IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO REALLY understand the rise of the New Left or the development of armed struggle in West Germany in the late sixties and early seventies without understanding the nature of the country and the role it played within the hegemonic, anticommunist strategy developed by the United States in the period following World War II.
The Federal Republic of Germany was a hybrid state, some elements— its institutions, some legislation, many personnel—seamlessly persisting from the Nazi period, and others grafted on by the Americans. As a nation almost constitutionally defined as a junior partner of U.S. imperialism, West Germany remained subordinate to it in the first postwar decades in a way that even Britain or France were not. Making matters even worse, in return for their allegiance, the West German ruling and professional classes were given free reign to negotiate their own stiflingly conservative and authoritarian post-Nazi culture and identity.
All of this was built on a post-genocidal basis; dead Jews remaining the elephant in the corner, alternately ignored or explained away as a tragic consequence of the “lack of morals” under Hitler. Many Germans growing up after the war would not know any Jews personally, and would be only vaguely aware of the horrors that had befallen them: bitter testimony to the way in which the dead, precisely because they are dead, have no say over how their murderers explain or ignore their absence.
At first, the defeat of Nazism in May 1945 seemed to spell the end of Germany’s national sovereignty, its territory occupied by France, Britain, and the United States in the West, and the Soviet Union in the East.
In this Soviet Zone, which would eventually become the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Socialist Unity Party (SED) held power. The Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries had borne the brunt of Germany’s war, and so for many years rehabilitation took second place to reparations in the GDR. Throughout its existence, East Germany bore many of the hallmarks of “real existing socialism”: compared to the capitalist west, there was less abject poverty and less involvement in the pillage of the Third World; at the same time, there was next to no room for political dissent or protest. Even communists suspected of differing from the dominant party line could find themselves arrested and tortured by the Stasi, the secret police. Society and culture were not frozen, yet they were certainly chilled, creating a distinctly “socialist” kind of conservatism.
Yet more than a few lifelong Communists felt that this was an unfortunate but acceptable price to pay to fetter the German aggression that had defined the first half of the century. As Markus Wolf, head of the dreaded Stasi during the period covered by this book, would explain in his post-wall apologia:
We East German Socialists tried to create a new kind of society that would never repeat the German crimes of the past. Most of all, we were determined that war should never again originate on German soil.1
In the Western Zone too, initially the United States had toyed with the idea of deindustrializing the country, so as to cripple its development and preclude any future German wars. Very soon, however, this approach was rejected, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff Directive of June 1947 finding that, “An orderly, prosperous Europe requires the economic contributions of a stable and productive Germany.”
It didn’t hurt that corporations such as Ford, General Motors, Chase Manhattan Bank, IBM, and Standard Oil had had huge prewar investments in Germany and were all lobbying for a rapid resumption of business-as-usual.2
The geopolitical goals of the United States, always foremost amongst the western occupiers, combined with the interests of the German middle and upper classes, effectively sabotaging any real efforts at denazification in the West. In no time at all, important sections of the establishment that had helped maintain the Third Reich were being welcomed into the new pro-American administration. As the late William D. Graf observed:
Almost all the representatives of big business labeled as war criminals by the American Kilgore Commission in 1945 were back in their former positions by 1948; and of roughly 53,000 civil servants dismissed on account of their Nazi pasts in 1945, only about 1,000 remained permanently excluded, while the judiciary was almost 100% restored as early as 1946.3
The result, much as desired, was a political system which remained significantly tilted to the right.
This period marked the beginning of the American “Cold War” against the Soviet bloc, in which Germany was to become an important chip. In keeping with the Truman Doctrine, the zone occupied by the western Allies was built up as an anticommunist bulwark. The vehicle for this project was the European Relief Program, a blueprint for the economic and military reconstruction of Western Europe, which U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall convinced the U.S. Congress to pass in 1948. Almost one-and-a-half billion dollars were pumped into West Germany through the Marshall Plan, its economy rebuilt in such a way as to guarantee the expansion of U.S. economic influence in Europe, to serve as the foundation for the military and political integration of West Europe into the anticommunist bloc, and to facilitate the cultural and technological Americanization of European societies, especially West Germany itself.4
In short, demolished by war and in social and economic chaos, West Germany was offered reconstruction, rapid economic growth, and integration into the Allied Bloc in exchange for offering its support to international capitalism and the use of its territory as a front line position in the Cold War with the U.S.S.R.. This was an appeal aimed not only at the ruling class, but also at “ordinary” Germans, who may have benefited from the Third Reich’s policies of plunder and genocide, but who now, in defeat, found themselves thrown into economic insecurity1 An early propaganda document from the western occupation government, issued just weeks after a pro-Soviet coup in neighboring Czechoslovakia, explained what was at stake:
The fate of the Marshall Plan will determine who is to be the victor in the great ideological conflict of democracy versus totalitarianism. Unless the Germans can get enough to eat and decent homes to live in, no amount of fine words about the benefit of democracy and no amount of repression will prevent them from going over to Communism.2
Former Nazis, provided they were not personally too notorious or unwilling to play by the new rules, appeared to the Americans as far preferable to communists or their presumed fellow travelers. Indeed, it has been noted that for much of the West German establishment, “anticommunism provided a point of common cause with the Western victors and hence… a means of avoiding being called to account for their complicity” with the Hitler regime.3
By the time the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was granted semi-sovereign statehood in 1949, this set of common interests had become embodied in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), under the iron fist of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Ruling for almost twenty years, normally in coalition with the much smaller liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the slightly more rabid Christian Social Union (CSU) in Bavaria, the CDU soon became almost synonymous with the state itself.
