Authors: Frederick Taylor
The one-man anomaly that was Wolf Biermann finally provided one of the great absurdist jokes of the Cold War. In November 1976, while touring in West Germany, he was stripped of his East German citizenship and banned from going home. A regime that had expended billions of marks and hundreds of lives to stop its people from leaving, now forbade one of its most famous citizens to come back.
At worst the regime’s attitude towards those who refused to go along with its plans for a society composed of ‘new human beings’ veered into a murderous Stalinist security obsession. At best it resembled a puzzled adult trying to correct a child who keeps trying to go ‘down’ on an ‘up’ escalator. The ‘up’ escalator of History. Does this uninformed little person not see that such behaviour is not just wrong but dangerous?
All the same, the treaties brought a tidal wave of West German visitors to the GDR. Both West Germans and West Berliners could now travel at will, whether as simple tourists or to see families and friends long trapped behind the border.
At Friedrichstrasse station, where thousands now crossed between West and East every day, the GDR built a glass-and-steel bunker to process visitors in and out. Great queues would form at night there, when Western day-trippers (who had to be back on the train at midnight, Cinderella-fashion) entered and waited to go downstairs to the complex of underground processing halls, where he or she would shuffle their way to sections labelled ‘Westberlin’, ‘BRD’ (West Germany), or ‘citizens of other states’.
The infamously ill-mannered and brusque border officials would check passports, ensure no one had abused the currency regulations (which forced compulsory amounts of East German marks to be taken into the country but none to be brought out) and—when finally he or she was satisfied that the security of the Workers’ and Peasants’ State had not
been undermined in any major way—press a button that allowed the traveller to pass through. If they were entering the East, travellers would emerge into the Eastern part of the station, where taxis or further S-and U-Bahn trains would be waiting to take them where they wanted to go in East Berlin. If they were leaving for the West, they would end up on the westbound platform that would take they back over the Wall into West Berlin. Many heart-rendingly emotional scenes occurred outside, as East Germans greeted or bid farewell to their Western friends or relatives. Berliners dubbed this intimidating complex the ‘Palace of Tears’ (
Tränenpalast
).
Whether arriving directly at the border around the established checkpoints at Helmstedt or Hof, or taking advantage of the other frontier posts that were opened up in the 1970s, Volkswagens, Audis and Mercedes were now frequent sights on the pot-holed and cobbled roads of the GDR. The West German cousins were making full use of their visiting rights.
Claus Christian Malzahn, West Berlin resident but son of refugees from the Leipzig area of East Germany, recalls how in the 1970s, once the treaties were signed, they could suddenly cross the Iron Curtain and visit the rest of the family whenever they wanted. There would be scarce Western treats for the Eastern relations-Rolling Stones albums for the kids, fresh real coffee for the grown-ups. On the return trip home, the car would be loaded up with model railways (a speciality in the GDR), carved toys for which the Thuringian Forest was famous, and Christmas stollen.
Every summer without fail there would be a get-together of the entire clan. A great table would be laid out in the open, groaning with all the things the Eastern relations always complained they could never get, but which miraculously materialised on special occasions:
The conversations at table would first centre on friends and relations: who’s been sick, who got married, who bought a new car. Then the grown-ups would talk politics. First off, the spokesman for the East, my uncle by marriage from Keutschen, would complain about shortages of materials, the restrictive travel policy of the government, and the Soviet-style sloppiness in technical equipment. Then the spokesman for the
West, an uncle who had been born in the East but meanwhile lived in Schleswig-Holstein, would reply that things here were not so bad really. After all, a lot of stuff here was free, for instance places in kindergartens, and a lot was cheap, for example bread. And in the West everything wasn’t perfect either, unemployment was a total scourge, especially among young people and so on and so on. The end of the song was that in the final analysis life could be tough in both countries, and everyone had his cross to bear. This had nothing to do with pretending that everything in the GDR was lovely. Rather, it was the basic condition for a family truce-and also a question of good manners.
