20 years since the reunification of Germany: What was the GDR?

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20 years since the reunification of Germany: What was the GDR?
4 October 2010

The 20th anniversary of the reunification of Germany is not only a historical
landmark; it also stands out in another respect. The two decades that have
passed since 1990 represent half the life of the German Democratic Republic
(East Germany). The GDR was founded on October 7, 1949. One month before the
Berlin Wall fell on November 9, 1989, it celebrated its 40th anniversary. One
year later, the GDR had disappeared from the political map. The Berlin Wall,
erected in August 1961, stood only eight years longer than the period that has
elapsed since its collapse.

In view of the considerable time that has passed since the GDR’s demise, one
could have expected that the anniversary of German reunification offered the
chance to undertake a sober and objective assessment of what the GDR really was.
However, nothing of the sort took place. The numerous anniversary speeches were
characterised by the same ideological fervour that dominated in the period of
the Cold War. Instead of receiving an answer to the question of “What was the
GDR?,” the public was served up hollow slogans and swear words.

The Christian Democratic Union called upon the services of Helmut Kohl, who is
wheelchair-bound and hardly able to speak, to remind an audience of party
functionaries that the GDR was characterised by the “rule of injustice”. Whoever
claimed anything else had “learnt nothing, absolutely nothing”. Ironically, the
former chancellor spoke at a meeting celebrating the 20th anniversary of the
CDU’s merger with its East German counterpart, which as a so-called bloc party
was an integral component of the Stalinist regime.

The German president Christian Wulff, speaking at the official celebrations in
Bremen, praised the quest for liberty on the part of the people “who freed
themselves from dictatorship without shedding blood”. Chancellor Angela Merkel,
in a contribution for Bild am Sonntag, while expressing her appreciation for the
“lifetime achievements of former GDR citizens,” insisted that this was something
completely different from the “state structure of the GDR”. US President Barack
Obama in a message of greetings described the “courage and convictions of the
Germans who brought about the collapse of the Berlin wall” as a contribution “to
a joint vision of a united and free Europe.”

If the political establishments in both Germany and the US are reluctant to
seriously address the nature of the GDR, it is because this state had its
origins in the greatest historical crimes—the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Responsibility for these crimes rested not just with Hitler and his cronies, but
with a broad layer of the economic and political elite in Germany: industrial
magnates like Thyssen, Krupp and Quandt, who bankrolled Hitler and increased
their own fortunes with forced labour; generals and officers, who organised the
war of destruction in the East; academics and jurists who worked out and
implemented the race laws; and many more.

The role played by the capitalist elite in initiating war and genocide was so
evident at the end of the war that the prevailing anti-capitalist sentiments
even found their reflection in the postwar Ahlen programme of the CDU. This
state of affairs was not only a source of concern for the governments in
Washington and London, but also for the Stalinist rulers in Moscow. Stalin,
whose power rested on a privileged bureaucratic caste and who had persecuted and
murdered the leaders of the October Revolution, feared that a socialist mass
movement in Europe would jeopardise his own rule.

Consequently, the US, the Soviet Union and Great Britain reached an agreement at
the conferences held at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam to divide up Germany and
Europe into different spheres of influence. Stalin was assigned a buffer zone in
Eastern Europe, and in return he pledged to help in suppressing any
anti-capitalist movement in Western Europe. This was to prove of decisive
significance in countries like France and Italy, where the Moscow-oriented
Communist Parties were in the leadership of armed resistance armies.

The fate of Germany—divided into four different occupation zones—was finally
decided four years after the end of the war. In May 1949, the Federal Republic
was founded within the three zones controlled by the Western powers. The GDR was
founded five months later in response. Although the CDU, led at the time by
Konrad Adenauer, used the division of Germany for its own propaganda purposes,
the party had deliberately decided in favour of the division in order to align
itself economically and militarily with the Western powers.

As the Cold War intensified, the persecution of former Nazi war criminals in the
Federal Republic came to an abrupt halt. Convicted industrial magnates were
released from prison, Nazi secret service and army officers reemployed and
former member of the Hitler NSDAP elevated to the highest political posts. Not a
single Nazi jurist was held to account for his crimes. This made the GDR, which
was more consistent in prosecuting Nazi war criminals, attractive for many
workers, artists and intellectuals.

Under the growing pressure of the Cold War, the GDR regime also carried out
major inroads into capitalist property relations. In 1945, the Soviet occupation
authorities had already confiscated without compensation all areas of land
exceeding 100 hectares, turning the land over to half a million farm workers,
re-settlers and small farmers. This removed the material base of the
eastern-based Junkers, who had formed the bedrock for political and military
reaction in the Wilhelmian Empire and the Weimar Republic. Following the
founding of the GDR, capitalist enterprises were also nationalised.

Although the GDR Stalinist regime functioned as the extended arm of the Kremlin
bureaucracy and suppressed the working class, it was compelled to implement a
considerable number of social concessions. State-owned property became the basis
for an extensive education, health and social system guaranteeing workers a high
degree of social security.

In short, the GDR had a contradictory character, which cannot be captured by
simple slogans such as “rule of injustice” or “dictatorship”. It was not a
socialist state, but neither was it a capitalist state. Socially owned property
relations represented an advance, but their potential could only have been
realised on the basis of workers’ democracy and the spread of such social
relations to other countries. The ruling bureaucracy opposed both. In the final
analysis, the contradictory character of the GDR was part of the unresolved
contradictions of world capitalism, which had not been resolved, but merely
covered up, by the postwar economic boom.

Since the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Soviet Union,
these contradictions have erupted to the surface ever more openly. Twenty years
after unification, the Federal republic increasingly resembles the Germany of
the 1920s and 1930s, while capitalism all over the world is in profound crisis.

Instead of the “flourishing landscapes” promised by Chancellor Helmut Kohl in
1990, poverty and unemployment are spreading in both east and west Germany. Some
6.7 million Germans are dependent on Hartz IV welfare payments, while another 5
million are employed in low-paid, precarious forms of work. The country’s
pension and health systems are being whittled away bit by bit.

Nationalism and racism are once again finding support in ruling circles. In his
anniversary speech, President Wulff spoke out in favour of a “relaxed
patriotism” and warned immigrants who refuse to accept “our way of life” that
they must “reckon with decisive resistance”. He also defended the profound
social gulf that has opened up during the past 20 years, declaring: “Too much
equality suffocates individual initiative and can only be achieved at the cost
of loosing freedom”.

On the world stage, German imperialism is returning to its former arrogance.
German troops are once again fighting and killing in Afghanistan and other parts
of the world. The German finance ministry is dictating terms across Europe for
drastic austerity measures and attacks on the working population.

If there is one central lesson to be drawn from the 20 years since the
reunification of Germany, it is that none of the problems that made the
twentieth century the most violent in human history have been resolved. Workers
must prepare for class confrontations. They must learn to distinguish between
Stalinism and socialism and understand the real nature of the GDR.

Peter Schwarz

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/oct2010/pers-o04.shtml

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