A Specter is Haunting the West: Academic and Popular Perspectives

The assumption that political repression drove many East Germans to suicide influenced the West for decades. The specter surfaced occasionally, temporarily became invisible, then returned time and again. In 1959, population scientist Roderich von Ungern-Sternberg claimed, without providing any details, that “more difficult living conditions” were the main cause of the GDR's high suicide rate.Footnote ⁷ In 1963, the West German newsmagazine Der Spiegel placed blame on the East German regime in particular for the high suicide rate of elderly people.Footnote ⁸ The governing Socialist Unity Party (SED) stopped the publication of suicide data that same year, which meant that authors could only allude to the “high but unknown” suicide rate in the GDR.Footnote ⁹ Over the following decades, several authors nevertheless expressed strong views about the subject, despite the lack of sound evidence. In 1977, for example, Konstantin Pritzel suggested that “burdens caused by the communist rulers’ coercive and terrorist measures” contributed to East Germany's high suicide rate. The author, a former member of the West Berlin Untersuchungsausschuss Freiheitlicher Juristen (Investigative Committee of Free Jurists), which was partly financed by the CIA, even manipulated statistics to support his misleading claim.Footnote ¹⁰ Somewhat more cautiously, a West German journalist asserted in 1986 that “totalitarian Marxism-Leninism, coupled with the tradition of Prussian statism,” could have generated “considerable suicidogenic factors.”Footnote ¹¹ After German unification, some scholars continued to argue that political circumstances affected the suicide rate in the GDR. In 1998, for instance, Ehrhart Neubert, a sociologist of religion, blamed the communist regime for suicides in an essay he published in the German edition of the Black Book of Communism. Neubert listed a number of suicides that, he claimed, were a result of the political situation in the GDR; he also identified supposedly specific “suicidal structures” there.Footnote ¹² In a similar vein, in their study of unofficial literature in the GDR, Ines Geipel and Joachim Walther downplayed the private suffering of the few East German authors who had committed suicide, stressing political maltreatment instead.Footnote ¹³

Many East German dissidents took a comparable tack in the writing they published before 1989. Jürgen Fuchs, for instance, subtly alluded in the late 1970s to the army's supposed responsibility for the prevalence of suicides among its recruits.Footnote ¹⁴ More generally, Hermann von Berg, the author of an opposition manifesto published in 1978, asked why the German Democratic Republic had “some of the highest rates of divorce, suicide, and alcohol abuse.”Footnote ¹⁵ By keeping suicide statistics secret and by practicing censorship, the SED unintentionally fueled speculation about the apparently strong correlation between suicide and communist dictatorship. Neubert, a former member of the GDR opposition group Demokratischer Aufbruch (Democratic Awakening), captured the fears of many East German dissidents in his bold claim that there was “no other country in Europe where so many suicides” were a result of official communist policy.Footnote ¹⁶

Several films and television series from the period made similarly misleading claims. In 1966, for instance, the West German television series Die fünfte Kolonne presented an episode, “Das verräterische Licht,” in which an office assistant commits suicide after being forced to spy for the Stasi. The fictitious secretary, Beate Zöllner—employed by a Munich-based enterprise that carried out research for NATO—has an East German brother who has been sentenced to ten years imprisonment for helping a friend escape from the GDR. Exploiting his ill health, the Stasi approaches Fräulein Zöllner with a promise that her brother will be released if she takes pictures of secret documents. Several mishaps occur, and the deal does not work out; West German intelligence intervenes and discovers her guilt. Ashamed about deceiving her boss, who trusted her unquestioningly, and scared by the prospect of being convicted, Zöllner throws herself under a train. The episode's message is banal: the only reason for this desperate deed was blackmail by the Stasi.

Forty years later, the box-office hit The Lives of Others revived the totalitarian framing of East Germany's suicide rates. It is worth closely examining how the movie presents suicide—in this case, the suicide of theater director Albert Jerska, who hangs himself after being banned for years from his profession. The vast majority of the film's audience apparently considered suicide to be a representation—and result—of suffering in a world deprived of artistic freedom. In an exemplary comment along these lines, film scholar Mary-Elizabeth O'Brien commended the movie because it “does not shy away from showing the cost in human lives for defying the SED dictatorship, especially in its depictions of suicides.”Footnote ¹⁷ It should nevertheless be noted that the fictional Jerska belonged to the milieu of privileged state artists, who had a good chance of escaping the regime's narrow-minded cultural policies. His occupational ban dated back to the time when dozens of prominent artists had unsuccessfully protested against the expatriation of singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann in November 1976. Disappointed about the hardline attitude of the SED, many artists left the GDR or negotiated temporary exit visas. These options did not seem to exist for Jerska because he still felt strongly connected to communist ideology and never envisaged leaving the country he considered to be the “better” Germany. Reducing his suicide to political repression disregards Jerska's personal issues and his other problems, which are also portrayed in the film.Footnote ¹⁸ More important, the reality for most East German dissidents was different: although many had to work in undesirable jobs, some chose to emigrate when all other options had been exhausted.

It is possible, of course, that suicide, inspired by opposition to the regime, did occur in the GDR. But the film becomes utterly misleading when Jerska's individual case is linked to the elevated suicide rate. In a eulogy he gives at the funeral, the fictional playwright Georg Dreyman does not blame the regime directly for his friend's death, but he does accuse the East German state of coldheartedly ignoring people who commit suicide. It might be, as one scholar claims, that Dreyman was “drawn first to investigate and then to expose in the West the high incidence of suicide in East Germany,” but the film suggests a different story.Footnote ¹⁹ There is no indication that Dreyman had access to suicide figures, which would have been unrealistic. Dreyman's embittered words of farewell become source material for an essay that he manages to have smuggled to West Berlin. Following its publication in Der Spiegel, it is West German television news that connects the East German suicide rate to the recent suicides of artists living there. By making this choice, the film unintentionally shows how the Western media transformed individual despair in the East into a political reproach.

