In 1948, John Steinbeck and photographer Robert Capa embarked on a carefully choreographed tour of the Soviet Union. The resulting book, A Russian Journal, was meant to humanize the Soviet people to American readers spooked by mounting Cold War tensions. Steinbeck and Capa made for a memorable pair, drinking their way through stuffy official functions, feuding with a translator-cum-minder, and barely surviving several hungover flights on the Soviet Union’s primitive domestic air network. The book they produced, however, was compromised by the obvious constraints imposed by Soviet authorities, Steinbeck’s every interaction with “real” Russians, Ukrainians, and Georgians overcast by Stalin’s bleak shadow.
This is usually the story with what journalists call junkets to dictatorships, which are happy to host the sections of the foreign press who would be interested in coming but not happy to let them see what they please. Given these constraints, is it possible to write sympathetically but honestly about normal people in a carefully monitored, heavily regimented, and thoroughly politicized society? In Beyond the Wall, a new history of life in East Germany, the Anglo-German academic Katja Hoyer has done just that. In the process, she inadvertently highlights the distinctly East German character of certain modern ideological fads.
THE CULTURAL STORY OF DENAZIFICATION
Hoyer has several important advantages that Steinbeck and Capa lacked. East Germany’s fearsome internal security apparatus is long gone, which means her surviving subjects are free to speak openly about life “beyond the wall.” Readers expecting a uniformly negative opinion of the German Democratic Republic will be disappointed; the diverse cast of characters Hoyer has assembled from interviews and archival research have a range of views. Some were content to raise children in the cramped but sociable confines of post-war apartment blocs. Others were true believers who joined the East German military or the Stasi, the GDR’s infamous secret police. Many resented the stifling political climate but ultimately accommodated themselves to life in East Germany. A few risked everything to escape across a border that, following the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall, transformed from a permeable frontier into a forbidding barrier.
After reading Hoyer’s account of East Germany’s troubled origins, one might reasonably conclude that the whole enterprise was doomed from the start. The GDR’s “founding fathers,” led by First Secretary Walter Ulbricht of the all-powerful Socialist Unity Party, were drawn from the cadre of German exiles who managed to survive Stalin’s purges. This Darwinian process produced a ruling class characterized by ideological purity and a certain ruthless opportunism, but it was hardly meant to instill inspiring leadership.
Ulbricht’s survival instincts did help the regime weather its difficult early years. After a brutal war and Soviet occupation, the 1950s brought rebuilding and modest growth, aided by just enough liberalization to keep the economy afloat. Berlin was an open wound, however. Before the construction of the Berlin Wall, hundreds of thousands of educated Germans left every year through the city’s relatively open border. Quality of life, and not ideology, was the main reason — six out of seven East German refugees cited economic factors as their motivation for leaving.
In the long run, the Berlin Wall became a symbol of East German repression, but its construction inaugurated a period of relative political stability. Housing construction boomed, and East Germans began to enjoy greater access to radios, cars, and other consumer goods, mainly because key industries were no longer hemorrhaging skilled workers. Restrictions on Western musical imports were loosened, and East Germany began to produce its own distinct brand of popular culture.
The regime also benefited from greater international recognition, diminished tensions with its Western counterpart, and the steroid-fueled success of its Olympic athletes. By the late 1960s, East Germany’s ideological allies had come to resent its reputation as a paragon of international socialism. The regime’s public relations campaign was so successful that a 1978 World Bank report concluded that East Germans enjoyed a higher standard of living than the British.
Hoyer is able to point to a few modest successes in an otherwise drab landscape, such as East Germany’s export-oriented toy industry or its popular and accessible cruise lines (which still had to be restricted to ideologically friendly ports after several embarrassing mass defections). Other regime accomplishments are more ambiguous. Hoyer mentions the GDR’s push to expand access to higher education, comparing it favorably to lower enrollment rates at West German universities. But higher education is useful insofar as it enriches students intellectually or equips them for better jobs. Like many Eastern Bloc programs, the GDR’s university system produced impressive figures, but its tangible benefits are more elusive.
