Corey Ross

East Germans and the Berlin Wall: Popular Opinion and Social Change before and after the Border Closure of August 1961

Based on sources from the East German regime’s internal archives, this article considers how the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 affected both the regime’s political authority as well as wider processes of social change. After first considering the domestic problems that the East German communist leadership sought to solve by sealing the border, it proceeds to examine the immediate popular response to the building of the Wall and the longer-term consequences for the regime’s ability to realize some of its central socio-political aims at the grass-roots level. It argues that although the Wall was in many respects a turning-point in state-society relations, there were nonetheless many important threads of continuity that spanned the events of 12-13 August 1961. The period of enhanced political stability apparently ushered in by the Wall was arguably the product of a shift not only in popular political attitudes, but equally in the increasingly pragmatic expectations of the party leadership.

BEFORE THE WALL: EAST GERMANS, COMMUNIST AUTHORITY, AND THE MASS EXODUS TO THE WEST

Based on sources from the East German regimes internal archives, this article examines how the exodus of over 3 million people from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before the construction of the Berlin Wall undermined the communist regimes ability to exert its authority over internal affairs. Instead of focusing on the relatively well-known economic and diplomatic costs of the mass exodus, it considers rather the grass-roots political ramifications of this unique phenomenon among the Soviet satellite states. The article focuses on three interrelated issues: first, the governments little-known efforts to curb and control emigration before the Wall; second, the myriad causes of the mass emigration and how these were perceived by the party/state apparatus; and third, the variety of strategies through which ordinary East Germans who stayed in the GDR attempted to use the possibility of flight to the West to enhance their bargaining position with state authorities. It argues that the refugees to the West were not the only East Germans to capitalize on the permeable border around West Berlin. The possibility of emigrating westwards also gave those who stayed a degree of power vis-a-vis the regime that they otherwise would not have had.

Cinema, Radio, and “Mass Culture” in the Weimar Republic: Between Shared Experience and Social Division

The unique explosion of creativity in Weimar-era Germany has long been a highlight of twentieth century cultural history. From literature to theater, from the visual arts to cutting-edge design, Germany could plausibly lay claim to the most vibrant cultural scene in the world during the 1920s. In some respects, the retrospective brilliance of these artistic feats has cast a peculiar light on the less illustrious popular cultural artifacts of these years. Even if the bulk of films, magazines, and radio shows had little to do with the avant-garde scene, they too are commonly regarded as part of the wider groundswell of cultural change after the First World War. In this view, the combination of a new democratic political system, shorter working hours, technological advances, and the general atmosphere of cultural experimentation encouraged the emergence of a new and more widely shared mass culture.1

Radio, Film and Morale: Wartime Entertainment between Mobilization and Distraction

Historians have often struggled to gauge the importance or irrelevance of ‘pleasure’ and ‘leisure’. While on the one hand such non-essentials can seem trivial in comparison to the history of government, wars, economics and religion, there can be little doubt that they have come to occupy more of our time and energy over the past century, and are a crucial element in any understanding of popular culture. Part of the reason might be a lingering sense of anxiety about a surfeit of ‘pleasure’ itself, anxieties with a remarkably long pedigree. The ‘Protestant’ spirit dissected by Weber always tended to associate pleasure with sloth and to assume that too much enjoyment posed a danger to individuals and society as a whole. In the nineteenth century, the productive, utilitarian commercial bourgeoisie largely defined itself in contrast to an effeminate, self-indulgent aristocracy. By the turn of the century, this new commercial elite was itself pilloried as the latest manifestation of a parasitical ‘leisure class’ (following T. Veblen). As living standards rose and more social groups could afford simple pleasures, this strand of critique evolved into elaborate schemes for ‘rational recreation’ and wholesome alternatives to commercial amusements. It is certainly not hard to find echoes of this reformism under National Socialism, from the productivist thrust of Kraft durch Freude to the constant appeals to discipline and heroic self-sacrifice.

Pleasure and Power in Nazi Germany: An Introduction

Although scholars generally (and with good reason) associate the Third Reich above all with pain, fear and violence, we cannot hope to understand its underlying social and cultural dynamics without seriously considering the role of pleasure. After all, one of the most important promises the Nazi movement made, both before but especially after the seizure of power, was ‘Freude’, a term combining a sense of pleasure, happiness and joy. One struggles to find other dictatorial regimes in the twentieth century that made so much of this theme. For the National Socialists, Kraft durch Freude, or ‘strength through joy’, was more than just the name of a leisure organization: it denoted a broader idea, a programme of action, a promise of national fulfilment. In the competitive racial worldview of the Nazis, pleasure and power were inseparable, even mutually reinforcing. Strength came through joy and joy through strength. A contented people was a more productive and thus stronger people; and only a strong people could expect to achieve lasting contentment in the eternal struggle between the races. Pleasure in the Third Reich was both a means and an end.

