Urban Histories of the GDR

At the end of World War II, Germany's cities lay in ruin. Bombs had reduced some fifty percent of urban buildings to rubble. In Berlin, all but 380,000 of the city's 1.5 million apartments were damaged.Footnote ¹⁴ Unsurprisingly, the battle to reclaim the urban environment began almost as soon as the war ended. Soviet occupiers soon replaced Nazi street signs with new, cardboard ones, while so-called rubble women cleared away debris. The destruction bequeathed East Germany's socialist rulers both an opportunity to reimagine the country's urban geography and an intractable housing problem that would plague the country for decades.

In the first years after the war, as socialist leaders grappled with this housing shortage, urban planning was not dominated by either socialist principles or Soviet dogma, Paul Stangl argues. His study of the rebuilding of Berlin in the late 1940s and early 1950s highlights genuine debates between planners who subscribed to modernist design and those steeped in socialist realism. Tasked by the country's leaders with solving the housing shortage, modernist planners initially focused on the concept of “residential cells” that would each house about four thousand people.Footnote ¹⁵ But these planners soon found themselves in conflict with Soviet architects, who favored the more ornate aesthetic of Stalin-era socialist realism. Ultimately, Walter Ulbricht weighed in on the side of socialist realism, accusing modernist planners of “wanting to ‘trivialize the capital of Germany’ with low-rise buildings suitable for the outskirts of cities” (199), and throwing his clout behind those who advocated mammoth new prestige projects befitting a great city.

The best-known of these projects was Stalinallee (today Karl-Marx-Allee), which ran from Alexanderplatz to Frankfurter Tor. Architects planned monumental new buildings along the boulevard. It was, above all else, a propaganda piece, meant to lure West Berliners with the (false) promise of plentiful and luxurious housing. Yet the Stalinallee project soon became a propaganda nightmare. Laborers began arguing about quotas on June 12, 1953, Stangl recounts, and by June 15 some had gone on strike, eventually sparking the June 17 revolt that rocked the young socialist state. Eventually Ulbricht would backtrack, instructing planners to focus on standardized, mass housing. Thus Stangl contends that ideological battles over housing and architecture in the early years of the GDR were just that—battles. They were not preordained to turn out the way they did, just as it was not inevitable that East Germany would suffer from chronic housing shortages all the way up to 1989. Though he focuses more on elite views than everyday experiences, Stangl opens up space to think not just about the normality of East German governance—that is, the degree to which there existed social and political norms under which competing individuals, ideologies, and organizations exercised degrees of agency—but also the contingencies inherent to its evolution.Footnote ¹⁶

Ulbricht's government never did get a handle on the housing crisis, and by the 1960s, it had come to a head. In spite of more standardized construction in the 1950s, East Germans struggled to find housing. Young couples often had to cohabit with their parents. Those lucky enough to live in their own unit frequently shared a toilet or had no hot water. When Erich Honecker came to power in 1971 promising the “unity of economic and social policy,” he made housing a central focus of his rule. In 1973, his government inaugurated a new Housing Program (Wohnungsbauprogramm) with the goal of providing every East German a new apartment by 1990. Using prefabricated construction—so-called Plattenbau—the debt-financed program erected massive new settlements on the outskirts of major cities, building two million new apartments and refurbishing another one million over the course of sixteen years. By November 1989, forty-five percent of East Germans lived in prefabricated housing and over a quarter lived in settlements of one thousand apartments or more.

Eli Rubin unearths the “bottommost” layer of everyday life in Marzahn, the largest of these “concrete utopia[s]” (4, 6). In so doing, he argues that East Germans traded material comfort for a loss of connection to the past by relocating to such neighborhoods. These new settlements were nothing like the tenements most moved from. Everything from the climate to olfactory sensations molded residents into new socialist citizens. Ultimately, Rubin sees Marzahn and similar settlements not only as a means to house East Germans, but also as “a physical manifestation” of “socialism as an iteration of a kind of modernity; an all-encompassing Enlightenment project” (114). Like Stangl, Rubin thus takes the GDR seriously as a normal state that endeavored to construct a new vision of modernity.

Moreover, Rubin does not consider the regime's struggle to resolve the housing crisis as a problem of socialism, writing “it is a highly questionable matter whether the American model is itself sustainable” (158). In fact, the protests of autumn 1989 burst forth from the decaying urban centers of East Germany's cities, revealing, Rubin suggests, that had the regime succeeded in moving a larger proportion of the population into comfortable Plattenbaus, it might have weathered the storm. The SED simply “ran out of time” to realize the lofty goals of its housing program (155).

