The Contradictions of East German Communism

I would like to begin with a rather ominous poem by Johannes R. Becher, a poet and one of East Germany’s first Ministers of Culture. It remained unpublished during his lifetime:

This is the Tower of Babel,
It speaks every tongue.
And Cain killed Abel
And was lauded as a god.
He wants to climb to heaven

In his tower

He will not capitulate to any storm
That batters him.
But rumours spread
The truth is concealed
Hearts are confused
We have risen so high.
The word becomes a vocabulary
That falls on deaf ears.
The Tower of Babel will collapse
And crumble into nothing.[1]

Literary scholar Hans Mayer placed this poem at both the beginning and ending of his 1991 book Der Turm von Babel: Erinnerung an eine Deutsche Demokratische Republik (The Tower of Babel: Memories from a German Democratic Republic), in which he seeks to identify the reasons for the failure of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), often referred to as East Germany. This work dissects the various contradictions inherent in the high standards set by an anti-fascist, democratic order and criticizes the profuse propaganda and “blind spots” of official GDR ideology.

Of course, Hans Mayer’s critique was worlds apart from the historical accounts written by the victors, since for him, the end of the GDR “did not mean the end of thinking about social alternatives. The German Democratic Republic has always been a specifically German wound. It will remain open for as long as people fail to recognize that its collapse was simultaneously the collapse of an opportunity for Germany.”[2] This song, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung declared, “has long been sung, but Don Quixote refuses to take note”.[3] According to Thomas Assheuer in Die ZEIT, Mayer champions 1945 as the start of the anti-fascist movement. But in reality, he follows the GDR ideologues in promoting “the illusion of a reconciliation between intellect and power. Obstinate and at times casting aside his faculties of political judgment, he projects an exile’s literary dream of the political onto the GDR’s infancy, thereby casting a much more frightening light on a structure that was already unable to withstand the weight of so many utopian projections”.[4]

There is no denying the fact that the German Democratic Republic only qualified as democratic in the specifically Soviet-Communist sense of the term: the country’s “democratic centralism” was far more centralized than democratic. It was the expression of a dictatorship rather than a democratic consensus. “But to recognize that the GDR was a dictatorship says little about the specific character of that dictatorship”, Mary Fulbrook wrote almost 30 years ago in her first attempt to understand the GDR’s history beyond the standard categories used to study it, even though such categories cannot be completely dispensed with.[5] “The focus on repression is not actually very revealing. It does not tell us very much about degrees of political compliance, or acquiescence in their own domination, to be found among the East German population.”[6]

The following considerations investigate how internally coherent and adaptable the Soviet system of rule proved to be in East Germany.[7] Doing so requires that we limit our inquiry to the relevant political issues. Space and time limitations require that economic and sociological issues, which are equally important, take a back seat. Repression and tolerance serve as concepts for analysing specific methods of rule, and facilitate a nuanced understanding of persistence and change within this system of rule. These issues are not new.

However, I would like to broaden the debate by contextualizing the formation of the GDR more strongly in pan-European history, and not least in the history of the socialist and Communist movements. The latter was an indication of the open political constellations in the period following World War II. We of course know that more than 300,000 Soviet soldiers were stationed in the GDR, which distinguished it from other states in the Soviet bloc. On top of that, the western border of the GDR formed the front line in the Cold War. However, frontlines were not always so clearly and definitively drawn as they may appear in retrospect on the map.

Repression in Stalinist and Post-Stalinist Societies

Repression was certainly always one of the most prominent features of Soviet societies, at least until 1985.[8] Stalinist societies, such as the Soviet Union from 1935 to around 1956, or post-war Eastern Europe up until 1956–57, were generally based on a system of the most stringent state surveillance, which the state Communist parties created and employed in order to preserve social order. In the Soviet Union, this was preceded, in the early 1930s by the disintegration and de facto liquidation of the very social and political classes on which the system had been based: workers and peasants. The gradual transition to organized terror was only possible thanks to internal changes in party rule.

From the outset, the Bolsheviks resolutely pushed for the establishment of a party apparatus, and after the October Revolution of 1917 this formed the basis for the creation of a nomenklatura system for filling positions in the party and state.[9] High-ranking members of the party began to develop a party bureaucracy. The most significant feature of the nascent Stalinism was a concentration of power in the hands of a few privileged members of this bureaucracy that was increasingly beyond any form of oversight. This process was accompanied by the expansion of the state security apparatus. Voluntary commitment was replaced by unconditional obedience.

