TooLateandTooLittle:EastGermanDemocraticSocialism

TooLateandTooLittle:EastGermanDemocraticSocialism

byWolfSchfer

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Source: PRAXISInternational(PRAXISInternational),issue:1/1991,pages:712,onwww.ceeol.com.

Praxis International

VOICES FROM A BYGONE LAND: EAST GERMAN PERSPECTIVES BEFORE GERMAN UNITY

TOO LATE AND TOO LITTLE: EAST GERMAN DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

Wolf Schfer False consciousness is a privilege of all humans. Even East German MarxistLeninist intellectuals have not been immune to it. Gorbachevs ominous remark in East Berlin shortly before the non-violent revolution of 1989 Wer zu spt kommt, den bestraft das Leben (Life punishes the one who comes too late) made possible the overthrow of Honeckers government of old-timers. The East German workers and farmers, daily referred to but never attended to, promptly liberated themselves and embraced without hesitation West German Capitalism and (Christian) Democracy. The Left in both Germanies has had ambivalent and disparate feelings about the rush toward German national unity led by Chancellor Kohl, and, consequently, has lost all crucial elections decisively. The high speed toward German unification was fueled by the fear that the window of historical opportunity, which Gorbachev had pushed open, might soon close again. Grab German unity, dont look at the bill and run! was the conservative and, as it happens, correct and costly understanding of the situation. Gorbachevs elbowroom is much smaller today, especially since it has become clear that rapid decolonization of the Soviet empire is all that Gorbachevs Perestroika can accomplish for sure. Life did not only punish the upper class of party politicians, but also the East German intellectuals. The political Nomenklatura, which had consistently blocked democratic reforms, fully deserved this rare German revolution from below. It had to relinquish power and leave Wandlitz, its top secret suburbian ghetto-paradise in East Berlin. But even the comparatively less powerful, yet privileged, class of academics, mainly professors and writers, who played a catalytic role in most of the other European revolutions of 1989, came too late in East Germany and is losing its jobs now. This severe punishment which causes a lot of social hardship is not completely unjustified, however. Most East German philosophers, for example, had been members of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) since the late 60s.1 They taught Marxs party line from 1845 that philosophy should not only interpret but change the world. But the world of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the first advanced socialist society on German soil, rooted in the antifascist-democratic tradition of German communism, was not really up for change, not even for interpretation. Too many philosophers, historians and other workers in ideology-sensitive fields helped to paint the GDR as a
Praxis International 11:1 April 1991 0260-8448

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progressive society, capable in principle . . . of solving all problems affecting society as a whole, even the most difficult ones, some either today or in the near future, others in the longer term.2 The unswerving East German intelligentsia perfected the great German society of workers and farmers in principle. In reality the GDR was a rather backward, unhealthy and depressing place. But only false consciousness could say so. In 1985 I was invited to give a talk at the University of Halle. In the discussion I mentioned the progressive role of the new social movements (ecologist and feminist) in western society and remarked at one point that one could actually smell the need for an East German ecology movement hic et nunc (the air pollution in the Halle region was incredible). This was false consciousness on my part a sensory illusion to be expected from a West German intellectual, but not permissible for an East German Marxist, as I was told afterwards by an East German friend. The general situation of East German intellectuals was unique. As in all authoritarian societies the margin of allowable error was narrow. Either you walked the fine line of political correctness or you fell. The fall could be soft and pedagogical (a position at a provincial university, no travel to the west) or hard and uncompromising (no career, no appropriate job). That was the usual range of threats. What was unique in this case, however, was that you could be sent to the West German paradise with a one-way ticket. This became a regular feature of the two Germanies from 1976 onwards when Wolf Biermann, the popular poet and folksinger, was sent over to his West German friends and not allowed to come back. He became a West German citizen, said the common man on the street to the proverbial housewife, there is no language problem; there is milk and honey, freedom and prosperity; you cant call that exile. Many shared Biermanns fate and a substantial part of the critical spirit of East Germany was thus drained away and neutralized. In Poland and Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the seeds of an alternative civil society grew among Solidarity members and the Charter 77 group. There was no second Poland or Czechoslovakia to ship unruly citizens to. East Germany used West Germany as the alternative society of all evil, but that backfired in two ways. First, when the moment of truth came, there was not enough critical human potential left, uncompromised and able to build a truly alternative East German society. In fact, when the wall came down East Germany acknowledged West Germany as the only alternative for all its citizens. Second, the daily lies of East German journalism had made a cynical hermeneuticist out of every GDR citizen. The population had learned to call good what the state propagandists had called bad and vice versa. So, West Germany enjoyed a fantastically high reputation, surely much higher than it deserved. The East German intellectual was also very German. As a true German thinker he or she was capable of perfecting life theoretically;3 and as a genuine product of a strong state he or she had learned to believe that the best chance to improve the social and political system of the GDR was from within the corridors of communist party power. Thus the East German system did

