Oct. 7, 2024, marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the German Democratic Republic. For several years in the 1980s, People’s World Editor John Wojcik served as chair of the U.S. Committee for Friendship with the GDR. He traveled there extensively during the country’s last decade, leading tours of American visitors and building opportunities for cultural exchange and cooperation. The article below is an updated version of a story he originally wrote in 2019 for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A few years ago, there were events in Germany commemorating the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the pages of the press, prominent personalities—from former U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker to then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel to the now-deceased former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev—all weighed in with commentaries celebrating to a greater or lesser degree the demise of the former socialist state in the east.
The fall of the wall on Nov. 9, 1989, may have signaled the German Democratic Republic’s pending death, but today—Oct. 7, 2024—is the 75th anniversary of its founding. As someone who traveled frequently to the GDR when it existed and spent years involved in the movement for friendship and solidarity with that country, I offer here some thoughts on the historic importance of the establishment of an anti-fascist state on German soil and the legacy of socialism in that country.
The GDR, as the old East Germany was officially known, was a lot more than the totalitarian prop that gets paraded out during anniversaries to prove the supposed superiority of capitalism over socialism. It was up against tough odds, right from the start—long before construction of the wall began in August 1961.
The anniversary of the GDR’s founding is actually a good time to revisit how and why Germany was divided in the first place, an outcome that resulted from the actions of capitalist countries in the West, not because of policies originating with the Soviet Union as Western historians have long claimed.
World War II in Europe ended with an agreement reached and signed in Potsdam, Germany, in 1945. The Soviet Union, the United States, Britain, and France were parties to the deal, which involved an agreement to de-Nazify Germany, demilitarize it completely, and nationalize the major industries with the intention of keeping them out of the hands of former Nazis.
The country was to be only temporarily divided into four occupation zones, one each to be ruled by the United States, Britain, and France in the Western part of Germany and the Soviet Union in the eastern part of the country. The capital of Berlin, situated in the eastern section, was to be similarly divided into four occupation zones.
The occupiers were to jointly oversee the carrying out of the Potsdam Agreement, which included a call for the arrest and imprisonment of all high-level Nazi Party members in and out of the military.
The deal was actually a victory for the Soviet Union, which wanted a neutral but united and peaceful Germany to develop. The Soviet delegation in Potsdam vigorously fought proposals by the U.S. that called for the permanent division of Germany into separate industrial and agricultural states.
Step by step, the Western powers began violating the Potsdam Agreement, first by offering jobs and positions to Nazis who fled the Russian zone and poured into the U.S., French, and British zones in the West.
Next, they reneged on deals to nationalize major industries in the western part of the country, often handing them back to powerful Nazis and Nazi sympathizers who had lost ownership and control of them after the war.
Then, they extended Marshall Plan aid in the billions of dollars to the Western zones, excluding the Soviet zone. Their next move was to develop a new currency, the German mark for the French, British, and U.S. zones, yet again excluding the East.
Finally, they united the three Western zones into a formation called the Federal Republic of Germany. Only after all of these Western moves to ditch the Potsdam Agreement and divide Germany permanently did the political parties in the Soviet zone unite to form the German Democratic Republic. From its formation on Oct. 7, 1949, however, until the early 1960s, the GDR never closed the border around West Berlin, despite the fact that it was a city fully inside the GDR that was controlled by the capitalist Western powers.
Why the wall went up
One big problem for the GDR from its beginning in 1949 was that it occupied the much weaker and war-torn eastern third of Germany. Compared with the money that was pumped into the western part of Germany by the U.S. for rebuilding, the GDR started out with almost nothing.
Its quick elimination of former Nazis from positions of power and influence added another downside, of sorts. In many walks of life, Nazis at the end of the war were the folks who had experience running industries, schools, big businesses, and almost everything else. Those Nazis not arrested in the GDR fled, as fast as they could, to the west.
A third disadvantage was the forced economic and political blockade imposed upon the GDR by both the West German government based in Bonn and the U.S. It wasn’t a wall in those early days, but rather policies in the West that kept GDR citizens out of international conferences, scientific seminars, training sessions, and sporting events. So, early on, there was already a de-facto wall denying GDR citizens the right to participate in international life and bring home knowledge and experience.
