Popular Protest in East Germany

Gareth Dale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781138995147
• eBook ISBN: 9781135760915
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An incisive new study of dissent and protest in the German Democratic Republic, focusing on the upheaval of 1989-1990.

The author, an active participant both in the 'Citizens' Movement' and in the street protests of that year, draws upon a vast array of sources including interviews, documents from the archives of the old regime and the Citizens' Movement and his own diary entries, to explore the causes and processes of the East German revolution. The book is at once a lucid and vibrant narrative history and a pioneering contribution to research in this field.

Part I

Mass movements in the
GDR’s early years

1 The June 1953 uprising

In the GDR’s early years one popular protest event stands out above all others. On 17 June 1953 – or, more accurately, between 16 and 21 June – between 1 and 1.5 million people, 6 to 9 per cent of the total population, participated in strikes, demonstrations and rallies.¹ Over 700 towns and villages were affected, and at least 0.5 million workers in well over 1,000 workplaces stopped work. If these statistics are arresting in themselves, recent research indicates that the potential scale of the rising was greater still. In many areas strikes were nipped in the bud thanks either to the timely response of SED or FDGB (the state-run ‘union’) functionaries, or to massive intervention by the security forces and the Soviet army. These made large-scale arrests, especially of strike leaders, they blocked factory gates, dispersed crowds and occupied urban areas.² It used to be thought that the rising had already begun to peter out before the arrival of Soviet tanks, yet, although this claim is not without foundation, recent evidence emphasises the degree to which their appearance and the imposition of military law cut into a rising movement. There is also no question but that solidarity with the strikes extended well beyond striking workplaces. Wide layers of the workforce showed sympathy with the strikes in countless ‘turbulent meetings’, many of which were only dispersed by management’s blandishments and threats, sometimes by military occupation.³ Each new publication based on materials from the East German archives brings a rich collection of incidents of ‘sub-strike’ or strike-related activity, such as acts of sabotage, or brief work stoppages to honour colleagues who had been killed in previous days.⁴ It seems safe to conclude, in the words of a Stasi report quoted by Armin Mitter, that ‘the potential for protest and resistance was very much greater than the numbers actually on strike would suggest’.⁵

Measured by the yardstick of numbers involved, the rising was an uncommon event but not exceptional. Only a few years earlier, for example, West Germany’s Bizone was shaken by a strike involving over 9 million workers, almost four-fifths of the workforce, in support of demands for co-determination and the nationalisation of industries.⁶ What distinguishes the East German rising from those strikes across the border and similar events elsewhere is, first, its spontaneous character. With trade unions prohibited and the FDGB opposed to strike action, no established organisations existed through which the strike call could be spread.⁷ Second, events unfolded at an extraordinary tempo. In historical accounts of the event words such as ‘contagion’, ‘chain reaction’ and ‘wildfire’ crop up repeatedly. Most of the activity that will be narrated in this chapter occurred on one day, 17 June – and largely, indeed, in a matter of hours, between the morning shift clocking on and the imposition of martial law in the afternoon. Third, strike action and demonstrations gave way to large-scale civil unrest. Over 250 public buildings, including police stations, were stormed, and around 1,400 prisoners were freed from twelve prisons.⁸ Up to twenty functionaries and security force personnel lost their lives. Fourth, the suppression of the rising depended upon the deployment of ruthless military force. Between sixty and 100 civilians were killed by bullets from the security forces or were crushed by tanks.⁹ At least twenty others were summarily executed. Also, 12,000–15,000 protestors were arrested, thousands of whom were imprisoned.¹⁰ This was, in short, a rising that developed at a breathtaking pace and which could only be crushed by the merciless application of military power.