That crumbling urban core, conversely, is the subject of Andrew Demshuk's page-turning microhistory, which forms a kind of companion piece to Rubin's study. If Marzahn serves as a vivid illustration of the “utopia and dystopia” of real existing socialism (Rubin, 129), Demshuk offers an account of both the challenges and the opportunities of urban decay. Unearthing local planning initiatives in Leipzig, Demshuk's object of study is the Bowlingtreff, a luxurious bowling establishment that the city built in the 1980s, largely without the approval or help of the central government. An example of what Demshuk terms “urban ingenuity” (4) the Bowlingtreff depended on genuine local enthusiasm and even a sort of grassroots democracy that challenged state power in the waning years of the GDR.

At the same time, the story of the bowling alley is not that, Demshuk sassily writes, of “a halcyon ‘people's state’” (4). Leipzigers did not believe they had achieved the promise of socialism in building it (or other so-called Schwartzbauten). Rather, they thought the establishment, which was incidentally far better appointed than most capitalist bowling alleys, to be “a taste of the Imaginary West they hungered for each day” (138). So alluring was this “Imaginary West” that several of the alley's employees—who had been vetted for loyalty—fled the country. These flights, which Demshuk discovered in local Stasi files, reveal that the Bowlingtreff had not sated Leipzigers’ dissatisfaction with socialism. Such urban unhappiness, Demshuk (like Rubin) argues, helped spark the unrest of 1989. When the government slated the historic town of Görlitz for demolition in 1989, for instance, it led to a panic around the country. Likewise, though, Demshuk does not understand these problems to be uniquely socialist in nature. Concluding in post-Wende Leipzig, Demshuk notes how capitalism “stole some of Leipzig residents’ fire about saving their built environment” (175). Today, the Bowlingtreff stands empty, a shell of its former self.

These three works reveal the extent to which struggles over housing and urban space in the GDR were both highly contingent and not so terribly different from similar struggles playing out in other parts of the world, including the capitalist West. Indeed, the East German housing crisis rhymes all too well with the one roiling capitalist cities today. Stangl, Rubin, and Demshuk use the East German past to hold up an mirror to our own society, revealing the possibilities of individual initiative and utopian planning alike, while also serving as a cautionary tale about the failures of both state socialism and liberal capitalism to solve this most intractable of problems.

Transnational East Germany

Although the SED never resolved East Germany's housing problem—among other perpetual crises that defined its rule—the country nonetheless turned confidently to the world stage, seeking to valorize its experiment in real existing socialism. Transnational histories of the GDR have begun to appear in new historiography that takes East Germany seriously as an independent state, rather than merely a Soviet colony or a foil to West Germany. When it came to relationships with other socialist countries, the GDR pursued bold initiatives. In some cases, it even exported its building program, as Christina Schwenkel recounts in her study of Quang Trung, an East German housing development in the Vietnamese city of Vinh. Schwenkel conducted extensive oral histories and ethnographic work in both countries. Like Rubin, she is interested in how planned space produces affective communities, how “hope in a brighter future of peace and prosperity were closely tied to transformative materiality.”Footnote ¹⁷ Hers is an expansive work that makes interventions in Vietnamese and East German historiographies as well as urban studies, ultimately arguing that the Quang Trung development reveals the emergence of a specifically socialist modernity during the Cold War.

During the Vietnam War, the United States Air Force bombed Vinh relentlessly, subjecting it to more than four thousand sorties over eight years. One woman whom Schwenkel interviewed remembered, “I saw nothing but rubble” (75). East Germans connected the city's fate to their own in World War II, especially the firebombing of Dresden. Moreover, aiding Vietnam fit well within East German efforts to cultivate solidarity for anti-colonial struggles around the world.Footnote ¹⁸ As discussed below, Ned Richardson-Little argues East German thinkers developed a vision of human rights centered on decolonization. This vision manifested itself in places like Vinh, where East German planners and engineers actually helped build a massive complex of high-rise apartments.