A fourth disadvantage was that high-quality products manufactured in the GDR were forbidden to use their famous brand names (like Zeiss Optical and Meissen porcelain, for example) for international sales. This denied the GDR economy much-needed foreign currency.
A fifth disadvantage was that the Bonn government actually strong-armed U.S. trade officials into denying the GDR “most favored nation” trade status, which kept it blocked behind a figurative tariff wall. The GDR was denied this status, despite the fact that the U.S. had conferred it upon other socialist countries, including Poland and Hungary. This move made it impossible for the GDR to compete with West Germany in the U.S., the most important market in the world in those formative years of the fledgling republic and even today.
A sixth disadvantage was a steady CIA effort to entice effective political leaders out of the GDR. Allen Dulles, the CIA leader who engineered the overthrow of democratically-elected governments in Iran, Guatemala, and the Congo and engineered attempts to overthrow the government of socialist Cuba, was hard at work in the GDR, too.
Rather than assassination in the GDR, however, his agents attempted to bribe Otto Grotewohl, the leader of the Social Democrats who merged his party with the Communists in East Germany to form the Socialist Unity Party (SED). Not only did Grotewohl spurn those agents, but he also became the first prime minister of the GDR.
A seventh disadvantage was what the CIA continually did throughout the 1950s to lure skilled technicians, scientists, medical experts, and others out of the GDR. State Department documents now available reflect many of these efforts, unlike the attempt with Grotewohl, were successful. This intentional campaign of brain drain contributed to the growing economic gap between West Germany and the GDR in the late 1950s.
With the Marshall Plan and all the encouragement of West German economic growth, something the GDR could not possibly keep up with, the addition of this sabotage by the CIA dealt severe blows to the GDR economy in its formative years.
An eighth disadvantage to the GDR, as opposed to West Germany, was the negative effect of the push for war underway in the United States. When the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba failed, President John F. Kennedy met with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
The Soviet leader put pressure on Kennedy to agree to an all-German peace treaty to ease the situation in Berlin, which was full of U.S. and Soviet tanks, not separated from one another by any border wall. Khrushchev urged the pulling of all troops, Soviet and U.S., out of the city. He threatened that U.S. failure to agree would force the Soviet Union to conclude its own peace treaty with the GDR.
In the U.S., meanwhile, the war hawks were having a field day. Kennedy was calling for billions more for the Pentagon and increasing the size of the armed forces by almost one million men. Fallout shelters had been built all over the U.S., with the basements of run-down apartment buildings being enlisted as such “shelters.” American schoolchildren had already been forced under their desks weekly to prepare for a nuclear attack.
In Berlin, everyone was nervous. A “now or never” fear was stoked by the media in Germany, and the number of people leaving the GDR, especially the experts and the technicians mentioned earlier, through the open border in Berlin increased. Many left simply because they felt it was “safer on the other side” or because they were afraid “something” was about to happen.
An additional, ninth, problem for the GDR was the day-to-day sabotage of the economy that was happening on top of the brain drain. One could change 10 West marks for 70 East marks in the West, openly and without fear of any consequences, and then go to the East where food and other products were available at cheap prices, and clean out the shelves of the grocery stores, leaving little for GDR workers to purchase with their hard-earned East marks. The legal exchange rate was supposed to be one-for-one, but in the West, you could often get seven or more. All the better to help destroy both the economy and morale in the East.
On top of all of these disadvantages and adverse factors faced by the GDR, Berlin had become a flashpoint by 1960 where many believed a third world war was likely to explode at any time. Again, with no closed border between East and West Berlin, Soviet and U.S. tanks were facing each other only inches apart on street corners. (Then too, don’t forget that capitalist West Berlin, filled to the brim with U.S. equipment and soldiers, was situated entirely inside the GDR, with no border that would prevent tanks from the U.S. encroaching on the GDR or tanks from the Soviet Union encroaching on West Berlin.)
