The German Democratic Republic

In the winter of 1989-90 the unintended consequences of Mikhail S. Gorbachev's program of political and economic refonn had become obvious to all but his most optimistic spokesmen. The General Secretary's attempt to create a new ideology of perestroika by grafting "bourgeois" and "social democratic" concepts onto the conventional ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had divided the party, created immense ideological confusion, and led to the formation of non-Communist and anti-Communist political organizations. The attempt to shift authority from party officials to elected soviets on the union and republican levels had led to the emergence of separatist and nationalist movements in many of the USSR's republics, including the RSFSR. The decentralization of the state's administration of the economy and the encouragement of both private and cooperative economic activity had failed to reverse the deterioration of economic conditions. As anxiety swept through the CPSU, orthodox party leaders called for the establishment of an autonomous Communist Party for the RSFSR to counter Gorbachev's policies and to "save Soviet Russia" from destruction.

This article examines Soviet perspectives on the limitation of the arms race in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as reflected in expert memoranda produced by the Institute for US Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences and submitted to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). The study highlights the development of arguments in favour of détente within these documents. The memoranda reveal the efforts of Soviet Americanists to promote the normalisation of relations with the United States – an objective of growing significance given the ambivalence within the Party leadership regarding rapprochement. In this context, the Institute’s director, Georgy Arbatov – who maintained close ties with prominent figures such as Brezhnev, Andropov, and Gromyko – sought to position the Institute’s expertise as a resource for those advocating engagement. Soviet experts justified arms control on both economic and strategic grounds. They underscored the disproportionate economic burden of the arms race on the USSR, which impeded much-needed domestic reform, while also highlighting the technological and economic superiority of the United States, which risked shifting the strategic balance. Alongside analytical assessments, the memoranda contained concrete policy recommendations. These included exploiting internal political dynamics in the United States, expanding public diplomacy, and strengthening ties with American society. The experts advocated for a flexible strategy capable of sustaining bilateral relations beyond short-term electoral cycles or presidential administrations. Taken together, the memoranda constitute a significant source for understanding the role of foreign policy expertise in the Soviet Union and reflect broader attempts to conceptualise alternative approaches to US-Soviet relations during the Cold War.

Since 1959 one of the most noted ideological issues in the Sino-Soviet conflict has been the question of the “inevitability of war.” Krushchev had brought up this subject at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956, where he proclaimed as no longer applicable “a Marxist-Leninist precept that wars are inevitable as long as imperialism exists.” His objective in this exercise in revisionism was to rid the foreign policy and the international image of the Soviet Union of a doctrinal liability. Coming to terms with the realities of the thermo-nuclear stalemate, the Soviet leaders had decided to emphasize “peaceful coexistence” (interpreted by them as political, ideological and economic struggle) as the “highest form of class struggle” and the road to victory over Western capitalism. On the ideological plane, this optimistic vision clearly called for the scrapping of a tenet-inevitability of war- according to which, given present-day military technology, the triumph of socialism would have been precluded by the disappearance of the human species. This, and no more, lay behind Khrushchev's pronouncement of 1956, since raised to an article of Soviet dogma, that war can be avoided. “Avoidability of war” became the doctrinal complement to the global strategy and propaganda line of “peaceful coexistence.”

This chapter examines the aggravation for the conflict between China and the Soviet Union during the early 1960s. After the January 1963 East Germany party congress, the CCP and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) issued a series of polemics. The only point of agreement was that the situation was critical. While the Chinese believed that there was a serious threat against world communist movements, the Russians referred to serious differences on cardinal issues of policy. A major focus of the rival polemics was Yugoslavia.

A radical improvement in the management of science and the organization of scientific research is very important to the successful resolution of the task of continually increasing the effectiveness of scientific research, a task posed by the Twenty-fourth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). In the area of organization, the coordination of scientific research work holds an important place. Improving coordination, among other things, in pedagogical science depends largely on regularizing and developing a functionally component part of pedagogical science - information. The indissoluble bond between these two elements determines the many-sidedness of coordination as well as the system of coordination.

