A panel from the GDR mural at the House of Ministries (formerly Reich Air Ministry)
At first, many GDR citizens did not see matters this way. Once again, they resented it that their government was sinking millions of marks into a gaudy project in Berlin while a severe housing shortage gripped the nation as a whole. Such critics believed that the new building would serve only the Bonzen (party bigwigs); they labeled the new building the “Palazzo Prozzi.” With time, however, many East Germans came to feel genuine affection for Palace of the Republic, not least because it turned out to be not just for the Bonzen after all. Ordinary citizens were allowed to use its facilities, including its bowling alley. The palace was beloved also because it hosted many of the shows by Western artists that were allowed to appear in East Berlin during the waning years of the GDR. It was here that Carlos Santana and Udo Lindenberg performed, here that the singer Milva brought down the house with the lines: “Wenn der Wind sich dreht, weht er Mauern fort (When the wind changes direction, it blows down walls).”
When GDR television broadcast segments of Milva’s concert, it left out the part about walls being blown down. For all the early talk about openness and experimentation, Honecker’s regime continued to keep its citizens on a very tight leash. Indeed, Honecker and his colleagues ended up refining and perfecting the police state apparatus they had inherited from Ulbricht. “Real existierender Sozialismus (Real, existing socialism),” as the regime described its system, amounted, in the end, to a real suppression of dissident voices.
The main enforcer of ideological conformity remained the omnipresent Stasi, which grew even more formidable in response to the challenges of East-West détente and increased exposure to the West. By the early 1980s the Stasi had about 85,000 regular employees and about a million and a half full- and part-time informers. (By contrast, the Gestapo at its height had about 15,000 staff employees for a much larger area, and an undetermined, but certainly much smaller, cadre of regular informers.) Although there were Stasi branch offices in every East German town of any consequence, East Berlin remained the center of the agency’s operations. The headquarters in the Normannenstrasse bristled with high-tech communications and listening devices, rendered all the more sinister by the complex’s false windows, potted geraniums, lace curtains, and innocuous signs. In addition to its over four miles of files, the facility now included thousands of little bottles, called “smell conserves,” containing samples of the personal odor of known dissidents. Should the dissidents go underground, the thinking went, their scent could be given to bloodhounds for more effective tracking. Of course, GDR citizens knew that the agency had informers spread throughout the society, but they often could not know precisely who “was Stasi” and who was not. Only after the wall came down and people were allowed to examine the detailed files kept on them by the agency could they find out who among their associates had been working for the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (Ministry for State Security, MfS).
Western students and scholars who spent extended periods in the GDR also came under surveillance. In 1978 the Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash, then a Ph.D. student, went to East Berlin to conduct research for his dissertation. As he discovered when he returned to investigate his file fifteen years later, some of his associates and supposed friends had been Stasi informers, busily keeping the agency informed about what he said and whom he saw. The authorities were particularly interested in his ties to members of the Polish Solidarity movement, for the GDR rulers were deeply afraid that their state might catch what they called “the Polish disease”—a thirst for freedom. When, on his return to Berlin in 1993, Ash managed to track down some of the people who had informed on him, none would take personal responsibility for their actions; all blamed the Communist Party, which they said had “forced” them to act as they did.
Such claims sometimes had a measure of validity. The Stasi often recruited its low-level informers with blackmail, offering them a choice of working for the agency or facing punishment for some crime or transgression. However, the surveillance system could not have been as pervasive as it was had not millions of ordinary citizens been willing to help the state enforce ideological orthodoxy. It has been estimated that one out of ten employable East Germans was a Stasi informer.
East Berliners were as active as the rest of their countrymen in enforcing this conformity despite Berlin’s vaunted image as a bastion of political irreverence. As “Capital of the GDR,” indeed, East Berlin had the highest concentration of party loyalists in the land. The Honecker regime brought to the capital thousands of SED stalwarts from other parts of the GDR, especially from Saxony, Ulbricht’s old home turf. (The influx of Saxons was a source of constant aggravation to native East Berliners, who made jokes—but not too openly—about these crude provincials in their midst, calling them “the fifth occupation power.”) The classier districts of East Berlin, crammed as they were with ambitious apparatchiks, were among the few parts of the GDR where the citizenry voted solidly SED out of conviction, not just for want of alternatives.
Marzahn housing estate in East Berlin
In addition to prestige, East Berlin offered the best and most numerous perks of power. The city had more than its share of “Intershops,” the special hard-currency stores that sold Western goods and other hard-to-find items. Because of the ongoing competition with West Berlin, East Berlin boasted a few “international” restaurants, nightclubs, and even strip joints. Midlevel party and Stasi functionaries had access to decent apartments in the better parts of town, while the top bosses rated detached houses in the government compound near the village of Wandlitz. The compound, like a miniature West Berlin, had a high wall around it.
While East Berlin offered a host of amenities to its party functionaries, most of its citizens had to make do with living conditions that were considerably below Western standards. Rents in the city were low because of government controls, but much of the housing stock was in woeful condition due to years of neglect. Roofs leaked, balconies collapsed, bullet-scarred facades crumbled into dust. The newer housing projects on the outskirts of town, most notably the vast complex at Marzahn, were not much of an improvement, for in addition to being inhuman in scale and drably uniform, they began falling apart almost as soon as they were inhabited—instant slums. As for consumer goods, the Soviet bloc-made domestic appliances that were available in the capital’s stores tended to be technologically primitive and aesthetically inelegant by Western standards. This was also true of the East German-made automobiles, the infamous Wartburgs and Trabants, which featured plastic bodies and two-stroke engines that belched noxious fumes. Because production of these machines was as slow as the cars themselves, buyers had to wait several years for delivery after placing an order; on the other hand, the cars did not become dated since there were few design improvements from year to year. East Berlin’s grocery stores and butcher shops generally had food on the shelves, though the selection tended to be limited and monotonous. Restaurants served heavy meat dishes and canned vegetables, which one could wash down with good beer or (less good) Bulgarian wine. Cafés featured dry cakes topped with fruit jelly substitute or iced in suspiciously gaudy hues. Fresh fruit was hard to come by, especially exotic items like pineapples and bananas, which many East Berliners knew only from advertisements on West German television. (The lack of bananas inspired one of the many jokes with which East Berliners tried to laugh off the iniquities of life in the Honecker era. To wit: An East Berlin kid and a West Berlin kid face each other across the Wall. “Ha,” says the western kid, “I have bananas and you don’t.” “Phooey,” says the eastern kid, “I have socialism and you don’t.” “So what?” counters the western kid, “we’ll get socialism too.” “Then you won’t have bananas anymore,” responds the boy from the East.)