Gone with the Wind: Romanticizing East Germany

By Amity Shlaes

Thursday, September 14, 2023

 

Public memory keeps getting shorter.

 

Seven decades had to elapse before readers were willing suspend disbelief about the antebellum South and luxuriate in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Only three decades have passed since the Berlin Wall fell. Yet the door to the romanticization of East German communism is already being cracked open by Katja Hoyer with Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany (2023).

 

And a masterful cracking it is. Hoyer prefaces her book with a comment about East Germany dropped recently by departing German chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel expressed her disappointment that Westerners had always regarded her past in the communist East German state as “ballast.” “Ballast?” she bridled, “An unnecessary burden that can just be shrugged off?”

 

“Ballast” has two meanings in German, as in English. Back in 1990, the heavy material of Merkel’s past — study of physics at Leipzig’s Karl Marx University, a doctorate before the Wall fell — was rated pure gold by the conservative Christian Democratic Union, a West German party desperate to find a constituency in the East German Länder. The ballast stabilized the candidacy of the then-unknown Merkel (“Who, exactly, is she?” asked Henry Kissinger at the Munich Security Conference in the mid 1990s). It enabled Merkel’s remarkable sail from the post of Bundestag member for Stralsund and Rugen in 1990 to the post of leader of Europe’s largest democracy. Merkel’s ballast — experience in a worse place — informed her long tenure as chancellor. But Merkel’s early adulthood in the Wrong Republic was also something Western politicians in her party preferred she not bring up in public, perhaps out of fear she would be caught in a gotcha as an apologist. Because she felt she had to keep silent about it, this ballast was Merkel’s burden.

 

Ballast or ballast, many of us have long wondered about the 40-year German Democratic Republic, now reduced by the epistemologists in the Land of Immanuel Kant to a mere ephemera, part of what official historians have labelled, in that German way, “The Period of German Two-Statedness.” What was the place Hoyer calls “a vanished country,” which, as she notes, has been “somewhat written out of the narrative”? What happened to the tens of thousands of East Germans who spent years or a lifetime locked in the prisons of the regime, or the hundreds who died after torture, or were executed? What happened when dissidents were priced by the head and sold — thousands were — to West Germany? Why did millions flee East Germany before the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961? Who were the people who, as Hoyer puts it, “made East Germany work”? In the 1970s or 1980s, after all, East Germany was regarded as a star among Soviet satellites even here in the West, a country “aglow with prosperity,” to quote a 1973 New York Times account.

 

Here, Hoyer, a great talent in matters of emphasis, style, and detail, often satisfies. She meticulously fills in many of the blanks in the chronological list of little mysteries in the Western mind titled “Cold War Events We’ve Been Wondering About.”

 

The first such question involves the quality of the figures selected — “voted” would be too strong — to lead the state Moscow established in the Soviet Zone of Occupation in 1949. The bearded Walter Ulbricht and plump Wilhelm Pieck were mediocrities so craven it is hard to imagine them playing anything on the national or international stage, even as Moscow’s puppets. In 1942, during the Siege of Stalingrad, the German Ulbricht, on Stalin’s side, was so eager to prove to Stalin he could get the Sixth Army to surrender that day he risked life and limb of the Soviet side by rolling carts bearing loudspeakers within the range of German fire, blaring surrender arguments in “his high-pitched wooden voice into the freezing ears of his [German] compatriots.” General Paulus responded with ten heavy mines.

 

The pairs’ elevation seemed likewise improbable after the war, even to weary, hungry, and intimidated East Germans. They made their own rhyme about the bearded Ulbricht, the plump Pieck, and a third new power, the bespectacled Social Democrat Otto Grotewohl:

 

Spitzbart, Bauch and Brille

Sind nicht des Volkes Wille. —

 

“Goatee, belly and glasses/Are not the will of the masses.”

 

Hoyer supplies the evidence for what one only suspected before: Pieck and Ulbricht were chosen because they were just about the only ones left. Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, the police arrested the leader of the Communist Party of Germany, Ernst Thälmann. Other German communists for their fled to what was to them Mother Russia. As Hoyer reminds, their welcome did not last long. Hitler tortured, imprisoned, and later killed Thälmann. The fate of the German communists in Russia was not better. The regime conducted a German Purge within Stalin’s Great Purge. Between 1936 and 1938, the regime killed 41,898 Germans. Stalin executed more leading German communists than even Hitler. The Russian leader took out those with more rigorous minds, whom Hoyer categorizes as “idealists and dreamers.” He “distilled the German communist diaspora down to its most ruthless and pro-Soviet core.”

