The GDR: Casting my thoughts back
by Hans Heinz Holz
Translation and introduction by Hermann Glaser-Baur
“The big 60” one paper in Germany called it; “60 years of freedom” was another headline. They try to outdo each other in celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany, or West Germany, as the capitalist part of the German nation is generally called.
Hans Heinz Holz wrote the following article for the June issue of Anstoss, the monthly magazine of the German Communist Party in Berlin. It is being published at a time when the propaganda masters of the “free world” dig deep into their treasure chests. Countless are the wreaths laid to remember the “victims of Stalinism” and those “murdered at the Berlin wall”; every celebration of sixty years of their freedom is accompanied by a horror show about a Stasi prison, murdering border guards, and secret police taking people from their homes and into the dungeons of the communists. “This must never happen again” is the ever-repeated conclusion.
They are truthful at this one point: socialism is the one thing they hate and never want to see again—on German territory or on any other.
Winter 1946/47. Freezing cold. For some reason—I don’t remember what—I had to travel from Frankfurt am Main into the SBZ [Soviet Occupied Zone].
Hand in the food rationing card in Frankfurt; receive the East German one in Rostock.
It was like a Christmas present: the daily ration was one-and-a-half times that of the western one. Amidst the deepest poverty, the Soviet occupation power—near starving themselves—looked after the people.
That happened more than sixty-two years ago. I am eighty-two now and will never forget it.
Why am I using this as an introduction?
It was this very spirit of communist solidarity that the GDR was created from. Stalin said: “The Hitlers will come and go—the German people will remain.” This type of thinking determined the deeds; the national question was not an object of propaganda. When Adenauer* was pushing the integration of West Germany into the cold-war alliance of the USA, communists on both sides of the border fought for German unity. The first shots at the border were fired when West German members of the FDJ† travelled to their national meeting in Berlin. “Blue flags to Berlin” was the slogan. West German border guards fired at west German youths. And who is talking about the “shootings at the wall” nowadays?
The partition of Germany into two states from which two part-nations developed (which they are to this very day) was forced by the West, thereby breaching the Potsdam Aagreement. As late as 1958, when two German states and two currencies had been in existence for almost ten years, Walter Ulbricht‡ produced a plan for a reunited Germany based on a confederation with a neutral status and on a territory free of nuclear-weapons. By the way, the Soviet leadership under Khrushchev did not at all like this idea: they were increasingly treating the GDR as their economic and military province.
The west’s answer was the arms race, driven by the Minister for Defence, Franz Josef Strauß, and later the undermining strategy of Chancellor Willy Brandt’s “new east politics,” which naïve peacelovers fell for immediately. My position on that can be read in detail in the documents of the Moscow Peace Conference of 1967.
The plans for the conquering of the GDR were made as early as the time of the “emergency laws” of that period. They were kept in the safes of the “Ministry for All-German Problems.” We knew that and put all our emphasis on the strengthening of the GDR in world politics and counteracting all slander against it on the national level. West German communists did that with no ifs or buts—certainly too uncritical in many details, but solidarity was the first priority. We had to suffer defamation, a ban from teaching and civil service jobs, persecution; many hopes and many lives were destroyed.
Forty years of the GDR, that was one-and-a-half generations of building socialism. The effects of that will not be lost in world history, even though they may have to survive under the surface for a time. It is the task of us whose lifetime this period has been to pass on the memory so it can become part of the new that must and will come.
Those are memories of a West German citizen. Since 1945 I have been involved in the very front line of publishing and writing and in struggles. The GDR was a piece of my life. The newly constructed contradiction of “Wessis” (Westies) and “Ossis” (Easties) means nothing to me: these are class contradictions, not territorial ones.
Of course there were bourgeois people in the GDR, or else the events of 1990 would have been impossible. We underestimated how correct Lenin and Stalin had been when they said that class struggle will intensify under the conditions of socialism being built. Some of our self-judgements were utopian rather than socialist. When we look back on sixty years since the foundation of the GDR we must not exclude the shortcomings in the theoretical field. But mainly we must remember the huge achievements! GDR citizens are able to describe these better, especially now after getting to know life under capitalism.
Together we have to think about the present.
As part of the world crisis, new wars are being prepared. Fascist forms of rule are being considered, and indeed implemented in places, in order to safeguard the system; the pauperisation of masses of people and the opportunism that seeks to find a niche for survival by adjusting to the system, constructing all sorts of revisionist and reformist ideologies for the purpose.
This snow of yesterday has to melt away before today’s gentle breeze can grow into tomorrow’s revolutionary storm.
*Konrad Adenauer, first chancellor (head of West German government) after the Second World War.
†Freie Deutche Jugend (Free German Youth), communist youth movement in West Germany, banned in 1952.
‡Walter Ulbricht, head of state in the GDR.
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