75 years of the GDR: What remains of this state to this day?

The last birthday party was 35 years ago. On a grandstand on Karl-Marx-Allee, gray men admire passing steel helmets, tanks and rocket launchers. Behind them the motto “40 Years of the GDR” is emblazoned over the hammer and compass. Plus marching music. In the front row, State Council Chairman Erich Honecker is smiling gauntly, with Kremlin President Mikhail Gorbachev next to him. It is October 7, 1989.

The celebration is canceled for the 75th. Unlike the 75th anniversary of the Federal Republic in May, the anniversary of the founding of the GDR in 1949 is more or less ignored. Instead, we remember the triumph of the peaceful revolution 35 years ago and the Day of German Unity on October 3rd. Anna Kaminsky, director of the Foundation for Coming to terms with the SED Dictatorship, thinks this is correct: “Why should one celebrate the state establishment of a dictatorship?” And yet she says it is important to remember the historical background.

“The GDR continues to have an impact”

The founding of Germany’s second post-war state sealed more than 40 years of German division – an experience that millions of people carry with them to this day. It shaped a view of the Soviet Union, Russia, the USA and NATO that often divides Germans in East and West to this day.

“Of course the GDR has an impact on how it shaped people and also with the expectations of state institutions, state action and democracy,” says Kaminsky. Looking back, many people also judge the faded SED state surprisingly mildly. From a survey of a good 3,500 East Germans, researchers at the University of Leipzig concluded in 2023 that two thirds shared a “longing for the GDR”.

Anger at the “Bonn Separate State”

A quick reminder: The GDR was founded on October 7, 1949 after the victorious powers of the Second World War fell out and the occupation zones developed apart. The introduction of the German mark in the British, French and American zones in the West in 1948 increased tensions. After the Federal Republic was founded with the promulgation of the Basic Law in May 1949, the Soviet Union felt under pressure to follow suit in its occupied zone.

In his first government statement on October 12, 1949, GDR Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl denounced this: “The separate Bonn state created by the Western powers is the completion of the division of Germany.” Because of the “imminent danger of an imperialist war,” “effective leadership” is necessary. “For this purpose, we constituted the German Democratic Republic and formed the provisional government.”

Division inevitable?

There were repeated arguments as to whether the split could have been prevented. Whether the government of the Federal Republic should have accepted offers from the Soviet Union. The historian Wolfgang Benz came to the conclusion in a detailed analysis decades ago: “The division of Germany was apparently unavoidable.”

Kaminsky sees it the same way. “It couldn’t be prevented at all,” says the Gera-born social scientist. “The Soviet Union insisted that all of Germany should exist under its conditions. So that means: no democracy, no free elections, no civil rights.” The different political systems had long since been installed in 1949. “For the East Germans, this meant four more decades of dictatorship,” says Kaminsky.

A universe of your own

The GDR became a country in which hundreds of thousands took to the streets in 1953 to demand more freedom and were brutally stopped by tanks. From which around 3.8 million people fled by 1990. That sealed itself off with a wall. And over the years, more than 600,000 people were employed by the state security service to monitor its own population. It is estimated that up to 250,000 people were temporarily imprisoned for political reasons.

But it was also a country where people started families, worked, went to school and to work, jumped into lakes, and lay in the sun on the Baltic Sea. It was the land of youth consecration and company sports groups, of multifunctional tables and prefabricated apartments, of tempo lenses and mackerel mix in cans, of Pittiplatsch and television ballet. A country with its own universe of goods, tastes and smells, rules and customs, everyday life and memories. A country that was suddenly gone.

Back to the GDR for a week

This familiar or foreign world attracts around half a million people every year to the Berlin GDR Museum, which has just republished the practical handbook “GDR Guide – Journey to a Bygone State”. Does the museum inspire Ostalgie? “Not at all,” says Stefan Wolle, the company’s scientific director. “We reject that.”

Some visitors would of course have nostalgic feelings, along the lines of: “Oh look, the cookware, our grandma had that too.” But that is not the goal. “We even have a lot of complaints that we portray the ‘beautiful GDR’ so ironically and make it so ‘bad’.”

Wolle says he can’t really take the romanticized view of the fallen state seriously. “Yes, 30 years ago or 40 years ago everything was much nicer,” says the 73-year-old historian, born in Halle an der Saale. “That’s true. I was 40 years younger and had life ahead of me.”

But anyone who longs to go back should imagine living in the GDR for another week: “That they’re standing in line at the bakery, standing in line for meat, and vegetables are no longer available for consumption anyway. You don’t get any building materials, you don’t get a car, You don’t get a telephone. Add to that the party meetings, the surveillance by the Stasi, the mandatory demonstrations and parades, the mendacity of the public media. After a week we would have revolution again.”

Demo instead of celebration

In his own words, Wolle withdrew from the celebrations on October 7, 1989, that 40th birthday with the pompous parade on Karl-Marx-Allee. “Back then, we held a demonstration on Alexanderplatz every 7th of the month as a protest against the election fraud on May 7th,” says the historian. This refers to the irregularities in the GDR local elections in 1989.

So Wolle went to protest, like thousands of people in many other places across the country. In Plauen, Saxony alone, there were 15,000. Two days later, 70,000 marched across the Leipziger Ring – a key moment of the peaceful revolution. On the 35th anniversary, this is the official reason to celebrate. On October 9th, Chancellor Olaf Scholz will speak in Leipzig.