State and Minorities in Communist East Germany

Mike Dennis, Norman LaPorte

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857451965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Allemagne

Based on interviews and the voluminous materials in the archives of the SED, the Stasi and central and regional authorities, this volume focuses on several contrasting minorities (Jehovah's Witnesses, Jews, 'guest' workers from Vietnam and Mozambique, football fans, punks, and skinheads) and their interaction with state and party bodies during Erich Honecker's rule over the communist system. It explores how they were able to resist persecution and surveillance by instruments of the state, thus illustrating the limits on the power of the East German dictatorship and shedding light on the notion of authority as social practice.

Chapter 1

STATE, SOCIETY AND MINORITY GROUPS
IN THE GDR

From Upheaval to Stability

While the turbulence of socialist construction is by no means neglected, this book concentrates on the second half of the GDR’s history, that is, from the consolidation of SED rule in the mid 1960s to its unexpectedly rapid disintegration a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. The overall aim of this chapter is to provide the historical context for the study of relations between state and minorities and, secondly, to place this development within broad theoretical constructs such as post-totalitarianism. Our argument is that a flexible version of the latter concept, one which encompasses the policies of a repressive state and myriad personal experiences, can be applied to the GDR in the Honecker era to provide an insight into the complex and shifting interactions between state and individuals in society.

The final two decades of the GDR, or at least until the mid 1980s, are usually regarded as a time when, with the socialist revolution in both society and the economy completed and with the Berlin Wall providing indispensable security for the regime, the GDR shifted from a totalitarian to an authoritarian form of dictatorship. The SED leader, Erich Honecker, an experienced communist apparatchik, kept a tight rein on party-political power after he became First Secretary of the SED in 1971. The Berlin Wall had stemmed a demographic haemorrhage, new opportunities for social advancement were created by the reforms associated with the New Economic System (NES) introduced in 1963, and the SED exerted firm control over the other major political institutions. The period of high Stalinism, between 1945 and 1953, had involved the concentration of power in the hands of a small political-bureaucratic elite assisted by privileged cadres, the enshrinement of Marxism-Leninism as the source of official values and organisation, widespread purges, show trials and the centrality of the security forces and the police. With the elimination of a competitive multi-party system, the East German Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the other three bloc parties lost their independence, and the mass organisations, such as the Confederation of Free German Trade Unions (FDGB) and the Free German Youth Organisation (FDJ), complied unreservedly with the SED’s leadership role. Stability was also based on the continuation of relatively cheap raw materials imports from the Soviet Union and the presence of its armed forces on East German territory.

The onset of détente between the USSR and the U.S.A. was a further stabilising factor as it encompassed the Western powers’ diplomatic recognition of the GDR in the early 1970s, notably in the Basic Treaty between the GDR and the FRG in December 1972. This development was capped by the entry of the two German states into full membership of the United Nations in September 1973. The improvement in relations was also followed by a sharp increase in a wide range of transfer payments from the FRG into East German coffers. The hard currency obtained from inter-German transfers in the 1970s and 1980s, fluctuating between DM 1 billion and DM 2 billion per annum, bolstered détente as well as the GDR economy, but it also had the drawback for the SED of gradually increasing East German dependency on the FRG.

As détente came to frame relations between East and West, many old conflicts abated both at home and abroad. Typical of this development was the informal concordat reached in 1978 when Honecker met the executive of the League of Protestant Churches. In the GDR, as in many other states of Eastern Europe, Christian churches had proved to be what Carl J. Friedrich referred to as ‘a real bulwark against the claim to total power of the totalitarian dictatorship’ (Friedrich and Brzezinski 1965: 314). At the meeting, the culmination of a gradual improvement in relations since the fierce state-church struggle of the 1950s, Honecker offered numerous concessions to the League in return for its willingness to observe the statement of its chairman, Bishop Albrecht Schönherr, that it would act as a ‘Church within socialism’, albeit neither for nor against the state. A similar pattern was followed in relations between the GDR government and the Jewish Communities (Gemeinden) after the wave of anti-semitism and purges of Jewish citizens in the 1950s had subsided.

