WELCOME TO UNITED GERMANY
Today is the twentieth anniversary of the German Wiedervereinigung, so I reproduce an article I wrote about this last year:
The breaching of the Berlin Wall saw the end of the East German, DDR. Perhaps less obviously it also marked the end of West Germany.
This is less obvious in two regards. Firstly that the new, reunited Germany was the legal successor state of the West German BRD, that simply subsumed the land to the East; and secondly that the circumstances of reunification were the triumph of the West over the East.
Nevertheless, many of the distinctive features of the old West German society were lost. The Federal Republic was prosperous, relatively homogenous, and built upon a total denial of its past. What is more, no German troops ever served in military operations abroad until reunification, since then they have bombed Yugoslavia, and have ground forces in Afghanistan.
Before we consider what changed , let us look at the history of West Germany.
Founded primarily on the basis of Anglo-American self-interest, the state was formed in 1949, a year after the introduction of the Deutschmark. The new state was characterised by a huge economic and financial stimulus through the Marshal Aid Plan – funded by the USA, but masterminded by British foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, who was canny enough to let the Americans take all the credit. It was Bevin in particular who ruled out a priori any aid going to the Soviet bloc.
The other remarkable features was the extremely shallow de-Nazification. Originally, de-nazification was quite rigorous. Military rule was harsh right across Germany immediately after the war, and the piecemeal Nazi guerrilla resistance of the Werwolf organisation led to some terrible reprisals against civilians, especially in the French sector. In this early phase Nazis were detained, with some 90000 incarcerated, and two million barred from any skilled employment by 1947.
However, the changing priorities of the USA towards an antagonistic attitude to the USSR altered everything. (it is worth saying in parenthasis that the idea that the USSR was a military threat to Western Europe at that time was fantasy. Not only did the USA have the atomic bomb, but the Soviet Union was economically, socially and mentally exhausted). The Americans decided they couldn’t afford to get rid of Nazi talent if they were to challenge the USSR.
The degree to which Nazis were rehabilitated in the West can be seen by a few examples.
Hans Globke was the Director of the Federal Chancellory between 1953 and 1963 , the second most important person in the BRD after the Chancellor, Adendaeur. Globke was the author of the law that gave Hitler dictatorial powers, he was the author of the 1935 Nuremburg laws removing citizenship rights for Jews. He was the chief legal advisor to the department of Jewish affairs at the Ministry of the Interior throughout the Holocaust, and he was a Ministerial Counsel to Hitler.
Theodor Oberländer was from 1953 to 1960 the Minister for Displaced Persons, Refugees and Victims of War. Oberländer had been a senior Nazi since 1933, and was implicated in the Lviv massacre in the Ukraine in 1940. He was unrepentant about his Nazi politics, and after being sacked in 1960 following an in absentia war crimes conviction in East Germany, he started to write for neo-Nazi magazines. In 1986 Oberländer received the Bavarian Order of Merit from the state of Bavaria.
Kurt Georg Kiesinger was Chancellor of West Germany from 1966 to 1969. He was a member of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945.
These were three particularly high ranking examples, but the judiciary, the medical profession, the army and the other professions were stuffed full of former high ranking Nazis.
The industrialist, Hanns-Martin Schleyer, kidnapped and murdered by the Red Army Faction (RAF – Baader-Meinhof gang) in 1977 was head of the main German Employers organisation, he had been a former member of the Nazi party, and a member of the SS, with a personal history of vile anti-Semitism.
Indeed, the nihilist murder campaign by the RAF can only be understood by a generational disgust at the fact that West Germany was still run by Nazis. Despite having killed 34 people, opinion polls showed that 25% of Germans under 40 years old sympathised with the RAF, and 10% would hide them from the police.
Arguably, most of the worst Nazi war criminals were brought to justice, and the transition of West Germany towards a stable liberal democracy showed that this “amnesia and reconciliation” policy was effective. But it was at an immense moral and political cost, not least that the rulers of East Germany, who had personally suffered under the Nazis, were understandably paranoid about the West German government’s intentions.
West German politics suffocated its Nazi past through the creation of two mass parties. The CDU had included Nazis from the outset, but it also absorbed during the 1950s all of the smaller extreme right parties, except for one small openly Hitlerite party that was banned. In symmetry, the SPD formerly renounced its theoretical legacy of Marxism at the Bad-Goddesburg conference in 1959, rediscovering itself as a centre-right social-democratic party. The communist KPD was banned. This led to a stable, and rather dull political conformity.
After the building of the Berlin wall in 1961, West German society largely ignored the existance of East Germany, though relations normalised, and with Willy Brandt’s policy of Ostpolitik, there were no trade tariffs between the two Germanys, effectively allowing the DDR to have some of the benefits of EEC membership.
Reunification was certainly not the plan of those courageous protesters who took to the streets of Leipzig twenty years ago. The objectives of the New Forum were to democratise and improve East Germany. They wanted free speech, contested elections, freedom of travel, an end to environmental destruction, an end to the Stasi and a whole list of other progressive reforms. Even the thousands who crossed the border in their Trabants once the wall came down, mainly did a bit of shopping and came home again. Everyone crossing was given 100 DM welcome money, and 20 million DM was given out – meaning that 125% of the East German population crossed the border according to West German figures.
The West German government had the whole issue thrust upon them out of the blue. It is one thing to oppose Communism verbally, it is another to suddenly deal with its collapse on your doorstep.
Helmut Kohl was at the time an unpopular and shop-soiled leader, who had badly mishandled a visit by the American President to an SS war cemetery, and a series of financial scandals. Although his handling of the crisis is regarded as good, this is the prerogative of the victor writing the history.
Frankly, the Eastern government fell down like a house of cards. Honecker was succeeded by Krenz. History should remember Krenz more kindly, it was he on October 7th, at the inglorious end of Honecker’s rule, who overruled orders to the Army and police to use violent force to drown the protests in blood. On October 18th Krenz was voted party leader. The sacking in disgrace of a generation of SED leaders was a sad conclusion for men who had fought against fascism in Spain and suffered in Hitler’s death camps, but power and the shoddy paranoia of their political rule had robbed them of the right to draw upon that heritage.
Krenz’s rule saw a blistering pace of reforms, new openness and debate. On November 4th a march through Berlin was organised by the Actors and Directors guild. Thousands took part, the first anxiety free public oppositional demonstration in 40 years. The slogans were witty and celebratory, lampooning Honecker, and the old guard, but also the new government of Krenz’s fifty-somethings. Not a single banner called for the free market, not a single banner called for reunification.
Yet within a year, the DDR was gone.
Krenz had no chance. On November 9th an announcement was made by Berlin party boss Schabowski that all travel restrictions were permanently removed. This was at the end of a press conference as an afterthought. Was it even government policy? Or was he shooting from the hip? It was a good thing, but the government was no longer in control of anything. Events took a surreal air, when Hans Morrow was elected Prime Minister, discredited Stasi boss, Erich Mielke, shouted across the People’s Chamber “I love you all!”
The already failing economy was hit by two hammer blows – firstly, there was a massive brain drain as professionals, particularly doctors, just followed the money and moved West. Secondly Helmut Kohl made the offer of any aid package conditional upon acceptance of a free market economy, and a programme towards reunification. In face of the obvious demoralisation and disorientation of the party leadership, almost no-one was prepared to bet on the survival of the DDR, as such the behaviour of the professionals jumping ship was rational, even though this was the social class who were formerly the biggest supporters of the SED.
There were voices arguing for the DDR to be reformed and saved, but they were like Canute before the rising waters.
The elections saw pro-capitalist parties subsidised from the West, a climate of anathematization against the former communists, now called SED-PDS, including West German neo-Nazis physically assaulting FDJ youth arguing in support of the DDR. It saw a wave of revulsion against the daily indignities of Stasi and bureaucracy, but combined with huge naivety about what reunification would mean. Even SED members who had stood up and defended their colleagues in the past, and who had always been commited to democracy were shouted down as “Stalinists”, rational political debate became impossible. This was an early exemplar of the phenomenon we now recognise as a colour revolution, where popular discontent is manipulated by foreign capital to bounce a government.
