East German-west German Relations And The Fall Of The Gdr

Ernest D. Plock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367016104
• eBook ISBN: 9780429714856
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book investigates inner-German economic ties, travel contacts, and national consciousness that proved to be of greater consequence after Gorbachev's accession to power. It addresses the inevitability of the German Democratic Republic revolution and unification with the Federal Republic.

1
Nationalism and Unity: An Introduction

The collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as is now clear, was part of a sequence of transformations that eliminated the Communist regimes installed in Eastern and Central Europe after World War II. Several significant developments in 1989 have been identified for their contribution to the overthrow of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) leadership under Erich Honecker and the end of the party's dominant position. Among these are Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev's decision not to uphold the SED's monopoly on power with military force, Moscow's increasing preoccupation with internal economic and political problems, and the official inauguration of liberal democracies in Poland and Hungary. Moreover, the Hungarian Government's September decision to remove the remaining barriers to travel to the West acted as an immediate trigger to further depopulation of the GDR as well as to popular demands that led to the eventual removal of SED rule.

Each of these popular revolutions and evolutions in the Soviet security community was unique in its own fight, as each resulted from a particular mixture of social and historical forces and proceeded at its own tempo. No parallel could be found to the Polish case. Poland's transformation into a pluralist, multiparty democracy was accomplished a scant nine years after the thunderous entrance of striking laborers in the Gdansk shipyards. The short-lived success of the Solidarity union in obtaining official status until its violent suppression in 1981 as well as the bold social disobedience of individual Poles made this event unlike earlier upheavals in the Warsaw Treaty Organization (WTO) member states. Indeed, the absence of any emulation of this event elsewhere in the Soviet glacis gave rise to the belief that Solidarity's emergence was a profound aberration, a testimony to the pronounced failure of Polish Communism to penetrate society with its institutions and methods of cooptation rather than a beacon for wider uprisings in Eastern and Central Europe.

Hungary's peaceful, though hardly quiescent, transition to social democracy followed from an even longer period of national reconciliation after the unsuccessful 1956 revolution. The Magyar state's renowned proclivity for experiments with quasi-free market economic tools and milder cultural and political environment suggested a practical alternative for those desperate to discover a "socialism with a human face." Yet the state's declining economic prospects by the 1980s and the catalyzing of a greater appetite for more fundamental reform with the appearance of Mikhail Gorbachev ensured the irrelevance and replacement of a less imaginative Janos Kádár in 1988. And Czechoslovakia's "velvet revolution" capitalized on the actions of a critical mass of human rights activists and liberal socialists estranged by the throttling of the 1968 reforms unveiled by Alexander Dubcek; an "old guard" leadership that distrusted the Soviet reformer's intentions also unwittingly accelerated its own demise.

Certainly the GDR was also "different." It featured neither a population with Poland's insurrectionist elan, a governing elite open to a modest departure from rigid central planning as in Hungary, nor a dissident stratum with the fortitude and influence of "Charter 77" in Czechoslovakia. Lenin's awareness that "Germans don't make revolutions" was somehow intuitively compelling even if it paid insufficient heed to a 1953 uprising in East Germany that necessitated Soviet tanks to vanquish. Moreover, the collapse of this state was as singular as its consequences were heartfelt. With the November 1989 opening of the Berlin Wall and the manifest incapability of the deposed Erich Honecker's party comrades to satisfy a population immovable in its demands for civil rights and political pluralism, the reigning certitudes of post-World War II history were quickly discarded. The piece-by-piece dismantling of what had become the most immutable of Cold War structures was cause for both joy and astonishment. Yet the invalidation of the axiom that East Germany's "forward state" defense status and its barrier to the reappearance of a unified Germany would prevent an internally or externally induced drift out of the Soviet orbit was equally breathtaking. Finally, the October 1990 signatures of the four former wartime allies on documents ending their rights and responsibilities in Germany demonstrated with finality that postwar boundaries in Europe were not frozen in the nuclear age.

The pivotal importance of these outside events for the GDR's October upheaval has been universally appreciated. However, foreign affairs specialists have devoted less attention to the Federal Republic of Germany's (FRG) contribution to the change in East Germany's political landscape, a process more subtle and long-term in its effects but which made its presence felt in a number of ways. West German decisionmakers sought to foster East German identification with the German nation, in particular, through inner-German travel and communication links and economic assistance to the GDR. From Bonn's perspective, the complexity of the German question followed from the recognition that it was necessarily multi-layered. West German governments were not only aiming at fundamental changes in the two German states' relationship and East German internal practices which the GDR elite was reluctant to grant, but the Federal Republic's allies had reason to be apprehensive about too thorough an inner-German rapprochement.

