Reinventing Politics
Page 24
To counter the proliferation of reformist-democratic ideas, the regime intensified its commitment to an utterly conservative vision of socialism. When Gorbachev came to power and launched his de-Stalinization campaign, the GDR leaders did not conceal their displeasure with what they perceived as a dangerous “adventurist” course. Ironically, for a country where almost 400,000 Soviet troops were stationed, the government banned certain Soviet publications that were outspokenly advocating the reformation of socialism. Relations between the Soviet and East German leaders grew increasingly sour and tense, especially after the Soviets made clear their intention to renounce the class approach in international relations. The Yakovlev-Shevardnadze doctrine of the preeminence of universal values like peace and human rights in international relations was particularly resented by the seasoned Stalinists within the East German Politburo. For example, speaking at a festive event to mark the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) in December 1988, Erich Honecker turned down suggestions to modify SED policies in accordance with the winds of change then blowing from Moscow:
[W]e have no reason to copy the practice of this or that fraternal country, apart from the fact that this would be a gross contradiction of the fundamental teachings of Marxism. Peace … is served by our foreign policy, it is served by our military policy, it is served by the education of the younger generation, and it is served by the all-round strengthening of our socialist fatherland.18
In its efforts to insert itself into national life, the regime desperately tried to emphasize the East German national identity. First, it tried to gain popular prestige through the incorporation into the official ideology of certain symbols and ideas associated with important moments in the history of the German nation. Second, it insisted that the GDR represented a major pillar of the world communist system and insisted on the paramount significance of “socialist internationalism.” That second argument tended to lose its significance after 1987, when Honecker and his associates looked increasingly askance at Gorbachev’s new policies.
For a long time the SED managed to eradicate the shoots of political dissent, but, especially after 1980, it was confronted with growing autonomous, grassroots collective efforts to oppose its militaristic course. Initially apolitical, the East German independent peace movement—definitely the largest and most articulate in what used to be the Soviet bloc—realized that the totalitarian state would not enter into dialogue with the alternative forces. The new groups found a source of support and encouragement among members of the Evangelical Church. Because of its special, suprapolitical status, the church was able to provide the emerging independent movement with a powerful protective shield. Although the relations between church officials and the representatives of the independent and human rights groups were not always smooth, the religious institutions turned out to be a significant ally for the persecuted activists.
The new groups tried to channel the energies of those who believed in the reformability of the GDR. That was precisely the reason for their failure to attract more people among those who simply regarded the system as alien, unnatural, and inherently illegitimate. Later on, the commitment to the existence of an East Geman state would become the principal liability of the anti-authoritarian groups that headed the strugle against the Honecker regime in the fall of 1989. They seemed impervious to messages from below, to the voices of the younger generation, which found the whole ideological edifice of East German socialism a blatant lie. The poet and songwriter Sascha Anderson emigrated to the Federal Republic in August 1986. Born in 1953 into an intellectual family, he was typical of a generation that refused to consider the GDR a “motherland.” Anderson did not nourish any lyrical illusions about the humanist virtues of communism. In that respect, his views differed radically from those held by idealist Marxists like the late physics professor Robert Havemann, a former anti-Nazi resistance fighter who had become increasingly disappointed with the bureaucratic despotism practiced by the SED or even with those spelled out by the nonconformist balladeer Wolf Biermann, who had been expelled by the regime in the late 1970s. Anderson belonged to a deradicalized and totally disenchanted generation of critics. For them, the regime was just a fraud, an opportunity for political scoundrels to take advantage and exert unlimited power over their humiliated subjects. For Anderson and his peers, trying to improve the system looked like a sheer waste of time, or even an aberration. Their attitude was therefore bluntly and unequivocally system-rejective: “I have never taken an interest in the system …. I never had an interest in undermining the system from inside. I did not even want to set myself in accordance with the demands of the system.”19
Most of the dissidents, however, questioned not the existing social order but rather the “distortion” of Marxist principles in the SED’s behavior. In that respect the East German opposition was definitely lagging behind similar movements in Poland and Hungary, which had long since abandoned the revisionist hopes of intrasystemic change. The case of Havemann was emblematic. A resolute opponent of police dictatorship, he was convinced that Marxist criticism could decisively affect the politics of the totalitarian system. For Havemann and his supporters in the fledgling democratic opposition, the solution was to reassert the humanist potential of socialism. He identified imagining a communist Utopia based on real equality between citizens as a major task of our times: “There must be no privileged people, classes, or groups of any description, but everybody, every person must have exactly the same opportunities, the same chances, and must be equal with regard to each other.”20 The regime reacted in a draconian way to the humanist challenge championed by intellectuals like Havemann. Dissident authors were harassed, prevented from publishing their books, kept under permanent police surveillance, and often forced to emigrate.