This development was only possible after the defeat of the rival tendencies within the Soviet party. Controversial debates within the party leadership, especially among its higher and middle echelons, increasingly came to be seen as a direct threat to the party’s monopoly on power.[10] The Stalinist faction won out over the others due to its use of sheer force and smear campaigns. The liquidation of internal opposition marked the beginning of a total reorganization of the party and the state by means of terrorist measures. Above all, this terror was directed against critical thinking within the party itself.

The history of the East German ruling party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), reflects the development of East German society as a whole. It is an illustrative example of the transformation that took place under the Soviet system of rule. This system was based on strict party control, yet developed into a regime that gradually tried to take a variety of the population’s needs into account as well. What remained unchanged during this transitional period was the main feature of the system: its coercive character. However, as Konrad H. Jarausch has pointed out, in the period after Stalin, party leaders sought to establish a “welfare dictatorship” that sought to both enact as well as respond to changes within society.[11] Its goals were not simply an updated version of the more repressive phase of social development. This shift is evident in the way that party discipline changed during this time.

In May 1945, the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) was re-established as a Stalinist cadre party. All internal dissidents within the KPD had already been purged during the party’s “bolshevization” phase in the late Weimar Republic. Those party leaders who had emigrated to the Soviet Union and survived the terror of the 1930s became loyal followers of Stalin.[12] Unlike in the Soviet Union itself, however, the Communists in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany had not yet taken the decisive step of eliminating potential political alternatives and their advocates. The party faced a unique set of challenges in post-war Germany.

Immediately after the war, Stalin declared that he did not want to transfer the Soviet system to East Germany out of consideration for his Western allies. Nevertheless, in June 1945, he claimed that a parliamentary democratic system was necessary to guarantee “the hegemony of the working class and its revolutionary party”.[13] This meant that the KPD was forced to show a great deal of tolerance towards the newly emerging non-Communist parties, especially the Social Democratic Party (SPD), its main adversary within the workers’ movement.

The KPD lacked experienced working-class personnel whom it urgently needed to fill leadership positions in the East German state apparatus, the economy, and society. Its own members were simply too new, and had inadequate training and experience to master the necessary tasks.

The Soviet occupying power realized very early on that a centralized cadre party based on the Soviet model would be a necessary prerequisite if their military administration in East Germany was ever to be replaced by a German government. This central party was to form the backbone of the new order. However, the unexpected rise in popularity of the SPD in the second half of 1945 threw a wrench in the plans of the Soviet and German Communists and prompted the KPD to attempt to unify with the Social Democrats.

Hermann Weber, who influenced research on the GDR in the West for decades, claimed that internal “cadre-related” problems also prompted the KPD to take these steps, which were intended to lend weight to its demand for leadership and control of society. According to Weber, the KPD lacked experienced working-class personnel whom it urgently needed to fill leadership positions in the East German state apparatus, the economy, and society. Its own members were simply too new, and had inadequate training and experience to master the necessary tasks. Meanwhile, the SPD could fall back on a larger pool of personnel from its pre-war workers’ movement organizations. The KPD considered that pool as a potential source of qualified staff for administrative roles.[14] Most important in precipitating the merger, however, was the Soviet desire to eliminate the SPD as an active political force in East German society. Equally important was the virulent anti-Soviet attitude of Kurt Schumacher, the SPD leader in the Western zones, which the Soviet occupying power viewed as a potential threat.[15]

In April 1946, the KPD and the East German SPD (excluding the three Western zones of Berlin) merged to form the SED. The Communists, who had been educated in the Soviet tradition, saw this party as a “mixed” organization. They believed it was full of “elements” that had to swiftly be brought under control. But the effort to purge the party of allegedly politically undesirable forces was disproportionate to the actual “danger” posed by former Social Democrats. Beyond that, however, the authorities of the Soviet occupation and their German collaborators identified another potential source of opposition: those SED members who had belonged to left-socialist or anti-Stalinist communist groups before 1933, such as the Socialist Workers Party of Germany (SAPD), the KPD Opposition (KPDO), or the Leninbund.[16]

