`Freedoms won, freedoms lost' -- left views on the fall of the Berlin Wall

November 15, 2009 – For the past few weeks the international capitalist mass media has been awash with triumphalist hoopla about the so-called “collapse of Communism'' as it celebrates the 20th anniversary of the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. Below Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal posts a number of commenatries from the left that deal with facts and fictions of those dramatic events, and how the people most effected are faring today.

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By Chris Slee

November 16, 2009 – Green Left Weekly – The 20th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin wall – November 9 – was the occasion for self-congratulation by supporters of the capitalist system. They talked of the fall of the wall as heralding a new era of freedom.

They failed to note that other walls and fences have been built or strengthened during the past 20 years.

• Israel's apartheid wall confines Palestinians within a small part of their homeland. In 1948 Israel seized 78% of Palestine's territory. Under the 1993 Oslo agreement, the Palestinians had expected to be able to establish a state on the remaining 22%, but the wall extends deep into the West Bank and reduces still further the territory available for such a state, if it was ever established. The wall cuts off Palestinian farmers from their land and almost totally surrounds some Palestinian towns.

• The fence along the US/Mexico border keeps out Latin Americans fleeing from poverty and repressive regimes and hoping to enter the United States. The poverty is largely caused by US economic exploitation of Latin America, and the repressive regimes are backed by the US government. The fence has been built to keep out these victims of US policies. Those who have died trying to enter the US greatly outnumber those who died trying to leave East Germany across the Berlin Wall.

• The walls around the detention centres which imprison refugees trying to reach Australia. Detention now occurs on Christmas Island and in Indonesia, rather than on the Australian mainland. But there is no "new era of freedom" for refugees fleeing US- and Australian-backed wars and repression in Iraq, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

1989 protests

The fall of the Berlin Wall was the result of a growing series of protests against the Stalinist regime in East Germany. 1989 was a year of protest and rebellion throughout Eastern Europe. The Stalinist parties were forced from power, or changed their leaders and proclaimed themselves supporters of democracy and reform.

But the term "reform" meant different things to different people. For most ordinary people in Eastern Europe, it meant things like freedom of speech and democratic elections. But for some other people, including some of the protest leaders, but also many bureaucrats in the "reformed" communist parties, "reform" meant the restoration of the capitalist economic system.

Pro-capitalist forces succeeded in getting control of the new governments which came to power in Eastern Europe after 1989. They implemented neoliberal policies such as the privatisation of state-owned enterprises, the sacking of large numbers of workers and cuts to social services.

These policies led to severe economic decline, reaching depression levels in some cases. Even after the economies of these countries began to recover, unemployment remained high.

Many socialists had hoped for a different outcome to the upsurge in Eastern Europe. The front cover of the November 14, 1989, edition of Direct Action, the newspaper of the Democratic Socialist Party, read: "The Wall Comes Down: A New Era of Democratic Socialism".

However the forces consciously striving for democratic socialism in Eastern Europe were too weak to lead these countries towards that goal. Many intellectuals in Eastern Europe, disillusioned with the Stalinist version of socialism, had been won to the view that "free markets" guarantee prosperity and democracy.

Many workers were also disillusioned with socialism, due to the corrupt and repressive nature of the Stalinist regimes which claimed to be socialist. Although most workers did not want the neoliberal policies of privatisation, sackings and social service cuts that the "reformers" had in store for them, they were not effectively organised to fight against them.

The fact that the fall of the Stalinist regimes led to capitalist restoration, rather than democratic socialism, was a setback for the people of Eastern Europe and the world. The triumphalism of the US ruling class after the fall of the Berlin wall strengthened their confidence in their ability to dominate the world. This led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq – generating refugees who sit behind the walls of detention centres on Christmas Island and in Indonesia today.

[Chris Slee is a member of the Socialist Alliance in Australia.]

The fall of the wall

By Victor Grossman

November 10, 2009 – MRZine – Here in Berlin, radio and TV are celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago so intensively there’s hardly a moment for the weather report, which, unfortunately for all the planned events, turned out nasty and rainy. From my window I just watched the fireworks’ brave attempts to spite the clouds and drizzle.

