Born in the GDR Read online

  6. You shall protect and enhance state-owned property.

  7. You shall always strive to improve your performance, be frugal, and strengthen socialist discipline at work.

  8. You shall raise your children in the spirit of peace and socialism to be well educated, highly principled, and physically hardened people.

  9. You shall live purely and fairly and respect your family.

  10. You shall show solidarity with those who fight for their national liberation and those who defend their national independence.

  So how did the regime aim to imbue young people with these socialist values? There was a strong ideological element to belonging to the Young Pioneers. There was a set of commandments, for example, that each 6-year-old had to recite on joining the organization:

  Commandments of the Young Pioneers

  We Young Pioneers love our German Democratic Republic.

  We Young Pioneers love our parents.

  We Young Pioneers love peace.

  We Young Pioneers are friends with children of the Soviet Union and of all countries.

  We Young Pioneers learn diligently, are orderly and disciplined.

  We Young Pioneers respect all working people and lend a hand everywhere.

  We Young Pioneers are good friends and help each other.

  We Young Pioneers like singing and dancing, playing and doing handicrafts.

  We Young Pioneers play sports and keep our body clean and healthy.

  We Young Pioneers proudly wear the blue neckerchief.

  We Young Pioneers prepare to become good Thälmann pioneers.

  There was also a uniform, including the blue hat and the blue neckerchief mentioned in the commandments. The three tips of the neckerchief stood for the three institutions of education—the parent’s household, school, and the pioneer organization—and the knot symbolized their unity.43 All of this gave children a sense of importance at a young age.

  Alongside the SED’s youth movement, schools were of primary importance for inculcating the socialist world view. In fact, the youth movement was integrated into each school’s activities, with time set aside for this on a weekly basis. Furthermore, a high point in the formation of the ‘socialist personality’ was the Jugendweihe, the socialist rite of passage for 14-year-olds akin to Christian confirmation. The ceremony involved a procession, a speech, a proclamation of vows, and a presentation, and was yet another chance for the SED to prepare young people to become active participants in the socialist state.44

  Though the SED was extremely focused on getting young people ‘on side’, its efforts were more successful at securing outward conformity than active enthusiasm. Some children enjoyed the sense of belonging and the outdoor activities arranged by the youth groups, but many disliked having their free time organized and found the emphasis on ideology boring, participating only to avoid the educational and career blocks which stymied the careers of the uncooperative.45 Watching Western television to some extent immunized young East Germans against SED propaganda. And Western TV, along with Intershops which sold Western goods in the GDR at extortionate prices, showcased the allure of the brighter, freer, and materially superior West Germany. Also, in the specific context of the 1980s young people in the GDR had raised expectations of reform in light of Gorbachev’s pioneering liberalization policies of glasnost and perestroika. All of these factors help to explain why GDR youth policies did not meet with widespread enthusiasm from young people.46

  What follows explores what young East Germans made of the merging of East and West Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many of them had been involved in the demonstrations in the autumn of 1989, indicating that in some sense the East German leadership had failed to wholeheartedly win the hearts and minds of young people. But once these young people had unfettered access to the Western consumer world—the delights of Levi’s jeans, Coca-Cola, and Milka chocolate—what did they make of the regime change in the years that followed? Had living under socialism actually influenced their outlooks more than they realized?47 After 1989, many young East Germans initially appear to have been happy to adopt a more materialistic, consumer-oriented outlook. Jana Hensel, who was 13 years old when the Wall fell, describes how life changed for her in her memoir:

  At some point in late ’89 or early ’90—here, too, I can't remember exactly when—we stopped going to all those state-run extra-curricular events. Saturdays had previously been reserved for community activities, but now most of us preferred to drive across the border to West Germany with our parents … And Wednesdays changed, too. As a pre-teen in the GDR, I used to put on my scarf and pointy cap every Wednesday afternoon at 4 p.m. and head off to meetings of the Junge Pioniere, our version of the Scouts, but with a heavy Socialist slant … Seemingly overnight, the endless appointments that had filled our childhood were cancelled … Gone, too, were the Spartacus Track and Field Competitions … Competitive sports were out. … Now we rushed home as soon as school was over and parked ourselves in front of the TV … Our interests had moved on … We now collected the free toy surprises that came with McDonald’s Happy Meals.48

  However, despite young people’s dissatisfaction with life in the GDR, and their converse attraction to all things Western, after reunification many seemed to miss aspects of life in the former East Germany. Reunification represented a huge change. And, over time, young people felt the social dislocation prompted by the political change a lot more keenly: they developed a more nuanced view than straightforward delight at being able to drink real Coca-Cola. In most cases, political socialization in the GDR had influenced East Germans’ values and attitudes, and these principles were slow to change.49 Many East Germans felt that they had cut themselves off from the government’s influence by living in niches among like-minded people, but as West German diplomat Günther Gaus pointed out in 1983, ‘Niches are not external [to the socialist system], on the contrary they are niches inside GDR socialism … Over the decades more facts, beliefs, and standards of really existing socialism have made themselves at home in private corners than niche dwellers are always aware of.’50 If, as Gaus suggests, East Germans young and old were far more shaped by life under socialist rule than they had realized, when familiar socialist structures were swept away with reunification, many experienced a deep and unexpected sense of loss. The stories that follow deepen our qualitative understanding of this experience.51

