[News] I’m Still Here, Though My Country’s Gone West

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/17-ddr/ I’m Still Here,
Though My Country’s Gone West: The Seventeenth Newsletter (2021)
Vijay Prashad - April 29, 2021
------------------------------

[image: Berlin, Fackelzug zur Gründung der DDR]

A mass rally with the Free German Youth that marked the founding of the
German Democratic Republic in the Soviet Occupation Zone, October 1949.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.org/>.

A full generation has elapsed since the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
(USSR) collapsed in late 1991. Two years earlier, in 1989, the communist
states of Eastern Europe dissolved, with the first salvo fired when Hungary
opened its border. On 3 March 1989, Hungary’s last communist prime minister
Miklós Németh asked
<https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB490/docs/1989-03-03%20Conversation%20between%20Mikhail%20Gorbachev%20and%20Miklos%20Nemeth.pdf>
the USSR’s last President Mikhail Gorbachev whether the border to Western
Europe could be opened. ‘We have a strict regime on our borders’, Gorbachev
told Németh, ‘but we are also becoming more open’. Three months later, on
15 June, Gorbachev told
<https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB490/docs/1989-06-15%20Gorbachev%20press-conference%20Bonn.pdf>
the press in Bonn (West Germany) that the Berlin Wall ‘could disappear when
the preconditions, which brought it about, cease to exist’. He did not list
the preconditions, but he said, ‘Nothing is permanent under the Moon’. On 9
November 1989, the Berlin Wall was knocked down. By October 1990, the
German Democratic Republic (*Deutsche Demokratische Republik* or DDR) was
absorbed into a unified Germany dominated by West Germany.

As part of the unification, the structures of the DDR had to be demolished.
Headed by the Social Democratic politician Detlev Rohwedder, the new rulers
created the Treuhandanstalt (‘Trust Agency’) to privatise 8,500 public
enterprises that employed over 4 million workers. ‘Privatise quickly,
restructure resolutely, and shut down carefully’, Rohwedder said. But
before he could do this, Rohwedder was assassinated in April 1991. He was
succeeded by the economist Birgit Breuel who told
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/08/01/she-sells-east-germany-fires-millions-and-earns-little-love/9bddbddc-a141-44ae-8d0c-69eed08b7fd1/>
the *Washington Post*, ‘We can try to explain ourselves to people, but they
will never love us. Because whatever we do, it’s hard for people. With
every one of the 8,500 enterprises, we either privatise or restructure or
close them down. In every case, people lose jobs’. Hundreds of firms that
had been public property (*Volkseigentum*) fell into private hands and
millions of people lost their jobs; during this time, 70%
<https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300144246/peoples-state> of women lost
their jobs. The stunning scale of the corruption and cronyism only came
<https://www.zvab.com/9783360018083/Raubzug-Ost-Treuhand-DDR-pl%C3%BCnderte-3360018087/plp>
out decades later in a German parliamentary inquiry in 2009.

[image: LPG Mansfeld, Solidaritätsbekundung mit Vietnam]

Cooperative farmers handing over a flag of solidarity with the motto
‘Solidarity Hastens Victory’ written on it to the Ambassador of the
Democratic Republic of Vietnam, 1972.

Not only did the public property of the DDR slip into the pockets of
private capital, but the entire history of the project vanished in a haze
of anti-communist rhetoric. The only word that remained to define the forty
years of DDR history was *stasi*, the colloquial name for the Ministry for
State Security. Nothing else mattered. Neither the de-Nazification of that
part of Germany – which was not conducted in the West – nor the impressive
gains in terms of housing, health, education, and social life occupy space
in the public imagination. There is little mention of the DDR’s
contribution to the anti-colonial struggle or to the socialist construction
experiments from Vietnam to Tanzania. All this vanished, the earthquake of
the reunification swallowing up the achievements of the DDR and leaving
behind the ash heap of social despair and amnesia. Little wonder that poll
after poll – whether in the 1990s <https://www.grin.com/document/104931> or
the 2000s
<https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/sehnsucht-nach-der-ddr.1005.de.html?dram:article_id=158852>
– show that large numbers of people living in the former East Germany look
back longingly for the DDR past. This *Ostalgie* (‘nostalgia’) for the East
remains intact, reinforced by the greater unemployment and lower incomes in
the eastern over the western part of Germany.

In 1998, the German parliament set up the Federal Foundation for the Study
of Communist Dictatorship in East Germany, which set the terms for the
national appraisal of communist history. The organisation’s mandate was to
fund research on the DDR that would portray it as a criminal enterprise
rather than a historical project. Fury governed the historical undertaking.
The attempt to delegitimise Marxism and Communism in Germany mirrored
attempts in other countries in Europe and North America that hastened to
snuff out the reappearance of these left ideologies. The ferocity of
efforts to rewrite history suggested that they feared its return.

<https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-ddr/>

This month, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with
the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (IF DDR) to produce the first of a
new series, *Studies on the DDR*. The first study
<https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-ddr/>, *Risen from the Ruins: The
Economic History of Socialism in the German Democratic Republic*, goes
beneath the anti-communist sludge to unearth, in a reasonable way, the
historical development of the forty-year project in the DDR. Based in
Berlin, the authors of the text sifted through the archives and memories,
interviewing those who helped construct socialism in Germany at different
levels of society.

