German Reunification

A Multinational History

Frédéric Bozo, Andreas Rödder, Mary Elise Sarotte, Frédéric Bozo, Andreas Rödder, Mary Elise Sarotte

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317336044
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

This book provides a multinational history of German reunification based on empirical work by leading scholars.

The reunification of Germany in 1989-90 was one of the most unexpected and momentous events of the twentieth century. Embedded within the wider process of the end of the Cold War, it contributed decisively to the dramatic changes that followed: the end of the division of Europe, the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the origins of NATO's eastward expansion and, not least, the creation of the European Union. Based on the wealth of evidence that has become available from many countries involved, and relying on the most recent historiography, this collection takes into account the complex interaction of multinational processes that were instrumental in shaping German reunification in the pivotal years 1989-90. The volume brings together renowned international scholars whose recent works, based on their research in multiple languages and sources, have contributed significantly to the history of the end of the Cold War and of German reunification. The resulting volume represents an important contribution to our knowledge and understanding of a significant chapter in recent history.

This book will be of much interest to students of German politics, Cold war history, international and multinational history and IR in general.

I The two Germanies and unification

1 The revolution in Germany

The end of the SED dictatorship, East German society, and reunification

Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk

DOI: 10.4324/9781315660103-2

The longing for a self-determined past

In the period after the fall of Eastern Europe's communist states, “the historian was robbed of his or her historical monopoly over interpreting the past.”¹ In East German society, people demonstrated an immense desire to investigate the past, if only in the form of their own biographies. In March 1990, shortly before elections for the People's Chamber, a compilation of State Security Ministry reports was published under the title “But I Love You All” (“Ich liebe euch doch alle”). People eager to get their hands on the coveted volume flocked to the “House of Democracy” in East Berlin, where copies of the book were sold directly from the backs of trucks. They wanted to find out about what had really been going on around them in the previous years. This volume of source materials, edited by historians Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, gave birth to a new brand of history that addressed elementary popular needs in times of upheaval.

That presaged what would become the special characteristic of German attempts to come to grips with the revolution of 1989. A broad spectrum of protagonists in the story of the revolution of 1989 has crystallized around several groups. Institutionally, they encompass state entities (for example, Stasi record offices’ foundations devoted to investigating the past as well as universities and research institutions), public bodies such as victims’ associations, the Robert Havemann Foundation, the archive of the Leipzig protest movement, and private initiatives such as the GDR Museum. New types of archives evolved parallel to federal and local ones. The most prominent of these is the Archive for the Records of the State Security Service of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), but this list also includes archives that collect and preserve materials concerning the East German opposition, such as the Robert Havemann Society and the Leipzig Protest Movement archive.² In general, access to the archives is excellent. There is a plethora of empirical information concerning the run-up to and events of the 1989 revolution. Historians now face the problem of how to narrow their archival research and need to have the courage to leave things out.

The situation is similar with the secondary literature. Academics are not the only ones who have investigated these historical events. A great number of people who were part of the 1989 revolution published autobiographies and other works of non-fiction, and the “Enquete Kommission” of the German Bundestag (a committee that, in 1992–1998, studied the history of key events) published thirty-three major volumes full of surveillance reports and interrogation transcripts. This bounty presents a considerable challenge, particularly for younger scholars at the start of their research careers. The quality of what has been published varies dramatically, and most works do not conform to academic standards.³

As a result, while there may be a broad literary and documentary panorama of the 1980s, the literature appears rather meager from the academic perspective. East German economic history in the 1980s has been well researched, as have the histories of the opposition and the Stasi. But cultural history, the history of everyday attitudes and social history have been marginalized. For example, the internal culture of the SED (the German initials for the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany) hasn't been properly examined, even though the party issued the Stasi with its orders. Research has been confined almost exclusively to the SED leadership,⁴ which, on its own, is incapable of accounting for the meek collapse of the party and the entire GDR.⁵ Along with several overarching works on the 1989 revolution,⁶ there are numerous collections⁷ of essays and regional studies.⁸

The attempt to subject the events of 1989–1990 to serious historical investigation is barely underway.⁹ At present the body of historical research on the topic is more like a collection of memories and recollections. But, as has been recently shown in conjunction with the French Revolution, it is imperative for future scholarly works that German Reunification be treated as a historical phenomenon.¹⁰ Thus, notwithstanding my own intense personal experiences of the processes and events associated with unification, it may be that my own studies,¹¹ which form the basis of this chapter, are useful as perspectives on one of the fundamental upheavals of the twentieth century.

The basic situation

The beginning of the end came in 1980 in Poland. The founding of the independent trade union Solidarnosc and the rapid swelling of the membership to ten million were blows from which the communist bloc would never recover, even though martial law was declared in Poland the following year. Poland may have led the way, but the fundamental political and social crisis, characteristic of the entire communist bloc with various nuances, awakened Eastern European civil societies from their slumber. The crisis focused around freedom, the rule of law and social equality. Popular demands for these three things were directly at odds with political, legal and social reality in the communist states. Each demand undermined communist ideology and the “real existing socialism” of Eastern European states. The installation of Mikhail Gorbachev as the head of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union in March 1985, which made him the de facto leader of global communism, was an attempt to save the ideology through reform. Gorbachev was an enthusiastic reformer, but he unintentionally sealed communism's fate. Nonetheless, Gorbachev was more than a response to the deep domestic, economic, social and political crisis within the Soviet Union himself. He wanted to prevent peripheral upheavals, particularly in Poland and to a somewhat lesser degree in Hungary, from penetrating to the center of the Soviet empire. Empires begin to collapse on the margins, as we have known for a long time. In this sense, Gorbachev's actions were an attempt to prevent “political situations” from developing in the Soviet Union.

