Authors: Frederick Taylor
Nevertheless, it was not enough just to keep arresting the country’s awkward citizens and strengthening the already stiflingly efficient internal-security apparatus—though both these things occurred in the period after 13 August 1961. Ordinary East Germans had to be given reasons to say yes to the regime. Some steam had to be allowed to escape from the pressure cooker. There had to be carrot as well as stick.
In accord with this principle, that hitherto unrepentant Stalinist, Ulbricht, now found sufficient courage to start experimenting a little. He fell in line with Khrushchev’s continuing anti-Stalin campaign at the XXII. Congress in October 1961. East Berlin’s Stalinallee became Karl-Marx-Allee, and the great dictator’s name vanished from other streets, factories, and other institutions too.
In economic matters, Ulbricht was surprisingly supportive of reform measures. There was more flexibility in pricing, an increased emphasis on the importance of technocratic expertise and R&D in industries, and the masses were also to be granted more consumer goods. This was a far cry from the triumphant attempt to overtake West Germany through rigorous ‘command economics’ in the late 1950s. It showed that Ulbricht was capable of learning a lesson if it revealed itself clearly enough.
While the so-called ‘New Economic System’ was being implemented, the government also brought in a whole new mass of social measures. There were intended to make the average East German more aware of the advantages of living in a closely knit, cradle-to-grave socialist system. Measures to improve the status and social involvement of youth (the young had always been a bit of a problem) while at the same time relaxing previously rigid political controls, an improved educational system, reformed family law, and so on—all impressively progressive and humane in their basic principles—were intended to help the GDR’s citizens, confined as they now were, not just to accept their lot but even to see some advantage in it.
The new youth code even allowed the kids some jazz and a little pop music, ‘properly channelled’ of course. There was a limited cultural thaw in which works were published such as Christa Wolf’s novel,
Der Geteilte Himmel
(
The Divided Heaven
), which dealt with a family divided by the Berlin Wall, albeit in a way that on the whole favoured the regime. Satirical leftists like the young Wolf Biermann (an ideological immigrant from West Germany) were also tolerated for a while.
The new family law recognised marriage and children as the basic unit and encouraged men to help with those family responsibilities. The regime might still talk of creating the ‘socialist personality’, but for most East Germans their way of life was starting to more closely resemble that of the traditional lower middle class than of a proletarian-revolutionary vanguard.
The ‘New Economic System’ didn’t work all that well, but it worked better than the previous model. With the haemorrhaging of the population staunched, and increased support from other East Bloc governments, the perception of most East Germans in the later 1960s and 1970s was of
relative comfort and prosperity. Private consumption per household rose by almost a quarter between 1965 and 1970.
There remained problems with the supply of everyday items such as toothbrushes, potatoes, sanitary towels and toilet paper, but between 1960 and 1970, the percentage of households in possession of a TV set increased from 16.7 per cent to 69.1 per cent, of a refrigerator from 6.1 per cent to 56.4 per cent, and of a washing machine from 6.2 per cent to 53.6 per cent, 3.2 per cent of East Germans owned a car in 1960, 15.6 per cent in 1970—though cars were expensive and waiting times for delivery years-long.
17
Some called it ‘an East German economic miracle’. This was an exaggeration, but from a material point of view life was more tolerable than it had been in the 1950s.
The regime gradually gained from an obvious but key fact: the generation growing into adulthood within the decade after the Wall was built had no experience of any other kind of society. As one East German woman born around 1950 would say after 1989, she had not realised before the fall of the Wall that the place she lived in was so shabby, so grey, or its air so polluted. Compared with other Eastern European countries—the only foreign places East Germans could visit—the GDR seemed a quite advanced place that enjoyed a good standard of living.
