Authors: Frederick Taylor
By the mid-1990s, East Germany’s economy was largely kept alive by a busy reconstruction industry, which was hard at work restoring long-neglected towns and installing modern transport and communications systems. Real economic viability was confined to a few ‘hot-spots’. The population was ageing dramatically. A political backlash benefited the PDS, which, after barely surviving the ‘Turn’ (
Wende
) as reunification became euphemistically known, climbed in the polls as the last decade of the second millennium CE progressed. The Communist successor party was helped by some appealing leaders, including the East Berlin lawyer and controversialist Gregor Gysi, a son of the old East German élite who became a standby on talk shows all over Germany. Perhaps more importantly, the PDS successfully asserted its rights as legal successor to the SED, and thus controlled a large number of bank accounts and properties that had belonged to the party when it was synonymous with the Communist regime. This made it perhaps the richest small political party in the world. Within a few years, the PDS’s share of the vote had settled at around 20 per cent in most of former East Germany, including East Berlin.
But the PDS was largely a party of older people. Around 60 per cent of those who voted for it were themselves over sixty. The young of the former GDR-those who stayed behind-often expressed their disillusion, and the results of decades of intellectual isolation, in a tendency to swing not to the old far Left but to the new far Right. This was particularly true in smaller provincial centres, but there was also a strong presence in cities such as Magdeburg, Halle, and Chemnitz (which had changed its name back from Karl-Marx-Stadt). Racist skinhead gangs sought out the relatively few foreigners who lived in the East and often committed terrible acts of violence against them. Support for far-right parties such as the NPD and the DVU burgeoned. A fervent, if ultimately poisonous and stifling, ‘national’ subculture spread across the former East Germany, and remains a prominent and ugly feature of the ‘new provinces’ well into the twenty-first century. Transparently neo-Nazi parties are represented in the provincial parliaments of Saxony and Brandenburg, though they have as yet failed to make the same mark on the national political scene. A number of the major leaders of this movement in the East are, in fact, ‘carpet-baggers’ from the West. They
saw an opportunity to break out of the electoral ghetto to which they had long been confined there, and consciously targeted the more fertile territory of the former GDR. In this they showed considerable astuteness.
As a substantial minority of East Germans swung back to the familiar tropes of the SED regime in reaction against the cold wind of capitalism, so at the same time a counter-trend saw a wave of accusations against those who had managed and served the state during the Ulbricht and Honecker years. Prosecutions followed.
Former conscripts, who had fired on and in many cases killed fellow East Germans attempting to cross the Wall, were hauled into court. The fresh-faced young
Grepos
of the 1960s and 1970s, now middle-aged, were forced to confront their actions. Decades later, the whole mess of fear, brainwashed enthusiasm, confusion and conformism that had dictated the world of the GDR’s border guardians during those ugly years was the subject of well-publicised court cases.
It must have given some satisfaction to victims such as Walter Tews, crippled at the age of fourteen as he fled to the West, and to the families of such young martyrs as Peter Fechter, Günter Litfin and Chris Gueffroy, when they saw these men and the state they served held to account. But in these often bewildered and defensive men it is not usually possible to discern heartless killers whose actions should be treated as common murder. The courts have tended to find them guilty but hand out short or suspended prison sentences.
As for the SED leaders, the really big fish got away.
Ulbricht, the East German state’s true begetter, died while his GDR still had a decade and a half of life in it. His successor and protégé, Erich Honecker, survived to be held responsible for the state he had helped create and the Wall whose construction he had overseen. He had fled to Moscow in the early spring of 1991, just as legal proceedings were being opened against him. After the Soviet Union itself collapsed, he was extradited back to Germany to answer accusations of having caused almost 200 deaths at the Berlin Wall and the border between the two Germanys.