In investigations of the uprising’s origins a common place to begin is with the economic problems, social privations and political grievances that fermented over previous years, which created a potent brew of discontent that then spilled onto the streets in June 1953. The story told is of a growing economic gap between East and West Germany, of the imposition of unacceptable burdens upon the East German population, of bottlenecks and consumption shortages in the year preceding the rising, and of repressive measures that became ever more onerous. In addition, accounts of the rising focus upon changes in the ‘political opportunity structure’ (POS) in East Germany as well as internationally. Following Doug McAdam et al., I take POS to refer to the ‘receptivity or vulnerability of the political system to organized protest by a given challenging group’.¹¹ Explanations of social change that centre on shifts in the POS emphasise the heightened vulnerability to pressure from below of the regime under examination in a context characterised by political crisis at the international or domestic level, or by divisions within elites, shifting political alignments, a sudden or disputed shift in strategy, or a leadership change. As regards the origins of the 1953 rising, the POS-altering factors that are commonly cited include the changing ‘international opportunity structure’ that followed the death of Stalin and, related to this, a policy switch in early June 1953 that opened up divisions both within and between elites in Moscow and East Berlin, and which, in the latter city, plunged the apparatuses of power into uncertainty and confusion.

In the following pages I shall briefly summarise the major economic developments and policy changes, as well as alterations to the POS in the interval between the arrival of Soviet tanks in German cities at the ‘zero hour’ of liberation and their reappearance on those same streets eight years later. The period may be divided into three distinct phases: the so-called ‘anti-fascist democratic transition’ of 1945–7; the restructuring of state and society along Soviet lines (1948–May 1953); and the ‘New Course’ of early June 1953.

‘Anti-fascist democratic transition’

The first phase began with the defeat of Hitler’s regime and the assumption of authority by the occupying powers. Politically, this was a period in which a power vacuum emerged, following the cessation of hostilities, but was gradually filled as the occupying armies consolidated their hold. Economically, it witnessed the repair of war damage, the recommencement of production, and the siphoning of a major part of the product, as reparations, to the USSR. Socially, it was a time of untold suffering and poverty for much of the population. Shortages of basic goods such as heating fuel and household supplies were acute (far worse, indeed, than in 1953). Chronicles of the time abound with horrific tales of hunger and disease, for example of starving citizens cutting meat from dead horses in the street. City dwellers were driven to wander the countryside searching for farmers with whom they could exchange potatoes or bacon, illegally, for their remaining possessions: clocks, porcelain or clothing.¹² Desperate shortages of goods together with runaway inflation were propitious conditions for the growth of the black economy. Scarce commodities such as cigarettes challenged the mark as the currency of choice.

Problems of infrastructural and economic collapse were exacerbated by vast population movements that ensued with the war’s end. In an outbound flow, some 10 million foreigners in Germany, including concentration-camp inmates as well as around 8 million imported slave labourers – many of whom had been tilling the fields to feed Germany’s urban population and armed forces – returned to their homelands, either voluntarily or under allied orders.¹³ Meanwhile, an inward stream arrived from Eastern Europe as the Red Army swept westwards. It comprised prisoners of war, Nazi officials and collaborators, alongside many more who were unwilling to live under non-German rule. In their wake came further millions of Germans expelled from territories occupied by the Soviet Union and by the new administrations of Poland and Czechoslovakia. Within two years, 4 million refugees and expellees had arrived in the Soviet zone – more than in any of the Western zones. They comprised around a quarter of its population; in some towns the figure was as high as 42 per cent.¹⁴

A further contributor to the chaotic conditions of the time was the disintegration of the institutions of state. In 1945, Germany was a country with no civil service, no education system, no executive and no judiciary. Throughout most of East Germany, as Gareth Pritchard has described,

this created a vacuum of power which was filled only partially by the armies of occupation … In the cities and towns there was widespread looting by civilians and even, on occasion, by feral German policemen. In the countryside, hungry and often armed bands of former slave labourers and POWs rampaged at will, looting and killing as they went. In areas overrun by the Red Army, groups of drunken and violent Russian soldiers constituted a massive threat to civilian life and property. The cumulative impact of these perils was to impose a reign of terror on the population, particularly in the smaller and more isolated towns and villages.¹⁵

