The German Democratic Republic

The Search For Identity

Henry Krisch

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000301847
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Politique

This important new overview of the German Democratic Republic focuses on the country's search for identity and legitimacy throughout its history. Dr. Henry Krisch analyzes major aspects of East German life—political, economic, cultural, and societal—to answer the fundamental question of the nature of the GDR. Arguing that East Germany has been shaped by history to an unusual degree, he explores the country's historical background, including the Soviet Zone, the origins of the GDR, and the leadership of Ulbricht and Honecker, and examines the role and structure of the party, state, and military and security forces. The main emphasis of this book, however, is upon current problems and on likely responses to them in the near future. Issues such as the viability of communist politics in a technologically advanced society, the relationship of the GDR to a common German heritage and a competing West German state, and the country's role within the Soviet alliance system are examined in detail, and current social concerns, including the peace movement, cultural trends, the role of women and youth, and the prime importance of sports, are discussed.

1
The GDR in Time and Place

The Historical Background of the GDR (Before 1945)

Although it is a small country, celebrating (in 1985) only its thirty-sixth anniversary, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is the product of over a thousand years of German and European history. That history, furthermore, took place over a larger geographical territory than that of today’s GDR. To understand the GDR, therefore, one must consider its politics and society against this historical and territorial background.¹

The dominant theme of German history has been the search for a secure communal identity and for political and territorial arrangements that would reflect and secure this identity. Other problems, such as foreign affairs and social relations, important in themselves, have been shaped by this central drive. The questions of what is Germany and who are the Germans influence the rate and direction of social change in the two German states, the nature of German culture in all of its manifestations, and the relations of the two German states to the world at large, to their respective alliances, and, not least, to each other.

Despite a long and glorious record of cultural achievement, Germans in modern times are bitterly aware of their historical inability to establish a single state resting on a social and political consensus. There have been many lines of cleavage in German history, beginning with the conflicts between the Holy Roman Empire and territorial sovereigns and between the Empire and the Papacy—two dichotomies that by the end of the Middle Ages left “Germany” a political mosaic of varied jurisdictions. Colonization and eastward expansion laid the foundation for later tensions with Poles and Czechs.

The religious conflicts of the early modern period (i.e., the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) divided the German lands into Catholic and Protestant areas (with neither denomination sufficiently in the majority to impose a settlement on the other) and further divided the Protestants into Lutheran, Calvinist, and other groups. These manifold religious divisions of Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were intertwined with dynastic and social conflicts and were further complicated by the interventions of such foreign powers as Spain, Sweden, and France. These interventions exacerbated Germany’s political and religious struggles and helped to bring on the paroxysm of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648), which, in turn, left the German people and states economically and demographically devastated, politically more divided than ever, and helpless on the international level.

In the eighteenth century, German economic backwardness and military weakness reached their apogee, and language and culture were strongly under foreign, especially French, influence. Ironically, it was during this same century that Germany began its recovery—politically and militarily through the rise of Prussia, and culturally through the emergence of distinctively German music, literature, and art, culminating in the early nineteenth-century Romantic movement. The ultimately successful response to French pressure in the Napoleonic era demonstrated this renewed German vitality.

From a later German perspective, a crucial aspect of this resurgence was the link between internal reform, central political authority, and external success. The drive for administrative efficiency and rationality under such Prussian rulers as Frederick William (the Great Elector, from 1640–1688) and Frederick II (the Great, from 1740–1786), as well as the reforms of state and society at the time of the “War of Liberation” against the French (1813–1815), provided the precedents for the assertion of German power under Bismarck.

The Bismarckian state was both the product and the generator of an economic advance that by 1900 made Germany the premier economic power of Europe. Germany’s strength was mobilized by an authoritarian regime that had its origins in the defeat of the liberal and largely middle class movement for national unity and political reform symbolized by the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848, and, more particularly, Bismarck’s defeat of the Prussian parliamentary opposition of the early 1860s. The resulting regime of “Blood and Iron” used Germany’s growing strength against the major enemies of a German national state—France and Austria—in the three famous victorious wars (of 1864, 1866, and 1870–1871) that led to the formation of the German Empire in 1871.

