Читать книгу A Socialist Defector - Victor Grossman - Страница 7
Оглавление21—Changing the Countryside
Conflicts and differences under the surface were never absent in the ferment of GDR cities; for a few years they were far sharper in the countryside. They began in the first postwar year in connection with dividing up the landowners’ estates, as I learned from my father-in-law in my wife’s village. He was a carpenter, and before Hitler a union man, a Social Democrat. He was also a member of a Slavic minority nationality in that region, the Sorbs, who had been oppressed for centuries, but especially by Hitler, and were seen as allies by the Soviets. All street signs and shop or office signs were bilingual. His rural village, even before the Nazis took power, had probably never known a single Communist and not many Social Democrats either, which may explain why the Occupation officers appointed him provisional mayor. Most of the land confiscated from the owner (a titled lower-ranking princess who moved west) was split into new farms averaging twelve to fifty acres. Non-farming village people like my father-in-law also received small plots, just enough for urgently needed vegetables and, after a few years, a number of small farm animals, maybe one hog, a nanny goat, a ewe with lambs, some geese, chickens, and rabbits. For a majority, especially in the cities but also for those rural mayors who remained honest, the first years were extremely cold and hungry. Renate recalled her family’s luck, during a meager, hungry Christmastide, when her father found a rabbit frozen in the snow.
The mayor had no easy job, for on one hand the Soviets demanded full quotas from the farmers to feed hungry people in the cities, while relatively prosperous farmers wanted to sell as much as possible privately, at much higher, illegal, prices. Another crucial question, also involving the mayor and the Soviet staff, was determining who in the village had been a vicious brutal Nazi and who had simply gone along, as opportunists, doing little or no harm to others. All such matters made life for the mayor—and the Soviets—a series of tightrope acts.
After 1952, when the decision was made to move toward socialism, the first Agricultural Production Cooperatives (LPG) farms were started up, distinguished from Soviet “collective farms” because the members pooled land, farm buildings, and eventually herds but maintained ownership rights to the amount of acreage they had contributed. The growth of the LPGs was very slow; successful farmers tended to stay private whereas the cooperatives attracted less experienced or less industrious farmers, which meant that many of them failed to prosper. By 1960 at most a third had joined up. In that year the national leaders decided to force a solution to the problem of uncertain harvests and resulting shortages. It exerted strong, sometimes extreme pressure on all farmers to join the LPGs, including making it difficult for reluctant private farmers to get credit, charging them higher prices when they rented farm equipment, and even setting up loudspeakers near the homes of especially recalcitrant farmers. Some absconded westward. Others gnashed their teeth and joined.
And some were quite willing, like a woman I spoke to, a leader in starting an LPG in her village. She compared the effort with a horse and a repainted stable door. “It’s new for him and he resists at first.” She also used a metaphor about a cow giving birth: “Sometimes it’s necessary to grab the emerging calf by the legs and give it a helping pull.”
“And now,” she told me, “as a member of a cooperative I can count on regular hours when I do farm work, and health and pensions are now covered. I get a regular paid vacation; for the first time since my honeymoon we can now visit the seaside—only 30 kilometers from here. I have a seat in the farm council where we make decisions and vote for the chair, a secretary and a treasurer.”
At first, the going was not easy, and farm production slumped, worsened by two years of bad, wet weather. There were more shortages, even of Germany’s staple food, potatoes, and people were not yet used to eating rice or pasta. There was a popular joke series in the Eastern Bloc in those years, resembling in its question-and-answer form the “knock, knock” jokes in the United States, but always involving “questions to Radio Yerevan” with naive biting responses. Like: “Question to Radio Yerevan: When we move past socialism to the higher goal of communism, will we still be using money?—Answer of Radio Yerevan: ‘No, there won’t be any of that either.’” Now there were farm-based additions: “What is the meaning of the word ‘chaos’?—Sorry, Radio Yerevan does not deal with questions regarding agriculture!”
These shortages, probably a factor in the mass departure of so many people in 1961, may have been part of the reason it was found necessary to build the Berlin Wall—to save the GDR’s existence.