Entertainment, Technology and Tradition: The Rise of Recorded Music from the Empire to the Third Reich

‘The truly musical, in modern, mechanical form, the German soul up to date.’ Thus was the gramophone first introduced to Hans Castorp, hero of Thomas Mann’s monumental 1924 novel The Magic Mountain. Listening intently to the ‘many overtures, and single symphonic movements, played by famous orchestras’ while sitting with folded hands in the tranquillity of his mountain sanatorium, Castorp is the epitome of the cultivated aficionado: ‘what, finally, he felt, understood, and enjoyed … was the triumphant idealism of the music, of art, of the human spirit.’1 Yet only two years later the gramophone features very differently in Mann’s 1926 novella Unordnung und fruhes Leid, where the young adults of even the most cultivated intellectual families succumb to ‘the exotic sounds of the gramophone, played with robust needles to make its shimmies, foxtrots and one-steps resound all the more loudly … a monotonous Negro-amusement (Neger-Amusement) dressed up with orchestral frills, drums, tinkling and finger-snapping.’2 Here the gramophone is presented as an ambiguous object of youthful vigour and shallowness, earlier as a sublime instrument of cultural enrichment and spiritual profundity — and all in the work of (arguably) Germany’s foremost author of the early twentieth century. Clearly, in terms of its cultural and social impact, the advent of recorded music was not a straightforward matter.

Mass Media, Culture and Society in Twentieth-Century Germany: An Introduction

In January 1932, a journalist who had set out to report on modern aspects of everyday life took the unusual step of visiting the Sunday matinee shows in two movie theatres in Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city. As was then customary, the audience of both matinees consisted almost exclusively of children under the age of 14. Despite this basic similarity, however, the show took on a very different character in these two cinemas. Throughout the screening, the children in one of Hamburg’s working-class districts were very active viewers. Again and again, they commented noisily on the proceedings that they saw on the silver screen. Much to his surprise, the reporter learnt that this was true not only of the feature film but also of the preceding newsreel. According to the journalist the Wochenschau was heavily biased, offering a right-wing view of Germany’s political and social situation, but this left the assembled working-class youngsters completely unim-pressed. They laughed and whistled during footage showing a solemn memorial service for former Freikorps soldiers who had fought against Polish troops in 1921, and when Chancellor Bruning appeared on the screen the whole audience exploded with catcalls the Hamburg reporter thought unfit to print. Disruption soared once again when the newsreel finally offered pictures of German traditional dances (Volkstanze): ‘What a load of rubbish!’ (‘So’n Quatsch!’) was one of the more moderate comments emanating from the youthful audience.

Historians, Unification and the ‘New National Paradigm’

To the vast majority of German intellectuals, the events of 1989–90 came not just as a surprise but as a shock. For all the vehemence of intellectual exchange during the years of division, a handful of certainties and fundamental viewpoints had long structured the debates in fairly clear and sometimes rather predictable ways. The role of the ‘nation’ in Germany’s past, present and future was undoubtedly one of the central touchstones of these debates. Both Right and Left drew much of their self-understanding from diverging views on Germany’s national past, the former often lamenting the loss of a unified nation-state and criticising the so-called ‘national masochism’ of the Germans after the catastrophe of the Third Reich, the latter generally perceiving German division as the just reward for Nazi crimes and the cornerstone of European peace. The dissolution of the GDR and unification of the two states has, therefore, fundamentally redrawn the lines of argument and forced a questioning of previous certainties about the role, desirability and justification of a German nation-state.

The Origins and Effects of 17 June in the Factories

What was the initial reaction to the announcement of the accelerated ‘construction of socialism’ in the factories? While many workers were basically uninterested, their apathy producing little sediment in the archives, the picture painted by the internal reports is one of a wide array of responses ranging from excitement at the prospect of realizing what sounded like a decades-old goal of the workers’ movement to a deep-seated scepticism of the type of ‘socialism’ the Soviet-style SED intended to construct.

The ‘Unforced’ Collectivization, 1952–53

To the SED leadership in Berlin, agricultural collectivization represented a necessary escalation of the ‘class struggle’ in the East German countryside.1 It was the central feature of the SED’s agricultural policy throughout the remainder of the 1950s and early 1960s and was an essential component of the broader attempt to build a new socialist society. But what did the collectivization of agriculture look like in the villages and hamlets of the GDR? What was the role of local functionaries and officials in helping to carry it out? How did East German farmers respond to the foundation of LPGs and how did those who opposed them try to defend their farms against the claims of the state? As was also the case in the factories, many of the pre-existing problems of exerting control in the villages continued to plague the SED’s efforts to transform the countryside. And what is more, the attempt to push through collectivization with force in 1952–53 only alienated most East German farmers even further.