Gorbachev's policy of reforms, which sought to rescue Leninism and make it compatible with the future, occasioned popular hopes in the GDR. The official slogan “Learning from the Soviet Union means learning to be victorious,” which had been around since the 1950s, suddenly became a subversive weapon in the arsenal of those who desired change. If reforms were possible in Moscow, the popular reasoning ran, things would have to change in the GDR as well. For years, the SED had promised East Germans that tomorrow, in the future, everything would be “even better.” But the prognosticating ideologues insisted on defining tomorrow as some distant point from the present. By the mid-1980s, the glorious future had receded into NeverLand. No matter how hard East Germans worked, tomorrow never came. Feelings of inferiority compared with the West and all of its promise, visible every evening on television sets in millions of East German living rooms, became ever greater, and faith in the future diminished even more as the SED leadership tried to insulate itself from Gorbachev's reforms. The political leadership did not only rule against the will of the people¹²—it also increasingly lost its hold over those people upon whom it had been able to count as supporters: the 2.3 million SED members and the 500,000 members of the block parties (CDU, LDPD, DBD and NDPD).

There is no single explanation for the East German revolution of 1989. One major factor was the international context. The example of Poland encouraged resistance by East Germans toward their own government. The Federal Republic of Germany constantly stoked real East German desires. But no less important were East Germans’ feelings that they were missing out. In many respects, the GDR in the latter half of the 1980s was a society already in the midst of collapse.

While East German standards of living had improved since the late 1950s, and daily life was simpler, people were not any more content than they had been, and the gap with the West was increasing dramatically. In 1971, SED chairman Erich Honecker came up with an economic and social policy that turned the slogans of sacrifice from the 1950s on their heads.¹³ The guiding principle was that people could live today on the work that they would do tomorrow. The people were to be kept happy. The government sought to improve living conditions and end the postwar period of austerity on the one hand, while creating a modern, efficient economy that would automatically finance the generous social benefits on the other. Unofficially this meant spending money today that would hopefully be earned tomorrow. There was no way this policy could work. A year before he stepped down, Honecker admitted to functionaries of the party's youth organization, the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ): “In some respects, we're living beyond our means.”¹⁴ Today, economic historians tend to classify the GDR as a threshold country.¹⁵ Because sectors such as mechanical engineering and electronics were never modernized and suffered from a lack of investment, few people wanted to buy East German products despite cheap prices. Productivity declined to the extent that by the late 1980s it was only a third as high as in West Germany. The state was running up ever greater debts both internationally and domestically. Debt accounted for more than half of state expenditures in 1988–1989. Meanwhile, the percentage of money invested declined throughout the 1980s.¹⁶ Pillars of the economy such as communication, transport and agriculture were neglected. In mid-1989, the GDR was unable to fulfill more than a million requests for a telephone. Only a minority of East Germans had a home phone connection.¹⁷

The exception to the systematically poor planning was microelectronics, but in retrospect, it proved to be the biggest disaster. The SED leadership had supported an ambitious program in this sector since the 1970s, but the result was a 256-kilobyte hard drive that sold for 534 marks in the GDR but was only worth five West German marks elsewhere. The GDR ran eight to ten years behind international development standards, and production was one-tenth as efficient as in the West. The microelectronics focus was ultimately a quixotic attempt to create autarchic structure in a rapidly globalizing world.

Agriculture was another weak spot for the SED. East Germans had enough to eat, but agricultural production costs kept rising while food prices remained steady. Government subsidies led to the grotesque situation of farmers buying bread and potatoes to feed their livestock. As a result, the GDR kept needing to import food, and there were repeated “logjams” in the supply of necessities.

East Germans got used to the basics being taken care of, but they wanted more, and the official “market” was unable to meet their demands. Almost everything was in short supply at one time or another. For that reason, East Germans bought everything they could get their hands on whether they needed it or not, since unwanted goods could be bartered for other products. The need to stand in lines and keep an eye out for goods for sale meant that the average East German missed six hours of work per week in 1989.

The SED's policy of social benefits was extremely costly. Urgently needed resources that should have been used for investments were squandered on futile subsidy and social-benefit programs. They failed to legitimize the system—on the contrary, they achieved the precise opposite. East Germans did not just take the social benefits guaranteed by the system in 1989 for granted. They could also see only too clearly the reverse side of SED policy. Cheap train tickets were offset by a decrepit railway infrastructure, and inexpensive books and newspapers could not compensate for state-controlled media, governmental censorship and the banishing of critical voices. Hundreds of thousands of people had steady jobs, but their work made no sense.

This offers one reason, along with increasing environmental pollution, that in contrast to the global trend, life expectancies in the GDR began declining in the early 1980s. East Germans were 4.6 times more likely to die from curable diseases as their West German counterparts. Medical diagnoses and therapies failed to measure up to international standards. Doctors and nurses were disproportionately likely to flee the GDR or apply for...