The members of those small left-wing workers’ organizations that had managed to survive the Nazi regime were among the most active forces in forming anti-fascist action committees in a number of cities and villages at the end of the war. Such groups had formed in areas not yet liberated by Soviet or Western armies. While these committees were summarily dissolved by British and American troops, the Soviet occupying forces acted with much more caution. It was Walter Ulbricht, then the most loyal to Moscow of all Communist politicians, who eventually ordered the dissolution of these spontaneously formed bodies. Many members of these committees joined the KPD, even if only to raise their voices in criticism.[17]

The Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) was quite irritated by this fact. In May 1946, the two SMAD leaders, Sergei Tyulpanov and Fyodor Bokov, warned the SED leaders Walter Ulbricht and Otto Grotewohl of “Trotskyist elements” within the party and urged them to take countermeasures.[18] Hermann Matern, then head of the Berlin SED organization, wrote that the ultra-leftists, who were assumed to be sympathetic to Leon Trotsky, would become active in factories despite not having their own organization.[19] Both the SMAD and the SED leadership were particularly averse to criticism of the Soviet Union voiced by non-aligned Communists. These were regarded as “dissenters from Marxism-Leninism.” “Only after our intervention,” reported Lt. Colonel Bleskin, did the SED “begin to take measures to exclude several of them [‘opponents of unity’] from the party.”[20]

The local Soviet authorities in Thuringia feared that criticism of the Soviet Union from both the Communists and the Social Democrats would coalesce into a unified tendency within the SED, resulting in the formation of an organized internal opposition. Their fear was that such a political opposition would develop a programme that, despite situating Lenin within the Marxist tradition, would paint Stalin as the founder of Soviet imperialism.

In fact, there was illegal activity by former KPDO members in 1946: they smuggled writings by Heinrich Brandler and August Thalheimer into the Soviet zone, mainly into Thuringia. Brandler and Thalheimer, leading figures in the KPD and then the KPDO in the Weimar Republic,[21] had written a series of pamphlets while in exile in Cuba that advanced precisely the arguments that the Soviet authorities were trying to suppress.[22] The Soviet military intelligence service went to considerable lengths to find the source of this “subversive” activity, to no avail.[23]

It was only after Nikita Khrushchev’s disclosures at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 that the repressive system was definitively curbed and blatant repression was replaced by an authoritarian system of rule characterized by a mixture of repression and tolerance.

At the same time, a group of critical SED members centred around the trade union official Karl Schmidt sought to strengthen socialism by “resorting back” to Lenin’s teachings. Schmidt went so far as to claim that the Soviet Union had turned its back on Leninism by declaring the Oder-Neisse line to be the new German-Polish border. In Schmidt’s view, this represented a complete renunciation of Lenin’s principle of “peace without annexation”.[24] The Trotskyists were able to carry out some activities, but after a short time, these too were suppressed.[25]

These and many similar incidents in what was then the Soviet occupation zone led the SED and SMAD to establish party organs whose task consisted in preventing such internal party conflicts.[26] To this end, the Counter-Intelligence Division was created within the Political Personnel Department (PPA) of the Central Committee. This agency compiled information on party critics and, in particular, on organized opposition groups within the party. This material was passed on to the agency by informants who had infiltrated such groups or been recruited from their ranks. Even before the party “purges” of the early 1950s (which ranged from expulsion from the party to imprisonment and internment in Soviet labour camps), such information, if not used immediately for disciplinary measures, was kept on file for later use.

Walter Ulbricht sought to turn the SED into a well-oiled machine for controlling public life. Through internal cadre policies, he sought, as Norman Naimark noted, “to reduce institutional conflicts and make administrative procedures more hierarchical”. Thus, the SED leadership created the nomenklatura system “that was supposed to provide the administrations with the appropriate cadres”.[27] This meant that the PPA had to approve all appointments to leading positions in the administration, in public institutions and, above all, in the party itself.

