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Cold War - East Germany's History - Katja Hoyer
205 Plays1 year ago
Ep 035 – Nonfiction. In 1990, East Germany, a country born from war, ceased to exist. Katja Hoyer joins me to discuss East Germany's evolution during the Cold War & her fantastic new book, "Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany."
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Transcript
Introduction and Apology
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey everyone, this is AJ from the War Books Podcast. I wanted to make a quick note before we begin today's episode with Katja Heuer, who wrote a terrific book about East Germany. We had some technical difficulties with this show. On one hand, my audio wasn't so great. At times it's a little bit unclear, so I apologize for that.
00:00:23
Speaker
On the other hand, a little bit of our conversation got cut off at the end. So you'll notice that it ends a little bit abruptly. Apologize for this. It was just one of those days where technology is not on our side. So I hope you get a lot of value out of the conversation. Katya was such a fascinating author to talk to. And I learned so much from her book. I hope you learn a lot from our talk. And thanks so much for listening.
00:00:54
Speaker
It's
Post-WWII German Division
00:00:55
Speaker
worth pointing out that it's a direct result of the Second World War. It just wouldn't exist without that. So it's an entirely artificial construct, if you will. And the reason it came about was that Germany lost the war. And this time, in contrast to the First World War, it had completely morally bankrupted itself to a point where nobody with any position of authority who had kind of been in a political, economic position of any shape or form
00:01:24
Speaker
could stay in that position. So Germany needed to be run by others, namely by the victorious allies. And so you ended up with the big four, if you will, so the Soviet Union, the US, Britain and France, each getting a part of Germany allocated to them. And they were supposed to run that part until the Germans could be trusted again to form their own government.
00:01:58
Speaker
Hello, everyone.
Meet Katja Heuer and 'Beyond the Wall'
00:01:59
Speaker
This is A.J. Woodams, host of the War Books podcast, where I interview today's best authors writing about war related topics. Today, I am extremely excited to have on the show Katja Heuer for her new book, Beyond the Wall, A History of East Germany. Katja is the author of Blood and Iron, The Rise and Fall of the German Empire. She is a member of the Royal Historical Society, and her writing has appeared in history today.
00:02:29
Speaker
BBC History Extra and The Spectator. She was born in East Germany and now lives in the UK. Katja, how are you doing today? I'm very well, thank you very much. Yeah, and thanks again. I know we were talking before we went on. It's a little bit later, your time. I'm here in the US. You're in the UK, as I just mentioned, so I appreciate you burning the
00:02:54
Speaker
Not the midnight oil, but not just yet, but not far off. Sure, sure, sure. Well, your book, so this is a really interesting book to me. So I was born in 1992. So I've never even been alive when East Germany was around. And it's always just seemed so fascinating to me that there were two Germanys
00:03:20
Speaker
that existed side by side. And East Germany especially has always fascinated me. So I'm really glad you wrote this book and you're here to talk about it. First question I like people
Writing East Germany's Story from Within
00:03:34
Speaker
to answer when they come on the show, even though it's very clear in the subtitle of your book, but could you just talk about what is your book about in your own words?
00:03:44
Speaker
So the book is a general history of East Germany going all the way from its foundations, and actually I started a little bit before 1949 when the state was founded, all the way to the end, the fall of the Berlin Wall.
00:03:58
Speaker
1989 and then reunification of both of the German states into one state which still is today in 1990 and I wanted to do this really from the point of view of the people that lived in East Germany themselves so that was important to me but in a way that was understandable and comprehensible for people who did not live in East Germany and
00:04:23
Speaker
sort of don't really have any experiences themselves of that world that they beyond the wall, so to speak. So that's the overall approach that I took to this history of East Germany.
Witnessing History: Berlin Protests
00:04:35
Speaker
Yeah. And you write about in your book, I think you were four or five when the Berlin Wall came down. What's your, I guess, just first, like, what are your personal, what are your memories of that time period of growing up in East Germany? And again, you're a child, so it's not like you have like this
00:04:54
Speaker
informed analysis of the world, but what can you just tell us about growing up in East Germany for a short period of time? Yeah, so as you have said, I was only a small child when the Berlin Wall fell, so four years old then and then five years old when the state was dissolved a year later. And I only really have one very clear memory of that. I've got several, you know, like you've got sort of hazy childhood memories of what it was like to be in kindergarten.
