The German Democratic Republic The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State (428)

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23:32And so these things also existed in other parts of the communist world, but they did really have effect sometime.

23:38Ned Richardson-Little:And one of the things you can see when the GDR starts breaking down is that a lot of bureaucrats just stop answering their mail. That they might not accept the request, they might not do anything about it. But once they just start hiding from the mail, once they just start filling up boxes with letters and hoping people don't write back, even this system of response to popular unhappiness, once that starts to grind down, that's when the wheels really come off. Yeah, which we'll come on to when we reach the 1980s. I found it interesting that you describe the SED using these letters almost like market research to see perhaps what direction the next five-year plan should be going in and that sort of thing.

24:19Ned Richardson-Little:When you think about what you'd have to do, just imagining every product a modern society could want, sitting down in an office somewhere in East Berlin and thinking, this is how many shoes they're going to want in Leipzig, and this is what style, this is what shape, this is how many children are we going to have. We're going to have to talk to the office, the health department to figure out birth rates, to plan out how many children's shoes at what size you're going to need. it's a hugely daunting task and this is sort of one one way to try and figure out what you're going to need but it's one sort of when you think through the the mechanisms you need to run a command economy it's a massive challenge yeah that's never going to go wrong is it we were talking about the formation of the gdr and there's a lot of repression going on during that period, particularly in the period of the uprising in 1953.

25:15But as you said, you can't just rule a country by repression. And that sort of mass terror holding the population together moves away towards this more social control. And okay, there's surveillance, but they're using sort of psychological methods to control people rather than torture or interrogation.

25:42Ned Richardson-Little:Yeah, 1953 is a really interesting case study here because the lead up to 53, you've got this decision that we're getting rid of all this playing nice with the idea that we're a nice democratic state. We're going to work with these anti-fascist bourgeois parties. We're going to have a nice gradual historical transition. in 1952 it's we're hitting the gas we're transitioning to socialism nationalize industry collectivize the farms and we're going to go all out and this is a huge austerity program basically they're getting people to work twice as hard for half as much and this is where from the state side they really try to test how much can we squeeze out of people with the promise that eventually it might get better.

26:26Ned Richardson-Little:And this is right when Stalin dies in March 53. You've got the sense of political unsettlement. And even the Soviets start writing saying, we think you're going too quickly. You're asking too much of the people. You're not giving them enough back. And the SED tries to roll things back. And you have an explosion of dissent, which goes from people upset about working conditions into what if we get rid of the SED? And in order to put down this uprising, you have to deploy Soviet tanks, people are killed, and you have sort of ringleaders or people anyone's expected of this are being rounded up. But this is really what scares the SED, that things are really on a knife edge, that if we can't be guaranteed the population is going to stay still for this.

27:08Ned Richardson-Little:And the Soviet side telling them, you need to keep people happy, you need to give some concessions. And this is what he said, this is when you get into more social control, You get the expansion of the Stasi as an organization that exists hovering above society. So it's ever-present that they could be there, but you don't need a man on the front porch with a bayonet threatening you. It's the idea that if you don't take part in the youth group, you won't get into university. If you don't show up to work on time, then we might move you to a much worse apartment. I mean, this is also post-war period.

27:43There's a lot of rubble. A lot of people don't have shelter. this isn't whether or not you had a nice vacation this year. This is, do you have an apartment that has running water? Do you have an apartment that is secured from the fact that the wind is blowing into a lot of these buildings for several years afterwards? Or are you a person who's going to get one of these shiny new, pleasant concrete prefab buildings that actually have some modern furnishing in them. Indeed, indeed. Now, the chapter you put together about the GDR's international connections, and particularly its relationship with West Germany, the Eastern Bloc and the Global South, I found particularly interesting because often you sort of imagine or you can see the GDR and West Germany as almost being like fire and water.

28:35They're completely separate but there's a deeply entangled relationship i think you describe it that becomes even more entangled as the years go on yeah it's interesting because you really have

28:52Ned Richardson-Little:the border shutting down for migration it's the obvious place where you get a disconnect in 52 you start having the clearance of the german german border you have people who are forcibly deported from their homes if they're too close to the border you have the death strips that are created. You have the Berlin Wall going up in 61. And for East Germans, you cannot cross the border until the 70s, really, in some cases, except if you're a pensioner. West Germans can't come to East Germany until the 70s, really. And this is obviously a thing to focus on because it's so dramatic and public, but there's so many interconnections in terms of trade.