In those circumstances, a new opposition strategy had to be devised to take advantage of those areas not entirely permeated with the dominant ideas and values. A reconstruction of the critical discourse was required, and also a rethinking of the possibilities for autonomous social movements in a strongly authoritarian context. The only solution for those who wished to do something inside the GDR appeared to be to go beyond the merely intellectual opposition, altruistic and heroic but fatally marginal and isolated as it was, and address urgent public issues in accordance with public aspirations, expectations, and needs. In the view of East German critical intellectuals, vital issues included the state’s manipulation of the notion of peace and its blatant indifference to environmental degradation. In January 1982 Robert Havemann endorsed the “Berlin Appeal,” a document that marked the birth of the unofficial East German peace movement. The statement, whose main author was Reiner Eppelmann, an East Berlin Lutheran minister involved in youth work, was eventually signed by more than two thousand people.21 The main objective of the “Berlin Appeal” was to challenge the regime’s militaristic propaganda. A slogan frequently reproduced on official East German posters read: “The stronger the socialism, the more secure the peace.” To this, the signatories of the “Berlin Appeal” replied: “We propose holding a great debate on the questions of peace, in an atmosphere of tolerance and recognition of the right of free speech, and to permit and encourage every spontaneous public expression of the desire for peace.” The authors suggested a broad range of topics to be discussed in such a dialogue. Denying the moral validity of the militaristic course, they asked:
(a) Oughtn’t we to stop producing, selling, and importing so-called war toys?
(b) Oughtn’t we to introduce peace studies in our schools in place of military instruction?
(c) Oughtn’t we to allow social work for peace instead of the present alternative service for conscientious objectors?
(d) Oughtn’t we to stop all public displays of military might and instead use our ceremonies of state to give expression to the nation’s desire for peace?
(e) Oughtn’t we to stop the so-called civil-defense exercises? As no worthwhile civil defense is
possible in nuclear war, these exercises merely make nuclear war seem more serious. Does it not perhaps amount to a kind of psychological preparation for war?22
Apparently the GDR was a state immune to profound challenges from below: The morale of the population was not very high, to be sure, but there was more dissatisfaction among the students and intellectuals than among the workers. The latter were not inclined toward labor unrest and preferred to accept the government’s offer of better living standards in exchange for social peace. On the other hand, as events were to show during 1989 and 1990, there was very little knowledge among GDR citizens of the extent of corruption among the ruling elite. Whatever people may have thought about such leaders as the party General Secretary Erich Honecker, the trade union chief Harry Tisch, and the security police boss Erich Mielke, no one would have suspected that the Spartan-looking, austerity-preaching East German communists, many of whom were survivors of Hitler’s jails and concentration camps, did not differ in their taste for luxury cars, sumptuous hunting lodges, and swimming pools from the Soviet leadership under Brezhnev. In the early 1980s those who dared to criticize the SED for its lack of concern for the real citizens were few and quite isolated. Had it not been for church support, they could have been more easily disbanded, and the movement could have been thwarted. The church’s support, however, was motivated by the widespread conviction that unless a social movement from below emerged to express the concerns and expectations of large strata of the population, there would be spontaneous eruptions of violence and rage. The church and the peace movement shared worries about the brutal interference of the state in private affairs. For young East German pacifists, the idea of turning “Swords into Plowshares” (Schwerter zu Pflugscharen) was more than a prophetic metaphor. It was the symbol of their decision to rebel against militarism, censorship, ideological manipulation, and police repression. It was the only way to resist the system’s attempt to integrate and deflect any form of idealistic behavior. The independent peace movement in the GDR was first and foremost an effect of the all-pervading moral crisis that affected large strata of East German youth, who were looking for stable values and were acutely dissatisfied with the government’s revolutionary demagogy.
