Born in the GDR Read online

  BORN IN THE GDR

  Born

  IN THE GDR

  LIVING IN THE SHADOW

  OF THE WALL

  Hester Vaizey

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom

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  © Hester Vaizey 2014

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  First Edition published in 2014

  Impression: 1

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014933817

  ISBN 978–0–19–871873–4

  ebook ISBN 978–0–19–102883–0

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  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the people who have helped me to write this book. The East Germans I interviewed were extremely generous with their time and their stories. Without them, this book would not have been possible. William Cavert, Mark Fenemore, Jan Hennings, Catherine Orme, Matthew Stibbe, and David Tinnion read early drafts of the manuscript and provided insightful feedback. Angela Abmeier gave me a roof over my head in Berlin while I was conducting my research. Clare College, Cambridge, provided funding for this project. My agent, Peter Robinson, was instrumental in helping this book to see the light of day. And Matthew Cotton and Luciana O’Flaherty at Oxford University Press were most helpful in the final stages of getting the manuscript ready. My family, Margaret, Russell, and George Vaizey, gave me their unstinting support as ever. Above all, though, it is my husband, David Tinnion, who has lived and breathed this book with me every step of the way. This book is dedicated to him.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Glossary

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. Petra ~ Shaping the Change

  2. Carola ~ Seeing the Contradictions

  3. Lisa ~ Accepting the Circumstances

  4. Mario ~ Feeling the Regime’s Wrath

  5. Katharina ~ Believing in God under Pressure

  6. Robert ~ Supporting the Idea of Socialism

  7. Mirko ~ Rejecting the Party Line

  8. Peggy ~ Feeling Safe and Secure

  Interpreting the End of East Germany

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1 Divided Germany, 1949–1989

  2 Thousands of people rushed to the Berlin Wall in the days after it opened

  3 Petra Bläss as a delegate of the Independent Women’s Association on the East German Electoral Commission in 1990

  4 Carola’s GDR passport

  5 Carola’s passport, showing her tourist visa to visit West Germany

  6 Extract from Carola’s diary, on 22nd November 1988

  7 Carola’s draft application to leave the GDR for good

  8 Carola’s last school report from 5th July 1986

  9 East Germans are welcomed as they drive their Trabant into West Berlin on the morning of 10th November 1989

  10 ‘Wall woodpeckers’, 12th November 1989

  11 Sixteen-year-old Mario on holiday in 1984

  12 Photograph of Mario on his arrival at the Stasi prison in Hohenschönhausen, Berlin on 3rd July 1987

  13 An interrogation room at the Stasi prison in Berlin Hohenschönhausen, Berlin

  14 Free at last! Mario standing in front of the Berlin Wall in Kreuzberg, West Berlin in March 1988

  15 Mario on holiday in Sweden, August 2010

  16 Katharina and Gilbert at the registry office in Prenzlauer Berg, East Berlin, on their wedding day, 23rd October 1987

  17 Katharina and Gilbert on holiday in 1987 on Rügen, an island off East Germany in the Baltic Sea

  18 Robert’s membership card to the socialist Young Pioneers Organization (Pionierausweiss)

  19 Robert’s ticket to an alternative rock concert organized by the FDJ in the summer of 1989

  20 Robert as a teenager, on the day of his Jugendweihe in 1988

  21 Postcard from the Young Pioneers’ holiday camp ‘M. I. Kalinin’ near Berlin in the 1980s

  22 Robert’s passport bearing the stamp of his first visit to West Berlin on 12th November 1989

  23 GDR refugees on the train leaving Prague for West Germany in the autumn of 1989

  24 Mirko as a teenager on his first solo visits to East Berlin: (above) aged 16; (below) aged 15

  25 ‘……and it [the Wall] will still be standing in a hundred years.’: Erich Honecker speaking in Berlin on 19th January 1989

  26 Extract from Mirko’s exercise book. Sketch of the GDR flag scribbled out to emphasize its demise

  27 ‘But I love you all ……’: Erick Mielke addressing the Volkskammer on 13th November 1989

  28 Claudia’s school report from 1989

  29 Smell samples collected from political ‘enemies’ by the Stasi

  30 Traffic light men (Ampelmänner) in East Berlin

  31 A Trabant outside the Brandenberg Gate, Berlin, 1984

  Glossary

  DTA Deutsches Tagebucharchiv (German Diary Archive)

  FDJ Freie Deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth Organi-zation)

  FRG Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany)

  GDR German Democratic Republic (East Germany)

  Ostalgie Nostalgia for the former East Germany

  PDS Partei des Demokratischen Sozialismus (Party of Democratic Socialism)

  SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (German Socialist Unity Party), the East German the Communist Party in the GDR

  SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (Social Democratic Party)

  Staatsbürgekunde Citizenship lessons

  Wende This literally means ‘change’, and is a term used to describe the period of transition following the fall of the Berlin Wall

  Preface

  In Germany, 9th November is referred to as a ‘Schicksalstag’ or ‘Destiny Day’. It was on this day in 1918 that Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated; it was on this day in 1923 that Hitler first tried to seize power in Munich in the so-called ‘Beer Hall Putsch’; it was on this day in 1938 that the Nazis vandalized and looted Jewish synagogues; and, of course, it was on this day in 1989 that the Berlin Wall fell.

