The Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic) was a European state that was created in 1949 when the northeastern zone of occupied Germany under Soviet control became its own country after World War II. Accordingly, it was Commie Land.
The leaders of the freshly founded GDR were Walter Ulbricht ("the guy with the Lenin beard"), Wilhelm Pieck ("the guy with the potbelly") and Otto Grotewohl ("the guy with the glasses"—not this one, obviously). As early as 1953, shortly after Josef Stalin's death, the state had its first big crisis when workers rose against the government on June 17th. It didn't end too well. Even Communist author Bertolt Brecht criticized the government in his poem The Solution: "Would it not be simpler then for the government/To dissolve the people and elect another?"
Under considerable Soviet influence (and with a huge Soviet military presence, the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany), East Germany is best known for the massive amount of surveillance carried out on its citizens by its Secret Police, the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security), known as "The Stasi". Its police force, the Volkspolizei (People's Police, known as "Vopos" for short) were also fairly notorious. It built the Berlin Wall and heavily fortified the Iron Curtain to stop its people from fleeing to the West (officially, it was to prevent Western spies going East—it probably did that, toonote ).
Like any proper People's Republic of Tyranny, the German Democratic Republic did have elections, and other parties than the Marxist-Leninist SED, but they were far from democratic. East Germans called this voting "Falten gehen" (going to fold), because anybody who did anything but fold their ballot (like crossing out candidates, or even staying at home) and put it in the urn immediately became suspicious. As the East Germans said, the only way to vote was "by foot", i.e., leaving the GDR for West Germany. Well, until 1961 that is, afterwards this was less of an option.
During its early years, the conservative West German government did everything they could not to acknowledge East Germany's existence; breaking off diplomatic relations with every state (other than the USSR, which was too big to ignore) that acknowledged the GDR, calling it derogatory names like "Ostzone" (east zone), "Sowjetische Besatzungszone" (Soviet-occupied Zone), "so-called GDR" and "Undeutsche Undemokratische Diktatur" (Un-German Undemocratic Dictatorship), and generally claiming that western Germany was the only legitimate German state. The GDR rulers did the same, just the other way round. Later, in 1971, under Social Democrat Willy Brandt, inter-German relationsnote improved (the so-called Neue Ostpolitik, "New Eastern Policy") and relations with the Eastern Bloc were established. However, all the way until 1990 there was a lot of Insistent Terminology on the part of West Germany when it came to the East. For instance, the "embassy" in East Berlin was not called a Botschaft ("Embassy") but a "ständige Vertretung" (idiomatically, "Permanent Mission") and maps went to absurd lengths when describing the de facto borders of Europe with terms like "administered by Poland" for the former German territories east of Oder and Neiße.
East Germany was one of the economic success stories of Commie Land, with a decent agricultural system and enough manufacturing to put consumer goods within reach of many; their flag reflects this with its hammer and pair of compasses surrounded by wheat instead of the ubiquitous sickle. They achieved this even though their government, like all the others of Commie Land, invested far more than was necessary into the military and heavy industry. In fact, while the 1989 protesters had popular support for doing away with the oppressive regime, many East Germans were proud of their state and were not happy with the way that East Germany "became part of the effective area of the Basic Law of Germany" quite so summarily.note At least not after realising that reunification did not bring them an instant paradise, and that the now-ruling Western leaders weren't shy about handing out pink slips.note
The Eastern side did have a pretty good military, getting the full Soviet versions of military tech rather than the weaker export versions. Planned the one or other raid on West Germany too, but the unification stopped the plan before it could be executed. Their uniforms, though... Due to Germany still being, in many regards, an occupied country with two separate and independent governments, the Western powers (US, UK, France) had Military Liaison Missions in the GDR, allowing them to observe Soviet forces in action.
