prize and the Fatherland Merit Medal in Silver. He urged West Berliners to boycott the Marshall Plan, persuaded qualified colleagues to fulfill their national duty by contributing to the DDR atomic program, and lionized Stalin in the Tägliche Rundschau as “the greatest scientist of our time.”
Unlike most Party leaders, Havemann was highly respected by non-Party scientists and by the younger technical elite in industry. Moreover, he was a fearless, charismatic speaker. His Friday afternoon lectures were popular with students (and unannounced SSD auditors),59 sparking lively discussion at Humboldt University and drawing auditors from as far away as Jena and Leipzig. “You can command human beings and prescribe to them a great deal,” Havemann declared, “but you can’t prescribe to them what they should think.”60
The professor was speaking from personal experience. A defender of Ulbricht’s harsh measures on June 17—indeed Havemann had been one of the government spokesmen who had addressed the workers in the streets on June 16 and had been shouted down by them—he had been an unwavering Party loyalist until 1956 when his eyes were opened by the events in Hungary. When Forum, the FDJ news paper, tried to humiliate him and discredit his SED criticisms of the 1960s by publishing a long list of his previous professions of faith to the regime, Havemann sent a simple, one-sentence reply:
Yes, I was wrong—that’s why I was a Stalinist and became an anti-Stalinist.61
Havemann was not blind to the Orwellian character of the DDR. A Party member’s support for the Party line amounted, he declared, to “Unfreedom as Necessity,” “the leitmotif of Stalinist pseudo-socialism.”62
But Havemann remained a Marxist, albeit a “revisionist” like Leslek Kolakowski and Adam Schaff in Poland, Eduard Goldstiicker in Czechoslovakia, Ernst Fischer in Austria, and Roger Garaudy in France, all of whom Havemann quoted and admired. Havemann continued to believe, as Sartre expressed it in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), that Marxism was the “horizon” toward which the modern world and all other philosophies were heading.63
Despite his fierce criticisms of the Party—even including comparisons between it and the NSDAP64—Havemann remained true to his vision of the DDR as “the better Germany.” He never sought asylum in the West, even though he was kept under virtual house arrest for the last decade of his life, until his death in 1982.65 In the mid-1960s, he went on to explain his change of heart toward the SED, in words that recall those of Alfred Kantorowicz, words that testify to the onetime power of the Marxist dream to capture even the strongest minds—and of the internal battle of wills that must ensue to oust the Thought Police agents after “they get inside you.” Coming from a man of such great integrity and fortitude, and illustrating a much further phase of the process of “working through” the “God That Failed” disillusionment than did Kantorowicz’s testimony, Havemann’s statement is a stirring declaration of hope:
If one changes his opinions on important questions, it isn’t enough to set forth the new views and criticize the old ones. One must inquire as to why one thought differently before, why one today thinks differently. . . . One must lay the change in one’s thinking before others in all openness. Whoever seeks to give the impression that he never erred is behaving dishonestly and deserves no credit.
Before what held force for me was the principle: Truth is “partisan.” I held every thought that wasn’t “Marxist” to be threatening and false. Naturally I wasn’t so arrogant as to judge whether certain opinions merited the characterization “Marxist” according to my own thinking. That decision was a matter for the Party. I was reared to unconditional modesty toward the collective wisdom of the Party. I believed: Die Partei hat immer recht. . . .
Before I was of the opinion that one could recognize a good comrade by how fast he could understand new insights of the Party and publicly campaign for them. The bad, uncertain comrades, on the other hand, were recognizable by their immodest superiority, whereby they objected and asked completely pointless questions, which one had best not even answer. The worst cowards of all, however—who already stood with one foot in the camp of the class enemy—were the unfortunates who risked criticizing the leading comrades of the party, indeed criticizing even the leading comrade. . . .
Year after year I believed myself to be a good Marxist. Precisely because I believed that, I wasn’t. Today I don’t believe it any more. I am in doubt, restless. I am trying to think through everything. . . .
Before [1956], [criticism of] the Party leadership was taboo for me. The Party had the right to censure and to suppress all opinions that it didn’t share. Today I know that all of us, outside and inside the Party, have the right and the duty to form an independent judgment, as I have explained in my lectures.66
Published in the West in 1964 as Dialectik ohne Dogma (Dialectics without Dogma), and quickly soaring near the top of Der Spiegel’s best-seller list, Havemann’s lectures criticizing dialectical materialist dogma represented still another doomed attempt—in the footsteps of Ackermann, Leonhard, Harich, Bloch, Lukäcs and numerous others—to mark out a “third way” between SED Stalinism and western capitalism. “A spectre is haunting Europe,” announced Havemann, echoing the classic lines in The Communist Manifesto, “the spectre of humanistic socialism, the spectre of the Third Way.”67
But the call raised only the full fury of the DIAMATniks and SED Thought Police against Havemann. “Why should we permit this Socrates—he is not as smart as Socrates!—to despoil our children?” demanded Hanna Wolf, director of the SED Party College in Berlin. Like his predecessors, Havemann was branded a heretic and a revisionist for defying the “Eternal Truth” of the Party leadership’s infallibility. He had warned in his lectures against the Party’s approach to dissents becoming a “papist Inquisition toward Galileo”—and now the Italian communist newspaper Unita admiringly compared Havemann himself to a freethinking, Marxist Galileo.68 Havemann advocated “ideological coexistence” with the West, which he defined as “engagement with what others think” and “presuppos[ing] freedom.” “Reactionary regimes,” Havemann declaimed to his students, “have striven at all times in history to keep the People ignorant.”69
“The Party,” replied Horst Sindermann of the SED Central Committee, “can’t leave rotten eggs lying in the nest.”70 Havemann was thrown out of the SED in October 1964 because of “continued damage and an outlook foreign to the Party.” He had already lost his post as Director of the Berlin Institute for Physical Chemistry for insisting on academic freedom of information and expression. “Under the cover of criticizing ‘inadequacies’ [in Marxism-Leninism],” explained SED Ideologist Kurt Hager, “Havemann wants to disseminate, in organized fashion, skepticism.”71 When Havemann criticized the SED in a December 1965 Spiegel article, suggesting both that the DDR establish opposition parties and the BRD readmit a reformed KPD (which had been banished in West Germany since the mid-1950s) as moves toward possible reunification, he was summarily dismissed from the Academy of Sciences.72 No general protest in the universities answered the expulsion of Havemann, who had become the conscience of the post-Wall era, the Harich and Bloch of his generation. The intellectuals and students, let alone the general population, raised barely a whimper.
Thus did the long period of brutal force and terror tactics slip into the age of wearied accommodation: this was the key change in the attitude of the DDR populace “after the Wall.” The new generation of students had been carefully screened for ideological conformity; more vocationally and technically oriented than earlier generations, neither they nor the technical elite interfered in political or Party decisions that fell outside their narrow spheres of interest. Calibrated and synchronized by Party leaders, the technical-scientific “revolution” was, finally, starting to hum along smoothly.
Looking back from 1990 on her DDR university days in the mid-1960s, Freya Klier spoke of her generation’s experience of dogmatic “scientific socialism” as the core curriculum,73 confirming Havemann’s critique and suggesting how—in the same way that he himself had once coped—they fitted themselves to their Procrustean-Stalinist beds:
Everyone who began his studies after 1961, and stayed the course, left the university damaged. . . . “Scientific communism” lasted for all of us at least three years and was not a matter of a creative engagement, but of the SED’s cramming its power-preserving, self-dignifying doctrines [into us]. All of us prettified and rationalized this, in order to keep our scholarships and because we didn’t know anything else. The horizon of our thinking was systematically shrunken during these years.74
Given this mentality, it is hardly surprising that Havemann’s official unpersonhood excited no university protests; even more revealing of this slide into public resignation and inner emigration was the indifferent response of DDR students to the revolutionary events of 1968 in neighboring Czechoslovakia: the “Prague Spring.”
In January 1968, the liberal Aleksandr Dubček replaced pro-Soviet hard-liner Antonin Novotny as First Secretary of the Czechoslovakian CP. Now the long Prague winter of Stalinist discontent ended, and a long-deferred process of de- Stalinization began in earnest. Dubček’s program of reforms, dubbed “socialism with a human face,” included freedom of travel, freedom of speech and the press, the speedy rehabilitation of victims of Stalinism, and free-market incentives. Tito voiced immediate support for Dubček’s humanistic socialism, but in March, Moscow and the other Warsaw Pact nations emerged from a Soviet bloc summit meeting held in Dresden to castigate the reforms.
“A thaw is a dangerous climate for politicians,” Havemann remarked. “When the old ice melts, a new, thin ice then exists.”75 In the spring of 1968, Ulbricht knew the ice was thin, and he took proper precautions that the warmest southeast winds from Prague did not reach the DDR. Indeed the SED—fully aware that Czechoslovakian intellectuals around dissident magazine Kulturny zivot had inspired Havemann’s own thinking five years earlier—became one of the fiercest critics of Dubček’s Prague Spring. Playing it safe, Ulbricht forbade entry of the German-language Prague Volkszeitung, and eventually also banned university student meetings; he even went so far in March as to prohibit FDJ-sponsored marches against the Vietnam War, fearing that they might turn against the regime, as had happened in Czechoslovakia, Poland, and West Germany.76 Fearing unrest in the DDR after the Easter week assassination attempt by a right-wing youth on 28-year-old Rudi Dutschke, the radical student leader at the Free University in West Berlin, SED restrictions on student freedoms tightened further. While revolution-minded students from Paris to Tokyo to New York to West Berlin were barricading university buildings and skirmishing with police, not a peep was heard from DDR students. Asked about the prevailing climate of order and discipline in the DDR, a proud Ulbricht announced, “All students here see only progress and sing happy songs”—like the FDJ’s “Tell me where you stand!”
For the DDR revolution was long over—a revolution from above. When non-FDJ students did issue scattered calls for youth activities outside the sponsorship of the FDJ, the Minister for Higher Education replied: “Only a united youth organization led by the Party of the working class can measure up to its historical responsibility of bringing about the worldwide victory of socialism.” The socialist student, declared an FDJ leader, “is class conscious, trained in modern ways, well adjusted . . . , and above all full of revolutionary passion.”77 At long last, the DDR “young revolutionary” had met Lenin’s exacting standard: a comrade with a heart of fire and a brain of ice.
RELIABILITY, NOT BOLDNESS!
TRUST AND RESPONSIBILITY TO THE YOUTH!
THE YOUTH HAVE THE WORD!
The season of hope in Czechoslovakia, however, was far advanced; only brute force could freeze its progress. “They want to be national heroes,” said Ulbricht of the Prague reformers. “We’ll soon make heroes of them.”78 In July 1968, the Warsaw Pact nations, excepting Yugoslavia, issued a condemnation of the Prague Spring, followed by the announcements of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which authorized the CPSU to set the “line” for international socialism. An SED Politburo resolution of July 25, 1968, Ulbricht cautioned Dubček’s supporters that they underestimated the “anti-socialist forces at work in their country. . . .” Ulbricht visited Dubček on August 13, warning him personally that harsh measures awaited him if he proceeded on his course.
The wait was a short one. With the NVA at its side—evoking bitter memories for Czechoslovakians of the last time, exactly three decades earlier, that German troops had invaded Prague—the Red Army marched into Czechoslovakia on August 20/21, crushing all anti-Soviet opposition and jailing Dubček and his followers. On August 22, Neues Deutschland falsely “exposed” Dubček as a paid agent of the West and thanked the SED “Party leadership for their Leninist vigilance toward the machinations of the counter-revolution.”79 To avoid comparison with Hitler’s Czechoslovakian invasion, no DDR publication mentioned that two NVA divisions had marched on Prague.
Thus far public reaction in the DDR largely resembled that of October/November 1956: hope, then dejection and disillusion. But similarities to the events of Poland and Hungary ended there: little protest followed.80 Instead, both professors and teachers decried the Czechoslovakian “counterrevolution” and praised the interventionist “act of peace.” Declared a professor of People’s Law: “The sovereignty and independence of socialist Czechoslovakia now lie in safe hands.”81 Except for a few scattered outcries by the children of prominent dissidents—including Havemann’s two teenage sons, who did nothing more than daub Dubček’s name on a few signs—the “young revolutionaries” of the post-Wall generation barely responded. In Erfurt and Gotha a few hundred youngsters gathered in the streets and shouted anti-Ulbricht slogans until the police arrived. In East Berlin, youths surreptitiously distributed leaflets condemning the invasion; in Frankfurt an der Oder, someone scrawled, “Up with Dubček—Down with Ulbricht.”