Perhaps the key determinant of stability, once the border to West Berlin had been closed and the chances of unification seriously diminished, was the perceptible improvement in living standards since the early 1960s, often referred to as ‘goulash communism’. Some quantitative indicators of growing material well-being are the rise in the ownership of TV sets and washing machines per household from 16.7 per cent to 88.1 per cent and from 6.2 per cent to 80.4 per cent respectively between 1960 and 1980 (Statistisches Amt der DDR 1990: 325). After Honecker came to power in May 1971, the SED also sought to woo the East German population by granting them permission in 1974 to use the Intershops, where Western goods could be bought for hard currency. Honecker calculated that society could be ‘pacified’ by promises of further and substantial improvements in living standards, a new housing programme, heavy subsidies for rents and public transport, and extensive social welfare provision. These policy goals were to be achieved by sustained economic growth, supposedly driven by the application of modern scientific and technical advances. Dressed in ideological garb as the ‘unity of economic and social policy’, it became the leitmotif or totem of Honecker’s ‘reign’ and was perceived as a kind of socio-economic tradeoff for tolerance of, or acquiescence in, SED rule.

What did East Germans think of these various developments and how did they perceive the GDR? These questions remain difficult to answer due to the lack of independent social science institutions in the GDR and tight restrictions on the publication of survey data. Indeed, as Werner Müller has observed, only on two occasions, in 1946 and 1990, is it possible to assess with accuracy the overall response – on balance a negative one – of East Germans to the key question as to how far the SED and the Soviet Zone and later the GDR could count on their support (Müller 2003: 263). In 1946, the SED, which was not then openly Stalinist, failed to secure a majority of the votes in the provincial elections, and in the March 1990 election to the GDR parliament or Volkskammer, the PDS, the reformed version of the SED, came a distant third behind the CDU-led Alliance for Germany. The vote was a strong, though not unqualified, popular endorsement of the latter’s programme for rapid monetary union and political unification with the Federal Republic. In effect, the people had dissolved the GDR.

Other indicators of contemporary opinion can also be found in the materials of the Central and Regional Evaluation and Information Groups of the Ministry of State Security and, especially from the mid 1960s onwards, in the investigations of three GDR research groups: the Leipzig-based Central Institute for Youth Research, the SED Central Committee’s Academy of Science, and the same body’s Institute of Public Opinion Research. While the findings of the three academic groups, unlike those of the Stasi, aspired to meet social scientific criteria, it should be stressed that the representative nature of the surveys they conducted is difficult to assess retrospectively and that tight political constraints were in operation (Dennis 2000a: 121–23; Dennis 2003: 219–22; Friedrich 2002: 14–17). Despite the methodological shortcomings, the data assembled by the Institute of Public Opinion and the other two bodies suggest that, for about two decades from the mid 1960s onwards, increasing numbers of East Germans were supportive of the paternalistic social welfare system of their country, thereby bolstering the stability of SED rule and feelings of identity within the GDR (Friedrich 2002: 15; see also Meier 1994: 276–86). A similar conclusion was reached in the early 1970s by the West German political scientist Gerhard Schweigler. On the basis of interviews conducted by FRG public opinion institutes with West German visitors to the GDR, journalistic accounts and individual experts on East Germany, he argued that a consciousness of the GDR as a distinct political entity was growing among East Germans without, however, extending to an identification with the GDR as a separate nation (Schweigler 1975: 126–30).

Numerous surveys conducted after the fall of the SED also give good reason for believing that the party’s social policy had enjoyed considerable popular support, especially for key aspects such as full employment, greater job opportunities for women and cheap rents (Dennis 2000b: 90–92). It should be noted, however, that the positive evaluation of these elements was given added weight for many middle-aged and older east Germans by the dramatic social upheavals, widespread job losses and deep economic depression in the five New Länder after unification. Since 1990, some historians, notably Konrad Jarausch, have been persuaded by the outcomes of the SED’s social policy to liken the GDR to a Fürsorgediktatur, or ‘welfare dictatorship’ (Jarausch 1997: 44), while others have drawn an analogy with Bismarck’s instrumentalisation of the new social security system for pacifying the working class (Sabrow 2008: 128). Jarausch’s view has an antecedent in the interpretation, current in the 1970s, of the Soviet Union as a form of ‘welfare-state authoritarianism’ (Breslauer 1978: 4–5). With the average age of membership of the SED politburo reaching 67 years in 1989, perhaps its members would have been grateful for such a system, lending substance to Norbert Kapferer’s dismissive characterisation of the GDR, as ‘an extremely authoritarian old people’s home’ rather than a prison cell (Kapferer 2000: 35).

