In 2007 a retired farmer from an East German frontier village recounted the moment that the inter-German border became a reality for him. As part of the escalation of the Cold War and the buildup of state power in the summer of 1952, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) revamped its Western border, deported thousands of residents to the hinterland, built a fence, and declared security zones along the border.Footnote 1 Fifty-five years later, the farmer could not recall much about this event—not even the year it took place. But he could easily pinpoint the month, because “they came at the peak of the harvest season; it all happened in June.” Though he did remember that some villagers were deported and had suffered, the worst part of the day for him was that “they came with a tractor and a plow and drove straight through the fields, marked the border; we had no more potatoes on this side, no more beets, nothing. Everything was in the West, end of story.”Footnote 2
This farmer's experience was far from anomalous: all along the border, the events of late May and early June 1952 were imprinted on farmers' consciousness through the loss of the harvest and their fields. Historical accounts of this development highlight deportations, mass emigration to the West, a few violent incidents, and the construction of physical barriers.Footnote 3 Yet, this stage, as well as many others in the process of German division, forced themselves into the lives of farmers primarily through their effects on access to and ownership of land.
This article argues that, for many German farmers, the path to becoming either “East” or “West” German passed through decisions regarding land ownership. It contends that this process progressed gradually, in three distinct stages; that it was largely completed during the first two postwar decades; and that division affected farmers' lives earlier and more dramatically than the lives of most other Germans. To get to their land, the article shows, farmers were the most common border crossers during the period of the so-called kleine Grenzverkehr (Little Border Traffic) of 1947 to 1952. Crossing brought them into daily contact with the developing border, and thus made them quickly recognize the early political and economic divisions, and they were keenly aware of the implications of these developments for agriculture. They knew that West Germany had exhausted its arable land resources and that East Germany, by contrast, had an ample supply of vacant land. This became a major factor in their decision whether to stay put or migrate across the border when crossing permits were suddenly revoked in 1952. Consequently, many East German farmers chose to remain (or to return East after migrating to the West) during this period in order to keep their self-perception as Bauer intact. By the same token, a significant number of West Germans opted for vacant land in East Germany.
The article contributes to a continuing effort to delineate more accurately the chronology of German social division.Footnote 4 The quest to understand how Germans learned to think of themselves as West Germans or as East Germans draws our attention to their lives amid the developing division. Such an inquiry requires turning a scholarly gaze to the complex processes that occurred between and beyond outstanding events such as the 1952 deportations or the 1961 construction of the Berlin Wall. The article contributes to this effort by formulating a more precise chronology of the development of division-related practices and attitudes anchored in agriculture.
It is worth emphasizing at the outset that the results do not dovetail neatly with established chronologies. Viewing division through the lens of farming and land ownership produces a chronology of its own, one that divides the first two postwar decades into three stages. The first eighteen months of occupation were characterized by uncertainty, distress, and chaos, with weak authorities trying to enforce aggressive regulations for food production. The following five-and-a-half years, from late 1946 to May 1952, saw developing political and economic divisions existing alongside a mostly intact social fabric and a relatively open border. During this period, farmers became well acquainted with the emerging economic and political conditions on both sides of the border as they pertained to agriculture. A new stage began when the GDR announced the border closing in May 1952 and deported thousands from the frontier area. Daily border crossing as part of routine life and work was no longer possible outside of Berlin. Over the next decade or so, farmers were forced to choose where they wished to live. Rather than seeing the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961 as the endpoint of division, this article argues that, from the farmers' perspective, crucial stages of division first developed after the Wall.
At the end of this third period, private land ownership in East Germany had been greatly limited by agricultural collectivization, which changed the parameters of farmers' decision-making and pushed many East German farmers to leave for the West. By the mid-1960s, farmers had chosen sides, so to speak, and movement back and forth between the two states ceased to be a viable option.Footnote 5 Existing studies have shown that the 1960s was a watershed decade in terms of the transformation of rural society and the practice of agriculture in West and East Germany.Footnote 6 This holds for the chronology of social division as well. The end of the period covered in this article was marked by a progression of collectivization and border fortification. From 1952 onward, collectivization of agriculture was on the East German agenda.Footnote 7 The Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, SED) pushed it forcefully beginning in 1959, but it remained a bone of contention in the GDR until at least the mid-1960s.Footnote 8 Fortification of the long rural border was carried out in the fall of 1961, following the erection of the Berlin Wall. Another wave of deportations and plans for transforming the Western border then came on a massive scale, and this project was not even close to completion before the end of the decade.Footnote 9 Yet, even as incomplete processes, the combined effect of these two projects transformed the balance of decision-making for farmers during the first half of the 1960s. East Germans who managed to remain private farmers in organizations officially declared to be agricultural collectives (Landwirtschaftliche Produktiongenossenschaften, LPG) soon realized that state agencies would not allow such compromises to stand. In addition, even though East German border facilities were constructed slowly, crossing the border became riskier from the early 1960s onward, especially for non-locals. Thus, by 1965, the lines of social division had been solidified on the ground.
