The German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied a special place among the countries that were called “people’s democracies” in 1950-80 and, later, “socialist.” Soviet tourists used to roam, with open-mouthed surprise, the shops of Leipzig, Dresden, or East Berlin, where “you could buy everything.” To serve in the Group of Soviet Troops in Germany was the ultimate dream of not only Soviet Army officers but also their wives and other close relatives. A heroine of the well-known Soviet film Your Contemporary, made in the early Brezhnev era, boasts that she has a GDR dress which she only wears on special occasions. The living standards in East Germany were much higher than in the neighboring Poland or even Czechoslovakia, and only Hungary managed to achieve something of the kind in the late 1960s.
But all this paled in the eyes of the populace of the first German workers’ and peasants’ state, when they saw how people lived in the neighboring Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). It only seemed to the half-starved Soviet people that things were OK on the Oder and the Elbe, but, in reality, things were as bad as they could be. As a matter of fact, socialist management turned into banal mismanagement. Enterprises stood underloaded, the working day was being reduced, as were the wages. Nevertheless, output quotas were on the rise. Public discontent stirred up a rebellion of Berlin workers in June 1953, which the Soviet tanks effectively crushed.
The report of the USSR Foreign Ministry’s Information Committee to the CPSU Central Committee, dated December 28, 1955, points out: “The GDR is facing serious economic difficulties. The irregular supply of the industry with lignite, electricity, steel, various raw materials, and serious shortcomings in industrial organization, are causing enterprises to stand idle and unloaded, which sometimes results in layoffs… There are a lot of businesses, where workers are employed part-time. High-skilled workers are often used as auxiliary laborers, which brings their wages down… There have been some token strikes over the introduction of new output quotas.”
Even in the mid-1950s the GDR still rationed the basic foodstuffs, whereas West Germany had canceled the ration card system in 1949 and began to forget it. “The sales of meat, butter, sugar, coffee, and other foodstuffs to the populace noticeably declined [in 1955. – Author]. In late 1954, the GDR almost completely discontinued commercial trade in sugar. To ration the supply of food to the populace, some other items have also been withdrawn from commercial trade.”
The same report says: “The economy of West Germany is now in a period of relative upsurge. In 1955 the growth of industrial output turned out to be an economic boom. The output of industrial products rose by 16.3 percent in the nine months of 1955 against the same period in 1954, exceeding almost twofold the 1936. A fast growth of industrial output is accompanied with increased employment of the populace. Moreover, there is a shortage of high-skilled labor in some of the West German industries… West Germany is very much ahead of the GDR in terms of workmanship and product quality. West Germany has long canceled the ration card system, with consumer goods being produced in larger numbers and on a wider range than in the GDR. West Germany produces 4.5 times as many automobiles and 2.7 times as many motorcycles per 1,000 people as the GDR does. There are 41 times more TVs in West Germany than in the GDR.” Incidentally, East German-made Trabant and Wartburg cars, a pipe dream for many, were not a patch on the West German Opel or Volkswagen, let alone BMW or Mercedes.
If you cannot openly oppose the regime, you may opt for a passive form – in this case, voting with your feet. People would head for the country’s western part in search of a better life, higher wages, and a wider range of goods in shops. Another quote from the report: “The exodus of a part of the German Democratic Republic’s population to West Germany still remains a difficult problem for our German friends [the CPSU CC thus called the East German leadership. – Author]. About 1,219,000 people left the GDR for West Germany from September 3, 1950, until October 1955. It should be noted that the outflow of workers, young people, and intellectuals has considerably increased recently. For instance, 78,000 workers and about 5,000 engineers, designers, doctors, teachers and other professionals moved to West Germany in the nine months of 1955. And 62,000 out of the total number of those who have moved are aged 18 to 25.”
The situation had become really catastrophic by the summer of 1961. The period of 1945 to 1961 saw 3.6 million people moving to the west, including 360,000 in the seven months of 1961 alone. There were almost no doctors left in some areas of the GDR, and many cities were so much short of engineers and high-skilled workers that not only some factory shops but factories as a whole would grind to a halt.
Under these circumstances, the GDR leadership literally wrested from their Soviet comrades the approval for establishing a full-fledged border between West Germany and West Berlin. This was done on the night of August 13, 1961. This triggered a new, extremely dangerous, Berlin crisis. It is widely believed that the world came to the brink of a nuclear war in the fall of 1962 during the Caribbean Crisis. No, in reality, this danger was obvious in the summer and fall of 1961. Soviet and American tanks faced one another on Friedrichstrasse near the now famous Checkpoint Charlie. In a few rooms of the latter there is a small museum with an exposition on liberation movements in Ukraine. In general, the Berlin Crisis is a thrilling whodunit much in the spirit of James Bond.