  To this day, the legacy of Germany’s divided past remains evident to all visitors crossing between the Eastern and Western parts of the city. Hordes of tourists continue to visit the remaining preserved section of the Berlin Wall for a reason. For twenty eight years the Wall divided Germany into two countries, and was the most powerful symbol of ongoing Cold War divisions.
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  East Germans born after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 knew no other reality. But while life under Communism felt normal to some young people, others felt severely constrained by the travel restrictions, the Stasi surveillance, and the penalties for voicing views different from the Communist leadership. In the twenty-eight years that the Berlin Wall remained up, over 5,000 dissatisfied East Germans successfully escaped across the border. One man hired an American Army Officer’s uniform from a dressing-up shop and walked across the border, another man smuggled his girlfriend out curled up in the boot of his car.

  That left approximately 17 million East Germans living behind the Iron Curtain. This book is interested in those people. How did they experience the transition to a united Germany? How had they been affected by immersion in the Communist culture? And now, twenty-five years on, when enough time has passed to allow for genuine reflection on the impact of the change, how do they feel their lives are marked by the country’s divided past? These are the questions that this book explores. By offering answers to these questions, the book hopes to help readers to imagine what it was like to live through this momentous phase in German history.

  Born in the GDR details the individual experiences of eight East Germans, forming a framework to understand the variety of views of the GDR and its demise, looking back from the perspective of a unified Germany. These eight stories are complemented by accounts from many others, to give a broader context. They explore a range of themes relating to life in the GDR, such as religion, the environment, sexuality, travel, and education.

  Experiences of this time were far from uniform as the conversations reveal. Through conversations with many East Germans, this book reveals the many and varied ways in which people think about about and make sense of this momentous phase of German history of this time. How people responded to living under Communism undoubtedly informed how they subsequently adjusted to reunion with Capitalist West Germany. Although all of the people featured in this book were born into what is often called ‘Germany’s second dictatorship’ of the twentieth century, they nonetheless remained individuals, each of whom had to live their life and was presented with a set of choices. This book offers eight different perspectives on the transition from East Germany to a united Germany. Each of the stories that follow is about survival, as well as adjusting and adapting to life in the newly established habitat of reunited Germany.

  Introduction

  When the Berlin Wall fell on 9 November 1989, the physical division of East and West Germany came to an end. Huge changes followed this pivotal moment. The two countries were officially stitched back together a year later, and—on paper at least—German unity was achieved. Though the Wall had been knocked down and the debris tidied away, getting to the point at which Germany is one country again has been a much more protracted process. For East Germans, whose communist-run country was amalgamated into capitalist West Germany through the reunification process, the changes were particularly dramatic. The whole fabric of their daily lives changed, from the way they voted, to the brand of butter they bought, to the newspapers they read.1 And yet in spite of these external changes, East Germans understandably continued to think and act in ways that were informed by their socialist past. Different mentalities continued to divide East and West Germans to the point that Germans on both sides could be said to be still living with Die Mauer im Kopf (the Wall in their heads) years after reunification.2

  New divides have also emerged among East Germans about how they remember their old lives in the German Democratic Republic (GDR).3 For some, it is the restrictions of living in a dictatorship that loom large in their recollections: the lack of free elections, the absence of freedom of speech, and the inability to travel freely.4 Others, by contrast, look back fondly to an era in which a paternalistic state provided for all. Views of the GDR therefore range from being a ‘Stasiland’5 at one extreme to a benevolent welfare state on the other. These polarized depictions of life in the GDR have been reinforced by two popular films: Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) and The Lives of Others (2006). Goodbye, Lenin! is nostalgic for the best elements of life in the GDR, which is shown as a protective yet benign (and at times ridiculous) state looking after its citizens, in contrast to the relentless and often difficult reality of reunification. The Lives of Others suggests that East Germany was a Stasi-state, since two of the main characters, a couple, feel constantly vulnerable and afraid. Crucially, although the GDR is often characterized in terms of this dichotomy, many East Germans’ experiences lie somewhere between. Born in the GDR offers a more variegated picture and aims to deepen our understanding of how the transition from communism to capitalism affected the daily lives of ‘ordinary people’—individuals who would otherwise remain anonymous in the historical record.6 This in turn will help to explain the longer-term legacies of the GDR.