Just a few years earlier, such protests would have been considered child’s play; but, in the climate of wintry neo-Stalinist reaction provoked by the Prague Spring, the Party’s response was swift and harsh. In late October, a series of secret show trials of 100 students and young intellectuals began. The defendants, who had variously expressed their solidarity with Dubček’s reform communism—distributing anti-SED leaflets, painting walls with pro-Prague doggerel, and shouting pro- Dubček slogans in the streets—included the children of high-ranking Party functionaries as well as non-Party intellectuals and vocal dissidents. Among them were the 23-year-old son of the Deputy Minister of Culture (whose own father reported him to the SSD); the 18-year-old daughter of the director of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism; the two sons of Havemann, whom the defense cited (unsuccessfully) as a “harmful influence” in its plea for leniency;82 and a 20-year-old niece of Helene Weigel, widow of Bertolt Brecht and now director of the Berliner Ensemble. Charged with “instigation hostile to the state,” “smearing inflammatory slogans on buildings,” and aiming to “incite citizens of the German Democratic Republic against the socialist social order,” the defendants received jail terms—sometimes suspended on condition of future proper behavior—ranging from 20 to 27 months.83
The Central Administration of Eternal Truths had, once again, handed down its unerring verdict.
THOU SHALT RESPECT THE COLLECTIVE AND TAKE ITS CRITICISMS TO HEART!
THOU SHALT PERFORM GOOD DEEDS FOR SOCIALISM, SINCE SOCIALISM PRODUCES A BETTER LIFE FOR ALL WORKING PEOPLE!
THOU SHALT PROTECT AND INCREASE THE PROPERTY OF THE PEOPLE!
Many western observers speculated that Ulbricht had played a key role in the decision to invade Czechoslovakia. Not only did he convene the Dresden summit meeting of the Warsaw Pact in March, but he also made two special trips to Moscow to protest Dubček’s reforms; certainly the “Prussian corporal,” as the Czechoslovakians mockingly called him, saw the Prague Spring as a threat to his power and even to that of the SED. After the Czechoslovakian “counterrevolution” was suppressed, Ulbricht, as in 1956, left nothing to chance. This “Friend and Champion of the Youth,” as Party newspapers called him and FDJ jingles affirmed (“Wer ist mit uns jung geblieben? / Walter Ulbricht, den wir lieben!” [“Who has stayed young like us? / Walter Ulbricht, whom we love!”]), launched a vigorous campaign to bring the youth and intelligentsia fully back into “revolutionary” lockstep. Father Ulbricht argued that the protests had been precipitated by those, like Havemann, who urged the “third way” of “ideological co-existence” with the West.84 Ulbricht sought now to create a new “reliable young guard of revolutionaries.” Announcing his goal in an impassioned October 1968 speech delivered to 150,000 JP members, he recommended “sausage communism” to them: “A tasty sausage in a solid package is preferable to the People than the coffee grounds of antisocialist intellectuals made in Prague!” Then the JP, wearing KPD uniforms from the 1918 revolution, marched from Marx-Engels Square down Unter den Linden in a torchlight parade. Having given the JP food for thought, Ulbricht now updated his 1958 list of socialist commandments, appending four new, centrally administered Eternal Truths showing how a Young Pioneer was ipso facto an upstanding “young revolutionary”:
A young revolutionary proves his loyalty to his socialist Fatherland, the German Democratic Republic, through deeds.
A young revolutionary heeds the motto, “Knowledge is Power,” and seeks a higher education.
A young revolutionary steels his character and strives to become an industrious member of socialist society.
A young revolutionary is a true friend of the Soviet Union and a glowing champion of socialist internationalism.85
Such Party calls to serve socialism as “a matter of honor, of glory, and of heroism” continued to be sounded into the 1970s. But the times had changed; hypocritical calls for revolutionary loyalty had lost their power to move East Germans. As Klier noted, such old Marxist shibboleths provoked “only a flood of jokes . . . Hardly a soul would now raise either cheek of his backside for the honor of the Party.”86
Still, Ulbricht’s relentless “revolution” from above continued. “National defense” needs in the wake of the Czechoslovakian “counterrevolution” prompted him to take decisive action to expand compulsory military training for the 200,000-man NVA. Under a newly authorized program, a four-year pre-army training course was made compulsory for all male youths. For the first time—now that conscription could no longer drive male youths westward and that the labor shortages were easing—an 18-month draft into the NVA became mandatory, after which paramilitary service in Betriebskampfgruppen (factory fighting groups) or call-ups for reserve duty were slated. Henceforth, millions of DDR males aged 14 to 60 would be subject to immediate call-up for active or reserve duty.87
By early 1969, all pathetically modest vestiges in the DDR of the “counterrevolutionary” Prague Spring had been swept away; at the 20th anniversary celebration of the DDR in October 1969, Ulbricht showed himself in firmer control than ever.
And, finally, in this anniversary year, the longest battle in DDR education had also met with victory. As the rector of Humboldt University put it: “On the table of offerings to the Republic this year we’ve placed a new university.”88 The “university of the new type” had arrived: the Marxist-Leninist, polytechnical, “praxisoriented” university, featuring close ties to industry and agriculture.
In the Land of Learning, the citadel was in secure hands.
The next several years would be known as “the Good Years” in Ulbricht’s Reich, especially among Party members: growing prosperity, peace at home, increasing acceptance abroad. The biggest new success was the economy, which in the early 1970s experienced a boom similar to the BRD’s Wirtschaftswunder of the 1950s. Modest prosperity reigned. With a GNP of $14 billion that was rising at a healthy six percent annually, the DDR had indeed “arisen from ruins” to rank fifth among economic powers in Europe, second only to the USSR within the Soviet bloc, and ninth in the world.
Much of the credit for these successes owed to the policies of Ulbricht, whom even his enemies reluctantly acknowledged was the Lenin and Stalin of the DDR: Spirit and Welder of the nation. Hegel had once said that Germany would need a Zwingherr—a heroic oppressor—to impose greatness and unity on the nation.89 Earlier generations of German historians had awarded Bismarck and Hitler this dubious honor; but now Ulbricht, as his lavish 75th birthday celebration in 1968 and his ubiquity during the DDR’s 1969 anniversary gala demonstrated—again evoking uneasy whispers within even the SED leadership of a Stalin-like cult of personality (and even talk of “Ulbricht’s Reich”)—was coming to seem to many even better qualified. Outside the Party and even in the West, hatred had turned into a grudging respect for Old Spitzbart, for with the passage of years his caution and unctuousness toward Moscow had come to appear to be patience and even cleverness and foresight—and had, finally, delivered undeniable results.90
And yet: Alas for Ulbricht, his days in power were numbered: he would not reap the full glory of the DDR’s triumphs. The man who had always shown extreme circumspection and vigilance, especially toward the Kremlin, would be undone by his own hubris.
In the years after Khrushchev’s fall from power in 1964, Old Spitzbart increasingly irritated Premier Leonid Brezhnev and President Aleksei Kosygin. Especially annoying to them were Ulbricht’s frequent reminders that he had headed his country longer than any other Soviet bloc leader and that no other living communist leader had ever met the great Vladimir Ilych.91 Moreover, the new CPSU leaders bristled at Ulbricht’s growing personality cult; they upheld the Leninist principle of collective leadership far more than even Khrushchev. Nor did the new keepers of the Kremlin approve of Ulbricht’s tendency to try to elevate the DDR above its traditional junior-partner status vis-a-vis the USSR. Indeed, Ulbricht’s seniority among Soviet bloc leaders and the DDR’s expanding economic strength induced him to imply occasionally that East Germany could serve as an alternative model for communist nations, an ironic example of Ulbricht himself touting a version of the allegedly counter-revolutionary “special German road” to socialism.
Such personal tensions exacerbated the substantive differences between Brezhnev and Ulbricht over Deutschlandpolitik, the main policy issue that divided them: Ulbricht wanted a settlement on West Berlin and relations with West Germany highly favorable to the DDR; the USSR wanted a deal with West Germany that chiefly promoted Moscow’s own geopolitical and economic interests. Brezhnev prevailed, of course, and Ulbricht lost his Party position as First Secretary in May 1971, retaining only ceremonial state posts.
Indeed fate dealt the weakening 78-year-old Ulbricht a harsh blow: he did not remain in power long enough to gain lasting credit for the policies of his final decade, policies that would soon bring the DDR worldwide diplomatic and athletic recognition. Forced out by Brezhnev, he fell overnight from his towering height, becoming now an unperson himself—“a political corpse,” remarked one ob server—from virtually the day of his demotion. “De-Ulbrichtization” was swift and thoroughgoing; whereas the basic SED ideology manual of 1971 quoted him more than 100 times, the 1973 manual contained not a single reference to him.92 “Walter Ulbricht—das sind wir alle!” the old Party slogan had run. “Walter who?” would soon be closer to the mark.
And with his death in August 1973, Ulbricht did not even live to witness his dearest, decades-long dream become reality: the DDR’s entry into the United Nations in September and its formal exchange of diplomatic representatives with Bonn the following June. Like Moses, the SED patriarch had delivered the DDR its Ten Commandments (plus four) of socialist morality and had led it out of the desert of economic chaos and diplomatic nonrecognition; but he would not live to enter the Promised Land of universal international acceptance and respect.
Instead Erich Honecker would be the Joshua who would preside over the breakthroughs with the West—the triumphs at the Munich Olympics, the reception of dozens of western ambassadors in East Berlin, the 1987 state visit to Bonn. Ulbricht’s favorite ever since 1958, when he had sided with Ulbricht against Ulbricht’s moderate Politburo rivals, Honecker had been the official SED Kronprinz since the Seventh Party Congress in 1967, and had bided his time to succeed Old Spitzbart. Like Ulbricht, Honecker had been no fan of Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik;he had criticized the West German SPD leadership ferociously during 1969/70, fearing (correctly) Brandt’s strategy of liberalizing the DDR by enmeshing it in diplomatic and economic agreements with Bonn. But Honecker still had the flexibility that the aging, prideful Ulbricht had lost by 1971: the younger man quickly grasped that Brezhnev was determined to have a comprehensive treaty with West Germany as part of his western détente initiative, and that only a pliable partner as SED head would be tolerable to him.
At the Eighth Party Congress in May 1971, Honecker secured his authority, replacing numerous Ulbricht footmen with his own old “FDJnik” cronies. Among his advisers was his wife Margot Honecker, head of the Ministry of Education since November 1963, candidate member of the Politburo, and the only woman in the Council of Ministers.
Working together throughout the 1970s and ’80s, the Honeckers would always take special interest in education and youth issues. And together, they would superintend the era of “real existing socialism”—when fully developed socialism became, at last, a purported reality in the First German Workers’ and Peasants’ State—and marked the final long movement in the rise and fall of the DDR.
Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.
[First grub, then morality.]
Brecht,
The Three-Penny Opera (1928)
On August 3, 1973, a feeble, 80-year-old Walter Ulbricht died of heart failure in the Wandlitz hospital in East Berlin, a fact little remarked, indeed scarcely noticed, even by SED officials: Ulbricht had been politically dead for two years.93 Less than a mile away, in the former Walter Ulbricht Stadium, recently renamed the Stadium of the World Youth, festivities at the 10th gathering of the quadrennial World Festival of Youth and Students continued without even a moment of silence; at the Youth Ball that evening the only official notice was a sign announcing that “Walter Ulbricht’s last wish was that this festival be conducted successfully to its end.”94
The World Festival of 1973 was the first youth festival that the DDR had hosted since 1951—and the largest international event of any kind of the entire Honecker era.95 And it was Erich and Margot Honecker’s particular triumph, the SED’s jubilant unveiling of the newest “new Germany”—an internationally recognized DDR—before the world. “The host of this tremendous gathering is our German Democratic Republic,” announced Honecker in his greeting to Festival delegates, “and this year we now have almost 90 countries that have established formal diplomatic relations with us.” The nine-day Festival, wrote Der Spiegel, “illustrates the end of the Era of Ulbricht, and the openness, even opulence, with which the DDR this week presents itself to the world.”96
Another new era was at hand.
On Saturday, July 28, 100,000 young people from 130 countries—led by the Vietnamese delegates, who ignited strings of firecrackers to symbolize American guns firing on their people—marched from Alexanderplatz through the Karl Marx Allee into the Stadium of the World Youth, their placards blazoning the Festival’s theme: anti-imperialism. “Away with the U.S. Bases.” “All Hail the Memory of the Martyrs of the Sudanese National Democratic Front.” “We ALL Decide the World’s Future.” Evoking memories of the Soviet-sponsored Olympiads of years past, a runner carried a “Solidarity Torch” into the stadium, lighting a “Solidarity Flame,” whereupon 100,000 Blueshirts clapped their hands and shouted in unison: “Friede, Freundschaft, Solidarität!”