West Germany was to be more than just a shield against the “encroaching red menace”; it was to be western imperialism’s visible model of economically and socially “progressive” capitalism. Modell Deutschland (“Model Germany”), as it became known, was to serve as an example to other West European states and as a taunt to the working class on the other side of the “wall.”
As an anticommunist showpiece, the FRG soon payed for itself in a time honored capitalist fashion—on the backs of the proletariat, especially the most desperate and oppressed layers.
Heightened levels of exploitation combined with the financial assistance offered by the Marshall Plan made the FRG the envy of other western capitalist states. By every measure of the ruling class, the West German economy shone. Real wages in the period 1948-1958 were at the level already established by the fascist regime,4 roughly 25% below that of workers in the United States,5 while the working week in 1955 could go as high as fifty hours, longer in key sectors like the steel industry. In that year, West German industrial workers had a work-week two and a half hours longer than their counterparts in Britain and eight hours longer than industrial workers in the United States and Canada.6
The profits made possible by this arrangement encouraged an extremely high rate of investment, which grew from 19.1% in 1950 to 26.5% in 1965; even with the recessions of the seventies, it wasn’t until 1976 that it had fallen back to 20%. In 1960, when France was showing a rate of investment of 17.4% and both Britain and the U.S. only registered 16%, West Germany was already showing an investment rate of 24%.7
As Werner Hülsberg notes:
The ‘economic miracle’ merely indicated the existence of ideal conditions for the exploitation of wage labor and, as such, is somewhat of a cynical myth. The long-term upswing in the economy, however, did lead to a continuous rise in the living standards of the West German population. While net wages and salaries during the period 1950 to 1962 grew by 143 per cent, the income of independent entrepreneurs during the same period grew by 236 per cent.1
This boom was also based on real divisions in the working class, with German men in their prime being lifted into higher status and better paying jobs than the “pariah layers” which included young and older German men, but were fundamentally built around immigrant and female labor.
In the immediate aftermath of German defeat, working class women had borne the brunt of reconstruction unpaid and off the books, but absolutely necessary for survival, to the point that the term Trümmerfrauen (“women of the rubble”) was coined for those who hauled away the debris of bombed out buildings with their bare hands. At the same time, in October 1945, the Allied Control Council had declared it a duty of all women between the ages of fifteen and fifty to also work in the official economy: the female labor force, which had already earned only 86 cents to the male dollar under the Nazis, now saw its relative wages dropping, until in the 1950s and 60s women’s wages were on average just 60% of those of their menfolk.2
Throughout the 1950s, seven million refugees and displaced persons, many of whom were highly skilled, streamed into the country from the East. The German industries which had been structured around the use of forced labor during the Nazi period soon found they could fill this same niche with immigrant labor.
As New Left historian Karl Heinz Roth has remarked, from the point of view of big business, “this exceptionally mobile subproletariat compensated completely for the loss of the slaves condemned to forced labor in the Nazi era.”3 Yet, with a crucial difference: unlike the slave labourers, who were literally worked to death under Nazism, these new immigrants were to be highly favored. They were overwhelmingly loyal and politically reliable in the eyes of the ruling class, seeing as they came from the “Communist East” where more than a few of them had lost real privileges as ethnic Germans when the Nazi occupation came to an end. Indeed, these expellees and refugees from the East, exploited as they were, were naturally drawn towards the most virulent anticommunism, and catalyzed shopfloor and grassroots resistance to the left within the working class.4
Following this initial wave of cheap labor, which was regimented by its own political sympathies, came guest workers, many of whom were politically active on the left, and who were thus subjected to greater external regimentation and control. As the source of this labor switched from the East to southern Europe, these workers would be politically screened before entry, and targeted with deportation if identified as “troublemakers.”