29:27Ned Richardson-Little:You've got the problem that West Berlin is right there in the center of East Germany. This is something you have to figure out how to deal with after the blockade the Soviets put up in 49. And one of the problems for East Germany is that West Germany is just always there as this better other. It's always there as the country we have to exceed. No one's really impressed when they have a better standard of living than Romania or Poland or, say, the People's Republic of China. Being the richest communist country doesn't cut it. It's we're up against one of the richest Western countries where they speak our language and almost all of us can see their television.

30:05Ned Richardson-Little:And television is obviously the idealized version of most of what is going on. But this sort of the culture is getting beamed in. So while you're trying to create a completely separate socialist Germany, it's always there in the background. What are the West Germans doing? How do we go up against it? Sometimes it's about blocking it, trying to prevent it from coming in, which doesn't work very well because radio signals and people can watch tv but a lot of times it's things like trying to come up with an alternative to rock and roll that people can enjoy and when that doesn't work then you come up with your own version of rock and roll so you have to have socialist bands that produce approved socialist rock and roll because the west is there and you have to figure out some way to sort of take these things in and remake them because otherwise then people will get alienated and just start listening to the beatles secretly and also in that early history of the GDR, they're diplomatically isolated as well.

31:00It was the Halstein Doctrine with Konrad Adenauer, who's the first chancellor of West Germany. It's basically trying to make the GDR not look like a legitimate state.

31:12Ned Richardson-Little:From the beginning, both countries claim that they want reunification, and it becomes awkward over time when both of them have to come up with an explanation for why they're both separate. And for the West Germans, it's that the East isn't a real country. It's just a separate thing created by the Soviets. They said the Hallstein Doctrine, this is the diplomatic maneuver by the West saying, anyone who recognizes the East, we're going to cut off all diplomatic ties. We're going to cut off all trade. We won't give you foreign aid. and this is right when you have decolonization and you've got dozens of new countries are being created they all need their own diplomatic recognition they're all looking for legitimacy they're all looking for trade with a powerful western country and foreign aid is becoming this new tool of international affairs so the west germans really try to create this blanket that sort of comes down on all these countries as soon as they're formed of which side you're going to choose.

32:06And they're remarkably successful that they can offer more money, they can offer more legitimacy. And the GDR from the get-go is it's recognized by the rest of the Eastern Bloc and China, and that's about it. And this is where you have the GDR gets shoved into global affairs

32:21Ned Richardson-Little:much more so than it otherwise would. It's constantly going around trying to find newly formed countries, countries that are in the middle of a political transition, and trying their best to sort of compete with West Germany in their own little version of the Cold War over who gets to be the real Germany. And it's like when you look at the United Nations that the United Nations doesn't want to recognize the split of any of these countries. They say only one can get in. This is what comes up with China later, the sort of dispute over which is the real China. And there's a problem for Germany of eventually one has to be the real Germany and the other one not.

32:58And sort of the zero-sum game, which for the first two decades, the GDR is really languishing in isolation, trying to chip away at the edges, getting a bit of attention from Zanzibar right before it stops being a country and gets absorbed by Tanganyika to become Tanzania. And the GDR ends up in all of these different parts of the world, trying to work some magic and get someone to say they're a real country. And at first, it's not terribly successful. Until West German Chancellor Willy Brandt arrives in the late 1960s and he's pursuing a sort of form of détente Ostpolitik which results in the basic treaty of 1972 where both German states are in the UN and that fundamentally changes

33:48Ned Richardson-Little:the the international status of the GDR yeah this dam breaks initially in 69 with Cambodia and Iraq The West Germans had found a way to alienate Cambodia, the Iraqis. This is also tied up in the Arab-Israeli conflict as well. And the West Germans under Brandi Setser, they changed tactics seeing that this constant global fight to make sure no one ever recognizes the GDR is eventually going to break. There's only so much money they can throw at the problem. And too many countries start figuring out that they have leverage, that they can start throwing out there, that they want a little bit extra.

34:26They'd like better trade terms, more foreign aid, similar to what you see with Egypt at this time when they're sort of playing the U.S. and the Soviets off of each other, just on a slightly smaller scale. and so this combination of the west germans start to fumble uh the holstein doctrine a bit the east germans start to get a few openings and there's mutual recognition between east and west germany they get into the un and then you have the helsinki accords that come up and this rapid shift only in a couple of years where the gdr goes from this sort of global pariah state to being recognized by everyone i always find it interesting with the helsinki accords because that really opens East Germany to even more international criticism.