00:05:21
Speaker
going on holidays and things like that. But my one clear and abiding memory, I've mentioned this in the book as well.
00:05:27
Speaker
is actually of the last day of the Republic, so to speak. So the day of the Republic was the 7th of October. It was kind of the national holiday, if you will. And because you got the day off for that, my parents, on the last one in 1989, decided to just go on a family day out, as you would, I suppose, you know, equivalent to 4th of July sort of thing.
00:05:52
Speaker
And we went to Berlin to go up on the TV tower which is probably the most famous landmark of Berlin still. Because it's really high, obviously very tall.
00:06:01
Speaker
I think it's still the tallest building in Germany today and there's a viewing platform at the top so like a rotating restaurant kind of place where you can look down over Berlin and we were up there and I sort of remember looking down and being just amazed that this miniature city sort of unfolding you know below and it all looked like little toy cars and little toy people to me
00:06:25
Speaker
and I turned around to my dad who was buying drinks and there was a restaurant and there was like a bar in the centre of the viewing platform and he just ignored me basically in all of my babblings until I looked down and spotted some police cars and I said, oh look there's police cars and suddenly he went all white in the face and turned around and looked down
00:06:46
Speaker
and realized actually these were were barrack police like military type police basically armed policemen and that all those people that I've been talking about were protesters and we were out there in the tens of thousands demonstrating against the state and against the
00:07:04
Speaker
sort of existing regime and wanting change. And there was no telling how the police and the authorities would respond to that. And at that moment, I sensed my father who never, you know, gets into a panic over anything. And as always, you know, in your child's mind, always knows everything, always knows the way forward. There's never a problem that your parents can't solve.
00:07:27
Speaker
panic at that moment. And he just grabbed me and my mother and kind of dragged us back into the lift. We went back down, went into the car and drove home. And on the way home, my parents were sort of talking very excitedly, both with excitement and with fear, really, about what's going to happen. And that was really the last sort of few days that the state's existence still had in it before it collapsed on the 9th of November when the Berlin Wall
00:07:57
Speaker
uh, was opened up and that is a very clear, abiding memory in my mind, because it is, is this kind of sense of, you know, as I say, like a mix of feeling, feelings, really excitement, but also uncertainty about what's going to happen next. So that, that sort of stuck with me and lingered with me. Yeah.
East Germany's Collapse: Family Impact
00:08:17
Speaker
And you, I think you were right too. Your dad was, uh, he was in the Air Force. Is that right? Yeah. He was an officer in the, in the Air Force. Yeah.
00:08:25
Speaker
Now, what was he, I mean, uncertainty, to be in the military at a very uncertain time seems like a very, could be a very frightening thing. Do you recall anything he said that made you think maybe he was a little scared about the direction things are going in East Germany, or was fear not really
00:08:48
Speaker
You know, was that not something that calculated into his assessment of the situation? How did your dad feel about his state collapsing?
00:08:56
Speaker
Well, I think at that particular moment, it was mostly uncertainty because his job was directly dependent on the state that it was part of, really, in terms of being part of the military means your salary is basically paid by the state and your position only exists if the state does. And so there wasn't really any indication as to where
00:09:19
Speaker
things were going whether you know there was going to be some sort of reform or whether the state would collapse entirely and if that happened what would happen to your livelihood and therefore to your to your family. Neither of my parents were particularly political so they didn't feel particularly I would say neither aggrieved nor particularly sort of overly joyful either not they weren't part of those kind of you know really
00:09:46
Speaker
iconic pictures now that we have in our minds of people climbing over the wall when it was finally over. Like most people I would say they sat and watched those events unfold at home and were mostly concerned with their own
00:10:02
Speaker
lives as to what would happen to them and to me obviously being a young child at home. My mother was also pregnant at the time with my sister so they were I think mostly kind of very existential basic concerns around you know what would happen to the family and to him in particular.