There were also other mistakes along the way, like overstressing the cultivation of corn. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, farm families became so accustomed to the new cooperative teamwork methods that within two or three years they got to like them and produced more and more, surpluses of milk, butter, meat, and the customary fruits, vegetables, and grains. Though each member family could keep a cow and calf or pig and smaller animals, care of the herds became more hygienic, more efficient and more profitable. Farm families now had some leisure time, while the increasingly productive LPG farms had sufficient labor power for rewarding projects on the side, like horse-breeding, honey, hops, or weaving and basketry. A growing number of young farmers attended free agricultural colleges and became experts, and cooperative farmers in the GDR became an increasingly prosperous sector.
Another aspect was noteworthy. In West Germany, bad weather, the rivalry of mega-farms, and price pressure from discount chains forced many to give up their farms, less dramatically yet sadly reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s great Dust Bowl Okie novel Grapes of Wrath. In the GDR, aside from that rough, tough year of change, 1960, purchases, prices, and sales were guaranteed, assistance was provided when necessary, and no family was forced to give up farming against its will.
Thirty years later, after the demise of the GDR, most farmers rejected the chance to regain their private fields and tried every way to stay together in some legally permissible cooperative farm. It was not made easy for them, though some old baronets and other lords got friendly support in attempted comebacks.
22—More Defiance and More Progress
As the republic kept growing, its planned economy made it possible to pay special attention to backward areas. Old Chancellor Otto von Bismarck allegedly joked that “when the world goes under I want to move to Mecklenburg because everything there happens fifty years later.” This region south of the Baltic had been the poorest and most feudally backward in all Germany, until GDR planners altered its status remarkably. New industries were developed based on growing supplies of agricultural products from the new LPG farms, on shipyards like the one described above, and other new sectors. In Eichsfelde, another traditional poverty corner so down-and-out it was a world source of organ-grinders and other oompah musical beggars, a large new cotton spinning center offered thousands of job opportunities in the region, especially to women previously cut off from almost any employment.
Big new industrial centers were constructed in many regions, north, east, west, and south, with public transportation costing a pittance connecting the jobs with high-rise homes. Young couples from all over were attracted to such centers, with their clean, new nurseries, kindergartens, and schools, medical centers, cultural and sport facilities. The supermarkets and department stores at these key project sites were also better supplied with hard-to-get imported goods.
The concentration was on basic industries: mining, coke, iron and steel, energy, transportation equipment, and machine tools. After a rough start making simple plows the farm equipment industry was developed until it could supply more and more complex machinery for cultivating potatoes, grain, sugar beets, oilseed, and dairy products. But the concentration on basics and foodstuffs left less investment money or labor power for making consumer goods, an imbalance that gradually improved but was never able to meet demand, while too many well-designed, high-quality GDR-made goods—hair-dryers, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners—were exported to West Germany, where mail-order companies sold them at very low prices. That even included greatly desired delicacies like eel, calf’s liver, and very good beer. Western wholesalers and retailers paid for these good things well below value in the hard “Western” marks or dollars so desperately needed for the import of vital raw materials—and, occasionally, limited imports of fashionable, modern goods to reduce the dissatisfaction of GDR consumers.
Yet undeniably, while always stumbling behind full-pocketed consumer demand, living standards moved upward. When we got married in 1955, I spoke to my wife about buying a refrigerator. “What for?” she asked. She had grown up without one, with a corner in the cellar and various tricks to keep foodstuffs cool. By the 1960s even villagers like her had learned what fridges and later freezers were good for. I was proud to have been quick and lucky enough to get one of the first new taller models. My consumerist pride was soon deflated, however, when my mother, on her first visit from New York, commented, “What a cute little fridge!” By the end of the decade almost every family also had at least such a “cute little fridge.”
As for TV sets, their penetration, if somewhat later than in the United States or the FRG, was soon so swift that virtually every family had a set, except for those intellectuals who rejected them in favor of reading books or the like. For a while, there was a snag with color TV; most people wanted only the brand with two reception systems so they could pick up West German television. Such viewing was officially regarded as a “no-no” until well into the 1970s, but by then almost everybody watched such channels as much as they wanted. Only in two areas, around Greifswald in the northeast and Dresden in the southeast, was “West” reception technically difficult; as a result, until antennas got higher and more receptive, the latter area bore a sarcastic nickname: the “Valley of Blissful Ignorance.” With most GDR viewers able to regularly watch both East and West news reports, some U.S. visitors found them most likely “the best informed people in the world.”