 

In the early days of the Cold War, even before the Wall, America told itself that only communist governments shut people out. Here in the West, we were free to travel and speak. This was, of course, a little too simple: The Western Allies managed the press and political activity in their zones from the get go, if far less strictly than did their Soviet counterparts. The year 1951 brought a moment that confused those who nursed this simple vision. That was when packs of what looked to the underinformed like East German version of Boy Scouts — they wore bright blue shirts decorated with a yellow badge — travelled to an island in the North Sea, Heligoland, to protest British use of the island as a practice bombing target. The same young enthusiasts — the uniforms were those of the Free German Youth, an East German group — agitated for communism in Western Germany. German chancellor Konrad Adenauer shortly thereafter banned their presence in the Federal Republic. A propaganda victory for East Berlin: The Cold Warrior shuts people out! The Heligoland snapshot had a small, but still geopolitical, effect; London announced it would cease bombing Heligoland, and Heligoland moved under West German control.

 

After Heligoland, the Freie Deutsche Jugend served for decades as poster youths for East Germany. Hundreds of thousands routinely marched at East German parades. As Hoyer reveals, the FDJ children were no scouts. The Free German Youth was a powerhouse affiliate of the Communist Party, into which East German children born between 1925 and 1936 were initially recruited. Hoyer shows the FDJ targeted “Hitler’s children,” now lost and “shaped by his world view.” As Hoyer reports, the FDJ “unashamedly offered these young Germans who had felt at home in the Hitler Youth a chance to rehabilitate themselves.”

 

Rehab in communist regimes is precious. No wonder so many bit. It was also a training ground for the party’s leadership. Some FDJ alumni and managers graduated to top positions, or even the summit, in the case of Erich Honecker and Egon Krenz.

 

Even those not enrolled in the FDJ were fed a steady diet of anti-American propaganda: When a plague of beetles destroyed the harvest of a German staple food, potatoes, the beetles that ate away at the food were labelled “Amikaefer,” American beetles, an entomological weapon of the Cold War. It could be true, but if so, the evidence has not yet reached us.

 

When it comes to the storied uprising of East German workers in 1953, Beyond the Wall also does not disappoint. Workers in Jena — the city of Schiller and Humboldt, after all — became so angry over poor wages and housing shortages they stormed the state-controlled trade-union organization and party offices; they cast “beautiful old typewriters” onto the town square. An order from Moscow suppressed what was largely a young people’s mutiny, and older Germans, by now thoroughly tamed, burst into tears, one telling a schoolgirl, “You young people will see it happen! It will get better.”

 

It did not, at least not enough to stop the 3 million or so people who committed what the East German regime criminalized as Republikflucht, “Republic Flight,” before the August 1961 day the regime built the Wall. The period after, in which first Ulbricht, who led until 1971, and then his successor, Honecker, gets lengthy coverage in Beyond the Wall. Hoyer devotes space to the early 1970s treaty written between the Germanys by one of Adenauer’s successors in office, Willy Brandt, and the East German leadership. Over the course of the 1970s, an international consensus built up, claiming that friendlier relations between West and East were the only humane path, and that East Germany was a Wunderkind among Moscow’s satellites. In the academy and the press, the Soziale Einheitspartei Deutschland, the official name of the ruling party, was described as well tolerated by its people: “There is no doubt that the SED’s policy of fostering increases in the material wellbeing of the population has been sincere, successful politically, and effective,” reads a 1976 article in Current History, an attitude likewise common in the period.

 

To what extent the regime went to win that reputation, Hoyer also reveals. From 1962, the regime sold its own people, collecting from West German government, charities, or families a hard currency fee for the release in West Berlin of any dissident causing Eastern authorities too much trouble. This was no occasional trade, but rather a genuine industry. The amount of Deutsche Marks, then the West German currency, going into the account to which the payoffs were made totaled nearly DM 3.5 billion. Some, but only some, of the money in the Honecker Account, as the receiving instrument was known, was then disbursed to bribe the remaining unsold citizens with goods their own socialized and collectivized economy had trouble making: “bicycle tires, biscuits, chocolate, wine, socks for men, underwear for adults, terry towels, outdoor shoes, cleaning cloths, tea towels,” reads an August 1970 report of items purchased by East Berlin for DM 32 million. That list doesn’t include Western blue jeans, over which there was something close to riots in East German department stores when a few pair became available. Nor does it mention coffee beans, as non-optional a purchase in East Germany as to the coffee-obsessed today. East Germans might have accepted Ersatz during the war, but decades into peacetime, they resented deeply the way the regime sold ground coffee, rather than beans, in order that its factories might dilute the product with grain and just about anything else.