Starting in May 1948, the SED embarked on an open and intensified Stalinization process with the aim of transforming itself into a disciplined mass party. This was achieved primarily with the help of the Central Party Control Commission (ZPKK). With its resolution on the “removal of hostile and irresponsible elements from the party” passed in July 1948, the SED leadership followed the policy laid out by the Cominform[28] and treated any deviation from the party line as hostile activity and the work of foreign agents. In the first KPD documents immediately after the war, there was still talk of a “German path to socialism”, that is, one that differed from the Soviet model.[29] Anton Ackermann’s famous essay of 1946 was regarded as a prime expression of this.[30]

There is no denying the fact that the German Democratic Republic only qualified as democratic in the specifically Soviet-Communist sense of the term.

The years 1949–51 were characterized by the most severe disciplinary measures and purges. It is important to note that most of the victims of the campaigns against “Tito fascism”, “Trotskyism”, “social-democratism”, “imperialist spies and agents” and, as will be shown later, “Zionist conspiracies” were not directly accused of hostile actions. They were only accused of intending to commit criminal acts. Those accused became hostages of Stalinist “disciplinary measures” because of their political past and the Soviet Union’s new foreign policy security interests, especially with regard to Eastern and Southeastern Europe in the early years of the Cold War. The most memorable victim in the GDR was SED Politburo member Paul Merker, who was sentenced to many years in prison at a secret trial.[31]

Some of the gravest attacks against these victims ceased immediately after Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953. But it was only after Nikita Khrushchev’s disclosures at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 that the repressive system was definitively curbed and blatant repression was replaced by an authoritarian system of rule characterized by a mixture of repression and tolerance.

From Repression to Tolerance... and Back?

In 1956, all those who were responsible for the SED’s internal “purging” and who remained in upper party positions feared that their comrades would attempt to hold them accountable. While there had been no show trials in the DDR such as those held for László Rajk (1949), Trajtscho Kostov (1949), and Rudolf Slánský (1952) in Budapest, Sofia, and Prague, the SED was nonetheless forced to deal with the thorny issue of forced party discipline, which had shaped both recent history and the present. Since the party “purges” from the 1930s were still present in collective memory, internal party control had to be achieved through more subtle techniques of rule instead of the repressive measures used previously. These new techniques had to be perfected in a similar way to the earlier Stalinist coercive measures. That the party organs responsible for maintaining control implemented these new techniques of rule must be considered in connection with the changed political situation in the mid-to-late 1950s. These techniques served to concentrate power exclusively within the party leadership and sought to nip any real or presumed opposition in the bud.

Here we can only briefly refer to the fact that the party’s control and disciplinary measures spawned disaffection within the party, which subsequently had to be dealt with. The party leadership made the slogan “Party Unity” into the highest precept. After 1956, the leadership’s “struggle against revisionist tendencies” led only to a rather inconsequential destalinization policy. What this campaign did achieve was the key goal of securing the unlimited power of the Politburo. This policy of half-destalinization continued until around the end of the 1950s, at which point the number of repressive measures was generally reduced, despite not being renounced altogether.[32]

At the beginning of the 1960s, immediately following the construction of the Berlin Wall, the SED leadership begun taking a more flexible approach to dealing with party members. This transition even suggested that the party had adopted some degree of self-criticism. Party leaders now considered a show of unity with the people to be more important than pugnacious ideological disputes. They began to better accommodate people’s real needs instead of relying solely on indoctrination. This more measured approach was evidenced by those administrative measures that conceded some independence to the judiciary relative to the party. This was accompanied by more realistic economic and youth policies as well as by more openness toward Western cultural trends (until 1965), particularly regarding popular music.[33]

After Stalin’s death, the new freedoms, guaranteed to a limited extent by party and state, were still by no means protected. As in proto-bourgeois societies, they could be revoked at any moment.

All of these measures were designed to serve as the foundation for wide-ranging economic reforms within the framework established by the system. But this trend of liberalization was halted as soon as it became clear that GDR youth, who were fascinated by Western “beat” and hippie culture, were rebellious and hard to control. This was officially decided upon at a Central Committee meeting in November 1965.[34] Fear of spontaneous and uncontrollable events that might transgress the boundaries of the authoritarian model of rule finally led the SED leadership to abandon the economic reforms in the late 1960s.[35] The clocks were turned back, yet not to the point at which mass repression once again become a technique of rule. The “overcoming” of the 1968 “Czechoslovak crisis” — caused when the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded to suppress reforms within the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia — demonstrated the success of a double strategy in the GDR, which consciously relied on both the reintegration of dissenters and massive intimidation of anyone suspected of oppositional activity.[36]

It is worth noting that a policy of tolerance, as was implemented by the SED leadership, was a characteristic feature of proto-bourgeois societies. Kaiser Joseph II’s 1781 Edict of Toleration guaranteed religious freedom to Protestants in Austria, yet did not grant the Protestant church the same rights as the national Catholic Church. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia’s 1847 Edict of Tolerance can be understood similarly — namely as a political instrument of “enlightened absolutism”.