00:10:20
Speaker
but not really a sense of either relief or anger or grief or whatever in terms of the actual existence of the state. They adapted very quickly to the sort of new conditions afterwards as well. I don't remember a sense of
00:10:35
Speaker
sort of nostalgia or anything like that towards the state that they had lived in.
Unintended Division: East Germany's Formation
00:10:41
Speaker
It was mostly a question of, well, it's gone now, you just got to kind of adapt towards there. And as most people I think did, they kind of did the same thing. Well, let's dive into the history. Take us to the birth of East Germany. Immediately after the war, how did East Germany come to exist?
00:11:05
Speaker
So it's worth pointing out that it's a direct result of the Second World War. It just wouldn't exist without that. So it's an entirely artificial construct, if you will. And the reason it came about was that Germany lost the war. And this time, in contrast to the First World War, it had completely morally bankrupted itself to a point where nobody with any position of authority who had kind of been in a political, economic position of any shape or form
00:11:34
Speaker
could stay in that position. So Germany needed to be run by others, namely by the victorious allies. And so you ended up with the big four, if you will, so the Soviet Union, the US, Britain and France, each getting a part of Germany allocated to them.
00:11:53
Speaker
and they were supposed to run that part until the Germans could be trusted again to form their own government and until kind of the good Germans, so to speak, had been found. So people who were in resistance or hadn't kind of been involved with the Nazi regime until they could be found, the German people could be re-educated and democratized. And
00:12:15
Speaker
you know, sort of trusted to run their own country again without invading their neighbors. And that was kind of the logic behind that. It wasn't supposed to be a permanent split. So this was really just because, you know, it's a huge undertaking for another state's military to come into a foreign country and then run it. And especially as big as Germany was, that was massive. The logistics alone, all of these countries had exhausted themselves in the war as well. And so it was just a share of the burden really, rather than a permanent
00:12:45
Speaker
sort of split of Germany. But over the next sort of 1945 when the war ended to 1949, over those four years, the two sort of emerging systems of capitalism and communism began to sort of crystallize into what was then slowly becoming the Cold War.
00:13:06
Speaker
And each of the two sides was beginning to run Germany, their zone of Germany in their own image. And so the sort of
Stalin and East Germany: Cold War Dynamics
00:13:14
Speaker
divide between the different zones that wasn't supposed to be there at all, nevermind permanent, sort of eventually cemented into the formation of two different states in 1949, West Germany, kind of the combination of the other three zones, so of France, Britain and the US.
00:13:32
Speaker
merging their zones together and then East Germany was the Soviet zone of occupation formed as a state and people often also forget that as a result of that it's just one part of four and not one of two. We like to think in halves or in polar opposites and we think of East and West Germany as mirror images of each other.
00:13:56
Speaker
kind of, you know, one communist, one capitalist, one good, one bad, one black, one white sort of thing. And actually, you know, it's a much smaller part, it's got the smaller population, only 18 million at the time for most of its existence, only 16 million people lived there. Yeah, smaller than Western Germany. Yeah, absolutely. You just paid the numbers. Yeah.
00:14:21
Speaker
Yeah. And also in terms of its economic power, the powerhouse really that makes the German economy, the German economy, namely its industry, its steel, its coal out all in the West. And so from Stalin's point of view, he'd really sort of drawn the short straw when it came to his zone. And he was actually quite reluctant to accept that fact in the end that Germany was divided simply because the resources that he needed out of Germany to rebuild his own country
00:14:51
Speaker
I found that so fascinating that Stalin didn't actually want an East Germany. He would have preferred a unified neutral Germany, which really kind of blew my mind a little bit.
00:15:07
Speaker
Well there is a debate about that in academia. It depends how seriously you take what Stalin said both internally and externally on this. I think to me that makes sense and that's why I stuck with that debate because basically Stalin had this really odd relationship with Germany. It's really like a love-hate relationship to some extent. I mean you would imagine or you would think at that point having just fought virtually a genocidal existential war where Germany was going to
00:15:37
Speaker
in the end, virtually eradicate the entire sort of Slavic population, including the Soviet Union, at least enslave them and then eventually probably work or starve them to death. That certainly where it was going.