In spite of their utopian design, the plans were marred by neocolonial misunderstandings and neglect from the start. The GDR sent used and obsolete equipment, which led to frequent breakdowns, delays in construction, and, ultimately, the “‘secondhand modernity’ that East Germany had gifted Vinh” (320). East Germans also struggled to understand Vietnamese norms, seeking to impose their own assumptions about work, family life, and leisure through planning. For example, they wanted to plant palm trees on the central Victory Square, which, their Vietnamese counterparts pointed out, would offer scant shade from the punishing midday sun. Nonetheless, Vinh residents still see the buildings as a success. According to Schwenkel, “In Vinh, being German was associated with moral goodness and technological prowess” (13). For all their superficial decay, “the most durable and disaster-resistant housing in Vinh was East German-made” (293). Schwenkel thus casts East German urbanism in a new, transnational light, revealing the complexities of the regime's foreign initiatives, while also recapturing something utopian in the East German past that might challenge neoliberalism's hegemony in the present.

A converse but complimentary argument emerges from Thomas Fleischman's history of East Germany's romance with the industrial pig. Although Fleischman's beautifully written book follows the animal that he lovingly calls “the very ideal of charismatic megafauna,”Footnote ¹⁹ it is really a history of how global markets changed in the 1970s and 1980s and, in turn, changed everything from eating habits to the environment. Starting in the 1960s, East German economic planners became enthralled with American-style agribusiness and planned to replicate it. In 1969, the pig-breeding and -fattening combine Eberswalde opened, a mammoth industrial center stocked with pigs bred to withstand the travails of industrial agriculture.

Initially, the plan seemed like a success. With assistance from the Western creditors who also helped build Marzahn, East Germany doubled its pork output by 1981. But pigs require vast quantities of fodder, which economic planners tried to provide by saturating arable land with nitrate fertilizers. These chemicals, however, found their way into the pigs themselves and thus the human food chain. Moreover, weaned on a diet largely devoid of roughage, the pigs produced liquid and semi-liquid bodily waste, toxic sludge that planners had little idea how to deal with. Farmers soon began depositing the waste wherever they thought no one would notice. The results were catastrophic: poisoned lakes that were “opaque, slimy, and devoid of fish” (111), toxic nitrate levels in the drinking water consumed by nearly 3 million East Germans, and increased rates of cancer and blue baby syndrome.

But these were not the wages of socialism, Fleischman argues, rather those of capitalism. The foreign debt that East Germany accumulated and the environmental catastrophe in the GDR were not separate problems but rather “two sides of the same coin” (115). Thus, Fleischmann suggests that much of what was “wrong” with East Germany had to do with the international capitalist systems in which it was imbricated. “So what was it that tied the East German experience to this global history of agricultural pollution?” Fleischman's answer: “It was capitalism” (115). In offering such a counterintuitive explanation of East Germany's environmental catastrophe, Fleischman does not shift responsibility away from its government, which, after all, implicated itself and its economy in systems of global capital. Rather, by according blame to capitalism, Fleischman highlights the interconnectedness of the Cold War world, while also disabusing readers of the notion that socialism was to blame for all of the Eastern Bloc's ills.

Like most of the other works under consideration here, Fleischman remains profoundly skeptical of post-1990 developments, contending that the reunification was greenwashed. “Under the cover of environmental remediation,” he writes, “wealthy West Germans and politically privileged East Germans seized the most valuable assets for themselves and left the pollution, destroyed forests, and work of remaking Germany's industrial economy to everybody else” (202). As we grapple with the catastrophe of climate change, the world thus “becomes more like East Germany every day” (207).

Ned Richardson-Little traces a similarly counterintuitive narrative in his history of human rights and the GDR. Far from an authoritarian system that rejected the very notion of human rights, he contends, the GDR actually saw itself as a global leader in it. Drawing on both recent scholarship that questions contemporary assumptions about human rights and revisionist historiography that has emphasized the sophistication of SED rule, Richardson-Little reveals how the party slowly adopted and applied a peculiar vision of human rights.Footnote ²⁰

Richardson-Little's book begins with the SED's electoral catastrophe of 1946, the only (partially) free elections the party ever contested. The SPD, which won an astonishing 48.7% of the vote in Berlin, where the election was freer than in the rest of the Soviet Zone, hammered the SED for human rights abuses. That defeat prompted thinkers in the East to begin elucidating a socialist theory of human rights. When the Federal Republic adopted the Hallstein Doctrine in 1955, which mandated West Germany would only establish diplomatic relations with countries that did not recognize the GDR, the SED created the Committee for the Protection of Human Rights in response.Footnote ²¹ It was the first such organization in the Soviet Bloc. Initially advocating for the release of imprisoned communists in the Federal Republic, the committee eventually turned to anti-colonial solidarity as its banner issue – a domestic partner to foreign projects like the Quang Trung development in Vinh.