Being a practical politician and knowing full well the disadvantages faced by the GDR, Kennedy, who knew in advance that the wall was about to be built in the summer of 1961, at first remained quiet, avoiding any incendiary remarks. He is reported widely to have said of the wall: “It’s not a very nice solution, but a wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
That common sense, however, did not stop the U.S. president from launching an enormous propaganda campaign to exploit the GDR’s closing of the border around West Berlin. It would be portrayed to the world not as the construction of a border and checkpoints around West Berlin but rather as the bottling up and containment of a whole people in the GDR yearning to be free.
The immediate effect of the wall after its construction, of course, was improved security for the GDR.
A secondary effect was the immediate, if only temporary, weakening of the right-wing war hawks in West Germany with the ex-Nazi-friendly Conrad Adenauer being replaced by Willy Brandt, who advocated open and peaceful relations between the two Germanies.
Those determined to defeat socialism in the East and export capitalism into it did not give up, however. For them, the new “Ostpolitik” promised economic softening up of the “Stalinists” by other means—by opening relations with them and by dangling Coca-Cola and western clothing in front of the population.
The standard of living in the GDR rose rapidly after the wall was built around West Berlin, and, ironically, cultural opportunities flourished. With artists, musicians, and moviemakers less preoccupied with the West, and with some giving up their plans of going there, they turned their attention to developing cultural outlets in the GDR. Also, cultural figures who had trouble finding jobs in the West were welcomed to come and perform in the GDR.
The art of the early years of the GDR (too often dominated by happy, smiling, and energetic workers engaging in production) began to be replaced with countless individual styles, cities and landscapes, modern art, events in Cuba, China, and elsewhere, portraits of African Americans and much more. (See p. 132 of Victor Grossman’s book A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl Marx-Allee, from Monthly Review Publishers.)
Dramatic films from all over the world were shown in theaters. The closing of the border around West Berlin at first opened up some cultural opportunities by reducing the fear that had previously existed of political problems coming in along with performers over open borders.
Why the wall had to fall
In the end, however, the GDR could not overcome the many disadvantages it had faced from the beginning, nor could it overcome the Western propaganda campaign around the Berlin Wall.
To defend its noble anti-fascist and socialist goals—(many of its top leaders’ bodies still bore the numbers tattooed onto them in Nazi concentration camps)—the GDR’s security agencies did indeed resort to very unpleasant things. A cement wall, censorship in the media, and often overly intense surveillance of its own population—none of these served as glowing recommendations of socialism.
And to be fair, the challenges the country faced were not just ones imposed upon it from the outside. Fearful, closed, and sometimes narrow minds worked together to create many internal problems.
From 1980 until 1989, I was the chair of the U.S. Committee for Friendship with the GDR. Our organization worked hard to bring cultural, educational, political, and working-class people from the GDR to the U.S. and vice-versa. We believed that there should be peace and cooperation between nations with differing social systems.
While I admit that there were wrong and sometimes terrible choices made by leading figures in the GDR, I say today with as much certainty as ever that they never resorted to racism, national chauvinism, or regional hostility. Until the dying days of their republic, they supported good relations with every single country and nationality hurt by the Nazis and with every other country and nationality in the world.
It is important for people to realize that, unlike our leaders here in the U.S., the leaders of the GDR headed a country and a system that could flourish only in the context of world peace and cooperation among nations. They could not and did not profit from war.
They wrongly believed when the Berlin Wall went up that it would keep out Deutsche Bank and the Krupps and the Siemens, and that it would protect their dream of a better future. History proved otherwise. After the wall came down, capitalism was exported right back into the GDR.
And in the West, both the wall and socialism—the system it failed to protect—continue to be beaten up by the capitalist powers-that-be and their spokespersons in the media and academia.
Long after the wall fell, just a few years ago, the real estate industry in West Berlin drove out of office the city’s housing secretary who supported homeless people squatting in vacant apartments on the pretext that he had been an agent of the Stasi, the GDR secret service, in East Berlin. Andrej Holm was barely 19 when the wall fell. How extensive could his Stasi career have been?
It didn’t matter. The hatred of the wall which came down over three decades ago was resurrected by the real estate industry to destroy a man whose only crime was protecting homeless people in the united “free” Berlin.
In the capital of the German Democratic Republic—in the Berlin that ended when the wall came down—there were no homeless people.
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