It is well-nigh impossible to be nasty about that strange event in 1989 when a seemingly random remark by an East German big shot opened the gates to a mass rush by East Berliners to West Berlin and, soon after, places further westward. There was general euphoria, bliss, the commonest word was Wahnsinn — "insane, crazy, unbelievable”. Then and now it seemed petty to entertain even the tiniest critical idea.

Without a doubt, the great event permitted happy reunions of many families and opened the way for East Germans to visit no longer only Prague, Warsaw, or Moscow but also Paris, Washington, and Munich, as well as West Berlin.

It was truly a blissful occasion. The film footage has been shown a thousand times, but the crossing, embraces, the dancing on the wall are still moving, even to tears. But as a socialist who tries to analyse history, I find it impossible to banish certain heretical recollections and doubts.

Unexplained

For moments of mass euphoria, wonderful as they are for those involved, do not always explain history. And for me too many issues and questions remain unexplained or simply unasked.

Why does no one recall that it was Eastern Germany – the German Democratic Republic (GDR) --- that pushed for reunification during the postwar years while Konrad Adenauer, chancellor of West Germany from 1949-1963, brusquely rejected all proposals, even general elections?

Only when and after West Germany – the Federal Republic of Germany – set up its own state, formed an army, joined NATO and insisted on regaining huge hunks of what was now Poland were such attempts finally abandoned.

Why is it never mentioned that the GDR, though certainly undergoing an economic crisis, was in less of a crisis than all of Germany today? Or that until its very end, it had no unemployment, no homelessness and its people enjoyed free medical care, child care, education and a sufficiently stable standard of living?

Why is it forgotten that many of its travel restrictions had been considerably eased in the two years before the Wall’s fall, so that not only pensioners, who were always able to visit West Germany, but up to 2 million GDR citizens had been able to visit West Germany in 1987-1989? Young people wanted desperately to travel, it is true, but their chances of being able to were already improving.

Sadly, there was often an intolerant atmosphere in the GDR, traceable to the limitations of its aged leadership, to bad traditions inherited from (or in part imposed by) the USSR. But also traceable to a kind of paranoia that was not entirely unrealistic in its fears of being swallowed by West Germany, which is what finally happened.

From the start, geographically and historically Germany’s weaker third, the GDR was always under powerful, merciless attack. This created endless problems for GDR leaders, which they were never able to solve satisfactorily.

Nevertheless, most participants in the demonstrations and rebellions in the fateful autumn of 1989 wanted an improved GDR, not a dead one. Only after West German leaders promised them not only freedom but all the consumer goods they had gazed at so enviously in TV shows were they lured by the seductive songs of the Lorelei beauties [the mythical Rhine Maidens, who, according to legend, would lure unwary river navigators to their deaths].

Many have done very well thanks to their status as federal German citizens. Certainly all consumer goods and travel possibilities are available. The leaden speeches and dull media articles of the old GDR are gone and forgotten, although replaced by endless platitudes and deadening commercials.

Freedoms won, freedoms lost

For freedoms won, however, there have been freedoms lost.

In the GDR, according to one bon mot, you were wise not to criticise government or party big shots, but you could say whatever you wanted against your foreman, the manager or the factory director. Today, this has been reversed. People are fired for rejecting unpaid overtime, for asking what a colleague earned, for simply being suspected of eating a company-owned roll or forgetting to turn in a 13 cent coupon.

Beggars, the homeless, patrons of free food outlets, people with untreated tooth gaps — all unknown in GDR days — are now taken for granted.

So are towns with closed factories and a population of pensioners, with most young people off somewhere far away hunting jobs.

The GDR had been founded with certain basic principles. Above all, as a bulwark against fascism, led for many years almost exclusively by anti-Nazis, replete with books, films, theatre, even the names of streets, schools and youth clubs anti-fascist in nature.

This was in extreme contrast with a post-World War II West German establishment whose military brass and diplomatic corps, academia, police and courts, up to the peak of the government, were riddled with former Nazis — not a few of them earnest criminals.

In 1961, when the wall was built, they were still to a remarkable degree in leadership. When the wall came down in 1989, most old Nazis were retired or dead, but the giant concerns, trusts and banks that built up Hitler and made billions from his war — and hundreds of thousands of slave labourers — were for the most part still powerful.