Familiar Party lines prevailed in the Festival agitprop. The official slogans of the Festival sounded no new notes: “Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace, and Friendship!” “Volk, Youth, and Students of the DDR Are Building Socialism!” An official “solidarity opera” celebrated a workers’ strike; the anti-imperialist theme of the “Festival of Happiness,” as the SED proclaimed it, was also trumpeted in the official anthem, specially written for the Festival by a loyal teacher:
Festival des Glückes
Freundschaft uns vereint!
Festival des Kampfes
Schlagt den Klassenfeind!
[Festival of Happiness
We are united in friendship!
Festival of Battle
Defeat the class enemy!]
The Young Pioneers of Socialism attended official functions, lots of them—the FDJ had organized 1,542 political and cultural events, many of them meetings to express “solidarity” with the youth of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Mozambique, and numerous Third World nations. “United in friendship,” delegates joined discussion groups devoted to Young Health Workers, Young Technicians and Engineers, and Young Metal Workers; university youth checked in regularly at the Students Accuse Imperialism Center. Gemütlichkeit reigned; no imminent East- West confrontation threatened to disturb it. But this did not prevent long-haired Blueshirts from arguing spiritedly in the streets with long-haired Jusos (Young Socialists, affiliated with the West German SPD) about the wisdom of gradualist versus revolutionary roads to the socialist utopia.97
In contrast to the 1951 Festival, which welcomed a lonely tribe of only three dozen American delegates—mostly from New York City—more than 300 Americans from 30 states attended the 1973 Festival, almost half of them black. Angela Davis, honorary chair, a striking presence in her Afro and flowing dashiki, stood proudly next to Herr Honecker as he hailed her as a representative of “the Other America.” Fellow “Other Americans” included Jarvis Tyner and Stoney Cooks of the Young Workers Liberation League, affiliated with the American Communist Party; actors Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee; and the Rev. Ben Chavis of the Wilmington Ten. “The Festival is an eloquent expression of the changed relationships in the world,” Angela Davis proclaimed, adding that “the magnificent victory of the Vietnamese people over the U.S. government” testified to “an erosion of the strength of imperialism.” Later she told the press: “I have had three unforgettable experiences in my life: my experience as a member of the Communist Party, my release from prison by the power of international solidarity, and the Youth and Student Festival in Berlin.”98
The “Festival of Happiness” was unforgettable for more than political reasons. The buoyant atmosphere in the Land of Youth resembled less a traditional communist rally than Woodstock on the Elbe, a brief DDR Summer of Love. At least 500,000 East and West Germans—plus 150,000 foreign visitors and 25,646 official foreign guests, among them such international celebrities as Yasir Arafat—cavorted and kissed in the Alexanderplatz fountains, roamed up and down Karl Marx Allee, and shouted “Freundschaft!” on Unter den Linden. Pegging their transistor radios to the DDR’s western-oriented Youth Radio DT 64, the young Builders of Socialism relaxed to the deafening beat of western and East bloc rock bands. Or they sat in the grass, listening to The Puhdys perform their melodious socialist realist hit, “Ahead is the Future,” or to the hard-driving Klaus-Renft-Combo condemn imperialism in “The Chains Grow Tighter.”99 (In the spring of 1973, the DDR had begun, once again, pushing its own German rock, officially supervised by the Section Rockmusik of the Ministry of Culture.)100
“This will be a party of joyfulness!” Erich Honecker had declaimed on opening day. Was this the Erich Honecker who had fought rock’n’roll in the 1960s? Who had masterminded the construction of the Wall, hounded the intellectuals, and figured prominently in the fall of Dubček and the death of the Prague Spring? The model apparatchik who had so perfected his invisibility under Ulbricht that DDR burghers didn’t even have any jokes about him?
On the face of it, Honecker had hardly seemed the man to lead the DDR into the new era of détente. Lacking Ulbricht’s standing both nationally and interna tionally, Honecker had never run a ministry or held formal office after leaving the FDJ in 1955. True, he had overseen the SSD and NVA throughout the 1960s, reporting to the Politburo on activities in three crucial areas: state security, the armed forces, and youth affairs. But his grasp of economic and technical questions was limited; he was a strategist and ideologist. He was known, like Ulbricht, to have feared the embrace of the West German SPD after Brandt became chancellor in 1969, interpreting Brandt’s Ostpolitik as “wanting to get a foot in the other fellow’s door. First they want to make themselves look open-minded and objective, then they want ‘contacts’ below what they call the threshold of international recognition to lull our potential vigilance.”101 And in February 1970, even as inter-German détente loomed on the horizon, he had launched an even more violent attack on the SPD leadership, fearing with Ulbricht that uncontrollable pressures for domestic liberalization would follow.
All this notwithstanding, Moscow had accepted Ulbricht’s choice of successor without demurral. The Kremlin was pleased by the new leader’s embrace of Lenin’s principle of collective leadership and explicit disavowal of a cult of personality; in a deliberate, and, of course, politically necessary move, Honecker had assumed at first only one of Ulbricht’s offices, his Party title. Ulbricht’s state offices had gone to other politicians, such as Prime Minister Willi Stoph, Honecker’s main rival. Stoph had led the way to Deutschlandpolitik and met personally with Willy Brandt in March 1970 in Erfurt; the tension between Stoph and Honecker was an open secret in East Berlin. DDR power politics in the 1960s thus resembled that of the USSR a decade earlier, when Brezhnev and Aleksei Kosygin had vied for supremacy. Just as Brezhnev, using the Party as his base, had outflanked Kosygin by the late 1960s, so Honecker, as Party leader, outmaneuvered Stoph within two years. It was a Honecker fully in control who greeted the 1973 Festival—a very different Honecker than the invisible apparatchik of the Ulbricht era.102
In 1971, when he was named First Secretary of the SED, Honecker had seemed the quintessential Number 2 man—indeed, in American terms, a career vice president: modest, diligent, unassuming, obedient. One of his few touches of personality was his old-fashioned Saarland straw hat. Little noticed previously, it began to draw frequent public comment across the border. Western commentators observed that it evoked a vague nostalgia among Germans, as though alluding to Honecker’s youth in the West and the tragedy of divided Deutschland; indeed it softened his hard-liner reputation, helping project a solicitous, even warm image.103 For nearly a decade, this new reputation would grow. Honecker himself was known to be nostalgic, and Party stories began to circulate about how young Erich had delivered newspapers for the KPD when he was eight, how he had shunned religion for Marxism and played as the little drummer boy in the KJVD brass band,104 how die Nummer Eins of the Party, as he would now be called, relished traditional German pork knuckles and sauerkraut washed down with buttermilk, loved hunting, and enjoyed playing the card game Skat. Given his origins in the Saarland, now part of the Bundesrepublik, the West German press dubbed him “our German brother” and “unser Erich”; some DDR citizens, halfaffectionately and half-mockingly, would privately refer to their leader—often with a wide grin and quick shake of the head—as “Honi.”
No one had ever referred to Ulbricht—except with withering ridicule—as “Walter,” let alone “Ulbie.” The difference was refreshing to many DDR citizens. Formerly viewed as the contemptible architect of the Wall and the dutiful son of Ulbricht, Honecker now came to be seen as a Hoffnungsträger (carrier of hope) and a liberal. His “former” calculating ambitiousness and rigid conservatism were generally excused in the West as the cold warrior role required of Ulbricht’s prote´ge´. Western reports of the machinations that enabled him to rise so quickly after 1945, revealed in a 1971 Honecker biography by a former FDJ assistant who had defected, were largely overlooked; vague charges that Honecker was involved in the SSD kidnapping of onetime FDJ colleague and rival Robert Bialek were ignored.105 By now, Honecker was firmly entrenched. He owed his rise to Ulbricht and his durability to his own patronage power; like Stalin, his onetime “beloved leader of the workers of the entire world,” he had amassed a legion of loyalists in the Party apparatus due to his influence over appointments.106
And no one was more loyal to the Party than his wife and comrade, Margot Honecker, Minister of Education. But the “First Lady” of the DDR, as she was known in the western European press, was less popular than “Honi,” her fierce conservatism and ideological tenacity, if anything, outdoing that of her mildmannered husband. “It is our task to pass on those spiritual and moral values to youth that will produce a socialist society,” she declared, defending her forced adoption policy, whereby children of politically suspect parents were given to loyal SED families.107 To her, the purpose of education was nothing more or less than the formation of “socialist personalities.”108
Like her husband, Margot Feist was born into a communist family. But she grew up in Halle on the Saale in Saxony-Anhalt, a region that would become the DDR. Her father was a shoemaker and, even during the Nazi era, a communist functionary in the illegal KPD (and served a seven-year prison term for high treason, including four years in Buchenwald).109 Offered a training practicum to become a teacher in 1941, 14-year-old Margot turned it down, instead taking nonideological jobs as a telephone operator and typist. After the war’s end, she joined the KPD and founded an anti-fascist youth committee in Halle; by 1946, she was a member of the FDJ regional leadership. She was just 22 years old when, in 1949, as head of the Young Pioneers and the youngest FDJ delegate in the Volkskämmer, SED authorities chose her to congratulate Wilhelm Pieck in a public ceremony on his inauguration as the first president of the DDR. In 1950, she became secretary of the Central Committee of the FDJ, where she worked closely with her boss, Herr Honecker. Erich left his wife, Edith Baumann, a Social Democrat, for Margot, who bore his second daughter in 1951;110 Honecker soon divorced his wife and married Margot in 1953. She advanced quickly thereafter: department head in the Ministry of Education at 27; candidate member of the Politburo at 29; Assistant Minister of Education at 31. In 1963, at the age of 36, she rose to Minister of Education and a full member of the Central Committee; she became the so-called First Lady of the DDR in 1971.111 Known for her charm and elegant style, Frau Honecker’s bluerinse hair and expensive clothes distinguished her in the drab SED Central Committee; she defied the clichés of the joyless, repressed communist female functionary, even when she exhibited rabid constancy to the Party. Unlike her inconspicuous predecessor, Lotte Ulbricht, Ulbricht’s second and long-time wife, Margot cultivated a high public profile and wielded considerable political influence, especially among hard-liners, even beyond education: for style and clout, she became something close to a DDR combination of Raisa Gorbachev and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Erich and Margot: carrier of hope and purveyor of ideological orthodoxy. Together they embodied the contradictory DDR in the early 1970s and its attempted reconciliations: liberalism toward western culture and fidelity to Marxism- Leninism. The 1973 Festival demonstrated the new unwritten “don’t ask, don’t tell” commandment for “young revolutionaries” during the early Honecker era: Thou art granted a western “private” life, if thou leadest a communist life in public.
Two liberal domestic programs launched during 1971–73 bolstered Erich Honecker’s image as a Hoffnungsträger. Downplaying the technical-scientific revolution and the buildup of industry in his opening speech at the Eighth Party Congress in May 1971, Honecker had instead stressed consumer satisfaction, inaugurating a new policy, dubbed “consumer communism” in the West.112 “A Better Quality of Life for the Citizens” was Honecker’s slogan for a program that emphasized the service sector and extensive business cooperation with the West. Ulbricht had promised, and partly delivered on, “sausage communism”; DDR citizens, impressed with the smorgasbord of western wares newly available in the early ’70s, welcomed what they termed Honecker’s “goulash socialism.”
If “consumer communism” gained Honecker favor from the DDR populace, his declaration of openness to artistic experiment and the literary avant garde won him supporters in the intelligentsia. Soon after his elevation to First Secretary, in December 1971, he uttered two sentences that created an excited stir: “If the starting point is the firm position of socialism, there can, in my opinion, be no taboos in the field of art and literature. That concerns questions of content as well as of style—in short: the question of artistic excellence.”113 In later years, exegetes would pore over every phrase in these sentences: What did “in my opinion” mean? What defined a “starting point”? What constituted a “firm” socialist position?
Was this yet another side of the new Honecker in the making? In the 1950s and ’60s, Honecker was known to have had little respect for intellectuals, artists, and professors, once provoking Johannes Becher to dismiss him as “an arrogant, egotistical numbskull.”114 The “correct class perspective,” Honecker held, was “more important than book knowledge.”115 Still, despite the uncertainties over Ho- necker’s sudden turn, the immediate effect of his new dispensation was to set in motion a cultural thaw that soon witnessed the publication of such works as Ulrich Plenzdorf’s Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (The New Sufferings of Young W.), a work updating Goethe about an East German Werther; Carl Heinz Danziger’s Die Partei hat immer recht, a systematic assault on the SED literary Establishment; Stefan Heym’s Der König David Bericht (The King David Report), a trenchant satire of Stalinism; and Völker Braun’s Unvollendete Geschichte (Unfinished Story), a controversial novella sharply critical of both the Party and the socialist state.
