For a long time, East Germany was said to be the economic star of the Soviet bloc, which (to steal a phrase) was rather like being the healthiest horse in a glue factory. But the history of this mysterious place is relatively little known (apart, mainly, from walls going up and then down) in the English-speaking world, making a new book on this topic something that’s worth a look.
And so in her latest book review for Capital Matters, Amity Shlaes turns her attention to Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany:
[M]any of us have long wondered about the 40-year German Democratic Republic, now reduced by the epistemologists in the Land of Immanuel Kant to a mere ephemera, part of what official historians have labelled, in that German way, “The Period of German Two-Statedness.” What was the place Hoyer calls “a vanished country,” which, as she notes, has been “somewhat written out of the narrative”? What happened to the tens of thousands of East Germans who spent years or a lifetime locked in the prisons of the regime, or the hundreds who died after torture, or were executed? What happened when dissidents were priced by the head and sold — thousands were — to West Germany? Why did millions flee East Germany before the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961? Who were the people who, as Hoyer puts it, “made East Germany work”? In the 1970s or 1980s, after all, East Germany was regarded as a star among Soviet satellites even here in the West, a country “aglow with prosperity,” to quote a 1973 New York Times account.
Read the whole thing, but before you do, maybe click on the link to the New York Times account to find, for example, this:
East Germany is also unusual in that the Communist leadership is more attentive to doctrine, to the inculcation of ideology, than other Eastern European countries. Its top leader, the party’s First Secretary, Erich Honecker, lives quite simply, indulging only in hunting.
Just over 15 years later, the same journalist was writing this for the same paper, a few weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall:
For the last two days, the East German press has been publishing accusations of corruption and profiteering by top officials of the former Communist leadership under Erich Honecker, and the reports are coming as a shock to the public here.
For the first time, East Germans have learned from reporters in Neues Deutschland, the main Communist paper, as well as Berliner Zeitung and Junge Welt about the extraordinary privileges accumulated by the Honecker regime, which was ousted a month ago. The shock is all the greater among ordinary party members because the former regime had presented itself for years as a model of Communist modesty and probity.
A shock? I wonder. . . .