Peter Hacks, a poet of the DDR, said in retrospect, ‘The worst socialism is
better than the best capitalism. Socialism, that society that was toppled
because it was virtuous (a fault on the world market). That society whose
economy respects values other than the accumulation of capital: the rights
of its citizens to life, happiness, and health; art and science; utility
and the reduction of waste’. For when socialism is involved, Hacks said, it
is not economic growth, but ‘the growth of its people that is the actual
goal of the economy’. *Risen from the Ruins* lays out the story of the DDR
and its people from the ashes of Germany after the defeat of fascism to the
economic pillage of the DDR after 1989.

[image: Leipzig, Straßenschild Lumumbastraße]

A monument to Patrice Lumumba built by Leipzig’s Free German Youth; the
street was later renamed ‘Lumumba Street’ in a ceremony with Congolese
students, 1961.

One of the least known parts of the DDR’s history is its internationalism,
wonderfully explored in this study. Three brief extracts make the point:

   1. *Solidarity Work. *Between 1964 and 1988, sixty friendship brigades
   of the Free German Youth (the DDR youth mass organisation) were deployed to
   twenty-seven countries in order to share their knowledge, help with
   construction, and create training opportunities and conditions for economic
   self-sufficiency. A number of these projects still exist today, though some
   have taken on different names, such as the Carlos Marx Hospital in Managua,
   Nicaragua; the German-Vietnamese Friendship Hospital in Hanoi, Vietnam; and
   the Karl Marx Cement Factory in Cienfuegos, Cuba, to name but a few.
   2. *Learning and Exchange Opportunities. *Overall, more than 50,000
   foreign students successfully completed their education at the universities
   and colleges of the DDR. The studies were financed by the DDR’s state
   budget. As a rule, there were no tuition fees, a large number of foreign
   students received scholarships, and accommodation was provided for them in
   student halls of residence. In addition to the students, many contract
   workers came to the DDR from allied states such as Mozambique, Vietnam, and
   Angola as well as from Poland and Hungary seeking job training and work in
   production. Right until the end, foreign workers remained a priority, with
   contract workers growing from 24,000 to 94,000 (1981-1989). In 1989, all
   foreigners in the DDR received full municipal voting rights and began to
   nominate candidates themselves.
   3. *Political Support. *While the West was slandering Nelson Mandela and
   the African National Congress (ANC) as terrorists and ‘racists’ and
   conducting business with the apartheid regime in South Africa – even
   providing arms shipments – the DDR supported the ANC, provided the freedom
   fighters with military training, printed their publications, and cared for
   its wounded. After black students in the township of Soweto launched an
   uprising against the apartheid regime on 16 June 1976, the DDR began to
   commemorate international Soweto Day as a sign of solidarity with the South
   African people and their struggle. Solidarity was even extended to those in
   the belly of the beast: when Angela Davis was tried as a terrorist in the
   United States, a DDR correspondent presented her with flowers for Women’s
   Day and students led the One Million Roses for Angela Davis campaign,
   during which they delivered truckloads of cards with hand-painted roses to
   her in prison.

The memory of this solidarity no longer remains either in Germany or in
South Africa. Without the material support provided by the DDR, the USSR,
and Cuba, it is unlikely that national liberation in South Africa would
have come when it did. Cuban military support for the national liberation
fighters at the 1987 Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was crucial for this defeat
of the South African apartheid army, leading eventually to the collapse of
the apartheid project in 1994.

[image: Berlin, 10. Weltfestspiel, Demonstration, Ehrentribüne]

The Free German Youth, a member of the World Federation of Democratic
Youth, hosted the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin,
1973.

Organisations such as the Federal Foundation for the Study of Communist
Dictatorship in East Germany (Berlin) and the Victims of Communism Memorial
Foundation (Washington, United States) exist not only to denigrate the
communist past and to malign communism, but also to make sure that
communist projects in the present carry the penalty of their caricatures.
To advance a left project in our time – which is imperative – is made much
more difficult if it must carry the albatross of anti-communist
fabrications on its back. That is the reason why this project, led by IF
DDR, is so important. It is not merely an argument about the DDR; it is
also, at its core, a broader argument about the possibilities opened by
experiments to create a socialist society and the material improvements
they create, and have created, in the lives of the people.

Socialism does not emerge fully fledged nor perfectly formed. A socialist
project inherits all the limitations of the past. It takes effort and
patience to transform a country, with its rigidities and class hierarchies,
into a socialist society. The DDR lasted for a mere forty years, half the
life expectancy of the average German citizen. In its aftermath, the
adversaries of socialism exaggerated all its problems to eclipse its
achievements.

Volker Braun, an East German poet, wrote an elegy to his forgotten country
in October 1989 called *Das Eigentum* or Property.

I’m still here: my country has gone West.
PEACE FOR THE PALACES AND WAR ON THE SHACKS.
I myself have given my country the boot.

What little virtue it possessed burns in the fire.
Winter is followed by a summer of desire.

I might as well get lost, who cares what’s next
And no one will ever again decipher my texts.

What I never possessed, from me was taken.
I will eternally long for what I didn’t partake in.

Hope appeared on the path like a trap
You grope and grab at the property I had.

When will I say mine again and mean we and ours.

Our quest here is not to reverse direction and exaggerate all the
achievements while hiding the problems. The past is a resource to
understand the complexities of social development so that lessons can be
learnt about what went wrong and what went right. The IF DDR project, in
collaboration with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, is
invested in this kind of archaeology to dig amongst the bones to discover
how to improve the way we humans stretch our spines and stand upright with
dignity.

Warmly,

Vijay

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