The film does contain a number of subtle details that mitigate against such an overly simplistic interpretation. But the film as a whole conveys a fatalistic impression of life in the GDR. The totalitarian atmosphere of the film, as well as the clear distinction between victims and perpetrators (with one fictional character, Stasi officer Gerd Wiesler, being the only exception), create empathy with the victims and convey an implicit message: “Suicide is, of course, a metaphor for the tragic loss of vitality and life under totalitarianism; and underlying the film, heavy as a basso continuo, is this tragic sense of loss and waste—the repression, squandering, and death of talent, productivity, pleasure, and hope.”Footnote ²⁰ The film's emotional effects apparently had a stronger impact on audiences than its authentic details did. The film's subtleties notwithstanding, its plot seems to suggest a link between political repression and suicide.Footnote ²¹ A similar kind of reductionism is characteristic of the public discourse about East German suicides that has persisted for decades.

There were nevertheless scholarly debates about East German suicide rates that challenged such Cold War stereotypes. East and West German medical statisticians and psychiatrists discussed the issue in and around 1961, the year the Berlin Wall was built. In 1956, the GDR had begun publishing yearly suicide rates, and, in light of the high numbers, East and West German experts adopted Emile Durkheim's theory of anomie to argue that social and political changes in East Germany might have been responsible for the elevated rate.Footnote ²² But this claim was quickly challenged, with an emphasis on the fact that the GDR's geographic territory had a long history of high suicide rates.Footnote ²³

Since the beginning of statistical surveys in the nineteenth century, the ratio of suicide rates in those areas that later constituted the GDR and the Federal Republic was roughly three to two, respectively. Political factors are thus very unlikely to have had a significant impact on this figure, given the relative constancy of suicide rates under monarchy, democracy, and dictatorship. Under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and the Third Reich, it was not the political system as such but rather long-term regional differences that determined the frequency of suicide over the “longue durée.” In the 1960s, that insight was accepted, to some extent, among experts in the East and West, but this consensus had minimal impact on public perceptions. That held true for West German politicians and journalists, as well as for the leadership of the SED. The Politburo avoided any discussion of the problem for fear that high suicide rates would damage the international reputation of the GDR, a fear compounded by a slight increase in suicide rates in the 1960s. That was why statistics on suicide were classified beginning in 1963—a typical reaction by the regime.Footnote ²⁴ Nine years later, as a result of a sudden rise in crime, the SED also stopped publishing annual crime rates in the official yearbook of statistics.Footnote ²⁵ Attempts by East German experts to convince party officials that “the high suicide rate [was] not connected to the building of socialism” went unheeded. Psychiatrist Helmut F. Späte admonished the authorities, in vain, that “we cannot settle the problem by locking away the documents.”Footnote ²⁶ The ban nevertheless remained in effect until 1990.

That said, research into the causes of suicide in the GDR was not entirely impossible. Scholars produced dozens of regional and sectoral studies. The classification of epidemiological investigations nevertheless thwarted the accumulation of greater knowledge about the phenomenon and also open debate. It is therefore hardly surprising that, at the time of German reunification, the very same discussion began all over again. Medical scientists reiterated the assumption that factors such as political stagnation and social isolation might have caused higher suicide rates in East Germany.Footnote ²⁷ Empirical research rejected such simplistic views, but, once again, just as in the 1960s, that discussion was confined to academic circles and thus had little impact on public perceptions.Footnote ²⁸

Fact Check: Politically Motivated Suicides in the GDR

Before dealing with the reasons that have led to the persistence of a politicized framing of suicide rates, it is necessary to determine as precisely as possible the actual impact of political factors on suicide rates in the GDR, and there is sufficient data to do so. Continuing a Prussian tradition, the criminal police and medical examiners both investigated unnatural deaths in the GDR, and the results of their investigations allow for rough conclusions about the impact of social factors. Police investigations found that conflicts in personal relationships were the main cause in 11 to 22 percent of all cases, whereas East German medical studies found that mental health issues were the main cause in up to 30 percent of all suicides. Most sources attributed more than a third to serious physical diseases. By contrast, investigations found that conflicts between individuals and society were evident in a far lower percentage of cases: “fear of punishment” (for political or criminal offences) was considered a main motivation in only 5 to 10 percent of all cases, and problems at work were recorded in only 1 to 3 percent of all cases.Footnote ²⁹ Only a very small percentage of suicides that were recognizably related to social factors had clear political causes.

There was another procedure, however, for investigating politically motivated suicides. The Stasi was responsible for looking into all unnatural deaths with possible political implications. To that end, it established, in the 1960s, homicide squads in all East German districts (Bezirke) to investigate all deaths that had a possible political cause. These so-called special commissions (Spezialkommissionen) worked independently of murder investigations carried out by the police.Footnote ³⁰ In East Berlin, the Stasi investigated an average of thirteen suicides per year; in other districts, the number was lower, between five and ten—which meant that approximately 1.4 to 2.5 percent of all suicides had a possible political cause—in theory. But these investigations found that private causes had led to the vast majority of suicides, with functionaries—just like ordinary East Germans—typically committing suicide because of family problems or illness.Footnote ³¹

Because the results of the Stasi investigations were kept top secret and thus only accessible to a handful of top functionaries, there was little reason to manipulate entire case files. Some conclusions and reports denied political motivations, but some documents in the extant files—e.g., the minutes of interrogations, informer reports, recorded phone calls, various internal reports, and so-called action plans—allow for a critical reading and alternative conclusions. But even if read against the grain, they do not contain many hints suggesting political conflicts as the root cause.

