Life in East Germany | Animated History

It is August 1945, and the guns have gone silent across Europe. The Third Reich is no more, its ambitions crushed beneath the overwhelming power of the Allied nations and Comintern. Yet amidst the ruins, people still remain. Although battered and beaten, the hardy German spirit still endures. But unbeknownst to them, they are about to become pawns in an even greater war, one fought not with guns and bombs, but with economics and ideology. At the Potsdam Conference, Germany was divided between the Allied powers. With the stroke of a pen, 16 million people fell under Soviet dominion. The two halves of the nation would now stand at odds. On one side, a capitalist buffer state against the menace of communism. On the other, a glorious socialist utopia. At least, that was the theory. Hi, I'm Griffin Johnson, the Armchair Historian. In today's video, we're going to take a look at what life was like in the German Democratic Republic, also known as East Germany. This Soviet puppet state imagined itself as a glorious communist utopia, while Western propaganda painted it as a nightmarish dystopia. As is so often the case, the truth is more complicated, and lies somewhere between these two envisioned extremes. As soon as the Soviets began their occupation, they treated their new subjects harshly. The defeated populace could only watch as Russian soldiers rapidly dismantled what little remained of their industrial infrastructure and shipped it back to Russia. Tens of thousands of suspected Nazi sympathizers or anti-communists were rounded up and imprisoned at repurposed concentration camps. Simultaneously, the Soviets set to work laying the political foundations for a communist regime in East Germany. In 1946, the occupiers forcibly merged two German political parties, the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party, to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, or SED. The SED was quickly purged of all opponents of Stalinism and was then installed as the sole ruling party in the new government. In October of 1949, the Soviets formally turned over political control over their occupied zone to the SED, establishing the German Democratic Republic, or GDR, as a new independent nation. From the moment of its creation, East Germany and its people were faced with tremendous hardship. The western portion of Germany, namely the Ruhr Valley, had always been the industrial heart of the nation, and its loss left the GDR with almost no industrial capacity. This resulted in devastating shortages of most essential goods, and the population suffered from severe malnourishment. With nothing available to purchase, laborers had no incentive to work, which caused the economy to stagnate even further. As the beleaguered citizens of East Germany struggled to survive, their former countrymen in the west were already experiencing economic recovery thanks to the American aid under what was called the Marshall Plan. When news of this supposed prosperity reached the GDR, desperate people began to flee to the west in the tens of thousands. The mass exodus from East Germany only worsened its economic conditions, as young people, skilled laborers, and intellectuals vacated the country in droves. The SED attempted to counteract this brain drain with aggressive propaganda campaigns, framing the decision to leave East Germany as an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity. But there was nothing physically stopping people from leaving, and so the exodus continued. The task of halting this flow of emigration and reviving the economy fell to General Secretary of the SED, Walter Ulbricht. In 1952, Ulbricht decided that in order to accomplish this goal, he needed to follow the example of the USSR by rapidly converting East Germany into a proper communist society using a good old five-year plan. In carrying out this plan, Ulbricht demonstrated that he had truly embraced the teachings of Stalin by successfully starving his people even further and making everything much, much worse. His attempts to collectivize agriculture led to disastrous food shortages, and the high taxes on private enterprise caused those consumer goods, which had crept back onto the shelves to disappear once again. The party tried to compensate for these new shortages by increasing worker quotas, requiring 10% more effort to earn the same wages. This last burden finally pushed people over the edge, and hundreds of thousands more fled to the West. In the summer of 1953, even after the Soviets had forced Ulbricht to dial back most of his collectivization efforts, a worker strike broke out in East Berlin, which quickly grew into a protest demanding free elections and other reforms. The movement soon spread across the country, and within days, 340,000 people were protesting in every city and almost every large town in East Germany. The situation was dire enough that Ulbricht was forced to call on the Soviets for help, and it was only upon the arrival of their tanks and armed soldiers that the unrest was finally quelled. And so, migration to the West continued. By the beginning of the 1960s, nearly 4 million people had fled the GDR since its foundation, representing over a quarter of the country's original population. Party officials tried several tactics to keep people from escaping, including fortifying their border with West Germany, but citizens continued to flee through Berlin. Due to its unusual status as a single city divided between Soviet East and Allied West, it was difficult to stop people from crossing the border, turning the former capital into a city-sized loophole through which over 90% of the migrants fleeing East Germany were able to escape. By 1961, the party had had enough and finally decided