Although East Berliners and other GDR citizens were fully aware that the standard of living in their country was inferior to that of West Germany, they could take consolation in the knowledge that they were generally better off than the citizens of any other East-bloc state. This was an important factor in blunting the development of a strong opposition movement. On the other hand, as the socialist “brother-states” of Poland, Hungary, and even the Soviet Union began to reform and become freer in the 1980s, East Germans were confronted with what Timothy Garton Ash has called a “double contrast”: that between their own society and the West, and that between their intransigently repressive system and the suddenly innovative East. It was bad enough to be “behind” the West, but to be behind the Poles was galling in the extreme. To cope with the fears and frustrations of everyday life, many East Germans retreated into the private sphere, a tactic reminiscent of the “inner emigration” of the Nazi era. The GDR advertised itself as a model of social cohesion and community, but in reality it was a Nischengesellschaft (society of niches) marked by the protective clinging to one’s family and to small groups of kindred spirits.
The consolations of close social ties, low rents, free day care, good beer, and, not to forget, champion Olympic teams (the pharmacological bases of whose successes came out only later) were insufficient to deter a sizable number of GDR citizens from trying to move west, one way or another. They could tender an official application to leave, and under Honecker a few hundred were allowed to emigrate each year provided that they sold their property and valuables to the state at artificially low prices. Of course, people could also attempt to flee illegally, but in addition to the risk of being shot at the border they faced a jail term if captured. Parents caught trying to escape with their children risked having their kids taken away from them and placed with foster parents.
The Stasi maintained a number of prisons around the country specifically for political prisoners. Bautzen II, a high security facility in Saxony, was the most notorious of these. Opened in the early 1950s, it supplemented an existing prison in the same town that had been built in 1904 and used by the Nazis and Soviets before becoming a normal GDR jail. East Berlin itself had three Stasi prisons, each of them a hellhole where torture was a regular part of the “reeducation” process. In a report on his incarceration at Berlin-Pankow and Rummelsburg in the early 1970s, Timo Zilli, an Italian-born socialist, described a regimen of daily beatings, weeks of solitary confinement in a windowless cell, and hours of being hanged by his wrists with his feet barely touching the floor. A Jewish prisoner in Pankow who had spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp made the mistake of addressing his guards as “SS-Gestapo” and giving them the Hitler salute. As the guards beat him senseless, they shouted: “You Jewish swine think you can put on such a show because the Nazis let you survive. . . . We’ll finish the job.”
The one consolation for GDR political prisoners remained the prospect of being “bought free” by the Federal Republic. This program was expanded under Honecker as a way of bringing in much needed hard currency. In 1977 a covert organization called the “Commercial Coordination Area,” or CoCo, which had been set up ten years earlier to help with the human transfers, negotiated a hefty price increase for these transactions. Previously, prisoners serving short sentences went for about 40,000 marks, while long-term cases fetched three times as much. Now Bonn agreed to pay a uniform price of 95,847 marks a head. Occasionally the Stasi also sold prisoners directly to their relatives in the West, but in these cases the price was even higher: around 250,000 marks a head. By the time the Wall fell, almost 34,000 people had reached the West through buy-outs of one kind or another, which earned the GDR over 3 billion marks. This human export turned out to be one of the GDR’s most lucrative means of earning hard currency.
Cultural Dissidence: A Sinking Ship?
Of course, not all East German citizens who were disenchanted with conditions at home wanted to move west. Many dissidents continued to have faith in a socialist system whose principles, in their view, were being betrayed by their government. They remained convinced that socialism was fully compatible with, indeed dependent upon, free expression. Rather than abandoning the GDR, they wanted to make it better.
This sentiment was particularly prevalent in the literary community of East Berlin. Having taken seriously Honecker’s declaration of 1971 that there would be “no taboos in the area of art and literature” as long as artists proceeded “from the firm position of socialism,” writers such as Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Heiner Müller, Reiner Kunze, and Ulrich Plenzdorf began exploring the inadequacies of “real, existing socialism” in the daily lives of ordinary East German citizens. They soon discovered that what the government expected from the country’s writers was affirmation, not fault-finding. Hermann Kant, president of the GDR Writer’s Association, warned his more independent-minded colleagues that they faced expulsion from the association, and hence a ban on publication, if they did not show restraint in their treatment of political subjects.
The regime itself showed some restraint in its dealings with errant artists in the early 1970s because it was then mounting a major campaign for international recognition and could not afford to be seen as disrespectful of human rights. Following the Basic Treaty with Bonn, the GDR, along with West Germany, applied to join the United Nations (UN) and other international bodies. In 1973 both states were admitted to the UN and became signatories to the Helsinki Final Accords. In that same year East Berlin hosted the World Youth Games, another sign of its “arrival” on the international stage. But these very achievements allowed the Honecker government to contemplate a harsher stance vis-à-vis its most difficult intellectuals. In this regard, as in so many others, the USSR showed the way by expatriating Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1974. If Moscow could summarily expel one of its best known troublemakers, could not East Berlin do the same?
Wolf Biermann, 1983
The GDR’s Solzhenitsyn turned out to be the folksinger Wolf Biermann. From a public relations standpoint, Honecker could not have chosen a worse target. The son of a Communist dockworker who had been murdered by the Nazis, Biermann had moved from Hamburg to East Berlin in 1953 to document his preference for the socialist East over the capitalist West. His early songs reflected the fervor of his belief in humanitarian socialism. Yet he also began to chastise the Ulbricht regime for its attacks on intellectual freedom and its disregard for the concerns of ordinary citizens. Singing in a hoarse, off-pitch voice that rendered his biting lyrics all the more poignant, Biermann soon achieved cult status as the troubled conscience of communism. Hoping to muzzle him, the government banned him from performing in public in 1965, but this only increased his standing among local dissidents. Honecker’s men found Biermann just as unpalatable as the Ulbricht cadres had, and resolved to kick him out of the country. The opportunity to do so came in November 1976 when the singer received an invitation to perform in Cologne. To his surprise, the authorities not only allowed him to go, but immediately arranged the necessary travel documents. As soon as he was in the West, the GDR government denounced him as an “enemy of socialism,” revoked his citizenship, and banned him from returning to East Germany.