Working in parallel to the special commissions, the Stasi's so-called Hauptabteilung I investigated unnatural deaths in the army. For example, a noncommissioned officer who served as a border guard shot himself in 1988, after having found out that his girlfriend intended to apply for an exit visa; he also wanted to apply to emigrate from the GDR, but knew that his chances were slim because of his status as a person who had been granted access to secret information.Footnote ³² As this example underscores, the suspicion that the Stasi might have ignored the political motivations underlying some suicides is incorrect. Because the organization's main task was to identify possible threats to the dictatorship, Stasi officers were eager to detect even miniscule hints of oppositional thought or ideological conflict.

The Stasi often presumed, in fact, that political factors had led to suicide—before an ensuing examination debunked that supposition. A striking example in this regard was the suicide of a Polish student in the autumn of 1980, which the Stasi initially considered to be politically motivated. It based this conclusion on the fact that the suicide had coincided with the rise of the Polish opposition movement Solidarity (Solidarnosc), even though there was no specific evidence to support that assumption. In fact, the Stasi eventually found out that the suicide was mainly caused by emotional turmoil and jealousy following a night at a disco.Footnote ³³ At the same time, there are records elsewhere of suicides that indeed had political implications. The police did not contact the Stasi in all cases involving political motivations, as suicide reports compiled by criminal police in the districts of Dresden and Potsdam suggest. There were, for example, some cases of young men who had committed suicide for fear of being conscripted into the army.Footnote ³⁴ The police sometimes also investigated suicides by political prisoners. But, all in all, such cases suggest that politically motivated suicides barely exceeded 1 percent of all suicides. An unofficial estimate by East Berlin's chief public prosecutor, who cited “weariness of the state” (Staatsverdrossenheit) as the motivation in a mere 0.4 percent of all suicides between 1975 and 1981, supports this conclusion.Footnote ³⁵

Over the long term, the suicide rate in the GDR remained relatively constant, but there was nonetheless some fluctuation, which is why the possible impact of historical events on suicide also requires careful scrutiny. According to Mary Fulbrook, “suicide rates very clearly correlated with political events.” In fact, oscillations in the suicide rate can only rarely be attributed to specific historical developments.Footnote ³⁶ The failed uprising of June 1953, for example, did not lead to an increase in the suicide rate, and the liberalization of economic and youth policy after 1963, did not bring a decline in its wake. Fulbrook's misleading claim that historical changes explain the fall in suicide rates around 1968, and then again around 1989, is a particularly clear example why changes in the suicide rate should be interpreted with extreme caution. With Durkheim's social theory of suicide in mind, it is tempting to interpret the drop around 1968, to political disturbances, most notably to Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia and its suppression.Footnote ³⁷ But there is another explanation—an administrative one: the international classification of suicide changed in 1967–1968. The introduction of new official documents created uncertainty that no doubt led to underreporting; a shortage of new printed forms must have also played a role.Footnote ³⁸ Likewise, it might seem obvious to attribute the decline of the suicide rate in the second half of the 1980s to the positive expectations ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms in the Soviet Union. Statistical analysis has shown, however, that the drop was actually the result of a demographic shift that gave more weight to age cohorts born after 1949; that was significant because they had less inclination to commit suicide than previous cohorts had.Footnote ³⁹ This example also usefully reminds us that overall statistics are aggregated data. Big numbers can conceal hidden trends—for instance, a high suicide rate among a specific subgroup. The forced agricultural collectivization campaign that took place in the East German countryside in the spring of 1960, provides one example. It encouraged dozens of farmers to take their own lives, but such incidents were still too infrequent to cause a steep increase in the overall suicide rate.Footnote ⁴⁰

Only in extreme situations did the coercive policies of the SED cause a statistically relevant number of additional suicides. Most notably, as Fulbrook rightly highlights, it was the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, that coincided with rising suicide rates. The increase in the average annual rate from 28.8 suicides per 100,000 inhabitants (from 1956 to 1960) to 31.6 (1961 to 1965) represents a 10 percent increase. There were, moreover, more suicides in and around East Berlin and among young people, reinforcing the idea that those directly affected experienced the sudden border closure as a major shock.Footnote ⁴¹ The months of harsh repression that followed, as well as the introduction of conscription at this time, no doubt exacerbated some suicidal impulses. The West German perception of an “epidemic” was nevertheless an exaggeration.Footnote ⁴²

Apart from these exceptional situations, certain submilieus in the GDR have been linked to high suicide rates. Ehrhart Neubert has claimed, for example, that there were remarkably high numbers of suicides on the part of prisoners in East German jails. But he relies on absolute numbers, which do not allow for an accurate assessment. A calculation of the annual suicide rate per 100,000 inmates reveals, in fact, that Neubert's claims are inaccurate. It was, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, not only close to the average of the GDR population as a whole, but also three to four times lower than in the Federal Republic. Apart from a poor use of statistics, the flaw in Neubert's reasoning stems from his equation of political repression and suicide. A random sample of a Stasi prison, where 20 percent of prisoners showed suicidal tendencies but not one took his or her own life, underscores the complexity of the relationship between suicide and repression.Footnote ⁴³ Whereas strict und inhumane measures in East German prisons made it almost impossible to take one's own life, the relative leniency of West German prisons facilitated the “success” of such acts of despair.Footnote ⁴⁴ In addition to the strict controls there, several social factors prevented East German prisoners from committing suicide, such as collective accommodation in large cells and a requirement to work. There were statistical “effects” as well, such as the more rapid handling of criminal proceedings: this resulted in a smaller share of prisoners awaiting trial—a group generally at the highest risk of committing suicide.Footnote ⁴⁵ As for “political prisoners,” the prospect of being released to the West helped many stay alive, despite the harsh nature of their current conditions.Footnote ⁴⁶