When the wall came down, these interests swarmed back to East Germany and beyond — the Czech Republic, Poland, Rumania. Its army and navy, built by war criminals, still led by militarists, was no longer blocked by the GDR and was fighting in parts of Africa, the near East, Afghanistan.

Two wars have been waged since the wall came down.

And, while the GDR had aided the left-wing Chilean government of Salvador Allende, the Vietnamese and Algerian peoples' struggles for national liberation, the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the anti-apartheid forces of the ANC and SWAPO in southern Africa, West Germany was always on the other side.

Yes, the euphoria of the common people who always suffer from the deeds of the big shots was understandable. But today in all Germany, wealthy men in towering skyscrapers coolly decide the fates of tens of thousands: they fire 3000 here, 10,000 there, move this factory a thousand kilometres eastward, close that one. It is as if they were playing some gigantic Monopoly game.

Nokia, Opel-GM, Siemens, drug firms, weapons makers: to a great extent they rule the roost, more than ever with the newest German government, despite its sweet smiles about freedom.

But isn’t there just a note of worry in their declamations? The latest crisis, by no means cured, is making some people think a bit more carefully. Some of them even spite the media and their pronouncements and vote for a party that calls for re-thinking, sometimes even for socialism. Not the same as in the GDR with its many weaknesses, but a state no longer ruled by the monopoly men in their skyscrapers.

Perhaps the ingenious domino ceremonies and slightly soggy fireworks in their insistence on “We Are the Greatest” reflect these very worries.

[Victor Grossman is a US journalist and author and a long-time resident of East Berlin. He is the author of Crossing the River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War, and Life in East Germany (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).]

Over the Wall

By Ewout Irrgang

November 13, 2009 – Spectrezine – Twenty years ago the wall fell. In 1982, as a six-year-old, I visited my family in the GDR (East Germany) in the company of my parents and my four-year-old brother. I was very young. But I was old enough to carry away a child's memories. Such as the fact that my parents suddenly became very nervous as we arrived at the German-German border, the then “Iron Curtain''. Not a single checkpoint, but a whole street with many checkpoints had to be traversed before we could drive into the “Workers' and Farmers' Paradise''. And I was really offended when I had to hand in my comic book to the border guards.

As a child you could feel the anxiety and fear in the GDR. The children themselves were a potential danger to their parents, in case they spoke out of turn. At school there was a risk that they would repeat something that they had heard their parents say at home. Or if the teachers asked them to draw what they had seen on the television the night before. If they drew the logo of the West German television service, their parents had a problem.

This fear was ever present in the GDR. You never knew who was spying for the Stasi, the secret police. Sometimes this was done quite openly, for example in the case of a niece who was a party member because this meant she could get a Trabant – the national car – more quickly. Sometimes you only found out after 1989. We gave a sigh of relief when we were once again on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But our family could visit us in the Netherlands only if they left their children in the GDR, because otherwise it was feared by the authorities that they would not return.

On an economic level the GDR did not function at all. Even as a child I could see this in the poor quality of pastries and lego. When I was thirteen the wall fell. It sent shivers down my spine when I heard the chants of “Wir sind das volk'' (“We are the people'') on the demonstrations. It was even more exciting when the chants changed to “Wir sind ein volk'''(“We are one people''). With the call for unification of Germany the Soviet Union, already reeling, was once again challenged. But euphoria won over fear that “they'' would intervene.

In our home the fall of the wall was felt as an enormous liberation. That feeling, twenty years later, has not been wholly fulfilled. Before the wall came down the family could not easily visit us, but now that they can it isn't that much easier.

Still, the fear is gone. The fear of the dictatorship. Its disappearance is something which is intrinsically good. The GDR called itself socialist. But socialism without democracy is like a pub with no beer. The GDR has been gone for almost twenty years, and a good thing too.

[Ewout Irrgang is a member of parliament for the Socialist Party of the Netherlands.]

Beyond the fairy story

By Andy Newman

November 6, 2009 – Socialist Unity – Nothing represents the superiority of capitalism over socialism better than the sight of tens of thousands of East Germans clamouring to get into the West, fleeing their drab, oppressive police state; the end of a forty year mistake, a totalitarian nightmare, that only survived due to the tanks of the Soviet Red Army. In contrast West Germany was a triumph of democracy, consumer capitalism and liberalism, where America proved its moral superiority by committing itself via NATO to the defence of democracy in Europe.

