Beyond the very real dictatorship, the GDR was not a simple parenthesis, an accident of history. Incarnated in speeches, organizations, objects, international partnerships, communism was something other than a prelude to post-communism.
Nicolas Offenstadt’s new work is part of a trilogy that he has published since 2018 on the history of GDR. As for The Country disappeared. In the footsteps of the GDR (Stock, 2018) and Urbex GDREast Germany told through its abandoned places (Albin Michel, 2019), it draws here on existing studies and original archives, coming from flea markets, from testimonies, from discussions with East German citizens, through chance encounters, which he crosses with more traditional archives, such as the municipal archives of Frankfurt-on-the-Oder or those of the Eisenhüttenstadt museum.
The senses and landscapes
The urbex plays a significant role. For example, the author discovers archives in a cellar of the former Th. Hartmann and Schulze company, or in the abandoned steel foundry in Chemnitz. He is a regular at these very varied archives – this is one of the things that makes this work original.
Indeed, it was the terrain, the taste for abandoned places, abandoned areas, chance encounters, which led him to study the GDRalthough he was initially a specialist in the Middle Ages and questions of memory and historiography. By living for several years in the east of Germany, Nicolas Offenstadt quickly understood: the heritage of this ephemeral State cannot be reduced to the bittersweet image that it gives. Goodbye Leninnor to barbed wire, nor to torture in prison, nor to the deaths along the wall, which often dominate a narrative overdetermined by anti-communism.
The taste for anecdotes, for details, and the attention to small everyday facts make reading the work very enjoyable. The emphasis placed on the senses and the landscapes allows a sensory dive into the history of the GDRlike this passage on smells:
One of the central characteristics of the odorous landscape of the GDR is due to the role of lignite in the country’s economy and in heating in particular, which produced a particular, slightly mechanical smell. (pg. 125)
This is somewhat reminiscent of the work of Alain Corbin, a pioneer in the field.
Restore density
The work begins in an original way with the quick portraits of Aljoscha Rompe, who had Swiss nationality thanks to his biological father, but preferred to stay in GDR to play his music there, believing that concerts in the East were more creative, and Ronald M. Schernikau, a figure in the West Berlin gay scene, who voluntarily returned to live in GDR in the 1980s, when he left her as a child with his mother. In 1990, during the last congress of writers of GDRthe latter uttered a phrase that became famous:
I consider that the stupidity of communists is not an argument against communism. (…) You still know nothing of the degree of submission that the West demands from each of its inhabitants.
We understand, after these portraits, that it will be a question of writing a history of GDR nuanced, which allows us to understand these two life paths. If we reduce the GDR to the dictatorship that it was, without trying to go further, it is by definition impossible to understand them. The idea is therefore, as in other recent works, to restore the density and diversity of a society too often reduced to its repressive apparatus.
One could adhere to socialist values and, at the same time, be critical of its achievement. There GDR was something other than what German media discourse still often conveys: an ideological bubble that burst, leaving no trace. The opposite happened: the traces of the GDR are everywhere.
Obviously, it has left its mark, including in France where interest in this State is great, as shown by the commercial success of recent works and the opening in Tonnerre (Yonne) of a museum of the GDR.
When to start ?
Nicolas Offenstadt’s work is defined as a global history for a whole series of reasons. It strives to take into account the diversity of GDR : it is neither a monograph on a region, nor a work on East Berlin, the center of power, and it attempts to take into account all points of view, not just those of the leaders. The Mansfeld-Eisleben region, that of the copper mines in Saxony-Anhalt (the Luther region before being this mining region), however, is of particular interest to the author, who returns to it several times.
This story is also global, because the objective is to capture the long time of the GDRsince the creation in 1943 of the National Committee for Free Germany in USSR by communist resistance fighters, until its fall in 1990 and the traces that this state left thereafter. The author could even have started even earlier.
