75 years German Democratic Republic: What remains?

Workers World publishes here the speech by Egon Krenz, who was one of the last remaining former leaders of the German Democratic Republic (socialist East Germany) and was the Socialist Unity Party (SED) general secretary in 1989. This was the major talk at the commemoration of the 75th anniversary of that state’s founding in October 1949, at the Babylon cinema in Berlin Oct. 5, as reported in the German daily newspaper, Junge Welt (jungewelt.de), organizer of the event.

Translation: John Catalinotto.

Dear attendees,

I would like to extend my greetings to all friends, all comrades and all supporters who have come to commemorate the founding of the German Democratic Republic. It was the pledge of Buchenwald: never again war, never again fascism, which was the foundation upon which the GDR was founded on October 7, 1949.

I greet the representatives of all age groups, especially those who, like me, experienced the GDR from its beginning to its end. I greet you who have given much of your life force in the conviction that by strengthening the GDR you are serving the good in Germany.

There are quite a few who, despite attempts to delegitimize the GDR, profess their belief in the GDR, so that the head of the so-called research group “SED State,” which is not exactly friendly towards us, has to admit that it has not yet been possible to “get the GDR out of people’s hearts.” The older generation would repeatedly say that the GDR was “our homeland.”

I extend my warmest greetings to you, those born later, who, despite slander and numerous falsifications of history, which can also be found in school books, are interested in the German Democratic Republic and its policies. You are confronted in this society with a lot of untruths about our state, a state that no longer exists. But I can assure you: We who were committed to the cause wanted to change the world and create a better Germany. So that never again will a mother weep for her son. Unfortunately, for many reasons, including our own fault, we have not yet succeeded. Much remains to be done.

And yet I think: We laid the groundwOutside the Babylon cinema, Berlin, Oct. 5, 2024.Credit: junge Weltork, we sowed the seeds. We will certainly not live to see the harvest. But I hope that you and your peers, your children and your children’s children will not forget that for 40 years there was an anti-fascist state in the east of Germany that had learned the lessons of two world wars and was a real alternative to capitalism and war.

Therefore, my request: Preserve what is left of the GDR’s heritage. There are no riches salted away in secret accounts. What’s left are social values such as respect, empathy and fairness that support and hold together a just society, a society in which one person dares not be a wolf that consumes another. Do better than we could. But when you speak of our weaknesses, please remember the poem by Brecht “To Those Born Later”:

“But when the time comes,

when people are helpers to others,

remember us

with leniency.”

Sharp contrasts

Dear attendees, there are many reasons to like the GDR. And also many reasons to sharply criticize its shortcomings. But above all stands the word peace. The GDR never waged war. It was the German state of peace. In this context, I would like to recall the state telegram from Moscow to President Wilhelm Pieck and Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl regarding the founding of the GDR. I quote it, because it succinctly expresses the historical mission of the GDR:

“The formation of the German Democratic Peace-loving Republic is a turning point in the history of Europe.” And further: “There is no doubt that the existence of a peace-loving democratic Germany alongside the peace-loving Soviet Union precludes the possibility of new wars in Europe.” How true, how clear, how relevant!

Bombing Yugoslavia

As long as the Soviet Union existed, to which we — more than all others — owe the liberation of Germany from fascism, and at its side the GDR, peace reigned in Europe. What a contrast! No sooner was the USSR crushed than NATO, without a U.N. mandate and with the participation of the Federal Republic of Germany, on March 24, 1999, bombed sovereign Yugoslavia, which had been occupied by the fascist German armed forces a little more than half a century earlier.

The “Green” German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, did not hesitate to veil this attack, which was in violation of international law, with the pretext that it would prevent a second “Auschwitz.” To this day, the lie of an allegedly “humanitarian foreign policy” serves his “Green” successor as a justification for arms deliveries to Ukraine on an unprecedented scale, instead of pressing for negotiations with Russia.

The hypocrisy and one-sidedness of the current German government’s policy was also recently demonstrated at the United Nations General Assembly, where a resolution to improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and call for an immediate ceasefire was passed by a large majority of 120 states, while the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) was one of the 45 states that abstained.

