The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic

Feiwel Kupferberg

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351324700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Most public debate on reunited Germany has emphasized economic issues such as the collapse of East German industry, mass unemployment, career difficulties, and differences in wages and living standards. The overwhelming difficulty resulting from reunification, however, is not persisting economic differences but the internal cultural divide between East and West Germans, one based upon different moral values in the two Germanies. The invisible wall that has replaced the previous, highly visible territorial division of the German nation is rooted in issues of the past-the Nazi past as well as the German Democratic Republic past. In emphasizing economic differences, the media and academics have avoided dealing with typically German cultural traits. These include the psychological posture of West Germany, which emphasized not differences between East and West but the break with Germany's Nazi past. The adversarial posture of certain professional groups in East Germany towards the liberal and democratic values of West Germany have also been an obstacle. Reviewing the problems accompanying reunification, chapter 1 explores German culture and history and the moral lessons evolved from the Nazi past. Chapter 2 focuses on the East-West mindset and how differences in attitude affect efforts to adapt to reunification. Chapter 3 discusses the simulated break with Nazi Germany in the German Democratic Republic. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 analyze the roots of the adversary posture of the professional groups in East Germany towards the values of the Berlin Republic. Chapter 7 demonstrates the strong presence of inherited, typically German cultural traits among East Germans, such as a lack of individualism, suspicion of strangers, and obedience to authority. Chapter 8 documents the extent to which a right-wing extremist culture has remained latent in Eastern Germany. Chapter 9 documents the extent to which moral reasoning in the GDR relieves the individual of any kind of responsibility for the actions of the state, reproducing the way ordinary Germans rationalized their participation in the Nazi regime immediately after World War II. Chapter 10 concludes with an overview of the historical and sociological factors revolving around the discussion of Nazi Germany, the GDR and inner unification.This volume will be important for historians, political scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and a general public interested in Germany's reunification.

1
Introduction

Cultural Studies, German History, and Moral Lessons

Beyond Postmodernism

There are currently two main approaches to the study of culture—the essentialist and the constructivist traditions (Rutherford, 1990; McCarthy, 1996). Essentialists believe culture is at the very core of one’s being, one cannot escape it, cannot even think beyond it. Culture is everywhere, in time as well as in space. Once one has been born into and/or grown up within a particular national or ethnic culture one becomes a prisoner of that culture, carrying it with one or being influenced by it for the rest of one’s life. Culture, consisting as it does of collective beliefs and practices, extends into all one’s activities, governs all aspects of one’s life and dominates one’s mindset. It influences child-caring practices, gender roles, friendship patterns, family rituals, food preferences and ways of communicating. The emphasis here is on culture as an underlying structure which is more or less immune to change or only changes very slowly—the role of personal choice is minimal and the individual is fundamentally unfree and takes the imposition of the culture for granted.

By contrast, constructivists view culture less as something given and unchanging than as a conscious choice. For them, cultural beliefs and practices are not natural or primordial, they are constructs of the human mind. Since they are brought into being by creative human beings, cultures and societies can be reshaped. Individuals are not prisoners of their past, they are responsible for their personal or collective destiny. The emphasis here is on a dynamic, active and creative culture. And as cultures and societies change so do individuals. The message is that people are masters of their own future, not prisoners of the past.

The constructivist revolution in the social sciences was inaugurated by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann who, in their pathbreaking book The Social Construction of Reality, offered the first powerful argument for the role of reflexive agency rather than unbending structures as the point of departure for an understanding of societies and how they work. The core of this argument was later developed by Anthony Giddens in a number of seminal works such as New Rules of the Sociological Method, Central Problems in Social Theory, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism, The Constitutions of Society, Consequences of Modernity and Modernity and Self-Identity, in which he set out the contours of an anti-structuralist view of culture, society and individual socialization. Giddens’s project includes and is supplemented by Ulrich Beck’s important work Risk Society, which is strikingly similar to Giddens’s view, in the tone and content of its analysis of careers and labor markets in modern capitalism (see also the accompanying volume What is Globalization?).

Some cultural theorists claiming to be postmodernists but confessing themselves to be constructivist rather than essentialist use the ideas of Berger and Luckmann and Giddens and Beck for purposes that are radically different from their original intentions. Neither in Peter Berger’s extensive writings after The Social Construction of Reality nor in Anthony Giddens’s project on developing a theory around the concept of reflexive agency do we find anything even resembling the inherently nihilistic idea of moral and cultural relativism to which postmodernist students of culture seem to be so strongly attracted (Sarup, 1988).

