Thomas Grossbölting

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, ideas of what the DDR was like were still just as divided as they had been during the existence of the East German state between 1949 and 1990. There's the "official", "Western", narrative of the SED-dictatorship, the oppressive state with its associated crew of guilty perpetrators and their mass of innocent victims, rescued from a terrible fate by their noble friends in the West; there's also a rival, self-justifying narrative of "it wasn't all bad" from Ossies who didn't necessarily appreciate being rescued from their dull but safe socialist environment into a new capitalist paradise of poverty, asset-stripping and unemployment, and there is also the subtle temptation of Ostalgie, an uncritical cult of the cultural products of the vanished state.

Professor Großbölting — who had previously worked as a historian at the Stasi Documentation Centre, the BStU — put together this symposium of essays by an assortment of specialist historians and sociologists exploring some of the most prominent or persistent myths about the DDR. Was it really — as the title asks — a state dedicated to world peace, a nation of readers, or of athletes? Did it have a magnificent social-care system, high-quality education, a progressive attitude to the role of women in society and a first-class army? Or a bankrupt economy and the most all-pervasive secret police outside Switzerland?

Well, I don't suppose anyone will be surprised at the conclusions, which range from "no" to "yes, but...". The Workers' and Peasants' State had neither the economic nor the geopolitical clout to live up to its stated aims, trapped as it was by military domination from the Soviet Union on the one side and the presence of the successful, dynamic Federal Republic on the other. Even if that hadn't been the case, it was stuck with a set of political leaders who had been trained under Stalin and became increasingly sclerotic — and impossible to update — as time went on. The economy was initially ravaged by Soviet "reparations" and continued to be constrained by restrictions on trade that forced it to make locally what could more efficiently have been bought in; the renowned social system had huge gaps, especially in areas like pensions; the "emancipation" of women was successful in getting them into the workforce, but made no real attempt to change roles and attitudes beyond that; the education system suffered from an undue focus on ideology rather than ability, and was latterly very underfunded; East German internationalism was undermined at home by suspicion of outsiders and abroad by the successful West German campaign to prevent international recognition of the DDR; East Germany did astonishingly well at harvesting Olympic medals, but this was based partly on a cynical concentration on those disciplines ("Sport I") where individuals could win many medals and partly on a powerful diet of anabolic steroids; DDR citizens might have read more books per head than anyone else outside the Soviet Union, but that was only because there was nothing else to do: they stopped doing so as soon as the wall came down(*). And so on.

When it comes to his own specialist topic, the "Stasi-state", Großbölting nuances things the other way. Obviously, it is undeniable that the scale and sheer nastiness of the Stasi's activities had a huge influence on the way the DDR is perceived, but he asks us to reflect on to what extent the notion of the Stasi-state and the constant stream of revelations about the contents of Stasi files after the Wende was deliberately encouraged by people in power who had less spectacular misdeeds to hide. He points out that we really need to know more about how it all fitted into ordinary life. One interesting throwaway comment in his essay contrasts the Gestapo during the Nazi period, which received so many voluntary tips and denunciations from the German public that it wasn't able to follow more than a fraction of them up, with the Stasi, which had to go out and actively recruit the members of its vast network of "informal associates" and to use all the ingenuity and coercive methods at its disposal to get useful information out of them.

No great revelations, but some interesting detail, which certainly filled in a lot of little gaps in my knowledge.

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(*) Großbölting commissioned independent publisher Christoph Links to write the essay on "reading in the DDR". In the proper socialist tradition, there obviously had to be a quid pro quo, so guess who published the book...… (plus d'informations)