18
Apart from the élite—whose cosseted lifestyle at Wandlitz and elsewhere was hidden from the masses—almost no East Germans could be called rich. But there was free kindergarten provision, free medical care, subsidised rents and vacations (the latter usually organised through state-controlled trade unions and professional organisations), and free higher education for those of whom the state approved. If you conformed, and had no unusual ambitions or desires for an alternative lifestyle, and paid your dues literally and metaphorically to the SED or the ‘block’ parties, life could feel tranquil and secure.
And there were other things to be proud of in the ‘other Germany’. In the early 1950s, the state began an enormously ambitious campaign of encouraging sport. What began as a measure to improve health and productivity turned into a headlong quest for national prestige. Promising young athletes were picked out at an early age and sent to special sports schools. There, apart from the usual school lessons, the children
were subjected to intensive training under strict discipline and a background of uncompromising political indoctrination. As they approached adulthood, the most successful were directed into thirty or so extremely well-financed and equipped sports clubs in major towns and cities. These were often associated with the army and the
Stasi
, in which athletes were offered secure jobs that enabled them to retain a technical amateur status. At the Leipzig Researach Institute for Physical Culture and Sport (Forschungsinstitut für Körperkultur und Sport), high-grade sports instructors and coaches were trained to manage the sports offensive.
The rewards for successful coaches and athletes were high: foreign travel, privileged treatment when it came to homes and cars, bonuses in Western currency. Unfortunately, the price was often equally high. At the 1968 Mexico Olympics, the GDR’s team achieved third place in the medals table, behind only the USA and the USSR. Many competitors were already on dangerous performance-enhancing drugs such as anabolic steroids and hormones.
Olympic success strengthened this trend. From 1969, a comprehensive doping programme was embarked on. The Leipzig Institute, the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin, and the Jenapharm drugs company all collaborated shamelessly to ensure that East German athletes kept their place at the top of the international rankings. Such world-beating achievements provided other countries with a positive image of the German Communist state, as well as a sorely needed focus for communal pride back in the GDR. For a state of only sixteen million to enjoy such success was indeed amazing. Only after 1989 would the extent of this ruthless state conspiracy become clear. Many children and young people were given these powerful and often damaging drugs without their parents’ permission, and many, as they experience middle age, suffer from disastrous long-term effects.
19
In his twilight years, Walter Ulbricht presided over a walled fiefdom that eerily resembled the autocratic Prussian state of two centuries previously. East Germany was likewise an obsessively micro-managed, paternalistic, militarised economy in which the market-place played second fiddle to necessities of state, and where freakishly pumped-up fighters (in this case from the sports arena rather than the battlefield) were paraded for its ruler’s delectation. We do not know if the ‘tall
fellows’ of the East German athletics team were marched through Ulbricht’s bedroom, with the Communist leader in the voyeuristic role of the order-besotted ‘soldier king’ Frederick Wilhelm I. But since 13 August 1961 there was a wall around the city of Berlin once more—from which in the twentieth century ‘deserters’ would be shot while trying to escape, just as they had been in the eighteenth.
It would be for Ulbricht’s successor to take the next logical step and reintroduce a cult of Prussia and Frederick the Great to provide some desperately needed historical backbone to the GDR. For East Germany’s stubborn, squeaky-voiced creator, it was perhaps enough to have survived and fashioned, at whatever cost to its inhabitants, an entity that reflected what he had been dreaming of since his fevered, working-class adolescence back in imperial German Leipzig.
Ulbricht was removed from real power in the East German state at the age of seventy-seven, in May 1971. Leonid Brezhnev, Khrushchev’s dour successor as leader of the Soviet Union, had decided that his German satellite needed new blood at the top.
Ulbricht lived on for a little more than two years, his health slowly failing, still left with the title of president of the Council of State, but bereft of the power he had once wielded. He was not even allowed to choose his own visitors, who were selected by the Politburo’s protocol department.