In fact, the territory of GDR refers to an even older historical reality. Its unity is anchored in an agrarian economy which had characteristics due to a history different from the rest of the Germanic territories. More or less, the borders of the GDR corresponded to that of Mitteldeutschland. These lands, to the east of Altdeutschlandwere inhabited by Slavic populations and were occupied during the first wave of colonization organized by the Teutonic Order from 1105.
The specificity of this region is that, almost everywhere since the XIIe century, the Grundherrschaft has persisted: it is a power based on land occupation and on a contractual basis, and not a personal power, as in the rest of the agricultural lands of the Germanic territory. The author is therefore right to insist on the fact that the GDR is not only a result of the Cold War whose borders would be totally arbitrary and would result solely from military positions in 1945.
It’s more complicated than that, especially if we take into account that the GDR existed as a project well before the Cold War. Marx was a German, Lenin lived in Leipzig and Berlin: he had the first Marxist newspaper for all of Russia printed in Leipzig, Iskra (The Spark). We can therefore define temporal limits to the project and to the imagination which governs the founding of the GDR well before the 1943 Committee.
A relative openness
The author strives to include the GDR in a world history, obviously emphasizing its links with West Germany, theUSSR and the satellite countries, but also its relations with North Korea, North Vietnam, South Yemen, Mozambique, therefore all that we call “the red globalization “. It is also in this sense that this story is global.
Obviously, the opening of the country was not comparable to that of the FRGif only because of the lack of freedom of movement. But the country was not closed, cut off from the world, as was explained to me in my college history classes in the 1980s.
Among the ten commandments of “ good socialist », Ulbricht defines international solidarity, therefore support for insurrectional struggles, decolonization,PLOagainst apartheid. A high school of FDJ (the youth organization of the GDR) welcomed in training, on Lake Bogensee, young communists from all over the world, for example Chileans after Pinochet’s coup d’état in 1973 and Spanish communists from the 1950s (expelled from France).
The book Ostalgie internationalpublished around fifteen years ago, underlined this openness to part of the world, as the subtitle indicates, Memories of the GDRfrom Nicaragua to Vietnam. Through objects, motorcycles GDR (still used massively in Cuba, for example), memories of studies or professional training, GDR left traces all over the world, which still persist.
The close relations with North Korea are analyzed in a detailed and nuanced way, to show the investments, the provision of consumer goods, the state visits, on the one hand, but also the mutual distrust and the balance of power, on the other, in the context of a state which wanted a Korean path towards socialism (the author could have detailed a little more this little-known Juche ideology).
Endless difficulties
One of the merits of the work is to show that the GDR is not a simple accident of history, a deviation from normality, like a river which left its bed after overflowing and resumed its natural course in 1990. It cannot be reduced to a parenthesis which would be closed today. In short, communism was not just a prelude to post-communism.
This now forgotten system of values that promoted GDROffenstadt revives it in a convincing way, while showing the aporias of a state euergetism incapable of satisfying the expectations of the population in many areas, and faced with endless difficulties: lack of labor, concerns about energy supply, poor quality of lignite,USSR which reduced its oil deliveries in the 1980s, because it was itself in difficulty.
“ The history of the GDR has often been written from above, as a history of communist power, thus emphasizing the entrapment of society in the web of an authoritarianism sometimes described as totalitarianism » (p. 19), writes Nicolas Offenstadt. It must be emphasized that, for around 15 years, there have been numerous counter-examples, and what was true in the 1990s is no longer true today, since work on the history of everyday life, housing, childhood, artistic or sporting practices, and leisure activities has multiplied. Even in the 1990s, there were already exceptions.
We may be surprised that the author does not refer more to important concepts, forged by recent advances in historiography on GDRlike the Fürsorgediktatur (dictatorship of assistance, paternalism) of Konrad Jarausch, the durchherrschte Gesellschaft (society entirely dominated by power throughout) by Jürgen Kocka, or even the Partizipatorische Diktatur (participatory dictatorship) by Mary Fulbrook.
In the context of such a global history, it is true that it is difficult to outline all the ways of understanding this regime. Socialism has a history, but it is also a story: a story that Nicolas Offenstadt tells us with a precious appetite for the anecdotes and details of daily life.