Customer Reviews

The Rise and Fall of the German Democratic Republic

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The previous review is of a different book! This book is a very old-fashioned text on geopolitics more or less ignorant of the innovative thinking about geopolitics that has gone on over the past twenty years.

The textbook-like title of this book is rather misleading. This thematically compact monograph by Feiwel Kupferberg (associate professor of sociology at Aalborg University in Denmark) mainly focuses on the source of difficulties of German reunification. Kupferberg argues that they stem not so much from the economic transition, but from the discrepancies in the ways the West Germans ("Wessies") and East Germans ("Ossies") have viewed their Nazi past. Whereas the West Germans grimly faced it, atoned for it, and transformed their half of the country into a prosperous, free democracy that valued both individual freedom and responsibility, the East Germans absorbed the Soviet-made myth that East Germany was the "victor of history" that successfully resisted the fascists. They blamed their western compatriots for the Nazi atrocities, because West Germany - like Hitler's Germany - was, after all, a capitalist economy. Contrary to popular belief, many Ossies have done quite well economically, precisely because they tend to be more obedient and less opinionated than Wessies, the author states. (19). While reunification has been difficult for both German groups, the East Germans have blamed West Germans for closing down their factories and trying to reclaim their land that was lost during World War II. This is ironic, give the fact that the East Germans clamored for reunification the most strenuously and have contributed the least amount of wealth to Germany. According to the author, the Kohl government decided to move quickly on reunification because the piecemeal exodus of East German refugees was irritating local mayors and jeopardizing the reunification policy altogether. It was better to push the policy through, open the floodgates, and then get on with the real business of assimilation. (28). In contrast to the petulant East Germans, inwardly resentful West Germans - who footed the hefty bill of reunification - generally restrain themselves from criticizing their eastern neighbors, deeming this "politically incorrect." Kupferberg points to the interesting parallel here with West Germans' ginger treatment of Jews just after World War: it was also politically incorrect to pan them. Indeed a "philo-Semitism" developed. Jews in post-war Western Germany "were elevated overnight from sub-humans to model citizens," he writes (25).
Kupferberg offers profound insights about the long underestimated effects of the communist culture on East Germans, which became clear only after reunification in 1989, when the differences in coping styles and views of the Nazi past emerged. He articulates well the thesis that the rigid communist system in the GDR inculcated passivity, helplessness, and amoral pragmatism in its citizens. By depriving them of a panoply of individual freedoms - of creative expression, foreign travel, etcetera - the system also relieved citizens of individual responsibility and necessary risk-taking. They were trained to look to external sources for cradle-to-grave security. From this perspective, it is not surprising that East Germans also blamed an external source - the West Germans - for their post-reunification troubles.
As Kupferberg explains, the Soviet occupiers after 1945 were shrewd to promulgate the abovementioned "victors of history" myth. Indoctrinated to view themselves as communist resistance fighters who defeated the Nazis, East German citizens never had to ask or answer tough moral questions about their complicity in Hitler's regime. It was easy to blame West Germany for World War II and the Holocaust, given the presence of officials with Nazi pasts in Chancellor Adenauer's government and intelligence service (originally General Gehlen's Organization) as well.
Not only historians, but political scientists and sociologists will find this book well worth reading. Not all East Germans were as brainwashed as Kupferberg suggests, however; for that reason serious students of German reunification should also consult Christian Joppke's East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime (NY: New York University Press, 1995). For a broader perspective on German reunification and its effects on German policies toward the European Union, students should also read Jeffrey Anderson's German Unification and the Union of Europe: The Domestic Politics of Integration Policy (Cambridge University Press, 1999).---Johanna Granville, Ph.D. (Stanford University)