From a historical perspective, it is clear that the principle of tolerance initially did not at all influence the politics of Leninist Soviet Russia. Rather, the Council of People’s Commissars started out combining repressive measures with a politics of the emancipation of small groups such as ethnic minorities. The Soviet Russian authorities tolerated the Zionist movement until 1922, for example. Zionist parties were considered political opponents, but they were not branded as nemeses. Emigration to Palestine was not banned until 1928, while “Zionist” agricultural colonization projects, for example in Crimea, received limited state support.[37]

After Stalin’s death, the new freedoms, guaranteed to a limited extent by party and state, were still by no means protected. As in proto-bourgeois societies, they could be revoked at any moment. The character of this policy of tolerance, with all of its limitations, can be seen in the change in attitude toward the minority groups that previously had fallen victim to Stalinist violence.

Late Stalinist policies regarding religious minorities (or regarding the religiously inclined among the majority population) ranged from outright repression in Albania to occasional oppression in Czechoslovakia to the accord between state and church in the GDR and in Hungary. In Poland, the state party resigned itself to the massive influence of the Catholic Church and conceded it so much leeway that the situation almost came to resemble something like “dual rule” within the one society.[38]

It is a paradox of history that Jewish Communists in particular, who only months earlier had feared the power of the state, the party, and security apparatus, and especially the will of the Soviet dictator, now had to see in the presence of this very state power a guarantee for their — relatively — secure existence.

Policies regarding different socio-cultural minorities also varied widely. For example, efforts were made to limit Jewish people to the status of a religious community, and so to assimilate non-religious parts of the Jewish population. When this policy backfired in 1968, the Polish regime responded by forcing countless Jews out of the country, while at the same time in Romania some steps towards increased liberalization were taken. In the Soviet Union, very strict limits were set to the policy of tolerance in the long period between Lenin’s death and Gorbachev’s accession to power.[39]

With the burdensome legacy of Nazism in Germany, the GDR was an exception in the Soviet realm. In their efforts to understand the dimensions of the Holocaust, some researchers also investigated the relation between the international workers movement, particularly in its Communist branch, and antisemitism.[40] The Communist approach to this issue thoroughly grasped the social and political dimensions of antisemitism and Jewish emancipation, while ethnic and religious aspects were largely overlooked. As a result, the idiosyncrasy and irrationality of the motives behind Auschwitz were underestimated.[41]

The GDR’s policy toward its numerically marginal Jewish population groups adhered to the dictates of the Soviet Union. Yet repressive measures against Jews, as practised in the USSR since 1949, were adopted in the GDR in 1952–53 in a far milder form. The policy of Stalinist antisemitism put an end to the early phase of SED policies regarding Jews, which had been characterized not only by tolerance but proactive support. Such policies were abandoned with the advent of the antisemitic campaigns, for which ultimately not the SED but rather its Soviet sponsor were responsible. The campaigns against “cosmopolitanism” initiated by the Soviet Union impacted Jews, but also non-Jewish returnees from Western exile, far more than other parts of the population.[42]

At the end of 1952, the Stasi searched the offices of Jewish synagogues and confiscated many files. Many Jews were gripped by a deep fear. Five of the eight chairpeople of the Jewish Communities of East Germany and more than 400 Jews fled to the West. On the other hand, at no point did the SED cease its financial support for the communities, despite the Stasi suspecting them of being “agents of the class enemy”. In keeping with the Moscow line, the SED adopted the antisemitic rhetoric of the Slánský trial in Prague, while at the same time suppressing isolated incidents of antisemitism among the population.