The authors, based on the journalistic discourse from the concluding period of perestroika, endeavor to analyze the perspectives and approaches of representatives of official government authorities as well as the emerging and increasingly influential opposition press regarding the exacerbated interethnic relations and the pathways to resolving interethnic conflicts that arose in the late 1980s. The study examines the opinions of representa-tives from opposition media concerning the causes of interethnic conflicts in the territory of the former USSR during the perestroika years, categorizing these approaches into major groups. The authors substantiate, through extensive material, that the primary source of nationalist sentiments in the USSR during 1989–1990 was the Baltic republics, where nationalists effectively managed to subordinate state structures, initiate pro-cesses of state independence formation, and disseminate nationalist propaganda with impunity. A significantly more constructive position regarding the issue of interethnic relations was adopted by the moderate liberal op-position press, which, while critically addressing the errors of Soviet leadership in national policy, nonetheless supported the reforms being implemented in the country and advocated for the preservation and renewal of the USSR. An anti-perestroika opposition emerged, whose representatives sharply criticized the national policy of the Soviet leadership, perceiving it as a deviation from Marxist-Leninist theory. Concurrently, in the RSFSR dur-ing 1987–1989, an independent opposition press, often manifesting in the form of samizdat, was formed and strengthened, reflecting viewpoints on the policies of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the state concerning interethnic relations that starkly contrasted with official narratives.

La República Democrática Alemana, en sus 41 años de existencia forjó y proyectó una identidad que sobrepasaba con creces sus capacidades geopolíticas. Fue un proceso singular e inédito, conducido básicamente por el jefe de Estado, Erich Honecker y por el políglota dirigente, Werner Lamberz. Se asume como clave explicativa general el entronque de una fuerte dinámica societal, relativamente autónoma (eigenständige), con la auto-percepción resolutiva de la elite en orden a generar una llamada sociedad socialista desarrollada. Se generó una identidad con proyección geopolítica, pese a la ausencia de una narrativa común entre gobernantes y gobernados. El elemento identitario germanooriental, no pensado en 1989, ha repercutido en las décadas posteriores a la reunificación a través de lo que se conoce como Ostalgie. En la obtención de un rol geopolítico propio, América Latina y especialmente Chile, fueron centrales. Como clave conceptual explicativa del vínculo con Chile, el paper profundiza el concepto Nibelungentreue (fidelidad emocional).

This dissertation covers the interrelationship between the ruling Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) and the filmmakers of the feature film studio at the German Film Corporation (DEFA) in the German Democratic Republic(GDR). The interactions between the two from 1945 to 1971reveal a great deal about the overarching cultural-­‐ ideological framework of the SED, and the ideologicaldevelopment of the GDR. As the sole ruling party of the GDR, the SED maintained a strong hold over the country,and developed an effective party-­‐state, in which the partymirrored all state offices and maintained strong ties to everyaspect of the state. This dissertation is chronologicallysplit between 5 chapters, each covering a separate five yearperiod of time from 1945 to 1971. These years bookendthe first era for the GDR, and go from its founding until thefirst head of the SED, and head of the GDR, Walter Ulbrichtwas removed from power in 1971. This period highlightsthe developmental era for the GDR, and its emergence asa stable political state. For DEFA this period covers itsfoundation through its most difficult moment in 1965, inwhich the leadership of the SED banned all 12 films produced by DEFA that year, and its years of renewedstability thereafter. The use of a specific political era todefine the chorological boundaries for this dissertationallows for a deeper comparative view, in which eachchapter covers the developments of film policy by the SED,then looks as how filmmakers at DEFA who were SED members interpreted the policy, and then covers an exemplar film from that specific period. When taken incombination the dissertation tells three distinct, but directlyrelated stories, that of the development of film policy bythe SED, the struggles of filmmakers to interpret and implement policy at their studio, and the shifts in filmmakingand ideology in film. For the time being this dissertationwill be embargoed, however it you would like to contactme about my research, or the contents of this dissertationyou can do so at stepp.jonathan@gmail.com

When one thinks of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the terms Heimat and historical preservation are not two that immediately spring to mind. The enduring vision of the GDR has not been one of preserved medieval city centers, nor one of intense searches for the intimacy of local identity. Rather it has been one of anonymous rows of prefabricated apartment buildings punctuated by the occasional utopian attempt to create a new Socialist architecture, an architecture designed to flatten regional differences and erase local loyalties. This paper will briefly explore how Heimat and preservation interacted with each other in the GDR, in particular through the activities of the Gesellschaft fur Denkmalpflege, or the Society for Historic Preservation.1 These preservation activists resisted, with some degree of success, attempts by the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and GDR to eliminate local identities or at least subsume them into a larger, national narrative of progressive socialism. In fact, by 1989, a great deal of volunteer preservation activity focused on areas that did not support a centralized vision of the GDR, occasionally resulting in confrontation with the SED’s cultural policies. But the Heimat of 1989 was signficiantly different from the supposedly reactionary Heimat of the 1940s against which the SED continued to struggle up until the collapse of the GDR as East Germans reacted more against local anonymity than in favor of older class relations. By appropriating the dialogue of socialist cultural policies, members of the Gesellschaft fur Denkmalpflege often found themselves at once praised for their cultural work while being punished for their love of their Heimat.