 

In geopolitics, East German–North Vietnamese relations often come up: The regime in Hanoi and Berlin was tracked through the 1970s by the CIA. But only recently, at least for many of us, has one reason for Vietnam’s key value to East Berlin emerged: as a coffee supplier. In exchange for a guarantee that East Germany would get half the crop for 20 years, East Berlin sent engineers, trucks, and farm machinery around the world to build a dam, clear 10,000 hectares in Dak Lak Province, and commence coffee cultivation there. The first harvest of this successful enterprise– even today people drink coffee made of the region’s Robusta beans — came, alas for the communists, too late, in 1990.

 

As she supplies such facts, Hoyer occasionally trips into outright distortion. She quotes a young mother who tended her baby in a flat in Dresden’s Outer New Town — a flat that shared a communal bathroom and sink with others; had no refrigeration; and had only one source of heating, a stove fed with coal that the mother had to bring up from the cellar. In this flat, the mother reported, “she had never been happier.” This is believable: Compared to having no flat (just after the war) or living through the firebombing of Dresden, having a flat at all was a victory. But the sentence is no answer to the question of how happy the mother would have been had she had water, a fridge, or other comforts that at the time were becoming givens in other industrialized nations. Here, Hoyer falls into the error of the Western academies of the 1970s or 1980s. East German authorities routinely distorted all sorts of data to mask the failures of their industry and the extent to which the key input of oil was subsidized by the Soviet Union. Too many in the West were ready to believe them.

 

Hoyer highlights the fact that East German women took advantage of training for trades and won more jobs than their Western counterparts. In East Germany, as she notes, more than half of women worked by 1955, a level that reached two-thirds in 1970. By contrast, only a third of West German women worked in 1950, and that level dropped to 27.5 percent in 1970s. Hoyer rates this a demerit for the West. All right. Hoyer likewise downplays too much for accuracy the horrors of service in the National People’s Army, in which the regime demanded, in exchange for university admission, an extralong term of service, three years, from students. (These horrors — the crushing service makes American basic training look tolerable — are well detailed in the excellent TV miniseries set in Dresden, The Tower, available on Amazon Prime.)

 

Hoyer does not neglect to cover the Stasi, the East German secret police, an institution that penetrated the society that was its hostage more thoroughly, by the numbers, than even the Gestapo in its day. She concedes one of the key points of East German–West German history: the jubilation of 1989, when East Germans chanting Wir sind das Volk, “We are the people,” switched to Wir sind ein Volk, “We are one people,” the call for reunification. But Hoyer does not treat this exhilaration thoroughly. The end of the East German government comes almost as a surprise to Hoyer’s readers.

 

And therein lies the essential flaw behind Hoyer’s own wall. Before 1989, the citizens of the East Germany sometimes pretended to themselves that East Germany was a country — they had little choice. In their fiction and movies, some still do — this form of nostalgia Germans have dubbed “Ostalgie.” But East Germany was not a country. It was a regime. And it is the job of historians to make that clear. In her conclusions, asides, and selective anecdotes, Hoyer earns for East Germany an analogy to the slave region that was the American South before the Civil War. Walter Ulbricht, she says, much of the time “made East Germany work for many of its citizens.” Slavery before 1860 also “worked” — for plantation lords on the Potomac and textile consumers the world round.

 

Though she writes carefully, Hoyer provides fodder for those who would exploit the general lack of collective memory to advance forgotten East Germany as evidence for currently popular goals such as economic redistribution. “For those on the left,” commented one host of the book in his podcast, “it has real value.”

 

Indeed. And this is a tragedy for the rest of us, who regret East Germany just as much as Hoyer, but for another reason. What we regret is our own willingness to succumb to the ease of détente, or accept the doctored data from the regimes of the East Bloc. Perhaps less Rapprochement and more pressure upon both East Berlin and Moscow would have toppled the Soviet Empire — a day, a week, a year, or years earlier. A year is an eternity to someone in prison. The hope is that writers and screenwriters of Hoyer’s caliber devote their next work to, say, the Stasi, or the conditions in the DDR prisons. Otherwise, the discussion will just drift onward — and toward Tara.