Another submilieu with supposedly high suicide rates was the National People's Army (NVA), a site of many serious conflicts related to political repression, as well as to bullying by one's peers. Here one could expect many self-inflicted fatalities because of the availability of lethal weapons. Yet, the suicide rate of soldiers was no higher than that of the corresponding male age cohort in civilian society. Internal military statistics buttress the conclusion that the NVA was not responsible for driving more young men to suicide. This applies to border guards as well. Dietmar Schultke believed that soldiers stationed directly at the Iron Curtain were particularly prone to Stasi terror, but he does not calculate the actual frequency of suicides, which leads him to argue that there was a high number of suicides there.Footnote ⁴⁷ In fact, border guards did not commit suicide more frequently than those in other units of the armed forces—or than East German civilians of the same age.Footnote ⁴⁸

Several factors help explain this surprising outcome. Soldiers who attempted suicide were not allowed to serve at the border. The Stasi—rather than causing suicides—were at pains to identify suicidal soldiers, whom they subsequently sent to other units. In August 1976, for example, an informant reported that a drunken border guard had attempted suicide. He was already under surveillance because he wanted to quit the SED, and also because he had expressed sympathy for his brother, who had been sentenced to jail for “slandering the state.” The Stasi directed the regimental commander to reassign the “unreliable” soldier away from the border.Footnote ⁴⁹

The findings of medical research shed light on the relatively “normal” suicide rate in the army: psychopathological disposition, often stemming from mental stress in early childhood, is a graver suicidogenic factor than a temporary life crisis resulting in acute internal conflict.Footnote ⁵⁰ This is not to deny the restrictions on personal freedom, pressure for conformity, or forms of repression that were all evident in the GDR's armed forces. Yet, discipline was apparently only rarely brutally enforced, at least to a degree that led to the consideration of suicide. The finding that situational factors are largely of secondary importance for suicide may also help explain the negligible correlation between political repression and the overall suicide rate in the GDR.

If not repression, what effect did social factors, such as poor living conditions and the shortage economy, have on suicide rates? Scholars such as Ursula Baumann consider the East German elderly to have been victims of a society that lauded youth and neglected those no longer needed for the workforce.Footnote ⁵¹ The suicide rate of pensioners was, in fact, extraordinarily high.Footnote ⁵² Whereas the suicide rate of the entire GDR population was approximately 1.5 times higher than that of the Federal republic, the suicide rate of East German pensioners was slightly more than twice as high. Der Spiegel was not alone in blaming the SED regime for this discrepancy.Footnote ⁵³ But the matter was more complex than that, as the following example suggests: The suicide rate of women aged sixty to eighty in the Saxon regions of the GDR was almost double that of the former Kingdom of Saxony shortly after 1900. The suicide rate of the corresponding male age group underwent a sharp decline, however, from 163 to 78 per 100,000. As a result, the gender difference diminished and the overall suicide rate of elderly people in Saxony slightly decreased from roughly 1900 to 1980.Footnote ⁵⁴ Advantages such as the privileged ability to visit the West—and thus gain greater access to scarce goods and other items—might have offset disadvantages such as poor living conditions and inadequate health care.

Behavior Patterns

After having used the critical potential of quantitative methodology, one might ask whether such a somewhat abstract approach risks overlooking something important. Or, to put it differently: is there a qualitative way to relate suicide to the political culture of the GDR? In fact, suicidal behavior in the GDR was not just a continuation of nineteenth-century practices; it was also influenced by developments and experiences under “real existing socialism,” with many suicides clearly mirroring the GDR's specific political, economic, and social context. A qualitative analysis of suicides reveals a number of specific conflicts that existed only under communist regimes.

The files of the education authorities, for instance, contain a number of suicides caused by political repression. Even if these suicides were not always recorded as political in nature, the files contain clear evidence pointing in that direction—as in the suicide of a female teacher in 1984. The report by education authorities that placed the blame on family problems was not entirely wrong, but the primary cause of her suicide was another, namely, that her husband had emigrated to the West. After recovering from a nervous breakdown, she pledged to file for divorce, but then decided, a couple of months later, to apply for an exit visa for herself and her two children. The authorities did not accept her private wish to reunite the family and instead considered the application to be a political provocation: she was dismissed from her job and then decided to take her life.Footnote ⁵⁵

The suicide of a fourteen-year-old pupil in 1982, was similarly linked to political conflict. The boy, who wanted to become a teacher, appeared to be a role model, based on his performance in school and his allegiance to the regime. As a good student and as a secretary of the Free German Youth, his career was as good as secure—if not for the somewhat conflicting worldviews of his parents. Whereas his father supported the official party line and was actively engaged on the parent committee at the boy's school, his mother was affiliated with the church. This was why the pupil participated in both the preparation course for the secular “coming of age” ceremony (Jugendweihe, or Youth Consecration) and for confirmation classes provided by the church.Footnote ⁵⁶ As a concession to the mother's religiosity, his parents decided, in the end, that the son would only take part in the religious confirmation ceremony and not in the Jugendweihe—even though his father helped prepare the local state ceremony. The extant documentation sheds little light on the ensuing discussions and conflicts. On the day of the suicide, the only conspicuous sign of internal turmoil was that the pupil had behaved in school in a “provocative manner” that was, for him, unprecedented. He criticized, for instance, the GDR's refusal to allow citizens to choose their place of residence freely.Footnote ⁵⁷

Conflicts within the SED leadership caused suicides as well. In 1958, for example, Gerhart Ziller, the economics secretary of the Central Committee, committed suicide after being accused of involvement in a conspiracy against the head of the party, Walter Ulbricht. Seven years later, in 1965, the head of the state Planning Commission, Erich Apel, shot himself dead on the day that a trade agreement with the Soviet Union, which he had opposed, was ratified. Because both officials felt mortally offended by any form of explicit or implicit criticism, one may consider their suicides to have been a result of the dictatorial climate that prevailed within the SED. But one should not forget, of course, the role of personality. The reportedly sensitive and emotional Ziller did not “fit the apparatchik mold,” and Apel was “an extremely ambitious man who found defeats difficult to bear.”Footnote ⁵⁸