A photograph of the celebrations for Ulbricht’s last birthday, in June 1973, shows the visibly aged former strongman of German Communism at eighty. The venue is the banqueting hall of the Council of State building. He crouches in a chair from which he is unable to rise, due to infirmity. His gaze is levelled downwards. His successor, Erich Honecker, stands at a microphone reading from a commemorative album, while behind Honecker the members of the Politburo loom impassively in their ill-fitting, buttoned-up suits. This is a tedious duty call for them. So far as can be seen, there is no other audience to the event. The faint rictus playing on the prone former leader’s face may express physical pain. Equally, it may express the frustration and anger of a decaying, once-mighty animal reduced to helpless dependency on creatures he once despised. If Ulbricht had the strength, perhaps he would tear all their throats out. But he does not and cannot.
Walter Ulbricht died five weeks later, on 1 August 1973, at his lakeside house on the Döllnsee. It was here, twelve years before, that he had invited his underlings to take tea with him and pay him obeisance, the day before the Berlin Wall was built.
WEST BERLIN TOO HAD
changed by the time Ulbricht died.
Joachim Trenkner had escaped the East in 1959, two years before the Wall was built. Although he had cheated the refugee system to stay in West Berlin, his initial time there was actually fairly short. A few months after 13 August, someone told him the Americans were offering scholarships to young West Berliners who wanted to study in the United States. These generous stipends were part of the cultural-exchange programme which the President’s brother Robert Kennedy had promoted so keenly, seeing it as a way of inoculating Germans against Communism.
Joachim applied for a scholarship and got it. So in 1962, he went to study at De Pauw College, a small university in the American Midwest. There he met and married an American girl. Together they moved to New York, where he worked for some years at the magazine
Newsweek
, beginning a career as a writer and cross-media journalist that proved long and successful. The marriage eventually failed, and he decided to return to Berlin.
When Joachim (now often known as ‘Jo’) landed once again at Tegel Airport, he was thirty and the year was 1968. Money had poured into the beleaguered city since 1961 and the place was full of new building projects, like the modernistic Europa Center in the Budapester Strasse, which reminded him of a ‘little Manhattan’. And the psychology of the place had changed too:
People seemed to be free of fear and less tense than earlier, the city had become more international, with countless Italian, Chinese or Turkish restaurants. Americans, Brits and the French looked after security, and the Berliners had grown accustomed to the Wall. And there was something
else new in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Often, all too often, there were demonstrations taking place, demonstrations against the protecting power, America, which was pursuing a bloody war in far-off Vietnam.
1
The late Hungarian composer, György Ligeti, who knew West Berlin well, called the half-city a ‘surreal cage’, a bizarre prison in which paradoxically only those locked up inside were free.
2
In fact, in the late 1960s—and certainly by the 1970s—West Berlin came to resemble in significant ways the ‘free city’ that had been Khrushchev’s brainwave back in 1958.
True, its population of just over two million survived because of huge subsidies from the half-city’s rich ‘big brother’, the Federal Republic. But West Berlin was not West Germany. It operated under different laws and had-increasingly—a curious social and political flavour all of its own. Cut off from its economic and demographic hinterland, and from almost half its former urban area (and a third of its former population), West Berlin was truly an island in the Communist sea.
The majority of established Berliners were still pro-Allies and especially pro-American. They still cheered at Christmas, when the tanks of the 40th Armoured toured Steglitz and Zehlendorf with Santa Claus in full fig in the turret and toys for the local kids.
3
America was the guarantee that their freedoms would not go the same way as those of their friends and relatives in East Berlin.
But the established Berliners no longer entirely dictated the tone. During the 1960s, the balance of the city began to change. In the early days after the Wall was built, the city had feared a flight of financial and human capital. So-called
Zittergeld
(literally: tremble-money) was paid to families and individuals prepared to stay in or come to the city marooned among the Communists. Manufacturing industries, including electrical equipment, machine-tools and the garment business, suffered from the unreliability and expense of the transit routes that were now the only ways in and out of West Berlin. No armaments or equipment with military applications could be manufactured there. People of working age were leaking away to the West, along with major parts of the city’s manufacturing industry.