As far as cars went, the little steel-frame, part-plastic bodied Trabants, or Trabis, were no rivals for Western brands. One Radio Yerevan joke I recall was: “Can a Trabi attain a speed of more than 110 km/h (about 68 mph)?”—The radio’s answer: “It depends on how high you drop it from.”
All the same, with few foreign cars available and all of them very expensive, the waiting time for a new GDR-made Trabant or a larger Wartburg was amazing, sometimes more than a decade, and a cause of plenty of anger and, as always, more jokes. In one, a wealthy American tells a friend: “You know, I was able to order this fancy German car called a Trabant. It must really be something! Just imagine, it’s so sought after there’s a ten-year waiting list! And when I mailed them the dollar sum they were kind enough to send me a small plastic model in advance—which actually works!”
Indeed, dollars could make a very big difference, and such gags caused as much teeth-gnashing as laughs. But used cars were easily available, often lined up on special parking lots with legible notes in each car detailing kilometer count, condition, price, and address. Oddly enough, a used car, at an unregulated bargaining price, often cost more than a new one, for which one had to wait so long but whose price, like nearly all prices, was nationally fixed. After finally getting a first new car, one could order the next one six years in advance, and with a spouse also ordering, it was possible to keep on trading old for new every three years if desired. That’s how I came to own four Trabis, one after the other. Neither they nor the Wartburgs could match those glossy Western dream-cars so admired by Easterners when they zipped past, or inspected when parked at a curb by some visitor or, most frequently, envied in West German TV commercials. Renate never loved my Trabis, which were bumpy and loud, but I was happy with them; for simpletons like me they were easier to care for, requiring neither oil (which came mixed in with the gasoline at designated pumps) nor water, since the motor was air-cooled. Many East Germans grew attached to their little vehicles and took such good care of them, washing them assiduously every weekend (there were no carwash facilities as yet) that some cynics maintained that East German fathers spent more loving care on their Trabis than on their children.
Life did keep improving in the 1960s and 1970s. Though West German, American, and other media offered grim descriptions after brief, superficial visits, one leading West German journalist, Joachim Besser, no leftist, wrote surprisingly honestly about a two-week tour in 1966. Here are excerpts:
The economy of the GDR is going through a boom period. Everywhere you go you hear about the labor shortage. Everywhere I read the “Help Wanted” placards—shop assistants, typists, garage hands, workers are sought. The phrase “economic miracle” is certainly applicable to the present state of affairs….
I visited Eisenhüttenstadt, with 40,000 inhabitants. There is the same picture here as in Schwedt, but here the picture is complete. The Eisenhüttenstadt combine turns out 1.5 million tons of pig iron annually. The ore comes from the Soviet Union, the coal from Poland. The new town is a fine town, a town which can be lived in. The buildings are light and friendly, there are good hotels and restaurants, a theater, cinemas and sports grounds. The shops too are good and tasteful.
But … there is naturally a parallel expansion of the old industrial centers of Saxony…. Everywhere you go you see factories of a smaller size.… And new housing is not confined to the key points either. I saw the fascinating reconstruction work in Magdeburg, wandered through Chemnitz, today Karl-Marx-Stadt, and admired the modern form in which the center of the city is being rebuilt. Our modern town planners would be pleased to see what is being done, particularly in Chemnitz. Many of the mistakes made in West Germany have been avoided. There are no residential quarters right on the main roads, and new buildings are set well back, allowing space for the growing traffic of the future. Here it will not be necessary to tear down the buildings again to widen the roads, as in so many West German cities….
In restaurants I ate as well as in the Federal Republic, and in every case more cheaply. The menus in the luxury hotels are first-class; but I also ate in village inns, in quick-lunch restaurants, and in all cases the prices were between 10% and 30% lower than in West Germany. (Joachim Besser, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, December 3, 1966, trans. in DGR, December 23, 1966, 182–83.)
Besser goes on to describe the assortment of groceries on sale, generally good but varying from place to place, with a shortage of some items in some areas, and of oranges everywhere, but plenty of poultry, preserved foods, and, especially in the north, every variety of fish. In comparing standards with his own Federal Republic, he finds that “we are a decade ahead, but if you compare it with Poland or Czechoslovakia then it is the GDR which is well ahead.”
