BERLIN – October 7th, for many, was a day of tears. Some were shed for family members who died or were captured during the attack by Hamas a year ago. Others – far, far more I fear – were in mourning for the more than 40,000 people who have since been killed in Gaza. Now, in addition, those killed in Lebanon.
And just as bitter there were tears at hearing of the many, many children who survived – as orphans, with amputated limbs, with physical and psychic scars, which will burden them for a lifetime.
Yet on that same day, there were a few less painful tears, simply at recalling an event long, long ago, completely painless, and for some at the time a very joyful event. Seventy-five years ago, in a small, most broken, most backward little corner of a land, the German Democratic Republic was born.
But how many at the time were skeptical! Only four years earlier small groups had combined here, returning from exile, resistance movements or allied armies, surviving concentration camps and prisons, or ending years of frightened silence.
Uniting them was a burning mission; after twelve years of terror and devastation, physical and mental, they were determined to create something new, cleansed of the poisons of fascism, racism, anti-human hatred, and to erect on that foundation a state which overcame hunger, poverty, constant fears of despair in a week, a month, a year, clear of greedy exploitation, of the oppression of women, of children, and dedicated to achieving friendship and cooperation with its neighbors and other peoples and cultures on all continents.
The little country which resulted – or the small Eastern corner of a bigger country – faced a broken, torn population, tainted by the poisoning of past years or by a cynical disbelief in any further plans or theories. It was faced, even before its birth, by fierce attacks with words, later with pictures, shaped by masters of twisting truth and unceasing, secretive activity and recruiting.
The attacks were motivated and organized by those who had benefited from exploitation, expansion, hostility, and conflict with neighbors and used divisiveness with such horrific success. Among them were giants like Krupp, Siemens, Bayer, BASF, Deutsche Bank, Rheinmetall, and the landowner nobility, the Junkers, who had supported every Prussian and German war, who built up and joined with Hitler in robbing all of Europe and enslaving or killing so many millions.
All of them had been thrown out of East Germany – if they had not already fled from an advancing Red Army and that little band of anti-fascist dreamers. They again dominated a much larger portion of Germany but were obsessed with their plans to return.
And, in the end, they proved stronger and succeeded. In 1990 they were able to resume their exploitation, with more modern tools and weapons but the same old goal, indeed the necessity, of expansion.
They, too, marked an anniversary last week, celebrating October 3rd, the date of their triumph in 1990, their glorious “reunification” of Germany – which some Easterners call annexation or colonization. It was this victory, a triumph for some, but which, even after so many years, caused bitter tears for those of us who were once inspired by our wishful hopes and dreams.
Despite all the many years, those who hated the GDR still hate it today. Indeed, they seem to fear it and continue almost daily to revile its memories – like kicking an old horse cadaver which might yet bite or strike out with a hoof or two.
Worried without tears
They are worried; perhaps even those without tears for a long-gone past may yet retain just a few undesirable GDR memories, and even pass them on.
Oh yes, blunders were made, big blunders at times, and blemishes whose demise no one can really regret. Some were made by people whose twelve years of struggle against fascism, with so much suffering and so many losses, had hardened and narrowed them, even as they aged, in ways which made it difficult to find rapport with generations with no such experience, and no such worries that those hostile to their little republic were often the same men, or their heirs, who were once responsible for German and world misery.
Then too, many GDR leaders had spent those years in the USSR, with its great achievements – above all bearing the main burden in defeating the mighty Nazi war machine – but also with so many elements of repression. Far too seldom did they learn to speak and write in a way that infused large majorities with whole-hearted approval or enthusiasm.
And yet, despite blunders and blemishes, how many wonders were achieved! Such basic ones: No joblessness, no shutting down of a department, factory, or mine without an equal job for everyone.
Equal pay for women and young employees, with half a year of paid maternity leave and a paid “household” day every month. Free, undisputed abortions.
For a limited monthly tax all medical and dental visits, with hospital stays 100% covered. Hearing aids, glasses, every prescribed test and medicine, four-week spa cures, for recuperation or preventative – and never a pfennig required! Plus three-week paid vacations, often in lakeside or seaside trade union resort hotels.
Add on totally free education, from full childcare through to apprenticeship, college, and graduate studies, with stipends making jobbing or money-earning interruptions superfluous and student debt unknown. Apartment rent under ten percent of income, urban and rural carfare twenty pfennigs, bakery, dairy, grocery and butcher prices the same everywhere, affordable and frozen over all the years.
Even a word for “food pantry” was unknown; everyone in every job and school was guaranteed, for less than one mark, a good lunch – in Germany the main meal of the day. No one went hungry.
Or was homeless; evictions were legally forbidden. The housing shortage was being met with a giant program to provide a pleasant modern apartment to every city-dweller.
About two million had been built – until unification. Today, owing to “regrettable high interest rates and rising costs” this problem is proving insoluble – except when it comes to super-luxury gentrification projects.
In GDR days even ex-convicts, after serving their terms, were guaranteed a job and a home!