So, at the same time as the German working class was highly exploited, it was also deeply divided. An inevitable consequence of this was that its more privileged layers would develop a different political orientation from the more oppressed.
To quote Hülsberg once again:
It is against this background that we must see the tragedy of the integration of the West German working class into the capitalist system and the loss of political strength. Class struggle was replaced by the “American way of life”. Even the king of rock’n’roll, Elvis Presley, paid tribute to it while on his tour of military duty in Germany… For the German petit-bourgeois soul this was the purest balm.5
Greek workers in a West German bottling factory: by the end of the 1960s, women constituted almost a third of all “guest workers” in West Germany.
These hierarchies within the working class resonated within its supposed institutions, the trade union movement and the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
In the first years of the Federal Republic, the trade unions were reorganized by the Allied victors with the express goal of avoiding the “economic chaos” the bourgeoisie feared most. These unions focused on Mitbestimmung (co-management, whereby workers would have some token representation in corporate boards of directors), thus further guaranteeing that the official labor movement would remain hostile to revolutionary politics. This degeneracy reached such a point in the 1960s that union members formed the backbone of the “factory militias” whose job it was repress wildcat strikes and unruly workers,1 and one foreign journalist began an article on the German labor market with the question, “What is a country to do when its trades unions decline to ask for more money?”2
As a complement to this sad political trajectory, the SPD “led the less class-conscious workers and the petit bourgeoisie into the arms of the reactionaries,” with a program that “in the immediate postwar period consisted of a crude mixture of nationalism and anti-communism garnished with a meaningless proclamation of the actuality of socialism.”3 Left-wing trade unionists were expelled from the party, as were the editors of the socialist newspaper Die Andere Zeitung,4 while the SPD leadership used its position as the official opposition to repeatedly mislead and sabotage any grassroots revolt.
Needless to say, neither the SPD nor the trade union leadership had any interest in bridging the divide between their (increasingly privileged) base and the growing “pariah layers” of the proletariat:
As a consensus-producing mechanism that united the most powerful interests in the corporate and labour organizations, Social Democratic corporatism consciously excluded the weaker elements: foreigners, women, youth and older workers, thus converting class struggles to group struggles and doing nothing to reduce racism, sexism and anti-welfarism within the subordinate classes.5
Of course, the Marshall Plan was not simply a local economic project: from the very beginning it was intended that West Germany also be a European outpost of U.S. imperialism. This is indicated not only in the virtually simultaneous foundation of both NATO and the FRG in 1949, but in the very nature of the Federal Republic as a state: when it was granted formal sovereignty in 1955, it was only on condition that it allow the western powers to station their armed forces within its borders, and within four days of achieving its new condition, it had joined the Atlantic Alliance.6 Perhaps most significantly, in the event of a military conflict, the commanding officer in NATO—always an American—would also become the Commander-in-Chief of the West German armed forces.
As Rudolph Augstein, the editor of the influential liberal magazine Spiegel, stated in 1955: “The new German army has not been founded to guarantee the safety of Bonn; rather the new state has been founded to be able to build up an army against the Soviet Union.”7
The result was a West Germany with more than one hundred U.S. bases on its territory and a ruling class eager to support American imperialism around the world. This was achieved by (1) acting as a conduit for financial and military support to anticommunist regimes opposing the national liberation movements, (2) establishing neocolonial penetration of former colonies on behalf of the West, and (3) providing logistical support for American military interventions around the world.
Some important examples of this first role—that of being a conduit to repressive regimes—could include West Germany’s support for the South African apartheid regime, for the fascist Salazar dictatorship in Portugal in its continuing war against freedom fighters in Mozambique and Angola, military and political support for the killers of Patrice Lumumba and for imperialist intervention in the Congo, massive financial aid (disguised as reparations) to the state of Israel, imperialism’s new colonial beachhead in the Middle East, and economic support for the South Vietnamese puppet regime.
Apart from loans, economic investment, military sales, and eventually the sharing of nuclear technology, these reactionary regimes would also benefit from the occasional intervention of German soldiers1 and mercenaries, including veterans of the Nazi SS.2
The task of entangling the former colonies in the western sphere was accomplished primarily through “development aid,” much of which took the form of weapons shipments to the new so-called “national states.” While such aid was often used to pressure the new national states to join pro-American military alliances, or else to refuse recognition to the GDR, it was equally important simply as a method of maintaining and entrenching the ties between Western capitalism and Third World elites.