Such improvement worried the men in Bonn. In December 1955, West Germany announced its “Hallstein Doctrine”: “Formal recognition of the GDR by a state with which the Federal Republic entertains diplomatic relations would represent an unfriendly act.” Tough consequences were threatened: a break in relations (except for the USSR, one of the “Occupation powers”). With West Germany economically far stronger than the GDR, the threat was effective. In 1957 Bonn broke relations with Yugoslavia after it rejected a secret bribe offer of big trade credits and recognized the GDR. Bonn broke with the new Castro government in Cuba for the same reason. But the threats worked well with Sri Lanka and newly independent Guinea, which had planned to establish relations with the GDR. When Bonn warned that all promised aid money was at stake, Guinea toed the line and quietly withdrew its diplomat from East Berlin. One side note was that recognition of West Germany required acceptance of its claims to “1937 borders,” with slices of Poland and the USSR. Very few noticed that the Foreign Office official whose name was used, Walter Hallstein, had been a prestigious Hitler-era professor and member of various Nazi-front organizations, or that Wilhelm Grewe, who actually worked out the doctrine (and later became ambassador to Washington until John F. Kennedy threw him out) had been an enthusiastic Nazi Party member from 1933 until 1945.
The Hallstein Doctrine gradually became counterproductive; it cut Bonn off from Eastern Europe (except for its friend Romania) and increasingly from the Arab world which, after the Six Days War in 1967, objected to West German support for Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan area. Arab-GDR connections grew closer and when, after a bloodless coup, a new government in Iraq decided to defy Hallstein in 1968, then-Foreign Minister Willy Brandt saw it as a warning omen and dropped the doctrine.
23—Nudity and Equality
Not only was a doctrine dropped in those days, but garments too, and by an amazing number of GDR citizens. I am referring to beach nudism, known as FKK, Freie Körperkultur, translated as Free Body Culture. After 1990 many of the West German vacationers who swarmed to the Baltic beaches of East Germany were often surprised if not greatly dismayed by the mass enjoyment of nakedness in the GDR—and they saw to it that it was strictly limited.
Nude bathing had formerly been forbidden everywhere. In the 1950s, as life improved, more and more people used vacation weeks to get away from towns and cities and the north’s beautiful beaches attracted more and more. But in those days police in the East as in the West arrested those who tried to brave waves, wind, and sand without decent cover.
A large number of those enjoying the sandy beaches and Baltic waves in those early years were union vacationers. Big plants or industries like the miners or steel workers had their own hotels, but every factory or office had a supply of two-week vacation tickets to divide up among employees, most of them for an incredibly low 30 marks, including bed, all meals, evening dances, programs of music or talks about local history, and a morning half hour of beach calisthenics for those who wanted it (with loud music, even for those who did not want it). Sometimes there were only enough to grant employees such tickets every three, four, or five years, but many had luck more often, perhaps as a reward for good work or, it was whispered, thanks again to “Vitamin B” (Beziehungen, that is, pull). And then some employees did not apply for the tickets, preferring their own summer bungalows, camping, or visits with their families. Union hotels in the mountains or at a lake could be enjoyable, but the shores of the Baltic were always in greatest demand.
At the seaside hotels, most people used Germany’s distinctive wicker “beach baskets,” with seats for two, easy to turn so as to catch more or less sun or wind, with footrests, armrests for sandwiches or a book and, if your partner held up a bathrobe, a way to change modestly in and out of bathing suits (no bikinis as yet). But people were gradually getting less modest.
As times got better, and more and more, like us, had cars and tents, many did not wait for a union vacation ticket but went north on their own, either to a camping site with a fee for electricity, toilets, and showers or a “wild site” where, if they were thrown out, they could move on to another.
It was usually these wild site campers who decided that nudity was nicer. They defied the laws, first at small out-of-the-way beaches, then more and more belligerently. In the 1960s they won their way; local laws against nudity were relaxed or dropped. By 1968 a total of 50 kilometers (30 miles) were declared FKK beaches. By 1982, 40 beaches had obtained this official title, by 1988 it was 60, not just at the Baltic Sea but at lakes scattered through northern Mecklenburg. One site near the Berlin autobahn proved too distracting, hence dangerous, so a thick row of trees was planted to hide it from drivers.