Moreover, as we have already seen, the foreign policy breakthroughs associated with Deutschlandpolitik—policies that had, until 1971, been more resisted than supported by Honecker—worked to his advantage during the early 1970s. “Honi,” rather than the forgotten Spitzbart, was generally credited with bringing the DDR “in from the cold”; until 1973, the year of Ulbricht’s death, the DDR had remained in relative isolation. That year alone, in the aftermath of the Basic Treaty signed in December 1972 with the BRD, 54 nations recognized the DDR; in the previous 24 years, only 40 nations had done so, most of them communist. In 1973, Honecker began to speak of “real existing socialism,” and many DDR citizens believed—now that Ulbricht was gone—that while it certainly did not yet exist, “real” socialism might at least now really begin to exist.
Hope sprang eternal even among liberal educators and students. Indeed the honeymoon with the intellectuals carried over partly into education and youth policy, which now entered a sixth period (1971–77) characterized by a more liberal stance toward western-imports in youth culture, alongside an insistence on ideological orthodoxy outside cultural matters. Now came a philosophical turn away from cybernetics toward Marxism-Leninism, as communist morality received greater attention than DDR polytechnics. Now came a growing stress on the duties of “young revolutionaries,” as ideologists decided that high worker performance and political reliability were fully compatible. Now came a drive to create an elite Party Apparat, as the SED consolidated its hold on every major institution of society.
The shift in priorities reflected Honecker’s own predilections. As the “systematic era” of integrated polytechnical education gave way to the “early Honecker era” of ideological adjustment, the downgrading of the scientific-technical revolution resulted in a more relaxed period for most DDR students and educators, especially non-Party members, one of increased private freedoms and greater public responsibilities.
In January 1974, the SED passed a new Jugendgesetz (youth law), the “Law on the Participation of Youth in the Shaping of the Developing Society,” which superseded the 1964 Jugendgesetz and represented the most significant youth legislation of the Honecker era. Combining indulgence of western culture with Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, it typified the balancing act that the SED was attempting in all policy areas. Article 30, for example, enjoined the FDJ to provide “good-quality discotheques” and to improve standards of popular entertainment. But the 1974 Jugendgesetz also codified Ulbricht’s Ten Commandments and four precepts, giving legal expression to the increased duties of “young revolutionaries”:
The three revolutionary tasks facing the younger generation are to strengthen friendship with the USSR, to demonstrate anti-imperialist solidarity, and to shape advanced socialist society. Their fulfillment requires the readiness to serve, initiative, and a clear political perspective.116
Enshrining such responsibilities in the 1974 Jugendgesetz testified not only to the Party’s new emphasis on Marxism-Leninism, but also to the growing confidence of the Party in DDR youth.
TRUST AND RESPONSIBILITY TO THE YOUTH!
THE YOUTH HAVE THE WORD!
Just a few months earlier, the World Youth Festival, at which a draft of the new Jugendgesetz had been circulated, had demonstrated how DDR youth were already serving as good comrades to the USSR and contributing to anti-imperialist solidarity; both goals were also reflected in the increased economic cooperation between the DDR and the Soviet bloc. Trade between the DDR and the USSR increased by 50 percent between 1971 and 1975; trade with COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance) countries increased by 90 percent between 1972 and 1975.117 The 25th anniversary of the DDR’s founding in October 1974—by which time the DDR was recognized by 104 nations, including the United States a scant two weeks earlier—announced a crucial change in the 1968 constitution, one that brought the DDR and USSR even closer—and separated the DDR and BRD even further. Article 1 of the 1968 constitution had stated: “The DDR is a socialist state of the German nation.” The revision specified: “The DDR is a socialist state of workers and peasants.” As part of Abgrenzung (delimitation), Honecker’s policy to reap economic advantages from the West while restricting its political influence on the DDR, mention of German reunification and of the “German nation” was now deleted. The word “German” was also replaced by “DDR” in the names of numerous state institutions. For instance, the German Academy of Sciences became the Academy of Sciences of the DDR. The National Front of Democratic Germany became the DDR National Front. German Radio became Voice of the DDR.118
But the technological race conflicted with such political decisions and led to worrisome, undialectical contradictions: Even as the SED was disengaging from the West and integrating more fully into COMECON, the equally important goal of keeping economic pace with the West—whether in consumerism or in the technical-scientific revolution—clearly demanded doing the reverse.
As Freya Klier points out, the DDR’s pseudo-egalitarian pedagogy had backed it into a corner. Two key slogans of yesteryear continued to have psychological force: “Reliability, not boldness!” and “We leave nobody behind!” Pedagogy based on those mottoes had created an elite of conformists, unfamiliar with creative thinking and uncomfortable with entrepreneurial decision-making.119 Now, as Cold War pedagogy became clearly outdated, educators rushed to develop a new didactics that echoed the once-despised bourgeois “endowment” theories associated with aptitudes and gifts. The old SED bromide had been: To everyone and everything the same. Now the new faith proclaimed: Some children are different. The old SED dogma had been: There are no differences in gifts or in development. Now the new doctrine held: Children are variously gifted. The old SED shibboleth had been: The teacher represents the Party’s will. Now the new wisdom maintained: Students and teachers are partners in learning, and the teacher too is an individual.
But “the new continent of individuality,” as Klier notes, was explored only in the case of a few thousand gifted students or exceptionally valuable teachers. Now the system would happily “leave behind” the 2.6 million “average” achievers. But preferential treatment presumed a “firm class perspective”; even as the Party urged intellectual innovation, its tight screening process and school indoctrination practices ensured political reliability. Exceptions would, however, be tolerated for the elite athletes, students, teachers, and coaches who produced or guided coveted Spitzenleistungen (top performances). As Klier puts it:
The highly gifted child need not be an obedient Young Pioneer, and even disapproved characteristics like unwillingness to conform or reservations about the FDJ could be tolerated if he or she possessed scientific talent. . . . The elite students enjoy the privilege of being seen as individual personalities. Nobody gets excited if they use a western bag for carrying their lunch.120
And so, students who attended special schools received a reduced period of military service; top athletes or Abitur examinees skipped the army altogether. (But average students who barely qualified for university and expressed “conflicts of conscience” about military service often had to spend double the time—three years—in a non-combat military assignment before gaining university entrance.) This exceptionalism was even enshrined in the new DDR pedagogy. One manual for special schools for the gifted advised teachers:
Gifted, especially highly gifted children, possess a different personality structure. We are responsible for recognizing this distinctive shape of conditions and developing distinctive pedagogical responses to them.121
By the 1970s, as education became ever more important for producing the politically reliable technical and Party elite, the majority of elementary and secondary school teachers came from two sources: teachers’ and Stasi families. An amazing 40 percent of all women students in higher education were daughters of DDR women teachers. Class differences between the educated and workers in the Workers’ and Peasants’ State widened further, even though the SED now defined all Party functionaries as “workers” and called anyone who had ever held a full-time manual job (even 50 years previously) a “worker.”122
Meanwhile, Herr and Frau Honecker’s honeymoon with the DDR public appeared as if it might turn into a tolerably decent marriage. Although growth had slowed after the 1973 Arab oil embargo, the economy was still strong. Abgrenzung was integrating the DDR more completely into the socialist bloc without preventing beneficial economic cooperation with the West. Scattered “troublemakers” and asozial (anti-social, delinquent) youth were still around; but workers, intellectuals, and students were generally quiet. The single unsettling issue was a new problem with emigration: in August 1975, both Honecker and Brezhnev had signed the final agreement of the Helsinki Conference on European Security and Cooperation, which guaranteed freedom of travel to citizens of signatory nations. Though few in the West expected a DDR policy change from this, 100,000 DDR citizens had taken the commitment seriously—much to Honecker’s public embarrassment—and applied to emigrate. After an initial period of relaxed regulations that generated hopes of greater liberalization among DDR youth, Honecker tightened emigration criteria, effectively disqualifying all applicants who did not already have families in the West. So the illegal escape attempts continued. In 1976, at least 10,000 citizens—1,000 of them between 15–20 years old—sat in jails as political prisoners, guilty of illegal attempted escape to the West.
Nevertheless, after the DDR’s spectacular second-place finish in gold medals (trailing only the USSR) at the Montreal Olympics in the summer of 1976, Honi’s popularity and power crested to an all-time high. His authority among Party members was so great that he added to his portfolio that fall the leadership offices of the other two key DDR institutions: the National Defense Council and the Council of State. Within just five years, he had attained a level of power that took Ulbricht more than 15, and without Party purges—and without a single rival in sight. As if to top off his success, the single list received still another all-time high of “yes” votes in the 1976 election: 99.86 percent.
But the popularity of the General Secretary came to an outraged end on November 17, 1976, when he moved against protest-singer Wolf Biermann—still a prominent “troublemaker” after a decade of official censure—stripping him of his DDR citizenship while he was on a tour of West Germany.123
Biermann had not appeared in concert in the DDR since 1966,124 and was still prohibited from recording or publishing in the DDR. But he was nonetheless managing to get his recordings and writings smuggled to the West, from which they soon reached the DDR via radio and underground publications. And he was still tweaking the SED with singles like his 1967 “Stasi Ballad” (addressed to “My truest fans . . . / Who ensure my immortality”).125 His albums, such as No Use Waiting for Better Times (1973) and Chaussee Street 131 (1975)126—both recorded for CBS Records—were immediately condemned by the SED as “pornographic” and “anti-socialist.” Still, on condition that he forego playing his more “objectionable” songs, Biermann had received permission to appear at a Cologne concert to be attended by 6,500 fans and broadcast live on West German radio and TV. Defiantly playing his preferred repertoire anyway, Biermann then learned that the SED had taken the opportunity to lock him out of the country. (Many observers later argued that the unexpected deal was a ploy to lure Biermann to leave the DDR: knowing that—agreement or no agreement—Biermann would be Biermann, the SED would have an excuse for refusing him re-entry for publicly “defaming the DDR.”)127
But Honecker was totally unprepared for the national and international outcry against his move. Biermann was more than just a popular singer. Originally from Hamburg, 17-year-old Wolf had emigrated to the East in 1953, arriving on March 5, the day of Stalin’s death.128 Traveling against the flow of refugees that year, Biermann continued to believe—despite the evidence of June 17129—in the dream of das bessere Deutschland, of a communist Germany, his father’s dream. “I was looking for a Fatherland,” he later explained. “Or should I say, the land of my father.” Imprisoned by the Nazis for being both Jewish and communist, Dagobert Biermann had been a shipyard worker, whose Party assignment was to sabotage ships carrying weapons for the Nazi bomber squadrons of the Legion Condor, which Hitler was sending to aid Franco in the Spanish civil war. Arrested and sent to a labor camp, Biermann Sr. was murdered in 1942 in Auschwitz, as were20 of young Wolf’s relatives. For years afterward, Frau Biermann would tell her son every day: “Wolfie, you must never forget your father’s murder.”130
Biermann never did. In his early 20s, he began composing songs condemning social evils and state tyrannies of all sorts. His mother’s admonitions fed the rage in his protest songs, which often seemed like diatribes or tirades to outsiders. Bristling with curses and cacophony, they had little melody, swinging from ecstasy to melancholy. All this made the idealistic, sometimes disillusioned Biermann—a short, rumpled man known by his droopy Mexican moustache and Spanish guitar—seem like a miniature German Don Quixote. His spiritual mentor was Brecht, the radiant “sun”131 that he never met and whose death in 1956 came a year before Biermann began a stint as an assistant to the new director of Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. Biermann developed his stage presence as an actor-director at the Berlin Workers’ and Students’ Theater during 1961/62, where he worked while studying economics, philosophy, and mathematics at Humboldt University (1955–63). From the SED’s standpoint, of course, Biermann should have studied diplomacy. An SED candidate member, Biermann was disqualified from Party membership in 1963; authorities banned him from performing, publishing, and foreign travel after the SED Central Committee attack on him in December 1965.
Nevertheless—or precisely for these reasons—Biermann enchanted a new generation. Already a folk hero to DDR youth by the late 1960s, Biermann the rogue troubadour might have become the dissidents’ successor to Havemann, indeed the public conscience of the ’60s generation—a lowbrow Harich or even a pop Brecht. Instead, he was forced to lay low. For the SED, Biermann too, like Harich, had crossed the line from dissident to renegade, a mistake that Havemann and Brecht never made; and unlike the elder pair, neither Biermann nor Harich were protected by a history of distinguished service to the Party, high international prestige, or close connections with SED higher-ups or the CPSU elite in Moscow.