It allowed churches to operate freely, provided they didn't get political. It also treated the LGBT Community in the most progressive way of the Eastern Bloc nation. This dates back to the German Communist Party's support of Magnus Hirschfeld's policies in the Weimar Republic (which preceded Stalin's homophobic reversal). The Paragraph 175 homophobic legislation from Imperial Germany remained on the books in both West and East Germany, but East Germany stopped enforcing it in The '50s and took a far more moderate approach albeit it absolutely forbade the creation of any public Gayborhood and kept the closet in force. In sharp contrast to West Germany, where the Churches opposed LGBT rights, in East Germany, Protestant Churches helped nurture the underground gay community. In The '80s, East Germany reversed homophobia and opened the first state-owned gay disco while the Supreme Court of East Germany affirmed, that "homosexuality, just like heterosexuality, represents a variant of sexual behavior. Homosexual people do therefore not stand outside socialist society, and the civil rights are warranted to them exactly as to all other citizens." In some respects, East Germany was a lot more progressive than West Germany on this issue, albeit the latter's development of free society and free speech allowed for openly gay artists and gay communities to develop, which did not quite happen behind the Wall.
East Germany also did quite well in sporting events... largely because many of its athletes were doped up to the eyeballs with the latest performance-enhancing drugs, in an effort to make the Communist regime look like it was working on the international stage. Most would suffer serious health problems as a result. In American TV of the 1970s and '80s, look for many jokes about East German sportswomen not really being women due to the Brawn Hilda-esque features that the drugs produced in female athletes. On the flip side to this, no one could accuse figure skater Katarina Witt, who won two Olympic golds in 1984 and 1988 along with a string of other titles, of being male; her elaborate and revealing costumes (which the the International Skating Union would change their rules to ban) led to her being dubbed "the most beautiful face of socialism" by TIME Magazine and who posed nude for a sell-out Playboy after the Wall came down. Less amusingly, some female athletes were so badly messed up by the doping regimen (which in some cases started at the age of ten) that they had to undergo a full sex change operation, while others found themselves unable to properly bear children.
The country's sole native ethnic minority were the Sorbs/Wends, located around the eastern border. Whenever someone needed a Token Minority for a piece of media or a public display to contrast the progressive nature of the state with its predecessors, they were the ones to go for (on the other hand, they had been treated badly since the Middle Ages, so that's a significant step upwards).
Most of East Germany could pick up West German TV networks, which helped undermine the regime. The channels couldn't be jammed since it would also jam West Germany and that would be bad diplomatically. The Dresden and Rügen areas couldn't, so were dubbed "The Valley of the Clueless". This was done a) because GDR television was full of propaganda and b) it appears not to have been that good. The only programmes that Wikipedia discusses in its English version are:
Der schwarze Kanal ("The Black Channel"—derived from a German plumbing term for sewer): Think of a Communist MSTing of West German television news, only without the humour. Or the popularity.note (May fall under So Bad, It's Good, though.) Or, basically, you'd have clips of West German news programmes and presenter Karl-Eduard von Schnitzlernote providing pro-regime, anti-Western commentary on those clips in an attempt to undermine beliefs that Western news was more accurate than the Eastern offering...
Aktuelle Kamera—the East German TV news broadcast, which was pretty much Propaganda. (After 1953 at least, prior to which it was even quite critical of the regime until coverage of the Uprising in that year put paid to that.)
In Good Bye, Lenin!, several real-life clips from the show are shown alongside edited-in fake reports made by the main character and his budding filmmaker friend in order to fool the former's mother into thinking communism never fell.
Ein Kessel Buntes ("A Kettle of Colour")—A Variety Show, shown six times a year. Hollywood production standards and (usually past their prime) Western celebrities. Continued into the Berlin Republic and still turns up in re-runs.
Das Spielhaus ("The Playhouse")—a popular puppet thing.
Sandmännchen—A children's show which holds the world record for most episodes (over 22,000 and counting). This time it was West Germany which created a copy which never reached the popularity of the original.
Polizeiruf 110 ("Police call 110")—A Police Procedural, originally the Alternate Germany Equivalent of ARD's Tatort (albeit one that averted Always Murder in an attempt to "educate" the people), this series moved to Das Erste after reunification and basically became indistinguishable from its new inspiration (and stablemate).