As a result of its increasingly assertive advocacy of human rights, the GDR signed on to numerous international conventions and treaties, not least the famed Helsinki Accords of 1975. While many historians view the Accords as a turning point, when Western nations tricked socialist governments into accepting human rights, Richardson-Little argues instead that “SED and party elites had already internalized the concept of human rights as an essential part of the socialist project” (98). By the 1980s, though, he acknowledges that human rights had become “a useful discourse of dissent” (178). “The SED's long-standing embrace of human rights discourse was fundamental to the peaceful revolution,” Richardson-Little contends, “because it created the shared language between those in power and those without” (254). Ultimately, then, the “human rights dictatorship” abolished itself “to realize its own ideals” (254). Yet those ideals were not, perhaps, realized in the Wende. Richardson-Little too is critical of reunification, dwelling on its consequences for East German women who, in addition to losing access to on-demand abortion in the first trimester, also lost “social and economic rights, such as state-provided childcare, that had previously facilitated their independence through participation in the workforce” (261).

Of course, the portrait Richardson-Little paints of the GDR is of an opportunistic regime using the language of human rights for its own ends. But this is precisely the point: what regime does not use human rights in this way? The wealth of scholarship on human rights over the last decade reveals just how intertwined ideology and opportunism are within Western human rights practices. East Germany, Richardson-Little shows, was less different than we might imagine. In this way—much like Fleischman's work—Richardson-Little holds up a mirror to the practices of liberal democracy, asking us if we are really so very different. The point, of course, is not to efface the very real differences between East Germany and Western countries, but rather to underline how, on a host of issues and problems, those differences were less categorical and more a matter of degrees.

The Many Afterlives of the GDR

If there is something that connects virtually all of the works considered above, it is the skepticism with which they view reunification. Although over thirty years have passed since East Germany legally ceased to exist on October 3, 1990, East Germany has lingered socially and culturally in numerous ways, from monuments that have been left standing, to the Ostalgie that permeates contemporary culture, to the AfD's stunning electoral results. It is therefore unsurprising that scholars have turned to how the GDR is remembered and memorialized in reunified Germany.

Of the three monographs concerned with these matters, Hope Harrison's is both the deepest and the narrowest, focused on how parts of the Berlin Wall have been destroyed, memorialized, and preserved since November 9, 1989. Relying on dozens of oral histories that she collected over the course of almost twenty years, Harrison paints a nuanced portrait of different stakeholders and how their idiosyncratic views shaped efforts to remember the Wall and especially its victims. Because of this emphasis on victims of the border regime, the book at times appears to eschew much of the contemporary historiography, sometimes painting East Germany in simplistic terms. Describing a 1989 performance of Beethoven's opera Fidelio, for instance, Harrison writes, “Just as the prisoners [in the opera] wanted freedom and not to be watched all the time, East Germans in Dresden and elsewhere wanted the same.”Footnote ²²

Across a series of in-depth case studies, from the Bernauerstraße Berlin Wall Memorial to the activities of Alexandra Hildebrandt, the director of the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, Harrison focuses on two overarching conflicts in East German memory culture. On the one hand was the fraught question of whether Germany could pay homage to those who had died at the Wall without cheapening the suffering of the Holocaust's victims. There was immense outcry, for instance, when Hildebrandt said a makeshift memorial she had erected to honor those killed at the GDR border was “a counterpart to the Holocaust memorial” (180).

On the other hand, people agitating for memorials were divided between those who wanted lifelike recreations of the Berlin Wall and those who wanted more abstract sites of remembrance. The latter group accused the former of advocating a “Disneyland” approach to traumatic memory (213). The former rebutted that their critics wanted to whitewash the SED regime by forcing moral ambiguity on what, in their minds, was “a simple, basic narrative: the Wall and the SED regime behind it were evil” (214). Although the Wall is now a firm fixture in Berlin's tourism industry—the Bernauerstraße Berlin Wall Memorial welcomed one million visitors in 2018—these divisions remain. Scholarly consensus may exist that the GDR was a complex state that relied on nuanced forms of consent and coercion to maintain its rule, but this consensus is not always reflected in popular discourse.