The political changes in the Soviet Union and other East European countries after Gorbachev’s coming to power in 1985 further radicalized the independent peace and human rights activists in the GDR. Instead of deterring the pacifists, the official repression convinced them that a broader agenda was needed. Early in 1985 they decided to address the relation between peace and human rights in a systematic way. A group of leading activists, including such veterans of the unofficial peace movements as Reiner Eppelmann, Ralf Hirsch, and Wolfgang Templin, launched a human rights initiative. More than three hundred people signed a letter addressed to Honecker calling for the full implementation of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The letter called for the demilitarization of public life and the creation of an alternative civil service for conscientious objectors. It also condemned travel restrictions and demanded freedom of expression and the abolition of censorship. The government preferred to feign ignorance of the memorandum. In July 1985 a new appeal sent to the official youth organization declared a leading objective of the independent peace movement to be the revival of the civil society. Peaceful assembly and the founding of initiatives, organizations, associations, clubs and political parties, it stated, should not be dependent on political parties. The unrestricted work of independent groups would protect society from “petrifying in an inflexible administrative order that inhibits creativity among its citizens.”23 In this formulation, one recognizes the philosophy of the new evolutionism that inspired the struggles of the Polish opposition and became the common ideology of the democratic activists in East-Central Europe. At the same time, insistence on the organic relationship between peace and human rights was also part of the moral and intellectual treasury of the antitotalitarian movements that had developed in other Soviet-bloc countries. In this regard, mention should be made of Vaclav Havel’s celebrated essay “An Anatomy of Reticence,” written in April 1985. The Czech dissident discussed the principal disagreements between East European human rights activists and the representatives of the anti-nuclear movements in Western Europe and the United States. According to Havel, the cause of the arms race and wars was not the existence of weapons but their use for expansionist purposes. East Europeans do not deal with peace and human rights as two distinct, separate issues. They know from their own experience that governments that disparage the rights of their citizens cannot be trusted when it comes to their international commitments:
Without free, self-respecting, and autonomous citizens there can be no free and independent nations. Without internal peace, that is peace among citizens and between the citizens and the state, there can be no guarantee of external peace: a state that ignores the will and the rights of its citizens can offer no guarantee that it will respect the will and the rights of other peoples, nations, and states. A state that refuses its citizens their right to public supervision of the exercise of power will not be susceptible to international supervision. A state that denies its citizens their basic rights becomes a danger to its neighbors as well: internal arbitrary rule will be reflected in arbitrary external relations …. Unreliability in some areas arouses justifiable fear of unreliability in everything. A state that does not hesitate to lie to its own people will not hesitate to lie to other states. All of this leads to the conclusion that respect for human rights is the fundamental condition and the sole, genuine guarantee of true peace. Suppressing the natural rights of citizens and peoples does not secure peace—quite the contrary, it endangers it.24
Havel’s views were actually a response to muted criticism and misunderstanding prevailing among Western pacifists about the skeptical attitudes of dissidents regarding international antiwar campaigns.