However, Honecker escaped the worst because he faced the worst. By the time the former General Secretary came to court in 1992, now aged eighty, he was dying from a liver cancer that the surgeons had failed to
find and remove during his hospital stay in the fateful summer of 1989. Sometimes, as he shuffled to and from the courtroom, he would bump into the likes of Mielke, Kessler, Hoffmann, all also arraigned for the Wall deaths. The elderly comrades would exchange gruff Marxist-Leninist phrases of encouragement, for all the world as if they were young, persecuted anti-Fascists again, with a future to fight for. Shortly after returning from Moscow, Honecker had joined the recently refounded, 500-member German Communist Party. Though mortally ill, he admitted he could not bear to remain ‘unorganised’-his Communist equivalent of a Catholic’s horror of dying ‘unshriven’.
The reunited German state took pity on the sick, tired old man in a way that his implacable apparatus of oppression would never have done under the same circumstances. Despite the fact that Erich Honecker defended the building of his Wall to the very last, he was released on health grounds on 12 January 1993. The court declared that Honecker’s death was ‘so imminent that the conduct of a criminal proceeding has lost its meaning’.
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The next day, 13 January 1993, the former East German leader climbed slowly aboard Flight RG 741 of the Brazilian airline, Varig, at Frankfurt Airport. The Boeing 747’s destination was São Paulo. There Honecker would change flights and continue on to Santiago, the capital of Chile. In fact, right up to the moment the plane took off, those who wished him to be prosecuted, sick or not, continued efforts to prevent him from embarking on his journey into exile.
Honecker’s choice of destination was based on personal circumstances. His daughter, Sonja, had married a Chilean exile who, like thousands of the country’s other leftists, had sought and been granted refuge in the GDR during the bloody period of military dictatorship between 1973 and 1988. Margot Honecker had left Moscow after her husband’s extradition to Germany the previous summer, and since then had been living in a comfortable villa outside Santiago. Honecker was welcomed enthusiastically by many Chileans. To them the GDR had been a friend. The
Stasi
had helped rescue endangered opponents of the military dictatorship and given them a safe haven. Looked at from their point of view, the East German secret police played the role, not of the ‘Red Gestapo’, but of the Scarlet Pimpernel.
The deposed SED leader died at his comfortable final refuge on 29 May 1994, in his eighty-second year. Homesick to the end-he spoke no Spanish-he none the less gave no sign of repentance or regret. Erich Honecker was buried in Santiago. The crucifix traditionally attached to a coffin in Catholic Chile was concealed, in the case of this lifelong atheist, by a black-red-and-gold GDR flag.
Honecker’s defence of the Wall merits little consideration. All the same, the case for condemning it, while ultimately compelling, is no simple matter either. According to the German Federal Prosecutor’s Office, between 13 August 1961 and 9 November 1989, 86 human beings died as a direct result of violence at the Berlin Wall. Other estimates run higher, largely depending on the criteria they use for classifying deaths as ‘Wall-related’. The government-supported website www.chronik-der-mauer.de quotes a death toll totalling 125, including several East German border guards killed in exchanges of fire and a few unfortunate individuals whose death can be obliquely blamed on the Wall. One such was a gentleman in his sixties who had a heart attack while being searched at the Dreilinden control point in 1971. Another man died in 1983 while being interrogated at a border crossing. A five-year-old boy from West Berlin drowned in a canal on the border while trying to retrieve his football. And a baby from the East, concealed in a suitcase while its parents made a successful escape, was found on arrival in West Berlin to have died of asphyxiation. There was also a desperate young couple who committed suicide at East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airfield after failing to steal an aircraft, which they had hoped to fly to a new life in the West.
The highest number of victims is cited by the Arbeitsgemeinschaft 13. August, an organisation associated with the late anti-Communist campaigner Rainer Hildebrandt’s Haus am Checkpoint Charlie museum. This list encompasses individuals who died for any reason at all either at or because of the Wall. It includes those who were caught and secretly executed for escape attempts, those who escaped but were kidnapped back across the border and then killed, and even those successful escapers thought to have been ‘liquidated’ by
Stasi
agents while living in conditions of apparent safety in West Germany. The list’s broad and changeable figure, contested by many experts, totals 227.