To be sure, the prospects for German reunification, with its associated spectre of German expansionism and militarism, appeared far from favorable by the 1980s. The FRG's Western partners were more often concerned that the strong West German affinity for preserving and expanding intimacy with Germans east of the Elbe River would encourage disassociation from Western policies through its accommodation of the GDR's powerful ward, the Soviet Union. Secondly, those who like U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski saw such a "Finlandization" of West German policies in the 1970s also perceived the dangers of a spur to German nationalism as a result of a "freewheeling" FRG Ostpolitik. The scenario of resurgent German nationalism was especially vexing because it was also conceivable that the opposite condition, frustration of the Federal Republic's national goals, could inspire pan-German sentiments. Indeed, the stalemate in West Germany's national outlets in the mid- to late 1960s had produced such an outcome on a lesser scale, with the rise in popularity of the extreme right National Democratic Party (NPD). The danger of a weakening of external constraints on West German foreign policy, in its starkest form, also raised the question of whether the FRG's renunciation of nuclear weapons could be indefinitely upheld. Bonn therefore continually faced the burden of proof regarding its NATO reliability, a commitment inevitably called into question during the surfacing of inner-German as well as West German-Soviet comity.

However, the task of adjusting FRG policies toward its Communist German neighbor was no less delicate. West German governing coalitions were determined to offer support and express solidarity with the East German populace while simultaneously accepting the de facto authority of its government and engaging in practical cooperation with East Berlin if Bonn was to have any hope of improving life perspectives in the GDR. Within this arrangement, the boundary between intergovernmental dialogue necessary to preserve national unity and sanctioning the SED regime to the degree that GDR inhabitants would grudgingly accept its legitimacy was difficult to locate. The official standard introduced by Chancellor Willy Brandt with the signing of the 1972 Basic Treaty attempted to resolve this difficulty through the adoption of a "two German states, one German nation" formula. On the surface, the governing coalition formed by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Free Democratic Party (FDP) in 1982 upheld this approach and even upgraded its recognition of the East German state, as was in evidence during Erich Honecker's September 1987 visit to Bonn. Yet Chancellor Helmut Kohl's statement that the Basic Law's reunification imperative was to be the "central expression" of his government's inner-German policy¹ implied more affirmative overtures to GDR inhabitants. Such emphasis contrasted with his Social Democratic Party (SPD) predecessors' downgrading of the reunification mandate. Kohl's vigorous pursuit of formal unification in 1989 and 1990 therefore demands an inquiry into his government's official and unofficial dealings with East Berlin in an attempt to assess the significance of cooperation.

In view of the inequality in the material capacities of East and West Germany and the substantial trade and financial ties between the two, the economic dimension of the inner-German relationship in the 1980s will receive substantial treatment. The importance of economic considerations was particularly evident in the drive to reunification, with the GDR's damaged industrial infrastructure and pressures for monetary union in sharp relief. Discovery of the scale of relative East German backwardness was all the more surprising because the 1980s marked a period during which the state appeared to have developed adequate economic wherewithal. Was the much-noted West German "net" extended to the GDR in itself of insufficient help to the SED regime? No less salient is the question of the degree to which a widening technological gap between the two German states in the 1980s and the level of East German receptivity to foreign investment set limits to GDR economic performance.

Brandt's major modification of West German Deutschlandpolitik was in large part driven by the realization that the mutual empathy and common historical memory of Germans divided by social and political systems threatened to wane over time. Most important, the very yearning for reunification in both East and West Germany could be expected to decline with the diminishing possibility of its realization. Ascertaining the strength of All-German consciousness in each German state, an attitude that was influenced by official policies as well as human contacts, will thus constitute a critical section of this examination. What was the actual strength of All-German consciousness in the FRG and GDR in the 1980s, and what were its consequences? East German inhabitants' identification with the German, as opposed to the SED-fostered socialist, nation will provide clues as to the underlying cohesion of Germans in separate states. The study will also evaluate West German subjective attachment to the "other Germans" on the way to explaining the inner-German dynamics behind reunification.