Still, Biermann’s forced expatriation unleashed a storm of protest, abroad as well as at home. The organs of the French, Spanish, Italian, and Swedish CPs criticized the SED’s decision, as did leading left-wing personalities such as Sartre, de Beauvoir, Yves Montand, Ernst Mandel, Peter Weiss, Rudi Dutschke, and even Joan Baez, who had, in concert, publicly castigated the SED’s silencing of Biermann when she played East Berlin in the early 1970s. Factory workers in West Berlin issued calls for solidarity with Biermann. In the DDR itself, a dozen intellectuals immediately released an open letter objecting to his expatriation; 150 more artists signed within days. The signatories included Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Stephan Hermlin, Sarah Kirsch, Günter Kunert, Heiner Muller, Rolf Schneider, Jürgen Fuchs, and Jurek Becker. Havemann, a friend of Biermann, also signed, and then published an article in Der Spiegel that criticized Biermann’s expatriation.132
The organized protest was the most serious since 1956. But the Party leadership withstood the international criticism and responded to the domestic opposition harshly: Biermann’s supporters variously endured imprisonment, house arrest, and expulsion from the DDR Writer’s Union.
Honecker’s “blue period” was over. Now it was back to leaden gray, as a new cultural winter set in. Havemann was put under 24-hour surveillance; dozens of artists and intellectuals now chose exile and followed Biermann westward during 1977/78: actress Eve Marie Hagen (one of Biermann’s many lovers) and her singerdaughter Nina Hagen; actresses Dagmar Graf and Katharina Thalbach; Berliner Ensemble director Einar Schleff; comedian Eberhard Cohrs; composer Tilo Medek; rock star Klaus Renft, lead singer in the Klaus-Renft-Combo; film star and ballad singer Manfred Krug; writers Siegmar Faust, Bernd Jentzsch, Erich Loest, Klaus Schlesinger, and Jurek Becker; acclaimed poets Reiner Kunze and Sarah Kirsch; and author Thomas Brasch, the deputy culture minister’s son who had been jailed in 1968 for his pro-Dubček gesture. Rudolph Bahro, a DDR economist and youth official, was jailed for two years, before being exiled for publishing in Der Spiegel passages from his manuscript, Die Alternative, a severe critique of the Party apparatus of the USSR and DDR.133
The intellectual exodus put an end to Honecker’s program of cultural liberalization, and he would never recover the intellectuals’ support; in the next decade at least 350 artists and cultural figures left the DDR.134 Indeed, as had happened before in the DDR, Honecker’s loosening of the reins had ultimately led to a heightening of tensions in his relations with the intelligentsia. As in the Ulbricht era, dissident intellectuals were hereafter treated as enemies of the state, though they were usually exiled rather than jailed (or, if possible, freigekauft [bought free] by the BRD, i.e., “sold” to Bonn, at prices ranging up to $20,000). A revision in the criminal code made passing information to western journalists punishable by 2 to 12 years’ imprisonment. All this contributed to the continuing exodus of the DDR’s leading intellectuals. “Our Erich” had reverted to type: dogmatic conservative.
Honi and Margot’s Good Years with the DDR public were now over too. The discord spilled into violent public expression in 1977, during the October 7 celebration of the DDR’s founding. Chanting “Wolf Biermann!” and “Russians go home!” 3,000 young people at an Alexanderplatz concert rioted, resulting in hundreds of arrests and 200 injuries; four Vopos and nine youths died in the melee. It was the first instance of mass unrest in DDR streets since 1953.135
The Alexanderplatz brawl revealed that, beneath the placid gray surface, little had really changed since 1961—or 1953. To mollify restless youth, the SED made some concessions in pop programming: formerly scorned, ideologically incorrect western music was now played, even at political rallies; soon even disco and new wave were in. Soon FDJ official Hartmut König could rewrite history and proudly declare: “German rock had its birthplace in the DDR.” The Party temporarily drew the line at punk, however, with bands like Itch in Magdeburg and Sewage in Weimar limited to small venues.136 But in the next decade, punk and every other western music craze would sweep the DDR. “Agit-socialist” rock groups like Karat and Silly would garner state recording contracts and promotional tours in the West if their music contained enough thumps at neutron bombs and Reaganism; in 1980, Neues Deutschland would eulogize John Lennon lavishly as a proletarian champion and Vietnam War opponent.137 At the same time, aggressive Szenesprache (“scene” language)—featuring German youth slang like “ Scheissspiesserladen” (“shitty philistine joint”) and “Null Bock” (“no way” or “I don’t wanna”)—would fill the song lyrics of bands like Rosa Extra.138 And the new-wave band Pankow would replace Klaus-Renft as the star bad-boy group of the 1980s, with hits like “Komm aus’m Arsch” (“Out of the Ass”) and the album Hans Makes Good, the story of “Hans Nihilist,” roaring the rage of a generation.139
With the reins loosened on DDR popcult programming, East German youth seemed mollified. No new instances of violence erupted, and most foreign observers dismissed the Alexanderplatz incident as little more than a Friday night of drunken revelry. Within the SED and the Soviet bloc, Honecker still appeared invulnerable, indeed perhaps stronger than ever. When he turned 65 in August 1977,140 West German commentators judged him at the zenith of his power.141 Not only did he now possess the leading offices of the Party and state, but he also enjoyed Brezhnev’s unwavering support—a level of power and prestige that Ulbricht had not attained until near the end of his career.
Under the circumstances, it was therefore understandable that neither Herr nor Frau Honecker had worried overmuch the previous August about a tragic incident near Margot’s hometown of Halle, which, however, aroused much distress among church leaders and church youth. As a protest against communist barriers preventing religious instruction in school and young Christians’ admission to higher education, Oscar Brusewitz, a pastor and youth minister previously jailed for helping youths in trouble with the authorities, doused himself with gasoline and set himself afire in the town square of Zeitz. A sign at his side read: “The churches accuse communism of oppressing Christian young people.”142
Neues Deutschland reported the death as a private matter—the suicide of a “mentally disturbed man”—but thousands of grief-stricken East German Christians found in Pastor Brusewitz’s self-immolation an expression of the acute despair and anger they felt toward the SED and its Christian youth policy, as well as of their frustration toward their own church leaders’ acquiescence in SED restrictions.143 Still, no one took the dramatic death as the prelude to a requiem for the regime. Or as the catalyzing spark of a national conflagration.
But the pastor’s cries were the first tongues of fire, a lighted candle to the tinderbox of DDR discontent, which would smolder quietly for a dozen years, ultimately to blaze forth and climax in a Wagnerian, self-consuming, empyrean end.
The Revolution of the Candles
Theory, my friend, is gray—but green is the everlasting tree of life.
Lenin,
Collected Works, vol. 20144
The Wall will be there in 50, and still in 100 years.
Erich Honecker,
January 15, 1989
In the spring of 1978, full-scale Gleichschaltung—the term that former FDJ Chief Erich Honecker had used, without concern for its Nazi overtones, in a speech thirty years earlier to describe the SED’s ultimate political goal—appeared near com plete. Every major DDR institution was now integrated into the socialist system—except one: the church.
With the erection of the Berlin Wall, and especially after Abgrenzung began in the early 1970s, SED policy had isolated the churches from western influences, forcing East German churches to abrogate ecclesiastical ties with West Germany’s “NATO churches,” with which they had previously shared bishops. Over the years, SED policy had successfully undermined much of the influence of the churches within the DDR; Lutheran church membership had declined from 80 percent of the DDR population (or 14 million) in 1945 to 30 percent (5 million) in 1978, and Catholics constituted a miniscule 7 percent (1.2 million) of the population. Atheistic, Marxist-Leninist rituals substituted for Christian sacraments—e.g., the Jugendweihe, the Namensweihe (socialist baptism), the Eheweihe (socialist matrimony), and even socialist funerals and wakes. For a majority of the population, these secular rites—conducted in festive rooms, featuring notable speakers and music from Bach or Handel, and completely paid for by the state—gradually replaced traditional religious ceremonies; indeed, by the mid-1970s, Jugendweihe participation stood at 95 percent, with church leaders no longer publicly voicing resistance to it. But religious opposition to the regime flickered here and ignited there (e.g., Brusewitz’s self-immolation).
Now Honecker moved to neutralize this last potential center of dissidence. Despite his recent failure at liberalization with the intellectuals, Honecker envisioned no comparable difficulties with church-state détente, because he saw no evidence of loose-lipped Biermanns in the churches’ ranks and believed that, in the main, the SED’s long-term church policies had already succeeded.
And so, on March 6, 1978, Honecker held an historic meeting with Bishop Albrecht Schönherr, head of the Evangelical (Lutheran) Church. Schönherr identified with the Confessing Church and Reformed theological tradition and was a disciple of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had criticized the political passivity inherent in the Lutheran concept of the “two kingdoms,” which taught respect for state authority as well as Almighty God and His church. Defying Hitler, Bonhoeffer had held that the church owed no allegiance except to God,145 breaking with most Lutheran (and Catholic) congregations in Nazi Germany, which had prayed until the war’s close for Hitler’s armies. By the end of the war, Bonhoeffer himself was imprisoned in Buchenwald as a conspirator in the July 20 movement to assassinate Hitler; he was executed in Flossenberg in April 1945, just days before the camp’s liberation by Allied armies.
Unlike the most radical church dissidents, Schönherr did not equate the SED with the Nazis. Declining either to support or oppose the government, he tried to chart his own third way between the pro-government stance of mainstream Lutheranism and the oppositional stance of the Confessing Church and the Reformed tradition. Schönherr embraced the role of the “Kirche nicht gegen und nicht neben, sondern im Sozialismus” (“a church neither against, nor alongside, but in socialism”). The nuance was ignored by SED leaders, however, for whom Schönherr’s new concept of the church “in socialism” was good as support. To the Party, the new concept meant that the church had disavowed a political role, accepting the traditional Lutheran doctrine of “separate kingdoms” between church and state. For consenting to abstain from interference in political or state affairs, Honecker granted church leaders important concessions: church kindergartens, radio and TV time for special church events, state aid for church buildings and cemeteries, church control of seminaries, and official acceptance of the internal autonomy of the churches and of the principle of religious freedom.146
Church-state détente signaled a change in SED agitprop tactics: “The premier question,” declared Klaus Gysi, head of the State Secretariat for Church Questions, “is not how to spread atheism, but how to win Christians to a socialist way of life.”147 A major consequence of this change was increased financial support for the churches. In pre-war Germany, the government had supplied 40 percent of church funding. By the 1960s, however, East German churches received less than 10 percent of their funds from the state, leaving them to depend on their western counterparts for support. Now, to reward their new “independence,” the SED agreed to increase state support for church reconstruction and such activities as care for the elderly and the disabled. Inadvertently, the SED was revivifying—with media access and even financial support—the “gendarmes in cassocks” that Lenin had railed against, the alternative institution that would ultimately bring down the SED.
With the churches and the intellectuals apparently in hand, the way now seemed paved for the DDR’s ambitious program of forming “socialist personalities” through education and youth policy to progress apace into its seventh and, as it would turn out, final stage (1977–89). During this increasingly embattled period, as western youth culture expanded beyond private life and increasingly encroached on DDR public life, SED educators fought the advance by remilitarizing the schools and stepping up youth indoctrination: Education for Socialist Patriotism evolved into mandatory Wehrerziehung (defense education), and Marxism- Leninism was integrated even more widely and systematically into school curricula.
Wehrerziehung had already been introduced in the 1950s into extracurricular activities via the GST, the paramilitary sports organization for youth, which had for a quarter-century been pressuring students, with only mixed success, to take up military exercises. In 1972/73, SED educators had already adopted new, optional courses for girls in emergency first-aid and for boys in firing practice and field training (totaling four hours per week). Beginning in September 1978, however, these courses became compulsory for 9th- and 10th-grade students, making the DDR the only country in the world whose core curriculum including training its 15-year-old schoolboys to kill. The new hard-line policy was the brainchild of Frau Honecker, who was dissatisfied with the apathetic response of her “young revolutionaries” to the 1974 Jugendgesetz and who rejected her husband’s advice to relax indoctrination.
The remilitarization campaign in the schools was a ticking time bomb. Indeed, just as ideological indoctrination in the schools had been the single major factor precipitating East Germans’ flight to the West in the 1950s and early ’60s, mandatory Wehrerziehung would prove the biggest catalyst to an unexpected grassroots movement in the 1980s: a peace movement growing out of the Lutheran churches.
That was all to come. The 30th anniversary celebration of the DDR in October 1979 went off like clockwork, another gala affair attended by Brezhnev, complete with torchlit procession, military parade, and the traditional 10-foot, socialistrealist portraits of the top Kremlin guest. Even as late as 1981, the determined attempt, on the 20th anniversary of the Unding (monstrosity), to glorify August 13 as a day of national celebration met with modest success.148 The Wall was Honecker’s own handiwork, and he would always remain proud of it. Before red banners draped from East Berlin shops and houses (“Everything for the Well-Being of the People!”), he honored the brave “border guard heroes” and praised his own midnight masterstroke as the key milestone on the way from the Cold War to détente. Scattered murmurs of protest against “DDR militarism” were heard during 1979–81 from a few church leaders. But church-state relations remained, in general, cordial.