Otherwise, FKK beaches were not hidden away but were open to everyone, including clothed “visitors,” indistinguishable anyway since everyone was clothed when they arrived. Then they found a good spot, hollowing it out, often sticking a colorful cloth wind-shield in the sand but otherwise quite open. As the custom gained popularity, nudists grew more aggressive, expanding their section, often demarcated only by the scribbled letters FKK on a piece of cardboard, into the neighboring “textile beach”—meaning clothed. This could lead to quarrels with those opposed to nudity, but they usually got used to it, and some beaches were even mixed.
Today’s West German historians, almost daily occupied with denigrating everything about the GDR, insist that this custom was in protest against strict authoritarian rule or at least a chance to get a small taste of freedom for three or four weeks. Since nudity was no longer taboo, the idea of protest carries little weight, but maybe some did see it as freeing, which hardly differs from vacation feelings everywhere. Most people I knew simply disliked wet bathing clothing, liked the sun, saw no reason for shame and enjoyed the friendly spirit prevailing at every FKK beach I knew. Our family was included, at the insistence of my wife, who was, however, far more attractive than I, and did not suffer like me from sunburn! Most people came as families, but even with singles I heard of no harassing, stalking, or anything of the kind. It was just a pleasantly free and easy way to spend a vacation. I would estimate that about a third of all beach-goers were in the buff.
The prevailing good spirits certainly did not rule out almost inevitable jokes on the subject. Did this one (hopefully not objectionable to anti-nudists) also contain a jab at commercialism?: An East German, undressing at an FKK beach with his West German visitor, is amazed at tattooed ads for a car brand on his back and a gasoline brand on his chest. “I get paid a goodly sum for ads,” the man explains. Then, looking rather lower, the East German says, “Oh, I’m so sad to see that you have AIDS. But must you advertise that, too, and there of all places? Who will ever pay you for that?”—“See that mixed game of volleyball over there, with those good-looking players? Just wait till we get closer to them and then take a look!”—“Aha! Not AIDS, but ADIDAS!”
Such jokes might be heard anywhere in Germany, but there were definite differences about sex in East and West. In the GDR there were no porno magazines and only one magazine with a monthly artistic nude photo; later on, there were art books of nude photography. Nor did I ever see a single brothel or peep show; I was never once approached by a prostitute. There were indeed amateurs who tried to befriend foreign businessmen at trade fairs and the like. Western money was highly sought after because of luxuries it could buy in special stores labeled “Intershop,” which sold Western goods for Western money (an unfortunate business—now still troubling Cuba). Was I too naive? I got around but never saw one single professional “sex worker” in all those GDR years. At the FKK beaches, expanding all along the coast and the lakeshores, I found an unself-conscious, unworried, friendly atmosphere, and not the slightest bit of commercialized sex.
In West Germany and West Berlin, brothels were legally permitted, often with neon lights inviting men to fancy “Eros Centers.” In some well-known streets and neighborhoods—Hamburg’s Reeperbahn was most famous—one neon marquee after another advertised sex shows inside, and insistent streetwalkers outside could become truly obnoxious. But non-commercial nudity with mixed sexes, outside the home, was almost completely restricted to saunas, and otherwise taboo.
Were there also differences in personal life? It seems so. A study made not long after German unification found that 19 percent of the mature population in West Germany was sexually active four to six times a week, but in East Germany twice as many, with 38 percent. In West Germany, 4 percent were sexually active at least once a day, in East Germany 13 percent. It was in the East that 83 percent of men and 86 percent of women said that the initiative to have sex “came from both.” Seventy-eight percent of the Eastern women said that their partners had fulfilled their sexual wishes, often involving the frequency of orgasms.
In the GDR premarital sex was not frowned upon but accepted as normal. Contraceptives were free and available to sixteen-year-olds (or older), and the average age of marriage and having babies was much lower (though not at sixteen), despite the fact that over 90 percent of GDR women—but only about half of West German women—had a regular job.