The new philosophy of the inseparability of peace and human rights had a strong impact on the Western antinuclear groups, which became increasingly involved in activities to support the cause of antitotalitarian movements in the Soviet bloc. Havel was right to state:
It has become evident that reflection on the bitter daily experience of the citizen in a totalitarian state always leads quite logically to the same point—a new appreciation of the importance of human rights, human dignity and civic freedom. This is the focus of my remarks, and the focus, with good reason, of all reflections about peace as well. It may be that this understanding of the fundamental preconditions of peace, purchased at a high price and marked by a new vehemence, is the most important contribution that independently thinking people in our part of the world can make to our common awareness today.25
The inextricable connection between peace and human rights became a leitmotif in the appeals of the mounting East German independent peace movement. It became obvious that its most articulate spokespersons had realized the need to transcend the self-limited peace agenda and to tackle the issue of political change. That did not mean the East German pacifists had abandoned their original project, but rather that internal peace could not be attained without a genuine dialogue between the rulers and the citizens of different political persuasions. Political freedoms, particularly the right to free expression and association, had to be legally guaranteed. Emboldened by the changes in the Soviet Union and the new margins of political activism created by the policy of glasnost, East German oppositionists decided to join other East European dissidents and in October 1986 signed a “Joint Declaration from Eastern Europe” commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution. The document, signed by 123 activists from four Soviet-bloc countries—Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, and Poland—proclaimed the traditions and experiences of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 to be the common heritage and inspiration for their present efforts: “We proclaim our common determination to struggle for political democracy in our countries, for their independence, for pluralism foun
ded on the principles of self-government, for the peaceful unification of a united Europe and for its democratic integration, as well as for the rights of minorities.”26
The tremendous significance of the joint declaration—a watershed in the development of dissident cross-frontier cooperation—was not missed by the East German authorities. They resorted to threats and abuse against the signatories from their country. The official propagandists clung to the description of the Hungarian Revolution as a “fascist rebellion.” But instead of declining, the pacifist and human rights activism continued to gather momentum. In November 1987 the government organized a police raid on the Church of Zion in East Berlin, where Grenzfall (borderline), a bulletin of the unofficial peace and human rights movement, was produced. In January 1988 new reprisals were organized against those who were calling for immediate reforms. Some of the most articulate critics, including the painter Barbel Böhley and the singer Stefan Krawczyk, were expelled, although the former was allowed to return after six months.
During the 1989 upheaval that overthrew the Honecker regime, Böhley emerged as one of the leaders of the New Forum, a political association dedicated to the defense of the civil society in East Germany. With their extremely insensitive and unimaginative treatment of reform-oriented groups, the authorities contributed to the disbandment of any potential force for the preservation of an East German state identity in case of genuine political opening. In a way, it was as if Honecker wanted to make sure that the GDR could not exist without him and his clique of pigheaded Stalinists. Prominent members of the independent peace and human rights movement acknowledged the disconcerting impact of the official assault on their nascent structures. By the end of 1988 most East Germans realized that no changes could be expected to come from the stiff and extremely conservative leadership headed by Erich Honecker. The brutal clampdown on dissent and the lack of prospects for the growth of an organic movement like Solidarity in Poland deepened the sense of political despair, especially among the youth. That explains the lack of popularity, after November 1989, of groups and parties that insisted on the preservation of a separate East German entity. One can say, however, that fragile and incipient as it was, the civil society contributed even in the GDR to the erosion of the pseudo-consensus imposed by authoritarian measures. Based on an ideological fiction, the East German state could not outlive the abandoning of naked physical terror. Once its citizens were allowed to choose between their homes in the GDR, with the minimal social protection offered by the state, and the opportunity to leave, they massively opted for the second choice. The East German pacifist and human rights groups were the outgrowth of a certain stage in the decomposition of the East German regime. They contributed to the decline of the regime’s spurious authority and became the principal mouthpiece for long-muted national and political grievances. Although they had a limited agenda, once the regime started to fall apart those groups enlarged their set of goals and eventually incorporated the calls for national reunification.