East Germany's most famous consumer products were the Exacta and Praktica cameras (the Praktica brand still exists; it was part of the Kombinat Volkseigener Betrieb Zeiss Jena (how's that for a company name, eh?) that invented the prism SLR design which is still the standard for cameras today—one of the few Communist inventions to have an impact in the West), MZ motorcycles (whose engine technology gave Suzuki quite a boost early in The '60s after one of MZ's factory riders defected to join Suzuki) and the Trabant car, which was, by Western standards, obsolete before the '60s were over but gave many a Worker and his family the opportunity to move themselves about a bit, trailing a blue two-stroke smoke cloud. It pretty much disappeared from the East German streets as soon as the Wall opening brought other choices, but it's now considered a classic car. Some drivers have succeeded in making their Trabants capable of passing the MoT, Britain's strict government-mandated roadworthiness test; divine intervention is suspected. However the Trabant, suitably renovated, is making a bit of a comeback today among enthusiasts, who rebuild them into customized hotrods or simply restore them to better-than-new conditions. Probably the most visible East German product on modern store shelves is Vita Cola, the de facto official soft drink of the DDR. While it went insolvent like most East German companies following reunification, the lingering memory of it proved viable enough that it was revived in 1994, and today it is sold on store shelves across Germany, particularly in the former East. It rivals the Hamburg-based Fritz Cola as being Germany's most popular homegrown soft drink. It is known for its strong lemon and citrus flavor.
The GDR was also famous for its bureaucratic nomenclature. Coffins for example were named Erdmöbel (literally: ground furniture), or the term Sättigungsbeilage (literally: Well, it is difficult to translate, really. It would be something like "a filling side dish", and means stuff like potatoes, dumplings or rice as a supplement to a proper mealnote ). Even more hilarious were the words they invented for religious symbols, like Frühjahrsschokoladenhohlkörper (hollow chocolate article of spring—a chocolate Easter Bunny) and Jahresendflügelpuppe (winged doll of the year's end—a Christmas angel for the Christmas tree and the like). The reason: Religion wasn't verboten in the GDR, but the ruling people didn't like it too much either. To what extent anybody ever actually and seriously used any of those words is still debated, much like alleged Berlin slang terms for several landmarks in Berlin that only tourists and guidebooks actually seem to use.
The East Germans had their own state airline. They originally called it Deutsche Lufthansa, but the West Germans complained and got awarded that trademark, so it adopted the name of a separate charter airline: Interflug.
On the other hand, the East German rail network retained the pre-1945 name of Deutsche Reichsbahn ("German Imperial Railways"), while the West Germans renamed theirs Deutsche Bundesbahn ("German Federal Railways"). This may have been done since several treaties dating to the end of World War II mentioned special privileges—particularly relating to trackage rights in West Berlin, including the right to run the S-Bahn there—given by name to Deutsche Reichsbahn that might not have transferred automatically to VEB Bahn der DDR or some such, so it was best not to risk it. In 1994 the two were unified to form the new "Deutsche Bahn AG", though the name "Bundesbahn" somehow still sticks around in the minds of many West-Germans. The GDR-Reichsbahn is famous among many a Rail Enthusiast because steam died very late in the GDR. Until well into the 1980s, steam was employed on main lines which was mostly due to the lack of electrification (all pre-war electrification was taken to the Soviet Union as war reparation) and the fact that the GDR had lignite in abundance but hardly any oil deposits (up until the 1980s, however, the GDR was able to get plentiful cheap oil from the Soviet Union; as a result, diesel locomotives and oil-fired steam locomotives were in common use until the 1980s, when the Soviet Union began demanding that other Comecon countries pay for oil with hard currency; as a result, in that decade, an ambitious electrification program was undertaken, with hundreds of new electric locomotives being built). Steam's main downsides (inefficiency and need for a lot of human labor) were of no major concern to the GDR authorities, as they wanted everybody to have a job (and only got it done by having a lot of people work less than full jobs, but paying them as if they were) and lignite was cheap and plentiful. As to speed, the horrible condition of most tracks allowed no more than 120 km/h on most lines, which was well within reach of pre-war era steam locomotives anyway. Also, after unification, the Meiningen Steam Locomotive Works, proved quite useful for steam locomotive restoration projects in Europe due to possessing the appropriate facilities and machinery of constructing new boilers and the knowledge of maintaining steam locomotives.
