Ernst Thälmann monument, covered in graffiti, 1994
The removal of politically tainted street names and monuments was just the beginning of a much broader campaign to root out the remnants of the Marxist system in the former GDR. The new eastern states harbored tens of thousands of state-owned factories, stores, farms, and other assets that, in the eyes of united Germany’s rulers, had no place in a free-market economy. Actually, this conclusion had already been reached by the Modrow government, which, in March 1990, had set up a privatization agency called the Treuhand to sell off some of the state-owned properties. Under East German administration, however, the Treuhand had managed to dispose of only 170 companies. After unification the agency came under the control of a government determined to make privatization a priority. The Treuhand quickly became the largest holding company in the world, with 8,000 companies, 40,000 plants, 6 million employees, and 62,000 square kilometers of farms, forests, and other real estate. Its holdings were particularly extensive in East Berlin, where it was the largest landlord. Appropriately, it set up shop in the city’s largest office building, the former Nazi Air Ministry and “House of Ministries” in GDR days. Most of the staff were Wessis, as was the new director, Detlev Rohwedder, a former chief of Hoesch Steel and a legendary downsizer.
In selling off its state-owned factories, the Treuhand was supposed to commit the purchasers to retain as many workers as possible, but in many cases the buyers salvaged only the profitable parts of the operation and shut down the rest. Thousands of plants proved so outmoded, expensive to run, or destructive to the environment that they found no purchasers at all. They were kept open for a while with federal funds, but eventually most were simply closed down. As early as December 1991, 4 million East Germans were out of work, and millions more were underemployed. The Treuhand, which had been founded as the putative savior of GDR industry, became the most hated institution in the land. Rohwedder began receiving death threats on a daily basis, and in early 1991 he fell victim to a terrorist’s bullet.
The murder of Rohwedder, of course, did not turn back the tide of privatization, which continued under his successor, Birgit Breuel, who led the Treuhand until its dissolution in late 1994. By that time, the former GDR, including eastern Berlin, which alone lost 150,000 manufacturing jobs, was substantially deindustrialized, with about half the adult population out of work. Assessing the role of the Treuhand, Ghrista Wolf wrote bitterly: “Isn’t it a little uncanny how the work of two or three generations can just vanish into nothing—not by physical destruction, war, or bombs but in the middle of peacetime, by the stroke of a pen, by the inflexible magic word ‘privatization’?”
In his satirical novel of post-Wall Berlin, Schlehweins Giraffe, Bernd Schirmer writes of a giraffe who has been abgewickelt (weeded out) from a Berlin zoo so strapped for funds that the weaker animals are fed to the stronger ones and superfluous specimens sold off to the public or to other zoos. The giraffe in question represents the millions of Ossis who after the Wende (the turnaround engendered by unification) suddenly found themselves deprived of their old cages and keepers, sold off to new owners—in essence devoured by their more powerful neighbors. The process of Abwicklung affected not only the redundant, but also the politically tainted: animals with the wrong spots, stripes, or colors. To weed these specimens out, the government of united Germany established a series of committees, consisting mostly of Wessis, that combed through the personnel lists of eastern German public institutions, including the army, police, universities, secondary schools, and research institutes. Like the Western Allies after the collapse of Nazism, the interrogators distributed questionnaires designed to identify people with problematical political pasts. As the former Communist capital—the central attraction of the GDR zoo—East Berlin came under particularly intense scrutiny.
In Berlin as elsewhere, weeding out known Stasi collaborators and SED time-servers proved the least controversial part of the purge. It was the marginal cases that caused the most problems, along with the dismissal of people who were simply seen as too old or intellectually calcified to adjust to the new environment. Rife as it was with condescension toward the “primitive” GDR, this process generated tremendous resentment in the eastern states. When queried by Western reviewers whether the employees of his institute had the linguistic skills to keep up with the latest English-language scholarship, one research director replied: “Look, it’s not so simple. First we have to learn to eat with a knife and a fork, then maybe we can start on English.” A group of abgewickelte economists from the East German Academy of Economics founded a cabaret in Berlin called Kartoon. A performer quipped in one of their skits: “We’ve got one thing in common with the government in Bonn: we haven’t the foggiest idea of what we’re doing at the moment.”
One person’s Abwicklung was another person’s opportunity: the process created thousands of vacancies across the former GDR, and many of these spaces were filled with Wessis. The eastern universities were particularly attractive targets for job-hungry western academics. In the first years after unification hundreds of suddenly empty chairs were filled by Western scholars. Like missionaries, some of the newcomers hoped to help reshape the “desertlike” academic landscape in the east. As the premier university of the ex-GDR, Humboldt-Universität in Berlin attracted a host of academic stars from the west. Efforts to effect a rapid westernization of that institution, however, yielded bitter disputes, as representatives of the old guard fought tenaciously to defend their turf. The rector, Heinrich Fink, who had been appointed shortly before unification, declared his intention to “renew” the university as far as possible with existing personnel, rather than through a thorough purge. This did not sit well with the new senator for Science and Research, who supervised the Berlin universities. He ordered Fink’s dismissal, citing as grounds the rector’s collaboration with the Stasi during his tenure as a theology professor. Seeing Fink as the victim of a Wessi witch-hunt, many Humboldt students, professors, and eastern intellectuals rallied to his defense. Meanwhile, other academic personnel who were being abgewickelt appealed their dismissals in court. The august university, which many hoped would be an ideal meeting place between east and west, became instead an ideological battlefield.
So too did Berlin’s literary landscape. The cause in this instance was not a formal purge but a widespread assault on the artistic reputation and personal character of a number of easterners following the opening of the Stasi files. Interestingly, pressure to throw open these files originated in the east, not in the west. Many GDR citizens believed that they had a right to know who had informed on them and what had been said. Officials of the federal government in Bonn, most notably Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble, warned that this could lead to an orgy of revenge-taking. Nevertheless, in 1991 the government passed a law that allowed access to personal files by the individuals upon whom the records were kept, but not to third parties. An independent commission was established to oversee this process. Its head was the former East German theologian Joachim Gauck, who (unlike Schäuble) believed that bringing the full scope of the Stasi crimes to light was necessary for collective healing. Of course, Gauck’s agency did not have possession of everything the Stasi had collected, since some records had been shredded right after the Wall came down and others had been sold to the press by Stasi men looking to finance their retirement. The records under Gauck’s purview, however, were voluminous, and many of them resembled shrapnel-filled letter-bombs, set to blow up in their viewer’s face as soon as they were opened. The East German feminist Vera Wollenberger, for example, discovered that her husband had been spying on her for the Stasi for years. Not a few citizens who gained access to their files later came to regret their curiosity. Some blamed the messenger, accusing Gauck of rubbing the Ossis’ noses in their sins, thereby aiding in the West’s campaign of humiliation. No corner of East German life was left undamaged by the detonations in the Stasi files, but East Berlin’s literary and intellectual community provided the most spectacular pyrotechnics.