As for the blemishes, even cruelties, most castigated are always the ”Stasi” snooping and spying, the restriction of the Berlin Wall, and censorship in the media and the arts.
Their cause was not only the hard past experience of the men at the top but rather, primarily, to counteract extreme pressures from “the West” bolstered by a society, rich with the money and influence of those old war-lords, again – or still – in power, infused with the lush dollar millions of the Marshall Plan, plus rich resources of iron, good hard coal and other minerals so lacking in the East.
A decent standard of living
The GDR supplied a decent, secure living standard to almost everyone, with more and more household appliances, cars, and vacations abroad. Our tourist sites were beautiful Prague, Budapest, Leningrad, Moscow, our “Alps” the High Tatras of Slovakia, our “Caribbean” beaches the Black Sea sands of Bulgaria, Romania, Sochy or, closer, the chilly but beautiful Baltic, with well nigh half the bathers in happy, unselfconscious, full GDR nudity.
But Rome could not be built in a day, nor total Utopia. The commodity assortment in West Germany, perhaps second only to that of the USA, could not be matched by its small sibling.
Making it worse in the final years: the billions needed for newly necessary electronics for its machinery exports, to be created by little GDR with no help from Sony, IBM, Silicon Valley, or even the hard-pressed USSR.
Then the billions were spent so as not to lag too far behind in an ever more modern armament race. And finally, that giant home construction program, all to be paid for without raising rents, fares, food staple prices, or charging more for health, education, and culture, or cutting heavily subsidized children’s and youth clubs, books, records, theater, opera, ballet, even musicals.
But, more and more, accomplishments were taken for granted while, evening for evening, people enviously watched western TV, in their own language, with all the luxurious lives purposefully displayed there, and symbolized by the oil baron series “Dallas.” Wasn’t that a great life?
Such attractions benefited the relentless attempts to lure away the best-trained Easterners, skilled machinists, engineers, medical doctors, professors, and even writers and actors, promising them fewer restrictions, far broader international connections, and, above all, far higher salaries, handsome villas, sleek cars. It was not so easy to resist.
There was often a preface for the younger set: “Complete your education first, at GDR expense. Then we have a good job for you.” The Berlin Wall was a tough attempt to hinder this, but it could never prevent it completely without forbidding all travel.
Today no travel is hindered, for which everyone is grateful. My mind returns to the years when official locution made even the word for the Berlin Wall (or Mauer) taboo, laundering it to the officially correct “anti-fascist protective rampart.”
We all knew it was erected not to protect us from others but to keep us in, and the awkward whitewash term was always said with a sarcastic grin – or a grimace.
But I look at today’s Germany – and I ponder. In the GDR a smeared swastika, in a school toilet stall or on an old Jewish tombstone, led immediately, even when it was a child’s prank, to police investigation and, if traced, often to punishment. But this was an extreme rarity, until near the end, when young West Berlin racists visited more freely and spread their influence.
Swastikas and the like are also forbidden today, but their proponents and converts are everywhere. Many towns and villages, especially in disgruntled, disadvantaged, rebellious Eastern areas, are easy prey for fascist ideas and fascist actions, with hardly disguised slogans sung at raucous concerts, shouted at soccer matches, chanted at body training or shooting clubs, and tolerated by prosecutors, police, judges, mayors – out of fear or favor.
They have supporters at high levels; for years the head of the FBI equivalent was an AfD supporter; more than a few Berlin cops are their protecting friends.
Recalling the hopes
Yes, any remaining tears on this 7th of October may be recalling the hopes of 75 years. None of those dreamers among the ruins in 1949 could have imagined that someday policemen would again be shielding old and young Nazis bellowing Horst Wessel chants while marching down the rebuilt streets of Berlin, sometimes past my windows on a boulevard which – as yet – still bears the name Karl Marx.
And now a political party, not openly fascist, but racist, nationalist, pro-capitalist, betrays with occasional slips of the tongue its brand of nostalgia for old-time German greatness and power. Like a vortex, it pulls in smaller, more openly extreme groups.
It has gained alarming strength. In national polls, this Alternative for Germany (AfD) duels with the Social Democrats for second place. In recent state elections, it barely missed first place in Brandenburg and Saxony.
In Thuringia, where the LINKE (Left Party) was in the lead for ten years, AfD won first place. It would normally be entitled to name the minister-president, except that no one wants to join with it to form a 50+ majority.
Meanwhile, the German economy seems to be grinding to a standstill, with near or minus zero growth levels, high power costs for industry and homes after the shutdown (and destruction) of Russian gas or oil pipelines and liquefied fracking gas from distant America endangering both budgets and coastal environment. Its leading industry, automobile production, faces a crisis, blaming China, but not happy about clashing with its main trading partner.
Volkswagen (VW), its crown jewel, is threatening to shutter big plants in East and West Germany while its workers, among the best paid due to long past struggles, threaten to replace their more placid role with old-time militancy, adding to generally angry stirrings caused by costlier rents and groceries, for some already unaffordable.