This article tackles those areas in which processes of social division were the most dramatic and consequential, namely, along the inter-German border. The common social fabric was strongest in the borderlands where long-time neighbors, relatives, and friends lived East and West of the borderline, and where cross-border economic and social networks abounded. The borderlands were also overwhelmingly rural in character. For many frontier residents, like rural populations elsewhere, land was a crucial material asset, as well as an anchor of identification, a status marker, and the venue in which routine activities took place.Footnote 10 Disruption of ownership and work patterns required protracted negotiations between state agencies and frontier farmers. For many farmers who lived in frontier areas close to the inter-German border, moving or staying put remained a choice until at least the mid-1960s. Such choices colored the biographies of the farmers, contributing over time to the emergence of distinct East and West German communities.
The first part of this article discusses the earliest stages of the postwar stabilization under Allied occupation, showing that farmers were forced to contend with division from the very start. A critical concern for all governing officials in occupied Germany was to ensure a sufficient food supply.Footnote 11 Regulation of agricultural production and marketing thus became a priority, and the occupiers' intervention pulled farmers away from border-crossing trade: division was thus introduced, in this way, into the routines and calculations of many farmers. The second part of the article deals with the period from 1947 to 1952. These years are typically identified with growing tensions among the Allies and with the finalization of German division. For frontier farmers, the period was defined by an array of local arrangements that allowed routine border crossing for agricultural work. Crossing the border regularly to get to their land, many thousands of farmers were confronted with regulation disparities and declining economic coordination between authorities on both sides of the border. Frontier farmers became keen observers of division processes and astute manipulators of the opportunities the latter afforded. The third and final section centers on farmers' decisions to live East or West of the inter-German divide, arguing that these were conscious choices that directly affected their self-perceptions. Through August 1961, and to a lesser degree until the mid-1960s, migrating (legally or illegally) across the inter-German border was relatively easy, and many did so.Footnote 12 For most farmers, choosing where to live was closely tied to land ownership and agricultural employment. Focusing on these three stages, the article demonstrates, then, that division struck root in individual and communal modes of identification partly through its effects on land ownership and agriculture.
German Division—Land First (1945–1946)
Almost immediately, farmers were confronted with the conflicting central-planning strategies adopted by the Soviet, British, French, and American occupation authorities. Concern about short-term food supply in their own zones drove Allied administrations to disrupt preexisting economic networks in the border areas.Footnote 13 Because agriculture is tied to immobile means of production, which are relatively simple to supervise and tax, the emergence of zonal borders affected the sector earlier and more dramatically than other economic branches. More specifically, the new demarcation lines quickly affected the marketing of produce through legally sanctioned channels.Footnote 14 Security forces and government officials on both sides claimed control over the land and its products. They proceeded to regulate and supervise food production closely, thereby limiting agricultural production and marketing. These interventions were the primary means through which many thousands of frontier residents first experienced German division.
Unlike the situation in the American and French zones, land reform was an important feature of Soviet and British occupation policy in Germany. Such activity was partly aimed at the large estate owners (mostly those east of the Elbe), who were regarded by many Allied leaders as pillars of militarism and nationalism. By the time the Red Army rolled into Brandenburg, most of those estate owners had fled westward, committed suicide, or been detained or killed.Footnote 15 Soviet land reform plans sought to break up large estates and divide the land into rentable plots. The goal was to loosen the hold of conservative rural elites on local political power and to empower refugees, landless laborers, and smallholders. At the same time, the reform aimed to give more people, specifically refugees, a stable source of income to curtail endless movement and alleviate hunger and misery.Footnote 16 Land reform in the Soviet Zone was multifaceted, but it had two consequences crucial for an analysis of division: first, it significantly reduced differences in land ownership between East and West Germany. Traditional developments had split the two major patterns of land inheritance in Germany (dividing the land between siblings, or keeping it whole in the hands of one child) along the Elbe River. But large swaths of the East Elbian regions were absorbed by Poland, and those estates that fell into the Soviet Zone were split up or nationalized under the reform. By 1946, average plot size in the Soviet Zone was no longer significantly different from that in other occupation zones.
The second consequence of Soviet land reform concerned the number of individual landowners throughout Germany, but especially those in the Soviet Zone.Footnote 17 Among the millions who fled and/or were driven from East Central Europe to occupied Germany were many who hoped to acquire some form of land as a means of subsistence. Land reform allowed the Soviets to assign these individuals plots—which, many soon discovered, were not up to the task because of their small size or poor soil quality. The Western occupation zones had no comparable supply of cheap land.Footnote 18 Countering the longer trend of rural emigration, Germany experienced a significant flow of migration to the countryside during most of the 1940s. The numbers of landowners and land laborers increased during the final years of the war and the early postwar years.Footnote 19 Consequently, more and more residents of occupied Germany had interests directly tied to the land.
The emerging division affected those interests almost immediately. Demarcation lines between occupation zones were largely unmarked, and none of the Allies was in a position to control movement across them effectively. Allied soldiers were not concerned about such movements initially. Moreover, the constant traffic of refugees, former concentration camp inmates, forced laborers, and returning prisoners-of-war made it difficult to supervise the constant crossing of these long, unmarked borderlines.Footnote 20 But agriculture soon became an object of keen concern because of acute food shortages in all four zones. Agricultural producers located in border areas were connected in supply-and-demand networks or by traditional markets that predated the demarcation lines, but none of the Allies wanted foodstuffs grown in its territory to be used to feed residents of other zones. Division thus affected the lives of many farmers through regulations governing the harvest and marketing of agricultural products.