  In 1990, Leipzig psychologist Walter Friedrich declared that the youth of the GDR was in ‘psychological chaos’.52 Over the space of a few months,

  pupils were confronted with textbooks lauding the praises of the West German state, which only months before had been portrayed as an Imperialist repressor. Normality had been turned on its head. Their country had disappeared and had been replaced by an unfamiliar one, which left them feeling as if they had a black hole in their biographies.53

  How then, should we try to understand this black hole? First-hand accounts are the starting point for this book which explores contrasting experiences of living across the historical caesura of 1989 and situates each individual’s response within the wider context of social, political, and economic developments at the time. From a wider collection of testimony gathered from thirty East Germans who were born from 1961 onwards, eight particularly striking stories have been selected54—a large enough number to showcase the multiple and varied experiences of the transition, while equally allowing each story to be explored fully within the confines of a single volume.

  To find participants from a combination of urban and rural parts of the GDR, the author placed adverts on noticeboards in supermarkets in former East Germany, pushed leaflets through doors in the Eastern neighbourhoods of Berlin, and advertised on a variety of mailing lists, including the GDR museum in Berlin, the Dritte Generation Ost organization (a forum for those East Germans who had not yet reached adulthood when the Wall fell), the academic research centre in Potsdam, the Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, the former Stasi prison at Hohensc
hönhausen, and the Zeitzeugenbüro—an eyewitness database of individuals from all over Germany willing to talk about their experiences. The interviewees, too, helped to find new participants in the project, asking among their friends and relatives for willing volunteers.

  Each interviewee was sent the same set of questions before the interview. The questions were carefully worded to be as open and neutrally phrased as possible, and they were divided into three sections: life in the GDR, the fall of the Wall and the period of transition between 1989 and 1990, and life since reunification. At the start of each interview, the author explained that she was writing a book about East German experiences of life before, during, and after reunification, with the hope of revealing a variety of responses going beyond the often polarized characterizations of the GDR, cast either as a ‘Stasiland’ or as a benign paternalistic state. All interviewees answered the same set of questions, as well as further individual questions prompted by their responses. The author used the questions to open up various themes but then let the interviewees speak freely even if they veered away from the question asked, the logic being that this would allow each one to recount things that he or she thought were significant. Alongside these personal testimonies, the book draws on school reports, school work, photographs, reports compiled by the Stasi, and contemporary diaries. This study emphatically does not aim to be representative of what all East Germans went through, but it certainly promises to offer a variety of personal insights into this dramatic time, each of the eight chapters representing one evocation of life in the GDR and its aftermath. And drawn together in one volume, these disparate accounts bring us closer to understanding what young East Germans went through before, during, and after unification.

  Though memory is fickle and uncontrollable in nature, the historian can nonetheless reap great rewards by teasing out and analysing unwieldy memories of the past. One of the great advantages of researching the relatively recent past is being able to talk to the participants at first hand. When a historian reads the diaries or letters of people who are dead, there is no opportunity to ask the author further questions or seek clarifications. Using paper sources in the archive, the historian can easily forget that it is real people’s lives that they are reading about. Interviews by contrast, unmistakably reinforce this reality. The interviewee becomes much more the subject of history than the object of it.55 When working with live witnesses and actively producing original historical sources through interviews, there is a valuable and unique opportunity for dialogue.56 Since all researchers have their own ‘baggage’, meaning that they cannot help but read sources through the prisms of their own experiences and values, it is surely extremely helpful to meet the protagonists of the story, so that any false impressions which may have been formed from their answers can be corrected. Above all, oral historians can decide which questions to ask of their real, living historical sources, as opposed to historians using paper records, whose questions are inevitably in part dictated by the content of the material they are looking at. And hearing eyewitnesses describe what they went through in their own words has a compelling immediacy which brings the past to life in a way like nothing else.57

  Certainly, as with many types of evidence, the interview testimonies offer only a partial account.58 Subconsciously as well as consciously, individuals will have established narratives and explanations of how they have made sense of their recent experiences. And these narratives, these memories, may well discard or exclude facts or incidences that do not fit their overall ‘take’ on proceedings. This is the reality. But it does not stop what they do remember from being valuable.59 Each individual will differ in how they decide to prioritize remembering their various experiences. People remember things differently and people had contrasting experiences, both of which help to explain why some accounts contradict as much as they corroborate each other. This does not mean that one account is necessarily more correct or valid than another. One experience might be more typical of the broader experience, but it does not make it more ‘right’. The simple fact is that there is more than one historical truth. Each of the life stories told here blends elements of the typical and the exceptional.