35:12And it gives sort of leverage for Western intervention and essentially becomes like a big liability for them as they get into the 1980s.

35:23Ned Richardson-Little:Yeah, the Helsinki Accords are interesting because on the one hand, it helps open things up. There's this agreement between East and West, this final peace treaty of World War II, really. It means there's a lot more travel, there's a lot more tourism, you have a lot more people going back and forth, exchange of information and culture. And this is really when you have a huge proliferation of the Stasi, that this opening comes with this constant perception of a security threat. and the other side of things there's certain human rights guarantees that are made as part of the treaty and the u.s starts trying to really lean on this as a way to find some international legal leverage as a way to put pressure on what's happening domestically you see us in poland with solidarity in the 80s and the soviet union with dissident movements charter 77 in czechoslovakia but at first this is for the gdr it's sort of seen as this is finally guaranteeing our borders We're finally being recognized as a country.

36:23Ned Richardson-Little:And this existential fear that we are not even treated as a real country and at any moment we could get wiped off the map. Maybe the Soviets will get tired of us and they're just going to pull the plug on the whole thing. This is seen as such a constant sort of Damocles hanging over the country that Helsinki is seen as this good deal. We're a real country. We have real borders. I mean we remember too that the eastern border of the GDR in Poland for the longest time West Germany was advocating not only getting back East Germany but also the territory that had been annexed by Poland so people talked about East Germany as middle Germany and Eastern Germany was actually what's still today Western Poland and the what's also Russian territory Kaliningrad so the idea that the Helsinki Accords are really crucial in just saying all of these borders that have basically been in place since 45, everyone's going to finally accept them, and we don't have to reopen the books on that.

37:20Ned Richardson-Little:Conacher in particular, he sees this as the final triumph of East Germany getting recognition. And also, I think this is the transition from Walter Oberg, who had been in charge in the earlier decades. Eric Conacher takes over in 71. Eric Conacher's really in charge for this period when they really start getting a lot more recognition. He's the architect of this. and regardless of the other politics on a personal level he saw this as a triumph that he got to be accepted he is a leader on part the west germans he represents a real country and i think this is something you see getting into the 80s where it's really important for hannaker to he goes on this world tour going to visit other countries as a head of state who is recognized by other countries um i always found interesting he starts off with japan and austria and these are slowly working his way back and the final crowning achievement of this is that he gets to go to West Germany in 88 to go meet Helmut Kohl, the chancellor of West Germany.

38:17And the idea that as a communist leader

38:20Ned Richardson-Little:of the GDR that he has to be respected is incredibly important. There's all this economic side of things, this is geopolitical, but on some level that for him as the head of the SED, this is the crowning achievement of German communism. That footage of him in West Germany, I find is fascinating. You know, seeing the Bundeswehr playing the East German anthem and Honecker standing next to Cole. And Cole looks like a giant. And Honecker's this tiny, well, he just appears really tiny. It's just because symbolism for a book cover. yeah yeah yeah and honicke's originally from the sire land so he actually goes and visits visits his hometown and where he was born and meets his sister you can see him sort of like brimming with look we are a proper country now you know you can't you know push us around but he's becoming more and more dependent on West Germany as well, even before then, for loans, because he's pursuing this policy of, is it unity of economic and social policy, which is really sort of offering a better level of consumerism to the population to try and match what's on offer in West Germany.

39:47But that is unsustainable in the longer term.

39:53Ned Richardson-Little:Yeah, I think this is again sort of the Olbert years, this is the Hanukkah years, that Olbert, especially the early years, sort of post-war period, that Germany is in really rough shape. There's very little in terms of consumer goods. You have rationing of basic goods into the late 50s. And this is a period of very austere socialism. This is people being told to go out, heroically overperform their tasks, to rebuild, to industrialize, to create a new country that will eventually pay off with the socialist utopia. And after a while, you need at least a bit of the utopia to show up. You can't just keep sort of hitting the snooze button on the payout.