A legendary event is associated with the 1961 Berlin Crisis and the Wall. On June 26, 1963, US President John Kennedy delivered a speech on the Schoeneberg City Hall steps near the Berlin Wall. He expressed his support for Berliners and pronounced twice the phrase “Ich bin ein Berliner” (“I am a Berliner”). Since then, this phrase has been part of the political lexicon. In 2008, the US presidential candidate John McCain pronounced a similar phrase in Tbilisi after the Caucasus war: “Today, we are all Georgians.” Interestingly, one more legend of our era is associated with Kennedy’s dictum. Journalist William Miller wrote in The New York Times on April 30, 1988, that this phrase of the US president had caused laughter among the audience because the president allegedly missed the article, which resulted in “I am a jelly-filled doughnut.” But, to tell the truth, the journalist was betrayed by his inadequate knowledge of German realities. The ill-fated doughnuts filled with strawberry or plum jam are called Berliner Pfannkuchen in German, not Berliner, as it is in the English-speaking countries. Kennedy was grammatically correct. The audience was amused by the fact that the interpreter mechanically translated this sentence from German into German, for which Kennedy thanked him to a burst of laughter. But this legend is still making rounds in the English-language, mostly American, press.
It became clear to the GDR leadership very soon that the barbed wire, a dug-up cobblestone street, and a check line were not enough. People used, especially in the beginning, the neighboring buildings to jump from their balconies and roofs into the free West Berlin. So it was decided to erect a wall. The latter had been repeatedly reconstructed and considerably reinforced for several years on end until it became a concrete structure in 1965. The wall’s overall length was 155 km, including 43.1 km within the limits of Berlin. And while one could easily approach it from the western side, this could not be done from the east because the wall was separated from the city with an empty space controlled by border guards. The wall was lined with mine fields and self-triggering machine-guns which opened fire whenever any object crossed the invisible infrared beam. The attempts to get over the wall claimed about 2,000 human lives, but this list is considered to be incomplete. About 200,000 people managed to flee, by hook or by crook, a socialist paradise called GDR between 1961 and 1989.
What reminds visitors of the wall in the now united Berlin is an open-air museum. A little more than one kilometer of the wall has been preserved and painted with graffiti. There is another part of the wall in Berlin’s museum Topography of Terror: it is kept in the same shape as it was in the GDR. The author of this article visited these and other museums of Berlin thanks to the Konrad Adenauer Foundation’s educational program for Ukrainian journalists. The main goal of this program was to familiarize with the reconsideration of the past in Germany and take part in a conference to mark the beginning of World War II.
When the 1989-90 euphoria over ruination of the wall and reunification of Germany abated, it turned out that it is easier to destroy the material symbols of a totalitarian past than to overcome the legacy of a split country.
We happened to visit Berlin 10 years ago. At the time, there was a striking difference between the two parts of the city. Downcast and cracked “Ulbricht houses” (known in this country as “Khrushchev houses”), spat-over, gloomy and dirty underpasses… We were shown a city development plan in the building of a former East German ministry on Alexander Platz, the main square of East Berlin. This structure, quite a good one by Soviet standards, was to be demolished. Asked why, they said it was impossible to stay, let alone work, at it. The ventilation system was out of order, and the other communications had gone bust and would cost too much to be repaired. It would be easier to build a new structure in compliance with modern-day requirements.
It is now rather difficult to find out which Berlin is where. First of all, the problem of supply pipelines was solved in the eastern part. A new system had to be built in fact. Then came the turn of residential buildings. Some of them were reconstructed, others were torn down and new ones were built instead. One more thing. This capital of a large European state is a very green city, with woods, parks, lakes, rivers, and canals accounting for almost 40 percent of its area. Naturally, these changes needed enormous expenses. In fact, 15.4 billion euros have been invested in construction since 1994. A major share of this is private capital.
Clearly, material problems can be solved one way or another. It is more difficult to deal with psychological troubles. There had always been differences between the German regions. For this reason, the country is based on federal principles. But the existence of two German states has brought to the fore the problem of mental differences between the two parts of the reunited country. It is a typical feature of socialism that people get quickly used to the fact that the bosses are making all decisions for them, and all they have to do is receive guaranteed, albeit small, wages once or twice a month. Those whom this did not suit escaped to the West, while the rest chose to prefer governmental sops to a richer life. Strange as it may seem to us, there are quite a few people in eastern Germany who are nostalgic about state paternalism. It is they who form the electorate of the Left (Die Linke) party, the successor to the GDR’s Socialist Unity Party. The Berlin Wall passed through the minds, not only the hearts, of people.
We must give the German state its due. It is making Herculean efforts to help people tackle this problem. But the main thing is – and here is a radical difference from Ukraine – these natural regional differences, which have come from a difficult past, do not become part of political games. Fueling inter-regional confrontations is considered bad style which will lead nowhere.
Healing the wounds of the past is a difficult process, but Germany chose the right path and achieved great successes. And it is a good example for us to follow.
