Authors: Frederick Taylor
In 1939, industrial production per head in the region that would a decade later become the GDR amounted to 725 Reichsmarks per year. In the territories that would become West Germany, production per head was only 609 Reichsmarks.
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Take one example, the Saxon metropolis of Leipzig. After 1945, most of the publishing industry, the tobacco industry, the printing industry (including Gisecke & Devrient, the largest banknote printer in the world), all huge employers, left Leipzig for the West. The same went for the German bibliographical and copyright library, which transferred to Frankfurt-on-Main, as did the German Football Association.
The senior management at Zeiss emigrated from Jena and Dresden to
the West in the aftermath of war. Although optics and camera works continued in operation in the GDR, and did quite well by comparison with other industries, the world-wide resurgence of the brand after the war was based on new, modern factories near Stuttgart. Wella, an international market leader in the hair-care, cosmetics and perfume business, founded in Rothenkirchen in Saxony in 1880, relocated to Darmstadt, in the American Zone of West Germany. The East Berlin brake-system manufacturer, Knorr-Bremse, moved to Munich. The examples go on and on.
In West Germany, the creativity and energy of an industrious, educated population, kick-started by the Marshall Plan and bolstered by rapid transfers of human and physical capital from the East, produced the famous ‘economic miracle’. The East, which should have been even more advantaged, never really recovered under the bureaucratic, centrally directed command structure that remained, for all the talk of ‘new courses’ and so on, the basis of the GDR’s economy.
‘Never before in the two-hundred-year industrial history of Germany,’ wrote an expert economist, ‘probably never before in the industrial history of the entire world, has there been such a powerful transfer of technology, a transfer from the East to the West’.
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Despite this, with West Germany tapped successfully for credits, with relatively favourable terms of trade with the Eastern Bloc and parts of the Third World, and despite raw-materials and energy problems and mounting deficits, the GDR maintained a façade of success. As the East German state approached its fortieth anniversary, it appeared to many unsuspecting outsiders to represent a confident, progressive and egalitarian alternative to grasping, high-stress Western capitalism.
These people did not see-perhaps did not want to see-the polluted cities and shabby buildings, and nor did they experience the sudden, unexplained and often bizarre shortages, or the bureaucratic delays and petty restrictions that marred the life of the average East German citizen. They also did not get to compare the pampered lives of the ageing Communist
apparatchiks
in Wandlitz with those of their subjects.
Almost no one suspected that the GDR was approaching its doom. That the writing was, almost literally, on the Wall.
In September 1987, Erich Honecker achieved the ambition he had been harbouring for the past five years. He made a state visit to West Germany.
Finally, the GDR-and Honecker-could feel themselves on equal terms with their bigger, more prosperous neighbour.
The behind-the-scenes preparations for the visit had not been easy. The refugee organisations were outraged at such an invitation to the ‘tyrant’ and ‘Soviet satrap’ Honecker, and many on the respectable Right in West Germany also expressed doubts. There were attempts to avoid a reception by the West German President, and to keep Honecker away from Bonn, but finally the West Germans capitulated.
Honecker was received with dignity, politeness and even friendliness. None the less, in various subtle ways the West Germans managed to make it clear that to them he was still not quite a foreign dignitary and the GDR still not quite a foreign land. The trip was described officially not as a state visit but as a ‘working visit’. Ex-Chancellor Willy Brandt described the curious refinements of protocol affecting Honecker’s reception:
Half amused, half amazed, I watched how the GDR’s Chairman of the State Council was received in front of the Chancellery with a gently lowered level of ceremony: the honour guard was a bit smaller; it was led not by its commander but by his deputy; only anthems, not national anthems were played.
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Only seven motorcycle outriders escorted Honecker’s limousine on the drive through Bonn, and the foreign diplomatic corps was not invited to the state dinner and to the receptions, to show that this was not an ‘international’ event.