This is, I believe, one of the main reasons why Giddens has consistently refused to accept the concept of a postmodernist society. There is no such thing. We have not passed beyond modernity, and the very claim that we have is a dishonest way of preserving the antimodernist prejudices of cultural studies inherent in the structuralist or culturalist view. But whereas the antimodernist bias of structuralism originated in the fears of a discipline (cultural anthropology) of losing the object of its research, the antimodernism of the postmodernists mainly stems from a deep disillusionment with Marxism. Postmodernism is the strategy of a utopian intelligentsia that has seen its utopia vanish but is not yet prepared to ask itself why and for whom the inner connection between utopian beliefs and totalitarian regimes remains elusive. Postmodernism is a means of pretending that utopia still exists as a serious intellectual alternative, although all the evidence of the twentieth century, and in particular the German experience, points to the opposite. Postmodernism is the will not to learn from history and in particular not to learn from German history.

The attempt by postmodernism to usurp the constructivist point of view should be seen in the context of Peter Berger’s clear rejection of utopia in The Homeless Mind (co-authored with Birgitte Berger and Hans-Joachim Kellner). The basic purpose of the book is to outline the background of political alienation and utopian antimodernism of the modern cultural intelligentsia. For Peter Berger, to be a constructionist was definitely not to be a moral relativist or intellectual nihilist. Modernity, with all its accompanying problems and dark sides, does indeed have a crucial moral advantage over traditional societies, namely the rise of free and morally responsible citizens. As an intellectual refugee from Nazi-dominated Europe, Peter Berger had experienced the crucial difference between a society in which the civil ethos was firmly ingrained in the moral fiber of a national culture and one in which this ethos was sorely lacking. This personal experience explains, I believe, why Berger never vacillated in his commitment to modernity and firmly upheld his view in spite of its increasing unpopularity with the cultural ascendancy in academia—the heartland of the intelligentsia.

The paradox is that although the postmodernist view of culture defines itself in contrast to the essentialist view, the underlying antimodernist message of cultural essentialism and postmodernist “constructivism” remains the same. As several sociologists have pointed out, the antimodernist streak among the modern cultural intelligentsia has made it strongly receptive to totalitarian utopias of various kinds (Aron, 1957; Löwy, 1979; Gouldner, 1985). On the surface postmodernist cultural theorists (Hall, 1990; 1991; Weeks, 1990; Robertson, 1992; McCarthy, 1996; Bauman, 1999) appear to have made a radical break with essentialism. They all emphasize a dynamic concept of culture, arguing that cultural identity is not stable but evolves through a series of transformations or turning points, displaying more discontinuity than continuity. Far from being essential or primordial, culture is constructed from a hybrid mixture of past, present and future. Cultural identities are constantly reconstituted or renegotiated. Instead of representing our “roots,” cultural identities are shifting points of identification in time and space with nothing fixed or inherent about them. Entering the area of culture means entering the area of free choice and reflexivity.

The problem with this alternative, free-floating concept of culture is that it implies that individuals cannot transcend their own pasts because they live in the present and have no pasts to relate to. Because postmodern people are so mobile, they never stop to learn anything from collective experience. Strictly speaking, such a collective experience does not exist, as the individual constantly negotiates and renegotiates many different identities, of which national identity is only one. Since gender, ethnicity or sexual preference might be much more important for a particular individual than nation, why should he or she engage in the project of learning anything from his or her own national history or heritage?

Since identities are mere constructs, any given culture is as good or valid as any other. There is no universal truth or morality to appeal to and every culture formulates its own criteria of moral and cognitive validity. Postmodernism thus tends to take the antimodernist bias of structuralism to its extreme. Because identity (class, gender, age, sexual preference, ethnicity and so on) is constantly renegotiated by the individual in postmodern society, every attempt to reach a universal consensus on what is morally or cognitively valid must necessarily be a hidden attempt to impose a cultural understanding from the outside—a kind of cultural imperialism or chauvinism of the powerful.

Thus the postmodernist version of the constructivist view of culture does not depart fundamentally from the most problematic consequence of essentialism, its antimodernism and provincialism. On the contrary, it radicalizes the provincialism of the orthodox essentialist or culturalist view. Precisely because cultures are thought of as being mere constructs, there is no way to argue that the study of culture can help elaborate a universally valid moral narrative of humanity. Although more mobile, “postmodern man” thus ultimately remains a prisoner of the past. Postmodernism makes the very idea of universality through exchange of ideas look hopelessly anachronistic. The orthodox view of culture was based on the cosmopolitan assumption that humans as members of the same species are fundamentally alike and that cultural differences are mere variations of the same fundamental human patterns of thought (Levi-Strauss, 1977). In postmodernism this logic has been turned upside down—it is the differences that are important, everything else is subsidiary (Weeks, 1990). The very idea of postmodernism is to abandon any attempt at “Grand Narrative” in the moral realm (Lyotard, 1984).