When it came to “war and peace,” there was never neutrality in the GDR. War propaganda and racial hatred, including Russophobia, were forbidden in the GDR. Our state doctrine was: “No war may ever again originate from German soil.” True to the GDR national anthem, the second verse of which reads: “Let the light of peace shine, so that never again will a mother weep for her son.”

It would have been unthinkable in the GDR to call on the population to make themselves “fit for war” [which German politicians now demand]. In our country, educating young people in particular for peace was given priority.

These were not just slogans or empty words, as we proved in the fall of 1989, when the GDR guaranteed the non-violence of the events. The call to the armed forces of the USSR to “Stay in the barracks” came not from Mikhail Gorbachev, but was a sovereign decision by the GDR, which the falsifiers of history dispute. At the time, however, we had no idea that the German government would subsequently bring its relationship with Russia to its lowest point since the end of World War II and retrospectively declare the victor of 1945 the loser of today.

Trust destroyed

I am convinced that many East Germans had similar thoughts in mind before casting their votes in the recent state elections. Their choice does not mean, as some commentators claim, that East Germany has now become “brown” [pro-fascist]. Rather, it is a signal to all established parties: Listen to us! We do not want new weapons deliveries to Ukraine and Israel. We do not need new missiles! We want peace!

Only in this way can we seriously undermine the AfD, which has been exploiting this issue eagerly to gather support. [AfD or Alternative for Germany is a far right party that came in first in a state election in eastern Germany this September and a close second in another.]

Within a historically short period of time, West German governments destroyed what had been built up in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the GDR in terms of trust between the Germans and the peoples of the Soviet Union. Now, German politicians and the German media are stirring up hatred of Russians, hatred that I last experienced as an eight-year-old during the final phase of World War II. The old enemy stereotype — the “Russian” is to blame for everything — and the myth of the dangerous Russia is being revived. It is raising fears of Russia as if its troops were lurking around the corner.

Every reasonably educated German knows that Germany fought against Russia or the Soviet Union in two world wars; but that Germany has never been invaded by Russia. Only twice in modern history did first the Russians and later the Red Army enter Germany, once against Napoleon and once against Hitler. It’s well known how that ended.

I am sure that if the Foreign Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany (BRD) had made statements in the 1980s like those made by the current appointee, that is, that a “war against Russia” was being waged and that the aim was to “ruin Russia,” he would have been dismissed on the spot by a Chancellor like Helmut Schmidt.

[BRD political leaders] Willy Brandt and Helmut Schmidt, Egon Bahr and Herbert Wehner are rightly praised for their policy of détente. But that is only half the story. These personalities did not pursue the policy of détente on their own. They needed partners, and in addition to the Soviet Union, these included the GDR.

Without the peaceful foreign policy of the GDR, there could have been no policy of détente by Willy Brandt and others. We agreed with them: It is better to negotiate with each other a hundred times than to shoot at each other once, as Erich Honecker repeatedly stated.

When I met Mikhail Gorbachev in the early 1990s to inform him that the West German judiciary had initiated over 100,000 political investigations against GDR citizens, he told me about a conversation he had with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Kohl had told him: “Mikhail Sergeyevich, we have encountered a foreign people over there in the East. They are very different from us.”

That was and is the worldview of the old West German political elite and their heirs, who to this day do not allow a historically accurate view of the GDR. For them, their capitalism is the only true and best thing they are capable of imagining. The fact that there were people in the East who found it better to live without capitalism, for whom human relationships were not dominated by elbowing each other aside, but who instead lived together socially every day — that is something that the haters of the GDR, who determine the mainstream in politics and the media, absolutely did not and do not want to accept.

Living memory

At the end of the GDR, there were around 16 million inhabitants. In the meantime, we have become fewer. This means that today there are many millions of individual views of the GDR. However, the right to interpret based on one’s own experience should be left exclusively to these citizens themselves and not to a media “reprocessing industry” or even to Pastor [Joachim] Gauck, who equates 12 years of Nazi barbarism with 45 post-war years in East Germany or the GDR. [Gauck was an anti-communist opposition leader in the GDR and president of the BRD from 2012-17.]