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Nor did Chancellor Kohl mince his words on the principled question of reunification. At an occasion that was also beamed into East German homes, Kohl spoke of the right of the German people to ‘complete the unity and freedom of Germany in free self-determination’. Honecker could only retort that the relations between East and West Germany were ‘marked by the realities of this world’, and-the old Communist showing his mettle-that ‘socialism and capitalism can no more be united than
fire and water’. It could not have failed to strike any viewer-and is clear from photographs of the encounter-that Honecker was a lot shorter and slighter than the enormous Chancellor Kohl, who at almost six feet four inches tall and weighing around 280 pounds, towered over him. To see in this juxtaposition a metaphor for ‘big Germany’ and ‘little Germany’ was inescapable.
In a way, it must have been a relief for Honecker to escape the treacherous hierarchies and invidious comparisons of Bonn and set off on his tour of the provinces. He was received in Düsseldorf, capital of the Ruhr industrial area that was the foundation of West Germany’s industrial might. He visited Trier, where Karl Marx was born, and Wuppertal-Barmen, where the co-founder of Communism, Friedrich Engels, had been brought up in the first decades of the nineteenth century as the son of a wealthy textile manufacturer. Honecker was even fêted at the splendid Villa Hügel in Essen, former residence of the Krupp family. This was the symbol of German capitalism at its most successful-and politically corrupt.
But the moment that briefly provided a glimpse into Erich Honecker, the human being, was his short but intensely felt trip to his home town, Wiebelskirchen in the Saarland, so far west that the French border lay just a short drive away. On arrival, he visited his sister, who still lived in the family house, and paid respects to his parents’ grave in the local cemetery. The powerful leader’s eyes moistened as he heard the miners’ choirs sing the songs of his youth. He chatted with pleasure in the distinctive dialect of his homeland. There were boos, and cries from the crowd of ‘murderer’, a handful of hostile or sarcastic placards, but on the whole the Saar greeted its long-lost son with a certain perverse approval. Its provincial premier, leftist SPD politician Oskar Lafontaine, told Honecker that ‘people around here feel a certain satisfaction, even a certain pride, when they see a born Saarlander ruling over the Prussians and the Saxons’.
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So overcome with emotion was Honecker that in his final speech he for the first time strayed from his prepared text. The situation was, he said, that there were two Germanys, anchored in two power blocs, and that-here came the surprise-as a result, understandably, ‘the borders are not as they should be’. One day, he added, it might be that ‘the borders will no longer divide us, but unite us’.
The journalists reacted with amazement. As did the Soviets. Honecker’s speech was broadcast live in East Germany. Within minutes of the transmission, the Soviet ambassador was on the telephone to the Politburo’s man in charge of security, Egon Krenz, who at fifty-two was reckoned Honecker’s probable successor. Moscow was not pleased. It might be that if you looked at Honecker’s speech carefully, it gave nothing away-but to use the word ‘unity’ in any context at all was very dangerous.
By the time Honecker arrived in Munich, for the last stop of his tour, he had recovered his composure. Bizarrely, the most powerful Communist in Germany was fêted in the capital of German conservatism by the Bavarian premier, Franz Josef Strauss, who had helped to arrange the vital credits five years before. As a mark of Bavaria’s long tradition of autonomy, the band played three national anthems at the reception-the West German, the East German, and the Bavarian. And Honecker had a full compliment of motorcycle outriders.
Within days of his return to East Berlin, Erich Honecker delivered a lengthy and triumphal report for his Politburo colleagues. It stretched to 170 pages. The document boasted that his visit was ‘of far-reaching effect and historical importance’, clear proof of the independence and sovereignty of the GDR. The West Germans had been constrained to ‘treat Comrade Erich Honecker as head of state of another sovereign state…’
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Meanwhile, the
Stasi
carried out one of its surveys of popular opinion inside East Germany, with special reference to Honecker’s visit to the West. ‘Progressive citizens’, it said, considered that the visit had proved the GDR’s sovereign status. However, among young people, the view was that it ‘signalled the obsolescence of the Berlin Wall and of the traditional negative image of West German imperialism’.
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Honecker had got off lightly in his visit to West Germany. Apart from Kohl’s reference to German self-determination, and a few small demonstrations along the way, the East German leader could and did consider the trip a PR success.