In the end, the East German government had nothing to negotiate with, and reunification was totally on the terms of the West,
The result was much worse than it should have been. In the very interesting book “Jumpstart” by the German economists, Sinn and Sinn, they argue that Helmut Kohl’s policies were a catastrophic mistake. The organisation taken on to deal with restructuring the economy, the Truehand, was fatally flawed, even within its own terms.
Because the DDR was deemed never to have existed, then the only state owned property recognised were the firms nationalised by the USSR between 1945 and 1949. Assets older than 1945 were held to be the property of the former owners from the pre-DDR period. So while the government committed to privatizing, they did so with ownership uncertain, which prevented capital being invested, and prevented buyers being interested.
The privatisation was also planned at breakneck spead, like a fire sale. Within a year, only DM 100 bn had been raised by privatisation, only one tenth of the funds required to bring capital intensity up to Western levels, and only one million jobs had been secured, a quarter of the jobs entrusted to Truehand. The East German economy simply collapsed, female employment in particular just disappeared almost overnight.
The sensible course – if reunification was necessary – would have been to run the two economies in parallel, while a full audit was carried out, and to retain in state hands the key levers of the DDR’s economy; some limited privatisation could have been used to attract West German capital and new technology; and there could have been partnership pairings between Western and Eastern concerns. Instead a vast amount of capital was just written off. A stable transition period underwritten by the West would have allowed the most effiecient concerns in the East to raise their technological level, while still benefitting from the lower wage costs. In reality, I suspect Kohl and the CDU government knew exactly what they were doing, Their policy was not economics but class warfare – they deliberately wanted to destroy the socialist economy of the East, and demoralise the Eastern workforce
The failure to plan a transition period also resulted in serious social disruption as generous maternity benefits were lost, abortion rights were temporarily in limbo, housing rents soured, transport costs rose. Eastern professionals found their university qualificatons and diplomas were sneered at by Besser Wessis (know it all Westerners), and people found to their surprise that becoming a citizen of the Federal Republic didn’t mean you could trade your Trabant for a Mercedes – you had to get a job that paid enough money to buy one. Cheap subsidised holidays to Bulgaria may not have been as glamorous as travel to Morocco, but if you were unemployed you didn’t get a holiday at all.
The result for the Federal republic has been that its former state of relative homogenity and social peace has been replaced by a structural divide between Ossis and Wessis; and as we have seen with the growth of die Linke, the more social democratic aspirations in the East have been resilient, and are now spreading to the West. The old political system has been cracked apart, and while it did look for a while like the East could be subsumed into the contentless false choice of CDU and SPD, new realities are asserting themselves.
Back in 1989, Gregor Gysi posed an alternative, which was a democratic socialist future for both the West and the East. Perhaps history has taken the scenic tour, but that destination is still the one to aim for.
“Cheap subsidised holidays to Bulgaria may not have been as glamorous as travel to Morocco, but if you were unemployed you didn’t get a holiday at all.”
And, of course, if you were critical of the Party in the GDR you got a long subsidised holiday to a place less glamorous than either. I know you think it is bad taste to keep mentioning those details, Andy.
And if you write poetry on your PC or even use or wear symbols that can be construed under sweeping British laws as support of terrorism, you can also get a long subsidised but unglamorous holiday. This is the “free West” I’m talking about. What is interesting about the post-1989 world has not been freedom breaking out everywhere, but increasing restrictions and surveillance. Some of them were already in place before 9/11.
In former West Germany, there has been, post-1989, a tendency to blame poverty and social stresses on the costs of German re-unification.
Given the pace of events, I’m not quite sure you you could have planned a transition period. And there was an intractable economic problem, too. If you converted Ostmarks to Deutschmarks at their market value, which was around 4:1, Easterners’ wages were about a quarter or less of the western level, and their savings were similarly paltry. That was unpopular in the short term in the East. If you converted at 1:1 (which the DDR authorities had always pretended was the Ostmark’s real value), then very quickly all East German industry became unprofitable. Scylla and Charybdis, really…
Excellent article Andy-very informative and educational. Last night on the BBC I watched a number of families from the former GDR who have been considerably worse off since unification. Freedom for them simply means freedom to be unemployed or freedom to be poor.
Not quoting the exact words, but Anatole France wrote that bourgeois freedom meant the rich and the poor had the same right to sleep under a bridge.
Excellent article, thanks.
what about neither washington nor moscow but international socialism……….
“Excellent article Andy-very informative and educational. Last night on the BBC I watched a number of families from the former GDR who have been considerably worse off since unification. Freedom for them simply means freedom to be unemployed or freedom to be poor.”
The danger is in forgetting that many people were extremely poor in the GDR too, especially those who were blacklisted for suspect political activities. Everyone was poor from a rights anc cultural point of view too, of course. Economic wealth is not the only kind, or even the most important after a point (quite a low point to my mind). How rich would you feel if your income was quadrupled but you wre no longer allowed to read anything not sanctioned by the state, or to organise without permission of the state, or to travel or consume foreign media?
Of course there will be some who don’t experienece these losses as real or powerful, and, sadly, those philisitnes will tend to end up running the place.
In the USSR in 1984, I remember seeing people travelling on the (inexpensive) Moscow metro reading Chekhov or Dostoyevsky. In the post-Soviet era, if they read anything at all, it was fairly trashy stuff, translations of Jackie Collins and suchlike.
‘The Federal Republic was prosperous, relatively homogenous, and built upon a total denial of its past.’
Absolutely ridiculous comment and anyone who has spent anytime in West Germany or with West Germans know that they were/are acutely consciousness of the past. A insensitive, insulting and absurd remark.
It is also ridiculous to cast East Germany as throughly de-nazified, there was probably less ‘de-nazification’ there than West Germany, being built as it was on the smug myth that a government of anti-fascists had taken over and the whole population had embraced totalitarian socialism.
The SED was littered with just as many ex-Nazi’s who had apparently embraced, with probably not too much shift on their stance on civil liberties, communism. For example
SED politbureau member and Sports Minister Manfred Ewald was a member of the Nazi party.
DDR Deputy prime minister Erich Apfel was a prominent Nazi and an organiser of slave labour for the building of V2 rockets.
Wilhelm Adam who participated in the Beerhall Putsch, quite a badge of honour in Nazi Germany, ran officer trained for the East German army.
The DDR chief public prosecutor Ernst Melshiemer was a Nazi member and a judge in the Nazi’s barbaric ‘People’s Court’ which dealth with ‘poitical offences’ and meted out death sentences like they were ASBO’s.
I do not think it is wise to cling on to the myth that the DDR was some Anti-Fascist beacon while West Germany was ignoring the Nazi past
“In the USSR in 1984, I remember seeing people travelling on the (inexpensive) Moscow metro reading Chekhov or Dostoyevsky. In the post-Soviet era, if they read anything at all, it was fairly trashy stuff, translations of Jackie Collins and suchlike.”
I can reassure you that Russians are still reading Chekov, but that now they have the option to read Bulgakov too. It is true that some people will choose Jackie Collins, but, feeble though she is as a writer, it seems to me to be a big overreaction to create an entire political framework to prevent them.
I also read an article in the “Brussels Bulletin” in 1998 that looked at Czech culture. It cited the writer Ivan Klima as complaining that since 1989, things had actually gone backward, since the overriding need to make a profit meant that publishers turned out superficial trash.
Good comment by Havelock. It is true that the anti-Nazi mythology of the GDR is swallowed whole by too many people.
Good piece. The point about the destruction of the collective property and the efficient farming and food sectors and much of the industry was the not only demoralise and fragment the former DDR workforce but to weaken the working class movement in the West.
Once the full employment, strong social welfare, anti fascist milieu of the east was dismantled the way was open to attack all-German welfare rights, pensions, pay rates and social provision.