This “Second Reich” seemed to provide a solution to Germany’s historical dilemmas of disunity and weakness, but at the cost of forfeiting the chances for democratic political life. Even so, it could not overcome a number of problems that confronted Germany in the late nineteenth century, and this failure led to the regime’s downfall in 1918. These problems had a common theme—namely, the question of German identity and its proper political, social, and national expression. Germany was faced by a double social cleavage: between the regime and the minority Catholic population of the Reich, and between the regime and the growing and ever more organized industrial working class. Its authoritarian political system came under increasing attack, particularly the three-class voting system in Prussia and the absence of cabinet responsibility to the legislature at the national level. Finally, the Imperial regime was unable, especially after Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890, to secure for Germany a peaceful place in the European state system. The exclusion of the German population of Austria in 1871 from the German national state left both Germany and Austria vulnerable to a dynamic German nationalism; it also tied Germany to the continued existence of the multiethnic Hapsburg state—a connection fateful for the prospects of European peace. (Germany itself had to deal with a Polish minority resulting from the partitions of Poland.)

Bismarck’s Germany might, in time, have dealt successfully with these problems, but the regime did not (and perhaps could not) avoid involvement in World War I; the result, of course, was Germany’s defeat (1918) and the collapse of the Imperial regime. Although from the perspective of many Germans in 1945 the period under Bismarck’s rule was seen as a time of German power and prosperity, its legacy to postwar Germany was one of unresolved social, national, and political questions.

The Weimar Republic that emerged in place of Bismarck’s Germany faced many of the same problems as those of its predecessor, but with a smaller margin of popular support. Its ultimate failure should not obscure its many accomplishments. Weimar Germany, especially during its era of relative stability (1924–1930), experienced an extraordinary and still influential flowering of the arts. Less appreciated is Weimar’s record of social and political innovation. For previously disadvantaged groups, such as women and Jews, the Weimar era was one of liberation. Weimar’s political structure and the social legislation it produced were among the most progressive in the world.

The Weimar legacy also included political flaws that served as negative examples to postwar Germans. Many lessons were drawn from the inability of the Weimar Republic to defend itself against its enemies. For the Social Democrats and Communists especially, a critical aspect of the Weimar record (and of particular importance to the politics of postwar Germany) was the disastrous internecine warfare within the working-class movement, followed by the failure of that movement, including its trade union component, along with the failure of the liberal bourgeoisie to save the Weimar Republic from its enemies.

Although the Weimar Republic preserved a united German national state, its ability to promote national interests was limited by its weak international position. Excluded initially from the ranks of the Great Powers, it could not exercise German sovereignty over the Saar or the Rhineland, was unable to secure self-determination for the German populations of Austria, South Tyrol, and the Sudetenland, and had difficulty in asserting German interests in Polish border areas.

Although Weimar Germany did not suffer from religious conflict to nearly the extent that the Empire had, social conflicts grew worse. The majority of industrial workers, organized through the Social Democratic party (SPD), now had a powerful voice in state and society, but the SPD was challenged by the breakaway of more radical groups, which eventually formed the Communist party of Germany (KPD). The Weimar Republic seemed at the mercy of economic fortune: the social and political stability of the mid-1920s ended in the turmoil of the Wall Street crash and the subsequent Great Depression.

In the years of economic distress that followed, the Weimar Republic was faced by a growing and increasingly Soviet-dominated Communist party, which to the end of the republic—and, indeed, beyond—was a bitter enemy of the parliamentary order. More deadly yet was the menace of the swiftly growing Nazi movement. Between September 1930 and the summer of 1932, the Nazis became the largest German political party and Adolf Hitler emerged as a charismatic enemy of German democracy. In the face of the Nazi menace, the republic suffered from weak, if not malevolent, leadership; its institutions were turned against its own survival. After July 1932, an absolute antirepublican majority paralyzed its legislature; from 1930 on, its government tended more and more to rule through abuse of the infamous Article 48, which gave presidential decrees the force of law. The president from 1925 on was former Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, a weak and faint-hearted, if very correct, defender of the republic. Acting on the advice of antirepublican intriguers, he appointed Adolf Hitler head of the German government on January 30, 1933.²

The fundamental cause of the Weimar Republic’s collapse was the lack of a democratic and republican political culture in Germany: Weimar was known as “the Republic without Republicans.” Although some of the stability of the Hitler regime undoubtedly stemmed from the widespread political terror employed by the Nazis, there can be little doubt that the Hitler regime could impose its political will on Germany because it seemed to end social conflict and restore prosperity at home while successfully asserting German national interests abroad.

