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<font size="1"><a href="https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/17-ddr/">https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/17-ddr/</a>
</font><h1 class="gmail-reader-title">I’m Still Here, Though My Country’s Gone West: The Seventeenth Newsletter (2021)</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Vijay Prashad - April 29, 2021</div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div><div id="gmail-attachment_40116" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/3_Fackelzug_zur_Gru%CC%88ndung_der_DDR.jpg" alt="Berlin, Fackelzug zur Gründung der DDR" width="950" height="608"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-40116" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>A
mass rally with the Free German Youth that marked the founding of the
German Democratic Republic in the Soviet Occupation Zone, October 1949.</span></p></div><p>Dear friends,</p><p>Greetings from the desk of the <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/">Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research</a>.</p><p>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 <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB490/docs/1989-03-03%20Conversation%20between%20Mikhail%20Gorbachev%20and%20Miklos%20Nemeth.pdf">asked</a>
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 <a href="https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB490/docs/1989-06-15%20Gorbachev%20press-conference%20Bonn.pdf">told</a>
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 (<i>Deutsche Demokratische Republik</i> or DDR) was absorbed into a unified Germany dominated by West Germany.</p><p>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 <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/08/01/she-sells-east-germany-fires-millions-and-earns-little-love/9bddbddc-a141-44ae-8d0c-69eed08b7fd1/">told</a> the <i>Washington Post</i>,
‘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 (<i>Volkseigentum</i>) fell into private hands and millions of people lost their jobs; during this time, <a href="https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300144246/peoples-state">70%</a> of women lost their jobs. The stunning scale of the corruption and cronyism only <a href="https://www.zvab.com/9783360018083/Raubzug-Ost-Treuhand-DDR-pl%C3%BCnderte-3360018087/plp">came</a> out decades later in a German parliamentary inquiry in 2009.</p><div id="gmail-attachment_40171" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/33_LPG-Mansfeld_Solidarita%CC%88tsbekundung_mit_Vietnam.jpg" alt="LPG Mansfeld, Solidaritätsbekundung mit Vietnam" width="950" height="555"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-40171" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>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.</span></p></div><p>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 <i>stasi</i>, 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 <a href="https://www.grin.com/document/104931">1990s</a> or the <a href="https://www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de/sehnsucht-nach-der-ddr.1005.de.html?dram:article_id=158852">2000s</a> – show that large numbers of people living in the former East Germany look back longingly for the DDR past. This <i>Ostalgie</i>
(‘nostalgia’) for the East remains intact, reinforced by the greater
unemployment and lower incomes in the eastern over the western part of
Germany.</p><p>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.</p><p><a href="https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-ddr/"><img src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20210420_DDR1_SM_EN_TT.jpeg" alt="" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="0" height="0"></a></p><p>This
month, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research partnered with the
Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (IF DDR) to produce the first of a
new series, <i>Studies on the DDR</i>. The first <a href="https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-ddr/">study</a>, <i>Risen from the Ruins: The Economic History of Socialism in the German Democratic Republic</i>,
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.</p><p>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’. <i>Risen from the Ruins</i> 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.</p><div id="gmail-attachment_40204" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/48_Herder-Institut_Strasenschild_Lumumbastrase.jpg" alt="Leipzig, Straßenschild Lumumbastraße" width="950" height="1306"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-40204" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>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.</span></p></div><p>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:</p><ol><li><b>Solidarity Work. </b>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.</li><li><b>Learning and Exchange Opportunities. </b>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.</li><li><b>Political Support. </b>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.</li></ol><p>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.</p><div id="gmail-attachment_40237" class="gmail-wp-caption"><p><img src="https://thetricontinental.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/54_10._Weltfestspiel_Demonstration_Ehrentribu%CC%88ne.jpg" alt="Berlin, 10. Weltfestspiel, Demonstration, Ehrentribüne" width="950" height="596"></p><p id="gmail-caption-attachment-40237" class="gmail-wp-caption-text"><span>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.</span></p></div><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>Volker Braun, an East German poet, wrote an elegy to his forgotten country in October 1989 called <i>Das Eigentum</i> or Property.</p><p>I’m still here: my country has gone West.<br>
PEACE FOR THE PALACES AND WAR ON THE SHACKS.<br>
I myself have given my country the boot.</p><p>What little virtue it possessed burns in the fire.<br>
Winter is followed by a summer of desire.</p><p>I might as well get lost, who cares what’s next<br>
And no one will ever again decipher my texts.</p><p>What I never possessed, from me was taken.<br>
I will eternally long for what I didn’t partake in.</p><p>Hope appeared on the path like a trap<br>
You grope and grab at the property I had.</p><p>When will I say mine again and mean we and ours.</p><p>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.</p><p>Warmly,</p><p>Vijay</p>
<p><a href="https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/17-ddr/?output=pdf">Download as PDF</a></p></div></div></div>
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