“I also read an article in the “Brussels Bulletin” in 1998 that looked at Czech culture. It cited the writer Ivan Klima as complaining that since 1989, things had actually gone backward, since the overriding need to make a profit meant that publishers turned out superficial trash.”
Writers who cannot persuade people to read their books always complain. When they want the state to force people to read their books, you should be a bit sceptical of their motives.
“Once the full employment, strong social welfare, anti fascist milieu of the east was dismantled the way was open to attack all-German welfare rights, pensions, pay rates and social provision.”
See Havelock’s comment on the ‘anti-Nazism’ and notice that poay rates and social provision in unified Germany are still better than in the old East, and people are allowed to leave and work elsewhere if they disagree. In fact thousands of workers try to get to Germany by any means every year. That was not a problem the old GDR seemed to suffer.
Meredith should explain how the GDR managed full employment and universal child care, suppressed the nazis and gave massive aid to the liberation movements of the third world while the old West Germany didn’t and the new germany cannot.
#10
“It is also ridiculous to cast East Germany as throughly de-nazified, there was probably less ‘de-nazification’ there than West Germany, being built as it was on the smug myth that a government of anti-fascists had taken over and the whole population had embraced totalitarian socialism.”
Bollocks.
Although former Nazi individuals were incorporated into the new state, how could it be othereise, you can only build a sciety based upon the people who actually live there. But the social and institutional foundations of the DDR were totally rerormed to remove the power bases of the former nazis. So while in the West there would be networks of fromer senior nazis controlling sectors of the economy, and the state, in the East the former nazis were dispersed.
Egon Krenz’s take on the fall of he wall is interesting
Was the opening of the border spontaneous?
No, the events leading up to the opening of the borders are ignored today. On the 1st of November 1989 I met Gorbachev in Moscow. We had talks lasting four hours, during which I asked him what place the GDR would have in the “European House” he was propagating, and whether the Soviet Union would continue to honour its fraternal commitment in relation to the GDR. He told me that German unity was not on the agenda. The USSR and the GDR were allies for ever. He even warned me about what he termed “Helmut Kohl’s politics, who had wagered everything on the horse of nationalism.” I still trusted Gorbachev. I didn’t know at that time that his emissaries had long since made contact with Bonn to establish what price Bonn was prepared to pay for German unity.
And how did it develop?
Following my meeting with Gorbachev I received intelligence reports from Moscow, Warsaw, and Berlin. Therein was contained information suggesting that certain political forces were planning to storm the border at the Brandenburg Gate on the 4th of November 1989. A concerted breach of the border at the Brandenburg Gate—regardless of who organised it—could have resulted in a war at that point. It was for this reason that I, as chairman of the Defence Council of the GDR, issued an order on the 3rd of November: “The use of weapons in connection with a possible demonstration is forbidden, without exception.” This order was in place also on the 9th of November.
http://communistperspective.blogspot.com/2009/11/interview-with-former-president-of-gdr.html
“Meredith should explain how the GDR managed full employment and universal child care, suppressed the nazis and gave massive aid to the liberation movements of the third world while the old West Germany didn’t and the new germany cannot”
The old GDR managed full employment by banning free trade uinions and the right to orgnaise, banning foreign travel and instituting a kind of virulent ‘work fair’. Universal child care ditto and as to aid, I am willing to bet that the current Gernmany contributes vastly more than the GDR ever did and without putting people in jail for criticising it. The Nazis were defeated by the united armies of the USSR, US and GB, of course.
Actually Klima (born 1931) had problems with the pre-1989 regime, being expelled from the Czechoslovak CP in the 1960s. His father was imprisoned in the early 1950s. It would be fair to say he suffered more repression at Nazi hands than Communist ones, but he comes from a Jewish background.
His comment that post-1989 there had been a great deal of dumbing down is quite a reasonable one, for anyone in any position to compare Before and After.
Well if that’s true, it just proves what a traitor Gorbachev was and what a spineless coward Krenz was.
So, in the face of a reported threat, he immediately ordered abject surrender.
“His comment that post-1989 there had been a great deal of dumbing down is quite a reasonable one, for anyone in any position to compare Before and After.”
The old guard are forever and everywhere complaining about ‘dumbing down’. What they mean is that the public is too stupid to prefer their books to other writers’. The answer is not to ban the works of younger writers.
You obviously thought Klima was some apparatchik who has been on the outs since 1989. In fact, he has been successful since then (whereas he mainly wrote samizdat before 1989 – his work could only be published outside Czechoslovakia). In 2002, he won the Franz Kafka literary prize.
He may not be as reflexively anti-Communist as you are, but then Klima was detained in Terezin concentration camp as a boy and it was the Red Army that liberated the camp.
#22. Karl – let’s just imagine that Krenz had ordered a replay of 17 June 1953. What then? What possible moral reserves would East German “socialism” have had to call upon? What would the regime have rested upon, other than sheer physical force?
And did it even have that physical force by that stage? By the end of 1989, the game was up. Jaruzelski, who had already saved the Eastern bloc’s bacon once, had already decided that it wasn’t worth the candle, and Poland was liberalising rapidly. So was Hungary. The GDR was already geographically isolated.
Krenz, who has not abandoned his beliefs and served time for them, was no “spineless coward”. But nor was he a fool or a psychopath. The one East European leader who imagined it was possible to resist by physical force was Nicolae Ceaucescu. We know what happened to him, and it was his own army which did it to him.
The fact that the GDR was doomed does not mean that everything about it was bad. But doomed it certainly was, and it is to Krenz’s eternal credit that its end was marked by a carnival in Berlin rather than a bloodbath.
“He may not be as reflexively anti-Communist as you are, but then Klima was detained in Terezin concentration camp as a boy and it was the Red Army that liberated the camp.”
I am not at all reflexively anti-communist and I am impressed that Klima forgave the USSR for signing a friendship pact with the regime that imprisoned him for his ethnicity.
I am sure that Klima would agree that despite the fact that some people like to read pulp fiction freedom of speech is more valuable than what went before. The moaning about ‘dumbing down’ is just what we expect to hear from old guard writers whatching the new generations shouldering them aside.
#25- Although I have probably had more reason to agree with Karl Stewart than with yourself Francis, I have to say that I find you spot on here.
Sometimes you have to win through losing.
re meredith 20
“The old GDR managed full employment by banning free trade uinions and the right to orgnaise, banning foreign travel and instituting a kind of virulent ‘work fair’”.
Meredith’s mindset reminds me of the Tory minister who, at the point when unemployment was rising fast and the GDR economy compared rather well, insisted that there was just as much structural unemployment under socialism … but that the regime covered it up by giving people jobs.
Francis, at that time, everone thought Cuba was going down too.
It was even more isolated, right on the US’s doorstep and facing a catastrophic loss of favourable trade.
Cuba, at the turn of that decade, was in many respects in a far weaker and more precarious position.
But, by being honest with its people about what they were facing, by developing a robust survival strategy and by actively and continually winning the support of its people, Cuba defied the odds and survived as a socialist state.
Today, with Venezuela also taking a socialist path, and with other latin American nations swinging left, Cuba’s position is now far more secure.
The defeat of socialism in the former GDR was not inevitable – history only appears inevitable retrospectively.
A bloodbath was not the only alternative to abject surrender. Cuba has resisted counter-revolution and has not experienced a bloodbath.
Venezuela has resisted couter-revolution and has not experienced a bloodbath.
Krenz was either a coward who did not have the stomach for a fight or a fool who did not know how to.
#29 Karl. Cuba is not the GDR. Cuban “socialism”, whatever you think of it, is an authentically Cuban product, stemming from an authentically Cuban revolution. The regime has been able to harness Cuban patriotism as well as support for “socialism” in the face of the US’s bullying. GDR “socialism” stemmed from the post-war carve up between the victorious powers, and the failure of the Soviet regime successfully to negotiate an Austrian solution for Germany. And patriotism – a very powerful factor in both Cuba and Venezuela – militated for German unity, not German division.