In a similar vein, the suicides of several factory managers were linked to the pressures of the command economy, which they apparently internalized. For example, the manager of a sugar factory hurled himself off a silo in the autumn of 1978: he had done everything he could to improve the poor performance of the factory, but some organizational and technological problems proved to be unsolvable. Despite his efforts, the district council criticized him in severe terms for the serious shortcomings. The factory manager was, by all reports, selfless, conscientious, and modest, but also optimistic and humorous. The police could not find any personality or mental health issues that would explain his suicide, apart from a tendency to ask too much of himself.Footnote ⁵⁹

The point is that the stern and hostile atmosphere of the dictatorship might have “driven to suicide” people who were unlikely to have taken their life under different political circumstances. But such incidents were rare, and the GDR hardly created new types of conflict. One can legitimately accuse the GDR of having generated conditions that preserved the high regional frequency of suicide, of having provided a socialist version of old conflicts, and of having failed to establish a more humane society. But the fact remains that the dictatorship did not increase the overall suicide rate.

A qualitative approach nevertheless provides some clues pointing to a “culture of shame” as one factor that helps explain East Germany's consistently high suicide rate.Footnote ⁶⁰ For example, a police officer in Leipzig took his life in 1974, after his wife threatened to inform the SED about his love affair with another woman.Footnote ⁶¹ And a party official in the Magdeburg district committed suicide in 1976, because of the shame he felt about his undignified behavior during a drinking spree.Footnote ⁶² In both cases, there was little specific evidence of any impact by the political system as such. But these cases can nevertheless be associated with more general patterns of behavior that might have increased the likelihood of suicide. Leaving aside stereotypes about the supposedly “depressive-obsessive” character of Saxons, the extraordinarily high suicide frequency in that southern region of the GDR suggests the need for a focus on specific behavioral patterns there.Footnote ⁶³ It is promising to consider unique aspects of regional mentalities, notably prevailing concepts of guilt, as research on Scandinavia has demonstrated.Footnote ⁶⁴ Particularly relevant to the GDR is the finding that high suicide rates in Denmark can be attributed to the frequent use of guilt arousal as a childrearing practice.Footnote ⁶⁵ Several scholars concur with the theory that a predominantly Protestant “culture of shame” in East Germany led to more suicides there than in West Germany.Footnote ⁶⁶ The more restrained attitudes of East Germans contributed to a more “consensus-oriented culture of conflict,” and, according to Oliver Bieri, suicide rates tend to be higher in societies where aggressive behavior is frowned upon.Footnote ⁶⁷

Since the nineteenth century, Protestant regions have had higher suicide rates than the ones in Catholic parts of Germany. Given that most of the areas “inherited” by the GDR were Protestant—in contrast to the Federal Republic, which contained many large Catholic regions, such as Bavaria and the Rhineland—it is worth exploring the possible role that denominational differences may have played in the frequency of suicide. One explanation for such differences is the Catholic Church's practice of confession, which can help unburden a Catholic's conscience. Protestants (and atheists), by contrast, are supposedly left alone to deal with feelings of guilt and responsibility. Another possible explanation is that different denominations have very different attitudes toward suicide. Whereas the Catholic Church considered suicide to be a mortal sin until 1983, the Protestant Church developed a more empathetic attitude. One might question the applicability of religion to the atheistic GDR, given that the percentage of believers dropped from 91 to 30 percent over the four decades of communist rule.Footnote ⁶⁸ But there were nevertheless signs that denominational attitudes exerted a persistent influence on suicide in the GDR: whereas suicide rates in the country's Protestant regions remained high, they were 25 percent lower in Catholic regions, such as the Eichsfeld.Footnote ⁶⁹

Denominational differences were less relevant for the younger generations, whose members tended to be more atheistic. But they do help explain the notable difference in the suicide rates of pensioners in East and West Germany. It is likely that their Christian faith mattered in particular for elderly people, as they approached the possibility of dying. Felix Robin Schulz's finding that a substantial proportion of East Germans still preferred Christian funerals supports this conclusion.Footnote ⁷⁰ An additional factor—also linked to religion, to some extent—was divorce: as Durkheim has shown, high suicide rates correlate with high divorce rates, and both tend to be higher in Protestant regions.Footnote ⁷¹ Saxony, East Germany's suicide “hotspot,” had long had particularly high divorce rates. In 1910, for instance, the divorce rate there was three times higher than in mainly Catholic Westphalia, and 50 percent higher than the average for the German Empire as a whole.Footnote ⁷² Similarly, the divorce rate in the GDR was approximately 50 percent higher than in the Federal Republic.Footnote ⁷³

The plausibility of these arguments depends, however, on the reliability of the relevant statistics. Hans Girod, a former professor of criminalistics in the GDR, has claimed that higher suicide rates in East Germany were merely a result of the fact that there is a greater cover-up of suicide in Catholic regions.Footnote ⁷⁴ The East-West difference was indeed arguably somewhat smaller than official figures indicate, especially given the fact that several vague categories, such as “sudden death” or “age and infirmity,” made up an extraordinarily high percentage of the causes of death in West German statistics. Moreover, the frequency of such dubious causes of death was most pronounced among older age groups, where the East-West difference in the suicide rate was most dramatic.Footnote ⁷⁵ It should also be noted that the coincidence of statistical inaccuracy and denomination was no accident. A case study in Catholic Aachen, which found that the actual number of suicides was twice as high as official figures, is an extreme example. The relatively high number of unrecorded suicides in Catholic regions is nevertheless still irrefutable, even if Girod overexaggerated its impact on overall numbers.Footnote ⁷⁶ Still, the tendency to cover up the number of suicides in the Federal Republic does not provide a full explanation for the difference between official suicide rates in East and West Germany.