The series of internal party “purges”, short-term imprisonments, professional demotions, and party expulsions reached its climax in the winter of 1952–53. Politburo member Paul Merker, who was not Jewish, was accused of having advised Jewish SED members to join the Jewish communities. Merker was also accused of having supported Zionism during his exile in Mexico. Further, he reputedly only supported compensation for the Nazi looting of Jewish property in order to help US capital penetrate into East Germany.

The Jewish communities were expected to conform to the official political line, yet they were not forced to take a position against Israel.

In a moving letter to the party leadership, Merker defended himself. He wrote: “I am neither Jewish nor a Zionist — although neither would be a crime — I never intended to flee to Palestine, and I did not support Zionist endeavours. I have … only expressed the view that, after the Jews were plundered by Hitler’s fascism, subjected to the worst offences, expelled from their homelands, and murdered by the millions simply for being Jewish, a profound feeling of solidarity paired with a desire for a country of their own has emerged among the Jews of different countries. And moreover, that we Germans in particular, among whom Hitler’s fascism developed, we who failed to block his rise to power and so to prevent his crimes through the actions of the working masses, must not ignore and certainly must not fight against the feeling Jewish people are having in response to the experience of the worst offences and outrages, one which I have described as the strengthening of a Jewish national feeling.”[43] It was only with Stalin’s death that the specific variant of antisemitism associated with his name, which went under the disguise of the “struggle against Zionism and cosmopolitanism”, would disappear. Yet Merker remained imprisoned until 1956.[44]

Conflicts over the 1953 East German uprising pushed the problem of antisemitism within the SED completely into the background. It is a paradox of history that Jewish Communists in particular, who only months earlier had feared the power of the state, the party, and security apparatus, and especially the will of the Soviet dictator, now had to see in the presence of this very state power a guarantee for their — relatively — secure existence. Yet not everyone was in a position to so quickly set aside what had happened only a few months prior. Alfred Kantorowicz, a literary historian and committed SED member, who was in hospital during the uprising, noted in his journal soon thereafter: “Why didn’t we intellectuals and old socialists place ourselves at the head of the movement? What have we done besides passive resistance, besides grouching, complaining, and intellectual self-glorification at the most?”[45] It remains uncertain whether the demonstrating workers would have actually listened to intellectuals who were supportive of the state. Jewish and non-Jewish communists alike believed that the violence jeopardized the “socialist order”. Precisely for that reason, they rallied around the SED leadership.[46]

Since then, the SED was able to maintain a policy of tolerance toward both the Jewish communities and secular Jews. The memory of the Nazi genocide of the Jews was preserved, even if in a rather one-sided way.[47] The Jewish communities were expected to conform to the official political line, yet they were not forced to take a position against Israel.[48] In the 1980s, this measured tolerance was replaced by the active support of Jewish culture and Jewish religious life. The reasons for this change lie in Jewish people’s strong interest in contacts with the United States, their improved standing in the Federal Republic of Germany, as well as in the new freedom that emerged in Soviet politics under Gorbachev. The latter was expressly opposed to all forms of antisemitism.

Between Repression and Tolerance

This leads us to a question that has been discussed from a new perspective in recent years: the question of the fractured loyalty of Communist intellectuals in the GDR. If in the first decades since the fall of the GDR, moral standards predominated in the judgement of intellectuals’ behaviour, with concepts such as resistance and conformism being front and centre, the last decade has seen a shift of perspective. Gerd Dietrich, in his magisterial three-volume cultural history of the GDR,[49] and French historian Sonia Combe both emphasize that Communist GDR intellectuals played a limited yet by no means negligible role in the expansion of public discourse, despite that discourse being subject to stringent limitations by the party leadership and its apparatus. Such limits were also subject to unforeseeable changes, catching party-affiliated intellectuals by surprise, as they were suddenly accused of deviating from the party line, or even of being dissidents despite their best intentions. The roles they were forced to internalize as party members conflicted with their role as active communist intellectuals.[50]

Until the very end, party-aligned intellectuals from the founding generation of the GDR often obscured the system’s fundamental contradictions. Instead, they saw themselves as the natural allies of the party’s upper echelons. Why didn’t the decision-makers come to them to discuss things, Anna Seghers naively asked at a meeting of the GDR Authors Association, immediately after the eleventh plenum of the SED Central Committee banned a range of books and films in 1965.[51] She did not want to acknowledge where the line separating emancipation from repression lay. In 1968, she refused even the meagre help she could have offered her friends who were being persecuted by the “normalization” measures in Prague following the invasion.

