Back in the GDR

I’m very much looking forward to seeing Goodbye Lenin!, especially because I’ll be interested to find out how far the film tallies with my own (admittedly brief) experience of the GDR. I spent a week there in 1984, staying with some medical students in Leipzig whom my girlfriend had made friends with in Hungary on an earlier holiday. They’d been very interested that we thought of ourselves as Trotskyists and we, in turn, were keen to discover what a “deformed workers’ state” (to use the official Trot jargon) was like. At the time (early Thatcherism) Britain was in a real mess, and the claim was frequently made that the GDR had a higher per capita GDP than the UK. So we went there expecting both a somewhat repressive society and one where living standards were similar to our own. So what did we find?

The population, so far as we could tell, was neither fanatically pro-regime nor pro-Western. I remember an elderly woman hearing us talking in English in a cafe and striking up a conversation. She told us that she had spent the Nazi years in Leeds, only returning to Germany with the end of “fascism” as Nazism was universally referred to. I’ve blogged before about our experience of playing a game of Monopoly with our hosts. They certainly didn’t have the capitalist ethos (near bankrupt players could depend on their comrades to bail them out!) and we Western socialists thrashed them easily! At the time, the people I talked to said that they wanted more democracy and political freedom, but not Western-style capitalism. They all seemed moderately hostile to the regime and I remember that there were jokes about people from Dresden being orthodox communists because the Western tv transmitters didn’t reach that far. East Germans were both proud and ignorant of their own history. Leipzigers in particular were proud that their town had witnessed the defiance of Dimitrov, later secretary to the Comintern, who was put on trial by Goering in 1933 (and won). But though they new about the high points of Communist history, they didn’t know much about the lows. My friends knew nothing of the history of the KPD (the pre-war Communist Party) before the Stalinist Thaelmann faction took control in 1927. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were known, of course, but as icons rather than as thinkers (their ideas would have been too radical for the GDR).

The public face of the regime was, of course, everywhere, with many banners and posters vaunting the achievements of the regime and the benefits of “Peace”. We didn’t get to see East German tv until I was in West Berlin (as our friends didn’t have a tv set, and when we did, we saw two programmes: a long (a really long) speech by Chernyenko and a drama about sabotage in a factory making agricultural machinery. As for political repression, I really have very little to say. We know now, of course, that the Stasi kept tabs on pretty much everyone (so I’m sure there was a little file on me somewhere). We misread the conditions of our visa and failed to report to the local police until three days after our arrival. But when we did go, full of trepidation, the policeman was very friendly and relaxed and stamped our passports without making a fuss. One of my student friends, who had been required to read “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (not one of Lenin’s best IMHO) told me that he had asked at the library for a copy of the work to which Lenin’s was a reply (Kautsky’s “The Class Struggle, I think). Although the work was in the catalogue, he was told that he was not permitted to inspect it, let alone borrow it. The same friend also displayed a certain wariness when out in public with us, and on one occasion, when we visited a bar, asked that we remain silent and not speak in English.

It was evident, almost immediately, that East German living standards were way below those of capitalist Britain.There was a terrible selection of consumer goods. There really was not much worth eating in the shops (and endless bottled vegetables), though many East Germans grew their own produce on allotments. Having heard our hosts moan about the difficulty of getting decent food, we were amazed to find a wide range of cheeses for sale. Or so we thought. In the shop, there were packets advertising Rocquefort, Camembert, Brie, Gouda and many other varieties. We bought many packets and took them home to general hilarity: all the packets contained identical processed cheese. Oranges from Cuba did seem to be plentiful (though they were a horrible brown/green colour) and on a trip to the zoo we discovered animals chewing through enormous quantities of turnips. Back at our friends’ place we looked up “turnip” in the German-English dictionary to find it rendered, literally as “animal food”. Clearly there was room for Anglo-German cultural disagreement on what counted as “food”.

The impression of generally poor living standards seemed to extend to housing. Our friends lived in the only inhabited apartment (on their staircase) in a condemned tenement block. One thing that took some getting used to was the toilet facilities. To go, one had to step out into the corridor and into what looked like a cupboard where there was a bench and what seemed to be a saucepan lid. On lifting the lid one was presented with a shute running straight down to the cesspit several floors below from which rose a most appalling stench. I was constipated for days! Apparently, a modern, flushing wc had been scheduled for installation, the parts had been delivered on day 1, but had been stolen by the time the workmen arrived on day 2. Nevertheless, the official records stated that the apartment had been modernised (in this respect, anyway!) and since the records must be right, nothing could now be done.

One day we visited Wittenberg (the town where Luther did all that nailing-to-the-door stuff) and spent a whole morning thinking there was something strange about the place. There was – the silence! Since East Germans had to wait many years to acquire a Trabant (the little state-manufactured car powered by a 2-stroke engine) most did not have one. There was no traffic, and so no traffic noise. On the same day we met an East German teacher of English and her teenage daughter, who were amazed to see Western tourists. I have to say that the teacher’s English was not especially good – but since she had never visited and never could visit an anglophone country, that was not surprising.

There was a definite edginess in the streets in the neighbourhood where our friends lived. We dressed oddly by East German standards and were shouted at by strangers on one occasion. We also witnessed a violent confrontation in front of the main railway station between football fans and police. When we saw gangs of fans in other areas later, we felt pretty nervous.

There are many other things I could mention (the pollution and how bad it was, for one). The main thing to say, though, is that though the GDR was a shoddy and poor place, it was not, at least for most of its history, a place that matches the dystopian fantasy imaged of the communist bloc that one sometimes finds in the blogsphere. There were not, as far as I could tell, widespread disappearances, torture or any of that stuff. Rather, people adjusted, adapted, whispered and grumbled and hoped for better times (though all thought that the wall was there for the rest of their lives). Grim and depressing, sometimes, but this was not Leningrad 1937. It was also a place where people could, on the whole, be pretty certain about the shape their lives would take. Sometimes this meant compromise. My doctor friends wanted to be together and get married, but they knew that there was a danger that once they had passed their exams they would be assigned to different cities. There was some flexibility in the system: you could say where you would prefer to practise. If thet put down a popular city like Berlin, then the likelihood was that they would each be sent to random towns, perhaps at opposite ends of the country. So they chose to go to Chemnitz (or Karl-Marx Stadt), guessing, correctly, that there would be few volunteers for that grim industrial Saxon city. They were right, and they got to stay together.

ADDENDUM: The Financial Times has a review of recent books on the GDR.