What a reassuring fairy story.

In reality the interpenetrating history of the two Germanys was always much more complex; the role of the West German Federal Republic rather less blameless; and the German Democratic Republic much more successful society than the simplistic Cold War narrative allows.

First, we need to understand how the divided Germany came about. The conventional interpretation is that the Soviet Union simply seized the territory as imperialist expansion, and rolled an Iron Curtain over Europe, trapping the populations behind.

There are a number of problems with this analysis, because it simply doesn’t fit the known facts. Initially the strategically important capital city was entirely in Soviet hands, but the USSR voluntarily agreed to allow Berlin to be divided between the three victorious allies (later including France as well). This made no sense if they had already been planning to set up a satellite state.

None of the allied powers had a plan for what should happen to Germany after the war, and its formal division into two states in 1949 was an ad hoc adaptation to developing Cold War rivalries. Even after the formation of the two states, reunification was anticipated. Stalin offered Soviet withdrawal in March 1952, and Beria made the same offer during his brief period in control of the USSR during the summer of 1953. However, the West was unwilling to concede to the demilitarisation of West Germany.

Indeed, the preferred objective of the USSR was that Germany should follow the Austrian path. Austria was also originally under shared occupation, but the USSR favoured unification on condition that it was militarily and diplomatically neutral. This was achieved by 1955.

As Mary Fullbrook explains in her bibliographic essay Interpretations of the Two Germany’s 1945-1990: “analysis of the actual steps through which the division of Germany proceeded reveals that the Western Powers repeatedly took initiatives to which Soviet measures came largely in response”. The pace was forced by the Western powers; the formation of Bizonia merging the British and American zones into a proto-state, the formation of West German military forces and, crucially, the creation of a new currency that excluded the Soviet occupation zone.

It is very important to understand that the unilateral introduction of the Deutschmark by the Western powers in June 1948 was the trigger for dividing Germany. Two currencies means two states – but the Soviet occupation zone could not accept the Deutschmark without surrendering all control of its own economy.

Britain and the USA rapidly adjusted due to their own domestic economic interests. Britain couldn’t even feed its own population, let alone Germany’s, and therefore needed Germany’s economy to be rebuilt. The USA now saw the USSR as a direct military threat and wanted to rebuild Germany as an ally. De-Nazification was suspended, and the USA overrode British objections to prevent state ownership of the German economy. The Marshall Aid plan rebuilt the German economy in circumstances of remarkable continuity of personnel, social and economic structure and attitudes from the Nazi era.

The controversial figure of Konrad Adenaeur played a crucial role. Elected as the first Kanzler in 1949 by a majority of only one vote, he was a conservative Rhineland Catholic more than willing to jettison the protestant East, and who was closely aligned to the USA’s anti-communism and militarism.

Adenaeur ensured that the new Federal Republic represented considerable continuity with the Nazi past. Senior Nazis were included in his government, and it was only a few years before Nazis were allowed to join the CDU party (Christian Democrats). The economy stayed in the same hands of those who had controlled it during the Nazi era. West Germany retained the Nazi anti-homosexuality law that imposed a long prison sentence on gays who even looked at another man in a lewd manner, they retained the ban on abortion, and state and church promoted and enforced highly conservative roles for women and girls.

View from the east

So how did this look from over in the East? We need to remember that they did not have the benefit of hindsight that we have now. It was entirely reasonable in the 1940s and early 1950s to anticipate that West Germany’s Nazi continuity, the militarisation, the conservative social agenda and the anti-communist rhetoric were a prelude to war and fascist revival.

Britain had promoted an anti-communist civil war in Greece, and was fighting communists in Malaya. The Cold War became a real war in Korea that left millions dead. Nor were expectations of the benefits of a state-owned economy unreasonable. Free market capitalism had seen worldwide depression in the 1930s and had led to fascism and war. Meanwhile the USSR’s economy had achieved staggering success in the same period, including a significant improvement in working-class living standards, despite the Stalin’s terror.

