The GDR and the lie of the peace state – Middle East column

Two years before everything changed, I bought a Simson 51 electronic. A moped, as it was called in the new-fangled style, with 3.7 hp, produced in Suhl. The “electronic” meant that there was a tachometer attached to the handlebars. The machine was green, “billiard green”, as it said on the instruction leaflet.

The S51 cost all my money, from the baptism to the youth consecration to the holiday work. But it was worth it. I could use it to drive to the forest pool in the neighboring village, to school in the nearby town or to the disco in the festival hall.

I was 15 and finally free!

Well, not quite. I lived in the German Democratic Republic, where so-called democracy consisted of the people’s representatives, elected via unity lists, approving decisions made by the state party, the SED.

The GDR was a dictatorship. This fact is not relativized by the fact that it did not propagate mass-murderous racism or fantasies of world conquest, but rather social equality and, of course, world peace.

GDR was a dictatorship

Admittedly, I had to come to this realization after 1989. But the evidence is clear. There was no rule of law, at least not for those who did not accept the SED’s dictates. There were no free elections, no free press, no separation of powers and no possibility of leaving the country of one’s own accord. Anyone who did not obey was spied on or imprisoned. And anyone who crossed the border in the wrong direction had to expect to be shot.

Okay, as far as I’m concerned, the GDR was, as Günter Grass said, a “comfortable dictatorship”. But that only applied to those who went along with it. And I went along with it in a Günter Grass-like way.

I, the free hero

Young Pioneer, Thälmann Pioneer, FDJ, the whole program. Towards the end I became a bit rebellious, but only in the wake of my braver parents. I attended a few peace services and, together with a friend, hung up the New Forum’s appeal in the school, even signing it.

Erich Honecker kindly resigned shortly afterwards and I was able to feel like a free hero without being punished. Yes, it does exist, the opportunism of the revolution.

If I had any remaining doubts about the nature of the GDR, they disappeared during my studies. For my master’s thesis, I worked my way through the Stasi files of the people who had dared to oppose the SED. And I read the reports of those who had done so. Who knows, perhaps only my being a minor had saved me from that.

And yet, when a restored S51 chugs past me, I take a deep breath. The smell of the petrol-oil mixture triggers a painfully sentimental feeling in me.

Memory is just one of those things. Our brains select, forget and distort until a very subjective view of things has been imprinted on our minds, which we then allow to be confirmed by the subjective views of others, be it in books, political parties or the algorithms of social media bubbles.

This can lead to the perspective that the GDR was something like a tyrannical father who, as a good dad, would buy you a soft ice cream if you behaved well. Then even a dictatorship becomes a homely place.

There was no Milka there, but there were crispy flakes. And there was no hotel in Mallorca, but there was the campsite in Prerow. And: didn’t our society of scarcity teach us to be modest? I, for one, was at least as happy about a BASF cassette (90 minutes, chromium dioxide) from the Intershop as my children are today about their third iPhone.

We had more hair and less weight

And weren’t we allowed to be proud of our state back then? We were poor, yes, but we were the anti-fascist vanguard of history. And thanks to our excellent VEB Jenapharm, we were not ranked anywhere else at the Olympic Games, but way ahead of this imaginary Federal Republic of Germany.

Especially since we were so much younger back then. We looked better, had more hair and less weight and even believed in something, even if it was socialism.

This is now being exploited. It is so easy to deceive yourself. And be deceived.

A little peace

Especially on the Internet, propaganda about Putinism and pandemic trauma mix with carefully curated memories of prefabricated buildings, pioneer camps and plastic products to create the unmistakable feeling that if the GDR was a dictatorship, then the current FRG is one too – and a worse one at that.

According to this logic, the completely militarized GDR is now retrospectively becoming a peace state. After all, Erich talked about disarmament at least as often as Vladimir, the dove of peace from Moscow, does now. And if the tanks of the peace-loving Soviet army appeared somewhere back then, in Prague or Kabul, then the Anglo-American imperialists were solely to blame. Just like in Ukraine today.

Well, I don’t want to deny the existence of the Anglo-American imperialists and their numerous wars, but I just want to tell you about a birthday party I recently went to. It was in an old summer camp in the woods, and when I got there I was shivering, even though it was very warm.

I had only been there once, and it was a long time ago. In the barracks that still smelled of East German linoleum, I had completed my military camp in the ninth grade. Three weeks of drill and red-light exposure, in other words Marxism-Leninism for complete idiots.

We took the rifles apart and put them back together again in unison. We shot with the AK47 in the shooting range until our ears were ringing. We ran up the mountain until we were sick, and I mean that literally, with gas bottles and full gear. A cadet showed us how to kill a person without a weapon: just press in the larynx with both thumbs and that’s it.

But hey, shortly after that I got my S51. It wasn’t all bad.