East Germany

• 1. Introduction

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  East Germany, officially the German Democratic Republic, was born on the 7th of October 1949 from the wreckage of a war and the hardening of a Cold War divide. It lasted exactly forty-one years. In that time, a state that began with a population of around nineteen million shrank to sixteen million as people voted with their feet. The government built a wall to stop them. Border guards killed those who tried to cross it. And yet, on the night of the 9th of November 1989, sections of that wall were opened and thousands of East Germans walked freely into West Berlin for the first time in nearly thirty years. What made a state so determined to cage its own people? How did a nation built on anti-fascist ideals shelter thousands of former Nazi Party members in its ministries? And what happened when a picnic near a Hungarian border town triggered the unraveling of an entire political order?

• 2. A State Forged by Force

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  On the 21st of April 1946, the Communist Party of Germany and the Social Democratic Party of Germany were merged under Soviet pressure into the Socialist Unity Party, known by its German initials SED. The two parties had been bitter rivals before the Nazis criminalized both of them. Official histories presented the merger as a voluntary socialist reunion. But the evidence suggests otherwise: Soviet occupation authorities pushed hard on the eastern branch of the Social Democrats, and communists who held a majority exercised near-total control over policy from the start.

  Wilhelm Pieck, born in 1876, became the first and only president of the new German Democratic Republic when it was formally established in October 1949. Real executive power, however, rested with the SED's general secretary, Walter Ulbricht. Socialist leader Otto Grotewohl served as prime minister until his death in 1964. From the beginning, the party built an architecture of control that extended through every institution in the country.

  Every political party in the GDR was required to join the National Front of Democratic Germany, a SED-led coalition. Member parties were completely subordinate to the SED and had to accept its leading role as a condition of their very existence. They received financial support and some government posts in exchange for compliance. The fiction of pluralism was maintained; the reality was a single-party state dressed in coalition clothing.

  The SED set an early priority of eliminating Nazism from East German society and imprisoned many former Nazis. Yet by 1954, thirty-two percent of GDR public administration employees were former members of the Nazi Party. While the share of former Nazi Party members in senior Interior Ministry posts fell below ten percent by 1961, several high-ranking SED functionaries, including Fritz Muller and Bruno Lietz, were former Nazi Party members. The contradiction between the state's anti-fascist self-image and the careers of former Nazis within it would persist for decades.

• 3. The Wall and the Watchers

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  On the night of the 12th of August 1961, East German soldiers began erecting the Berlin Wall. The trigger was an exodus the state could no longer tolerate. About one quarter of all East Germans had left the country before the Wall was completed, and because so many of those emigrants were young and well-educated, the economy bled badly. The government's term for this phenomenon was Republikflucht, desertion from the republic.

  The Wall did not merely divide a city. It transformed the nature of repression inside the GDR. Historian Nessim Ghouas describes a change in how the Ministry of State Security, the Stasi, operated after Erich Honecker came to power in 1971. The more brutal Stalinist forms of repression, including torture and executions, gave way to a more selective application of power. The reason was partly strategic: overt brutality risked international condemnation.

  The Stasi's substitute for open violence was a method called Zersetzung, which translates roughly as decomposition. A person targeted by the Stasi might find that mail was tampered with, that malicious rumors circulated about them, that their career was quietly destroyed, or that objects in their home were moved to induce disorientation. Between 1985 and 1988, the Stasi conducted roughly four thousand five hundred to five thousand operational cases per year, according to historian Mike Dennis. The International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims estimates between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand victims of direct physical torture, Zersetzung, and gross human rights violations at the Stasi's hands.

  At the end of the GDR in 1990, approximately one hundred and nine thousand informants were still active at every level of society. The Stasi also employed a vast network of unofficial collaborators who spied on people in nearly every organization in the country. Writers, artists, youth subcultures, and members of the church were frequent targets. Victims of historical Zersetzung can now draw a special pension from the German state.

• 4. Youth, Belief, and Loyalty

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  By 1975, the Ernst Thälmann Pioneer Organisation had nearly two million children enrolled in its ranks. The organization was for schoolchildren aged six to fourteen, loosely based on Scouting but designed to teach socialist ideology and prepare young people for the next stage of political life. Membership was formally voluntary. In practice, the school admitted entire classes at once, and the membership quota reached as high as ninety-eight percent of students in the GDR's later years.

  At fourteen, young people were expected to move into the Free German Youth, known as the FDJ. In 1981-1982, the FDJ had two point three million members. By 1985, roughly eighty percent of all GDR youths between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five belonged to it. Non-members faced concrete disadvantages in school admissions, career choices, and military service. The FDJ had been founded in 1946 with an emphasis on what it called happy youth life, organized around sports, dances, concerts, and hikes. Over the following decades it became an increasingly effective instrument of party control, taking on a harder anti-religious agenda.