Some aspects of agriculture are relatively easy to regulate. Fields cannot be hidden, nor can dairy farms, orchards, or forests. Production facilities, machinery, and warehouses are also unlikely to escape monitoring by state agents. Such agents arrived in many villages in occupied Germany as the administrations of each occupation zone prioritized efforts to feed residents within their territorially defined jurisdictions. Topography and regional divergence in land quality, as well as the availability of certain minerals, had created multiple dependencies and ties across administrative and state borders, especially since the establishment of the Customs Union (Zollverein) in the mid-nineteenth century. When the occupying powers tried to limit economic transactions to their own zones, agriculture along the border suffered as a result. The experience of the Werra Valley communities provides a good example of this.
The communities living in this valley in central Germany were economically tied to the river valley towns and to the railway that connected them to larger centers. Their main markets, as well as most of their economic and administrative interactions, were in the towns of Bad Sooden-Allendorf, Witzenhausen, and Eschwege, all located in the state of Hesse. The villages in the valley along the northeastern bank of the Werra were thus integrated economically into Hesse to the southwest of the river, not into the mountainous Thuringian lands to the northeast. In terms of administration, some of these communities belonged to Hesse and others to Thuringia, but, prior to 1945, these borders had not determined their economic integration into Hesse. Even before the end of the war, the occupation and division of Germany had undermined these ties. On April 8, 1945, retreating Wehrmacht soldiers blew up the bridge connecting the villages of the northeastern bank of the Werra to the West, eliminating the most convenient passage across the river. The demarcation line between the Soviet and American zones first stabilized only in September; quickly thereafter, it became a more restrictive divide than any of the administrative and state borders that had preceded it.Footnote 21
One of the earliest effects of division in this area involved the marketing of agricultural products. There were many dairy farms in the valley's villages, and all of them delivered their milk to the dairy producer at Bad Sooden-Allendorf. But, in the fall of 1945, Soviet administrators instructed farmers living east of the demarcation line to deliver their produce to Heiligenstadt in the Soviet Zone. Whereas Bad Sooden-Allendorf is located approximately four miles from the villages and is at the same altitude, Heiligenstadt is located over twelve miles away and is more than a thousand feet higher. The marketing of agricultural produce therefore required greater effort and expense. Some products became almost unprofitable as a result. Milk sent to Heiligenstadt lost some of its fat (and thus its value) during the long journey in summer, and the milk spoiled completely on particularly hot days. Winter was even worse: the roads to Heiligenstadt often froze, thus preventing milk carriers from making the trip. Overall, the cost of transporting milk to Heiligenstadt now consumed half the returns the farmers got on their milk.Footnote 22
The rising cost of transportation to and from border communities was a major problem on both sides of the demarcation line.Footnote 23 Complaints by one dairy producer from Herzberg in West Germany, who had to absorb these costs once the roads leading into the Soviet Zone had been blocked, shed light on this. Until the summer of 1945, the delivery truck had made cost-effective rounds through villages spread along a single road. But when farms in the Soviet Zone were henceforth not allowed to deliver to the West, the truck had to make separate trips to many small villages in Lower Saxony, which thus became final destinations. The cost of delivery rose steeply as a result. By 1953, transportation costs were more than double the average cost per kilogram of milk elsewhere in Germany. It would thus be impossible to continue marketing milk products in border areas, this producer explained, without government intervention.Footnote 24
Rising transportation costs were just one example of the effects of division on agricultural work routines and related activities during this first period of division. Rival state organizations (with conflicting priorities) made division a factor in the lives of frontier farmers in other ways as well. For German farmers, then, division was a dramatic, tangible process from the earliest postwar days. It meant land reallocation on a grand scale under the Soviets—and a lack thereof elsewhere. It also meant aggressive interference in the economy throughout occupied Germany, as well as attempts to align production and marketing with zonal demarcations. The upshot was divergent opportunities and regulations in different zones, something that farmers were quick to note. As we shall see later, all these factors came into play when farmers chose which side of the border they wished to live.
Routine Demarcation of Agricultural Practice: The Little Border Traffic and its Demise (1947–1952)
As noted earlier, milk producers of the Werra Valley had a major economic motive to cross the border. Yet, border crossing was an even greater economic necessity for the thousands of farmers who resided across the demarcation line from all or part of their landholdings. For them, the new demarcation lines spelled great hardship. Following the first year of occupation, however, new arrangements, referred to as the “Little Border Traffic” (kleine Grenzverkehr), were forged. The resulting pattern of agricultural work was representative of this second period (1947–1952), which was marked by a gradual normalization of division. Regional German bureaucracies regulated the Little Border Traffic under an umbrella directive issued jointly by the Allies.Footnote 25 Farmers and other workers received renewable permits (typically for three months at a time) that allowed them to cross over to the neighboring zone for work-related purposes. This regulation did not apply to goods, however, only to people. While permit holders could initially cross freely for the purpose stated in their permit, many shifts in the implementation of this regulation took place over the five years during which this system was in effect.Footnote 26 These arrangements, which affected thousands of individuals, gave rise to a routine of daily border crossing and work which, as we shall see, called for a continual negotiation of emerging economic, political, and legal gaps between East and West.