On May 2, 1945, Berlin capitulated to Soviet troops. The Ulbricht Group, composed of the Communist government in exile, had reached the German capital the day before and immediately began the political and administrative reorganization of the city and the Soviet zone of occupation. Later in the same month Johannes R. Becher, returning from his Moscow exile, reported to the headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). With this, Becher began his career as the leading formulator of cultural policy in the Soviet zone and the German Democratic Republic. The next thirteen years of Becher's life (he died October 11, 1958) were dominated by the physical and spiritual reconstruction of Germany, the struggle to preserve a cultural policy for a united Germany, and-when that attempt failed-the development of a national culture for the new GDR. There were three decisive periods in Becher's activity in the area of cultural policy: the new beginning in the first postwar years, the disputes over the so-called New Course in the summer of 1953, and the liberalization during the thaw of 1956. In between lay periods of personal depression and political disillusionment: from 1946 to 1950 as the division of Germany and the influence of a dogmatic Soviet cultural policy became evident; from 1950 to 1952 and 1955 when he differed with the party leadership on criticism and self-criticism; and from 1957 to 1958 when the aging Becher became increasingly isolated. Politics and literature had always been inseparable in Becher's life and works. In his Expressionist poems he had interpreted Liebknecht's and Lenin's revolutionary politics as the beginning of a general revitalization of mankind. In the 1920s, as propagandist for the KPD in the tradition of Mayakovsky and Bedny, he had written poems about the anonymous proletarian masses. And as the liaison for Soviet cultural policy, he had founded the League of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers and its journal Linkskurve before 1933. After that year-from his Moscow exile-he organized the International Writers' Congress for the Defense of Culture: the congress at which Heinrich Mann, Musil, Huxley, Gide, and Barbusse, among others, spoke out in favor of an anti-fascist people's front for the defense of democratic culture.

Caught between political allegiance to the Soviet Union and a shared history with West Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) occupied an awkward position in Cold War Europe. While other countries in the Eastern Bloc already existed as nation-states before coming under Soviet control, the GDR was the product of Germany's arbitrary division. There was no specifically East German culture in 1945—only a German culture. When it came to matters of national identity, officials in the GDR's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) could not posit a unique quality of “East Germanness,” but could only highlight East Germany's difference from its western neighbor. This difference did not stem from the language and culture of the past, but the politics and ideology of the present: East Germany was socialist Germany.

The body of work, letters, and journals produced by Bertolt Brecht after he settled in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is strangely silent about freedom of expression in the arts. Officially, censorship did not exist in the GDR, but Brecht already had trouble with institutional approvals before his exile years. For example, his film Kuhle Wampe, or Who Owns the World? ( Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? ) (1932) , co-authored with director Slatan Dudow, was initially prohibited upon completion. With few exceptions, Brecht’s primary texts rarely mention censorship explicitly. However, Brecht’s own work often deals with sociopolitical structures similar to those that challenge characters like Galileo, who live under conditions that make it difficult to do simple things. Brecht’s texts untiringly demonstrate that the prevailing ideological conditions that elicit certain responses need to be transformed before people will be able to correspondingly change. I suggest here that even without revolutionizing the system, Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel, who was theatre manager of the Berlin Ensemble, were often able to maneuver quite skillfully within the GDR’s political circumstances in what I call the “blind spots of censorship,” where the spaces of official and personal relationships overlapped. Until the Ministry of Culture was established in 1954, the function of overseeing the arts was carried out by a number of early cultural authorities. By the time these various organizations were subsumed into the ministry, Brecht and Weigel had developed relationships within these institutions. One of these associations was with Kurt Bork, a high-ranking functionary who had a long career advising on the arts in many official organizations with authority over the theatre. Another relationship was with Bork’s wife Elfriede, who worked for Weigel. To illustrate the wide-ranging significance of the ties between Brecht, Weigel, and the Borks, I examine two productions that span the years of the Berliner Ensemble under Weigel’s theatre management. The Trial of Lucullus ( Das Verhör des Lukullus ) (1951), by librettist Brecht and composer Paul Dessau, premiered with modifications and a new title, The Condemnation of Lucullus ( Die Verurteilung des Lukullus) , at the Berlin State Opera under manager Ernst Legal. Toward the end of Weigel’s career, Seven against Thebes ( Sieben gegen Theben ) (1969) was produced at the Berlin Ensemble, directed by Manfred Karge and Matthias Langhoff. Both works are marked by correspondence from 1951 to 1969 between the ensemble and Kurt Bork, who acted as a sympathetic liaison for Brecht’s communication with the Socialist Unity Party of Germany even before Brecht settled in Berlin. I suggest here that much effective discussion concerning these two productions took place in the blind spots of censorship.

