The Two Germanies, 1945–1990: Problems of Interpretation

120 Pages·1992·11.762 MB·English

by  Mary Fulbrook (auth.)

THE TWO GERMANIES, 1945-1990
Studies in European History
General Editor: Richard Overy
Editorial Consultants: John Breuilly
Roy Porter
PUBLISHED TITLES
Jeremy Black A Military Revolution? Military Change
and European Society 1550-1800
T. C. W. Blanning The French Revolution:
Aristocrats versus Bourgeois?
john Breuilly The Formation of the First German
Nation-State, 1800-1871
Peter Burke The Renaissance
Michael Dockrill The Cold War 1945-1963
William Doyle The Ancien Regime
Geoffrey Ellis The Napoleonic Empire
Donald A. Filtz.er The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinism and the
Limits ofReform in the USSR, 1953-1964
Mary Fulbrook The Two Germanies, 1945-1990
R G. Geary European Labour Politics from 1900 to the
Depression
Graeme Gill Stalinism
Henry Kamen Golden Age Spain
Richard Mackenney The City-State 1500-1700: Republican Liberty
in an Age of Princely Power
Andrew Porter European Imperialism 1860-1914
Roy Porter The Enlightenment
Roger Price The Revolutions of 1848
James Retallack Germany in the Age of Kaiser Wilhelm II
Geoffrey Scam! Witchcraft and Magic in
16th and 17th Century Europe
R W. Scribner The German Reformation
Robert Service The Russian Revolution 1900-1927, Second Edition
FORTHCOMING
R G. Bonney The Rise of European Absolutism
David Cesarani The Holocaust
Hugh Gough The Terror of the French Revolution
john Henry The Scientific Revolution
David Stevenson The First World War
Clive Trebilcock Problems in European Industrialisation
1800-1914
THE TWO GERMANIES,
1945-1990
Problems of Interpretation
MARY FULBROOK
Reader in German History
University College, London
© Mary Fulbrook 1992
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First published 1992 by
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ISBN 978-0-333-54341-2 ISBN 978-1-349-12134-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12134-2
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
2 Historical Development 10
3 Politics 27
4 Economy and Society 45
5 Patterns of Culture 63
6 The End of the Two Germanies 77
7 Conclusions 89
Select Bibliography 97
Index 110
1 Introduction
Following the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich and the
division of Germany, the French had a saying that 'we
like Germany so much, we are delighted that there are
now two of her'. For centuries, Germany - the 'land in the
middle of Europe' - had plagued her neighbours in West
and East, with contested and shifting boundaries testifying
to Germany's uneasy role in Europe. Moreover, Germany
had been plagued with domestic instability too, which
spilled over into bad relations with her neighbours: the
social conflicts in the rapidly industrialising Wilhelmine
Empire had played a role in the origins of the First
World War; and the continuing socioeconomic crises
and political strife of the Weimar Republic led into the
brutal dictatorship of Adolf Hitler and the unleashing
of the Second World War. In these circumstances, it
is scarcely surprising that the French saw a solution to
the apparently perpetually recurrent German problem in
draconian division.
For nearly half a century, the division of Germany - and
of Europe - did indeed appear to ensure a certain stability
in the frozen conflict that was the Cold War. A most
unlikely scenario developed: a nation of former Nazis
seemed to be being transformed into two nations, one of
democrats, the other of communists - and each appeared
to be a model instance of its type. Over nearly half
a century, the division of Germany became more and
more institutionalised and accepted, such that by the late
1980s it was generally recognised that only lip-service
need be paid by West Germans to their constitution's
preamble committing them to work for reunification.
The extraordinary stability and longevity of these two
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systems - in contrast to Germany's turbulent political her
itage - therefore requires serious analysis and explanation.
But then there was another surprise: with startling speed,
in the context of dramatic changes in Mikhail Gorbachev's
USSR and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the East German
revolution of 1989 inaugurated the end of division and
the hurtling towards the uneasy unification, on 3 October
1990, of two Germanies that had by now become very
different sorts of sociopolitical entity.
This trajectory thus poses three major sets of substan
tive explanatory problems. First, there is the question of
the emergence and crystallisation of two very different
systems - and the suppression of possible historical alter
natives. How was it that notions of a democratic socialist
'Third Way', perhaps even in a neutral, united Germany,
were defeated in favour of a conservative western state
and a hard-line Stalinist eastern state? Secondly, there is
that of explaining the remarkable stability of these two
systems, once established. How was it that a nation which
had experienced such political and economic turmoil in the
first half of the century was so apparently successful - and
in such different ways - in the latter half? How were
West Germans turned into good democrats? How did
East Germans accommodate themselves to communist
rule? Was it simply the fact of massive presence of
Soviet troops in the GDR, or was there more to the