Please, Karl, be specific. Whom was Krenz supposed to fight, and how? Was he supposed to disperse peaceful, unarmed demonstrators? How much force should he have used? Suppose they had resisted – what weaponry would have been permissible to disperse them? Water cannon? Rubber bullets? Live rounds? And in the long term, what good would it have done?
#18…Well the East German Communists were hugely successful in dispersal of former Nazi’s if they managed to disperse a Nazi slave-driver into the posistion of deputy-PM, a Nazi gallowsman as chief public prosecutor and a Nazi into their Politbureau.
In 1953 9 per cent of the membership of the SED were former Nazi’s.
It is utterly ridiculous to cast the DDR as a beacon of ‘denazification’ and West Germany being in ‘total denial’ over its Nazi past.
Do not forget in West Germany in 1947 90, 000 former Nazi were in jail and nearly two million wer banned from all occupations with the exception of manual labour.
“Meredith’s mindset reminds me of the Tory minister who, at the point when unemployment was rising fast and the GDR economy compared rather well, insisted that there was just as much structural unemployment under socialism … but that the regime covered it up by giving people jobs.”
What a peculiar comment. If the current government required that all unemployed had to perform certain tasks in order to collect benefits, would you agree that they had solved unemployment?
The GDR did not collapse because of lack of democracy, the Stasi or a great desire for freedom. It collapsed because the working class saw capitalism more vredible than the stalisnist economics that they endured which was state planned with little or no market for commodities. DDR had no benefit of the international division of labour that clearly West Germany had and therefore quickly grew.
DDR suffered from a failure of being able to compete in market conditions against the west. Why else would the wall have been built but to keep workers in?
The collpase of the Eastern Bloc has been a disaster in that capitalism has bene able to divide labour internationally to suit itself and has caused unrest, turmoil and as we know a wave of anti-East European racism.
However, the failures of ‘socialism in one country’ and the inability to invest in economies at a level comparable to the west led to stagnation and disaster.
The absence of democratic rights was unwelcome, but not the reason for collapse.
“Cuba defied the odds and survived as a socialist state.”
Cuba survives because the island is waiting for the death of Castro to begin a transition to democracy and some form of market economy (already well established in many areas of the economy). And we should bear in mind the almost complete absence of human rights within Cuba. Is that a price worth paying for a daily ration of rice?
Francis,
The situation was crying out for political leadership. The overwhelming majority of GDR citizens wanted reform and a continuation of an independent GDR. A majority even of the active protesters wanted a reformed East Germany, not an end to the GDR altogether. Even they did not call for unification with the west.
A courageous, principled and energetic political leadership would have had every chance of achieving a renewed socialist GDR.
Francis, unification was not an issue until Khol made it an issue.
Most GDR citizens had no memory of living in a unified Germany.
And remember, a unified Germany had only historically existed for around 60 years before WWII – as a “patriotic rallying point” it had little purchase among the population at large other than among neo-nazi revanchists.
What was needed was positive political vision, courageous political leadership and the strength and determination to see it through.
This would have stood every chance of winning mass support, certainly among the overwhelming majoprity of the population.
And what was also needed was firm and resolute measures against the minority of hard-right/neo-nazi elements.
“What was needed was positive political vision, courageous political leadership and the strength and determination to see it through.”
No, what was needed was a mandate from the peopple in the form of free elections. The fantasy of strong courageous leaders saving the world is particularly suspect in Germnay.
# If the majority did not want unification and wanted a reformed DDR why did over 75 per cent vote for pro-unification parties in the 1990 East German elections?
If they wanted a reformed DDR they could have supported the all-new PDS, which only 16.4 per cent did.
‘And remember, a unified Germany had only historically existed for around 60 years before WWII – as a “patriotic rallying point” it had little purchase among the population at large other than among neo-nazi revanchists.’
This is ridiculous, there has been a conscious recognition of a German nation for hundreds of years, the fact it was subsumed into the Holy Roman Empire prevented this becoming a political reality, in the manner of France or England, sooner.
Remember that the Holy Roman Empire was referred to as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation from the fifteenth century.
Also the 1848 revolutions were based on the idea of giving political shape to the German nation.
There was much deep emotional attachment to the idea of the German nation.
‘Also the 1848 revolutions were based on the idea of giving political shape to the German nation.’
That is obviously the rebellions within the German states.
#31
“Do not forget in West Germany in 1947 90, 000 former Nazi were in jail and nearly two million wer banned from all occupations with the exception of manual labour.”
The key fact in that sentence is …. “in 1947″.
that is until the change in American priorities kicked in.
Oh, I think you are reflexively anti-Communist. I am impressed Klima didn’t see salvation coming from the West. Oh, hang on a minute. Chamberlain and Daladier sold Czechoslovakia down the river at Munich in 1938. Now all becomes clear.
But Havelock, “Germany” as a single state came into existence in the 1870s.
And this was not the same territory as the former Holy Roman Empire. The late 19th-century and early 20th-century state of “Germany” was Prussian dominated and excluded Austria.
The former GDR occupied roughly similar territory to the former state of Prussia, which had a far longer history to that of a unified “German” state.
My point is, a viable and ongoing independent GDR was a possibility and both historically and culturally, it is the unified “German” state that has been more unusual.
There is some opinion polling about attitudes to whether West and East germans thought of themselves as belonging to different nations. There was – as you would expect – quite some confusuon, but amongst working class citizens of the DDR by 1989 there was a specific “East German” identification.
These thngs are volatile, as we see with the paradox of changing balances of “Scottish” and “British” identity, fo example.
the question of the historic German nation is a bit more complicated, becasue that also included Bavaria, Bohemia and Austria, as well as the Urban populations of the Hanseatic league cities on the Baltic. Indeed the specific long term strategic goal of of the various rulers in Vienna was to unite all the Germans under their rule. Today, Austrans think of themselves as a different nation.
The some 500000 ethnic Germans from the USSR, Romania, and other parts of the Soviet bloc moved to Germany after 1989, not becasue they has specific identification with the Federal republic rather than Austria, but for the pragmatic reason that Germany offered them citizenship.
Certainly the self-identification between Ossis and Wessis today would be sufficient to support two states, or one. IT is not a question of principle, just whahtever people want.
Germany as a single political state (which did occur in 1870) was only a representation of the idea of the German Nation which had been entrenched for hundreds of years.
Prussia always identified herself as part of the German nation. The idea of the German nation was the norm.
The GDR also always identified itself as part of an undivided German Nation, I think it was Ulbrecht who used the slogan ‘one Germany, two systems.’
The GDR was never viable historically and culturally.
#43
“Well Baby, things Change”
To quote Dwight Yoakum.
There is some opinion polling about attitudes to whether West and East germans thought of themselves as belonging to different nations … but amongst working class citizens of the DDR by 1989 there was a specific “East German” identification”
It would be interesting to see the figures.
#39 And there was a similar slowdown in the DDR around the same time. The Soviet administration shut down its denazification courts in April 1948.
As 46 per cent of doctors, dentists, chemists and engineers in the DDR were former Nazi’s the DDR was eager to rehabilitate former Nazi’s to fill the skills gap.
And former Nazi’s in the DDR were able to climb to the top of the SED like Apfel and Ewald.
The 1965 Free Jurists Report found that 12 members of the SED Central Committee were former-Nazi’s as were five government ministers and a numbers of deputies.
Germans have been subject to conflicting pressures towards unification and separation in the course of history, but yes, division has been more typical, with some of the states in the past being tiny – one 19th century cartoon showed a farmer’s cart at a border customs post where the rear of the cart was in one tiny state, most of it in another and the horses’ heads just inside the border of yet another state. Even after the 1871 unification, traces of these states remained. The Nazi who put down the Warsaw Ghetto rising, Jurgen Stroop, grew up in Lippe-Detmold, one of these micro-states, and judging from his prison memoirs before his execution, he was all the more a fanatical believer in “Greater Germany” as a reaction against Germany being such a patchwork quilt of little principalities. The large number of German speakers in the Austro-Hungarian Empire also encouraged such ideas among people like the young Hitler.