History, of course, has largely answered the question of the German people's desire for reunification even if its formal declaration on October 3, 1990 did not spawn unanimity on a range of remaining social, political, and economic questions. If the GDR's "October Revolution" spelled the failure of a political and economic system, it also produced a national solution scarcely conceivable between two mutually alienated peoples. It must be remembered that the East German decision to join with the Federal Republic, accented in the robust March 1990 vote for the CDU and its two allied parties, survived the forty-year physical separation of the two Germanies and concentrated SED propaganda proclaiming the militarist, exploitative nature of the West German state. It is therefore useful to examine whether East Germany's peaceful revolution was mainly fueled by All-German sentiments, by consumerist, economic imperatives,² or by anger at a police-state regime that erected a wall against the impulses for reform elsewhere in the Communist world. Specifically, what part did the layers of official and unofficial contacts between East and West Germans play in the SED regime's fall and the achievement of reunification? Discussion of the above themes will also lay the groundwork for a comparative assessment of the further questions raised by Mikhail Gorbachev's decision not to prop up the faltering Honecker leadership. Suggestions that the Soviet reformer had undertaken steps to rid himself of a defiant East German opponent of glasnost and perestroika even before the fall 1989 drama in East Germany³ are thus central to examination of the success of Bonn's inner-German policies, as the latter had historically registered some success in achieving inner-German goals through the Kremlin. Consideration of such motivations will clarify the degree to which the Kohl Government pursued a conscious reunification program, an impression conveyed in the chancellor's November 1989 "confederation" plan, or whether Bonn's unfolding program was more reactive in nature.

A final chapter will address the question of the inevitability of the GDR revolution and unification with the Federal Republic. Such an inquiry can assist in deciding if this outcome should be interpreted primarily as one among many collapses of European Communist regimes, as the impact of individual decisions in East Berlin and elsewhere that were not preordained, or as the result of an "unnatural" German division that could not last. Closely related to this discussion will be a further exploration of whether a GDR "third way" was conceivable in the face of a widespread discrediting of Marxist-Leninist systems and a unity-minded, democratic West Germany.

In selecting the 1980s as the time period for the above investigation, the author does not assume that all decisive developments in the relationship were confined to that decade or that the fate of the GDR cannot be explained within a broader sweep of time. The following chapter will discuss how Brandt's decision to extend state recognition to East Germany in the early 1970s altered the FRG-GDR equation, for example, and will draw a balance of the two states' mutual strengths and vulnerabilities in what remained an unusual national competition. This section will prepare the reader for the later investigation of inner-German economic ties, travel contacts, and national consciousness that proved to be of even greater consequence after Gorbachev's accession to power. A focus on the 1980s offers the additional advantage of testing whether the Kohl Government's approaches to the GDR shared long-term continuity with its rush to reunification in 1989 and 1990.

Notes

1. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 4 October 1982.

2. This explanation of the drive to unity was most succinctly conveyed in Jurgen Habermas' arresting phrase "deutschemark nationalism." See Die Zeit, 30 March 1990.

3. Probably the best-known of these pronouncements was Honecker's own provocative statement that his removal was the consequence of the contrivances of unspecified "big fish." See Reinhold Ander and Wolfgang Herzberg, ed., Der Sturz: Honecker im Kreuzverhör (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1991)

2
Inner-German Relations Before 1980

Numerous studies have examined East-West German relations both prior to their 1972 normalization and in the formative years immediately after the signing of the Basic Treaty.¹ This chapter will lay the historical foundation for the relationship in the three decades after the birth of the FRG and GDR in 1949. A concluding section will examine the consequences of the upgrade in mutual cooperation in the 1970s for the continued, albeit modified, competition between the two German states.

Cold War and German Rivalry, 1949-1969

One can speak of an "inner-German" relationship in the decade following official declaration of the FRG and GDR in 1949 only in highly qualified fashion. Although there were notable official and unofficial communications between the two states and important agreements concluded by their governments, particularly in the area of trade, bilateral relations were almost exclusively determined by the dependent positions of East and West Germany in their respective Cold War military alliances. This subordination did not prevent the restoration of partial FRG sovereignty under the leadership of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in return for West German integration into the Western alliance. However, both East and West German Deutschlandpolitik plainly reflected rather than shaped the strategic blueprint for Germany of the two preeminent alliance powers, the United States and the Soviet Union.

The above pattern of influence can be clearly discerned in both FRG and GDR treatment of the German question in the 1950s. In this early period, each of the two German states depicted the other in the worst possible light, creating a mirror image effect. Governments led by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) defined the GDR as a "terror regime," while the SED characterized the FRG as dominated by "fascist" and "monopoly capitalist" elements. Such was the common coin of inner-German exchanges, except when tactical measures were employed to influence opinion across die FRG-GDR border.

The preamble to the "Basic Law," the FRG's founding document which entered into force on May 23, 1949, constituted the doctrinal centerpiece of the Federal Republic's All-German policy. Proclaiming the eleven West German federal states' desire "to give a new order to political life for a transitional period," the preamble's "reunification imperative" called on the German people "to achieve in free self-determination the unity and freedom of Germany." This solemn declaration was limited, however, by the Potsdam Agreement's...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Nationalism and Unity: An Introduction
• 2 Inner-German Relations Before 1980
• 3 The "Laboratory GDR" and Economic Relations
• 4 Humanitarian Contacts and the National Question
• 5 Revolution and Solution
• 6 Unification: Statecraft or National Will?
• Selected Bibliography
• Index