40:32Ned Richardson-Little:And for Honecker, you already get this with Ulbricht, that initially the idea that the command economy is scientific. We've learned from the Soviets. They made Sputnik. We are superior to the crisis-ridden capitalist system, and we're going to overtake them. And then they keep on having crises. They can't produce enough food because farm collectivization doesn't work very well. Centralizing the economy creates all these bottlenecks, so people aren't getting enough products to produce into other products at different points of the supply line. And there's this real crisis. We need to produce enough televisions.

41:04We need to start producing enough clothing. And so Ulbricht already had this idea that we don't need to get better than the West at everything. We need to get better at them at a few things. So we're just going to take out a whack of cash as a loan, put it into some key technical areas. And when we make a quantum leap forward, we're going to leverage that to pull everything else along. And this doesn't

41:28Ned Richardson-Little:really work very well. A lot of the money gets sunk into things. They sometimes work, they sometimes don't. But this sort of miracle, one fun trick to solve your economic problems by just getting a lot of loans from the West and investing doesn't pay off in the way they're hoping. And as I said, Honecker has this idea, this sort of unity of economics and social policy, and they have this idea that essentially we're going to try to level out the benefits people are getting with the work they're expected to do. So we're trying to increase productivity, and that will come with benefits that you'll see one-to-one.

42:00Really try to incentivize people so that they feel like if I put in a few extra shifts, eventually I can get my own tri-bond. I'll get a new prefab suburban apartment with some nice new furnishings. I won't be in some sort of pre-war wreck that's held together with duct tape and hope with sort of no hot running water and things like this. So it's really this problem in the 70s. It sort of becomes this vicious cycle of taking out more money, investing in things. And the economy never takes off enough to really start paying back the Western money and stuff that they can export enough. And they really have this captive market in Eastern Bloc, other socialist countries.

42:41They can sell the goods there, but they can't compete internationally. So when they go into, there's a big program to create an East German microchip. And they make a pretty good microchip. It's too expensive to sell to anyone. it's not that they can't technically create these things. They can't create them at a price that's going to be able to compete with Siemens, Toshiba. They're the big German-American-Japanese giants. And so it's really not a question of competence, but can they create something that's efficient enough to be a real profit center to sort of haul the whole economy across the finish line?

43:14And eventually this just keeps spiraling and spiraling where they're increasingly faced with this problem that if we want to scale back our debt, we're going to have to massively cut consumer benefits. But Honecker's whole plan for socialism was to constantly provide a better life through consumer socialism, which shows the system works. So he sees this sort of precarious thing he's created. If we start scaling back on the money for consumer goods, we politically undermine the system. But if we need the money, we need to start getting more and more in hock to the West Germans, and then we're in debt to our capitalist rivals.

43:50So he's being pulled in both directions. Either we go back to austerity and we have uprisings or we start putting the West Germans in the driver's seat about our fiscal policy. He's sort of like kicking the can down the road, isn't he? And I mean, how is he selling this contradiction to the East German population that is taking out loans with West Germany? Because it must be reported on West German TV and the population are receiving that.

44:20Ned Richardson-Little:I think the main argument was that this is a period of peaceful coexistence. We can find ways to work across the border for peace. And this is really the catchword that keeps coming up. You've got the threat of nuclear war and people in Germany are acutely aware of if things kick off, they're going to be the ones who are under a bunch of mushroom clouds immediately. And so a lot of these initiatives can really be sold as peaceful engagement for greater economic payoff for both sides. And you no longer have the sense that sort of the West is this terrifying foreign enemy that with so much tourism engagement, people are watching television.

45:04Ned Richardson-Little:The West is the enemy, but at a way that the emotional heat on this has really dropped compared to, say, the 50s and 60s. Younger generations are used to the split of the countries, and you have fewer people where they're not seeing this through the lens of the West are still the Nazis who were the Nazis in the 40s. They're just the successor state who happens to be a capitalist, imperialist country. But we also still watch their television. We buy their products. and for a lot of people increasingly also that we're selling them products. So with all of this debt, I mean, it peaks at around 40 billion Deutschmarks, but it's still not doing the trick.

45:42And this is where there starts to be a rise or a rumble of dissent because the SED are refusing to implement reforms and you're starting to see these dissident groups appear.