On the other hand, regional feelings persisted. Although it was severely punished under the Nazis, people often showed hostility to Germans from different areas – Austrians would refer to North Germans slightingly as “Piefke”, while North Germans would call Austrians, esp. Viennese, “Schlawiener” (implying they were Slovenes and not proper Germans at all). Even the Prussian Hindenburg’s sarcastic references to Hitler as the “Bohemian corporal” shows a trace of this regional particularism, as well as snobbery. During the war, there was some hostility in some rural areas to people from bombed-out cities far away being resettled in their areas.
The GDR was around long enough for people to develop some sort of regional identity, it seems to me, that they were at least not the same in every respect as the people in the BRD.
I think the example Andy refers to of the changing “national” conciousness of we British is a good one.
Just 20 years ago, few here would have thought that we might today be beginning to doubt whether the “British” state will continue as a single entity, yet “Britain” has a very definite geographical form – far more clearly defined than “Germany” – and the “British” state has existed for over three hundred years, some five times longer than the “German” state.
The “German unification” that took place 20 years ago was a capitalist takeover, a political and economic act, and not a “natural” or “inevitable” process.
“Just 20 years ago, few here would have thought that we might today be beginning to doubt whether the “British” state will continue as a single entity,”
20 years ago this topic was hotly debated. It always has been really. What hasn’t been discussed is the disunification of (say) England, which is a closer analogy.
The GDR actually created a sort of shell of a political party for ex-Nazis, though with stress on the “ex”. It would be fair to say that both Germanies incorporated ex-NSDAP members. There were, after all, eight million of them by 1945 and shooting them all might not have been a humane response either.
The Cold War also included a war of words over the former Nazi affiliations of all sorts of people in the “other Germany”, though not without an element of hypocrisy. Certainly the GDR was often more demonstratively anti-Nazi. Typically, it issued a stamp to commemorate Hans and Sophie Scholl before West Germany did, even though the Scholls had staged their protest in Munich University.
re 32
Meredith thinks that ‘Workfare’ is the same as the full employment policies of the many different states of ‘socialism in one country’.
The difference is this. Workfare is a coercive mechanism for forcing the unemployed to labour for meagre benefits as a way of forcing down the general level of wages for similar work. It only functions when work is hard to find.
The situation in the socialist states and the GDR in particular was rather different. It had high rates of growth, a massive labour shortage, very high levels of skill and education and very good working environment. Even today Ossie’s speak of the social tranquility and the cameraderie and collective spirit. Work was a right (and parasitic living without work a crime).
For millions now life without work is compulsory. Meredith calls it freedom.
#45
“It would be interesting to see the figures.”
It si discused in Hobsbawm’s “nations and nationalism” if you want to pursue the refrence.
I find Meredith’s contention that the instant Fidel pops his clogs, the Cuban people will beg for the Miami mafia to come home and start the casinos up again, a bit too much like wishful thinking.
Seriously – what evidence is there that there’s this huge groundswell for the Glorious Free Market, held back only by the life of one sick old man? And if there were to be changes in Cuba, why would they shift to a US style system rather than – say – a system of socialist principles in a mixed economy, closer to what their friends and benefactors in Venezuela have?
This view from the Right is interesting in 3 respects:
1. The triumphalism of the immediate collpase of the Eastern Eurpean states is compeltely absent
2. The precise evidence that the populations of those countries are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the new regimes (Hungary is the most dramatic, where a whopping 34% of the population has changed it mind and no longer approves of the transformation to a market economy)
and
3. The growing risks of racism posed, especially to Roma peoples but also ethnic minorities within different states
sorry, should be here
ttp://www.turbulenceahead.com/2009/11/happy-freedom-day.html
.This view from the Right is interesting in 3 respects:
1. The triumphalism of the immediate collpase of the Eastern Eurpean states is compeltely absent
2. The precise evidence that the populations of those countries are becoming increasingly disenchanted with the new regimes (Hungary is the most dramatic, where a whopping 34% of the population has changed it mind and no longer approves of the transformation to a market economy)
and
3. The growing risks of racism posed, especially to Roma peoples but also ethnic minorities within different states
Hungary is also the place where the far right Jobbik won three Euro seats earlier this year, mainly on a platform of anti-Gypsy demagogy but also with a call for a “greater Hungary”. There are sizable Hungarian minorities in Slovakia, Romania and Serbia.
It also looks like jobbik are set to become the largest party in opposition after the general election due next year. Fascists will be the 2nd party of Hungary, very very worrying
What would happen if a fascist party became the leading party of government in an EU nation? We’ve already seen what happened when the FPÖ got into power in Austria (whether you consider Jörg “Dead Gay Führer” Haider an actual fascist or just a reactionary populist).
I was in Austria a couple of months ago, and I wonder whether it pre-figures Britain. The FPÖ is wealthy enough to afford displaying its propaganda on large roadside advertising hoardings, and its message of xenophobia is well within the mainstream.
The Austrian police gunned down a youth while he was allegedly trying to break into a supermarket in the town of Krems during the summer. The main parties all stood by the police, and to the extent that there was any criticism, it was that the boy was seen as an Austrian. If he had been a Turk or East European foreigner, there would have been no mainstream criticism at all.
The east Germans were so happy with their freedoms that they had the highest levels of alcoholism in Europe.
Revisionist pap.
#10
Havelock likes to pretend he knows someothing about gwrman history, and it is important to coorrect his misrepresentations:
He wrote this:
The facts:
Manfred Ewald was a 17 years old private soldier when captured by the Red Army to become a a POW in 1944. He was indeed a member of the Nazi party, but can hardly be described as a senior figure. Although he was influential in Geeman sport, he had little impact on the rest of soceity, and was not a politburo member.
“DDR Deputy prime minister Erich Apfel was a prominent Nazi” This took me a while because you both spelt his name wrong, and made up an entritely fictitious job title, and exagerated history for him.
Erich Apel was never a member of the Nazi party. And nor was he “an organiser of slave labour for the building of V2 rockets”. Nor was he a particularly senior figure in the SED, he was chief of the Business commission, reporting to Günter Mittag. He joined the central committee in 1960 (which was a large and relatively powerless body), and became a candidate politburo member in 1962. He was never on the politburo, and committed suicide in 1965.
Apel did work on the V2 reasearch project, but we can see how junior he was, because he was not spirited away by either the USA, who took Von Braun and 126 other leading V2 rocket scientists to America. Nor was he taken to the USSR with Groettrup and another 250 engineers. Apel was a team leader of indentured labour of scientists working in a laboratory. He was not involved in the indentured labour digging the tunnels, nor we he involved in the mass slave labour used at Dora at the V2 construction site. He was a young man in his twenties, who had been conscripted into the German Army, and played a very minor role in V2 development. It is a bit rich complaining about Apel, given that von Braun, a fanatical nazi and the man who initiated the use of slave labour was given the Congressional medal of honour by the USA.
Ernst Melsheimer was never a member of the Nazi party, he was a member of the SPD until 1933, and a member of no party until 1945 when he joined the KPD. He was never a member of any special nazi political court, he was the chief judge for the Berlin district dealing with ordinary criminal cases. He joined the Nazi aligned trade association for judges, because all judges did.
Wilhelm Adam – never heard if him. He was according to you a trainer at a military school. Hardly a leading figure in the DDR then. I have now found your source, which was a wiki article, that says Wilhelm Adam resigned from the nazi party in 1926 !!! Something you overlooked to mention.