It is also necessary to understand the degree that the German communists had been traumatised and brutalised. Some like Horst Sindermann had survived the Nazi death camps, others had endured long exile and war. The myth that Hitler’s Germany was liberated by the Red Army was literally true for the tiny minority of German communists and socialists. They genuinely feared and hated any sign of fascist revival.

The social experiment they sought to engage in to construct a socialist society was in the worst possible circumstances. Cities had been destroyed, almost the entire population was homeless; three and a half million ethnic Germans had been driven West from land now lost to Poland and the USSR. Millions of German men were in prisoner of war camps, some returning as late as 1955, people were living crowded into cellars and among ruins; women were raped, there was no food, people were dressed in rags and had no shoes. Famine and disease threatened catastrophe. A generation of children were orphaned and had witnessed Apocalypse.

Leading East German Communist Party (the Socialist Unity Party, SED) member Manfred Ushner described how as a seven-year-old boy, along with his four-year-old sister, he had seen his grandmother hit by an incendiary bomb and burnt before his eyes, and the next day they had to crawl over mountains of burned corpses after Britisg air raids on Magdburg. 

Popular social attitudes in both Germanys remained anti-democratic, racist and anti-socialist for many years. Large numbers of middle-class professionals: school teachers, doctors, lawyers and engineers were members of the Nazi party. Nearly 50% of doctors were Nazi party members by 1945, school teachers were even more likely to be Nazis.

Social revolution from above

The East German experience of de-Nazification was rather more complex than the state-sponsored amnesia in the West; because the communists promoted an acceptance of German guilt for the war suffering, but externalised that blame to the fascists. A number of former Nazis were rehabilitated as individuals, but the social structures and institutions that had sustained fascism were torn up by the roots.

Despite the lack of any long-term objectives for their zone of occupation, the USSR and their few German allies carried out a dramatic and rapid social revolution. Farms over a certain size were collectivised along with all land owned by former Nazis. The Junkers [landlord] class was dispossessed; industry and finance were nationalised; and the education system systematically favoured the children of manual workers and peasants. By 1949 the economy was almost entirely socialised.

This social revolution had taken place not only without the support of the population, but largely without any reference to it. However, in this regard there was little difference between East and West – the occupying powers disposed of the areas under their control largely regardless of German wishes, although both the USSR and the Western powers found local allies. In particular the local populations became bound to the occupying governments through simple dependency; and this dependency transferred onto both the German states – without direct state assistance the both peoples would have had no shelter, and would have starved.

But the polarisation between the economic and political blocs centred around the USA and the USSR pulled in different directions. The Anglo-American interest was in technology transfer and economic aid inwards towards Germany. (I ignore the experience of the French zone for simplicity here.) But from the point of view of Eastern Europe, despite the war devastation, Germany still had higher levels of capital investment and concentrations of modern technology. Germany and Austria were plundered to transfer high technology eastwards, where it contributed to a net increase of productive capacity. The resulting history of the two Germany’s reflected these differing starting points.

East Germany was already less industrially developed, and was part of an economic bloc with less access to capital to invest, and less access to new technology. The most important social gain was the guarantee of full employment. This removed the “reserve army of labour” and the fear that makes workers buckle down – the immediate effect was the loss of work discipline and productivity. SED reports from shop-floor factory members in the 1950s complain that their fellow workers work much less hard than they did before the war, and still hadn’t been inspired enough by socialism to work hard. A highly progressive tax system also taxed white-collar workers, managers and supervisors more than manual workers, to the degree that shop-floor workers often took home more than their bosses.

Remember that for the first 16 years after the war, the border was open. There was a stream of managers, dispossessed Junkers and capitalists, professionals of all sorts, particularly teachers, and ex-Nazis going West, along with many of the 3.5 million refugees who had only entered East Germany in transit. The discrimination for university places in favour of the children of manual workers and peasants meant that many middle-class youths went to the West instead. The passage was not all one way, gay people, single women wanting to be sexually active without stigma, pensioners, Jews and socialists went from West to East, and around a quarter of those who fled from the East to the West changed their minds and returned.

Starting from a very low base line the GDR’s economy improved, but in particular, the East German state quickly built a layer of beneficiaries who were loyal to it. Paradoxically, the professionals and managers moving West opened up social mobility and advancement; and a layer of working-class university students could never have enjoyed such an education or prospects in the West.

