Quite comfortable dictatorship: A “new history of the GDR”? Unfortunately not! – Politics

A book that promises “a new history of the GDR” in the subtitle arouses expectations. What arouses curiosity is that the author was a historian who was born in East Germany in 1985 and now lives in England. Unfortunately, Katja Hoyer’s book is disappointing across the board.

The “new story” turns out to be the old tale of a very comfortable dictatorship. It just doesn’t show “all facets of this vanished country”, but tries to prove that not everything was bad in the GDR. “Basically, life was quite pleasant,” the author sums up. For the daughter of an officer in the National People’s Army and a teacher, it may feel like this based on her parents’ stories. However, those who were harassed, spied on, even imprisoned by the state power, who were not allowed to choose their profession freely, who missed freedom of expression and free elections, remember differently.

Egon Krenz and Frank Schöbel as key witnesses

Hoyer names a dubious key witness for her portrayal of the GDR in the foreword. She invokes the notorious history blunderer, of all people Egon Krenz, the last SED general secretary, who to this day whitewashes the GDR as a better alternative to the old Federal Republic. Hoyer leads the second informant GDR pop singer Frank Schöbel who, as a privileged celebrity, naturally finds nothing wrong with the GDR. The book is based primarily on a dozen interviews with former GDR citizens that Katja Hoyer conducted herself, as well as on excerpts from Internet eyewitness portals and personal reminiscences published elsewhere. That could be an interesting approach to telling history from below. But the author only lets people speak “who let the state work”. System critics have no voice in this narrative.

Hoyer makes it easy for herself: “History is written by victors,” she states, “including that of the GDR.” Because “the west” the Interpretation sovereignty over forty years of East German socialism won, she bends the history of the GDR to her liking.

The Stalin note as a real offer?

Hoyer describes the militarization of GDR society as a reaction to West German rearmament. It suppresses the fact that Stalin instructed his East German vassals as early as 1952 that the GDR had to create a “people’s army” – whereupon the “Barracked People’s Police” was promptly founded, three years before the Bundeswehr. Hoyer insinuates that the GDR leaders “had to defend their state … against the West” as if an armed attack could have taken place at any time. The GDR was “permanently on alert,” which she claims was “partially justified.” What nonsense!

Stalin’s offer of March 1952The formation of a neutral all-German government was a real chance for earlier German reunification, Hoyer wants us to believe. The West dismissed the proposal “by trying to portray Stalin as the dishonest party.” Hoyer does not say that Stalin himself admitted the propaganda bluff to prevent the Federal Republic from integrating into the western community of states. Hoyer cannot deny that the popular uprising on June 17, 1953 was fueled “by frustration with the workload and pay”. But he was “sponsored by the West” in order to “foment further unrest” in the GDR.

So the SED reading goes on and on. If Hoyer is to be believed, the GDR’s economic failure was less due to the ineffective planned economy than to the West German Hallstein Doctrine: Only a few countries would have dared to recognize the GDR as a sovereign state before 1972. “The consequence: products like coffee, soap or chocolate remained difficult to obtain” – as if those were the only economic problems in the GDR.

Hoyer praises “anti-fascism as the founding dogma” of the GDR. In reality, many top politicians, media figures and public servants had a Nazi past. In 1954, for example, 27 percent of all SED members had once been in Hitler’s party and its branches. And 32 percent of all state employees at that time once belonged to National Socialist organizations. The GDR even created its own party, the National Democratic Party, as a catchment area for former NSDAP members and officials.

Women often suffer from multiple burdens

Also the myth of the Gender Equality in the GDR Hoyer maintains. In fact, women were integrated into the socialist world of work due to labor shortages, but rarely rose and earned on average 30 percent less than men. Their life was often a multiple burden: work, household, children – especially since the traditional patriarchal distribution of roles prevailed in the families. East German authors such as Anna Kaminsky and Freya Klier have long since disproved the emancipation legend.

Open detailed view

Hoyer praises the employment of foreign “contract workers” (most recently around 90,000) as an act of socialist solidarity and altruistic development aid. The reality was different: the contract workers were modern slaves. The GDR lured them with false promises, such as professional qualifications or university studies, and used them as cheap labour. They lived in ghettos, shielded from the GDR citizens. Anyone who violated the ban on contact or even entered into a romantic relationship could be sent back to their home country. All of this has been backed up by studies, but Hoyer insists that the foreigners were “neither brought into the country out of sheer economic necessity” nor were they “largely isolated for cynical or even xenophobic reasons,” “as is sometimes claimed.”

Open detailed view

Hoyer interprets the joint position paper by the SPD and SED (“The Conflict of Ideologies and Common Security”) from 1987 in the spirit of her mentor Krenz. She celebrates the foreign policy statements (“Policy of joint peacekeeping”), but omits the fact that the SED immediately stopped public discussion of the paper because GDR citizens relied on the passage contained therein about “free information and open discussion within every system”. could appoint.

Chicanes, orders to shoot – none of this occurs

Harassment of professing Christians, anti-Semitism practiced by the state, Mielke’s block warden system and Honecker’s order to shoot – none of this takes place in the book. Even after the end of the GDR, Hoyer clung to their image of the enemy, the evil West. She does this with demonstrably false figures about liquidated companies and lost jobs – like much of the book without citing a source common escrow bashing, as if this institution and not the failed economic policy of the SED were to blame for the decline of East German industry.

Ultimately, Hoyer recommends “shaking off the German obsession with coming to terms with the past.” For a historian, this is an astonishingly historical view. The opposite would be desirable: that the Don’t forget East Germanswhat the regime has done wrong. This is not an unreasonable West German request, but Freya Klier’s “eleventh commandment: You should remember!”

Norbert F. Pötzl has written, among other things, biographies on Erich Honecker and Wolfgang Vogel as well as the book “Der Treuhand-Complex”.