Many of the political and social factors suggested by Western authors—most notably, political repression and poor living conditions—can largely be ruled out, then, as the cause for higher suicide rates in the GDR. The number of people who would likely have chosen not to kill themselves, had political circumstances been different, was certainly small—and the factors underlying even those suicides that can be considered to have been politically motivated were often much more complex. In short, tensions resulting from the SED's dictatorial rule increased the number of suicides only slightly. By contrast, secular differences related to mentality and denomination (e.g., the concept of guilt) are worthy of greater consideration.

The Persistence of a Misperception

If neither quantitative nor qualitative approaches support a strong correlation between dictatorship and suicide, why has there been such a long-lasting misperception about suicide in the GDR? In the first place, there is a long tradition of understanding suicide as a “sign of the times,” a tradition that goes back to the beginnings of systematic statistical registration in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁷ Most notably, Durkheim's conceptualization of suicide as a result of destabilized social ties influenced subsequent generations of scholars and also many publicists. During the Weimar Republic, for instance, contemporaries quickly associated suicide with a variety of factors, including national weakness, mass culture, authoritarian pedagogies, and capitalist exploitation. Both left- and right-wing organizations exploited individual cases to berate the existing political and economic order.Footnote ⁷⁸ To some extent, the debate on the GDR's suicide rate—though less intense—echoed this earlier discourse.Footnote ⁷⁹

One should not overlook, however, the differences between the discourse on suicide in the GDR and during earlier periods of German history. The main focus of the Cold War discourse was on people supposedly driven to suicide by the SED regime. This pattern of thought emphasized “fatalistic” suicide, which appears only in a footnote in Durkheim's famous study, in contrast to the prevalence of “anomic” suicide in previous debates.Footnote ⁸⁰ From the scattered instances of suicide among dissidents, would-be émigrés, or SED officials who had fallen out of favor, the Western discourse established a slim but influential connection between suicide rates and the GDR's totalitarian character.

This politicized interpretation of East German suicides was not completely far-fetched. There were, in fact, several tragic individual cases that lent it credence—cases where the individuals involved can indeed be considered to have been victims of repression. The suicide of Matthias Domaschk offers a prominent example. The young dissident hanged himself in a Stasi prison after being arbitrarily arrested, undergoing two days of interrogation with threats of blackmail and sleep deprivation, and signing a commitment to work as a Stasi informant. This was not the only politically motivated suicide that became well known in the West. In 1976, the Protestant clergyman Oskar Bruesewitz protested against the communist indoctrination of youths by carrying out an act of self-immolation. And, the following year, Western media featured a case somewhat reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet: a couple committed suicide after the young man, who had left the GDR, was not allowed to return to visit his girlfriend.Footnote ⁸¹

Western journalists who overestimated the level of everyday terror in East German society considered such individual cases to be just the tip of the iceberg, and three main factors—an exaggerated politicization of suicides, limited knowledge about mental disorders, and the SED's treatment of suicide as a taboo subject—all contributed to this misperception. In fact, it was often an interaction between West and East German actors wishing to level criticism at the SED dictatorship that led to an oversimplification of the causes of suicide. In 1977, for instance, the dissident writer Reiner Kunze—who just had left the GDR for good—gave a radio interview to the Hessischer Rundfunk in which he mentioned the suicide of a friend of his daughter. The young man's forced collaboration with the Stasi, Kunze claimed, had led him to kill himself.Footnote ⁸² Yet, as his actual Stasi file clearly documents, this was not the case. The young man had been under surveillance since 1975. After breaking with his father, who was loyal to the regime, he joined the Junge Gemeinde, a rebellious youth organization of the Protestant Church.Footnote ⁸³ From the Stasi's perspective, the young man and his hippy attitude appeared to be a security risk. He had hitchhiked all over the country, and he had talked about becoming a conscientious objector. In addition, his housemate, an unofficial informant (IM), told the Stasi that he had purloined some goods from work. When called out for this petty crime, he quit his job as a driver and worked in a nursing home run by the church, where he had a confrontation with the conservative staff. He also suffered from undesirable living conditions and was unhappy in love. All of this prompted him to apply for an exit visa but then, on the advice of a clergyman, he decided to withdraw his application.

In November 1976, the young man spent some time in Jena, coinciding by chance with the expatriation of the dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann—which some of his friends had protested by filing a petition (Eingabe). The Stasi responded harshly, arresting dozens of suspects, including some of his friends. This almost literally scared the young man to death: he responded by trying to commit suicide but was rescued. Two days later, the Stasi interrogated him, an experience that seriously intimidated the young man. He was afraid of being rearrested, and he also had vague suspicions that he was under surveillance. Yet, he never suspected that his housemate had betrayed him, and that two Stasi informers had followed him when he moved to East Berlin in January 1977.

Most of the new problems he faced after his arrival in the East German capital had nothing to do with the Stasi, however. Rather, a private quarrel thwarted his plan to obtain a residence permit by marrying a friend, for the sake of appearances. The disillusioned twenty-year-old then decided to live in a shared apartment, and his roommates recommended a church cemetery where he could be employed as a gardener. Before that, the secret police had prevented him from working as a film projectionist—the only provable Stasi intervention in the case.Footnote ⁸⁴ But that Stasi intrigue was just one in a series of mishaps he suffered. It certainly did not trigger his final act of despair. Much more important was the suicide of a friend: returning from the funeral in a depressive state, the young man slashed his wrists because, as he told his flatmates, he wanted to suffer in the same way his suicidal friend had. Later on, he gassed himself. The interrogations and clandestine actions of the Stasi no doubt aggravated the young man's difficulties. But his restlessness, his pessimism, and his unhappy existence could not be attributed to that alone. To blame only the regime for his suicide, as Reiner Kunze did, was clearly an oversimplification.

