GDR
Inside East Germany: The State That Came in from the Cold.
by Jonathan Steele.
Urizen Books. 256 pp. $12.95.
East Germany long constituted a veritable terra incognita to all but a tiny handful of Western specialists. For approximately two decades after its establishment on the territory of the Soviet zone of military occupation in 1949, the German Democratic Republic was a diplomatic outcast, Europe’s one and only pariah state. But thanks to the détente diplomacy of the early 70’s, East Germany’s earlier status has now been largely overcome. The unstable Soviet satellite has given way to something more substantial, if still insecure.
Even today, however, journalistic coverage of the GDR is at best sporadic in the United States, and scholarly studies are few and far between. Worse still, some published works are analytically unsophisticated or politically naive, or both. Given the state of the literature, as well as East Germany’s crucial geopolitical importance to both East and West, this new book invites the closest attention. In it, Jonathan Steele, a well-informed foreign correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, argues that it is misleading to treat East Germany as merely a carbon copy of the Soviet system; indeed, he insists that, for better or worse, “its overall social and economic system is a presentable model of the kind of authoritarian welfare states which Eastern European nations have now become.” As Steele sees it, “socialism in the GDR is as much a part of the socialist tradition as any of its other national manifestations elsewhere in the world.”
The first six chapters of Steele’s book are given over to an interpretive summary of the East German regime from its pre-history in the split between the Communists and the Social Democrats more than a half-century ago through the “economic miracle” experienced by the GDR in the years following the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The next three chapters survey the human condition in the socioeconomic setting created by East Germany’s industrially advanced “authoritarian welfare state.”
Steele concludes with a discussion of “the self-image of a new Germany,” appending a brief epilogue of generously measured tribute to Walter Ulbricht. Steele considers the GDR’s late top political boss to have been “the most successful German statesman since Bismarck” and (if you please) “above all a German nationalist”—this, notwithstanding Ulbricht’s Comintern activities and his contribution to Germany’s present national division.
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Such curious judgments aside, it should be said that the historical chapters of Steele’s study are basically sound. He has made good use of memoirs and drawn upon most of the limited number of secondary scholarly accounts in order to describe East Germany’s problematic origins and precarious early years. In a series of vignettes, he illuminates the social role of such novel institutions as the factory-conflict commissions and the “collectives of socialist labor.” He also touches upon the cross-currents affecting East German youth, the uses of leisure, the handling of crime, and the churches’ more or less “critical solidarity” with the regime.
As Steele points out, East German life is characterized by a number of apparent contradictions and curiosities. There is, to begin with, the political elite’s unshakable monopoly on planning, which comes into conflict with its genuine desire for popular participation. Then there is the reputed “collectivist consciousness” of the East German population, which exists side by side with a remarkable spread of “privatization” through all sectors of society. Yet another striking contradiction obtains between the extraordinary resilience of the East German family, extended as well as nuclear, and the exceptionally high rates of divorce and suicide. Finally, in a chapter entitled “Social Services from Cradle to Grave,” Steele draws attention to the poignant fact that in East Germany it is far better to be young than old. In terms of the distribution of the state’s elaborate social services, things go downhill from infancy. If old-age pensioners alone enjoy the unrestricted right to travel to the West, that is because the state would gladly see them stay there and thus rid itself of the financial drain entailed in their support.
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All brief surveys suffer from regrettable omissions. This is certainly the case with respect to Steele’s discussion of East Germany’s attitude toward the Jews. Although he may well be correct in noting that East Germany “has been much more careful in drawing the line between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism than elsewhere in Eastern Europe,” he fails to mention the foreign-policy commitments undertaken by the regime in the name of anti-Zionism. And while Steele is right to note the state’s generosity to the “few pathetic survivors” of the Holocaust (now numbering about a thousand souls), in the form of the reconstruction of synagogues and the repair of cemeteries, he has nothing at all to say about the regime’s refusal to grant restitution to Jewish survivors who reside outside the GDR.
These omissions are symptomatic of a more basic failing of Steele’s presentation, namely, his almost complete neglect of the inextricable relationship between international politics and internal East German affairs. By his account, the Helsinki agreement ought never to have emboldened the East German population to demand permission to emigrate; but it did. Similarly, critical departures from Soviet orthodoxy on the part of Eurocommunists in the West should not be nurturing dissidence within the GDR’s ruling party; but they do. And if, as Steele persuasively argues, East Germany has produced its own distinctive version of national Communism, that alone should raise the question of the relationship between it and the other German state. Yet to this overwhelmingly crucial matter, Steele pays insufficient attention.
Indeed, Steele seems to assume that ever since the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, East German-West German relations have steadily declined in importance. He explicitly postulates that as the result of the treaties between the two German states in the early 70’s, “the two nations’ [sic] political relationship is likely to be more placid over the next decade than ever before.” Nothing could be further from the truth—as may be seen in the recent outbreak of political warfare over the publication in the West German weekly, Der Spiegel, of a manifesto by an ostensible “League of Democratic Communists” within the East German party.
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In fact, the GDR’s leaders remain at a loss as to how best to handle expanded and intensified contacts with West Germany. Even Honecker, demonstrably more flexible, pragmatic, and relaxed than Ulbricht, shares many of his predecessor’s ingrained cold-war reflexes.
Is this, as Steele appears to believe, only a manifestation of “excessive caution, and lack of confidence in a population which often seems more loyal than the leadership expects”? Or could it be a consequence of Honecker’s own quest for popular legitimation by satisfying the consumer wants of the East Germans? The “consumerism” course has resulted in heightened dependence on various forms of West German economic support. To guard against the potentially disruptive domestic inroads that flow from this, the regime has felt obliged to step up its unpopular campaign of ideological and political Abgrenzung (“delimitation”) against the West. To the extent that it does so and will continue to do so, East Germany is still far from being “the state that came in from the cold.”