It is difficult to say with certainty how many households were affected by the Little Border Traffic: the numbers fluctuated and were not systematically reported. Thuringia, which spanned about a third of the length of the border on the East German side, reported that 6,514 such permits had been issued for state residents in January 1952, of which 5,263 went to farmers.Footnote 27 Agriculture was prevalent along most of the length of this border on both sides. Even where the demarcation lines followed preexisting administrative borders closely, these lines had not affected property ownership or work patterns prior to 1945. It was common to own and/or work land in one occupation zone while residing in another. For example, in four border districts (Grenzkreise) in Lower Saxony (in the British Zone)—which made up roughly one-sixth of the length of the border on its western side—221 farming households owned 729 hectares (approximately 1,801 acres) in the Soviet Zone.Footnote 28 During the five years of the Little Border Traffic, these farmers could cross the border daily to work their land, and the vast majority did so. Yet, the numbers alone do not tell the whole story. The regulations were inconsistently enforced, and police, customs officers, and other agents could deny crossing even to permit holders, withdraw permits, refuse to renew them, or cause lengthy delays on the way to or from work.Footnote 29 In addition, the permits did not include an allowance for goods. This was not problematic for some permit holders, but it posed great difficulty for those farmers who required tools, machinery, and animal power, as well as daily food provisioning. This was why border crossing for agricultural work always entailed small-scale smuggling. Farmers holding permits were thus vulnerable to charges of bringing “unregistered goods” across the border.Footnote 30
The economic viability of borderland agriculture was always at risk because of shifting regulations and inconsistent enforcement. A critical threat to the entire system emerged in the summer of 1948, when the Western Allies reformed the West German currency and thereby effectively divided occupied Germany's economic system in half, with authorities on both sides of the border scrambling to regulate the use of now two currencies. The reform started a chain reaction that included a much less effective currency reform in the Soviet Zone and, more infamously, the Berlin Blockade, which lasted almost a year and prompted a US-led airlift to supply those living in West Berlin. The implications of the currency reform for participants in the Little Border Traffic have drawn scant scholarly attention: though the events of June 1948 presented all residents of occupied Germany with hard evidence of the progressing division, routine border crossers, who had to manage earnings in one currency and expenses in another while navigating taxation and regulation in both, felt the sting of reform most strongly.Footnote 31
The new situation required improvisation, especially on the part of farmers. These challenges were, like the regulation of the Little Border Traffic, handled locally, with minimal involvement by central state agencies. Authorities expected tax payment for wages and real estate in local currency. Moreover, agricultural produce had to be marketed in the zone where it was produced, which meant that income was in the currency of that zone. Wages were also paid in local currency. Contrary to initial expectations, most farmers (and industrial workers) found ways to deal with the two currencies, even in the absence of official exchange options. No agreements, official or otherwise, were made on this issue between authorities east and west of the border. Farmers used their own connections and resources to meet this challenge and overwhelmingly succeeded in both keeping their lands and living off them. Connections on both sides, as well as lively, unofficial border-crossing trade, provided the necessary currency-exchange options.Footnote 32
Public property posed a thornier problem. Several towns and villages along the border had significant assets “on the other side,” and, as official entities with supervised budgets, they could not avail themselves of the aforementioned currency solutions. For example, the town forests of Duderstadt (located in Lower Saxony in the British Zone) and of Bad Sooden-Allendorf (Hesse in the US Zone) were located in the Soviet Zone. Both towns derived their income and material supplies from the forests, and both tried to retain as much of this income as possible. Bad Sooden-Allendorf failed completely in this endeavor, whereas Duderstadt's efforts were partly successful. As we shall see, the solutions chosen by the two towns between 1946 and 1952 revealed both the rigidifying of Allied attitudes, as well as the flexibility of the actual practice of division. In the presence of good will and cooperation, land could be used to alleviate the effects of division. When local cooperation was weak, however, land turned into a bone of contention, weaving division into the fabric of borderland society.
Bad Sooden-Allendorf owned a 550-hectare (approximately 1,359-acre) forest in a territory transferred to the Soviet Occupation Zone in September 1945, as part of the so-called Wanfried Treaty. Wood from this forest had long provided materials for local industry and crafts, as well as for heating and other civilian needs. It was also an important source of income for the municipality. Town foresters lost access to their workplace immediately following the exchange, and, beginning in the spring of 1946, town officials tried to regain access to the forest. From October 1946, the Little Border Traffic paved the way for the negotiation of inter-zonal crossing permits between municipal and district (Kreis) offices on both sides. The town sought to manage its forest based on the land registry rather than on the location of the border. Proposals in this spirit had already been exchanged between Hessian and Thuringian authorities before the currency reform, but the strict American and Soviet opposition to any form of official agreement, even on the local level, beyond the temporary crossing permits of the Little Border Traffic hampered the success of such maneuvers. The currency reform sounded the death knell for these negotiations. Attempts to deal with administrative obstacles concerning border crossing, work regulations, taxes, sales, and now also currency conversions were completely shelved as a result.Footnote 33
Duderstadt, for its part, owned a 420-hectare (approximately 1,038-acre) forest in the Soviet Zone. Entering negotiations no less difficult than those faced by their counterparts in Bad Sooden-Allendorf, officials there arrived at a creative solution. The territory of Duderstadt included extensive arable lands tilled by residents of the Soviet Zone, who crossed the border each day as part of the Little Border Traffic. This was also true for Bad Sooden-Allendorf, but that did not affect the negotiations. The neighboring districts of Duderstadt (West) and Worbis (East) then worked out an arrangement that eliminated the need for currency exchange. Residents of the Worbis district who owned land in Duderstadt paid the taxes they owed Duderstadt to Worbis, and, with this money, Worbis paid the salaries of local foresters hired to work Duderstadt's town forest. Duderstadt and Worbis authorities were able to keep the Allies and their rigid dictates out of the negotiations, partly because no currency exchange was involved.Footnote 34 Considered together, these cases suggest that certain factors—above all, connections and good will between neighbors across the border—were pivotal in determining reactions to the tensions generated by the ongoing division. Arrangements of this kind throw light, then, on the progress of social division more generally.
