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East Germany DISSENT
Dissent has taken several forms in East Germany. Each year a
number of East German dissenters attempt to leave the country,
through either emigration or escape. Beginning in the 1980s,
there also emerged an organized opposition. Under the auspices of
the Evangelical Lutheran Church, one area of group dissent
revolved around the issues of peace and the demilitarization of
East German society. A second category of dissent involved
members of the intelligentsia who were independent Marxists.
From 1945 to 1961, a relatively large number of East Germans
left the country through emigration or escape. Since the
construction of the Berlin Wall, however, the numbers departing
have been smaller. According to official statistics,
approximately 320,000 persons have left since 1961; the
unofficial estimates are much higher. According to some West
German estimates, another 400,000 to 500,000 East Germans have
applied to emigrate and await exit permits. In 1984 the East
German regime allowed over 40,000 people to emigrate, and in 1985
the figure was over 20,000. Successful escapes were few in
number. The Wall and the heavy fortifications along the entire
length of the east-west border ensured that risks were great for
those trying to escape. Nevertheless escape attempts continued.
Many of those who escaped enlisted the aid of middlemen or
organizations (known as Fluchthilfer) that have made a
profession of arranging escapes. The help of these organizations
is expensive, and many of those who took advantage of such
services were necessarily relatively prosperous by East German
standards. This group of refugees has included members of the
intelligentsia and professionals. Escape was generally effected
by way of third countries where border security was not as tight
as in East Berlin.
An organized opposition within East Germany emerged only in
the 1980s. There are several reasons why organized dissent had
failed to appear before this time. Paradoxically the existence of
West Germany hindered the persistence of active dissent. In the
past, the East German regime had simply exiled activists to West
Germany and thereby isolated them from the country. Most notable
among those expelled were the singer Wolf Biermann and the
independent Marxist thinker Rudolf Bahro. The regime had also
used repression to curb dissent. In 1986, according to West
German sources, there were 2,000 political prisoners in East
Germany. Finally, the regime had been able to co-opt the vast
majority of the country's intelligentsia through a combination of
privileges and rewards
(see The Creative Intelligentsia;
The Technical Intelligentsia
, this ch.).
The roots of the organized opposition involving the
independent peace movement go back to the early 1960s, when
considerable resistance emerged to East Germany's
remilitarization, especially in Protestant circles. In the late
1970s and 1980s, Protestant activists objected to the
introduction, in the summer of 1978, of compulsory pre-military
training for fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds. Soldiers, who had
fulfilled their military obligation through work in special
military construction units, pressured Lutheran Church leaders to
support nonviolence and disarmament. In February 1982, the term
peace movement began to be used in connection with peace
initiatives that originated outside official party or government
circles. The initiatives stemmed from a forum organized by the
Lutheran Church that challenged the official government view that
peace can be maintained only through armed strength. In the mid1980s , the independent peace movement has sought the formation of
a civilian peace service as an alternate to military service and
the demilitarization of East German society.
In the 1980s, work for peace began to be decentralized and
extended to areas outside East Germany's major urban centers. For
example, by the mid-1980s the Protestant student community in
Rostock had organized a monthly Peace Worship Service. Every six
months a "Retreat and Meditation Day" on the theme of peace took
place in the Land-church of Mecklenburg. Standing workshops for
peace were formed in numerous student communities, and peace
seminars, often attended by hundreds of people, were held in
Karl-Marx-Stadt, Meissen, Waldheim, Zittau, Kessin, and
elsewhere.
Independent Marxist opposition among the intelligentsia was
also present in the 1980s and had attained an importance in East
Germany that far exceeded its influence elsewhere in Eastern
Europe. Although the independent Marxist group was very small,
the regime nevertheless considered such dissent to be very
dangerous. This opposition had been inspired by the late Robert
Havemann, whose thought, as expressed in Fragen, Antworten,
Fragen (Questions, Answers, Questions) and
Dialektik ohne Dogma (Dialectics Without Dogma),
centered on the gap between the theory and practice of socialism.
Havemann advocated a pluralistic socialism inspired by a return
to the humanism developed in Marx's early writings. Bahro's
Die Alternative, which attacked party and government
bureaucracy and called for an organized communist opposition in
the socialist countries, had also influenced East Germany's
independent Marxists. In the 1980s, these ideas were gaining
support among East Germany's young adults, who had been trained
in Marxist-Leninist ideology throughout their years in the
country's educational system.
* * *
In the 1980s, scholars have devoted significant attention to
the study of East German society. G.E. Edwards's GDR Society
and Social Institutions deals extensively with the family,
women, youth, and the elderly. Jonathan Steele's Inside East
Germany: The State That Came in from the Cold treats living
conditions, social programs, daily life, and education. Henry
Krisch's The German Democratic Republic: The Search for
Identity contains useful information on society, as does C.
Bradley Scharf's Politics and Change in East Germany. Roy
E.H. Mellor's The Two Germanies: A Modern Geography and
Norman J.G. Pounds's Eastern Europe are two valuable works
on geography and demography. Gebhard Schweigler's National
Consciousness in a Divided Germany is an important
contribution to the study of an emerging East German national
consciousness, although a number of more recent studies disagree
with his conclusion that East Germans are developing a separate
identity. Information on the social structure is contained in the
works of Peter Christian Ludz, Thomas A. Baylis, and John M.
Starrels and Anita Mallinckrodt. The family, mass organizations,
and educational system are dealt with in the works of Arthur M.
Hanhardt, Jr., Arthur Hearndon, Margrete Siebert Klein, and Harry
G. Schaffer. Robert F. Goeckel's "The Luther Anniversary in East
Germany" covers the politics surrounding that celebration. B.V.
Flow, Matthew Boyse, and Ronald D. Asmus have written fine
articles on religion in East Germany. Dissent in East Germany has
been covered by Pedro Ramet, Michael J. Sodaro, Klaus Ehring, and
Roger Woods. Ramet's "Disaffection and Dissent in East Germany"
is an especially penetrating article. (For further information
and complete citations,
see
Bibliography.)
Data as of July 1987
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