00:15:49
Speaker
millions of people died on the soviet side huge losses over 20 million people and you would have thought at that point that there was a really fundamental hatred there towards you know the germans and that's certainly very true on the part of the soldiers and and so the red army you see the excesses of violence with which they conduct their their sort of conquest and their defeat of germany but it isn't quite true for starlin there is that and you you also get phrases from him that
00:16:17
Speaker
you know that express that sort of hatred but on the flip side he keeps talking about Beethoven and Goethe and all the kind of you know sort of famous poets and composers and other people from Germany because he's got this really high regard of German culture or what he perceives to be German culture as well and so there's always this kind of feeling that yes the Slavic people so the Eastern European people should be part of the sphere of influence of the Soviet Union
00:16:47
Speaker
So there was for a long time a plan to sort of hold influence over Poland and Czechoslovakia and so on. But with Germany, there was always a sense that they're different people. That's part of the West. It makes no sense that they're not people that you enslave and that you keep down.
00:17:03
Speaker
And they're like somebody that you look in the eye and deal with. There's almost this kind of respect there that he doesn't hold for fellow Slavic people that should be part of the sort of Russian orbit. You still see this to some extent today with the way that Putin acts in Europe as well.
00:17:19
Speaker
There's always this kind of sense, what certainly has been in Moscow, that fellow Slavic people are kind of the sphere of influence of Moscow, whilst the West isn't. So that's a cultural
East Germans' Mixed Feelings on Soviet Rule
00:17:31
Speaker
argument, but even from an economic point of view, the North East that Stalin basically got with his own is fairly flat, very agrarian, has always kind of struggled really to follow in the sort of same developments that many other German regions have seen since the industrial
00:17:49
Speaker
era and so in terms of for him to rebuild his own country he did need things that could only come from the western zone and initially when it wasn't divided into two germanies some of that industrial output was actually sent Stalin's way and so i took that quite seriously when in 1952 he even offers again to reunify germany and says the only thing he really wants is that it isn't dangerous he doesn't want it to be the military state and as west germany under Conrad Ardenaar
00:18:18
Speaker
Forges a very very close relationship with the United States and starts rearming slowly but but definitely and then eventually becomes part of NATO. Stalin basically when that begins to become obvious Stalin panics at that point and kind of quickly offers reunification because he says maybe that's the only way around that to not have German soldiers once again you know sort of on his doorstep.
00:18:41
Speaker
He'd rather give up his part of Germany to make that happen if that was a possibility. It was never realistic and he may well have known that as well in his own sort of heart of hearts. But I do think that he would rather have seen that solution. Talk a little bit about how East Germans, how people felt that now they're living in this new country called
00:19:06
Speaker
East Germany. You write about there was, and this is I think pretty well known, there's a lot of violence that initially right after the war ended, a lot of violence perpetrated by Russian soldiers who were occupying, which left a lot of resentment. Tell us a little bit about kind of the first maybe five years of East Germany and how people felt about living in this new state.
00:19:35
Speaker
But I think that was a degree of...
00:19:39
Speaker
of resentment when it comes to the, their relationship with the Soviets really. I mean, when you think that the US was, was sending loads of money, you know, in form of martial aid, basically into West Germany, and there was a sense that they would be allowed to rebuild, um, under kind of Western guardianship and, and, you know, even rearm that relationship was completely different, uh, between the Soviet union and East Germany, where
00:20:07
Speaker
There's a really strong feeling that they're being occupied and they're being suppressed rather than, you know, sort of developing some sort of form of partnership. Even though the German communists who are now running the state have got that sort of admiration for the Soviet Union, most of the people don't. And they sense that as well, the leadership. So they, for instance, they make a huge effort
00:20:31
Speaker
to hide the fact that they have very close links to Russia. Most of them actually spent the war in the Soviet Union and went there during the 1930s to flee from the Nazis, and then spent the war in the Soviet Union really cozying up to Stalin and making themselves useful to Stalin.
00:20:50
Speaker
They come back and they try and hide that fact. That's never a known thing that doesn't get discussed. There's one member of this kind of communist group that gets sent back from the Soviet Union to set up structures in the Soviet zone of occupation in Germany whose name was Vladimir Leonhard because his mother was such a big communist that despite the fact that she was German, she called her son Vladimir in honor of Lenin.