In the two aforementioned cases, division worked its way into land-based routines. In Bad Sooden-Allendorf, alternative wood sources were sought (and found), as was compensation from the state for the lost income. In Duderstadt, established regional networks and interdependence permitted a coordinated mechanism driven by the acceptance of division and the curbing of farmers' illicit dealings in two currencies. Such arrangements were typical for the normalization of division that characterized the period of the Little Border Traffic. Locally designed mechanisms aimed at maintaining preexisting social and economic networks accompanied this growing recognition of division. Farmers legally crossed the border to work their land, and they clung to the idea that, despite political and economic divisions (which grew deeper on a daily basis), they would be able to hold on to their homes and farms. They might live under different regimes and use different currencies, but they were all “from here”—farmers who could cooperate to resist the forces trying to pull them apart.
Border Crossing, Land Ownership, and Agriculture between 1952 and 1965
The following years witnessed an erosion in the ability of farmers to maintain their farms. This occurred much earlier and to a greater degree in West than in East Germany. A combination of land reform, deportations, and mass emigration had left the latter with an abundance of vacant arable land. West Germany, for its part, had exhausted its reserves of land by absorbing refugees. Beginning in the mid-1950s, its economic growth also made small-scale farming unsustainable.Footnote 35 The following section demonstrates that, between the watershed period of 1952 and the mid-1960s, the possibility of land ownership and the viability of agricultural work were crucial considerations for farmers choosing to live either in East or in West Germany.
Migration between the two postwar states has been well researched. Yet, only a handful of studies has devoted space specifically to farmer migration, and no study has discussed conscious decisions by farmers to stay put and not migrate.Footnote 36 Patrick Major has written a comprehensive analysis of movement across the inter-German border and devotes a full chapter to analyzing the causes and perceptions of border crossing prior to the construction of the Berlin Wall.Footnote 37 This analysis briefly discusses the border-crossing behavior of farmers, at a time when they constituted a significant percentage of the overall migration from East to West during the years 1952–1953 and in 1960.Footnote 38 Yet, Major simply mentions (without elaborating any further) that farmers were tied to their land, and claims that they therefore mostly stayed put.Footnote 39 The next section complements Major's work, as well as that of others who have written on this topic. It focuses on the dilemmas faced by farmers during this period, arguing that the choice of sides had long-term implications for the self-perception of these farmers.
i) Migration from East to West
During the 1950s, an average of about a quarter of a million people crossed the border from East to West Germany annually. Broken down by occupation, this figure reveals a strong underrepresentation of farmers. Only following the East German fortification of the border, the deportations that took place in the summer of 1952, and the collectivization drive of 1959–1960 (discussed later) did the number of farmers approach their proportion of the population as a whole.Footnote 40 When farmers did move, their decision often hinged on the possibility of retaining or regaining access to land and other material assets (e.g., buildings, farm animals, machines). GDR border measures in the summer of 1952 separated many farming households from all or part of their land, and members of those households were now more likely to move to the West because they had land there that they could work.
The months of May and June 1952 were, as we have seen, a landmark period for residents of the inter-German borderlands. East German authorities, determined to shape a new reality, forced farmers to make tough choices—such as the family of Igor Schlenk. Two-thirds of its lands lay west of the border, though the family home was in tiny Sickenberg in the GDR. On the morning of June 6, 1952, East German forces entered the village and told the Schlenks to load a truck with their belongings: they were to be evacuated further inland. The family threw together some staples and ran the other way. Leaving behind their house and other property, they moved only a few kilometers south to nearby Bad Sooden-Allendorf in West Germany, and could continue to work the lion's share of their land.Footnote 41
Björn Ostfeld's family took a more tortuous route to the same destination. Its home, located in the neighboring village of Asbach, also on the GDR side of the border, was located in a narrow strip disputed by East and West German authorities. The family members held double citizenship for a number of years and received official residence papers from the West, but they were economically and socially integrated into their East German village. In June 1952, the conflict surrounding their house and fields turned into a series of standoffs, and the family found itself living in constant fear. Seeking refuge in the West, they kept working their fields until local negotiations finally settled the borderline dispute, leaving most of their lands in East Germany. Thanks to his good local contacts, the father was able to sign rental contracts with GDR farmers who owned land in the West, thereby supplementing what the family had lost.Footnote 42 Like thousands of farming families, the members of these two families became West German citizens in 1952–1953. In frontier areas, the number of farmers who moved to the West was greater than that of farmers deported inland. Rural communities along the GDR side of the border lost up to a third of their residents as a result. The border was not officially closed thereafter, but it became impossible to cross routinely for work-related purposes. From 1952 onward, frontier farmers knew that they would have to choose between East and West.