45:57Ned Richardson-Little:Yeah, I think you get a lot of things coming together at once in the 80s where this general sense of dissatisfaction that with all the money they're spending, the economy still can't keep up. People don't feel like they're getting enough. This increasing sense that the system is becoming more and more ossified. You've got the same old people in control who've been there forever. Younger generations don't have social mobility like they used to. and you've got these dissident groups coming up who really come out of a lot of people from different backgrounds. Some of them are concerned about this unrestricted mass industrial pollution that not just sort of things like the ozone layer, acid rain, but you've got communities where they've got the most polluted air and water in all of Europe, places like Bitterfeld.

46:40Ned Richardson-Little:Industrial sites is dumping like pure poison into the local water. And if people try to complain about it, they get sort of threatened with being imprisoned for undermining the economy. And this issue that you've got a lot of people who are worried about things like mandatory military training for young people, the possibility of international sort of the Cold War going hot, who are interested in peace activism, but on slightly different terms of the state. and they start to really coalesce together under the banner of human rights by the mid-80s. You get people who sort of started off being apolitical campaigners for moral issues, local problems, and they all start really coming together with the idea that what we need are domestic political reforms or we get to have more of a voice.

47:23The same time from the SED, they really do not accept this as an argument and see anyone trying to challenge things from below outside of the proper channels as a threat. And this comes up when you have Gorbachev in the Soviet Union implementing reforms like Glasnost and Perestroika, this twin effort of mobilizing people politically, shaking up the economy. And for the East Germans, it's all just heresy. They think the Soviets have lost the plot. They're going off track. And the key is we don't change anything. We hold the line against our own people, against our Soviet allies. And you start having things like the censorship of Soviet publications.

48:05You start having a lot of people who are looking around trying to figure out what even is the party line I'm supporting. That I've been a good, loyal

48:13Ned Richardson-Little:sort of servant of the GDR and now things are clearly starting to fall apart. Nothing's working. We're not supposed to actually engage politically and talk about how to fix it. And all of a sudden, the Soviets are the enemies. And the sense of people really feel unmoored, even the ones who are trying to be good, loyal citizens because they don't know how to do that anymore. That everything feels like it's breaking. No one wants to fix it and we can't talk about it. Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you will never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com.

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49:27Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three months,$90 for six months, or$180 for 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. We slow when network is busy. See terms. Yeah, I can't remember the name of the East German minister who says it, but there's some classic phrase like, if your neighbor changes their wallpaper, there's no need for you to change yours or something like that.

49:53Ned Richardson-Little:Yeah, it's Kurt Hager, the chief ideology minister, that sort of comparing this to this group. We don't need to make these cosmetic changes like the Soviets and being completely dismissive, whereas in previous generations, this line of to learn from the Soviets is to learn how to win. The Soviets are the wise elder brother ushering us into the glories of socialism. And now we're on our own. Poland's in the middle of this martial law crackdown. The Soviets have gone mad. And we're going to have to stick it out here. Yeah, we get to 1989. And one of the turning points is the realisation amongst the population is the May 1989 municipal elections have definitely been full supplied because a lot of these, it's called dissident groups have been monitoring these elections.

50:45And they can see that, you know, they knew it in their heads, but they've actually got the hard evidence then.

50:54Ned Richardson-Little:yeah the elections are interesting because this again one of those places where the previous systems of social control really start to backfire that you had elections where you had to go and just there's a list of the people you will be voting for you go to the urn that says yes you pop it in there and you could you had the option of going off to the other urn to say no where everyone can see you're voting no so your neighbors see this your boss sees this the local stasi agencies this. If you feel like making yourself a social outcast, you can go do so, but it doesn't make a difference anyway, so why bother?

51:25Ned Richardson-Little:So it's usually a pretty good enforcement mechanism of getting people to go and have to vote in favor in these elections. It's a nice little sort of ritual of loyalty. Once you get to 89, suddenly everyone can see how many people are voting no. And then the results get announced, and I think they decide to give a little sop to the opposition by saying it's just below 99 % instead of being 99.9 % like it normally is. And it's so obviously fraudulent that the state tried to create a system of surveillance to prevent people from voting no. And that system of surveillance is telling everyone the SED is lying.

52:04Ned Richardson-Little:They can't even accept a symbolic gesture in local elections of us saying we're kind of pissed off. And that really turns a lot of people that they can't even let us pretend to be annoyed at what's happening now. We all have to go along with this. And it's sort of a level of disrespect that's being shown that people really take offense at. And events outside of East Germany are starting to affect the country itself because the border between Hungary and Austria is opened and so there is a way out of east germany without climbing over a wall or without applying to emigrate and things are starting to get into a spiral then certain members of the politburo approach gorbachev and say look would you be okay if we replace honecker and egon krentz comes in yeah things start to really get away with them with the migration crisis.