The GDR was allocated an ISO 3166-1 code, but it never got a full domain code. Had it survived to get one, it would have been .dd. It had the international calling code +37, now divided up among some former Soviet states.
There is a degree of "Ostalgie" ("Eastalgia") in The Berlin Republic, including GDR-themed parties. Indeed, some GDR era architecture and murals still remain iconic parts of the ex-Eastern Germany, and memorabilia is still openly sold in "Ost-Shops". Some of these GDR symbols like the Berlin tower and Amplemann traffic light have even graduated to being icons of reunified Germany as a whole. Basically, if you want a good example of Ostalgie, visit a DDR museum in the East where you will learn about various atrocities of the regime. Once that tour ends, you'll be subject to a big Mood Whiplash where a tourist shop sells a whole bunch of DDR-themed souvenirs and snacks which (most) East Germans find amusing more than insulting. While obviously ex-East Germans hate the wall and oppression, many are more partial to cultural DDR symbols and memorabilia compared to their Western counterparts who have an aversion to it like it was the Third Reich all over again.
The German abbreviation for "German Democratic Republic" is "DDR" ("Day-Day-Air" in the German pronounciation), but has nothing to do with DanceDanceRevolution (or with double-data-rate synchronous dynamic random-access memory).
In a curious note, the DDR also did not own an island off the coast of Cuba as a gift from Castro, although some incredibly funny people like to twist facts to make it look that way.
One holdover from the DDR era is that some traffic lights have a green arrow under them. What does this mean? As long as the coast is clear, you can turn off even if the light is red. When West Germans found this out after reunification, they loved it (but it didn't catch on over there). If you don't spot it, be prepared for some honks from impatient drivers behind you.
Since approximately 1990 "Ossi" is the German slang term for a former East German, "Wessi" being the West Germany counterpart. Until then, "Zoni"note was used for people from the GDR, "Wessi" was used by the people in West Berlin for those from West Germany and "Ossi" was used in jokes about people from East Frisia.
The German Democratic Republic (GDR), German: Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR), often known in English as East Germany, existed from 1949 to 1990.[1] It covered the area of the present-day German states of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Berlin (excluding West Berlin), Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, and Thüringen. This area was occupied by the Soviet Union at the end of World War II excluding the former eastern lands annexed by Poland and the Soviet Union, with the remaining German territory to the west occupied by the British, American, and French armies. Following the economic and political unification of the three western occupation zones under a single administration and the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, known colloquially as West Germany) in May 1949, the German Democratic Republic (GDR or East Germany) was formally founded on 7 October 1949 as a sovereign nation.
East Germany's political and economic system reflected its status as a part of the Eastern Bloc of Soviet-allied Communist countries, with the nation ruled by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and operating with a command economy for 41 years until 3 October 1990 when East and West Germany were unified with the former being absorbed into the latter's existing system of liberal democracy and a market economy.
Creation, 1945–1949
Division of Germany
Occupation zone borders in Germany, 1947. The territories east of the Oder-Neisse line, under Polish and Soviet administration/annexation, are shown as white, as is the likewise detached Saar protectorate. Berlin is the multinational area within the Soviet zone.
The Yalta Conference
At the Yalta Conference, held in February 1945, the United States, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union agreed on the division of Germany into occupation zones. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin favored the maintenance of German unity, but supported its division among the Allies, a view that he reiterated at Potsdam.[2] Estimating the territory that the converging armies of the western Allies and the Soviet Union would overrun, the Yalta Conference determined the demarcation line for the respective areas of occupation. It was also decided that a "Committee on Dismemberment of Germany" was to be set up. The purpose was to decide whether Germany was to be divided into several nations, and if so, what borders and inter-relationships the new German states were to have. Following Germany's surrender, the Allied Control Council, representing the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, assumed governmental authority in postwar Germany. Economic demilitarization however (especially the stripping of industrial equipment) was the responsibility of each zone individually.