What you don’t seem to understand is that political decision making in the DDR was very highly concentrated in the samll group around Ulbricht/ Honecker (which was compltely free of former Nazis), and power was very distributed in terms of impementation. The DDR dismantaed the pre-existing institutions and power structures, and therefore disarticulated any powerbase or potential for a network of former Nazis to excercise infleunce. So it is a good thing that the SEd and DDR were humane enough to rehabilitate people who were not actual war criminals or human rights violators, and unlike West germany, they did not allow power to remain uniniterupted in the hands of former nazis – exercising power and influence through continued and unchanged social and economic institutions.
And is this the best you have got? You have had to exagrete both people’s connections with nazi Germnay, and also exagerate theiri importance in the DDR.
How does this compare with Hans Globke. A real hands on architect of the Nazi holocaust, and then the second most important person in the West german federal republic.
Um any chance of looking forward as opposed to back? Historical argument and debate is interesting to follow, i grant you, but its 20 years since the wall came down, East germany is long gone and the problems of building a left alternative today seem a bit more relevant…how about putting up an interview with someone from die linke or german trade unions about organising today?
Further to my comment at #62, referring to Havelock’s comment at #10
I have now found Havelock’s source, which is a wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ex-Nazi_Party_members#East_Germany
It really is foolish to base a factual argument on wikipedia, which is notoriously unreliable; and as I have established (by reference to proper books, and reliable peer reviwed sources) those listed here for East germany were mainly not nazis, and their position in the DDR society is exagerated by both wiki and havelock.
However, let us remember what havelock said
Yet Havelock’s own source lists 44 former nazis in prominent position sin West Germnay, and just 5 in East Germany, and of those five, at least two were not actualy members of the Nazi party!!!
So Hevelock’s own source disproves his contention that there was no more de-nazification in the East than in the West.
It is unreliable, but this is what wiki has for Wesr Germany:
[edit] West Germany
Gunter d’Alquen (1910–1998). Chief editor of the SS weekly Das Schwarze Korps and commander of the SS-Standarte Kurt Eggers. Fined DM 60.000 in 1955 by a Denazification court, deprived of civil rights for three years, and debarred from drawing an allowance or pension from public funds. After further investigations, fined again DM 28.000 in 1958.
Max Amann (1891–1957). Obergruppenführer and publisher of the Franz Eher Nachfolger, the central publishing house of the NSDAP. Sentenced to 10 years in labour camp in 1948, released in 1953.
Benno von Arent (1898–1956). Oberführer, died in Bonn in 1956.
Artur Axmann (1913–1996). Official in the Hitler Youth. Worked post-war as a sales representative.
Richard Baer (1911–1963). Sturmbannführer, commander of the Auschwitz I concentration camp. Lived under the pseudonym of Karl Neumann after the war, before being discovered in 1960 and arrested.
Alfred Baeumler (1887–1968). Nazi philosopher, one of the proponent of a biological and racist interpretation of Nietzsche (an interpretation repudiated by most post-war scholarship).
Werner Best (1903–1989).
Ernest Biberstein {1899-1986} SS Major Commander, EK 6/Egr. C. Found Guilty in 1948 trial and sentenced to hang 1949; sentenced changed 1951 by High Commissioner John J. McCloy to life sentence; released 1958; reported to have been “Co-worker” with Gehlen Organisation
Carl Diem (1882-1962). Chief organizer of the 1936 Olympic Summer Games in Berlin. Held top posts in the Nazi Sports Office, Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL). After WW2 he also held the main jobs in the highest sports bodies of the German Federal Republic.
Horst Ehmke (born 1927), later SPD politician and Minister under Willy Brandt
Erhard Eppler (born 1926), SPD politician
Martin Fellenz, former member of the SS, member of the FDP liberal party after the war, arrested in June 1960.
Reinhard von Brysonstofen former member of the state secret police Gestapo, change his name to Bryson and left Germany after the war, for the USA.
Eugen Fischer (1874–1967), appointed by Hitler rector of the University of Berlin, and one of the leading theorists of scientific racism
Fritz Fischer, (1908-1999) historian
Friedrich Flick (1883–1972), industrial leader and billionaire.
Dieter Hildebrandt (born 1927), cabaret artist
Hans Sommer, SS Untersturmführer instrumental in the bombing of seven synagogues in Paris in October 1941. Subsequently worked for the Gehlen Organisation and West Germany and subsequently Italy, but in reality as an agent for the GDR’s Stasi.
Martin Heidegger, philosopher.
Herbert von Karajan (1908-1989), conductor, joined the NSDAP in 1933 in Salzburg, Austria, five years before the Anschluss.
Kurt Georg Kiesinger (1904-1988), NSDAP later CDU and Chancellor of Germany.
Helmut Knochen (1910-2003), SS Standartenführer (equivalent of colonel) in France (1942-44) under Carl Oberg’s authority (SS and Police Leader). Sentenced to death in France before receiving a presidential pardon in 1958. He was released by President De Gaulle on November 28, 1962, retired in Baden-Baden where he lived free until his death.
Klaus Konrad (1914–2006), took part in the 1943 San Polo massacre in Italy, in which Eugenio Calò, a Partisan, died. Became a SPD deputy in the Bundestag from 1967 to 1972 (see de:Klaus Konrad).[3]
Horst Kopkow, (1910-1996) SS Major protected by MI5 and MI6
Walter Kopp, Wehrmacht Lieutenant Colonel, chief of one stay-behind networks code-named Kibitz-15 after the war. He was described by his own North-American handlers as an “unreconstructed Nazi,” in CIA documents released in June 2006[1].
Alfred Krupp, (1907-1967). NSDAP and SS sponsorship, industrialist involved in weapons; steel; and slave labor. Sentenced to 12 years and loss of all his property; pardoned by North American High Commissioner John J. McCloy in 1953 & all of Krupp’s property restored to him.
Gustav Krupp (1870–1950) ran the German Friedrich Krupp AG heavy industry conglomerate from 1909 until 1941. Indicted for prosecution at the 1945 Nuremberg trials, the charges were dropped because of his failing health.
Heinz Lammerding, (1905-1971) commander of the 2nd SS Division Das Reich involved in the Oradour-sur-Glane massacre.
Fritz Lenz (1887–1976), founder of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics and one of the leading theorists of eugenics and of scientific racism.
Siegfried Lenz (born 1926), author
Theodor Maunz, specialist of public law, then minister of Education and Culture in Bavaria.
Carl Oberg, (1897, 1965) SS and Police Leader (equivalent of general) he headed all German police units in France since 1942 to 1944. Like his mate Helmut Knochen, sentenced to death before getting presidential pardon (1958) ; released by Pdt De Gaulle on Nov. 1962, he retired free in Germany until his death in 1965.
Theodor Oberländer, (1905-1998) NSDAP member, SA-Obersturmbannführer, later became Refugee Minister under Konrad Adenauer.
Heinz Reinefarth (1903-1979) an SS Brigadeführer who became mayor of Westerland in December 1951
Karl Ritter von Halt The last supreme leader (Reichssportführer) of the Nazi Sports Office, Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL). He also held top jobs in the highest sports bodies of the German Federal Republic, like President of the German Olympic Committee.
Franz Schönhuber (1923–2005). Waffen-SS, later chairman of the right-wing Die Republikaner party which he co-founded in 1983.
Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), Nazi jurist and philosopher.
Hanns-Martin Schleyer,(1915-1977) SS, later employer representative, kidnapped and murdered by Red Army Faction.
Albert Speer (1905–1981), Hitler’s chief architect, sentenced to 20 years in prison at Nuremberg, became a noted author on Third Reich history.
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, NSDAP member, soprano singer.
Fritz Thyssen, (1873-1951) NSDAP member since 1931, steel industrialist.
Erich von dem Bach (1899–1972). Obergruppenführer, commander of troops fighting the Warsaw Uprising. Imprisoned after the war, but never judged for his role in the Eastern Front.
Guido von Mengden (1896-1982) Held a key post as propaganda leader in the Nationalsozialistischer Reichsbund für Leibesübungen (NSRL), the Sports Office of the Third Reich. Was later praised as the “spiritual father” of many post-war sports programs and German sports. He was an advisor for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich.