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not only attract those who entered the boat and left the ship whenever it seemed opportune, but also many serious people, people with character, young and not so young Germans formed in the good old Prussian tradition of putting secondary virtues like obedience, orderliness and frugality first. Professors, writers, journalists faithfully served the cause of German socialism as state servants in a profoundly uncivil society.4 The revolution of 1989 made them see many things much more clearly and critically. They began to address problems in public which had been silenced for decades. But it was too little and too late. Questions about world-historical determinism and scientific-technological progress; doubts about the successful transition from capitalism to socialism and the continuing external deformation of socialism by the capitalist world economy; reflections about democratic socialism and the (mis)leading role of the one and only party these and many other important issues which should have been aired ten, fifteen years ago, burst into the open; but by 1989 they no longer made any difference. Between the Fall of 1989 and Fall 1990 (precisely between November 9/10, 1989, the night the Berlin Wall came down, and December 2, 1990, the first general German election after unity) left intellectuals in both Germanies harbored still the hope of victory. West German Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Communists of the old-line SED - now renamed PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) - nevertheless tried to outdo each other on the party level. East German intellectuals quickly explored all kinds of third ways between state socialism and advanced capitalism, i.e. a socialist alternative to West Germany. Progressive West Germans, on the other hand, toyed with the idea of a brand-new, jointly and publicly discussed, constitution for the united Germany (instead of a mere East German accession to the territory covered by the West German Basic Law).5 These hopes sprang up and withered away in one year. National unity was achieved by a formal East German declaration of accession on October 3, 1990, soon thereafter the Social Democrats received their worst election results in thirty years; the Greens and the PDS almost disappeared, and any mandate for new experiments with socialism was soundly rejected. East Germany has become history now. Its protective isolation has been broken open. The East German life-world with its own language, culture, behavior etc. is rapidly decomposing. Things that made sense yesterday make less sense today and will be forgotten tomorrow. A world has come to an end. A concrete Wittgensteinian life-form which had allowed intellectuals to actively create and develop an appropriate language game has all of a sudden collapsed. The small world of the GDR has ceased to resonate on the wavelength of its native brain-workers. An elaborate system of reference has vanished, the game is over and those who are left behind begin to think, speak and write in a void - until they realize that they had better reorient their thinking and adapt their language to the new environment. As in 1945, many turned around in 1989 and began to play the dominant language game; they became known as Wendehlse (turncoats; literally turning necks). The rest of the East German Left still mourns the loss of

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the GDR (not as it was but as it might have been) and wonders how to make sense of life in the context of the victorious Federal Republic of Germany, known among its detractors as the bank with a flag. Some of these East German left intellectuals have started to scratch their heads and ask questions about the past, the history of Stalinism, Leninism and Marxism. They are not shaving their hairy socialist skin, but they want to understand what went wrong with Marxian philosophy when it became an official ism, and with the wonderful project of socialism when it was made into a government plan. The specter of socialism has been driven out almost everywhere but in Germany. Germany is still haunted by socialism in principle. Some German idealists agree with Daniel Bell and say: Socialism, in the classic sense, has not failed, for it was never tried.6 A few realists, however, find it more appropriate to assess the socialism that had been tried and did fail. They are bound to come up with interesting studies. Recent German history in general is destined to become a hot topic. Each of the two Germanies had been struggling with its own unmasterable past,7 be it Nazism or Stalinism; both Germanies designed a new national identity; each country was involved in the politics of memory; both parts of Germany had tried to undermine the other and, at the same time, forged a working relationship with the other amidst the world-historical conflict of the Cold War all this, a stark beginning in 1945 and a stunning conclusion in 1990, the opening of archives, different interests and common roots should certainly benefit the craft of German historiography, nationally and internationally. The flip side for the Germans, however, is the provincialism which comes with such a heavy dose of self-centered introspection. In the 1840s the European restoration forced Marx and Engels to enjoy the world perspective of imperial(ist) Britain. Today nobody is forced to think big or breathe cosmopolitan air. The disenchanted Marxist can settle down in Krhwinkel, his German Gotham, and ignore the issues of the wider world. This would be unfortunate because Marxian thought was not meant to be local knowledge. The demise of really existing socialism, as we used to call it ironically, demonstrates beyond doubt that most people prefer the constitutional freedom of the individual in the West and, also, the better conditions of life in Munich as compared to Dresden, for instance. However, elementary logic forbids us to think that because A was wrong, therefore, B must be right. Capitalism is not proven right because Communism was wrong. The western way is not perfect and has serious problems on a worldwide scale. That may be a trivial truth. But not so trivial is what I would prescribe to all of us everywhere: to advance the project of a universal civilization (Naipaul) which must be ecologically viable on the one hand and composed of an increasing number of civil societies on the other. The following four articles and one letter are a small sample of the East German discussion which began after the shock of 1989. In view of the concentration of competence and talent in the SED/PDS, Praxis International has chosen to document the discourse of people who had been close to the Apparat, but also to various programs of reform-communism and western critical thought.