Until 1958, West German law enabled a husband to nullify any job contract his wife signed, and until 1977 a wife needed her husband’s permission to take a job, while he controlled any wages or salary she earned. Until 1962, a wife could not even have her own bank account. Married women did not have full status in any business dealings until 1969. And, as a side note, female teachers in Bavaria were for decades not allowed to keep their jobs if they were married.
All this contrasted strongly with the GDR, whose constitution demanded from the start absolute equal status for women in marriage and at work, with full and equal pay, as well as guarantees to enable those with families to continue employment. Advantages like paid leave when having a baby were there from the start, gradually increasing, as I describe in a later section. Availability of free nursery and kindergarten care also increased year by year until it was practically universal and, while German tradition has school classes ending at midday, GDR schools, after a warm lunch, offered afternoon activities, games, play, and time for homework, making it possible for both parents to work a full day.
It was impossible to abolish all injustices, bad habits, and minor forms of discrimination since, after all, people remained people, hence burdened with human frailties and habits. Miners or steelworkers, mostly male, still got better pay than office workers or retail sales clerks, mostly female. But within each trade pay was equal, and union contracts in every enterprise required a women’s committee to check out complaints and work out plans for training and promoting female employees. This never applied at the very top of the Politburo (with only two women as “candidate members”), but it did on other levels, more and more. I recall what my American sister-in-law said to me during a family visit: “In all you’ve been telling us about your work and activities I’ve noticed how often you mention women in leadership jobs. They seem to play a much bigger role here.” I had not been aware of it, certainly a good sign.
It would be wrong to minimize the problems and stress in the daily lives of single mothers and of working wives, too, balancing jobs, children, shopping, and housekeeping, while males, especially those of an older generation, were far too slow to grasp that they must bear a fair share in all the duties. Even the many benefits did not add up to a walk on Easy Street. What the GDR was able to do was provide women with a far greater feeling of equality, independence, and greater personal fulfillment.
I end this section with a last political nudist joke. One nude SED official, meeting another, asks: “Have you read Marx?” The other answers: “Yes, me too. Must be from the wicker beach baskets.”
24—Problems Surface
In a book lent to me by John Peet, my boss, a bestseller by William L. Shirer, I found the following:
In November 1918 the Social Democrats, holding absolute power, might have quickly laid the foundation for a lasting democratic republic. But to have done so they would have had to suppress permanently, or at least curb permanently, the forces which had propped up the Hohenzollern Empire and which would not loyally accept a democratic Germany; the feudal Junker landlords and other upper castes, the magnates who ruled over the great industrial cartels, the roving condottieri of the Free Corps, the ranking officials of the imperial civil service and, above all, the military caste and the members of the General Staff. They would have had to break up many of the great estates, which were wasteful and uneconomic, and the industrial monopolies and cartels, and clean out the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police, the universities and the Army of all who would not loyally and honestly serve the new democratic regime. (William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1959.)
Didn’t these critical words, though describing the Weimar Republic after 1918, apply all too closely to West Germany and West Berlin after 1945—and to what was not done there? And wasn’t this exactly what had indeed been done in East Germany, under the pressure and protection of the Soviets, it is true, but led by highly motivated German leftists? Why did the GDR’s path, so close to that described by Shirer and in many ways successful, end up in 1990 in failure? Was it due to damaging pressures from the great power in the east? Or to pressures from the west? How much blame can be laid on devoted and well-meaning leaders who were handed the reins after 1945 and then held them tightly till the end, marring their very remarkable achievements with blunders, autocracy, a lack of freedom and democracy? Or, as prevailing opinion-makers now maintain, was the whole damned system faulty to the core, just like its model in the USSR?
Another look at the cultural scene can provide a few hints at answers. I had discovered at the start that the basic anti-fascist, humanist foundation in the GDR was unquestionable, and for me decisive, but that problems enough remained, even when they were carefully swept under media carpets.
There was one place where the dust was not so well hidden and did cause some coughing—but also much laughter. Political cabarets in West Berlin had always aimed jabs at the GDR, hoping for guffaws from many in the audience who, before the Wall, crossed over for short visits. Then Die Distel (The Thistle), founded in 1953 as an East Berlin antidote, quickly became so popular that great luck, patience (sometimes measured in months), or a good supply of “Vitamin B” (that is, good connections) might be necessary to get tickets. At times tickets became a kind of currency, involved in swaps of hard-to-get items—no longer simple things like washrags or razor blades but rather blue bathroom tiles or rare car parts. Die Distel programs always included dutiful jabs at NATO armaments, at Adenauer, Franz Joseph Strauss, and other nasty targets, and some were quite telling. But Easterners laughed far louder at gags about problems within GDR boundaries, most commonly about the latest shortages, often goods that you could swear had always been available until you happened to need them. You might then get an almost scornful reply: “What, scissors? Why, scissors have been short for over three months!”