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer (1896–1969), director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics, he carried out experiments on human beings in concentration camps. Awarded in 1951 the prestigious professorship of human genetics at the University of Münster, where he established one of the largest centers of genetics research in West Germany.
“Seriously – what evidence is there that there’s this huge groundswell for the Glorious Free Market, held back only by the life of one sick old man?”
The evidence is all around you in Cuba where the black economy, run on very aggressively free market principles, has seeped into every area of Cuban life. We have seen this before and it tneds to go in one direction only. If you want to visit Cuba, my advice is to take dollars.
“And if there were to be changes in Cuba, why would they shift to a US style system rather than – say – a system of socialist principles in a mixed economy, closer to what their friends and benefactors in Venezuela have?2
We don’t know which way they will shift but history tells that it tends to be inn a particular direction. We will see. They wdo not have Venezuela’s ocean of oil, don’t forget, and can only prosper through trade.
Andy, you have only demonstrated that both the GDR and West Germany tolerated a lot of ex-Nazis. And , of course, West Germany did it without denying basic human rights to its citizenry.
Personally, I don’t see how a more vigorous de-nazification would have helped. Elizabeth Schwartzkopf may have been politically loathesome, but would the world really have been a better place had she been stopped from singing? Of course, had she been East German her career would have been short, but the arts did not flourish in any sense in the East because they were entirely controlled by ideological bureaucrats.
John M: “the arts did not flourish in any sense in the East….”
Hmmmm. I have quite a large collection of high quality baroque music recordings from the GDR, which suggests to me that you might be overstating your case a bit, John.
“the arts did not flourish in any sense in the East ”
bollocks
Christa Wolf, Maxie Wander, Bertholdt Brecht and others in the field of literature, a thriving cinema industry, threatre. And also mass participation in choirs and popular orchestras.
” I don’t see how a more vigorous de-nazification would have helped. “
Do you tink that Jewish citizens of the Federal republic, who had survived the persecution were best served by Hans Globke being Director of the Federal Chancellery? The man who had drafted the nazi laws depriving Jews of citizenship, and provided the legal advice to the Jewish Affairs dept during the holocaust?
I suppose you think he can’t have been that bad, as he wasn’t a Muslim.
- 68 -
Of Brecht it was said that he achieved the impossible combination of “…an Austrian passport, a West German publisher, East German government backing and a Swiss bank account…”
Nice work!
Anyway, a lot of Nazis – or ex-Nazis – were driven and accomplishing people who had a lot to contribute to the postwar world. In an earlier thread some weeks ago a contributor detailed how a highly-esteemed and much-decorated female doctor in the GDR was revealed to have assisted with the involuntary euthanasia of the subnormal during the National Socialist period.
We are ALL entitled to a second chance.
Even creatures like Martin McGuinness can change!
“Christa Wolf, Maxie Wander, Bertholdt Brecht and others in the field of literature, a thriving cinema industry, threatre. And also mass participation in choirs and popular orchestras.”
Yes, agents of the state and the secret police did produce works but the GDR was culturally feeble by any of the usual measures. And it is telling that Brecht, who was a genius as well as a moral cretin, did not produce a major work once he chose to live in the GDR and become a functionary of the state.
“Do you tink that Jewish citizens of the Federal republic, who had survived the persecution were best served by Hans Globke being Director of the Federal Chancellery? The man who had drafted the nazi laws depriving Jews of citizenship, and provided the legal advice to the Jewish Affairs dept during the holocaust?”
It goes against the grain to see how Nazis thrived after the war iin both Germanies, but the cost of greater vengeance would, in my view, have been higher than the gains. We would have lost Schwartkopf as well as Globke, you see.
“Of Brecht it was said that he achieved the impossible combination of “…an Austrian passport, a West German publisher, East German government backing and a Swiss bank account…”
yes, I think Brecht the man is summed up nicely by the symbolism of his blue workers’ overall that he always wore after the war, but had hand-made in silk. The mitigation is that he clearly intended the irony, even the insult. It is not much mitigation, obviously.
And the moral of the story is that their were Nazi members at every level is both the DDR and the FDR, as you would expect when their was around 5 million of them.
To cast the DDR as a beacon of purity when it comes to the Nazi past is just wrong.
#74
No, the moral of the story is that you don’t know what you are talking about, that you rely upon wikipedia as a source of factual information, that you are unable to debate intelligently, that you start from a priori assumptions and then find “facts” to support what you have already decided, that you don’t respond to counterarguments in a rational manner, and that you are generally arguing bollocks.
There was clearly not an equivelence of influence of former nazis in the two Germanys, and I have never read anything by a serious academic, or expert commenter who suggests such a thing.
How do you account for the fact that every one of the examples that you quoted was wrng, sometimes comiically so.
This is slightly at a tangent, but I studied German and other languages at university in the 1980s, and spent a little under a year in (West) Germany as part of my course. My landlord was a former member of the SS. He did not like me, for various national-ethnic reasons, but was glad of the rent money. Fortunately we rarely met.
#76
For some years I lived with a woman, half Danish, half German, whose mother (who lived in Bristol) had been a former member of the Bund Deutscher Mädel and the NSDAP. She had given a bunch of flowers to Hitler, and was completely unreformed in her politics, and married to a member of the NF. Fortunately we rarely met either.
My accommodation was arranged by the university who clearly did not ask what people did between 1933 and 1945. Some months into my stay, a German flatmate (a supporter of the Greens) mentioned to me in the pub that the landlord had been in the Waffen-SS during WW2. (He had been a bit rude when I first met him but I had put that down to him being a crotchety pensioner who was a bit xenophobic.) I now realised that I was probably not considered Aryan.
I considered moving out but I did not have many months left and also did not welcome the hassle of finding somewhere else to stay. He was an absentee landlord anyway so that minimised the stress.
Havelock is totally wrong, ex nazis were completely removed from all public office, government and education in the GDR unlike the West where they were reinstated in Government posts and the military.
I happened to be in Germany at the time that then US President Reagan caused controversy by describing Waffen-SS soldiers as “victims”, while Reagan was visiting a cemetery.
Ah, holiday reminiscences… I was in West Berlin when Reagan visited in 1987. The demonstration against his visit was the most lively and imaginative one I have ever attended. Sometimes the German left has real style.
I was studying German, not exactly on holiday, but I certainly did a lot of beer-drinking. Litre glasses! Mein Gott!
The GDR debate is always strung up on the notion that somehow a capitalist economy = democracy+ civil liberties whilst a planned economy = repression.What ever the GDR was or wasn’t the capitalist alternative doesn’t look too popular according to http://www.globescan.com/news_archives/bbc2009_berlin_wall/
Some interesting polling on how well people feel capitalism works internationally
“Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new BBC World Service global poll finds that dissatisfaction with free market capitalism is widespread, with an average of only 11% across 27 countries saying that it works well and that greater regulation is not a good idea.”
In only two countries do more than one in five feel that capitalism works well as it stands—the US (25%) and Pakistan (21%).
The problem, as John Pilger noted years ago, is that capitalism doesn’t try to present itself as fair, merely as inevitable and the only way to do things. Any alternatives are to be discredited as tyrannical or at least unworkable and a powerful propaganda apparatus exists to foster this.
#65 I’m not sure when Meredith was in Cuba, but comrades of mine who’ve recently been say that Yankee dollars are bloody useless now that the convertible peso has come in. The only way a Cuban can spend a greenback is after their raft arrives in Miami.
“#65 I’m not sure when Meredith was in Cuba, but comrades of mine who’ve recently been say that Yankee dollars are bloody useless now that the convertible peso has come in. The only way a Cuban can spend a greenback is after their raft arrives in Miami.”
Your comrades have been there more recently than me, so they may have a better idea, although I would be a little sceptical.