Sonia Combe tells the history of the failed and persecuted reformers of GDR socialism, from Robert Havemann to Rudolf Bahro (but unfortunately not the “internal” economic reformers such as Fritz Behrens, Arne Benary, and Gunther Kohlmey) from the perspective of what Jürgen Kuczynski called the “party-loyal dissidents”, which he also considered himself to be. Kuczynski and Georg Lukács in Hungary — Sonia Combe notes certain parallels between the two despite the age difference — both mildly revolted against Stalinism in texts published in 1956–57, and both belonged to the generation of the Russian October Revolution. “Both were Marxists in the strict sense, intellectuals in the party, as opposed to those who were intellectuals of the party and who adapted their thinking to the needs of the party.”[52] Although both were driven by strong professional ambition, as evidenced by the volume of their publications, it was nonetheless true of both that “neither careerism nor opportunism were decisive characteristics, and for good reason: the stood above such mundane things.”[53] Both understood the need to refrain from day-to-day disputes. But this form of commitment to communism exacted a high price.

Conflicts over remaining or leaving, supporting or opposing the repression created rifts that could no longer be bridged.

In the 1970s, after the sometimes extreme intimidation of Robert Havemann and Stefan Heym and after Wolf Biermann was stripped of his citizenship and Rudolf Bahro was imprisoned, some of the best intellectual students of antifascist intellectuals broke with the GDR, although not necessarily with the idea of socialism, and emigrated to the West, including Jurek Becker, Klaus Schlesinger, and Bettina Wegner. Conflicts over remaining or leaving, supporting or opposing the repression created rifts that could no longer be bridged. Yet as for those from the generation of GDR founders who remained in the GDR, they preferred silence — with the exception of Stefan Heym.

But why did they remain silent? In Der Turm von Babel, Hans Mayer struggles to find an answer. In a passage of the book, “Excursus: Hanna and Kurt. A Story”, he writes: “Of course they weren’t named Hanna and Kurt when they were alive, for they once were alive. Now they are figures in a story and are named Hanna and Kurt. They were not spared. They spared neither themselves nor others, and in the end others did not spare them either.”[54]

Hanna and Kurt’s real names were Paul Böttcher and Rachel Dübendorfer. Böttcher (1891–1975), a typesetter from Leipzig, joined the SPD in his youth and then moved via the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) to the KPD in 1920, from which he was expelled in 1929. He joined the anti-Stalinist KPD opposition. In Swiss exile, Böttcher returned to the KPD in 1934. Over the next ten years, he performed important intelligence work in Geneva for the Soviet Union and became one of the key figures of the Red Orchestra.

In 1945, he returned to Germany. Together with his long-term collaborator and companion Rachel Dübendorfer, he was invited to Moscow in 1946. Rather than the being welcomed with a military decoration, as he anticipated, Stalin’s regime greeted him with a secret trial, including imprisonment in Vorkuta and other grim places. It was not until 1956 that both, having been imprisoned in different places, came to the GDR. They would only be half-heartedly rehabilitated there. Böttcher became deputy editor of the Leipziger Volkszeitung, which at the time served as the SED’s local press organ. Walter Hedeler was editor-in-chief there for a period; he, too, had survived the Soviet “gulag archipelago”. Rachel Dübendorfer (1900–1973) returned to the GDR with serious mental disorders; Hans Mayer painted a dismal portrait of a mentally deranged woman: “A confounded spirit and obdurate till the end. A delirium perhaps, which made everything bearable. Flight into meaningless loyalty, so as to not have to endure the total lie.”[55]

As the ‘last revolutionaries’, the Communist resistance fighters considered their own political standards and norms to be binding for the entire population. This generation’s experience of political persecution under fascism led to a hardening of attitudes and the development of enemy stereotypes that were never shattered.