In one gag, soon part of the language, a polite salesman tells a customer: “I fear you are in the wrong shop, sir. This is where we don’t have T-shirts. Next door is where they don’t have tennis shoes.”
Even when consumer supply had greatly improved (though with recurring surprises), there was no lack of complaints. Some gags reflected a lasting Eastern inferiority complex about almost every domestically made product, like one about a GDR engineer winning a U.S. competition to improve a new jet plane whose wings broke off at its top speed. “Simply bore a series of holes where the wings meet the fuselage,” he submitted. “Are you crazy?” the media asked. But he offered to demonstrate it himself and proved his theory. “How did you ever get such an amazing idea?” they asked. “Where I come from I always noted one fact: even toilet paper never tears at the perforations!”
Here, again, jokes about the GDR’s little part-plastic Trabi were inevitable, like “When does the Trabi reach peak speed?”—“When it’s being towed.”
The jokes could get sharper, to general delight, but I cannot swear that this one made it to the stage:
At the end of Prime Minister Grotewohl’s official visit to China, he asked his host: “Honestly, Mao, just between us: how many still oppose your party’s policies here?”—“Keep it to yourself, Otto, but we estimate about 16 or 17 million people.”—“Oh,” replied Grotewohl, “that’s no more than in our GDR!” (population 17 million).
Hans Krause, the director of Die Distel until 1963, had a dramatic past; arrested as a soldier in 1943 for “undermining military morale,” he fled and hid in a forest area until war’s end. He had troubles later, too, though no longer life-threatening ones; his witty ensemble always balanced on the edges of what many leaders considered hostile. Jobs heading political cabarets could be short-lived; a gag about the fabled goatee of Party head Ulbricht, if not subtle enough, might mean an early end to a contract. Yet public support was so strong that most cabarets survived cuts, compromises, and management changes and kept people laughing.
Political cabaret was often closest to the brink, but filmmakers, authors, even artists and composers, were never immune. Unfriendly reviews in the official media, sarcastic “revelations” in West German radio and TV, or just word of mouth indicated that some happenings behind the scenes, after the applause died down and the crowds left for the subway, could be unhappier than some dramas on the stage, even marked by bitterness or tears.
A major achievement of the young GDR had been to win Bertolt Brecht, one of the century’s best writers, after his nasty expulsion from the United States. But for some this coup was not wholly comfortable: in 1949 some influential critics had problems with his blindly defiant Mother Courage. In 1951, with that dispute largely forgotten, came his libretto for the opera The Trial of Lucullus, in which the Roman general is judged after death by fellow ghosts in the underworld. Did his military triumphs and culinary achievements, like introducing the cherry tree, outweigh his cruelty as a conqueror? A final decision was left to the audience. But recent war criminal trials in Nuremberg, and West German attempts to repudiate them, led official critics, even President Wilhelm Pieck, to call for certainty. Brecht altered the ending, judging Lucullus guilty and condemned to eternal oblivion, not for war in general, perhaps in self-defense, but for aggressive war. This was no great problem, as he often rewrote texts to keep up with developments. When reproached by a Western journalist for bowing to government interference, Brecht asked if he could name any other government that took such great interest in an opera performance.
Brecht was saved from overly sharp criticism by his world reputation and his run-in with the McCarthyite ghouls in Washington. Indeed, his Berliner Ensemble was granted a fine, well-financed theater. And with Lucullus, the main problem was really with the music. The twelve-tone score by Paul Dessau, who often worked with Brecht, with lots of drums and unusual percussion instruments but little melody, no strings, clarinets, or oboes, was not music to the ears of Walter Ulbricht, who huffily left the première as soon as the curtain fell, missing some catcalls but also a fifteen-minute ovation. Brecht’s reply to critics who called it “dissonant, formalistic and decadent” was: “Gentlemen, in terms of music I have the impression that you are three hundred years behind the times.”