By the late 1950s, the FRG had established itself as an important “donor” nation, for a while providing more “aid” than any Western government other than the United States.3 It was a logical candidate for this role given the fact that it had lost its own colonies decades earlier; as the Stuttgarter Zeitung noted in 1963:
It is clear why African states turn to Bonn and not to Paris or London… They turn to a country which is not tainted by colonialism.
Or, as the American Evening Star wrote that same year:
West Germany has been specifically authorized by the Atlantic Alliance to grant military aid to Africa and other countries; the simple reason is that no other western country is as well suited for these tasks. West Germany is free from the blemish of colonial rule…4
The prime examples of the FRG’s third role—providing direct support for American military forces—were the many U.S. military bases scattered throughout the country. These served both as a threat to the East Bloc countries, as well as staging areas for special operations. As military strikes against Third World targets became increasingly important to western imperialism, the Federal Republic’s airbases were all the more appreciated.
All U.S. bases had extra-territorial status and functioned under American law. They were, of course, also sites for CIA interventions in the FRG and in Western Europe in general, not only against Soviet influence, but also against independent left opposition. According to Operation Plan 101-1, the U.S. Commander-in-Chief in Europe was legally entitled to intervene in cases of internal unrest in West Germany. Furthermore, in cooperation with both former Nazis and a new generation of neo-nazis, the CIA established “stay behind” networks which were to carry out terrorist attacks should communists ever come to power in Germany.5
BETTER DEAD THAN RED
While both the economic and military aspects of Modell Deutschland were, to a greater or lesser degree, formulated in the public forum, and in some cases faced public opposition, the model had another equally important aspect, one which was never up for debate, and yet it bears directly on the topic under discussion here: anticommunism, described as the third pillar of West German society.6
“All Marxist Roads Lead to Moscow”: election poster for the CDU, 1953.
As we shall see, this anticommunism was far more than a mere ideological construct; rather, the legal structure of West German “constitutional democracy” was from its earliest days intended to prevent and/or eliminate all revolutionary left-wing opposition. This found its legal basis in the way that personal rights were framed in the Federal Republic’s Constitution, the Grundgesetz (Basic Law), which came into effect in 1949. While the Basic Law established the same personal rights and freedoms normally found in bourgeois democracies, it did this with one recurrent caveat: these rights could be withdrawn from those designated as enemies of the state.
This qualification was stated unambiguously in Article 18:
Whoever abuses the freedom of expression, in particular the freedom of the press (paragraph (1) of Article 5), the freedom of teaching (paragraph (3) of Article 5), the freedom of assembly (Article 8), the freedom of association (Article 9), the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications (Article 10), the rights of property (Article 14), or the right of asylum (Article 16a) in order to combat the free democratic basic order shall forfeit these basic rights. This forfeiture and its extent shall be declared by the Federal Constitutional Court.1
The following restriction to Article 21, limiting the right to form political parties, was added to this already ominous provision:
Parties that, by reason of their aims or the behavior of their adherents, seek to undermine or abolish the free democratic basic order or to endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany shall be unconstitutional. The Federal Constitutional Court shall rule on the question of unconstitutionality.2
These passages were marked by the experience of political instability that had traumatized the Weimar Republic. Their design owed very much to the desire to prevent any future such upheaval. Constraints on political freedoms were further rationalized by some observers as necessary to prevent a resurgence of Nazism, a credulous argument which would soon be disproved by the fact that the chief target of these exclusions would be the left.
In 1951, the CDU moved to further tighten the legal framework of repression with a volley of state security legislation, defined in the following five sections: High Treason, Dangers to the State, Offenses against Constitutional Organs, Resistance to the Authority of the State, and Offenses against Public Order.3 Minister of Justice Thomas Dehler explained that these laws would be used to combat “ideological high treason,” “ideological subversion,” and “ideological sabotage.”4 In short, thought crime.
The immediate target of all these statutes and constitutional restrictions became clear with due haste. On November 23, 1951, the federal government applied to the Constitutional Court to have the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) proscribed, on the basis of the aforementioned Article 21 of the Basic Law. This was at a time when the party held fifteen seats in the Bundestag.