The rise in Poland of the Solidarity trade union movement in August 1980, and the increasing outspokenness of the Polish Catholic Church thereafter, kindled the first sparks of East German activism. Unlike Poland, however, the DDR was overwhelmingly Protestant. Indeed it was the only Protestant nation in Eastern Europe outside the USSR,149 and this meant that DDR protest remained less organized and more populist, i.e., more focused on questions of individual conscience and less dependent upon protest leaders or influential clergy than in Catholic nations.
Ironically, the decisive impetus for the formation of an East German protest movement came from the DDR’s indomitable atheistic humanist, Robert Have- mann; the peace “movement” can properly be dated from his last public act: Hav- emann’s open letter to Brezhnev in November 1981, written two months before Havemann’s death, in which he appealed for world disarmament and the withdrawal of both NATO and Soviet troops from Germany.150 Havemann’s plea fell on deaf ears abroad: Not only did neither side withdraw troops, each proceeded with plans to place nuclear missiles on German soil.
But a candle had been lit at home. The DDR peace movement remained small in 1982/83: where Bonn’s streets rang with the shouts of 300,000 West Germans marching to protest the planned installation of U.S. Pershing missiles, 15 or 20 people would sit quietly in the Nicolai Church in Leipzig, discussing nuclear free zones. The Dresden Peace Forum, initiated in January 1982 by Rainer Eppelmann, was able to attract 2,000 signatures for a petition that called for stopping the production of children’s war toys, replacing military instruction in school with “peace education,” instituting a 24-month “peace service” alternative to the 18-month military draft, and ending military displays on public occasions. Eppelmann, a Lutheran youth pastor in East Berlin—whose uncanny physical resemblance to Lenin far exceeded that of the late Spitzbart—delivered the graveside oration at Havemann’s funeral. The candle—soon the torch—had been passed.
To Bishop Schönherr’s chagrin, Eppelmann quickly became the unofficial early leader of the peace movement. (Later in the year Schönherr would retire, to be succeeded by Werner Krusche, a more outspoken leader with a record of anti-Stalinist defiance.) Eppelmann upset Schönherr’s careful placement of the church “in socialism,” holding that Luther’s two kingdoms could not be separated and that no tidy line existed between preaching the Gospel and living it. Indeed, Eppelmann’s prominence in the peace movement signified that the center of DDR dissent was shifting from the intelligentsia to the clergy, from the seminar room to the church pew, from Marx to Bonhoeffer.
On February 14, 1982, 6,000 Dresdeners—mostly young people—chanted “Frieden schaffen ohne Waffen!” (“Make Peace Without Weapons!”) and sang “We Shall Overcome” and John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” as they solemnly marched, candles in hand, to the ruins of a war-damaged church to commemorate the 37th anniversary of the Anglo-American bombing of Dresden. Unbeknownst even to the protesters themselves, die Revolution der Kerzen—the Revolution of the Candles—had quietly begun.151
The church had found its niche “in socialism.” To counter the state’s Education for Socialist Patriotism program, the churches organized discussions on the theme of Education for Peace. Now the church, benefiting from its access to radio and TV, began to attract dissident nonbelievers: it was the only institution in this closed society in which citizens could express themselves openly and safely. At the July 1982 Kirchentag (church congress) in Dresden—the first of its kind since 1954—20,000 persons attended peace and disarmament workshops; later in the year church dissidents issued the first calls for unilateral DDR and Soviet disarmament.
In the summer of 1982, the SED began to take the nascent peace movement seriously, organizing the first state counter-rallies of 100,000 or more youth. One historic moment occurred when Margot Honecker and 30,000 Thälmann Pioneers gathered in Dresden on April 16 for a rally commemorating Ernst Thälmann’s birth, chanting the new FDJ line: “Der Friede muss bewaffnet werden!” (“Peace Must Be Armed!”). Meanwhile, a few dozen church members marched through nearby streets, wearing peace badges proclaiming “ Schwerter zu Pflugscharen!” (“Swords into Ploughshares!”)152 and chanting “Make Peace Without Weapons!” Before the decade was out, these slogans would be on the arms and lips of mil-
lions.153
Now that they were finding their voice, church youth and youth ministers tackled a number of issues: First, the lack of a socialist peace service. Although conscientious objectors could serve in DDR military building units, rather than in the armed forces, many religious believers wanted to fulfill their state responsibilities through social work. Second, mandatory Wehrerziehung in the schools. The churches objected to both the compulsory pre-military education (which they derisively called Kommandopa¨ dagogik (commando pedagogy). They also criticized the official disapproval of pacifism, which they viewed as a symptom of the wider militarization of society, exemplified, as they pointed out, by the proliferation of war toys and games for children and by lavish DDR military parades. Third, nuclear stockpiling in Germany. Church youth advocated nuclear disarmament. Worrying that no progress might ever be made until one side took the first step, some young people even urged unilateral disarmament.
Finally, the churches linked ecology and theology, embracing the polluted environment as a damaged part of divine creation needing spiritual care. It was East German church members who published the first reports on DDR air and water quality; the first “environmental library,” consisting of a few handouts, was set up in East Berlin’s Zion Church. The peace movement thus widened into the “ecopeace movement.” The churches were now defining their spiritual “sphere” ever more expansively; but so long as they avoided provoking the SED, the state had no justification to intervene.
Thus, despite close cooperation between the SED and church hierarchies—the last high point of church-state harmony occurred on the planning to commemorate the 500-year anniversary of Luther’s birth in November 1983, which the SED linked to its centenary of Karl Marx’s death,154—the peace movement continued to build. It surged after the DDR, along with the rest of the Warsaw Pact, accepted Soviet missiles in October 1983. Soon the SED claimed a monopoly on disarmament policy, holding that an unofficial “peace movement” endangered the national security. “Peace is our state policy!” announced SED leaders. “Make Peace Against NATO Weapons!”
Now SED authorities declared the Swords into Ploughshares badges provocative and pacifist (“The sword must be held just as firmly as the plough,” insisted one SED functionary), and Vopos were authorized to rip them off the clothing of DDR marchers, as well as to arrest repeat violators. Teachers searched schoolchildren’s book bags; university students caught with the emblems faced expulsion. Still, church leaders preached “Keine Gewalt!” (“No Violence”) to the youth, and the candlelight vigils went off largely without incident during 1984–86. Indeed, even a respected commentator such as Theo Sommer, editor of Die Zeit, could mistake East Germans’ sparks of interest in alternative politics for a brightening of the national mood, when he discerned during his summer 1986 visit “a more selfconfident, relaxed atmosphere, gray giving way to friendly colors—the oppressive melancholy has gone.”155
It hadn’t, but athletic and diplomatic achievements on the international scene distracted outsiders’ attention from domestic conditions, as did the contrasting upheaval elsewhere in the Soviet bloc, not excepting the USSR itself. The rapid turnover in the Kremlin in the mid-1980s—Brezhnev’s death in 1982, the brief tenures of Yuri Andropov (1982–84) and Konstantin Chernenko (1984/85), and the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev to CPSU General Secretary in 1985—camouflaged the mass discontent simmering in the DDR: living standards were stagnating, the intelligentsia was a constant problem, and the great diplomatic breakthroughs of earlier years were old laurels.
With Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, East German dissidents once again, as in 1956, received support from an unlikely source: the Kremlin. Gorbachev made it clear that reform was both desirable and possible. By 1987, his liberalization program, especially his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring)—put the Kremlin and SED publicly at variance with each other for the first time in their histories. A generation gap separated Honecker and Gorbachev, who at 55 was the first Soviet leader who had not fought in World War II or held office under Stalin. Asked by West Germany’s Stern in April 1987 about the SED’s reluctance to follow Gorbachev’s liberal leads, DDR Politburo member and ideology chief Kurt Hager remarked: “If your neighbor renewed the wallpaper in his flat, would you feel obliged to do the same?” Hager went on to cite, in earnest, the KPD’s postwar statement of June 1945—its opening exercise in Scheindemokratie—which argued that, given their distinctive historical developments, it would be misconceived to impose the Soviet system on Germany. Now the tables had turned; now it was the Soviets themselves falling into the trap of “revisionism,” seeking the illusory “third way.” And so now, ironically, it would be DDR Party leaders, rather than dissidents—who would resurrect the idea of a “separate German road” to socialism.156
Clearly the Honeckers felt no obligation to repaper their own Wall from good old SED leaden gray to the new Kremlin silver-gray. But in mid-1987 its edges began to peel. On June 6, 7, and 8—a week before Ronald Reagan’s famous “Tear down this Wall!” speech at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin—a more hip set of western emissaries provoked an even stronger reaction among DDR youth. For three straight nights—as 60,000 West Berliners listened to open-air concerts by British rockers David Bowie, the Eurythmics, and Genesis—4,000 DDR teens struggling to hear the music clashed with Vopos on the eastern side of the Wall, just 350 yards away and in full view of western TV crews. Not “daring to trust” the youths that close to the Wall, Vopos bloodied dozens and arrested hundreds every night, many of whom sported Mohawk punk haircuts and mockingly sang The Internationale or shouted “Bullen raus!” (“pigs out!”) and “Die Mauer muss weg!” (“The Wall must go!”).
PEACE MUST BE ARMED!
PEACE IS OUR STATE POLICY!
TRUST AND RESPONSIBILITY TO THE YOUTH!
As they were dragged off, thousands of teens chanted—within easy hearing range of the Soviet embassy: “Gor-bi! Gor-bi! Gor-bi!”
Yes, it was a long way from the “Ivan go home” calls of just a few years earlier, let alone from June 1953, when thousands stood in front of the same Soviet embassy and derided the Russians. Indeed, for DDR youth, “Gorbi” was now far more popular than “Honi” had ever been.
Two weeks later, Frau Honecker made it clear that DDR education would reject the sovietized “third way” and take the separate German road. She warned that attempts to liberalize the DDR under the pretext of glasnost would be repulsed; she was well aware that it was Gorbachev himself, far more than Reagan or western music, who threatened the regime. “It is an incontrovertible historical truth that socialism has brought working people the highest degree of democracy in history,” Frau Honecker declared. “Anyone who flirts and plays with this under the flag of freedom, the motto of more openness, and challenges the basis of democracy and freedom, will be shown his limits by the working classes.” DDR children’s hearts should be ablaze with complete dedication to socialism; their minds should be coolly alert to hypocritical western attempts to twist the ideas of freedom and democracy, she continued. The idea of a “third way” was still intolerable: “Time and time again we must explain that communism and capitalism cannot be mixed.”157
And now Erich Honecker was positioning himself as the international standard bearer for communism. Indeed, by the mid-1980s, Honecker had been received in Paris, Tokyo, Helsinki, and even by the Pope in Vatican City. His crowning moment came with his September 1987 visit to Bonn, during which West Germany effectively gave the DDR official recognition: the DDR flag was raised before the chancellor’s office and the West German army band played the East German national anthem. And for one final time, the Saarland straw hat imbued the scene with nostalgic warmth, as “our Erich” made a sentimental journey to his hometown of Neunkirchen, where the slight 75-year-old man with swept-back, thinning hair saw again the modest green wooden house of his boyhood, ate his favorite crumble cake at his sister’s, spoke with his sister and old friends in the local dialect, sang ballads from his KJVD days, and openly wept.158
Upon Honecker’s return from his nostalgic Heimkehr, however, he found a house increasingly divided, as secular intellectuals and FDJ youth openly joined the peace movement. On January 17, 1988, hundreds of protesters tried to enter the annual SED march commemorating the 1919 murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The uninvited marchers unfurled banners reminding DDR citizens that Luxemburg had supported free speech and the right to differ. Dozens of protesters were arrested and jailed; 54 of them were expatriated to the BRD within a week, in many cases freigekauft by Bonn. By mid-1988, Honecker found himself in the absurd position of banning the USSR youth magazine Sputnik, which was widely used in DDR Russian language classes; in the spirit of glasnost, Sputnik had begun publishing articles comparing Stalin with Hitler. In November, eight FDJ students at East Berlin’s elite Carl von Ossietzky EOS, the Eton of the DDR, organized a petition opposing the annual military parade to celebrate the anniversary of East Germany’s founding. FDJ officials pressured their local members (numbering virtually the entire school body) into voting the youths out of the FDJ; an FDJ official compared the group to neo-Nazi desecrators of graves. Then Frau Honecker stepped in and personally ordered “the ringleaders of dissent” expelled and the responsible administrators disciplined. Within days, four students were summarily expelled, two others were sent to other schools, and two were issued reprimands. Meanwhile, the school principal, who had also permitted the creation of a speakers’ corner for students to discuss difficult questions of politics and history, was disciplined.159 The order came down: The wallpaper stays ash-gray.