The AfD has profited greatly from the growing dissatisfaction. And the leftists, who should have been leading the fight against the profiteers? Alas, they are split!
The LINKE party, formed after East and West party amalgamation, reached its peak in 2009 after the recession, with 11.9% of the vote and 76 Bundestag seats, making it the strongest opposition party. But, spoiled by success with up to 30% in East German strongholds permitting coalitions on the state levels, some leaders hoped to join Social Democrats and Greens on the federal level as well.
To achieve this they reduced any alarming militancy, and moved towards acceptable Keynesian positions easing and improving the capitalist system, not really aiming at dumping it except, who knows, in some cloudy future.
This change was clearest in foreign policy. LINKE leaders slid away from former sharp opposition to NATO and its tsunami expansion, aiming at total encirclement of Russia, they diluted rejection of all arms shipments to conflict areas and wobbled the stand on wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
But a minority grouping in the party, with its dynamic, widely popular leader Sahra Wagenknecht, resisted the compromises, demanding negotiations for peace in Ukraine, no more support for Netanyahu, an ejection of American missile bases on German territory, and a switch from dependency on the USA in favor of following peace in Ukraine with resumed trade and normal relations with Russia.
With the LINKE seen by too many as “just another part of the establishment” and voting accordingly, the inner party quarrel came to a head in February 2023 when its leaders boycotted a peace rally led by Wagenknecht. Despite the boycott, it proved a huge success, with up to 50,000 participants; many quit the party in angry protest at its boycott, and in January 2024 Wagenknecht led a group of followers to found a new party, the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW).
Hardly any organization
In European Union elections this new BSW, with hardly any organization, got 6.2%, shaming the LINKE, which dropped to a tragic 2.7 % and nose-dived further in three recent East Germany state elections, losing its governor post in Thuringia, barely squeaking through in Saxony, and suffering total disaster in Brandenburg, from a high of 28% in 2008 down to 3% – and without a seat for even one single deputy.
There are two main reasons for the successes – of only the AfD and the new Wagenknecht BSW, which won most voters not away from the swollen AfD, as some had hoped and expected, but rather from its collapsing parent LINKE.
No doubt in part because the BSW, like the AfD, opposed immigration to Germany. The AfD, openly racist, to “protect German culture.” The BSW, Wagenknecht maintained, to protect the rights of workers in Germany; “economic immigrants” should remain in their homelands and solve their problems there. This position, though certainly reflecting serious problems, came for some too close for comfort to AfD rants – but has sad popularity in many working-class circles, especially in East Germany.
But the two have another surprising point in common. Definitely not in the AfD’s rabid support for (“anti-Muslim”) Netanyahu, nor its support for German rearmament, the draft, and “heroic Germany, past, present and future”! But it does agree with BSW on the rejection of weapons shipments, the ejection of U.S. weapons in Germany and a cease fire and peace negotiations on Ukraine.
Perhaps this reflects AfD’s stress on a strong Germany, replacing U.S. ties and dependence. For whatever reason, its call for peace resembles that of the BSW and the feelings of 70% of East Germans and perhaps 40% of Westerners.
It may explain their successes and losses of the “war to the death” parties. This angers the Krupp-Rheinmetall crowd, now making billions on wars.
But there have been hopeful surprises; the governors of the three Eastern states, feeling local winds, defied their national parties, the Christian CDU and the SPD, by daring to warn that stepping up the Ukraine war with longer-range weapons, some from Germany, can lead to catastrophe and must be reconsidered.
Until now an almost punishable heresy! But it is they who must worry about forming coalitions, despite taboos, with or without the AfD, the BSW, and even remnants of the LINKE. All three urge the withdrawal of U.S. arms!
On October 3rd, the “day of German unity,” there was again a big peace rally in Berlin, with a crowd of 40,000 (say the organizers, 10, 000 say the police). Happily, the speakers included not only Wagenknecht but also a key leader of the LINKE and, courageously these days, a former, well-known Social Democrat and even a retiree from the Bavarian Christians – none in rivalry but in shared concern!
Other surprises: In line with the miserable votes for the loudest war party, the Greens, both its co-chairs are now resigning. So is the young co-chair of the Social Democrats (for reasons of bad health, he insists).
The Christian candidate for chancellor after next year’s Bundestag election, Friedrich Merz, formerly Blackrock’s millionaire boss in Germany, has been chosen. He wants more weapons.
Indeed, despite doubts and political chaos, the war drumming is growing louder than ever. It will be a central question at the LINKE congress of the LINKE on October 18-20.
Who will replace the present co-chairs – who are also resigning? Can the consistently left-wing forces in the party displace or weaken those preaching compromises while supporting, loudly or quietly, NATO and Netanyahu? Will a recession bring conflicts to a head? Question marks abound, in a time now calling less for tears, nostalgic or otherwise, than for action against racists and fascists, IDF bombers, greedy billionaires, and climate destroyers. Above all, in a fight to avert a war which could suddenly and definitively resolve all questions and disagreement – with total annihilation.
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