A-Infos (en) France, Monde Libertaire - Pages d'histoire N°76: Pale GDR (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The work does not constitute a historiographical revolution in itself, 
it is a history of the GDR at the human level constructed from the 
testimonies of ordinary citizens, political leaders and actors in East 
German society between 1945 and 1989. However, it allows an initial 
approach that allows a large part of the history of the GDR to be 
reconstructed at the human level. ---- The author covers the major 
phases of the history of East Germany, dividing its history into a few 
major phases: the establishment of the regime until 1953, its 
stabilization from the 1950s to the early 1970s, the consensual years 
from the mid-1970s to the 1980s, and the collapse in 1989. ---- The GDR 
was built with the Red Army and German exiles who had stayed in the USSR 
between 1933 and 1945. Once Nazism was defeated, they imposed the 
conditions for reconstruction. Many former KPD executives who had taken 
refuge in the USSR, such as Walter Ulbricht or Wilhelm Pieck, or who had 
been partly trained in Moscow, such as Erich Mielke, the head of the 
Stasi, or Erich Honnecker, landed in Germany in 1945 to build socialism. 
Shaped by ideology, "the song of the Party" and "Youth wake up!" 
reproduced in the book, illustrate the hold on society. The construction 
of socialism does not seem to be self-evident, the weapon of constraint 
has been permanent. In 1953, the workers of East Berlin and Leipzig or 
Halle revolted first to obtain decent wages and then to denounce the 
regime. The intervention of the Red Army was necessary for the regime to 
be saved. Behind the egalitarian discourse, the reality is the opposite. 
In the 1950s, the GDR was a society of shortages and constraints, the 
mass departures towards the West indirectly forced the leaders, helped 
once again by the Army, to build the wall on the night of August 12 to 
13, 1961. If the regime was hated, some were able to find in the regime 
the means of a promotion like the "working class combat groups", this 
group of about 200,000 people who were ready to do anything to support 
the regime, some of them participating in the construction of the wall. 
The GDR was also an excessively militarized society: out of 17 million 
inhabitants, about 750,000 people worked for the police, the army and 
the Stasi which exercised implacable surveillance forcing some of the 
inhabitants to submit. Despite the constraint, the East Germans ended up 
accommodating the regime. The Honnecker era allowed some improvements. 
From the 1960s onwards, the inhabitants found material compensations 
such as leisure and holidays offered by the regime. It ended up 
tolerating alternative lifestyles. It partly explains what is now called 
contemporary ostalgia. While the regime was convinced that it had 
brought stability and a certain form of prosperity, the majority of the 
population refused to comply, with 9 November 1989 constituting the 
symbolic date of the rupture that was perceptible from the mid-1980s.

Beyond the Wall. History of the GDR.
Katja Hoyer
Ed. Passés-composés 2025 428 p. 26 EUR

https://monde-libertaire.fr/?articlen=8221
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