Honecker’s pragmatic social policy and the modest levels of consumerism epitomised a strategy pursued with varying success and commitment by other communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to establish an informal ‘societal contract’ with their populations. This marked a significant shift from the terror and radical socio-economic upheaval of high Stalinism typical of Eastern European regimes during the lifetime of the Soviet dictator and of their aspiration for totalistic domination of the key components of society and politics. For Honecker in the GDR, Gierek in Poland or Brezhnev in the USSR, the major concern revolved around system maintenance, the bureaucratisation of rule and the retention of the communist party’s monopoly of power rather than the realisation of totalistic aspirations and the communist utopia.

Modes of Control: Overt and Silent Repression

Despite improvements in living standards, recognition by the West and a marked degree of congruence between the needs of the population and interests of the regime, the social consensus, while not disintegrating until the later 1980s, remained fragile throughout the Honecker era. Among the main reasons for the brittleness are: the unresolved national question; the slowing down of social mobility and the tendency towards self-reproduction by the intelligentsia in the 1970s and 1980s (Bauerkämper 2005: 87–89); the undemocratic polity and the abuse of human rights, as symbolised by the Berlin Wall; strict censorship of the media; and the palpably higher prosperity enjoyed by the GDR’s Western sibling. The former chair of the State Planning Commission, Gerhard Schürer, conceded after the demise of the GDR that East Germans had measured their standard of living against that of West Germany, not against the lower level of socialist countries in Eastern Europe (Schürer 1994: 162).

The lack of democracy was exposed by widespread popular sympathy in the GDR for the Prague Spring of 1968, East Germans’ enthusiastic support for Gorbachev’s economic and political reforms in the late 1980s, and by opposition to the tight restrictions on travel abroad. As the 1970s drew to a close, the perennial problem of freedom of travel came to form a combustible mix with the broader social and political dissent as articulated in the loosely-structured counter-culture of small peace, ecological, women’s, gay and human rights groups. SED concessions on visits to the West, notably a flexible interpretation of the term ‘urgent family business’, failed to lift popular pressure for emigration which would, by the end of the 1980s, help bring down the Berlin Wall and, belatedly, an end to fatalities on the German–German border. It is difficult to assess how many people were killed at the Wall and on the GDR border with its socialist and capitalist neighbours: some died as a result of drowning and other accidents, while others were victims of shooting by border guards and mines deliberately planted to prevent flight. As a result, estimates of deaths vary from 420 to the much higher figure of 1,135 arrived at by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August based on all categories of fatality.¹ Whatever the actual number, these statistics bear out what Norman Naimark wrote in 1979: ‘Contemporary scholars can no more examine the mechanisms of coercion than criminologists can study prison populations and ignore the fact that prisoners are incarcerated by force’ (Naimark 1979: 576).

Not the least of the SED’s legitimation problems was its failure to devise a satisfactory solution to the issue of the GDR’s separate identity in a divided Germany. In the early postwar years, the party professed support for a united country with a socialist orientation. But as the two German republics drew further apart, and with division literally cemented by the Berlin Wall, new responses were required. In 1969, the West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, advanced the theory of two states in one German nation; the SED countered with the thesis of a separate socialist nation in the GDR. First propagated in the early 1970s, the thesis posited that the GDR had become a socialist German nation in contrast to the capitalist nation in the FRG. So allergic was the SED to feelings and symbols of a common nationhood that it embarked on a policy of demarcation (Abgrenzung), which included the renaming of many institutions containing the term ‘German’. Thus the name of the German Gymnastics and Sports Federation (DTSB) was changed to the DTSB of the GDR. This was not a satisfactory solution as the new title contained two references to the term ‘German’! Popular memory or personal contacts were also problematic: when East German football fans attended matches involving West German teams, either in the GDR or in other socialist countries, functionaries feared outbursts of sympathy for sporting representatives of the imperialist foe. Popular opposition to the SED’s new approach to the national question led to its modification towards the end of the decade and, to widespread surprise, a broadening of the GDR’s historical heritage to encompass previously negative figures such as Frederick the Great and Bismarck. Revisionism of this nature, however, ran the risk of reminding East Germans of a common heritage with West Germans in the FRG, a fundamental reason why the SED could not abandon its insistence on the GDR’s anti-fascist and socialist essence, even though this raised awkward questions, such as the party’s attitude towards, and treatment of, East German Jewry.