00:21:19
Speaker
And he was actually asked to change his name to Wolfgang because, you know, it was felt that even having this kind of Russian sounding name would give people too much of an inclination as to just how close they were in terms of their own links to the Soviet Union. Many, many people, Eric Mirko, who later, who later runs the Stasi, was actually trained in Moscow as a terrorist and in sort of sabotage and things like that.
00:21:44
Speaker
and then spent part of the war in Spain during the Spanish Civil War in France and occupied France. So again, close links to the Soviet Union and that's something that people sense and there's always a degree of
00:22:00
Speaker
you know, seeing these people as traitors, where were they during the war, even if you don't see them as traitors, you still think you've just gone through something quite horrendous, you know, especially the, as you just mentioned, the occupation was particularly brutal in the conquest of the Soviet Union in the east.
00:22:18
Speaker
They experience none of this and they come back to a population that they last saw in the early 1930s before the Nazis came to power. And there's a huge gulf as a result between the leaders and their people because they haven't had that shared experience, they haven't gone through the same thing. So people quite rightly say to them, well, I was starving, I was bombed, I was raped, people were murdered.
00:22:45
Speaker
where were you during that time? And then to try for these people to try and come back basically on behalf of Soviet Russia, of the Soviet Union, and to set up communism in a country that has been heavily Nazi fired. I mean, let's not forget that a lot of people actually supported the Nazis as well. And that didn't just go away in 1945. It did for many, but certainly not for everybody. And there was that. That's something that I think is so interesting in in such a
00:23:15
Speaker
just thinking about how, how, how an occupier now runs a country that, like you just said, like overnight, it's not like people stopped believing in Nazi ideology and all of a sudden were communists or, you know, at least not Nazis. And to me that, especially people coming back in who had had fought in the war. And it seems like just like such a complicated, tragic way to live, maybe is the right way to put it.
00:23:44
Speaker
What do you know about veterans who would come back? And I don't know, how were they treated in the new East Germany? Well, it was really difficult for them because you mean German sort of war veterans? Who fought on
Challenges for Post-War Soldiers and Refugees
00:24:01
Speaker
the Nazi, you know, German soldiers who fought and then were in prison and then came back to East Germany.
00:24:07
Speaker
I mean, first of all, the problem was that a lot of them didn't come back for a long time. The Soviet Union kept those prisoners of war much longer than the Western allies, again, because it needed them and it kind of felt that that was fair game given what they did to them. And so they basically kept them often for years and years. And a huge batch, mostly kind of the last people that were released was in 1955.
00:24:33
Speaker
That's 10 years after the end of the war, so if you were captured, say, at Stalingrad in 1943, you know, that's 12 years of working in a
00:24:43
Speaker
quarry somewhere in Georgia or whatever, so that they weren't the same people anymore. Many people came back completely changed. Their wives often didn't know whether they were still alive, so many of them literally be married or founded new families because they didn't know that they were still there. And really awkward situations came about when soldiers obviously then came back.
00:25:08
Speaker
And even if that wasn't the case, these people were men were broken. I mean, the Eastern Front was a horrific place to be. And for that to come back, having lost the war, having committed the crimes that they committed collectively on the Eastern Front, there was nobody waiting for them patting them on the shoulder and saying, well, it's quite the opposite. And then on top of that, their wives had sort of learned to cope by themselves in these horrific
00:25:36
Speaker
sort of months and years after the war they'd started to you know barter on the black markets their kids had grown up incredibly far so if you know if you had a small child and then they had to sort of help out their mothers finding food and and firewood and all sorts of things you know they could cope by the end of it without
00:25:57
Speaker
the father basically coming home and then this drunken, you know, quite often really dependent on alcohol to cope with things, broken physically and mentally broken man would come home. It really did horrific harm to family structures and society on the whole. And another thing that is particular to East Germany, more so than West Germany, is that
00:26:20
Speaker
Germany lost a lot of territory in the east, particularly in areas that are now Poland, because Poland was shifted westwards, basically with its new borders, so the Soviet Union could get a large chunk of what was eastern Poland.