This should be seen though in the historical context of a previous uncritical embrace of one particular “Grand Narrative,” namely the Marxist or historical materialist narrative, predicting the final crisis of capitalism and the coming of socialist and communist society. Such a position would indeed look silly today. What remains, if one still harbors utopian dreams of a return to a premodern type of national community, is the postmodernist posture, which gives the antimodernist intelligentsia the satisfaction of depriving the promodernist intellectuals of the joy of intellectual victory. Postmodernism is the “sour grapes” of the antimodernist who clings to a vulgar, antiuniversalistic interpretation of Berger and Luckmann’s highly original argument. There is nothing whatsoever to support this interpretation. What Berger and Luckmann emphasize is reflexive agency or the idea that individuals are creative rather than mere products of the environment. They never advance the nihilistic idea that nothing of universal validity can be learned from studying different cultures.

Cultural Interaction and Moral Lessons

For students of German history, the postmodernist concept of culture as unrelated to moral values and in particular the idea of civic ethos, the denial of scientific universality and the indifference to history as a means of moral learning has little attraction. On the contrary, the story of Germany is a perfect example of the importance of reflexive agency in history. Learning from history is what the study of German national culture is about, that is what gives it its fundamental value. The vital element missing from both the essentialist and postmodernist theories of culture is the crucial fact that national cultures are never isolated worlds, they always interact and this interaction helps them learn from the past. This cultural interaction is no mere epiphenomenon, it should be the main point of departure for our understanding of cultural dynamics and identities. Until recently, though, few cultural theorists apart from the Norwegian anthropologist Frederik Barth (1996) have taken this international or global aspect of cultural interaction seriously. Both the structuralists and the postmodernists prefer the provincial or local point of view. The main reason is, I believe, an inherent antimodernist bias in cultural studies present both in the traditional and postmodernist form although for different reasons.

The antimodernist or structuralist view originated in the professional bias of an academic discipline in fear of losing its subject matter. This explains the tone of lamentation and nostalgia in Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s autobiographical account of his travels among the Indian Tribes in Brazil. But the fact that a research object is disappearing in front of our eyes can never in itself be a valid claim for a particular culture to remain untouched and unchanged by forces from outside or inside. If we were to accept this plea for the cultural preservation of all our research objects, students of German history and society would find themselves in the same position as the neoNazis and supporters of the PDS in contemporary East Germany who represent pitiful attempts to cope with a GDR past (Klessmann, 1993; Walther, 1993) rooted in Nazi Germany and reproducing precisely those premodern German traditions that made a Hitler possible in the first place (see in particular chapters 3 and 8).

What is interesting is that the national cultures of Nazi Germany and the GDR changed mainly because of the impact of outside forces. In the first case it was only the defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allied forces which transformed (West) Germany from an aggressively nationalistic and racist state to a peace-seeking and cosmopolitan nation-state. In the second case, the obvious economic superiority of the West German economy (Schulz and Wielgohs, 1990; Offe, 1994) gradually eroded popular support for a regime which, until its collapse, had survived mainly because of the antifascist credentials and accompanying mythologies of its communist leaders, who claimed to represent the “Better Germany” (Meuschel, 1992; Simon, 1995).

Lévi-Strauss’s mistake is that he looks upon the world from a narrowly professional point of view. Since anthropology originally legitimized itself in terms of exploring that part of the world which was seen as “primitive” and “uncivilized,” the disappearance of these cultures was felt as a long term threat to the existence of the discipline itself. Lévi-Strauss’s fears were unfounded—anthropology has been able to flourish because of the universality of its methodological approach which transcends its original objects. Nevertheless, the original, mainly isolationist and static view of culture has tended to haunt the profession and has become increasingly irrelevant in an age of globalization (Hannerz, 1996).

The provincial and antiglobalist bias of cultural studies manifests itself both in the extreme cultural determinism of structuralist cultural theory and in the extreme cultural and moral relativism of postmodernism. The claim for the view that individuals are totally shaped by their culture and cannot escape their past assumes that they are brought up in a culture which is left untouched by other cultures, in other words does not engage in cultural interaction. What is interesting is that the argument for cultural and moral relativism—that there are no universal cognitive or moral truths to be learned from history—is based upon the same assumption of provincial isolation. But cultures do change and moral learning does take place and one of the main reasons they do so is the interaction of traditional societies with more modern ones.