Determined to uphold the party’s monopoly of power but highly sensitive to the frailty of the GDR’s national legitimacy and its vulnerable security on the border between the two rival power blocks, the SED elites were resistant to a fundamental overhaul of the system of domination created between the late 1940s and the mid 1950s. The system remained both hierarchical and comprehensive, encompassing, for example, the SED’s unflagging assertion of its leading role in society, Marxism-Leninism as the language of official discourse, and a highly pervasive system of coercion. There had, however, been some notable shifts over the decades. Ideology had lost some of its binding power, with a perceptible and growing discrepancy between SED rhetoric and reality. The scale of repression had slackened, too. In the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, the targets of the Stasi and the Central Party Control Commission, the SED’s organ of inquisition, ranged from Ulbricht’s internal party opponents to the small group of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The latter’s leaders were arrested and imprisoned as part of a concerted campaign to destroy the organisation. Nor were members of the Jewish Communities spared. But, from about the mid 1960s, the more brutal and open forms of repression were scaled down as the SED came to pay greater attention to domestic and foreign opinion. This change was reinforced by the onset of détente in the early 1970s, including the signing of the Final Act of the 1975 Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation, and, driven by Honecker out of raison d’état, by closer economic and political contacts between the GDR and the FRG.

Some members of the GDR’s political elite were highly perturbed by the thaw in East–West German relations and the subsequent rapid increase in personal and official contacts across the German–German border. Erich Mielke, the Minister of State Security and a leading figure on the ultra-conservative wing of the SED, called for heightened vigilance. In his opinion, closer relations with West Germany and the GDR’s adherence to the Helsinki accords constituted a Trojan horse, a means whereby the West could exploit the issue of human rights to undermine the socialist system from within. For Mielke and his officers, ‘imperialism’ was an implacable and ubiquitous enemy which must be thwarted not only internally but also in the West itself, or what the ministry called the ‘Operation Area’. The ‘enemy’, according to the dictionary of political terms issued by the Stasi for the benefit of its staff, consisted of ‘persons who in groups or as individuals intentionally develop political-ideological attitudes and views that are alien to socialism and who strive to implement these attitudes and views in practice’ (Suckut 1996: 121). While ‘foreigners’, especially from the ‘imperialist’ West, automatically came under suspicion, so too did East German groups or individuals with religious, political or cultural links to the West, whether Jehovah’s Witnesses or young people susceptible to what the Stasi and SED ideologues referred to as ‘political-ideological subversion’ by means of Western pop-music and football culture. Culture in this sense was part of the struggle between East and West, in the absence of military engagement, for ideological, moral and political ascendancy.

The Stasi and Operational Subversion

But how to counter Western influence and control ‘hostile’ and ‘negative’ individuals at the same time as the GDR was enjoying substantial economic benefits from the relationship with their Western counterparts, with whom government officials were in frequent contact? While overt coercion was not abandoned, the response was to give greater weight to insidious modes of control by the Ministry of State Security and the prioritisation of what Hubertus Knabe has dubbed a system of ‘silent repression’ (Knabe 2000) and Jürgen Fuchs a ‘soft form’ of terror against real or alleged opponents (Fuchs 1994). Honecker’s ‘unity of economic and social policy’ was the public face of this political modus operandi, which also found expression in the complex and widespread bargaining for ‘softer’ budget constraints between the planning bureaucracy a...