Because among brothers no one should be better off than the others, and even if he is, for God’s sake he should never admit it. Would it be right to paint the good life in the West in vivid colours for those stuck with living in the ‘Dumb Remnant’ {contemptuous Western slang for the GDR}? Would it be right to remind them that even a jobless guy in Bremen in the West could live better than a skilled worker in Eastern Bitterfeld? Of course, our relatives knew this perfectly well. So after an hour of political chat, we left it alone, drank another beer-and told jokes until dawn. As a child one thing really struck me: in my West/East family, there was a lot of laughter.
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But this ‘normalisation’ was only partial. The East still treated the West as ‘the enemy’. Both sides had long spied on each other, but in the 1960s and 1970s the
Stasi
’s foreign-espionage department, the ‘Main Administration for Reconnaissance’ (HVA) was hugely expanded. Its head, Markus Wolf, had grown up in exile in the USSR as son of a well-known German Communist writer, Friedrich Wolf. Bilingual in Russian and German, highly intelligent and renowned for his charm, he rapidly climbed the hierarchy after 1945 and was put in charge of the HVA in 1957 at the astonishingly young age of thirty-four. He was both admired and feared in the West. John le Carré is said to have modelled his fictional KGB mastermind Karla, after Wolf.
With a strength totalling almost 4,000, lavishly funded and equipped, the HVA was especially adept at penetrating West Germany with ‘sleepers’. One of these, specially trained and sent into the West in 1956 among many thousands of refugees from the GDR, was Günter
Guillaume. Guillaume’s cover was that of a firmly anti-Communist Social Democrat, and so it was that over the years he rose through the ranks of the SPD to become a prominent aide to Willy Brandt and finally, in 1972, his personal assistant and constant companion.
Early on the morning of 24 April 1974, the doorbell rang at the villa in Bonn where Guillaume lived with his wife (also a
Stasi
agent) and his children (who knew nothing of their father’s true identity). Guillaume answered the door in his dressing gown. His visitors identified themselves as officials of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, West Germany’s equivalent of the FBI or MI5.
‘Are you Herr Günter Guillaume?’ asked one of the officials. ‘We have a warrant for your arrest.’
At this point, Guillaume made a fatal error. He drew himself up to his full height and announced: ‘I am a citizen and officer of the GDR-respect that fact!’
Actually, they had no conclusive evidence against Guillaume until he incriminated himself.
Guillaume was the most prominent of a host of
Stasi
‘sleepers’ or ‘moles’ in West Germany, including senior members of the West German intelligence service, government and business communities. His arrest changed the course of post-war German history. It spelled the abrupt end of Willy Brandt’s career as chancellor. Brandt had survived a great deal, but he could not survive this. He took responsibility for the catastrophic failure of security and resigned, to be succeeded by a hard-headed SPD politician from Hamburg, Helmut Schmidt. Schmidt was a doer where Brandt could be a dreamer, tough where Brandt was instinctively conciliatory, a man who though never a Nazi had served like millions of other Germans in Hitler’s
Wehrmacht
. Schmidt continued with the ‘convergence’ policy towards the East, but his most obvious achievements were those of the ‘hard man’ who handled the mid-1970s economic recession and the growth of leftist urban terrorism. A new era of pragmatism had arrived.
Few in either East or West thought that the GDR was doomed. To consider a case such as the Guillaume affair, which brought down a great political leader, was to feel regret and anxiety. It was, at the same time,
hard to avoid a certain respect for an organisation like the
Stasi
that could achieve such a thing, and regard for the state that stood behind that organisation. And there was the Wall, stronger and more impregnable by the year. Above all, the GDR seemed to be enjoying a considerable amount of prosperity, not just compared with other Eastern countries, but also even when measured against much of the West.