Paradoxes

The East German leader Walter Ulbricht is a real paradox. While the label “Stalinist” is bandied around as a meaningless insult on the left, he was the real deal, personally committed to Stalin as a person, and who regarded Stalin’s model of political rule as an example to follow. Famously he provoked the 1953 uprising by demanding an extraordinary rise in productivity to support the drive to heavy industry announced in 1952. Ironically he survived the fall out of the uprising, but it provoked a coup in Moscow, removing Beria who had been committed to removing Ulbricht in order to allow political liberalisation in Germany.

But Ulbricht was also a man of extraordinary vision and ability, who was unafraid to pursue a very modernising liberal agenda over issues of women’s equality, sexual freedom, decriminalisation of gay sex and the promotion of industrial and scientific progress. Like most Germans of his generation, including those communists who had been in the USSR during the 1930s, he had a low opinion of Russians, and would not have felt compelled to use the USSR as a social exemplar.

The other paradox of the East German state is what has been described as “the benign and malign honeycomb of decentralised power”. The mass organisations of the state enjoyed genuine voluntary participation and identification, especially in the rural areas, and a great deal of responsibility and decision making was devolved to state owned companies and mayors (elected under the cadre system, around 70% were SED members). Complaining and petitioning were encouraged and led to the development of extensive social networks that both allowed consumers to work around the shortages but also almost comically reduced the presumptions of the state to be in control of production and distribution – particularly given the culture that developed of good-humoured sarcasm in letters of complaint.

But there was also a devolved repressive participation in the Stasi, that had mass popular support in enforcing social conformity. It is important to understand that social non-conformity was regarded to be the danger, not open political disagreement. Preconceptions of “totalitarianism” derived from Cold War political theories, and cultural images from Orwell’s novel 1984 are very wide of the mark; the GDR enjoyed mass popular support for much of its lifetime.

Arguably the GDR very much took on the same character as Ulbricht. A surprisingly socially liberal, modern and pragmatic society in many ways, and exhibiting occasional brilliant achievement, but also deeply repressive, and conformist.

Destabilisation

Into this mix we need to add the deliberate destabilisation and sabotage from the West German government. Remember, the initiation of a divided Germany came from the West, but once the eastern state was established, the Federal Republic engaged in diplomatic sabotage, refusing trade and diplomatic recognition to other countries if they had friendly relations with the GDR, the East Germans were blocked from membership of international sporting, cultural and scientific organisations. The East German state was blocked from accessing Western finance capital. West Berlin was massively subsidised to destabilise the economy and social stability of the East, and automatic citizenship and a welcome payment were made to any East German defecting.

The tragic building of the wall and closing the border in 1961 was the result. This was the result of a number of factors. The big social changes restructuring the economy were coming to an end, and had just seen the final wave of collectivisation in agriculture. As with any big change in agricultural policy this impacted on food supplies, and although East Germany was almost unique among advanced industrial societies in achieving food self-sufficiency, there were bread shortages in 1961. As the economy stabilised, there was also a reduction in prospects for rapid personal advancement. Generally there was a disappointing perceived failure of the youth to enthusiastically support the government, even though they had grown up in the socialist education system .

Paradoxically, if we set to one side the issue of personal liberty, the wall was a great success. It stabilised relations between the two Germanys, and led to a period of reform within the GDR. The interesting contrast of course is Yugoslavia, whose citizens could travel freely to the West. But the difference is that there was no equivalent of the West German state seeking to poach all Yugoslavia’s citizens, and to destabilise its economy.

This account has been partial, I have not addressed some of the obvious shortcomings, nor some of the less obvious but significant achievements of the GDR. Instead I have sought only to show how the divided Germany and the Berlin Wall were the result of policies by both of the Cold War power blocs, and the actions of both of the German states.

When the GDR was dismantled, good things were lost, as well as bad things.

The revolutions of 1989

November 12, 2009 – Socialist Worker (USA) --The fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago was one crest in a wave of revolt that overturned governments across half of Europe at the end of 1989. Tyrannies that were seen as exercising total control over the people – he ultimate Big Brother-style police states – fell with incredible speed, one after another, when faced with massive mobilisations demanding democracy and justice.