Coming on the heels of an epoch of dictatorship and war, these conditions of demographic flux, social and economic collapse, and material privation that obtained in the immediate post-war years help to account for the political apathy and fatalism that were observed amongst wide layers of the population. City dwellers had been stunned by the experience of saturation bombing. The arduous task of ensuring physical survival and well-being commanded their energies. ‘Even now,’ wrote Isaac Deutscher in October 1945, ‘questions of high politics mean little to [German citizens] in comparison to urgent daily problems of personal security, for oneself and above all for one’s wife or daughter.’¹⁶ For its part, the nationalist section of the population was disoriented by their country’s defeat. Around half the population had sympathy with what they perceived to be the basic aims of Nazism, if not with its methods. Many millions of Germans had been influenced by twelve years of Nazi rule, regretted its demise and greeted the new order with suspicion or hatred. Amongst these layers, anti-Communism, anti-liberalism, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism (notably towards Slavs) were deeply ingrained. A sense of the attitudes circulating amongst the middle classes in particular is conveyed by this excerpt from a document prepared in December 1945:

The major part of the population still remains politically reserved. In particular the middle classes, which lived through the period of the Wilhelmine system and the period of the Weimar Republic to their great disappointment, but which took fresh hope from National Socialism…have lost faith in everything. Trust in any new political movement does not yet exist amongst them.¹⁷

The Soviet occupying forces found themselves in a situation of social and economic breakdown, confronting a population that was not short of resentment towards the new masters in the land. The political apathy of much of the population may have helped the Soviet Military Administration and KPD (German Communist Party) to establish new power structures with relatively little opposition.¹⁸ Yet their base of support within the German population was slender. The institutions at their disposal were hastily put together and the personnel that staffed them were inexperienced. In such conditions, building a reliable power apparatus capable of executing decisions made in Moscow and East Berlin was no straightforward task.

That too few reliable cadre could be found in the KPD to fill public positions helps to explain the ruling group’s concern to find other means to broaden its base, and why a relatively tolerant period, rather than a rapid transformation of the Soviet zone along Stalinist lines, ensued.¹⁹ That a Stalinist path was not taken in the immediate post-war years was also, and more importantly, dictated by the relative flexibility of Soviet policy-makers in what was a highly unpredictable international context. It was unclear whether stability, either in international relations or in domestic affairs, would be achieved swiftly or whether the turbulence that had followed the previous world war would be repeated in Central and Eastern Europe. Would the populations of occupied territories acquiesce to the plans of their liberators, or would conflicts develop? How would the goals of the Great Powers evolve? Would co-operation reign, or would tensions and conflict dominate? In particular, whether Germany would be jointly administered by or divided between the victorious powers remained unclear. And, if divided, would it serve primarily as a source of plunder for the USSR, or could it be built up as a viable state?

In the context of an uncertain geopolitical environment Moscow attempted, initially at least, to maintain the wartime alliance with Britain and the USA. In the absence of a clear strategy for Germany that would meet with the approval of the Western powers, it pursued a comparatively flexible politics in its zone, under the rubric ‘anti-fascist democratic transformation’. In 1945 Stalin instructed KPD leaders that, in the medium term at least, there would be ‘bourgeois-democratic government in Germany’. The KPD programme proclaimed as its paramount goal not socialist but ‘bourgeois democratic’ revolution. The first two years of the occupation were characterised by a modicum of political freedom and tolerance, and party pluralism. The KPD, one-time cadre party of the German proletariat, was refounded as a ‘people’s party’ (Volkspartei) in which farmers, housewives, artisans, Christians and even small-business people were, in theory at least, equally welcome.²⁰ Although personnel decisions were supervised by the occupying authority and its East German protégés, with Communists allocated key portfolios such as police, personnel and ‘denazification’, influential positions were also offered to members of the ‘anti-fascist bourgeoisie’.

High Stalinism

By the turn of the decade the construction of a broad-based ‘people’s democracy’ had given way to a Stalinist agenda. The context for the policy shift was provided by the growing tensions between Moscow and the Western powers, exemplified in the unravelling of four-power plans for a unified German polity, the provision of Marshall Aid and the introduction of a new currency in the Western zones, followed by the Berlin blockade and counter-blockade of 1948. That Moscow had permitted a relatively tolerant and pluralist system in its zone had been, in part at least, the result of a calculation that democratic structures in Germany could ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Mass Movements In the GDR’s Early Years
• Part II: Infra-Political Resistance and Social Movements, 1954–88
• Part III: The Revolution of 1989