Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [87]
In one way the peculiar situation of the GDR made it easier. The East German regime suffered from the patent fact that it had no legitimacy, initially almost no support, and would have never in its lifetime won a freely contested election. The successor to the SED (Socialist Unity Party) has probably more genuine popular support today than when the old regime totted up the habitual 98 per cent of votes. To this extent East German communists were still, speaking globally, in embattled opposition, especially under the threat and temptation of their overpowering neighbour, the vastly larger Federal Republic. This justified measures which would otherwise have horrified communists, even allowing for their Party’s rejection of liberal democracy. One remembers Brecht’s bitter wisecrack about government dissolving the people and electing another. On that very occasion, 17 June 1953, my friend Fritz Klein, a devoted communist of twenty-nine, supported the Soviet intervention after the great workers’ revolt, because he thought the regime socially more just and politically more reliably anti-fascist than the Federal Republic. Similarly, in 1961 he supported the building of the Berlin Wall. ‘My view then,’ he writes, ‘was that it had to be accepted as the lesser evil, faced with the inevitable alternative: to abandon the still legitimate experiment of building a new society.’10 The most they could hope for was that the socialist society they were constructing would work and eventually win over the people. Without doubt the best and most intelligent East German Party members were both critics of the system and remained hopeful reformers to the end. But they were powerless. It was, of course, easier for Party members to abdicate their judgement and play it by the book (that is, at the top, ask for advice from Moscow) or simply do whatever the Party told them had to be done. And the Party was run by old hardliners from before 1933 or their successors of the next generation.
The passions of the Cold War have presented the East European regimes as gigantic systems of terror and gulags. In fact, after the years of blood and iron under Stalin (who was in two minds whether he wanted a GDR at all), the GDR’s system of justice and repression, leaving aside the victims of the Berlin Wall, has been well described authoritatively by a Harvard historian as ‘continuously shabby but relatively unsanguinary’.11 It was a monstrous all-embracing bureaucracy which did not terrorize but rather constantly chivvied, rewarded and punished its subjects. The new society they were building was not a bad society: work and careers for all, universal education open at all levels, health, social security and pensions, holidays in a firmly structured community of good people doing a honest day’s work, the best of high culture accessible to the people, open-air leisure and sports, no class distinctions. At its best it settled down into – Charles Maier’s words again – something between ‘socialism and Gemütlichkeit’, or a ‘Biedermeier collectivism’.12 The drawback, apart from the fact, unconcealable from its citizens, that it was far worse off than West Germany, was that it was imposed on its citizens by a system of superior authority, as by strict nineteenth-century parents on recalcitrant or at least unwilling minors. They had no control over their lives. They were not free. Since West German television was generally accessible the constant presence of compulsion and censorship was evident and resented. Nevertheless, as long as it looked permanent, it was tolerable enough.
All this affected Party members as much as, perhaps more than, the rest. Their conversations were not only recorded by rivals or the omnipresent Stasi informers, but, if deemed unacceptable, brought demands for public self-criticism or demotion by dour but unconvincing functionaries from the self-contained ghetto of the national rulers, rigidly laying down the line. Dissidents were worried