TRUST AND RESPONSIBILITY TO THE YOUTH!
THE YOUTH HAVE THE WORD!
EVERYTHING FOR THE WELL-BEING OF THE PEOPLE!
Yes, it was a long way from that honeymoon season in 1971 when Herr Honecker announced that there would henceforth be “no taboos.”160
The handwriting on the Wallpaper became near-legible in early 1989. The year began with the arrest of 80 marchers in Leipzig. “The Wall will be there in 50, still in 100 years,” declared Honecker in mid-January, angrily replying to a chorus of western calls—from U.S. Secretary of State George Schultz, British Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, and West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher—for its razing.161 A few days later, another would-be escapee—the last, as it turned out—was killed as he tried to scale the Wall. In February, the churches balked: Church-state relations snapped when Bishop Werner Leich stormed out of a fruitless Politburo meeting. Hereafter the Lutheran Church was not just in, or even alongside, but rather against SED socialism. In April, the previously silent Catholic Church joined Lutheran bishops in an ecumenical protest against SED policies on travel, press freedom, and human rights. Now the churches had a united front, and the DDR was fast catching up with its communist bloc neighbors. A new spectre was haunting Eastern Europe: “the spectre of dissent,” as Vaclav Havel, the Czechoslovakian playwright and later president, said. With the first multi-party elections in Poland in June 1989, after which a Solidarity-led government was formed under the leadership of Lech Walesa and the free trade union movement, the reform movement spread like wildfire throughout Eastern Europe.
But SED educators stood fast. “Rote Fahnen gegen weisse Kerzen!” cried SED loyalists in reply to the churches. “Red flags against white candles!” With Herr Honecker still recovering from gallbladder surgery, Frau Honecker, now widely referred to as “The Witch” and “the lilac dragon” by DDR citizens,162 led the would-be firefighters. On her orders, 2 million FDJ and 500,000 JP took an “oath of allegiance” to the “socialist Fatherland.” Teachers and FDJ functionaries administered catechisms to students that made the Party line clear.163 In a five-hour speech on June 13, delivered before 4,300 SED functionaries at the Nineteenth Pedagogical Congress in the Palace of the Republic in East Berlin, Margot rallied the educational elite. Fighting fire with fire, she delivered a scathing, grotesque denunciation of the churches and dissidents, whom she called “enemies,” “traitors,” and “counterrevolutionaries” who sought “not a strengthening of socialism, but a return to capitalism.” “Why shouldn’t we say clearly to our youth,” Frau Honecker told the teachers, “that they create grave worries for us when they contribute to the counterrevolutionaries’ plans under the slogan of ‘diversity’? It is proper that our youth be able to draw fine distinctions between what is revolutionary and what is counterrevolutionary.”164
All this came just a month after local elections garnering 98.85 percent for the SED (elections later shown to have been fraudulent), and just a week after Herr and Frau Honecker, almost alone among world leaders, publicly supported Deng Xiaoping’s bloodbath in Tiananmen Square, where the communist government had crushed the Beijing student protests with tanks. Now, in bloodcurdling language seldom heard since the era of high Stalinism, Frau Honecker lashed out at reformers such as Poland’s Solidarity and Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, insisting that nothing fundamental would ever change in the DDR, in education or anything else. DDR education would continue, she insisted, to produce youth “who campaign for socialism, with word and deed—if necessary, with gun in hand.”165
PEACE MUST BE ARMED!
PEACE IS OUR STATE POLICY!
RED FLAGS AGAINST WHITE CANDLES!
Frau Honecker’s verbal pyrotechnics drew a formal protest from Chancellor Kohl, and even the visible displeasure of Gorbachev, who was visiting in Bonn that day. But, for a brief moment, it had its intended effect at home: intimidation. Fearing to jeopardize their privileges and scholarships, few educators and even fewer university students—except for church youth—joined the active opposition. Nevertheless, given such public provocations, the ferment throughout Eastern Europe, and her husband’s illnesses (which left the SED adrift at the top), events in the DDR now advanced like an avalanche, as developments elsewhere in the Soviet bloc began to work against the SED and as the DDR public joined the church youth in the streets.
The crisis began unexpectedly. On August 8, 1989, 500 East Germans vacationing on the Hungarian-Austrian border suddenly fled across it to Austria, from which they made their way to West Germany. On August 9, as more East Germans crossed into Austria and began flooding the West German embassy in Budapest, Hungary announced that it would grant asylum to any and all East Germans. By August 13, the 28th anniversary of the building of the Wall, more than 55,000 citizens had fled, most of them young people,166 the largest number in 28 years. Indeed 1.5 million people—nine percent of the DDR population—had applied to emigrate. The wheel had come full circle, back to August 1961: the DDR was, once again, bleeding to death. Western journalists quipped that the DDR anthem should be changed to “Auf wiedersehen”; the proper gift for DDR relatives this year, they advised, was a new set of luggage.
On September 10, Neues Forum (New Forum), the dissident group headed by Jens Reich, a member of East Berlin’s Academy of Sciences, announced itself publicly. Within the next few days, leading intellectuals, including Party members, issued calls for urgent reforms, especially in education. “Our children are brought up in school to lie,” Christa Wolf declared in a widely quoted article. By September 26, the small Monday evening vigils in Leipzig had become a candlelight march of 7,000 citizens, the largest mass protest in the DDR since June 1953. The little sparks of faith that had begun in church basements were now ablaze in the streets: the candles’ simple message of peace and justice was lighting the night.
Still, the regime’s fall did not seem imminent: polls conducted in October 1989 showed that almost 70 percent of West Germans did not expect reunification by the year 2000; western estimates of East German expectations were similar.167 Anyone in attendance at the 40th anniversary celebration of the DDR’s founding on October 7—which featured, amid thousands of 40 Jahre DDR banners, a torch-lit parade of 100,000 FDJ members—could have been forgiven for believing the SED still had a firm grip on power. True, church leaders had declined invitations and Gorbachev had snubbed Honecker, sparing time only for a brief conversation in which he warned Honecker that the USSR opposed the use of force against the protesters: “Honi” could expect no support from “Gorbi.” But the combined force of the NVA and Vopos stood at more than a half million. “Den Sozialismus in seinem Lauf hält weder Ochs noch Esel auf,” Honecker declared, in one of his last public statements. “The course of socialism stops neither for oxen nor jackasses.”168 In plain German: “The future still belongs to socialism.”
Perhaps; and yet Honecker himself already belonged to the past. The anniversary celebration was, in reality, the Last Hurrah for the infirm 77-year-old, whose very appearance would soon seem symbolic of his regime’s frailty.
Still, the spectre of another Tiananmen Square was on everyone’s minds. On October 8, in Plauen, after 30,000 people had peacefully protested the day before against the DDR’s 40th anniversary, local newspapers warned darkly of swift government retaliation.169 On October 9, after meeting with a visiting Chinese Politburo member, Honecker publicly—and ominously—compared the “counter revolutionary rebellion in Beijing” to the “present campaign of defamation” against the DDR. That Monday evening, 150,000 Leipzigers bathed the streets in light, chanting “Wir sind das Volk!” (“We are the People!”). Over the next days, the peace marches grew, as the Revolution of the Candles swept through Dresden, Berlin, Halle, Jena, and other cities.
The “Chinese solution” was not applied, and now a remarkable change came over the DDR Volk: the polite peace marches turned into raucous Demos (demonstrations). Since 1953, the only slogans seen and chanted openly in DDR streets had been the hopelessly bland and boring shibboleths of the Party. But now, arisen from the ruins of the debased East German Sklavensprache came Demosprüche,sayings at the Demos that were of, by, and for the People (das Demos).
So now, in the streets, the public German language returned to life: colorful, rich, hilarious, witty, as evinced in an astonishing variety of political jokes, puns, and satire.
The Revolution of the Candles had become the Revolution of the Demosprüche.And “our Erich” became the first of the SED Bonzen to be publicly tarred as a figure of fun. Jokes about the SED General Secretary had grown plentiful since the early ’70s, but—like the Ulbricht gags during the reign of his predecessor—they had always circulated privately. Now the Honecker humor—by turns light-hearted, bitter, and ironic—burst forth on thousands of marchers’ placards and lips:
Erich, lass die Faxen sein
Lass endlich perestroika rein!
[Erich, stop finally with the buffoonery
Introduce perestroika!]
Die Demokratie in ihrem Lauf
Halt weder Ochs noch Esel auf!
[Democracy stops neither for oxen nor jackasses!]
Dear God, make me deaf, so that I can’t hear RIAS.
Dear God, make me blind, so that Hungary I can’t find.
Then deaf and blind,
I’ll be Erich’s dearest child!
“On his last day in office,” the joke went around, Erich drives his tractor throughout the DDR. The People ask him why he is on the road alone. Erich says, “I’m looking for followers!”170
Even within the Politburo, however, Honecker now found few followers. And so, in a surprise announcement on October 18, Honecker resigned, purportedly on grounds of “poor health,” though actually under severe pressure from his Politburo colleagues.171 The street barbs against him did not stop, however, but only changed to the past tense:
Q: What was the difference between a skilled worker and Honecker?
A: The worker never came, and Honecker never went.
Late in the summer, Erich wanted to emigrate to the BRD.
Why?
He wanted to be with his Volk.
And the jokes only multiplied:
George Bush, Mikhail Gorbachev, and Erich Honecker once flew together in an airplane to a UN meeting in New York. Suddenly the plane ran into turbulence and seemed about to plummet. Bush prayed to God for help. God appeared personally and said: “You can all be saved, when you divest yourselves of whatever is dearest and most precious to you. Spontaneously, Bush reached for his checkbook, kissed it, and threw it out the window. Erich took out of his coat pocket his Party book, kissed it, and threw it out the window. And Gorbachev turned, kissed Erich, and. . . .
What was a meeting of Honecker’s aged Politburo like? The agenda contained the following items:
1. Carry in the members
2. Synchronize pacemakers
3. Sing together: “We are the Young Pioneers”
4. Practice: Eulogy for the Next State Funeral
5. Carry out the members
“Erich, hol die Margot heim!” taunted protesters throughout the week following his resignation: “Erich, take Margot home with you!” And so, Frau Honecker also resigned, along with the entire 41-member cabinet, on November 3. “Mandatory 10-Year School Punishment” read Leipzig posters waving her goodbye.
Egon Krenz, Honecker’s longtime heir apparent, now took over. A former FDJ chief (1975–83) who handed over control of the organization only at the ripe age of 46, Krenz bore the mocking sobriquet der Berufsjugendliche (the professional youth). In classic apparatchik style, Krenz maneuvered to win all three of Honecker’s offices: General Secretary of the SED, Prime Minister, and Chairman of the Council of State. While insisting that the SED would remain the only party in the DDR, Krenz also began tentative measures to introduce glasnost. But now Gorbachev’s October 7 warning to Honecker proved all too true: “He who comes too late will be punished by History.”
It was decidedly too late. Dismissed by reform leaders as a rubbery Wendehals (wryneck, i.e., turncoat or quick-change artist), the man who had flown to Beijing to congratulate Deng Xiaoping after the Tiananmen Square massacre lasted less than two months. Krenz lamely expanded travel abroad to 30 days; the dissidents hooted. He lifted the ban on Sputnik and other publications; the dissidents scoffed. He secured Central Committee approval for freedom of assembly and association; the dissidents jeered. Ever bolder, they referred to the ZK (Zen- tralkommitee, Central Committee) as Zirkus Krenz (Krenz’s circus), and dubbed the new General Secretary himself “Krenz Xiaoping.” Indeed the ridicule of Krenz’s name, background, and even physical appearance (especially his toothy grin) was endless:
Reforms, yes, but unbeKRENZt [not limited]!
Zirkus Krenz: the performance is over!
Blumen statt Krenze!
[Flowers instead of garland wreaths (Kranze)!]
Away with the Krenztruppen [border or “Krenz” troops]!
Enough of the Ego(n)centric!
eGOn!
Egon—BEGONE!
Egon, remember Erich and Walter
Go before your Greisenalter [old age]!
Demokratie ohne Krenzen!
[Democracy without limits (Grenzen)!]
What little Krenz never learned, [big] Krenz will never learn.
China Lob und Wahlbetrug
Egon Krenz, es ist genug!
[Praising China and rigging the elections
Egon Krenz, we’ve had enough!]