It is worth noting that some East Germans who committed suicide similarly politicized their own suffering. According to Jean Baechler, they did not misrepresent their motivations intentionally. Rather, they projected their very private drama onto a political situation, rewriting their inner thoughts and feelings as a public performance.Footnote ⁸⁵ Examples of this kind of individual “identity management” include the suicides of those imprisoned offenders who blamed the political system for their misery.Footnote ⁸⁶ In the autumn of 1982, for example, an inmate of the Bautzen I political prison set himself on fire. Before doing so, he tore a sheet in half, wrote political protest slogans on each section, displayed one of them in the window of the cell, rubbed floor polish into his skin, and then pressed the alarm button. A year earlier, he had displayed another political slogan outside his cell in support of the Polish Solidarity movement—which led to him being sentenced to an additional sixteen months for “slander against the state.” His immediate reaction was to go on a hunger strike, whereupon he was transferred from a prison in Cottbus to Bautzen, where his behavior was largely unobtrusive—in contrast to his prior lack of discipline and refusals to work. Only on the day of his self-immolation did he refuse to fulfil his quota, which was why the authorities sent him back to his cell.Footnote ⁸⁷

After the transfer of the severely injured man to a hospital, where he died the next day, the Stasi searched the prison cell and found a suicide note behind a mirror. Some historians draw far-reaching conclusions from suicide notes.Footnote ⁸⁸ But, in this case, it would be naive to take the contents of the note seriously. The letter refers to a protest leaflet that the prisoner claims to have distributed. But extensive interrogations and investigations by the Stasi did not find any evidence of this. It is more likely that the protest action never took place, and that the prisoner used this false claim to scare the Stasi. In any event, the suicide note adopts a very aggressive tone, accusing the GDR regime of Bolshevik terror and criticizing it as social-fascistic. The names of West German organizations active during the Cold War, such as the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit (Combat Group Against Inhumanity), are mixed in with all kinds of fascist vocabulary, including terms such as Führer and Endlösung (Final Solution). The note even asks compatriots to commit acts of sabotage and to assassinate members of the SED. But it was arguably more an act of political protest than an explanation for the suicide.

To what extent, however, can his suicide be attributed to political factors? Two days before the prisoner died, fellow inmates had attacked him physically because of monetary debts that he could not or was not willing to repay. On the morning of the suicide, two prisoners insisted that he settle the debts immediately. A closer look at his biography further supports the argument that the prisoner's political provocations downplayed other factors that had led to his suicide. He had been a political prisoner since 1980, of course, and had even attempted to leave the country; this was considered a political crime in the GDR. But the unusual harshness of his sentence—four years and eight months imprisonment—resulted from the fact that he had already been imprisoned twice for fraud and robbery. In fact, his life before 1980, was more or less a sequence of professional and private failures. After failing to complete his vocational training as a locksmith, he began a professional career in the army—but, because of serious discipline violations, the NVA demoted and then discharged him. He got divorced, changed jobs frequently, and committed a series of petty crimes. Released early during a general amnesty at the end of 1979, he decided to move to West Germany, where he hoped to earn more money and have more freedom. It is pointless to speculate about how he might have lived after a successful move to the West, but it is not unlikely that new kinds of conflicts would have arisen in the Federal Republic, based on the experience of a few East German mavericks who moved to West Germany and then committed suicide.Footnote ⁸⁹

It is not known why the prisoner was not released to the Federal Republic, as he had hoped. Since the 1960s, there had been clandestine ransom deals, resulting in the release of almost thirty-four thousand political prisoners to the West.Footnote ⁹⁰ His disappointment about not being considered for this was likely the main reason for the political provocations contained in the prisoner's suicide note. This attempt to present his suicide in political terms obscured his criminal past, and it created the impression that he was a victim. That was how the West German media presented his case, and it did so without delving further into the man's background.Footnote ⁹¹ Western journalists had no access to reliable information, of course, which meant that they could not verify the statements made by East German refugees. But their eagerness to exploit suicides in the GDR for propaganda purposes prevented them from taking a more critical stance.

A second factor that led to misinterpretations was limited consideration of the pathological aspects of suicide. In March 1977, a West Berlin newspaper quoted the fiancé of a twenty-two-year-old nurse who had committed suicide in East Berlin. The fiancé, who had escaped over the border one year before, attributed his partner's suicide to the Stasi interrogations she had been forced to endure.Footnote ⁹² After the fiancé had arrived in the Federal Republic, he tried in vain to arrange for his partner to be smuggled across the border, at the same time that she had applied for an exit visa.Footnote ⁹³ In any event, her application was rejected in November 1976. This blow may have affected her mental health, but it was not the direct cause of her suicide four months later. In fact, the absence of an immediate trigger provoked widely differing interpretations. Her fiancé accused the East German regime, whereas colleagues and members of her family blamed it on her personal issues: she had suffered from depression.Footnote ⁹⁴ In other words, even if she had left the country, she still may have taken her own life.