  Religion itself became a contested battleground. In 1950, eighty-five percent of GDR citizens were Protestant. By 1989, that share had fallen to twenty-five percent, while the share of people identifying as non-religious rose from five percent in 1950 to seventy percent in 1989. The state established a State Secretariat for Church Affairs in 1957 to manage relations with religious communities. University chairs devoted to scientific atheism were founded in the mid-1950s, and extensive scholarly and popular literature on the subject was produced. In 1961, the theologian Paul Tillich argued that the Protestant community in East Germany had produced the most admirable church in Protestantism precisely because the communists had failed to achieve a spiritual victory over it.

• 5. The Richest Poor Economy

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  Despite owing substantial war reparations to the Soviet Union, the GDR built the most successful economy in the Eastern Bloc. By the early 1950s, Soviet forces had already extracted roughly ten billion US dollars in agricultural and industrial reparations, in addition to confiscating and transporting to the USSR approximately thirty-three percent of the industrial plants in the Soviet zone during 1945 and 1946.

  From that starting point, the centrally planned economy grew steadily. In 1976, the average annual GDP growth rate was five percent. The estimated 1984 per capita income was nine thousand eight hundred dollars, based on an official exchange rate that economists have noted was not fully realistic. In 1985, collective and state enterprises earned ninety-seven percent of the net national income. To keep consumer prices stable, the state subsidized eighty percent of basic supply costs, a system East Germans called the second pay packet.

  Notable exports included cameras sold under the Praktica brand, automobiles under the Trabant, Wartburg, and IFA labels, and hunting rifles, sextants, typewriters, and wristwatches. East Germans who had access to hard currency or relatives in the West could shop at Intershop stores for West German products or export-quality East German goods. Consumer goods were also available by mail from the Danish Jauerfood and Genex companies.

  Beneath the surface, the economy's weaknesses compounded over time. Loyalty to the SED was the primary criterion for employment advancement; professional competence was secondary to political reliability. The currency, the Ostmark, came to be seen by ordinary East Germans as worthless compared to the West German Deutsche Mark. By the 1980s, the socialist economy had grown steadily more dependent on hard-currency loans from West Germany. After reunification, the costs of economic integration were staggering: in 1991 alone, one hundred and fifty-three billion Deutsche Marks were transferred to eastern Germany. From 1991 to 1999, that total reached one point six three four trillion Deutsche Marks, more than doubling Germany's public debt.

• 6. A Picnic That Broke a Wall

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  On the 2nd of May 1989, Hungary removed the electrified fence along its border with Austria. That act, combined with widespread public anger over the faking of local government election results in May 1989, set off a chain of events that the GDR's leadership could not contain. Tens of thousands of East Germans entered Hungary via Czechoslovakia, hoping to cross illegally into Austria and then on to West Germany. By July, twenty-five thousand had crossed into Hungary.

  The decisive rupture came at a public gathering called the Pan-European Picnic on the 19th of August 1989, near the Hungarian town of Sopron. The idea of opening a border gate at a ceremony had been proposed by Otto von Habsburg to Hungarian Prime Minister Miklos Nemeth. The organizers, including the Austrian branch of the Paneuropean Union then headed by Karl von Habsburg, distributed thousands of brochures inviting GDR citizens in Hungary to the event. Local Sopron organizers knew nothing of potential East German refugees and had planned a local party with Austrian and Hungarian participants.

  At the picnic, the border opened. The mass escape that followed was the largest since the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The patrons of the event, Habsburg and Hungarian Minister of State Imre Pozsgay, had wanted to test whether Mikhail Gorbachev would order Soviet troops stationed in Hungary to intervene. They did not intervene.

  On the 10th of September 1989, Hungarian Foreign Minister Gyula Horn announced that his country would no longer restrict movement from Hungary into Austria. Within two days, twenty-two thousand East Germans crossed into Austria. Inside the GDR, protests grew. Leipzig's demonstrations became a weekly event, drawing ten thousand people at the first gathering on the 2nd of October and an estimated three hundred thousand by the end of the month. In East Berlin on the 4th of November, half a million demonstrators turned out. Kurt Masur, conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, led local negotiations with the government and held town meetings in the concert hall. Erich Honecker resigned in October. His replacement, Egon Krenz, faced an impossible choice: open the borders or watch the country drain away. On the 9th of November 1989, sections of the Wall were opened. Krenz resigned a month later. East Germany held its last free election in March 1990, and on the 3rd of October 1990, the five original East German states joined the Federal Republic of Germany. Egon Krenz was later prosecuted for offenses committed during the GDR era.