Henry Srebrnik: The forgotten “other” Germany

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Germany is wrestling with a debate over whether to ban the right-wing party Alternative for Germany (AfD), which many consider extremist and antidemocratic.

It currently leads the polls as the largest political party in the east German states of Brandenburg, Thuringia, Saxony, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

Anything could change before the state elections in September, but it’s not likely. For the AfD, the last year has witnessed a run of firsts: an AfD regional president elected in Thuringia, an AfD local mayor elected in Saxony-Anhalt, an AfD governing mayor elected in the Saxon town of Pirna.

In this coming June elections for the European Parliament, the AfD is polling second. In east German local elections, also in June, and for three eastern state governments in September, the AfD is running first.

There is much irony in this, because these entities were part of a now-forgotten country: the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany. A Communist creation of the Cold War, it is most infamously remembered for its construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

The GDR was a blank on the map, “remote, sinister and irredeemable,” in the words of German-British historian and journalist Katja Hoyer. It was often mocked as “Stasiland” (the common abbreviation of its secret police) and cemented in the popular imagination by films such as Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) and the Oscar-winning The Lives of Others (2006).

When Hitler’s Third Reich was defeated in 1945, the Soviet Army occupied Germany’s eastern reaches. Governance of the Soviet zone soon fell into the hands of exiled German Communists such as Walter Ulbricht, who arrived in Berlin with his Soviet patrons. The Soviets in their zone forced a merger of the Social Democrats with the Communist Party, creating the Socialist Unity Party, or SED, which would govern East Germany for 40 years.

Hoyer’s 2023 study Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990, argues even its very status was unique, as the GDR was “the only country in the Eastern bloc whose existence was never ensured.” The East German state suffered from what historian Andrew Port, the author of a 2007 book Conflict and Stability in the German Democratic Republic, termed a “siege mentality.” It “never stopped looking for monsters under its bed.”

After a workers’ strike rocked the country in June 1953, the state slowly but surely grew its security apparatus, until the Stasi was the largest police force per capita that the world has ever seen.

What’s more, the GDR was disadvantaged economically, because it also was burdened in its first years by crippling financial reparations to the Soviet Union. Soviet forces plundered the eastern zone and seized 60 per cent of its productive output.

East Germany, whose population never rose past 19 million, was also locked in competition with its far larger and richer neighbour, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Young people until 1961 could leave via East Berlin for a country where they spoke the same language and had common roots.

This migration proved an existential threat. By 1961, when the Berlin Wall was erected, the GDR had already lost 1.3 million people. “This was a city wall like no other – built not to repel invaders, but to keep people in,” noted Tim Marshall in his 2019 book The Age of Walls.

But “with the ideological divide cemented,” Hoyer writes, “a period of calm set in.” With relative stability, most people adapted to life in the country. There were benefits that weren’t available in the West, something forgotten now. It wasn’t just an “open air prison.”

Ulbricht’s government began to focus more on consumer staples and adequate housing. Household appliances became commonplace in the 1960s. Whereas only six per cent of homes had washing machines at the start of the decade, over half did by the end. The same for refrigerators. Over 50 per cent of East German households had them in 1970, while only 28 per cent of West German homes did. The number of East Germans with a car nearly doubled between 1970 and 1975. By 1980, almost every home had a television.

The GDR also made good on its commitment to social mobility. Working-class East Germans were elevated into the upper echelons of society; they comprised a third of university students. The country also took its commitment to women’s equality seriously and developed a generous social safety net to provide for mothers. By the early 1980s, over 90 per cent of women were employed.

The GDR had the highest standard of living in the Communist world by the 1970s. It was a state that provided more access to its universities for the working class and more employment opportunities for women than West Germany. But social and economic progress was not enough to save the country. The Berlin Wall tragically exposed the fundamental flaw of communism, the denial of individual liberty.

Yet the GDR did not simply vanish, and in a sense it lives on. Many East Germans feel cheated by the unequal way that reunification was carried out, to the benefit of West Germany. It led to difficulties, and there still remains an ossi (east) and wessi (west) divide.

More than 30 years after unification, two-thirds of former East Germans report feeling like second-class citizens. Now this is given expression by support for the AfD.

Henry Srebrnik is a professor of political science at the University of Prince Edward Island