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The articles of Reinhard Mocek (From Patriarchal Socialism to Socialist Democracy) and Michael Brie (The General Crisis of Administrative Centralized Socialism) have been taken from the first issue of the journal Initial which had been published under the title Sowjetwissenschaft (Soviet Social Science) until 1989; it changed its name in 1990. The essay by Lutz Marz (Illusions and Visions) appeared last year in the Kommune, a West German forum for left-leaning alternative thought. Hans-Peter Krgers article (Radical Democratization) is based on a talk he gave in February 1990 at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt; it was published in a Suhrkamp volume, edited by Rainer Deppe, Helmut Dubiel and Ulrich Rdel (Demokratischer Umbruch in Osteuropa, Frankfurt 1991). Horst Poldracks letter from Leipzig details the current sweeping out of Leftism in former East German universities a very testing experience for him and countless other academics. Hans-Peter Krger sympathizes with Habermas theory of communicative action and tries to overcome the concept of class struggle with discursive solutions for social conflicts. Lutz Marz approaches the problem of socialism with Ernst Bloch (who was rehabilitated in the GDR, together with Robert Havemann, in November 1989). Michael Brie and Reinhard Mocek are scouts of the third way; they try to avoid the pitfalls of both undemocratic communism and modern capitalism, in order to save a socialist GDR. In fact, all these authors wrestle, in one way or another, with the historical dilemma of the GDR, which was finally ready to sincerely answer demands for reform but not really capable of handling too much of it (since the only identity and raison detre of the GDR vis-a-vis West Germany was to be a socialist state on German territory or not to be).

NOTES
1. Cf. H.-P. Krger, Rckblick auf die DDR-Philosophie. Ost-Berlin in den 70er and 80er Jahren in: Frankfurter Rundschau, February 23, 1991. See also N. Kapferer, Das Feindbild der marxistisch-leninistischen Philosophie in der DDR, 1945-1988 (Darmstadt, 1990). 2. Heinz Heitzer, GDR: an historical outline (Dresden, 1981), p. 248. 3. Wolfgang Engler, a young East German philosopher (b. 1952) who left the SED in 1989, writes in Auf dem Weg zu einer Gesellschaft der Individuen? (Toward a society of individuals?), Weimarer Beitrge, vol. 36, 1990, No. 7, p. 1061 (my translation): It was emotionally satisfying to know that one was living in a society which offered principled solutions (Prinziplsungen) for the elementary antagonisms of capitalism, especially with regard to political power and economic property relations. Whatever the practical status of these solutions: the ideals of the real socialist democracy, the factual socialization, were preserved as unimpeachable and floated like radiant suns over the swamps of our daily political and economic life. There were always humans who defended the idealized principles against their miserable implementation. 4. Cf. Heitzer, op. cit., p. 116: In confrontation with reactionary theories and unscientific views, Marxism-Leninism gained supremacy in many disciplines [in the late 1950s], notably in the social sciences. Increasingly, members of the new intelligentsia that had emerged from the working class assumed positions of responsibility. At the same time, a growing number of intellectuals with a bourgeois background, most of them eminent specialists, shed lingering doubts and reservations and committed themselves to the building

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of socialism in what was a very complicated process. A contributing factor was the many clarifying talks which members of the SED Central Committees Politbureau conducted with the intelligentsia. 5. The controversy focused on two options provided by the West German Basic Law, articles 23 and 146. The path to unity based on article 23 offered unification by accession not requiring major constitutional changes because East Germany would simply adapt the existing Basic Law of West Germany, a kind of political capitulation indeed, whereas the other path, provided by article 146, offered unification as a consequence of a new political order emerging from a substantial act of self determination and constitution-building in both Germanies. A combination of both articles was also suggested, that is, accession followed by a constitutional referendum. 6. On the fate of communism, in: Dissent, Spring 1990, p. 188. 7. Cf. Charles S. Maier, The unmasterable past: history, holocaust, and German national identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).

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