If these people had their way, the GDR would only remain in the memories of the people as just “a tiny nation of patronized creatures,” locked behind a wall with a “crumbling economy,” surrounded by “stale air and state security.” No. That’s not what the GDR was like!

As long as those in power do not understand what roots the East Germans have and that many of the former GDR citizens are simply unwilling to have their lives explained to them from the West, nor will they accept that they were on the wrong side of history, as long as their life stories are dragged through the mud, the established parties and their ideological hacks will never understand the voting behavior of many East Germans.

The legacy

Despite everything, the GDR proved that a life without capitalists was possible even in highly industrialized Germany. The building blocks of our policy included concepts such as land reform, through which hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons received land and thus a basis for survival. The legacy of the GDR includes the expropriation of Nazis and war criminals and the conversion of their means of production into public property — which was often sold off by the Treuhand agency after the “turn” [annexation] for pennies.

What we also leave behind are generations of a new of kind of teachers, who in the beginning sometimes still used questionable spelling, and likewise the new lawyers, who often came from so-called modest backgrounds; generations of women who could live and work on an equal footing and who did not have to first ask their husbands for permission to pursue a profession or open a bank account.

I am reminded of the many academics whose careers were only made possible by the breaking of the privileges of class and education and who were often able to complete baccalaureates at workers’ and peasants’ universities without having passed their high-school graduation exams.

What we have also left behind are thousands of apartments, including the well-established experience that living space and land are not there to line the pockets of speculators and that having a “roof over one’s head” is not a matter of mercy but a human right.

However, we are not leaving behind some of the things that many people are complaining about today: There were no jobless people in the GDR; all, even the less industrious, were helped to gain a vocational qualification. Young people met in youth clubs — less often at gas stations or train stations.

We have not handed down any billionaires to posterity, but neither have we handed down beggars. And finally: maybe neo-Nazis did exist in hiding. But they only raised their imperial war flags after they had received them from the West, and the new state power looked on as if it were powerless and granted them the “liberties” that had been denied them until then.

The GDR was torn apart in the battle between social systems. Our dream of developing socialism also shattered due to our own weaknesses: inadequate information policy, insufficient use of the constitutionally guaranteed democratic rights, gaps in supply, bureaucracy – and often also narrow-mindedness. Reality grew more distant from ideals, and large sections of the population were no longer willing to accept this in 1989-90.

In retrospect, we know that since the GDR ceased to function as a social corrective, social alienation has increased. The already existing gap between rich and poor is growing ever wider, and the chasm is now downright obscene. Patronage-based political parties embezzle funds intended for the common good. But resistance is growing.

Social interest from almost all segments of society is forcing the bourgeois parties to discuss the worst excesses. If only they were led to discuss this as energetically as they did when methodically disparaging East German personal histories and engaging in a blanket witch hunt of former employees of the GDR’s security forces, all in an effort to divert attention from their own country’s problems! The GDR will not serve as the Cinderella of German history.

What the GDR was, why it was founded, what historical achievements it had, what position it occupied internationally, how both German states were always on the brink of a possible nuclear war in a cold civil war, what the reasons for the defeat of the GDR were and what will remain of it — these are fundamental questions of German post-war history, indeed of European and world history — and much, much more than a “footnote of history” and also far more than the “green arrow.”

Judging objectively

I can be accused of idealizing the GDR. That may be. But in reality, I am merely advocating something that should be self-evident, namely that academics, politicians and media professionals, who were mostly socialized in the Federal Republic, should finally strive for an objective and historically fair evaluation of the GDR.

We, the contemporary witnesses, are still alive. And when we are no longer here, our experiences and memories will remain in the memory of our children, who were born in the GDR. And there were plenty of them, because the GDR was also a child-friendly country. But I cannot and I refuse to give up the belief that this world of war and exploitation will change from what it is today and that “the sun will shine more brightly than ever over Germany,” as the GDR anthem says.