  Let us briefly consider the backstory. How was it that Germany came to be separated into two countries, divided by a Wall and then reunited? At the end of the Second World War Germany was defeated and physically occupied by the four Allied powers: the US, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Each of the four was in charge of a zone of Germany, as well as a sector of Berlin, which was situated within the Soviet zone. However, even as the post-war peace settlements were being decided at the Yalta and Potsdam conferences in 1945, relations were already becoming strained between the Soviet Union and the other Allied powers. Relations broke down irretrievably from June 1948, when the Soviets blocked access to Berlin by road and rail, allegedly for ‘construction purposes’—an action which the Western Allies called the Berlin Blockade. In response the Western Allies flew in key supplies for the Berliners in their sectors in what became known as the Berlin Airlift. The Berlin Blockade was lifted eleven months after it began, in May 1949, when it became clear that the Western Allies were able to convey more supplies by air than they had delivered by land, but nonetheless the blockade paved the way for the formation of two separate German states later that year: West Germany officially became the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) with Bonn as its capital on 23 May 1949 and East Germany officially became the German Democratic Republic (GDR) with East Berlin as its capital on 7 October 1949. Berlin, in particular, had a special position in these developments. Although located deep in the GDR, it remained divided into a Western sector and an Eastern sector. Those living in West Berlin were officially citizens of the FRG but stayed under occupation by the Western Allies until 1990. When this territorial division was completed, East Germany occupied less than one-third of German soil and was home to around a quarter of the population of post-war Germany.7

  Over the next twelve years, the equivalent of a town’s worth of people per year moved from living in East Germany, which was rapidly transformed into a socialist society and state, to West Germany, where capitalism was being restored, because the living standards and job opportunities were seen to be better.8 This was a problem for the GDR authorities, but it was not just the number of people leaving that was a cause for concern. Those leaving included some of the brightest and best from East Germany, in particular highly qualified young people whose education had been paid for by the East German state. In the competitive Cold War climate between East and West this state of affairs troubled the communist leaders: East Germans were voting with their feet and if they continued to leave at the same rate, soon there would be no one left in the East. Their solution was a wall.

  On Saturday 12 August Berliners went to bed being able to move freely between the eastern and western parts of the city. When they woke up this was no longer possible, because overnight the GDR authorities had erected a temporary security fence guarded by border police to prevent people from crossing into West Berlin. In fact, the little boy (on the book's cover) who became separated from his family on 13 August due to the ever-expanding barbed wire border was only reunited with them when an East German border guard disobeyed strict orders not to let anyone pass, and helped the child to cross back to the East. Over time,
however, this fence became permanent. In many ways, the Berlin Wall appeared to be the nail in the coffin for any prospect of German unity, but in reality Germany had been divided since 1949, and from 1952 the tightening of the border between East and West Germany had made it almost impossible to cross by that route.9 Nonetheless, for the twenty-eight years following the Wall’s appearance, Germans living in East Berlin or the wider GDR were literally walled in and were only allowed to travel to other communist countries within the Eastern bloc such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary.10 GDR citizens could apply for short-term visas to visit relatives in the West, but whether these would be granted was entirely at the whim of the authorities. Those who asked to leave the GDR for good were marked down as politically unreliable, subject to career blocks, and often put under surveillance by the Stasi, the East German secret police.

  figure 1 Divided Germany, 1949–1989.

  All this ended in November 1989. Just over forty years after the GDR had been founded in 1949 and thirty-seven after Germany had been physically divided in 1952, the Berlin Wall was torn down in a dramatic turn of events. A combination of longer-and shorter-term factors played their part, including the thawing of relations between East and West Germany, which was instigated by the fourth West German Chancellor Willy Brandt in the 1970s. In that era of so-called Ostpolitik, Germans on both sides of the Wall were allowed a greater number of visits across the border (though it was much easier for West Germans to travel to the GDR than the other way around). These visits underlined to East Germans just how poor the quality of their consumer goods was in comparison to that of their Western neighbours.

  Even for those who had not stepped outside the Eastern bloc, it was at this time that the cracks in the economic policies of the socialist countries became particularly apparent. In the GDR and elsewhere in the Eastern bloc food was heavily subsidized and basic necessities were sold at very low prices. In fact bread reputedly cost so little that people fed it to their pigs. People with allotments were forced to sell a share of their crops to the government in order to ensure a minimal supply of fruit and vegetables throughout the GDR. This sometimes had ludicrous consequences, for example a man selling the cherries he had produced to the state, only to buy them back again at a lower price than the one he had sold them for.11 It was this fundamental disconnect in the GDR’s economic policy that became increasingly apparent in the mid-1980s. The country was going bankrupt, as its overall earnings did not cover the cost of the extensive subsidies, and ordinary people found it increasingly difficult to get hold of basic household items.12 This fundamentally challenged the unspoken social contract between GDR citizens and their government, whereby the government delivered security and welfare in exchange for conformity to the regime’s dictates, and it ultimately contributed to the instability of the regime in the autumn of 1989.13