Dissolution: the Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany

This page intentionally left blank THE CRISIS OF COMMUNISM ANDTHEENDOFEASTGERMANY Charles S. Maier PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY Copyright © 1997 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Maier, Charles S. Dissolution : The crisis of Communism and the end of East Germany / Charles S. Maier. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN 1-4008-0504-X 1. Germany (East)—Politics and government—1989–1990. 2. Communism—Germany (East). 3. Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands. 4. Germany—History—Unification, 1990. 5. Opposition (Political science)— Germany (East). I. Title. DD289.M34 1997 943.1087′8—dc21 96-39995 CIP This book has been composed in Berkeley with Benguiat Display FOR PAULINE This page intentionally left blank No great historical event is better calculated . to teach political writers and statesmen to be cautious in their speculations; for never was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen. Was the phenomenon in fact so extraordinary as contemporaries supposed? . What was its true significance, its real nature, and what were the permanent ef- fects of this strange and terrifying revolution? What exactly did it de- stroy, and what did it create? I believe that the time has come when these questions can be answered; that today we are in a position to see this memorable event in its true perspective and pass judgment on it. For we now are far enough from the Revolution to be rela- tively unaffected by the frenzied enthusiasm of those who saw it through; yet near enough to be able to enter into the feelings of its promoters and to see what they were aiming at. Soon it will be difficult to do this; since when great revolutions are successful their causes cease to exist and the very fact of their success has made them incomprehensible. —Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface xi Chapter One. Losing Faith 3 Believers and Victims 3 Real Existing Socialism 22 Privilege, Secrecy, and Complicity 32 A Tethered Consciousness 52 Chapter Two. The Economic Collapse 59 The Debt Crisis and the Contradictions of Comecon 59 The Costs of Computerization 73 Retreat from Reform: State Socialism in Retrospect 78 The Archaeology of Coal and Steel 97 Chapter Three. The Autumn Upheaval 108 Prologue: A Revolution in Germany 108 Decomposition and Flight 120 Two Languages of Revolution 131 Monday Nights in Leipzig 135 Berlin: Rulers and Ruled 146 Chapter Four. Protagonists of the Transition 168 New Forums and Round Tables 169 Redeeming “Civil Society” 185 Political Parties and the Elections of March 18, 1990 195 x CONTENTS Chapter Five. Unification 215 Still Masters of the Game? Soviet Policy Shifts on Germany 216 2 = 1 or 1 = 1? The Economics of Unification 227 2+4=1:TheDiplomacy of Unification 244 Chapter Six. Anschluss and Melancholy 285 Between Two Berlins, 1990 285 Between Socialism and Capitalism 290 Abwicklung: Academic Purge and Renewal 303 Stasi Stains: The Old Regime on Trial 311 Epilogue. Wrapped Reichstag, 1995 330 Notes 339 A Note on Sources 421 Index 427 Preface THIS book addresses one of the great transformations of our century, the sudden and unexpected fall of communism as a ruling system. As Tocque- ville wrote about the French events of 1789, whose bicentennial was being celebrated even as the story told here gathered momentum, rarely was an upheaval so unforeseen. We cannot say so confidently that it was inevitable. Not because it was not, but because at best historians can circumscribe the inquiry into inevitability (What exactly was inevitable? After what date?); they cannot resolve it. Certainly in retrospect there were powerful causes militating for the radical transformation of state socialism. But to what pre- cise degree it must dissolve, by what process it must be transformed, was not foreordained. This indeterminacy was certainly the case for East Germany. By the late 1980s many observers held it to be a Communist “success story.” That it could have remained a stalwart Marxist-Leninist state, however, once the process of perestroika was under way in the Soviet Union seems almost impossible. Still, its collapse could have been less clamorous; it might con- ceivably have preserved at least a temporary lease on life as a reformed con- stituent of a German confederation. I do not propose that this would have been a more desirable outcome, only that, as we look back at the remarkable events of 1989–90, we can at best ascribe powerful causes for the disintegra- tion of German communism, but no ineluctable reason that predetermined today’s united Germany, and certainly not so rapidly. This book is thus the history not only of how a governing system disinte- grated, but of how a particular Communist state disappeared. Like the Ber- lin Wall, the German Democratic Republic has now vanished. Its remains are ever more difficult to recapture. For the traveler, the concrete barrier and its graffiti, the watchtowers, lethal border strip, and crossing points that formed the frontier of the socialist world have now become just a vague xii PREFACE winding strip of turf beneath the creaky Berlin elevated railroad or running along the curves of the Spree. Soon even that strip will be effaced by new construction. The back streets of provincial towns are still run down, indus- tries have shut, Russian barracks are empty and desolate; the apartment blocks constructed in the past four decades remain bleak. But electronics stores and cafés now line village streets; vast merchandise outlets have been constructed near the Saxon Autobahn. The architectural legacy of past cen- turies—the brick cathedrals of the Altmark and Mecklenburg and the fret- work houses of Görlitz or Tangermünde, neoclassical villas, even some of the gutted synagogues—now reemerge, authentically revived, sometimes in that never-never land of expectant tourism. “The DDR: Germany’s Dis- neyland,” I have seen scrawled on one wall. The history of the interim yes- terday needs to be written before preservation of the remoter past takes over. The twin aspirations of this project—accounting for the crisis of communism and narrating the end of East Germany—have entailed different histo- riographical agendas. I wanted first just to convey the drama of historic transformation. The popular challenge to a regime that ruled oppressively for so long was, I felt then and still believe now, a great and heartening event. The participants who made their history in 1989 deserved an account that captured the energies, hopes, and anxieties at stake. Whether I have succeeded in this narrative task is up to the reader to decide, but it has remained an objective throughout. At the same time, to account for the collapse of communism—certainly the greatest European political develop- ment since the end of the Second World War—has required analyzing elements common to the Soviet bloc as a whole, including its systemic economic crisis, the rulers’ loss of conviction, the brief heyday of “forum” de- mocracy, and the international diplomatic framework. Although this is not a work of systematic comparison, I hope that it will encourage readers to think about the former Communist countries as a group. It may also prod some insights about how Western societies function with respect to those in Eastern Europe. Most centrally, though, this book endeavors to describe the disappear- ance of a very particular society with a complicated history: small, regi- mented, seemingly industrious, one of two heirs to a rich, even oppressive cultural legacy. I have had to recover the vanished German Democratic Re- public in an almost archaeological way. In many respects it was a repressive little state built on public self-congratulations and pervasive policing. Dur- ing the years that I passed through the country, from the early 1960s on, I PREFACE xiii found it a shabby and sad experience. There was truculence and pettifog- ging at the frontiers, an overweaning security apparatus within, a dismaying love for great asphalt spaces, the inculcation of fear as a tool of governance, the continuing celebration of mediocre achievements at home and of like- minded authoritarian regimes abroad, the constant projection of militarist and revanchist threats from the West. On the other hand, some people of good conscience sought to give their East German fatherland a good-faith effort. It incorporated for them some generous if deformed aspirations. It is easy enough to say they were proved wrong, but the task is to understand why they lent their efforts to the enterprise. For all the loyalties and life histories accumulated in forty postwar years, there was always an elusive element to East Germany. At the very beginning of the 1960s, the displaced writer Uwe Johnson sought to come to grips with his foresaken homeland in a novel called The Third Book about Achim. Achim, an athlete and a hero of the German Democratic Republic, turns out to be curiously insubstantial, less his own man than a creation of his socialist society, courteous but spectral. “The persons are invented,” Johnson conceded. “The events don’t relate to similar ones, but to the boundary, the difference, the remoteness, and the attempt to describe them.” The events analyzed in this history are not invented, but my book too relates to “the boundary, the difference, the remoteness, and the attempt to describe them.” It seeks to evoke a society whose public institutions were totally disappearing even as all its inhabitants continued their individual lives.

Load more