53:08Ned Richardson-Little:Suddenly a whole lot of the country wants to go camping in Hungary and not come back. And I think, as mentioned, this problem, these mass demonstrations that the state blinks, and this had already been happening in the spring. You have elections, semi-free elections in Poland, but the crackdown in Tiananmen Square in China really creates this counterexample that people get a bit nervous. But by the fall, you have this cycle of people making demonstrations, people trying to leave the country. Then you start having expulsions of certain activists, which sets off more demonstrations. And eventually these Monday demonstrations that happen in Leipzig that just everyone knows to turn up.

53:48You don't need a leader. You don't need somebody to make any kind of organization. It just by word of mouth just starts building. And the state really, the SED, its whole security app is really blinks in Leipzig. On October 7th, when you get this massive demonstration, they bring in Krenz to try and fix things. And he's completely hapless. He thinks he gets to be a GDR Gorbachev. He's going to be this great reformer. And similar to the post-war period, he massively overestimates what kind of popularity, what kind of legitimacy they've got in society. He thinks he can make a nice slow rollout of a handful of tweaks, make it a bit easier to go on holiday to the West.

54:30And events just completely overtake him. As these demonstrations continue, everyone keeps on trying to emigrate. And the shaky economy, once you start losing that many professionals, doctors are trying to get out of the country, all these key people. It's like a Jenga tower as people are pulling out all these key blocks. And enough people who are running the system look around and think, this whole thing's just over. I guess, is it a close-run thing as to whether the troops are used to try and put down these demonstrations?

55:05Ned Richardson-Little:the troops are certainly deployed one of the big problems that comes up is this general sort of collapse of morale in the security services you've got these militia groups that were formed after the 53 uprising you've got the military got the stasi you've got all these different branches but the stasi is really designed to tamp down on descent in these tiny little descent groups keep monitoring people go after intellectuals who start speaking out of turn to western media They're not designed to clamp down on 80 ,000 people in the streets. The militia groups have the problem that everyone's related to people who are also demonstrating.

55:40So suddenly people aren't turning up to work. Everyone suddenly has the flu. And the military is being called in. And the military has been training to fight the capitalist imperialist invasion. The military hasn't been trained up to be the domestic security force to clamp down in the same way. And nobody wants to be the one to kick off a massacre. There's nobody in the SEDs willing to give the order explicitly. I think on the one hand, you've had some Egon Krenz, this great reformer, had come out and he had praised Tiananmen Square and praised the Chinese leadership. But he still doesn't have the guts to do it himself, in part because no one's really sure if anyone's going to listen to the orders.

56:21And so this problem at first, Honaker isn't willing to give the order. The military isn't willing to do so on their own and take the heat for it. And this is where this problem that the state that really, the state as an entity no longer is willing to defend its own authority. No one's willing to put their lives on the line in the same way. No one's willing to kill for it. And once enough people push back on this, it's sort of like a door giving way. and this comes up with the opening of the berlin wall you just have enough people show up at a border checkpoint one night thinking that they're going to be allowed to pass because someone in the scd gives a confusing press conference when he's a little too sleepy one time and enough people show up and the border guards aren't willing to open fire and they managed to push their way through An incredible evening that on TV, unbelievable times.

57:14And so there's an attempt by some of these dissident groups to sort of create a new sort of democratic socialist GDR. and the SEDs become the party for democratic socialism. But really, they're just overwhelmed by the money and power of the political parties of the West. And obviously, the SPD existed in the West. So they're coming in to finance their party in the East as well. And, you know, there is reunification of Germany. But I think one of the chapters I found really interesting is the aftermath of the GDR, because the history often ends with reunification. And I think that whole dislocation, that societal dislocation, is a really untold story.

58:14It must have been like your whole world had, well, if you remember the SED, your whole world had disappeared. but just the degree of uncertainty. I mean, what were the challenges that GDR citizens were facing with reunification?