It’s about mass legitmacy, which the Cuban government has because of a popular revolution and the gains thatt has brought about, and which Chavez has, as demonstrated by the willingness of the people to mobilise to end the coup against him. Both governments rest on mass support.
The mobilisations in 1989 showed that the DDR’s government had lost any such legitimacy. They could not even have relied on the army.
As we know, large numbers of poeople are looking back with nostalgia to the good things that were lost. Who believesthat anything like as many would be doing so if the regime had decided to make a last ditch attempt to hold onto power by instigating armed repression?
Given the choice how many posters would have preferred to live in East Germany rather than West Germany?
Perhaps I missed it above, but there wasn’t just one DDR/GDR. To get the picture as it unfolded and was lived by ‘east’ Germans, then we should describe the phases of what it was like to live in eastern Germany from the end of the war to the end of the wall. And in that mix, the differing roles/positions/functions of the Communist leaders. For a start, there’s the figure of Ulbricht, surely an utterly objectionable character who clearly loved ‘purges’ and through whom Stalin could pursue his usual policy of eliminating local communists and socialists. It’s OK (ish) to point to things like social health care etc but as socialists of any kind, we should be alert to just how shitty Communists (official ones that is) have been to socialists and non-official communists. We have been purged, imprisoned, killed by the thousand.
Andy, I’m sure, will be able to describe the phases between the time of the ending of the ‘Soviet zone’ ie the beginning of the GDR and the end of the GDR. EAch decade is different, with different plans, economic organisation and so on. There’s also the issue of the contradictory policy of the Soviets in first stripping the zone of raw materials and factory plant, and then reversing it later…The economic success and/or failure of the GDR is wrapped up in part with these policies.
#89
This take on relations between German communists and socialists is hardly the full picture. And this category ‘socialists of any kind’ is too broad to possess any descriptive value. Does it include the ‘socialist’ police chiefs who ordered the shooting of communists as well as the socialists who worked in the underground or fought in Spain with communists? Does it include the thousands of socialists who merged into the SED as well as those who took the CIA’s money?
I was in Berlin on the day Ulbricht died with a group of students from the trade union hochschule and was very interested to hear reactions to the news. A few (younger) people were moved to tears but to most his death seemed expected. (He had been ill). When I asked people how they felt the general opinion was that he had introduced economic reforms that were needed but was seen as a figure from the post war era.
#90 – Indeed, like the evening edition of the SPD newspaper before May Day 1929 that prepared the ground for police killings of KPD demonstrators in Berlin on “Blutmai”. Not to mention complicity with the Freikorps in 1919-20. SPD election posters and newspaper articles under Weimar were often vitriolically anti-KPD. The SPD even had its own version of “social fascism” – the KPD and the Nazis were presented as being two sides of the same coin – one SPD article called the KPD “romantic revolutionaries” while the Nazis were “romantic reactionaries”. The SPD, of course, was totally pragmatic and above “romantic” nonsense.
It might be noted by some of the cynical comments by those hostile to the USSR and GDR that at Potsdam Stalin proposed and argued for a united neutral Germany after the war, eventually having no occupying forces from any country. This proposal was hastily rejected by the US and Britain who wanted to use West Germany as a base for attacking the socialist countries and fanning the cold war. The West broke agreements made at the end of the war, introduced a new currency, rearmed West Germany, set up NATO (rejecting an application by the Soviet Union to join.) It was after all this double crossing the Warsaw pact was formed. Britan’s labour government at the time were at the spearhead of anti-Sovietism.
“The new state was characterised by a huge economic and financial stimulus through the Marshal Aid Plan”
Ah, the old British claim that the Wirtschaftwunder was due to Marshall aid. However, the UK received 3297 million — much higher than the 1448 received by Germany (which also received less than the 2296 received by France). Yet Germany was somehow able to end rationing before Blighty. Hmm funny that.
Comrade, I am appalled at the title of this article using the word “United” in “WELCOME TO UNITED GERMANY”
This was a word used by that people (who aren’t rich) hating shyster Thatcher at the time of the Wiedervereinigung (trans Reunification). The right word, particularly from the left is Reunited. Also Thatcher was opposedto a reunified Germany.
#93
It is hard to understand what DHT is arguing here realting to the Marshall Aid plan.
#93
“the old British claim that the Wirtschaftwunder was due to Marshall aid. However, the UK received 3297 million — much higher than the 1448 received by Germany (which also received less than the 2296 received by France). Yet Germany was somehow able to end rationing before Blighty. Hmm funny that.”
I have written about this before.
So quite contrary to DHT’s claims I have never argued that the marshall aid was responsible for West Germany’s economic success. If you understand the purpose of the marshal Aid plan, then you would expect the greatest transfer to go to the more developed British economy, espeically as the 1947 Sterling crisis had threatened to bring down the entire structure of international trade, and jeapordise all US exports to europe, and the european colonies.
continued British rationing was also a function of the Sterling crisis, that was forced upon britan by the USA, and meant that Britain could not pay for food imports. Indeed the cutting of the food ration by the labour government in 1947 was not domesticaly controverisal, becasue standing up to the Americans by Stafford Cripps and harold Wilson and reneging on Britan’s treaty obligations to make Sterling fully convertibale was seen as a progressive solution to the crisis
however it is important to understand that the diverging histories of the two Germanies derived from their relationships with the USa and USSR, and not in a simple way.
the occupying powers disposed of the areas under their control largely regardless of German wishes, although both the USSR and the Western powers found local allies. In particular the local populations became bound to the occupying governments through simple dependency; and this dependency transferred onto both the German states – without direct state assistance the peoples would have had no shelter, and would have starved.
But the polarisation between the economic and political blocks centred around the USA and the USSR pulled in different directions. The Anglo-American interest was in technology transfer and economic aid inwards towards Germany. (I ignore the experience of the French zone for simplicity here) But from the point of view of Eastern Europe, despite the war devastation, Germany still had higher levels of capital investment and concentrations of modern technology. Germany and Austria were plundered to transfer high technology eastwards, where it contributed to a net increase of productive capacity. The resulting history of the two Germany’s reflected these differing starting points.
Marshall Aid (to the benefit of the US economy and as a marker for the shift in imperial power from Britain to the USA) was also the economic dimension of a new global dispensation.
And a combat-ready Britain, and Western Germany, were necessary if the offensive against the East was to be renewed. I have spoken with British communists who were taken off ‘denazifaction’ duties in Northern Germany as Wermacht units were held at concentration points along with their armour and weapons.
The campaign against the Marshall Plan was seen as a vital part of the peace movement’s work and as an aspect of anti-imperialist struggle. In many ways we can see the Marshall Plan as a precursor to the creation of the EEC and the EU.
The situation in Germany was very complex with unification of the SPD and KPD
http://21stcenturymanifesto.wordpress.com/2010/10/03/german-unification/
opposed by right wing social democracy (compliant as usual with the new American masters) while in other European countries there were strikes and demonstrations against the Marshall plan.
What is striking is the intensity of US intervention in Europe (and especially in the Labour movement) and the willing compliance of right wing social democracy with this.
An extremely useful werk for understanding Europe’s economy at this time id Thomas balogh’s 1949 book “The dollar crsis”
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BjIYZz3q_N0C&printsec=frontcover&dq=thomas+balogh&source=bl&ots=wFbuMBp84R&sig=-o-u_mF8sHyU_GlbR2aNseayDow&hl=en&ei=6qmpTNOjLMiK4gaIh_ilDQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=10&ved=0CDEQ6AEwCQ#v=onepage&q&f=false
Balogh of course later became famous as an advisor to Harold Wilson on economic planning.
Writing in 1949 Balogh referred to one of the consequences of the division of Europe as an artifical barrier to the Westward population movement that had characterised the entire 20th century.
In the context of population movements that occured after the war, which were given a political gloss by Western anti-Communist politicians, it is very interesting to note that Eastern Europeans moving to Western germany em masse was a phenomenon that had been going on throughout the previous 60 or so years.
HOPE not hate
Celebrating modern Britain
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