From Egon’s arithmetic book: 100 – 20 = 98.85
(on the falsified May 1989 elections)
Support our Egon in the next election: 105%!
EGON—what does that mean?
Er geht ooch noch! [He’ll go too!]
Grandmother, why do you have such big teeth?
Egon, first do something! Then smile!
As long as Krenz rules, we’ll demonstrate!
And they did. What the Russians had once deemed absurd was now reality: a revolution on German soil. Gorbachev had fomented what Lenin and Stalin pronounced impossible; East Germans were no longer shy about walking on the grass—indeed, they were trampling it. “Put trust in our policy of renewal,” pleaded Krenz in a November 3 television address. “Your place is here. We need you.”172
But a skeptical DDR Volk decided that control was better, and that their place was in the streets. On November 4, a million citizens marched in East Berlin, including tens of thousands of educators and students, whose objects of wrath included the schools and youth organizations.173
To learn from the Volk / Means Learning to Triumph!
I want to have a voice in how I’m educated!
Teach our children to stand up!
Zensoren auf die Traktoren!
[Censors—to the tractors!]
Wir wollen kein Foltsbildungsystem!
[We don’t want an educational persecution system!]
Schluss mit der Volks(miss)bildung!
[End People’s (Mis)education!]
Frei, deutsch, jung = ohne FDJ!
[Free, German, young = without the FDJ!]
FDJ—You need a facelift!
Wir sind nicht traurig ohne Aurich!
[We won’t be sad without (FDJ head) Aurich!]
40 Years of kindergarten are enough!
Demilitarize the schools!
Peace education instead of Wehrerziehung!
Church youth, above all, felt a sense of triumph. Marx ist tot und Jesus lebt! they cried throughout the streets of Berlin and other cities: “Marx is dead and Jesus lives!” Party calls for “red flags” died away.
The end of SED rule now flared on the horizon: a revolution by candlelight, a tyranny in twilight. History had never witnessed a revolution like it: millions marching without incident, armed with nothing mightier than candles and catchwords. “Vernunft der Strasse,” the novelist Christoph Hein termed the peaceful protests. “The reason of the streets.” Things had come a long way from the night in November 1950, when 18-year-old Hermann Flade stuffed a few handmade circulars critical of the SED in neighbors’ mailboxes—and paid for his effrontery with a death sentence grudgingly commuted to 15 years in prison. The same Germans whom Bolshevik leaders had joked would never even tiptoe on a lawn were now a street-smart—indeed smart-alecky—Volk.
Now the Word(play) about to set them free raised its voice in every town and village in the country. Perhaps the biggest issue for DDR Bürger was travel. “What illness is worse than AIDS in the DDR?” they joked. “The Buda-pest!”
And indeed, the Hungarian fever was now epidemic. By the first week of November, tens of thousands of DDR citizens were heading for Hungary or Czechoslovakia in hopes of gaining passage to the West; others were chanting “Wir bleiben hier!” (“We’re staying!”) as they escalated their demands for freedom of travel. “Visafrei bis Shanghai!” chanted the marchers: “No visa until Shanghai!” “Ohne Visa bis nach Pisa!” (“Travel to Pisa without a visa!”). “Mit dem Fahrrad durch Europa / Aber nicht als alter Opa!” (“A European bike tour, but not when I’m an old Granddad!”).
On Thursday, November 9, 1989, Politburo member Günther Schabowski ended an hour-long press conference with a stunning announcement: in the face of 2.7 million exit visa requests, the DDR would open the Wall.
That evening, thousands of honking little Trabis—the state-manufactured auto of the DDR—chugged happily into West Berlin. For the first time in 28 years, East Berliners could cross the death strip unimpeded, leaving behind the confused border guards and running a gauntlet of welcoming West Berliners, who met the spluttering Trabis with congratulatory bangs on their rooftops—as well as fistfuls of ripe yellow Dollar bananas. And as East met West in that wondrous scene, future and past also converged: If the big Dollar banana would soon represent the symbol of the eastern German future, the tiny Trabant would soon stand as the emblem of the DDR past.
The SED leadership seems to have believed—naïvely—that the decision to open the Wall might stabilize the regime and stop the DDR exodus, that the prospect of such an immense flood of emigrants might prompt Bonn to suspend DDR citizenship rights or act to limit the tide. But it was not to be: the world community and DDR citizens themselves saw the opening of borders as an admission of the desperate weakness of the SED. As West Berlin writer Peter Schneider later observed, the regime had, ironically, thus both erected and eradicated the Wall for the same reason: to stop East Germans from fleeing.174
And now, a second crucial transformation came over the DDR citizenry: the revolution to overthrow the DDR dictatorship gave way to an urge to reunite with the BRD and enjoy the fruits of capitalism. Armed with DM 100 in Begrüssungsgeld (welcome money) from the West German government, one million DDR citizens swept through West Berlin during the weekend following November 9, gawking at the store windows and buying everything from CDs to pretzels. Events had taken an unexpected turn: After 40 years in the communist wilderness, DDR citizens had entered the consumerist Promised Land. The Revolution of the Candles, and the Revolution of the Demosprüche, had become, within hours, the Banana Revolution.
Thus did the SED’s decision on the Wall catalyze German popular thinking on reunification and soon prove the beginning of the real end—the end of the DDR, the last and greatest addition to the 1989 necrology. Marxism, not just Marx, seemed forever dead. The cries of “Wir sind das Volk” soon changed into “Wir sind ein Volk.” Within days, membership in the SED dropped from 2.4 to 1.2 million. “Demokratie statt Bonzokratie!” (“Democracy instead of Bigwig Rule!”) shouted the protesters, who began referring to the SED leaders’ residential area in Wandlitz, an East Berlin suburb, variously as “Bonzograd,” “Honecker-City,” and Volvograd.” (The latter name alluded to the high number of Volvos driven by Party leaders.)175 Some Politburo members, such as ideology chief Kurt Hager, came in for special treatment. “We need architects of reform, not carpet-makers!” “Reformen á la Hager / Sind uns zu mager!” went one chant (“Reforms a la Hager / Are too meager!”). With the late-November revelations of the luxurious lifestyles that the SED Bonzen in Wandlitz had enjoyed, the Party—not just Honecker, Krenz, and the Politburo, but the SED itself—became the target of protesters’ wrath.
SED—das tut weh! [that hurts!]
SED—Geh! [Go!]
SED—Sicheres Ende DDR! [A certain end for the DDR!]
SED—Nee! [No!]
SED—Ade! [Bye-bye!]
SED, gib acht,
Das Volk ist die Macht!
[SED, pay heed,
The People are the power!]
S wie Sauwirtschaft, E wie Egoismus, D wie Diebstahl = SED!
[S as in a disgusting economy, E as in egoism, D as in theft = SED!]
40 Jahre Lug und Trug
SED—es ist genug!
[40 years of lying and deception
SED—that’s enough!]
Kommt raus aus Wandlitz
Und zeigt euer Antlitz!
[Come out of Wandlitz
And show your faces!]
Dem Land ein neues Antlitz
Ohne Kalk aus Wandlitz!
[A new face for the nation Without the
slime in Wandlitz!]
Privileged Ones of all countries, remove yourselves!
Our Volk need the SED like a fish needs a bicycle!
Away with the Wendeh¨lse [turncoats]!
SED allein—das darf nicht sein!
[The SED must not rule alone!]
Partei Monopol macht hohl!
[A party monopoly is a bankrupt policy!]
Demos müssen sein
Sonst schlafen die Reformen ein!
[There must be demonstrations
Otherwise the reforms will cease!]
Whoever votes SED will be punished by Life!
Desperate, Krenz called a full Party congress, at which the SED formally expelled Honecker and announced a name change, first to SED-PDS, then a few days later to PDS (Partei Demokratischen Sozialismus, Party of Democratic Socialism). Gregor Gysi, a lawyer and son of the former minister of culture, took over the Party leadership and spoke at the podium with broom in hand, reassuring listeners that he would clean house. Still, the onslaught from the streets did not stop; indeed by now it had gone far beyond criticism of the SED Bonzen to a blistering attack on the Party itself.
SED—stalinistisch, egoistisch, diskriminierend;
PDS—perspektivlos, demokratiefeindlich, stasifreundlich
[SED—stalinist, egoistic, discriminatory;
PDS—hopeless, hostile to democracy, friendly to the Stasi]
PDS—Pleite des Sozialismus, Partei der Stalinisten, Pack deine Sachen!
[PDS—Bankruptcy of socialism, Party of Stalinists, Pack up!]
PDS—Parasiten, Diktatoren, Stalinisten!
Don’t Gysi, Be Happy!
Don’t worry, take Gysi [away]!
Verify, not trust, was the aim of DDR citizens now, fed up with Marxist-Leninist “dares” to trust:
Trust is good, changing officials is better, democratic elections are the best!
Gestern noch hauen—heute vertrauen?!
[Still beating us yesterday—and trust you today?!]
Mistrust is good, control is better!
Vomit out Stalin!
Von Arkona bis Plauen—der SED kein Vertrauen!
[From Arkona to Plauen—don’t trust the SED!]
Q: What is the difference between Lenin and Gorbachev?
A: Very simple: Lenin wanted to make communists out of workers. Gorbachev wants to make workers out of communists!
The Wende (turn) had arrived. “Really a Wende! Not just bananas and travel permits!” cried the demonstrators. “The issue isn’t bananas anymore. Es geht um die Wurst!” (“It’s sausages”; i.e., do or die!). As revolutionary protest suddenly gave way to reunification calls, and then reunification proposals, and then reunification negotiations, plans, and timetables, it would soon become the Wende in the Wende, and the Wende in the Wende in the Wende. And on and on.
Now the wheel was turning fast; ironies piled upon one another as the revolution came full circle. Three of the richest moments at the close of annus mirabilis 1989:
November: With the fall of the Wall, the People’s Chamber comes to life for the first time in its 40-year history. Delegates begin asking questions and even criticizing SED leaders. On November 13, under the glare of flashing TV lights, 82-year-old Comrade Major General Erich Mielke, Minister for State Security since 1957 and Politburo member since 1971, is called to account for his state within a state, an empire including 2,000 properties, 130,000 full-time employees, and 1.2 million informants. In what turns out to be his valedictory speech, before he is hauled off to one of the prisons he used to administer, he describes his Stasi agents: “We are the sons and daughters of the working class. We did it for you.” The People’s Chamber delegates hoot and jeer. “Believe me, believe me,” Mielke pleads. “Comrades. . . .” A heckler shouts that he’s no comrade of Mielke, who sputters and then blurts out: “Ich liebe Euch doch alle!” (“But I love you all—really!”).176
December: In yet another sign that the times really are a-changing, Wolf Biermann returns to the rapidly disintegrating DDR, giving his first public performances in 23 years. On December 1, 800 fans jam into Leipzig’s Massenhalle 2 to glimpse the Biermann legend, as millions more tune in on TV. Just days before the Wall came down, ideology chief Kurt Hager and the Krenz government had declared Biermann an “anti-communist rowdy” and had refused him entry at Checkpoint Charlie; now Krenz sees liberalization as the only, if slim, chance to remain in power.177
Playing taps for tyrants is a Biermann specialty, and Wolf arrives, with a new number for the occasion: “The Ballad of the Rotten Old Men”:
Hey Krenz, you happy Cold Warrior
I don’t believe you, not one word
You cheered the tanks in Beijing
I saw your toothy smile at the mass murder. . . .
Hey Hager, Professor Flying Carpet
I don’t believe you, you rotten old man
Now our own words roll smoothly out of your mouth
In new phrases you deliver your same old shit. . . .
Hey Honi, you left for health reasons
I don’t believe any of this
You always had the worst kind of disease
The Stalinist syphilis.178
By turns bitter and nostalgic, Biermann ends the concert with an old song, “Or Maybe I’m Wrong,” whose last stanza goes:
Perhaps when I’m there
At the end of the road
And the race has been run
I’ll be back at square one.
January: The feeble object of Biermann’s wrath, a poor KPD miner’s son and now a homeless Stalinist pariah, may have had similar feelings. With thousands of East Germans still pouring into resettlement camps in the West, Erich and Margot Honecker are reduced to asylum seekers too. Expelled from palatial Wandlitz, having nowhere to go, and under constant attack from all sides, the Honeckers receive shelter in Lobetal, northeast of Berlin. In this little Bethlehem of the DDR, under the roof of a Protestant pastor whose son had been denied higher education by Margot’s policies, the fallen atheist pair meekly accept Christian alms.
Asked about the rage felt by many villagers at the thought of helping the former First Couple, a Lobetal social worker tells the press: “We take in the homeless, the mentally handicapped, and alcoholics. So why not also our head of state?”179