58:30Ned Richardson-Little:I think the thing that we talked about earlier that you have people whose whole lives have been organized around specific workplaces. If you grew up on a collective farm that regulated where you lived, where you went to school. If you worked in a certain factory that handled your childcare, it handled your social life. And one of the things that's really difficult in East Germany is that they get hit with all the same deindustrialization that the West had been hit with from the 70s onward. And they get hit all at once. It's like a ton of bricks. So the factory closures, the mine closures, in most Western countries, this has been something that's been a crisis since the 60s.

59:07A lot of communities, and it's been going at a much slower rate and compared to, say, what happened with coal mining in Britain, that's a multi-decade process that's really traumatic for society. This happens in about 18 months in some cases. um and the problem there too same as it had been before just because you're part of west germany doesn't mean these factories can compete on the international market that you don't have poland and romania as these places you can just sell all your products to anymore the gdr is suddenly competing on this and they have good workers they've got smart people they've got the products aren't all completely terrible it's just they can't compete in the same way in most cases.

59:48And then you have a process of economically winding up the economy, which

59:53Ned Richardson-Little:instead of examples like Czechoslovakia or Poland, where they decided to create these vouchers, try to sort of make mass ownership, there's this real hope of shock therapy. We're going to bring in Western companies. They're going to buy things up. We're going to make it as efficient as possible. And in a lot of cases, you have companies that come in who really don't have any interest in trying to maintain employment rates. They're just looking to see what they can make in terms of a quick buck and they get there and find there's nothing to do with some of these factories like the travant factory is it's using production technology from the 1950s still you didn't have the investment needed to keep up in the same way so these even when western companies come in as saviors maybe you're going to lose 80 of the workforce the steel plants all these other things so it's massively socially dislocating where people lose their their social identity as part of these different groups they lose their economic identity and if they identified with east germany as a country politically it doesn't exist anymore so in this way that a lot of people come out doing well in the sense that you do have a lot of people who made money off this a lot of money flush sort of rushes in um and some people who'd gone from sort of regular working class people suddenly are the the sort of nouveau riche that comes out of it other people who've been socially well-to-do the respected intellectuals of the gdr there's a rapid social decline and then for people who are part of the stasi or the scd in some cases they're facing prosecution for shootings at the wall they're getting kicked out of their jobs and they're basically unemployable at that point and sort of put at the same level as sort of war criminals and you've also got west german citizens coming over and reclaiming property as well.

1:01:40So you've been perhaps living in a property for 20 years, renting it, and you're just kicked out, are you? What happens to those people?

1:01:51Ned Richardson-Little:There's a system for compensation, but there's this idea of essentially sort of returning things instead of having to compensate people. But you had things like, you have so many layers of political repression in German history that it becomes this problem that you have, say, someone who was a Jewish victim of the Nazis, that they had property that was seized from them, picked up by the Nazi state, taken over by the SED, handed out to somebody who then sold it to someone else at some point. You have this long chain and that there's a process of restitution, but it's not frictionless. You get a lot of people who are suddenly displaced by this, or they said if they're renting, this is part of a larger problem of property changing hands, privatization, West Germany is going through a phase in the 1990s when the state's privatizing as well.

1:02:40So public housing in general is being put onto the open market, right? As all this other housing is also getting shoved in there. And yet a lot of these neighborhoods are these waves of gentrification and people being pushed out as new people are showing up. But not that everyone is victimized by this, but even the people who did well financially went through a radical transition process. Hi, this is Rhonda in Virginia, and I support Cold War conversations because I think the work that Ian is doing is critically important. I think it's vital to record the firsthand accounts of people who lived and experienced the Cold War because it illustrates history in a way that a book never can.

1:03:24So thank you so much for the podcast. It's my favorite podcast and I look forward to it every week. To be like Rhonda and help to preserve these incredible stories of the Cold War, as a monthly or annual supporter, you'll be able to listen ad-free, you'll become one of our community, get the sought after Cold War Conversations drinks coaster as a thank you, and you'll bask in the warm glow of knowing that you're helping to preserve Cold War history. Just go to coldwarconversations.com slash donate to find out more this hits women more than men because by effectively becoming part of west germany you're taking on west german laws and there's some quite significant differences there particularly around areas like abortion access yeah east germany had initially after the war abortion

1:04:22Ned Richardson-Little:had been banned because they were worried about population demographics this gets liberalized in 1970s. And West Germany had also had a push to liberalize abortion law, which had been rolled back by the courts. And even till today, abortion at any time is technically illegal, even if you can access it under 12 weeks for specific conditions. And in the East, this becomes this huge conflict that for a lot of women, they're losing their job, which means losing access to childcare. They're no longer as economically independent. And this idea that We have political self-determination and democracy, but we've lost control over our own bodies.