For East German farmers who did not own land in the Federal Republic, moving to the West entailed real uncertainty. Driven by US opposition to the disruption of property relations, land-ownership patterns were not affected by land reform in the West as they had been in the East. Despite the incentives offered by a fast-growing economy and by government policies designed to persuade small holders to give up their land, West German farmers were reluctant to relinquish land ownership in the 1950s—even as they accepted nonagricultural jobs elsewhere.Footnote 43 Arable land was consequently scarce and expensive in West Germany—and then further exhausted by Land and federal governments as part of their effort to ameliorate the plight of the millions of refugees and expellees from Eastern Europe pouring into West Germany.Footnote 44 Despite attempts to protect agricultural producers, the number of those employed in the primary sector in West Germany rapidly shrank in the 1950s and 1960s, but without freeing up much land.Footnote 45 Moving from East to West Germany, farmers and other agricultural workers could not, then, expect to replace their land and retain their previous profession. A move to the West meant a radical shift in occupation, lifestyle, and self-perception. It meant, in effect, a move to the “city.”
Migration from the village to the city is commonly considered a basic feature of modernization. Often complicated and conflictual, such a move confronts migrants with a number of formidable challenges, such as unfamiliar communal structures, work environments, and rhythms of life. Moreover, migration to the city often entails a radical shift in self-perception.Footnote 46 In postwar Germany, millions ended up making this dramatic transition as a by-product of other decisions—specifically, the decision to relocate to West Germany. In these farmer-migrant “life-stories” (including those of expellees from Eastern Europe and of long-time residents of what became the Soviet Zone and later the GDR), the notion of the “city” was incorporated into the image of the “West.” Such perceptions held true not only for those who chose to move to the West. Staying put in the face of emerging division and growing emigration was a deliberate choice, then: one largely informed by land availability. As we shall see, this applied most clearly to those farmers who had moved to the West and then chose to return to East Germany. For many, the GDR was associated with the life of the rural community, which offered intimacy and security as well as repression and underdevelopment.
The possibility of owning and running a sustainable farm proved to be a major factor in the migration choices of many East German farmers. This was the case, for instance, for one East German cattle farmer who bought calves and raised them for slaughter, assuming credit early on but then earning a good income later in the year. In 1959, the local LPG in his village leveraged his summer debt in an effort to persuade him to join, but he opted to resolve his problem in a different fashion: on Sunday, August 23, 1959, the farmer led his fourteen head of cattle, as well as his wife and two children (ages five and ten), through a gate in the border fence to West Germany. They left their farmhouse and belongings behind—along with their debts. The land they had received under the land reform was not fertile and had no water sources, and their most valuable asset was their cows. This family thus “became” West German once independent farming no longer provided a sufficient livelihood for them in East Germany.Footnote 47
For another East German farming family, the decision to move to the West in 1960 was more clearly tied to the process of collectivization. With three children aged ten, eleven, and fourteen, the family crossed the Werra River on an open cart pulled by five cows. According to the West German regional newspaper that reported the story, they had left behind a furnished farmhouse, five hectares (approximately 12.5 acres) of arable land, seven pigs, as well as many sheep, goats, and fowl: “the couple and their children swapped all that for freedom.”Footnote 48 This family, which had now become West German, had clearly not chosen “freedom” as an abstract value: only after losing their farmland and self-perception as independent farmers did they move. For them, becoming West German meant giving up farming and becoming something else.Footnote 49
In the years 1959–1960, East German authorities once again pressured farmers to join agricultural collectives. This proved to be the last straw for many farming families in East Germany, who consequently chose to relocate to the West.Footnote 50 But full collectivization, officially achieved in the spring of 1960, was not finished, in fact, until the mid-1960s. One of the best documented cases of emigration to the West during this period was the mass crossing of about a quarter of the inhabitants of the village Böseckendorf, located just on the GDR border with Lower Saxony in the county (Bezirk) of Erfurt during the night of October 2, 1961. Scholars have portrayed this episode as a response to the renewed buildup of the GDR's “state border West” (Staatsgrenze West) following the erection of the Berlin Wall. This was certainly true, but a concentration on the drama of deportations, minefields, and fences blurs the significance of collectivization as a motive for crossing to the West.Footnote 51 Though the latter had been declared complete more than a year earlier, this event was part of the ongoing negotiations that continued to take place. The local LPG in Böseckendorf was stripped of its leadership, and its legitimacy was challenged by this mass departure. Those who left included fourteen of the better-off farming families in the village, including the chairman of the LPG. The collective had been formed the year before under intense pressure from a brigade of party “activists,” and the approximately fifty people who subsequently left the village voted—with their legs—against collectivization. Had they been able to do so, they surely would have taken their land with them.Footnote 52 Party organs attempted to discipline Böseckendorf following this incident, but sixteen months later, another group from the village also managed to cross to the West. It consisted of two entire families (who were among the remaining medium-size landholders), as well as the new chairman of the LPG.Footnote 53 These farmers chose West Germany only after they had lost the ability to farm independently. Yet, faced with the same choice, most of their neighbors opted to stay. The reasons for that are the subject of the next subsection.
