Michael Gehler - Three Germanies

THREE GERMANIES

CONTEMPORARY WORLDS explores the present and recent past. Books in the series take
a distinctive theme, geo-political entity or cultural group and explore their developments over a
period ranging usually over the last fifty years. The impact of current events and developments
are accounted for by rapid but clear interpretation in order to unveil the cultural, political,
religious and technological forces that are reshaping todays worlds.

SERIES EDITOR
Jeremy Black

In the same series

West Germany, East Germany
and the Berlin Republic

MICHAEL GEHLER

translated by Anthony Mathews

REAKTION BOOKS

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33 Great Sutton Street
London EC1V 0DX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

First published 2011

Copyright Michael Gehler 2011

All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publishers.

Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.

Printed and bound in Great Britain
by CPI/Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Gehler, Michael.

Three Germanies: West Germany, East Germany and the Berlin
Republic since 1945. (Contemporary worlds)
1. Germany History 1945 2. Germany Politics and
government 19451990. 3. Germany Politics and
government 1990 4. Germany (East) History. 5. Germany
(East) Politics and government.
I. Title II. Series
943.087-dc22

eISBN 9781861899897

This book is about the three German republics: the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from 19491990; the German Democratic Republic (GDR) over the same period; and the Berlin Republic since the unification of Germany. In the process it will deal with aspects of domestic, foreign, social, cultural and economic politics.

At the same time there is a series of problems that need to be addressed: the events of the 1970s, the 80s and the 90s have hardly ever been the object of systematic research up to now. Key official source material for those decades is still classified, so there is a lack of work on the basic facts relating to West Germany. After the end of the GDR state, on the other hand, the relevant files on the complete 40-year period have become available and have been the object of research in the last two decades. The challenge as regards the contents and methodology consisted in simultaneously dealing with the Federal Republic and the GDR and therefore in taking them both into equal consideration. This led to a further problem in that there are only very few continuous accounts of the history of the two German states. Exceptions prove the rule: as a trained historian, outstanding journalist, publicist and writer, Peter Bender has published impressive analyses, as has the team of researchers led by Clemens Burrichter, Detlef Nakath and Gerd-Rdiger Stephan, the editors of a comprehensive encyclopaedic textbook. A further problem arises from the fact that selective historical writing on each of the German partial states has been carried out without regard to the other states and therefore has been one-sided. The Federal Republic and the GDR, in spite of all the alienation and growing apart, remained related to one another, above all as regards competition between the two systems. Each one wanted to outdo the other and prove to be the better of the two. This has had its effect on the writing of history on each side and is still the case today. The history of the GDR presented by East German historians before 1990 as directed by the (Communist) SED was ideologically loaded and politically blown up into a Socialist success story. The history of the Federal Republic, on the other hand, was also largely represented by West German historians as the story of the better Germany, of a Germany that emerged as winner and champion from the inner-German confrontation. This dichotomy of success and failure as well as the binary opposition of winner and loser, however, will not take us far in dealing with the deficiencies and weaknesses that existed in both states.

In viewing the position overall, it is also not enough just to compare the two Germanies, since Germany was more than the sum of its individual parts (as Bender puts it). What needs to be done is to view both states based on the same criteria and judge them by the same standards; not from either a Western or an Eastern viewpoint, but from one in-between.

I am an Austrian and have observed developments in internal German history of the last few decades very much as an outsider. Born in Innsbruck in 1962, after going to school in the Upper Franconian town of Neustadt near Coburg/Bavaria, I spent the years from 1981 to 2006 studying and pursuing research in Austria. Illuminating the events from this neutral perspective was one of the motivations for this overview aimed at a public generally interested in the topic. It is not intended to be an apology for the success story of winner-takes-all on the part of the Federal Republic nor a simple story of failure on the part of the GDR, but instead sets out to see both states as being of equal value, if not of equal weight, and to treat them with necessary detachment and critical distance. Good and bad are not categories in modern historical research. It can only be superficial to talk of better and worse in the context of internal German history. There were positive and negative aspects to both German states, and they had far more things in common as regards mentality and structure. These also paradoxically encouraged the division, but as reinvigorated trace elements that eventually led to German unification. Heres hoping that this attempt at a sketch is appreciated in the new Federal Republic.

Finally, thanks must also go to Franz-Werner Endrissat, Felix Hinz, Hinnerk Meyer, Andreas Pudlat, Andreas Schimmelpfennig and Louise Stevenson, who read the manuscript critically. I should like to thank Tony Mathews for the work of translating it.