  Historians interpreting memories must be aware that individual memories evolve as they are slotted into wider narratives that develop long after the event. In the immediate aftermath of reunification, for example, the word Wendehals (reunification turncoat) was coined, to describe people who had supported the SED in the GDR but hastily rewrote their own histories to put distance between themselves and the old regime. Since reunification there have certainly been broad shifts in the prevailing memory cultures relating to the SED. Initially, while hopes for a brighter future in a reunited Germany remained high, East Germans appeared happy enough to characterize themselves as victims of an oppressive state, dominated by the Stasi, because emphasizing the repressive nature of the SED helped to justify their conformist behaviour. But as time passed, and disillusion with the reunification process became more widespread, many East Germans began to mourn the loss of their collective past, somehow forgetting or marginalizing the Stasi’s activities from their memories in the process. And yet for those who were political dissidents in the GDR, the pervasiveness of Ostalgie (nostalgia for the former East Germany), with its attendant rosy memories of the secure and simple life, is understandably a source of great anger, as it conveniently forgets the very real repressive elements of SED rule and emphasizes a cosy past over a dictatorial one.

  There are a number of important factors to be aware of when using oral testimony. Firstly, there is no one, monolithic version of events which captures the experiences of all the protagonists. Secondly, the way individuals remember the past may change over time with retelling. Indeed, each individual will likely not have just one version of events that remains static throughout his or her life. This is partly because the way one sees the world at 20 years old is likely to be different to the way one sees the world at 40, and partly to do with the changing context and the prevailing values of the society in which we live.60 Thirdly, interviewees may well present the past in a way which they believe shows them in the most favourable light. And finally, years after the event interviewees have the benefit of hindsight and, with this, often a fuller understanding of events than was available at the time. Yet in spite of these causes for caution, recollections are usually accurate enough to mean that retrospective interviewing can bring huge rewards. And in some ways memories are more authentic than other sources, since they combine an individual’s first-hand experience of events with how they have made sense of events subsequently.61 In fact, it is extremely informative to look at how people have made sense of what they went through.62

  Individual eyewitnesses may have an axe to grind in the way they recount their experiences, but presenting a collection of accounts helps to reveal the disparate agendas that individuals may have and in so doing illuminates the dichotomized memory culture about the GDR. Indeed, when employing memories as key historical sources for understanding East German perspectives on the transition of 1989, it is helpful to think of the existence of two GDRs: the GDR as it was at the time, and the GDR as we understand it now, which is based on memories of it. Neither historians nor ordinary East Germans will ever recapture the actual GDR that East Germans lived in, because we no longer have access to it. If we accept that the memory of the GDR is now what we mean by the GDR, we must acknowledge, too, that there is no single memory of this past. Instead, there are competing and often contradictory versions, which often try to exclude each other. It is therefore important to capture multiple accounts of this past so as not to privilege particular perspectives.63

  If the GDR as we understand it, is based on disparate accounts of it, this should give no cause for concern. In contrast to historians of the Middle Ages who have relatively few sources from which to tease out readings and rereadings of the past, contemporary historians face the opposite challenge. Instead of having one set of correspondence to tell us
about the wider social context of an era, contemporary historians have more information to choose from than they could ever possibly look at. And by doing interviews, historians can learn things that it would not have been possible to discover otherwise. Surely this is a fortunate position to be in, rather than a problem?

  Let us briefly consider the cast of characters that form the eight case studies in this book.64 In the opening chapter we hear from Petra, a 25-year-old Berlin-based PhD student who found herself propelled into high politics after the Wall fell. Petra had been an ardent socialist from her student days in the 1980s but in the transition of 1989/90 she occupied a central position in discussions about how to make reunification happen in practice. Once this was done, Petra was one of only seventeen communist MPs elected to the German parliament in 1990. This chapter explains Petra’s continued loyalty to the SED’s values in the wake of unification. Unlike Petra, Carola from Eisenach began questioning the regime during her schooldays. She escaped to West Germany when she was 21 years old, mere months before the Wall fell. Chapter 2 focuses on her story and how she felt totally isolated amongst friends who did not seem to mind that SED propaganda was so different from the reality. Carola was angry at the GDR’s wanton destruction of the environment and was part of an environmental movement intent on exposing damage the government was keen to keep quiet. This chapter explores her frustration with life in the GDR, recounts her escape, and includes her reflections on life since reunification.

  In Chapter 3 we learn about Lisa, a schoolteacher, who was happy with life in communist East Germany and remains happy with life since the transition of 1989. We hear about her experience of daily life behind the Iron Curtain in Pankow and gain a contented, relatively apolitical perspective on how things changed for the 22-year-old once the Berlin Wall fell. Chapter 4 provides a sharp contrast with Lisa’s story: we hear from Mario, a waiter from East Berlin, who was shot at and imprisoned for trying to leave East Germany when he was 20. We learn why Mario was so desperate to leave the GDR, and we hear about his experiences as a political prisoner at the hands of the Stasi, gaining insights into the long-term impact of his persecution. The subject of Chapter 5, 28 year-old Katharina from Brandenburg, was, like Mario, strongly opposed to the socialist set-up in the GDR, but for very different reasons. She was the daughter of a Protestant pastor, and accordingly suffered taunting and other disadvantages at school, and later at work, because of upholding her faith in an increasingly secular society. Katharina married a man who had been imprisoned by the Stasi for disseminating oppositional pamphlets, and as a result, their lives were carefully monitored by the Stasi.