ii) Decisions to Stay in the East
Research on emigration from the GDR tends to obscure the fact that most residents chose to remain. In Böseckendorf, as in other parts of East Germany, the overwhelming majority stayed put during the early process of state-building, deportations, deepening division, and collectivization. Overt and covert police action (or the fear thereof), as well as ideological mobilization, often influenced this decision.Footnote 54 Border crossing during the 1950s was a widely available option. Moving to the West was not risk-free, and in most cases illegal, but did not require complicated planning or great sophistication, as the successful migration of friends and neighbors made clear. Farmers who continued to live as they had before division did not attract media attention, however—which helps account for the short shrift this choice has thus far received in the scholarship.
Alongside habituation and fear of state security forces, the GDR's reserves of vacant arable land also contributed to the decision by farmers to stay in East Germany—or move there from West Germany. In the Werra Valley communities discussed earlier, milk farming became less profitable after 1945, as we have seen. Agriculture nevertheless remained the primary source of income for most inhabitants there. The communities negotiated with GDR authorities and reached an agreement whereby the state sent some locals to university for specialized training in mechanics and agriculture; they also supported a gradual shift in local agriculture to the growing of vegetables. Local farmers joined a collective dedicated to this new agricultural endeavor and founded a successful business for the marketing of these new products. Those farmers who chose to stay on the East German side of the Werra Valley were thus forced to give up private ownership and milk farming. The idea of collectivization was not popular, but they preferred it to leaving for the West. As LPG farmers, they were able to remain in their homes and communities, and, no less important, to continue working their lands.Footnote 55 With this transition during the years 1952–1965, German division was firmly integrated into the biographies of these farmers: being East German was part and parcel of holding onto their home and land. One might say that they were East Germans because they were farmers—and that they were farmers because they were East Germans.
iii) Migration from West to East
Accounts of inter-German migration during the period of national division generally center on movement from East to West, and the opposite direction is only discussed—if at all—in passing. Yet, during the 1950s, between thirty thousand and seventy thousand people decided to cross annually from West to East Germany.Footnote 56 Access to land and agricultural work often figured strongly in this decision. Precise numbers are difficult to ascertain, partly because of the confusion caused by the categories used in the extant East German records. As Andrea Schmelz has demonstrated, GDR authorities designated many immigrants as “workers”: one consequence of this categorization is that the numbers given for farmers (Bauern) do not include the many who had gone to the GDR to work in agriculture but were identified in terms of their profession as workers.Footnote 57 As a result of emigration, deportations from the border regions, mismanagement of land reform (as well as insufficient state support for the new farms that the latter created), and the continuing process of “flight from the land,” thousands of acres of arable land remained untended in the GDR.Footnote 58 This was a serious problem, especially with food shortages remaining rampant. Beginning in 1954, the GDR tried to lure West German farmers by offering them vacant land. Districts were directed to compile lists of untended plots, including statistics on available housing, livestock, and other inventory, and this was then used to attract West Germans interested in farming. In addition, district authorities were instructed to assign a person in each of the affected committees to handle the intake of the expected Westerners.Footnote 59 It seems that those in government circles overestimated the flow of farmers from the West. One cause for the underwhelming results of this program was, in all likelihood, that some of the areas containing the most vacant lands were excluded from the program—in the very same directive—on security grounds.Footnote 60 More significant, though, these results suggest that the majority of West German farmers did not consider moving to the GDR a reasonable option, even if it did offer cheap land.
Still, thousands of people did opt to move (or return) to East Germany to work in the primary sector. Applications were not as numerous as expected, but they did come—and in significant numbers.Footnote 61 Thanks to a special clearance process put into place for settling Westerners in border districts, there are detailed records of the applications and of their processing. The agenda of the weekly meetings of the committee active in the border district of Heiligenstadt, for example, regularly featured a discussion about West German applications to settle in local villages. Because of security considerations, the committee typically only approved applications from natives of that region or from their spouses, who wished to return to work or inherit their parents' farm.Footnote 62 The story of Thomas Lang reveals the power of intergenerational commitment to family property. Lang's parents owned a plot in a small village in the county (Bezirk) of Cottbus. He was able to purchase a small patch for himself in 1951, but continued to work with his parents. Lang acquired debt as a private farmer, which is why he decided to move to the West. After he had left in December 1952, his plot was given to the local LPG. He returned to the village in August 1953, however, after learning that his parents were unable to maintain their farm without him, and their land was also taken over by the LPG the following summer. Lang responded by filing official complaints with village officials, the district, and even Berlin, and finally succeeded in reclaiming his parents' land. He was not able to have his own plot returned, but did stay in East Germany to help his parents keep their farm afloat.Footnote 63
Thomas Lang was far from alone in his commitment to the family farm. The fate of the family plot was a serious consideration for many village residents, even those who had left at a young age—and even when they decided not to return to the village after their parents died.Footnote 64 The correspondence between Lothar Fromm, a resident of Paderborn in West Germany, and the council (Gemeinderat) of his native East German village, Wingerode, in 1959–1960, provides an interesting illustration of this.Footnote 65 Fromm moved from Wingerode to Paderborn during the 1920s and, when his parents died, he and his sister (who had also left the village) leased the family plot of 6.4 hectares (approximately 16 acres). In 1959, he received a letter from the village council saying that the plot had been slated to become part of the LPG that was to be formed in the village. The council requested that Fromm sign a contract to sell the plot at a given price. In the ensuing correspondence (involving the Federal Ministry of All-German Affairs), Fromm made a vigorous attempt to oppose the transaction—but eventually complied with the council's request only after learning that his sister and six other owners of adjacent plots had already signed and were waiting for their money, which was being held until he also signed. Despite living in Paderborn for most of his adult life, Fromm remained tied to his East German village and to his family's plot until 1959. German division became an integral part of his biography through this small plot of land when he had to give it up. He was no longer the owner of arable land and, at the same time, he lost much of the connection he still had to East Germany.