to close the border with the construction of the Berlin Wall. This 156-kilometer or 97-mile barrier effectively cut off the people of East Germany from the West. Where nearly 4 million had escaped since 1949, only 5,000 more would manage to abscond over the next 30 years. As the 1960s progressed, quality of life slowly improved in the GDR. After losing a quarter of their number, the remaining population of the nation slowly realized that there was no longer a shortage of housing or jobs. Production of consumer goods and strategic resources gradually increased, and by the end of the decade, East Germany had the richest economy in the Eastern Bloc. But while more goods were being produced, not everything was consistently available. The government was in control of all production. The resulting fluctuations led to massive lines outside of stores and the widespread hoarding of common goods. Those without access to hard currency from the West were subject to the whims of the party's economic planners, and often had to wait months or even years for certain goods to become available. For example, those wishing to purchase a sleek, stylish, high-performing East German automobile would have no trouble paying for it, but they would have to up to 13 years to actually receive their vehicle. Despite the long waits, standards of living in East Germany did improve significantly in the 1960s, but unrest and opposition to the communist government remained. Despite ongoing discontent, there was never another widespread rebellion like the 1953 uprising, until the Soviet Union began to collapse. This effective suppression of unrest was all thanks to the Ministry of State Security, also known as the Stasi. The Stasi was one of the most feared secret police forces in the Eastern Bloc, and between their founding in 1950 and their dissolution after German reunification, they carried out one of the most extensive mass surveillance programs in the pre-digital age. They employed over 170,000 informants among the civilian population, although some estimates suggest there could have been as many as half a million. There were Stasi agents in every apartment building, every factory, every hospital and university, watching and listening for any sign of subversive or anti-communist behavior. Until 1970, dissidents identified by this surveillance network were simply arrested, dragged off somewhere, and tortured until they gave up any accomplices before being imprisoned. In the 1970s, the Stasi decided that these methods were too crude and began to employ a form of psychological warfare called zersetzung, which literally means decomposition. These insidious tactics and mass surveillance created a culture of suspicion and fear in much of the East German populace. The eyes of the Stasi were everywhere. Despite this pervasive fear of Stasi surveillance and harsh state censorship, a vibrant and distinct art and material culture flourished in the GDR. The identity that developed within these restrictions was defined largely in opposition to the West, emphasizing the ways in which the people of East Germany were distinct from and of course superior to those in the West. Movies and plays produced by the state-owned studios and theaters celebrated the ordinary working-class heroes of socialism, along with brave underdogs who fought against fascism and imperialism. When it came to women's rights, East Germany rejected the traditional conservative gender rules still enforced in West Germany in favor for greater autonomy for women in marriage and in the workplace. Birth control was more widely accepted and available, and women were encouraged to participate in the workplace rather than remaining at home. This anti-Western, pro-communist cultural movement took hold most strongly among the older generation, while the youth, as they often do, chose to rebel. In the late 1970s and 80s, as the governments of both German nations were pushing for reconciliation and greater cooperation, cultural influences from the West began to seep in and catch on with the younger generation. Punk and rock music became popular, and tech-savvy teenagers became fascinated by Western video games. This created a cultural divide in the GDR, with the old guard still stubbornly in support of the communist system that kept them fed, sheltered, and employed, while young, educated East Germans grew more and more fascinated with the West and opposed the status quo. By 1989, discontent with the communist policies erupted into widespread protests for the first time since 1953, and this time the Soviet army was in no position to intervene. In November, the Berlin Wall was taken down and the SED abolished the provision in the constitution guaranteeing communist control of the government. The following year, East and West Germany were formally reunited. The reunification of Germany was met with approval from both sides of the old border, but the divisions between the two halves of this new nation did not disappear overnight. Many factories in the East were closed and widespread unemployment reappeared for the first time in decades. For many, particularly less educated men who had lost the stable jobs they'd enjoyed in the communist era, there was a sense that the West had finally won, and the East was now getting left behind. Even to this day, many Germans in the East feel a sense of nostalgia for the days of the GDR, when everyone enjoyed, if not prosperity, at least stability and solidarity within the communist system. While most historians acknowledge that East Germany was a repressive dictatorship, there are still Germans today who remember it fondly and identify more as East Germans than Germans. As always, it is impossible to simply classify a nation or its people one way or the other.