If we were to believe the figures coming out of East Berlin, the GDR’s own ‘economic miracle’ was almost comparable with West Germany’s. Towards the end of the 1970s, it was even claimed (the figures were published by the World Bank) that the GDR had a higher standard of living, expressed as per-capita income in dollars, than Great Britain. This contradicted all other evidence, especially empirical observation, but was widely cited by the East and by friends of the Soviet system as a key indication that the GDR was turning into a rampant economic success story.
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In fact, the relatively sunny exterior of Honecker’s East Germany belied permanent structural problems. Once the tourist got away from the showcase streets of East Berlin, Dresden, Leipzig or Halle, he or she would find decaying, shabby buildings (often beautiful old structures that in the West would have had materials and attention lavished upon them as a matter of course). By the same token, a combination of statistical sleight of hand, startlingly unconventional economic improvisation, and frankly brutal exploitation of human misery held sway behind the GDR’s façade.
During the previous few years, like other Communist countries such as Poland and Hungary, East Germany had embarked on a policy of importing technology from the West in the hope of raising productivity.
To do this, the government in East Berlin had accepted Western credits, assuming it would be able to repay them from the economic improvements these imports would bring. But from 1973, when the first oil crisis hit, the GDR had serious energy and raw-materials problems. Cheap raw materials and oil from Russia made up for the truncated state’s lack of natural resources, and favourable price agreements compensated for the lack of real productivity increases in the GDR’s industry. In the mid-1970s, the Soviet Union raised its prices for vital supplies of fuel and raw materials. In 1979-80 came the second ‘oil shock’, and the Soviet
Union reduced its oil deliveries to the GDR. The country slid into a situation of massive indebtedness to both the USSR and the West.
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The GDR was in a state of crisis that continued for the rest of its existence. For Honecker, it had become an article of faith that the people must be kept happy with consumer goods and social benefits, or the regime would risk another 1953. There was a social-security and welfare system to pay for-the cradle-to-grave safety net that helped compensate East Germans for their lack of freedom to travel, express themselves fully, or enrich themselves. And an army and a security apparatus-after the USSR, the GDR had proportionately the second-highest military budget in the entire East Bloc (5.8 per cent of GDP), twice or even three times those of its allies.
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The NVA, the
Stasi
at home and abroad, the cost of maintaining, extending, and manning the Wall, not just in Berlin but also along the entire length of the East/West German border, all these calls on the East German state finances were sky-high and, as the balance of payments situation deteriorated, crippling.
The state responded in a way unusual in a modern industrial country. It basically set up a completely alternative, secret economy that it didn’t have to account for. The organisation that controlled this, a shadowy branch of the administration, highly secret and closely tied in with the
Stasi
, was known by the curious title of ‘Commercial Co-ordination’ (KoKo). Founded in 1966, KoKo was charged with earning hard currency outside the normal, planned economic system.
The advantage, as the GDR accumulated foreign debts, was that KoKo, this secret store of foreign currency, wasn’t liable for payment of interest on foreign loans and could be used to plug gaps in the state’s finances. Always allowed great independence, it was totally detached from the Foreign-Trade Ministry by a Politburo resolution in 1972, and thereafter its full activities (and the amount of hard-currency funds it controlled) were declared no longer subject to the usual banking supervision. The full extent of KoKo’s machinations was known only to a handful of figures in the leadership, especially Honecker.
Through KoKo, the élite at Wandlitz were supplied with Western goods and personal luxuries unavailable to the vast majority of East Germans. Once Honecker himself became leader in the early 1970s, he gained personal control of a hard-currency bank account, the so-called
‘General Secretary’s account’, number 0628 at the Deutsche Handelsbank in East Berlin. By order, this had always to contain a minimum of a hundred million marks. Honecker used it for whatever purposes he saw fit. He might decide to donate forty million marks’ worth of grain to Nicaragua, or make a grant of eighty million to Poland during the political difficulties there. He might, as he did one year, personally write a cheque for two million marks for the importation of apples in order to counteract a fruit shortage in the GDR.
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The image of the General Secretary as absolutist ruler, dealing out largess at his gracious whim, grew year by year; back to the eighteenth century again.