Berlin Bulletin No. 31, August 9 2011

Another Nice Round Anniversary

By Victor Grossman
Submitted to Portside by the author

It's time for another nice round anniversary in
Germany. There are so many chances for emotional media
recollections: years ending with 3 or 8 are for 50th,
55th or 60th anniversaries of the Oppressed East German
Workers Revolt in 1953. On years ending with 9 or 4 we
are always reminded of the breaching of the Berlin Wall
in November 1989. And for years ending in 6, or
especially in 1, it's the Building of the Wall on
August 13 1961. The latter always helped me personally;
my marriage was on August 13th, though six years
earlier); West German media reminded me of the date
early enough to buy candy or flowers.

But this year Berlin's public TV channel gripped our
mnemonic brain cells not days but over a month in
advance. Every evening since late July offered an
interview with someone, almost anyone, who could tell a
moving Wall story. Every day we were shown the old,
familiar photos of escapes, pictures of Wall remnants
and a plethora of ceremonies.

Do I sound cynical?  I apologize. The Berlin Wall was a
tragic structure, large numbers of people suffered and
many died in connection with it. Every fatality was a
bitter loss. There is no conceivable way of prettifying
its memory, as anyone who lived at all close to it can
offer poignant testimony.

For anyone probing more deeply, however, some questions
still require answers. Why was it built? And why are
such unusually strong spotlights being focused on it
after so many years? With certain exceptions, the press
had largely forgotten tragedies connected with the Nazi
era within very few years after 1945. (One theme they
rarely forgot was anything regarding the loves and
idiosyncrasies of Hitler and his gang, which still seem
to fascinate.)

The Wall was built out of desperation, the only method
East German (and behind them Soviet) leaders could find
to end the hemorrhaging of people from East to West. I
find several main explanations for this dramatic blood-
letting.

Firstly, nearly all those in the eastern third of
Germany implicated in war crimes or other Nazi
brutality, correctly calculating that they would be far
safer under western rule than Soviet rule, got out as
fast as possible. So did many of those with the
strongest, deepest hatred of Communists and Russians
which was fostered so intensely by Hitler and his gang,
the men most guilty of systematically murdering
Communists and Russians. In many ways East Germany was
lucky to lose these people, but they included not just
storm troopers and Gestapo agents but a large share of
technicians, managers and professionals of all kinds.

Secondly, the war-ravaged East German economy was
disadvantaged from the start. It had long been a weaker
area economically; even where there was industry it was
largely dependent on raw materials from areas lost to
Poland or on West German sources of iron, coal and
other basics. Even more important, the victorious
powers had agreed that West Germany should pay
reparations to western countries, eastern Germany to
the Soviet Union and Poland. But the wealthier western
countries had suffered far less damage. Reparations to
them were soon halted while the USA, which suffered no
damage, used its powerful economy to pump in Marshall
Plan investments at a rapid pace, helping achieve what
was known as the West German "economic miracle".
Eastern Germany, on  the other hand (and after 1949 the
German Democratic Republic, or GDR), was not and could
not be excused from reparations to Poland and the
Soviets whose economies, less developed before the war
and destroyed beyond belief  by the Nazis, were in
desperate need of German machinery and other products.
Thus, for eight key years, East Germany was burdened
with over 90 percent of reparations.

The GDR was forced to pull itself up by its own
bootstraps - and that is exactly what it did, as
impartial economists pointed out. It quickly attained
pre-war levels, industrialized age-old feudally
backward areas, built new industries and provided land
for the rural poor and those from the lost eastern
provinces. In its 40 years it was able to offer full
employment, completely free medical coverage and
education from infancy to doctorate levels, free child
care and substantial advances toward the difficult goal
of equality for women, like family planning and legal
abortion. It greatly narrowed the gap between wealthy
and poor and came close to eliminating poverty
entirely. To me such achievements, amazing from today's
perspective, represented a memorable experiment on the
road toward socialism.

But despite these achievements - so many, many people
tried to leave! And when their numbers kept growing
that terrible Wall was built.

Basically it was a vicious circle. From the start the
GDR was under extreme pressure from a West German
republic always ahead in levels of consumer
satisfaction, for reasons partly described above, and
fully, officially determined to destroy any experiment
in constructing socialism. West Berlin was subsidized
with billions so as to awe and win over GDR citizens.
Extremely effective propaganda, based on all the
goodies of American consumer culture, schooled in the
highly refined methods of Madison Avenue hype, was
combined with countless enticements to come over, aimed
especially at a newly-trained generation of East German
experts. My wife, working at a hospital, knew of a
young West Berlin specialist who visited regularly and
urged doctors to "escape to the west". Training one
doctor in the GDR meant investing up to almost half a
million marks; such disappearances left vacancies,
painful economically and sometimes very literally.