In reality, Rachel Dübendorfer gradually recovered; her daughter’s visits to Berlin from Paris were particularly helpful in this regard. She remained a loyal party member until her death, but had no more contact with Böttcher. He also returned to the party, and remained in contact with Hans Mayer, who up until 1963 was a professor in Leipzig and who he knew from their exile in Switzerland. Yet Böttcher “rarely visited. There was nothing more to discuss. Much remained in the zone of silence. I was not disappointed with him. What he did was no different than what the stubborn Hanna had devised to protect herself.”[56]

“Hanna and Kurt” understood their self-imposed silence to be a kind of service to the “cause”. This service was a continuation of their Communist work from the period of opposition, exile, and persecution. But from the beginning it must have been based on self-deception. It was too unstable a bond. It proved too weak to hold the GDR together at a time when Communists were wielding state power and no longer had to subject it to democratic oversights, even if such power was also shored up by the protection of the Soviets.

The concepts of repression and tolerance can thus partially explain the manifold and contradictory dimensions of political rule in the GDR, but GDR society, for as long as it existed, demands further explanation. To my mind, the — sometimes fractured — loyalty of party activists constitutes a unique characteristic, whether it be considered positive or negative. It was this loyalty, which entwined the antifascist legacy, hopes for a better world, and a desperate flight from reality in different ways by different individuals, which also contributed to the internal stability of the GDR beyond the Soviet battalion, although it was not infinite. Of course, for a new generation of GDR Communists who only knew war and persecution from books, the party’s year-long training for members, and stories from the generation of founders, other aspects were important: not least also a careerist conduct, which led many SED comrades intent on climbing the ladder to seek new benefactors after the end of the GDR.

In the Thicket of Selective Truths

In the thicket of the selective truths and selective silences sketched here, a renewed reckoning with the antifascist heritage of the GDR came into our purview. Today, covert and open fascists want to do away with this heritage, while well-meaning liberals reduce it a burden to bear. Essentially, antifascism in its specific GDR form was a projection of the suffering, the life experiences, and the worldview of the representatives of the Communist resistance onto the whole of society. The ideological and cultural hegemony of this minority experience was the expression of the dominance of this political generation. It stood at the founding of the GDR and held decisive power and influence until the very end.

This class demanded that, given its participation in the resistance to Hitler and its own, often tragic, history of persecution, it ought to be able to determine the orientation and goals of the reorganization of the GDR. As the “last revolutionaries”, the Communist resistance fighters considered their own political standards and norms to be binding for the entire population.[57] This generation’s experience of political persecution under fascism led to a hardening of attitudes and the development of enemy stereotypes that were never shattered. All of this had enduring impacts on the domestic atmosphere of the GDR, a GDR that tolerated minor freedoms at the cost of refraining from any political engagement, yet in doing so distanced itself from the its original Marxist approach.

In 1938, the Russian-Belgian socialist Victor Serge wrote to Leon Trotsky, criticizing him, saying that,

Marxism ... was libertarian in words and only for a short time, during the brief period of Soviet democracy which extended from October, 1917, to the summer of 1918. Then it pulled itself together and resolutely entered on the path of the old “statism” — authoritarian, and soon totalitarian. It lacked the sense of liberty. ... The Bolshevik leaders of the great years lacked neither the knowledge nor intelligence nor energy. They lacked revolutionary audacity whenever it was necessary to seek [after 1918] the solution of their problems in the freedom of the masses and not in government constraint. They built systematically not the Communist State which they announced, but a State strong in the old sense of the word, strong in its police, in its censorship, its monopolies, its all-powerful bureaus. In this respect, the contrast is striking between the Bolshevist programme of 1917 and the political structure created by Bolshevism. After victory had been won in the Civil War, the socialist solution of the problems of the new society should have been sought in workers’ democracy, the stimulation of initiative, freedom of thought, freedom for the working-class groups, and not, as it was, in centralisation of power, repression of heresies, the monolithic single-party system, the narrow orthodoxy of an official school of thought. The dominance and ideology of a single party should have foreshadowed the dominance and ideology of a single leader. This extreme concentration of power, this dread of liberty and of ideological variations, this conditioning to absolute authority disarmed the masses and led to the strengthening of the bureaucracy.

Serge concluded: “Freedom is a necessity for socialism; the spirit of freedom is as vital to Marxism as oxygen is to living beings.”[58]

This essay was prepared as a lecture written for the Kantine Festival in Chemnitz on 23 July 2024. Translated by Hunter Bolin and Marty Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective.