|
|
 |
| |
| The good life in the Soviet
bloc |
Mary Fulbrook has uncovered a more human
side to the former East Germany, writes Illtyd Harrington
The People’s State: East Germany from Hitler to Honecker
by Mary Fulbrook
Yale University Press, £19.95
|
Before the Wall – A street corner in Bernauerstrasse
at the end of the French sector in Berlin
The Wall goes up. The East is effectively cut off from the
West in Bernauerstrasse
Children playing in one of the many childcare facilities
in the new town area of Cottbus in 1989 a few months before
the fall of the Wall
|
IN 1944, Henry Morgonthau, the head of he United States treasury
looked at the devastation that was Germany; pounded from the air
and being overrun from the east by the Red Army and the West by
the US and the UK. He seriously proposed turning Germany into a
vast wasteland to finish off the job. What happened rapidly, however,
was the division of the Fatherland into four zones. Even in Berlin,
which lay deep in the Soviet area of control.
Thereby lays the origin of the German Democratic Republic, which
came into being in 1949, and the construction of the Berlin Wall
in 1961, followed by its dramatic destruction in Nov 1989.
For 28 years 17 million East Germans lived under a Soviet puppet
government, brutally brought into conformity, spied upon by the
Stasi and starved of all the benefits of western capitalism only
to be caricatured in James Bond fantasies.
Well, not really and Professor Mary Fulbrook, who lives in Holborn,
has simply begun to put the record straight. For most ‘Ossis’,
and most ‘Wessis’, lived, according to her, “perfectly
ordinary lives” and were part of a “participatory dictatorship”.
She describes herself as an ‘old leftie’ but is no apologist
for the SED, the Communist Party rulers. The People’s State
is as objective as it comes.
Over three million people left East Germany before the Wall went
up. The old frontier in Berlin drained away currency and all the
while the ruling elite were paranoid about the enemy within, most
of them had fled from the Nazis. Gradually, however, and particularly
after 1961, East Germans went about their business and adapted to
their situation, openly grumbling and partitioning the authorities.
The new state tried to face the challenge of urgent housing needs
but with limited resources and manpower while West Germany roared
forward with enormous aid from America and the Marshall Plan.
As all good Germans do, they went to the theatre. There were 346
in the DDR, as opposed to 178 in the Federal republic. They dug
their allotments, joined discussion groups, took internal holidays
and plodded on.
Just after the war, they survived on 1,200 calories a day but major
epidemics were avoided. Disabled children who had survived the Nazis
were well cared for. As time went on, cigarettes and alcohol became
major killers. Forced industrial production brought appalling pollution
and industrial diseases.
As the memory of the war passed, youth demanded more liberty and
even old, rigid Walter Ulbricht, the old communist boss, realised
its importance. He pushed for hi-tech but produced too many over-educated
graduates and not enough jobs.
Women made up half the workforce and undoubtedly won helpful concessions.
By 1989 there was full pay and maternity leave for a year at least
when the baby arrived. Equality developed in what was a male dominated
society.
Fulbrook is Professor of German History at UCL and is a meticulous
scholar who blows away the monochrome image of a society where some
still yearn for the certainty of “those closed years of 1961-1989”.
With old-fashioned common-sense, she realises that most people got
up every day to face ‘perfectly normal lives’: hopefully
going to a job or shopping, even if there were few bananas in the
DDR
Finally, she is particularly good on the two communist leaders.
I interviewed Walter Ulbicht, who led from 1945-71, for the weekly
Tribune’s 50th anniversary of World War I. To my surprise,
she identifies his ability to listen and accommodate if not compromise.
His successor, Eric Honecker, comes across as doctrinaire who ended
his days in Chile, swept away by Gorbachov’s reforms.
Honecker abruptly terminated an interview with me in 1988 when I
told him, bluntly, what was happening to his financially bankrupt
regime. I left quickly by Checkpoint Charlie.
Mary Fulbrook has skilfully and honestly painted a picture of East
Germany between 1945 and 1989. No cold war rhetoric or airbrushing
of history here. |
| |
|
Paris is still No.1 in the wine world
PARIS, sera toujours Paris, sang the French singer and Hollywood star
of the 1940s Maurice Chevalier.
FULL STORY
Give our school kids a sporting
chance
DON’T know about you but I hated sport at school. It was all that
prancing around in your knickers...
FULL STORY
|