1:04:59Ned Richardson-Little:The good liberal democratic state now has more of a say over what I can do with my own body than what it was under communism. And this is a real sticking point for a lot of people, the sense of gaining political rights while at the same time a sense of being disenfranchised in other ways, particularly in this gendered way for women. that also leads to the fact that you have a lot of women who emigrate to the West looking for new economic opportunities, that if things aren't going to be happening in the East, that they're going to go looking elsewhere. When we look back at East Germany now, if you've lived in that country, you look at it differently to perhaps somebody from West Germany.

1:05:46So there's various challenges around how it's remembered historically. Obviously, there are tourist attractions and museums, but some statues are removed, some remain. How does the new Germany deal with those challenges of remembering that nation?

1:06:08Ned Richardson-Little:I think you do have this process of cleaning up the memory landscape. So you have the giant Lenin statue in East Berlin gets disappeared. The huge bust to Ernst Thelmann, the interwar communist leader who was killed at Buchenwald, it's still up. It's actually near to my apartment. So very strange going out with my kid as she's learning how to ride a bicycle, going around a giant communist bust monument and seeing photos. There's someone put up an exhibition, seeing a visit of solidarity from the leader of the Derg regime in Ethiopia opened the local park where my kid plays. It's very strange periodically to connect those two together.

1:06:43Ned Richardson-Little:In terms of memory, you've got a lot of commemoration of things like the wall of victims. But this question of sort of everyday life and things like that is really touchy because you've got people who may have been very disgruntled in the era of the GDR who found that after the collapse of the wall and reunification that they've come out feeling on the worst end of things or feeling like things have gone wrong. that they don't feel part of the same narrative of the sort of the wonderful uplift of the two countries coming together on the other hand you've got a lot of people who also feel like the kitchification of the gdr is sort of you can go out and get the little egg cups the ampelman all these other things that this is this slap in the face to people who are victims of the system people who've been suppressed by the stasi who've been imprisoned um other people victimized by everyday authoritarianism.

1:07:39And there's this real tension between the fact that people had different experiences in the GDR and their families themselves. They've had such different trajectories coming out of it that you have this disconnect between the big master narrative of the wall came down, everyone was happy, unification was good, and people's individual lives that don't necessarily line up there. I think some people overcompensate into a level of nostalgia where it really erases a lot of the negative aspects of the gdr on the other hand you still have people who talk about things like it's the 1950s and everything is just this totalitarian stalinist hellscape no one could have had a happy life in any way and if you mention a happy childhood memory you're an apologist so i think in this way that's one of the things about the book writing a book like this that on the one hand working as an academic you're trying to sort of say here's

1:08:33Ned Richardson-Little:as dispassionately as possible here's what happened but also having to respect the fact that this is still a really meaningful history to a lot of people who lived through it, whose families lived through it. And even if you disagree with people's interpretations, you have to respect that there's these completely different subjective understandings of what happened, that even if you don't agree with them, I think it's important we acknowledge they're there and acknowledge these conflicts and understand that you can't just wish them away because they're not scientifically accurate. it's a fantastic book i learned so much from it i think one of the most incredible facts for me was that east german pensions didn't match the amount that west german pensions were at until 2023 yeah there's a lot of yeah sort of the the country's still in a process of coming together.

1:09:33Ned Richardson-Little:There's a lot of these different statistics where you sort of see these east-west divisions, and you always had split between north and south in the west, but these hangovers from that time that are really there, and I think that, sort of going back to the question about history, you can see it in sort of television presentations about our history, that the sense that East Germany was actually part of German history is really missing sometimes, The sense that people had a history or had lives that are really part of sort of German history that sometimes sort of, and then some new people arrived in the 1990s.

1:10:08and so this way that again this problem of the ongoing divisions in germany not that everything is still perfectly split east and west but it's a sticking point that's more than just a subjective feeling or a sense of people being aggrieved about cultural portrayals in some cases it really comes down to money as a property the economic chances you have you have been listening to Ned Richardson Little, the author of The German Democratic Republic, The Rise and Fall of a Cold War State. There are links in the episode information where you can buy the book and help support the podcast. The episode extras such as videos, photos and other content are available via a link in the episode information.

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