Meanwhile, GDR cultural products often come across as pale, ideologically stilted imitations of sought-after originals. “Ostrock” emerged because the regime limited access to British and American pop music. Boxer Jeans were East Germany’s off-brand version of Levis. The clunky Trabant is still an object of nostalgia across the former Eastern Bloc because it was the first car for many working-class families, but it could never compete on an equal footing with Western models. GDR apologists, and there are still a few out there today (mainly working for The Guardian), defended the regime by pointing to its generous social safety net. But the relevant comparison is not Dickensian England or Gilded Age America, but the other German state across the wall, which managed to provide pensions and health insurance without the Stasi.
One overlooked feature of East German society was the regime’s reliance on a network of invisible subsidies from West Germany. As the economic shortcomings of communism became apparent, Eastern Bloc governments had two options: They could enact ruthless austerity measures to balance the books, as was the case in Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romania, or they could find ways to obtain foreign currency to prop up their creaky welfare states.
East Germany opted for the latter option. Hoyer outlines the variety of ways the regime raised cash from its ostensible rival, from trading political prisoners for hard currency to selling off artwork and Nazi memorabilia to generous inter-German loans. Even state-run coffee distribution was backstopped by the West, as the GDR factored ground beans sent in West German Christmas packages into its annual economic calculations. German reunification, which was accompanied by a raft of subsidies to ease East Germany’s absorption into the Federal Republic, merely formalized this one-sided relationship.
Selling political prisoners was another one of the GDR’s invisible pillars. As the only Eastern Bloc government with a Western counterpart, the GDR could use West Germany as a safety valve for offloading critics and dissidents. West Germany not only subsidized the East German economy. It also offered a convenient dumping ground for anyone who might threaten the regime politically.
Despite these clumsy workarounds, East Germany could never escape its Stalinist origins. Erich Honecker, the last longtime leader of the GDR, leveraged his predecessor Ulbricht’s minor ideological deviations to seize power in 1971. In the 1980s, even Gorbachev’s halting attempts at perestroika were too much for Honecker. Just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he was reportedly contemplating a repeat of Tiananmen Square in Central Europe.
Careful readers of Beyond the Wall may notice that certain aspects of life in the GDR anticipated the worst features of modern American politics. Before finishing her doctoral dissertation in 1978, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel was required to write an essay titled, “What is the socialist way of life?” According to the New York Times, nearly half of large universities in America now insist that job applicants write diversity, equity, and inclusion statements. The Stasi were obsessed with countering “politico-ideological diversion,” an umbrella term for subversive cultural products, fads, and political ideas that sounds uncomfortably close to the media’s current obsession with policing “disinformation.” Female athletes were unknowingly doped to boost East Germany’s Olympic medal count, including shot put champion Andreas Krieger, who later underwent female-to-male surgery because of the profound physical changes wrought by the steroid Turinabol. CBS News now hails him as “a transgender athlete you should know.”
“The personal is the political” is one of the left’s favorite mantras, and no government followed this directive more assiduously than the GDR. Police checked house parties to ensure partygoers were enjoying the officially prescribed 60/40 ratio of East German music to Western pop. Hoyer tells the story of a 14-year-old girl reprimanded by her teacher for wearing secondhand Levis. Americans have never endured anything remotely like the Stasi, but the relentless politicization of academia, popular culture, and mundane personal interactions recalls the worst excesses of the GDR’s ideological enforcers.
Most East Germans were willing to live with these indignities — and the political system they represented — if the regime could ensure a reasonable standard of living. The GDR only collapsed when its economic bargain failed and it lost the backing of its powerful Soviet patron. Prioritizing material comfort is not unique to East Germans, however. Any political consultant will tell you that ideological abstractions are less important than the “kitchen table issues” that eventually brought down Honecker.
When Steinbeck visited the Soviet Union in 1948, his attempts to explain the American system of checks and balances were met with bafflement from his Russian hosts, who had no patience for civil liberties in the midst of five-year plans and ambitious post-war rebuilding projects. He was baffled right back, but that’s because both sides couldn’t understand what politics is about for the other — whether it is concerned with the material and the everyday or the principled and the abstract. You, a reader of middlebrow book reviews in an opinion magazine, are almost certainly in the minority of people who profess to care about ideas such as freedom of speech and freedom of conscience. These are valuable things that I, a writer for the aforementioned magazine, also cherish. But they are not at the forefront of many people’s minds. In Beyond the Wall, Hoyer gives readers a thorough and sympathetic look at the lives of normal East Germans. The most disturbing conclusion the reader draws from her book is that people will put up with all manner of degrading propaganda if the trains run on time and supper is reasonably filling.
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Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.