Despite the altered ending and new name—The Condemnation of Lucullus—the opera was taboo until 1957, then produced in Leipzig and soon, for those gaining a taste for modern music, in over thirty GDR theaters. It was ignored in the West, which rejected almost everything from the “Soviet Zone” unless it could be labeled “dissident.”
The GDR had many disagreements about the arts. Some, after spirited theoretical debates, faded and were happily forgotten. One, famously, was not. Again, an opera was involved, or rather its libretto, since the great composer Hanns Eisler never wrote the music. Brecht’s close friend and collaborator, who composed the GDR national anthem, had also been forced to leave the United States by the Un-American Activities Committee. He had long planned an opera based on the story of Faust. Unlike Goethe, he placed his Johann Faustus in the midst of the Peasant Wars (1525), not as a hero but as an intellectual renegade seeking fame, selling out to the devil, betraying peasants and the poor, and symbolizing the sellout by many German intellectuals over the centuries, culminating in the Hitler era. Nor did those common people come off well who followed such a renegade.
But Faust, he discovered, was hallowed ground. His work, too, angered people like Ulbricht, who said: “In our struggle to preserve our German cultural heritage we must guarantee that one of the most important works by our great poet Goethe is not formalistically deformed, that the great ideals in Goethe’s Faust are not reversed into a caricature.” The Party newspaper called it “pessimistic, hopeless, anti-national, alien to the people.” Eisler, deeply hurt, gave up the project and moved (temporarily) to Vienna, his hometown, while a basic theoretical discussion on art and theater began in the Academy of Arts. It ended abruptly with the “workers’ uprising” on June 17, 1953.
Brecht’s sarcastic poem concerning this event, “The Solution,” is quoted over and over. Ridiculing one “official” author who said the people who had revolted might regain the government’s confidence by redoubling their efforts on the job, Brecht responded as cleverly as ever: “Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
Rarely quoted are words, which, though highly critical, clearly iterate Brecht’s basic support for the GDR. Despite disagreements and disappointments, I think this remained his position for the three remaining years of his life, during which his theater productions were always masterpieces. But because of his refusal to bash the GDR, his plays and writings were almost totally barred in Austria and West Germany. A top minister in Bonn compared his poetry with that of the thug, pimp, and Nazi “martyr” Horst Wessel, about whom the Nazi anthem was based (but who never wrote anything). The Bonn government even tried to prevent performances by the Berliner Ensemble in London. For them, Brecht was not a poet or dramatist but simply “a Communist”!
But why was there friction with top leaders of the young GDR, who like him, hated fascists and had hopes and plans for a happy future in a humane Germany, free of past evil influences?
They were obviously convinced that their duties included not only building a political and economic structure to this end but also guaranteeing that art and culture were doing the same. They saw themselves as revolutionaries, heading a vanguard party, and believed that in this struggle “art is a weapon.” Their questionable manner of wielding this weapon was greatly affected by influences from their own past and pressures from the present.
Most of the Party leaders grew up in working-class backgrounds in the Kaiser Wilhelm era or early 1920s. A tradition in Social Democratic groups, before and after the Communist Party was founded in 1919, was the effort to raise working-class members’ appreciation of the classics: Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, maybe Heine, music by Bach, Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, painters like Dürer, Rembrandt, maybe a few contemporaries like Max Liebermann. These artists all merited love and respect, but that often led to a mistrust of strange new trends like Expressionism or Cubism. That may help explain why many who became Communist leaders had middle-class, parlor-piano tastes and were suspicious of intellectual, individualist, or anarchist trends, even in pre-Hitler years when modernists like Brecht and Eisler took clearly left-wing positions, but were less “manageable.”
But these attitudes did not always apply. Some leaders had intellectual backgrounds more attuned to experimenting; others, like President Pieck with working-class backgrounds, were quite open-minded. Contradictions and crosscurrents abounded, and views like those of Walter Ulbricht were strong: “We no longer want to see any abstract pictures in our art schools. Nor have we any need for paintings of lunar landscapes or rotting fish. Gray-in-gray painting, an expression of capitalist collapse, is in sharp contrast with present-day life in the GDR.” Such views applied to all the arts.