The Western media constantly appealed to German
national feelings: "We are one folk, all brothers and
sisters!" But every eastern attempt at some sort of
neutralized unification or at least confederation was
rejected, indeed ignored. The strategy was "All or
nothing". Only after West Germany built up a new army
as part of NATO did the GDR give up its efforts. Then
West Germany played the national unity card more
vigorously than ever.

This is where the vicious cycle came in. GDR party and
government authorities could never find adequate
antidotes to the growing magnetic attraction of western
consumer goods and Americanized culture and the drain
of well-trained doctors, engineers and skilled
craftsmen. There were brave attempts: the best of
opera, dance, fine theaters, cultural and sport
opportunities for all ages and most interests. But the
leaders were offspring of their own political
upbringing, largely in the anti-Nazi but Stalin-tainted
political actions of the 1920's, 1930's and 1940's.
Threatened by the effects of the western offensive,
they felt it necessary to crack down. Virtually every
country cracks down on opposition it considers
menacing. Today's USA offers examples enough. But in
the GDR, partly due to the proximity of a menace with
no protective oceans or mountains in between, partly
because of the aging leaders' unbridled views of
themselves as omniscient and unfailing, and of
opportunist, careerist strata reinforcing such views,
their "cracking down" did far more harm than good. As a
result, the not unusual flow of people toward an
economy seen as more prosperous was augmented by those
who could not accept the pressures of a leadership
losing more and more rapport with its population.
Noting that the West German Lutheran Church often aided
GDR dissidents, the government often cracked down on
seemingly troublesome church leaders and members, even
while subsidizing the church in many ways. While
magnanimously supporting the arts, theater and film, it
was often suspicious and restrictive of what it saw
there as opposition allied with West Germany, thus
swelling the ranks of those wanting to leave. The Wall
was the desperate response to this truly vicious
circle. Perhaps surprisingly, for some years it
permitted great progress and even growing satisfaction
for many of those less directly affected.

Toward the end, these often contradictory trends were
affected by the GDR's struggle not to fall too far
behind in the electronic revolution transforming
advanced capitalist economies. But with no assistance
even from its Soviet or eastern allies and barred from
most western development, it was forced to invest
billions into vain competition with Sony or IBM, as
well as into a gigantic housing program and, never to
be forgotten, its military defense apparatus. In the
end all this proved too much for it.

Just before the Wall was built the floods of those
leaving, fearing it might be their final chance,
threatened to bring down the GDR. The Adenauer
government, then in Bonn, was waiting for such a
chance. But any spark in this tense situation might
easily have led to conflict; with US and Soviet forces
facing each other directly, both armed with atomic
arms, a catastrophic turn of events was far from pure
fantasy. President Kennedy has been quoted as saying
that the Wall "is not a nice solution but is a thousand
times better than war".

But why is it that especially when such round
anniversaries offer themselves flaws and misdeeds of
the old GDR, like the Wall, are not only neither
forgiven nor forgotten, but the reminders are hammered
into people's heads so ceaselessly, every day and every
evening?

For me, the answer seems clear. With the GDR out of the
way, the rulers of an enlarged Federal Republic no
longer needed a social network and living standards
attractive enough to match all comparisons with the
GDR. The last 21 years have seen constant
deterioration. Medical and dental care are increasingly
expensive, financing education is a constant source of
struggle, pension age has been upped to 67, sales taxes
and rents have been climbing, the latter alarmingly.
While Germany has rather less unemployment than most
countries, thanks to its commanding position in
exporting high-quality goods, more and more people are
forced into precarious, temporary, often miserably
underpaid jobs. A feeling of security, permitting
decisions on marriage, children, housing and the like,
is a rare quality. Business has no rivalry with the GDR
to worry about. And that lack of a rival GDR constantly
praising peace has permitted Germany to send troops,
warships and warplanes to Serbia, Lebanon and
Afghanistan. Who knows which will be next?

No, very few East Germans (and almost no West Germans)
dream of restoring the GDR, an obvious impossibility.
But today's rotten situation , which may well get
nastier, prompts people to recall the better aspects of
the GDR, especially in the fields of rent control,
child care, medical and dental care and above all
security in one's job and future. With the present
economy facing many menacing developments in the years
ahead - the euro crisis is only one omen - the economic
and political rulers, closely connected, fear just such
dangerous thinking. And this explains their constant,
so distorted message: the GDR was only the Wall, the
Stasi, and nothing else, that awful socialism was not
only a failure, it was as bad as, perhaps even worse
than fascist dictatorship under Hitler. And this is
what we are served up with every day, with triple or
more intensity at anniversary time.

___________________________________________

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