Other individuals with no landholdings were connected to land as a result of their professions. This was true, for example, of forester Dorothee Garn from the town of Heiligenstadt. She moved to West Germany in November 1954, but returned a year later asking to be reinstated in her old position. According to a monthly report by the department of internal affairs (Abteilung für Innere Angelegenheiten) in the Heiligenstadt district, her reason for returning was closely tied to that position: she could not find work as a forester in West Germany and thus had to make a living as a housekeeper, working long hours for low pay. In December 1955, she gave up the plentiful shops of the West in favor of certainty and job security in the East. At the same time, she also gave up the city for the forest—and for her hometown.Footnote 66 Because Germany was now divided, she was forced to choose between two distinct options—and when she chose forest work, she also chose East Germany. German division had thus become part of her self-perception in the period of 1954–1955—and, by the end of these two years, she had become “East German.”
Conclusion
This article argues that the process of German division contributed to changes in the relations of many farmers to land ownership and to agricultural work. Such changes, in turn, affected the process of social division in Germany; it was in this way that identification as “East” or “West” German solidified and that notions of difference between them became more broadly recognized. Individual farmers, families, and communities in rural areas absorbed division into their self-understanding through conflict and negotiation, as well as through choices about their land.
Agriculture in Germany has been exposed to the pressures of modernization since at least the nineteenth century. Increasing numbers of farmers gave up living off the land and moved to urban centers. At the end of World War II, only about 30 percent of all Germans still depended, even in part, on agriculture for their livelihood. On both sides of the inter-German divide, governments invested considerable effort in transforming agriculture. In West Germany, these efforts involved “modernization” and “land consolidation,” which were part of the process of integration into the European Economic Community. In East Germany, by contrast, party and state agencies exerted direct and sometimes even violent pressure on farmers—first during the land reform of 1945–1946, then again during the 1950s—especially between 1959 and 1965 as part of the massive collectivization drive. In addition to the processes of state-building on both sides of the Iron Curtain, such pressures forced farmers in postwar Germany to make difficult decisions regarding both their communities and their land.
The evolving division of Germany confronted farmers, from its earliest days, with a set of pragmatic and material considerations rooted in attachment to the land. As food producers, farmers were exposed to division from the very beginning as a result of the Allied decision to regulate the marketing of produce. As the most numerous beneficiaries of the Little Border Traffic, they closely followed developments related to division in the years 1947–1952. To hold on to their land and draw a living from it, farmers were forced to devise strategies that took into account regulations enforced by two competing state administrations. In those early years, farmers became acutely aware of the process of national division and learned to work with the political and economic systems on both sides of the border. From their own point of view, they were farmers first—and thus willing to accommodate division in order to retain their primary identification as such. They later used what they had learned during those early years when making decisions following the abolition of the Little Border Traffic in 1952.
By that year, when the GDR announced the closing of its western border, farmers were well aware that West Germany had little available arable land, whereas East Germany had an abundance of it. The unequal availability of farmland east and west of the inter-German border heavily influenced the decisions made by farmers, who found themselves actively choosing upon which side of the border to reside. Division thus influenced decisions that were often made according to pragmatic, professional calculations, but that had life-altering implications; it consequently became embedded in their very self-perception. Those who chose to move from East to West Germany realized that their opposition to certain aspects of life in the GDR was greater than their attachment to their village or their land—especially when collectivization had anyway deprived them of private ownership. Neighbors and friends who chose to stay in the GDR—by far the more numerous group—either welcomed East German policies or, more frequently, did not consider them terrible enough to give up being farmers. The much smaller number of farmers who moved from West to East Germany understood this decision as a reflection of their devotion to family, to tradition, to agriculture—or to their preference for a state that offered a reasonable opportunity to live off the land.
The division of Germany into East and West along arbitrary lines in 1945 became so embedded in German self-perception that it remains partly present more than a quarter century after the physical and political barriers have been dismantled.Footnote 67 By focusing on the first two decades of division, this article demonstrates that, by the time border crossing had become a risky proposition in the mid-1960s, significant processes of social division had already been well underway, with attachment to land and agriculture compelling farmers to make a choice: to become either “West” or “East” Germans.