00:26:36
Speaker
That was compensated for by taking a chunk away from Germany and giving it to Poland so that the country was basically shifted westwards. And then the decision was made that everybody who was German in those areas needed to move out of there. And so that we're talking 12 million people. You know, as I said, as I just said, the GDI had a population of 18 million people. So 12 million people are coming out of Eastern Europe, Germans, but I'd always lived there in East Prussia and elsewhere along the Baltic coast.
00:27:05
Speaker
are sent to East Germany now come with nothing because all of their stuff had been left behind. And most of them arrive in East Germany rather than West Germany to the point where you have a quarter of the population made up of these refugees that arrive with nothing and are just kind of allocated housing and things.
00:27:23
Speaker
So you have a society that is deeply disrupted, deeply disturbed, deeply hostile and suspicious of one another, run by a small group of communists who'd not spent the last 12 years with them and are also completely detached from what was going on. So it's a really dysfunctional state to start with.
The Appeal of Socialism in Post-War East Germany
00:27:45
Speaker
Did communism ever, in the whole history of East Germany, did communism ever really take root? Did most people start identifying with that ideology? It's an interesting question because to start with, I think a lot of people did, not necessarily outright communism, but certainly a form of socialism. People sort of believed that
00:28:06
Speaker
there should be a better way of doing things. And it's, I think, quite understandable when you look at where they've just come from. They've just gone through 12 years of Nazism. Before that, they had the Great Depression, you know, after the Wall Street crash, which hit Germany as hard as it did the US. Before that, you had complete instability and economic chaos under the Weimar Republic.
00:28:29
Speaker
with hyperinflation, people will know these pictures of bank nodes being carried around in wheelbarrows and stuff. And before that, it was the First World War, which was also a huge catastrophe wiping out an entire generation and also a total war situation that completely wrecked the country to the point of people being
00:28:50
Speaker
people starving and diseases breaking out so we're talking now really two three generations of complete chaos and people were looking for common denominators they quickly arrived at the idea that is German militarism and sort of the elites doing that to the people and so to many people socialism seemed the obvious answer at that point when you have a sort of working class
00:29:13
Speaker
driven government that looks after the common man, so to speak, and the country is run by little people rather than the elites. In a deliberately and explicitly anti-fascist state, the foundation dogma of the GDR of East Germany is that it wants to be an anti-fascist state and uses this terminology very strongly.
00:29:36
Speaker
So people, not everybody of course, but many people did actually think that this might be a chance to build a better Germany that would do better than all of that stuff that is really in living memory at that point. And there are even people who move over from West Germany to East Germany in those early sort of years, you know, from sort of poets and thinkers to workers, not as many as go the other way and flee. But you do have people kind of genuinely believing in that idea to start with.
00:30:07
Speaker
Well, talking about people fleeing, I know your book is beyond the wall. But for just a minute, I'm going to ask about the wall. So could you just tell the audience the reasons for the Berlin Wall, why it went up? And then I'm curious just how people felt about the wall going up in Berlin.
Why Was the Berlin Wall Built?
00:30:29
Speaker
Yeah, so people associate the country with the Berlin Wall, and quite rightly so. I mean, it is a huge factor, the fact that you couldn't leave and was shut off from the Western world. But it was only built in 1961. So the state was founded in 1949. So that's 12 years where there wasn't a Berlin Wall. And people often forget that. That's quite a substantial chunk of the 41 years that the state existed.
00:30:56
Speaker
and during that time you could still leave legally and safely and people did in their drives so initially there's a long border of course which again people strangely forget about sometimes that there's actually the Berlin Wall is in Berlin and in Berlin only it sort of shuts off West Berlin against its communist surroundings
00:31:19
Speaker
makes it like a little capitalist island. That's what the Berlin Wall does. Whilst there is a long land border between East and West Germany as well, which is sometimes called the Green Border, because it is in, you know, fields and woods and literally in the countryside. Well,
Conclusion and Book Recommendation
00:31:35
Speaker
Katja Heuer, Beyond the Wall, a history of East Germany. Go pick up a copy. Go check it out from your library. A really fascinating story you tell here. And Katja, thanks so much for your time.