The Oder-Neisse Line
The Potsdam Conference
The Potsdam Conference of July/August 1945 officially recognized the zones and confirmed jurisdiction of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (German: Sowjetische Militäradministration in Deutschland, SMAD) from the Oder and Neisse rivers to the demarcation line. The Soviet occupation zone included the former states of Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. The city of Berlin was placed under the control of the four powers. The German territory east of the Oder-Neisse line, equal in size to the Soviet occupation zone, was handed over to Poland and the Soviet Union for de facto annexation. This territory transfer was seen as a compensation for Nazi German military occupation of Poland and parts of the Soviet Union. The millions of Germans still remaining in these areas under the Potsdam Agreement were over a period of several years expelled and replaced by Polish settlers (see Expulsion of Germans after World War II), while millions of ethnic Germans from other Eastern European countries poured into Allied-occupied Germany. This migration was to such an extent that by the time the German Democratic Republic was founded, between a third and a quarter of the population of East Germany was Heimatvertriebene, i.e. ethnic German migrants who fled or were expelled as part of a wider trend of population transfer among the countries and regions of Eastern Europe following World War II.[3]
Map showing the different borders and territories of Poland and Germany during the 20th century, with the current areas of Germany and Poland in dark gray
1951 East German stamp commemorating the Treaty of Zgorzelec establishing the Oder-Neisse line as a "border of peace", featuring the presidents Wilhelm Pieck (GDR) and Bolesław Bierut (Poland)
Reparations
Allocation policy for "surplus" German heavy industry under the "Level of Industry" plans
Each occupation power assumed rule in its zone by June 1945. The powers originally pursued a common German policy, focused on denazification and demilitarization in preparation for the restoration of a democratic German nation-state. Over time, however, the western zones and the Soviet zone drifted apart economically, not least because of the Soviets' much greater use of disassembly of German industry under its control as a form of reparations. Reparations were officially agreed among the Allies from 2 August 1945, with 'removals' prior to this date not included. According to Soviet Foreign Ministry data, Soviet troops, organised in specialised "trophy" battalions, removed 1.28m tons of materials[clarification needed] and 3.6m tons of equipment, as well as large quantities of agricultural produce).[4] No agreement on reparations could be reached at the Potsdam Conference, but by December 1947 it was clear that Western governments were unwilling to accede to the Soviet request for $10bn in reparations (which the Soviets placed into perspective by calculating total war damage of $128bn).[5] (In contrast the Germans estimate a total loss of German property, due to the border changes promoted by the USSR and the population expulsions, of 355.3 billion Deutschmarks).[6] As a result, the Soviets sought to extract the $10bn from its occupation zone in eastern Germany, in addition to the trophy removals[clarification needed]; Naimark (1995) estimates that $10bn was transferred in material form by the early 1950s, including in 1945 and 1946 over 17,000 factories, amounting to a third of the productive capital of the eastern occupation zone.[7]
In the western zones, dismantling and/or destruction of German industry continued until 1951 in accordance to the (several times modified) "German level of industry" agreement connected with the Potsdam Conference whereby Germany was to be treated as a single unit and converted into an "agricultural and light industry economy". By the end of 1948 the US had dismantled or destroyed all war-related manufacturing capability in its occupation zone.[8] In accordance with the agreements with the USSR, shipment of dismantled industrial installations from the west began on March 31, 1946. Under the terms of the agreement the Soviet Union would in return ship raw materials such as food and timber to the western zones. When the Soviets did not fulfil their side of the agreement, the US temporarily halted shipments east, and they were never resumed. It was later shown that although these events were subsequently used for cold war propaganda purposes against the Soviet Union, the main reason for halting shipments east was not the behaviour of the USSR but rather the recalcitrance of France.[9] Material received by the USSR included equipment from the Kugel-Fischer ballbearing plant at Schweinfurt, the Daimler-Benz underground aircraft-engine plant at Obrigheim, the Deschimag shipyards at Bremen-Weser, and Gendorf power station.[10][11]
Military industries and those owned by the state, by Nazi activists, and by war criminals were confiscated by the Soviet occupation authority. These industries amounted to about 60% of total industrial production in the Soviet zone. Most heavy industry (constituting 20% of total production) was claimed by the Soviet Union as reparations, and Soviet joint stock companies (German: Sowjetische Aktiengesellschaften—SAG) were formed. The remaining confiscated industrial property was nationalized, leaving 40% of total industrial production to private enterprise.