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It is not that these deaths were not tragic. They are terrible to see described, and appalling to record. But when we compare the experience of other countries that in the twentieth century were forced to survive on ideological or religious fault lines, we may find ourselves marvelling not at how
many
died in Berlin or at the border between East and West Germany, but
how few
. Compare the millions who died in similarly divided countries elsewhere-North and South Korea (another fortified border which still exists), North and South Vietnam, or Northern and Southern Ireland. Or in the collapsed remnants of Yugoslavia, or the disputed borders between India and Pakistan, or between Israel and Palestine, where once again the Wall solution, while embarked on for different reasons, embarrasses and troubles us…
But in the case of the Berlin Wall we can read the individual stories of violent death. In the cynical words of Stalin, who knew a thing or two about mass murder, ‘a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic’. And while every death, even when lost among millions, is a tragedy to someone, the Wall deaths are all obviously and unmistakably individual. None the less, altogether, even if we take the most pessimistic of the death tolls-227 souls-then we are discussing a number equivalent to those killed in a commuter airliner coming down in a snowstorm. And if we accept the lower, more critically sifted figures, then we should add that the airliner was only half full.
That these deaths constituted a crime in principle and many score of crimes in practice, cannot possibly be denied.
But what, then, was the greater ‘punishment’ inflicted on the people of the East? Just three decades of ugliness, claustrophobia, shattered families, and a few score of violent, pointless deaths?
It was more subtle and long-lasting than any of those things. Within a few years after the end of the Second World War, the defeated Germans in the Western zones were permitted to establish parliamentary democracy and to launch what turned out to be one of the greatest economic recoveries in history.
Not so their Eastern brothers and sisters. Already held back by draconian Soviet reparation demands, and radical social and economic reorganisation in the Communist interest, by 1961 such formerly prosperous and advanced parts of Germany as Thuringia, Saxony and
Saxony-Anhalt, not forgetting East Berlin, had lost huge swathes of their productive capital, industrial know-how, patents and management skills to the dynamic, free-market Western zones.
After the Wall fell, two factors became shockingly clear. Firstly that the GDR’s loudly trumpeted industries were almost entirely uncompetitive, both in the enlarged domestic and the wider international market. Secondly that those skills, manpower and productive capital resources lost to the West in the post-war period were not coming back-or at least not in the quantities that would have made possible a genuine revival of the region’s fortunes to pre-GDR levels.
The true ‘punishment’ of the East-and the most insidious, lasting crime of its Communist masters-was this theft of hope.
Western German taxpayers poured billions upon billions into the East after 1989, but for little permanent gain. In the 1950s and 1960s, West Germany created its ‘economic miracle’, conquering the export markets in a post-war world crying out for the kind of quality goods that this energetic and skilled people could produce. Meanwhile, their brothers and sisters in the East stumbled along on a path which brought a modest revival, one that was almost considered another ‘miracle’-until the so-called wonder turned out to be mostly statistical sleight of hand.
By the 1990s, when the East Germans finally got their chance to catch up, the world was a different place: an emerging global market-place. In the 1950s the West Germans had faced relatively little comparable competition, but in the 1990s there was Japan, Korea, Malaysia, a revived USA-and towards the end of the decade, China-all producing goods of a quality that could compete more than adequately in the world market.
In 1989, West Germany seemed so rich and successful that the general opinion was, the East Germans are the lucky ex-Communists. They had their big, powerful brother to help them, whereas the Czechs and Slovaks, the Hungarians, the Poles and the Baltic nations, would have to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. In fact, the attachment to West Germany turned out in most ways to be a disadvantage. The unions representing East German workers demanded near parity between wages in the East and those in the West-while productivity lagged dramatically and would clearly take years to approach the West German level.
Result: millions of jobs lost or, instead of going to the East German provinces, exported to the low-wage, low-cost countries beyond the Oder river, with their aggressive tax breaks and eager, co-operative governments. At the time of writing (2006), it is reckoned that soon the highest proportion of automotive workers per head of the population in Europe will belong not to Germany or France or Italy (and certainly not Britain) but to Slovakia.
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