Although there was some domestic opposition to the Hitler regime, especially as the war turned against Germany, it is clear that only the victory of the Grand Alliance did in fact put an end to the Nazi order. The heroism of individual Communists notwithstanding, there is no basis for the later GDR claims of continuous and effective Communist resistance. Thus the legacy of the Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich to postwar Germany was one of political and moral failure, social and economic conflict, war and international ostracism.

With the unconditional surrender of German forces in 1945 there came the famous “Year Zero,” from which contemporary German politics is dated. German borders in the east were pushed back to the point at which they had rested centuries before. It was significant for the future GDR that German territories in East Prussia, Silesia, and Pomerania, including the mouth of the Oder River and the port of Stettin (in Polish, Szczecin), were assigned to Poland and to the USSR. Frontier adjustments were also made on Germany’s western and northern borders. Long-time German inhabitants were forcibly expelled from eastern Europe. German sovereignty in every part of the remaining territories passed into the hands of the occupying powers, who limited and strictly supervised every kind of political activity. The country’s economic life was shaped, as well, to suit the victors’ needs and plans.

It was in these circumstances of political and social disaster, amid physical and human ruin unmatched in German history since 1648, that the future GDR had its origins. Awareness of this humble beginning has been kept alive for future generations, as evidenced by the opening line of the country’s anthem: “Arisen from ruins.”

The Soviet Zone and the Origins of the GDR (1945–1949)

The German Democratic Republic was an unintended polity. Foreseen neither in the postwar plans of the governments of the anti-Hitler coalition nor in the thinking of German politicians during and immediately after World War II was the partition of Germany into two states—one tied to the Soviet Union, the other allied to the Western powers.³

It was at the wartime summit conferences of the Soviet, British, and U.S. leaders, especially at Yalta (January 1945) and Potsdam (July-August 1945), that the practical preparations for Allied control of Germany were made, based on the assumption of joint administration of a united country. It was this detailed but supposedly provisional demarcation of the occupation zones that in time became the basis for the division of Germany. The present borders of the GDR were determined by these Allied agreements, according to which the prewar German state lost territory while it absorbed German refugees. Some three million of those “new settlers” (as they were euphemistically known) were living in the Soviet Zone in 1946. Subsequently, many of them joined the flight of population to the West.⁴

The most consequential line of division was that established between the occupation zone allotted to the USSR and those allotted to the Western powers. The diplomatic history of the creation of these zonal borders shows that they were drawn largely for the military-administrative convenience of the occupying powers. As a result, the main inland waterways of the GDR, the Elbe and Oder Rivers, reach the sea after leaving GDR territory (in the FRG and Poland, respectively). The complications arising from the location of West Berlin amidst GDR territory are notorious.

In the final demarcation of the occupation zones, the Soviet Union received an area equivalent to about one-fifth of prewar Germany but over one-third of the Germany of 1945. The municipality of Greater Berlin was given special “four-power” status and was occupied by all of the Allied powers.⁵ In accordance with Allied agreements, the U.S. forces withdrew at war’s end from those areas of the present-day GDR in which they found themselves as a result of military operations, and they were replaced by Soviet troops; at the same time (July 1945), Western forces entered Berlin and occupied their assigned sectors. At the Potsdam Conference, the Allied powers agreed to treat Germany as an economic unity. Each occupation power was to be sovereign in its own zone, but questions affecting Germany as a whole were to be settled by the occupation commanders meeting as the Allied Control Council for Germany. Soviet actions at this time make it clear that Soviet measures were intended to apply to all of Germany, with control of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ) at best a minimum position.⁶

The Soviet au...