Agrarian reforms
The agrarian reform (Bodenreform) expropriated all land belonging to owners of more than 100 hectares of land as well as former Nazis and war criminals and generally limited ownership to 1 square kilometre (0.39 sq mi). Some 500 Junker estates were converted into collective people's farms (German: Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft—LPG), and more than 30,000 square kilometres (12,000 sq mi) were distributed among 500,000 peasant farmers, agricultural laborers, and refugees. State farms were also set up, called Volkseigenes Gut (State-owned Property).
Political tensions
Growing economic differences combined with developing political tensions between the US and the Soviet Union (which would eventually develop into the Cold War) were manifested in the refusal in 1947 of the SMAD to take part in the USA's Marshall Plan. In March 1948, the United States, Britain and France met in London and agreed to unite the Western zones and to establish a West German republic. The Soviet Union responded by leaving the Allied Control Council, and prepared to create an East German state. The division of Germany was made clear with the currency reform of 20 June 1948, which was limited to the western zones. Three days later a separate currency reform was introduced in the Soviet zone. The introduction of the Deutsche Mark to the western sectors of Berlin, against the will of the Soviet supreme commander, led the Soviet Union to introduce the Berlin Blockade to try to gain control of the whole of Berlin. The Western Allies decided to supply Berlin via an airbridge. This lasted 11 months until the Soviet Union lifted the blockade on 12 May 1949.
Political developments
An SMAD decree of June 10, 1945 allowed the formation of antifascist democratic political parties in the Soviet zone; elections to new state legislatures were scheduled for October 1946. A democratic-antifascist coalition, which included the KPD, the SPD, the new Christian Democratic Union (Christlich-Demokratische Union—CDU), and the Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (Liberal Demokratische Partei Deutschlands—LDPD), was formed in July 1945. The KPD (with 600,000 members, led by Wilhelm Pieck) and the SPD in East Germany (with 680,000 members, led by Otto Grotewohl), which was under strong pressure from the Communists, merged in April 1946 to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands—SED) under pressure from the occupation authorities. In the October 1946 elections, the SED polled approximately 50% of the vote in each state in the Soviet zone. However, a truer picture of the SED's support was revealed in Berlin, which was still undivided. The Berlin SPD managed to preserve its independence and, running on its own, polled 48.7% of the vote while the SED, with 19.8%, was third in the voting behind the SPD and the CDU.
In May 1949, elections were held in the Soviet zone for the German People's Congress to draft a constitution for a separate East German state. Members of the Nazi party were drawn and elections were held from the slate of candidates drawn from different organizations of the anti-fascist coalition. Communists won this election, thereby holding a majority of seats in the People's Congress. According to official results, two-thirds of voters approved the unity lists.
The SED was structured as a Soviet-style "party of the new type". To that end, German communist Walter Ulbricht became first secretary of the SED, and the Politburo, Secretariat, and Central Committee were formed. According to the Leninist principle of democratic centralism, each party body was controlled by its members, meaning that Ulbricht, as party chief, theoretically carried out the will of the members of his party.
Incidentally, the party system was designed to allow re-entry of only those former NSDAP adherents who had earlier decided to join the National Front, which was originally formed by emigrants and prisoners of war in the Soviet Union during World War II. Political denazification in the Soviet zone was thus handled rather more transparently than in the Western zones, where the issue soon came second to considerations of practicality or even just privacy.[citation needed]
In November 1948, the German Economic Commission (Deutsche Wirtschaftskomission—DWK), including antifascist bloc representation, assumed administrative authority. Five months after declaration of the western Federal Republic of Germany (better known as West Germany), on October 7, 1949, the DWK formed a provisional government and proclaimed the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Wilhelm Pieck, a party leader, was elected first president. On October 9, the Soviet Union withdrew her East Berlin headquarters, and subsequently it outwardly surrendered the functions of the military government to the new German state.