The Communists had opposed integration into NATO and as late as 1952 paid lip service to the revolutionary overthrow of the Adenauer regime. While it clearly didn’t have mass political support—it had garnered only 2.2% of the vote in the 1952 elections5—the KPD nevertheless constituted a potential nuisance as the only political institution to speak up for a number of popular interests which were poorly represented by the major parties:
Its continued advocacy of an anti-fascist, socialist front, its opposition to rearmament and atomic weapons, its resistance to authoritarian trends such as restrictions on free speech and emergency laws, and its demands for a greater measure of economic democracy were aims shared by members of a great range of groups, including neglected interests within the established parties. It was evident… that to discredit or even criminalize the KPD would also be to reduce the appeal of all groups that shared any of its aims.6
The trial of the KPD began on November 11, 1954. Sensing the direction things were going in, the party distanced itself from revolutionary politics in public statements in early 1956. It was already too late: on August 17 of that year, the KPD was declared illegal. Hundreds of arrests followed; not only party members, but also their families, members of alleged front groups, and anyone suspected of communist sympathies, were targeted, and a comprehensive apparatus developed to undertake surveillance of all these individuals and organizations.1
The suppression of the KPD was just the most obvious volley in a broader process of constitutional repression. On August 2, 1954, the Supreme Court ruled that the organization and promotion of demonstrations, meetings, and strikes could also constitute treason. A few months later, the Federal Supreme Court ruled that, “No action in a strike which goes beyond the cessation of work and violates interests protected by the law is justified by the so-called strike law.”2 In 1955, the essential nature of the Basic Law was further confirmed by a general ban on all political strikes.3
At the same time, ample use was made of Dreher’s new security measures. By the 1960s, thousands of cases of treason were being brought before the courts:
…in 1963 10,322 actions were started against people alleged to have committed treasonable offenses of one kind or another. In many cases these actions were against more than one person. In 1961 a total of 442 people were sentenced for various categories of “treason”. Admittedly, of these 36 were only fined and 212 only got between 9 months and 5 years and 5 were sentenced to between 5 and 15 years. Many others had their careers ruined by court actions in which the State failed to prove its case.4
With its culture sterilized and its traditions of worker militancy broken, the postfascist, post-genocidal society provided an ideal foundation for a new authoritarian and technocratic capitalist state.
Not Wanted In The Model: The KPD Immediately after the war, the KPD benefited from an unambiguous anti-Nazi track record, but this strong position quickly crumbled due to a variety of factors. Patrick Major of Warwick University has provided a valuable overview of this decline in his book The Death of the KPD: Communism and Anti-Communism in West Germany, 1945-1956. According to Major, the postwar Party leadership found itself frequently at odds with its more radical rank and file. It was ill placed to connect with its supposed constituency—the proletariat—as many working class grievances took aim at the occupying powers, one of which was the Soviet Union. Indeed, as Major notes, “the earliest proponents of strikes tended to be Social Democrats, whereas, like their French comrades, the German Communists placed national reconstruction before wage increases or even denazification of management.”5 The Party was further handicapped by its ties to East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED). The SED encouraged the KPD’s conservative tendencies, insisting that it prioritize forging a progressive nationalist opposition to the Western occupiers, relegating class struggle to the back burner. Not only was it still hoped that the “Western Zone” could be pried out of the hands of imperialism, but it was also recognized that the KPD’s chief competition—the SPD—was winning support with its own “nationalistic rabble rousing.”6 During this patriotic phase, anticapitalist rhetoric was toned down; in some Länder, Party members were instructed to stop singing the Internationale in public, and the hammer and sickle and Soviet star emblems were removed from their paraphernalia.7 To the disgust of many comrades who had barely survived the Third Reich, the KPD even briefly attempted to establish a broad “anticolonialist” National Front, appealing to middle class elements, patriotic capitalists, and even former Nazi supporters.1 |
Although the KPD was banned in 1956, this dubious “anticolonialism” represented real class forces, and a significant section of progressive opinion. While these gestures failed to win the Communists any significant nationalist support, the politics they represented remained visible in the future campaigns against rearmament and nuclear weapons. Though overwhelmingly left-wing, these campaigns were still able to attract (and accept) support from conservatives and even fascists who opposed integration within the western bloc as “unpatriotic.” The connection to East Germany’s SED became an ever-greater liability as the Cold War descended: while western communists opposed rearmament in the FRG, they had to make excuses for it in the GDR; while they decried exploitative work conditions in the west, they had to defend piece work policies in the east; while they complained of “colonization” of the FRG by the Americans, they had to remain pointedly silent about “integration” of the GDR into the Soviet Bloc. Thus, even as the Party played an important role in articulating opposition to the authoritarian Adenauer regime, it faced an uphill battle, not only because of right-wing repression, but also due to the contradictory demands of struggling in the Western Zone while its counterpart ruled in the East. These political weaknesses, combined with the deep changes to Germany’s class structure that occurred during the Hitler period, prevented the KPD from ever mounting a serious challenge to the new FRG. So much so that according to Major, “In some ways the KPD leadership was ‘saved by the bell’, banned before an internal party discussion could look for scapegoats for the disastrous policies of the past decade.”2 |