This interaction does not have to take the form of military conquest or economic impact. Sometimes the strongest impact of the more modern culture can be to function as a model of liberation or emancipation of repressed needs and wishes which the traditional society has regulated out of existence. Daniel Lerner refers to this type of cultural change in his seminal study, The Passing of Traditional Society. Lerner found that in all traditional societies there was a group of “moderns” who were anxious to escape from the bonds of the past and acquire the right to shape their own future. For them the encounter with modernity, although mainly theoretical and acquired through various media, nevertheless gave its members hope that their circumstances could indeed change. Similarly, access to West German television nourished hopes and dreams in East Germany of a different future from the one the communist rulers could offer its citizens (Gaus, 1986).

Coping with Cultural Prejudices

One of the main problems with both the structuralist and the postmodernist views of culture is that they make it difficult to see how cultural prejudices can be changed or modified. If cultures do not interact, individuals brought up in a particular culture are totally at the mercy of the group around them. They conform, they obey authority, their self-esteem is strongly tied to the destiny of the group, and they tend to develop strong and stereotyped images of themselves and others in order to boost their self-esteem.

This is what we should expect from a national culture, any culture. The problem is that it does not fit the German case. Although both West and East Germans tend to stereotype both themselves and the other, a comparison of the stereotypes of the two groups reveals an interesting difference (see chapter 7). Whereas East Germans believe themselves to be better than West Germans in all respects and find no reason to be self-critical, West Germans tend to present themselves in a surprisingly unflattering light. Their collective image of themselves is significantly more negative than that of the East Germans and their image of the other is significantly more positive.

This suggests a dimension, the importance of which is often ignored by both structuralist and postmodernist cultural theorists, namely that modernity brings with it a higher degree of individualization in the sense of individual empowerment and liberation from group conformity. The reason the West German stereoptypes are more self-reflexive is that the individual is less dependent upon the group for his or her self-esteem than is the East German. The question is why? How is this greater dependence upon and integration into the group among East Germans to be explained? And what are its consequences for the psychological wall that has developed between East and West Germans since unification?

How we as scholars account for the cultural differences between the two groups depends upon our point of departure or our view of the meaning of cultural studies. A cultural theorist, whether of the structuralist or the postmodernist school, would focus merely on the fact that there are indeed stereotypes among both groups. Structuralist cultural theorists would claim that this proves their main point—that individuals are prisoners of their past. The postmodernist would argue that no universally valid moral truths can be established through cultural comparison, that all cultures are valid from their own point of view and that truths are always related to the cultural context in which they arise and gain acceptance.

Both these views are unable to take account of the fact that both postwar Germanies basically rejected the cultural values of Nazi Germany, in particular its racist and militaristic dimensions, and tried to learn something from history. This raises the important question: How do we as scholars decide which of the two German states learned the right lesson or made the most accurate diagnosis of what had gone wrong in German history? To formulate the question in such a way we have first of all to abandon the deterministic idea that individuals are prisoners of the past, as this would not allow for the fact that a change of culture actually did take place, particularly in West Germany. But we have also to abandon the nihilistic postmodernist approach of moral relativism which makes it impossible for the scholar to critically analyze the reasons why East German culture preserved important aspects of the traditional German culture which produced the racism and militarism of Nazi Germany.

The fact is there is a German past from which the two states, in different ways, have tried to distance themselves. In 1945 there was only one type of German—shaped by the past. Today there are two types of Germans—shaped by different interpretations of that past. It is this element of historical and biographical reflexivity or learning that should be the subject of investigation by those who adopt a constructionist view of culture, not the obvious fact that individuals are shaped by the culture in which they grow up, nor the absurd claim that there are no universal moral values that can be used as a yardstick to measure moral progress.

It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Cultural Studies, German History, and Moral Lessons
• 2. The Unmanaged Past: Rethinking the Inner Wall in Reunited Germany
• 3. Victors of History: The Smokescreen of Antifascism
• 4. The Workers' and Peasants' State: The Myth of the Marxist Utopia
• 5. Die Wende: Exit, Voice, and Collapse
• 6. The Dismantling of the GDR: Saving Careers and Legitimizing Biographies
• 7. The "Elbow Society": East German Group Mentality and Cultural Alienation
• 8. Xenophobia and Right-Wing Extremism
• 9. When the World was Simple: GDR Nostalgia—A Return to Innocence
• 10. Conclusion: Nazi Germany, the GDR, and Inner Conflict
• References
• Index