relative quiescence of East Germans (in contrast to their
Polish and Czech neighbours)? And how far, under such
different circumstances, had culture and society in the two
Germanies diverged? Was there really still one German
nation? Finally, the destabilisation of communist rule in
the GDR, the peaceful revolution and its transmogri
fication into the unexpectedly rapid unification of East
and West Germany, must be explained.
There are also broader analytical and historiographical
problems. Perhaps the most fundamental relate to the fact
that the Federal Republic of Germany and the German
Democratic Republic were founded as conscious attempts
to develop new forms of state and society, radically
breaking with the immediate Nazi past, and based on
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explicit, very different political ideologies and theories of
society. They were in effect tests in reality of opposing
theories of how to create a 'good' society - a historical
experiment virtually unparalleled in history. The Federal
Republic was founded as an attempt to institutionalise
a stable parliamentary democracy on Anglo-American
principles combined with pre-Nazi German democratic
traditions. The GDR, by contrast, was premised on, and
legitimated by, the would-be 'scientific' theories of society
embodied in Marxism-Leninism- as currently interpreted
by those communists in power.
But this historical experiment - this test of social and
political theories in reality - was in no sense 'value neu
tral'. The two Germanies were created by the superpowers
as anatagonistic, opposing entities: they represented the
front line of the Cold War, and the hostile armies of East
and West faced each other on the Iron Curtain which ran
down the inner frontier of this divided nation. The two
Germanies bristled, not only with armaments, but also with
wholly opposing world views: they painted each other in
black and white terms, as friend and foe, as all Good or
all Evil; attempts to develop a more differentiated or sym
pathetic picture of the other camp might be denigrated as
a form of fifth columnism. Even the most sober, seemingly
objective, comparison of the two systems would inevitably
raise problems of evaluation in the light of moral-political
criteria. For example, the formal political democracy and
civil liberties of the Federal Republic could easily be
favourably contrasted with the obvious political constraints
and repression of the German Democratic Republic; but
apologists for the latter might point to the real restrictions
on freedom for those individuals unable to afford the
'freedom of choice' supposedly offered by 'late capitalism'
in the West, while emphasising the underlying ultimately
egalitarian and humanitarian goals of 'actually existing
socialism' in the East. Inherent in the latter view would
be a very different conception of historical dynamics and
political priorities than in the former, pro-western view.
The very concepts used in political debate were also,
of course, those of academic discourse. Words such as
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'socialism' and 'communism' are common currency in
the cut-and-thrust of contemporary politics - and are not
always used with the precision of meaning necessary for
scholarly debate. The collapse of neo-Stalinist communist
regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989 was seized upon glee
fully by many western right-wingers as an opportunity
to proclaim the 'triumph of capitalism' or the 'death of
socialism', without any attempt to differentiate between
democratic socialist ideals on the one hand and perversions
of a Marxist-Leninist dictatorship on the other. Indeed,
the occasion was specifically used for politically inspired
analytical confusion. The slogan of 'never again socialism'
(Nie wieder Sozialismus) was used to great effect by the
conservative CDU against both the former ruling Communist
Party (SED, renamed PDS) and the newly founded and
politically very different Social Democratic Party (SPD)
in the GDR's first (and last) democratic election of March
1990. This tactic of political and analytical confiation was
an old one - the West German SPD had already been tarred
with the brush of Communism in Adenauer's conservative
West Germany of the 1950s.
Although of course constraints and influences on schol
arship were very different in East and West, inevitably the
political animosities of the Cold War period rubbed off on
scholarly analyses, and this not only for those Germans most
directly affected by division. Much Anglo-American writing
on the two Germanies was also to a greater or lesser degree
affected by one form or another of political bias, conscious
or unconscious. More pragmatically, too, the division had
effects on the nature of academic analyses. Both western
and even, it seems, eastern scholars were not given full
access to accurate data about the political realities or the
economic performance of the GDR; East Germans had to
work within certain constraints with respect to what they
could undertake research on, how they could present their
findings - and even what was permissible as a 'finding';
and, given the backdrop of Auschwitz, debates about the
nature of the present were also in many ways political and
moral debates about degrees of responsibility for, and extent
of 'overcoming' of, a uniquely reprehensible past.
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