Of course, it changed nothing. The GDR was still in bad financial trouble, and relations with Moscow under the new, reformist leadership
were frosty. On the one hand, the GDR was too Stalinist for the Gorbachev clique, on the other Honecker and his supporters were too close to the West Germans (and their open-handed lending institutions) for the Soviets’ comfort. If anything, the trip caused a further deterioration in relations with Moscow. Honecker had not consulted Gorbachev before announcing the visit, and it was a slight the Russian never forgot.
Honecker’s trip to the West also changed nothing with regard to the Berlin Wall or the fortified border between East and West Germany. Though the automatic-fire installations had been removed from the interstate border in the early 1980s, as part of the Western credits deal, and in Berlin the notorious dog-runs had also been dismantled, the Wall was still there, as lethal as ever.
This subject had been raised while Honecker was in West Germany in September 1987. In an intimate meeting with Chancellor Kohl, the West German leader had almost casually questioned the ‘shoot-to-kill’ order. Before setting out from East Berlin, Honecker had prepared himself for just this eventuality. His assistants had ferreted out the wording of the regulations on the emergency use of firearms by the West German border police and included it in his briefing materials. Honecker now recited these back to Kohl and said, ‘For our people, it’s just the same as for yours’. Of course, in the West German case the firing of ‘warning shots’ was stipulated, but Honecker moved smoothly to assure Kohl: ‘We don’t want anyone to be killed. But you have to obey regulations in the restricted military area.’
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But the question would not go away. In the previous five years (1982-6 inclusive), a total of six deaths occurred on the Berlin Wall. The worst year was 1986, when three died, two of them in a single attempt to crash a truck through from East to West. The escapers perished in a hail of bullets when the truck came to a halt in no man’s land. These killings could not be concealed-many had observed them from the Western side. In the case of the two following deaths, however, the East German authorities took successful measures to make the murders ‘deniable’.
Michael Bittner, a 25-year-old bricklayer, had been born on 31 August 1961. He was just a few days younger than the Berlin Wall.
Bittner had applied several times to leave the GDR, without success. An hour or so after midnight on 24 November 1986 he approached the
Wall in the suburban area of Glienicke/Nordbahn, where it bordered on the French sector of West Berlin. He carried a ten-foot wooden ladder. With the aid of this, Bitter made it over the hinterland wall. Then he hit the signal fence and set off alarm sirens and automatic searchlights. This caught the attention of two guards who were patrolling about 200 metres distant. They advanced as he raced across the ‘death-strip’, and called upon him to stop. He did not do so. They fired warning shots. Still Bittner pressed on towards West Berlin. In fact, he actually reached the border wall with the West and managed to scramble on to it. He was now under heavy automatic fire from the two guards. He called out in despair, ‘Let me over!’ Those would be his last words. Michael Bittner was struck by several bullets and collapsed back into Eastern territory. He died half an hour later of a wound that had ruptured the heart wall.
The East Germans chose to overcome the embarrassment of this killing by pretending it hadn’t happened. Within hours of Bittner’s death, the
Stasi
moved to cover up the incident. The death certificate and autopsy report were destroyed. The East German authorities declared that he had made contact with a Western escape organisation (or ‘trader in human beings’) and had been successfully smuggled to the West. With breathtaking cynicism, they even issued a warrant for his arrest, which remained in force while the GDR still existed. Bittner’s brother and mother were told he had escaped to West Berlin. For years, they hoped against all hope that this was true. Only in 1990, when East German government documents were accessed, did they learn of his death and the cover-up that had followed.
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Worse happened three months later. On 12 February 1987, 24-year-old Lutz Schmidt and his friend Peter Schulze tried to crash a truck through the Wall in the southern suburbs of Berlin, near East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport. The weather was foggy. In the confusion they almost collided with a border-police truck that was patrolling the border area. They careered off the road and their wheels got stuck in the soft ground. The two young men left the vehicle and headed off to cross the Wall on foot. Border guards opened fire. Schmidt was shot through the heart and died almost immediately. Remarkably, Schulze pressed on and made it over to the West Berlin district of Neukölln, perhaps saved by the poor visibility.