Admittedly, for outsiders it is extraordinarily difficult to disentangle the complex set of inner (mental) and outer (sociopolitical) factors that account for many suicides. The case of a so-called brigadier at a Berlin-based concrete plant illustrates this. Because the man's enterprise considered him to be an exemplary and conscientious worker, he unexpectedly received the opportunity to buy a Soviet Lada automobile—something for which consumers normally had to wait ten or more years. Getting a rare and expensive Lada was an extraordinary privilege, but the man realized that he did not have the money to upgrade his East German Trabant for a Lada. This disappointment triggered a nervous breakdown: he suffered from crying fits and odd delusions—such as walking through Berlin with Vladimir Lenin, who showed him heaps of dirt that were to be removed. He returned to work after spending two months in a psychiatric hospital, but still showed signs of depression. His subsequent transfer to another workplace did not ease his situation. He told colleagues there that he had sold his dacha in order to improve his financial situation, and that he regretted this decision. Becoming heavily agitated after a foot operation was scheduled for his son, the man went to the property of a neighbor, where he slashed his wrists and died.Footnote ⁹⁵ A detailed Stasi report based on a two-week investigation revealed that the unexpected offer of an attractive car had triggered the man's suicidal feelings—but that these were not the actual cause. There had been conflicts within the family for years, and the man was plagued with feelings of guilt because of his mentally handicapped daughter. After returning from the psychiatric hospital, the man's pathological fears led him to believe that his son suffered from a malignant tumor. His wife assured him that their son would only undergo a harmless operation, but he nevertheless panicked and committed suicide. This case was one of many suicides caused or aggravated by family conflicts and mental health issues, whereas political aspects remained superficial and nonessential. Available statistical data suggest, moreover, that this was representative of a large percentage of suicides in the GDR.

A third factor that helped sustain incorrect suspicions about the correlation between the political system and suicide rates in the GDR was the dictatorship's own decision to treat both individual suicides and statistics on suicide as taboo—a choice that often had unintended consequences. The fact that investigations of suicide were considered a state secret not only aroused suspicions but also encouraged misleading interpretations—as, for example, in the case of the American singer and actor Dean Reed. The left-wing artist had lived in the GDR since the 1970s, and had even married one of East Germany's best known actresses. He committed suicide in 1986, and the SED officially declared Reed's death to be a “tragic accident.” The concealment of the actual cause of his death aroused suspicions of murder among his friends and relatives. The Western media circulated claims that the prominent singer had died after his car had plunged into a lake, and that he was found with a rope around his neck.Footnote ⁹⁶ That graphic account was a combination of half-truths and errors, but a more complete picture of what had occurred failed to emerge because the Stasi homicide squad that investigated the death kept all the details secret. The rumors that circulated about his death were completely wrong—including one that Reed was a Western agent, or that the Stasi had murdered him to prevent him from returning to the United States.

The rumors could not be debunked before the opening of the Stasi archive after 1990. The file on this case provides clear evidence, in fact, of the role played by a private conflict. After a serious argument with his wife and a first attempt to slash his wrists, Reed drove his car to a lake, and damages made to the car were a strong indication of the man's excited mental state. A rope was found nearby, suggesting that he had likely intended to hang himself. He chose instead to take an overdose of drugs, then dived into the water and went swimming—until he became unconscious and drowned. There is not the slightest hint that any other person was involved. The investigation also failed to detect any political influence on his decision, a conclusion supported by Reed's suicide note. Though hastily written, the fifteen-page letter highlighted Reed's state of mind at the time of his death. Suggesting that he had suspected the erroneous suspicions his death would arouse, the letter emphasizes his unshakeable belief in communism, and instead offers an extended criticism of his wife.Footnote ⁹⁷

Twenty-five years earlier, the tabooing of the suicide of an East German army officer had provoked similar suspicions. General Vinzenz Müller died of self-defenestration on the May 12, 1961. He received a state funeral to maintain a pretense of normality, but that did not prevent the West Berlin media from claiming that East German police officers and the Stasi had driven him to suicide. According to an eyewitness account publicized in the West, a prison transport vehicle had driven up in front of the retired general's house: shortly thereafter, several officers entered the house and Müller jumped out the window. The details of the report were close to the actual course of events, but the interpretation as a whole was erroneous.

During World War II, Müller was one of the few high-ranking Wehrmacht officers who joined the anti-Nazi National Committee for a Free Germany during his time as a Soviet prisoner-of-war. He later became chief of staff of the East German National People's Army, as well as deputy minister of defense. As part of SED efforts to purge former Nazis following the foundation and consolidation of the NVA, Mueller was forced to retire in 1958; he was no longer invited to state ceremonies, and he was even kept under surveillance. Yet, his permanent fear of arrest resulted from unjustified paranoia resulting, at least in part, from a series of personal conflicts. Müller's wife had committed suicide in the late 1950s, and he had an uneasy conscience because of an affair with a young woman. To escape this embarrassing situation, the retired general prepared to leave the GDR at the beginning of 1961, but, at the very last moment, he decided to cancel his plans because of revelations in a West German newspaper that he had been involved in mass shootings during World War II. Müller's situation now appeared to be precarious in both German states; he increasingly developed signs of ill health and was temporarily hospitalized. On the day of his suicide, a black ambulance arrived at his home; it was to bring him to the psychiatric ward of a Berlin hospital reserved for government officials. Müller's children had arranged for this under the pretense that he would receive “treatment” for his kidneys. Müller was presumably suspicious and misinterpreted the situation, believing that he was about to be arrested.Footnote ⁹⁸

The SED had good reasons for silencing this suicide. Attention on a leading military figure allegedly involved in war crimes was the last thing the GDR needed in its ideological battle for recognition as a true “antifascist” state. Once again, however, the efforts to conceal the suicide did not proceed smoothly: constant denial and the distribution of false information backfired.Footnote ⁹⁹ Treating the suicide of prominent East Germans as taboo was, of course, grist to the mills of those in the West who were eager to attribute suicides to political conflicts—even when no reliable information was available.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Censorship, conjecture, rumor, and other factors exacerbated this tendency to politicize suicide, and, for the sake of political expediency, public discourse in the West tended to neglect the long-term cultural and pathological factors that usually played a role.