Such conflicts are also the subject of Anna Saunders’ broad and engaging work that examines how East Germany has been (de)memorialized in the years since 1989. Each chapter focuses on a different site of memory, from former socialist statues to Soviet Zone special camps. In each instance, Saunders emphasizes striking disagreements about memorialization plans and the political stakes of these disputes. Looking at monuments constructed by the SED regime, for instance, she highlights how different localities took very different approaches to socialist statues. While a large statue of Lenin in Berlin came down in the early 1990s, other statues, including that of Weimar-era communist leader Ernst Thälmann and the massive Karl Marx head in Chemnitz both remained. In fact, the Marx statue is now one of the city's most popular tourist attractions—a striking illustration of how Ostalgie has become a profitable enterprise. Ironically, when local politicians, often from the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), tried to tear these monuments down in the early 1990s, voters accused them of behaving just like the SED.

Even more consequentially, Saunders dwells on how East German history has offered the newly reunified Berlin Republic a redemptive historical narrative, one that stretches from the 1953 uprisings to the 1989 revolution and ultimately reunification in 1990. As Harrison also notes, such an arc contrasts sharply with the memory culture that has grown up around the Holocaust. Moreover, Saunders highlights the tensions within this narrative between the so-called “winners” and “losers” of reunification.Footnote ²³ She describes, for instance, how Western politicians dominated the twentieth-anniversary commemoration of the Wall falling on November 9, 2009. Eastern activists have been pushed out of the limelight of such events, which have failed to resonate with “experiences of high unemployment and a shrinking population in the eastern Länder.” That disconnect, Saunders argues, has “led to disillusionment among many, not only among former activists, and contributed to election successes of the PDS/Die Linke in the East”—and, we might add, also the AfD (254). Saunders’ approach to East German memorialization allows her to home in on how phenomena such as Ostalgie do not always represent identification with the GDR per se, but rather “a sense of oppositional solidarity in the present” (13), of opposition to the ways that the Wende brought about the immiseration of former East German lands.

Ostalgie also takes center stage in Amieke Bouma's book, which sheds light on the East German Board of Associations (OKV). This umbrella organization arose in the years after the Wende to advocate for the interests of East Germans, in particular former state employees, and to maintain social connections among them. In order to write about this organization, which claimed some 25,000 members in the mid-1990s and has declined since, Bouma conducted oral interviews with thirty-two of its members. Although Bouma ultimately finds the OKV to be “inconsequential,”Footnote ²⁴ she contends that it is representative of the way that politicized nostalgia can be maintained by an “epistemic community” through an “impressive feedback loop” of purpose, memory, and social networks (194).

As in Saunders and Harrison's works, Bouma identifies different ways of viewing the East German past prevalent today, including the totalitarianism hypothesis and the accommodation thesis (namely, that East Germans accommodated themselves to the regime). She also identifies a narrative of progress, or “Fortschrittsgedächtnis,” that is common among OKV members. They hold that the GDR was a legitimate state which endeavored to enact radical, progressive reforms. Even as members occasionally acknowledged problems with the GDR, these individuals were reluctant to criticize it as such, a trend Bouma terms a “compartmentalization of memory” (63). She thus identifies the peculiar variant of Ostalgie prevalent among OKV members as “nostalgia not so much for the way the GDR was, but for the way in which the GDR understood itself to be” (84). Because this group remains so insular, cut off from larger groups and parties (Die Linke actively distances itself from the OKV), its interpretation of the GDR has found little resonance among the broader public and does little to explain the broader appeal of Ostalgie, especially among those born after the Wende.

Although the OKV as an organization can thus explain relatively little about Germany today, Bouma's study suggests that historians and memory scholars might think of the GDR not only as a state that ceased to exist on October 3, 1990, but also as an affective community that has and will continue to encompass large swaths of Germans. Indeed, most studies under consideration here express a deep skepticism about the process of stitching the two countries back together, highlighting why East Germans might retain a certain fondness for their former country. These authors focus on what was lost when East Germany ceased to exist as well as the corruption, ineptitude, and violence that attended reunification. The success of the AfD in those parts of Germany that lost the most in 1990 should thus not surprise us, as disillusioned East Germans cast protest votes or turn to what may seem as genuine alternatives to decades of failed reunification.