This chapter describes, explains, and evaluates the social policy of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) from the creation of that state on 7 October 1949 to the accession of its Lander (states) to the Federal Republic of Germany on 3 October 1990. What effects did the GDR’s social policy have? How did it influence the social situation of the population and the stratification of the society in East Germany? How and how much did dictatorship and socialist statism mark social policy? What shape did social policy assume in the final year of East Germany’s socialist state particularly after the fall of Erich Honecker in October 1989 and that of his successor, Egon Krenz? What did social policy of the GDR have in common with the critical junctures of social policy in pre-1945 Germany? At what point did it abandon old paths? Lastly, what distinguished the social policy of the GDR from that in other socialist states and from the welfare state in the Federal Republic of Germany prior to 1990? These questions guide the following analysis of the main features of social policy in former East Germany.

AntiFascism and Memory in East Germany is a book about remembering and about forgetting, about war, and about the peace which eventually followed. In the unlikely setting of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the Spanish Civil War became the subject of a debate which both predated and outlasted the Cold War, involving historians, veterans, politicains, censors, artists, writers, and Church activists. Examining these multiple memories and interpretations of Spain casts new and unexpected light on the legacy of the Spanish Civil War, and the relationship between history and memory under state socialism. The ruling Socialist Unity Party made full use of the antifascist legacy as legitimation for a non-democratic state. But despite dogged attempts at control and censorship, the state was unable to silence competing voices. All over East Germany, International Brigade veterans preserved their version of events - in letters to each other, in communications with the party, in discussions with friends and family around the kitchen table, and in memoirs written for the 'desk drawer'. For younger East Germans, the war retained an undeniably romantic aura. From their perspective, Spain was a far-away land to which they were forbidden to travel, the stuff of camp-fire singalongs and fantasies of adventure. This book dissects the relationship between state-sponsored history, the lobbying of veterans, cultural interpretations of war, and the memory traces left behind by marginalised or politically oppositional groups and individuals. It is a cultural history of memory under state socialism, a social history of veteran groups and their relationship with the state, and a political history of communist culture. Above all, it is the story of how post-war Europeans came to terms with the heavy burden of their pre-war past.

Introduction Leopoldo Nuti Part 1 The Superpowers and the CSCE 1 Zbigniew Brzenzinski and the Helsinki Final Act Patrick Vaughan 2 Human Rights Movement in the USSR after the Signing of the Helsinki Final Act, and the Reaction of Soviet Authorities Svetlana Savranskaya 3 The Politics of the Lesser Evil: the West, the Polish Crisis, and The CSCE Review Conference In Madrid, 1981-1983 Douglas Selvage Part 2 The Strategic Landscape of the 1980s, East and West 4 The Origins of the 1979 Dual Track Decision - A Survey Leopoldo Nuti 5 From Helsinki to Gorbachev: Belgium and the Euromissiles (1973-1985) Vincent Dujardin 6 The Strategic Defense Initiative: Between Strategy, Diplomacy and U.S. Intelligence Estimates John Prados 7 Reagan's SDI Announcement and the European Reaction: Diplomacy in the Last Decade of the Cold War Sean Kalic 8 From INF to SDI. How Helsinki Reshaped the Transatlantic Dimension of European Security Marilena Gala 9 Programming Armageddon: Warsaw Pact's War Planning, 1969-1985 Robert Nation 10 The Conceptual Battles of the Central Front: The Air-Land Battle and the Soviet Military-Technical Revolution Dima Adamsky 11 The Soviet Response to the Euromissiles Crisis Beatrice Heuser Part 3 Economic Issues and European Integration 12 Washington's Economic Diplomacy and the Reconstruction of U.S. Leadership Fiorella Favino 13 Europe and the EMS Challenge: Old and New Forms of European Integration in the '70s Maria Eleonora Guasconi 14 Economic Diplomacy and East- West Trade during the Era of Detente: Strategy or Obstacle for the West? Werner Lippert 15 The Polish Crisis and its Impact on Romanian Economy in the Early 1980s Petre Opris Part 4 The Battle of Ideas 16 Between East and West: Social Democracy as Alternative to Communism and Capitalism: Willy Brandt's Strategy as President of the Socialist International Bernd Rother 17 'Keeping Detente Alive' Inner-German Relations Under Helmut Schmidt And Erich Honecker, 1974-1982 Oliver Bange 18 Eurocommunism: An East German Perspective Laura Fasanaro 19 The Puerto Rico Summit of 1976 and the end of Eurocommunism Duccio Basosi and Giovanni Bernardini