1.1 - schäfer, wolf - too late and too little. east german democratic socialism (en)

7/30/2019 1.1 - Schäfer, Wolf - Too Late and Too Little. East German Democratic Socialism (EN)

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/11-schaefer-wolf-too-late-and-too-little-east-german-democratic-socialism 1/7

The following ad supports maintaining our C.E.E.O.L. service

Too Late and Too Little: East German Democratic Socialism

«Too Late and Too Little: East German Democratic Socialism»

by Wolf Schäfer

Source:

PRAXIS International (PRAXIS International), issue: 1 / 1991, pages: 7-12, on www.ceeol.com.

http://www.ceeol.com/



http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=0a3d3f96-8ad3-4089-b110-89e4753b2d5c




Praxis International 7

Praxis International 11:1 April 1991 0260-8448

VOICES FROM A BYGONE LAND: EAST GERMAN PERSPECTIVES

BEFORE GERMAN UNITY

TOO LATE AND TOO LITTLE: EAST

GERMAN DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM

Wolf Schäfer

False consciousness is a privilege of all humans. Even East German Marxist-Leninist intellectuals have not been immune to it. Gorbachev’s ominousremark in East Berlin shortly before the non-violent revolution of 1989 –“Wer zu spät kommt, den bestraft das Leben“ (Life punishes the one whocomes too late) – made possible the overthrow of Honecker’s government of old-timers. The East German “workers and farmers,” daily referred to butnever attended to, promptly liberated themselves and embraced withouthesitation West German Capitalism and (Christian) Democracy.

The Left in both Germanies has had ambivalent and disparate feelingsabout the rush toward German national unity led by Chancellor Kohl, and,consequently, has lost all crucial elections decisively. The high speed toward

German unification was fueled by the fear that the window of historicalopportunity, which Gorbachev had pushed open, might soon close again.Grab German unity, don’t look at the bill and run! was the conservative and,as it happens, correct and costly understanding of the situation. Gorbachev’selbowroom is much smaller today, especially since it has become clear thatrapid decolonization of the Soviet empire is all that Gorbachev’s Perestroika can accomplish for sure.

Life did not only punish the upper class of party politicians, but also theEast German intellectuals. The political Nomenklatura, which had consist-ently blocked democratic reforms, fully deserved this rare German

revolution from below. It had to relinquish power and leave Wandlitz, its topsecret suburbian ghetto-paradise in East Berlin. But even the comparativelyless powerful, yet privileged, class of academics, mainly professors and

writers, who played a catalytic role in most of the other European revolutionsof 1989, came too late in East Germany and is losing its jobs now. This severepunishment which causes a lot of social hardship is not completelyunjustified, however.

Most East German philosophers, for example, had been members of theSocialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) since the late 60s.1 They taughtMarx’s party line from 1845 that philosophy should not only interpret but

change the world. But the world of the German Democratic Republic(GDR), the “first advanced socialist society on German soil,” rooted in the“antifascist-democratic tradition” of German communism, was not really upfor change, not even for interpretation. Too many philosophers, historiansand other workers in ideology-sensitive fields helped to paint the GDR as a




progressive society, capable “in principle . . . of solving all problemsaffecting society as a whole, even the most difficult ones, some either todayor in the near future, others in the longer term.”2 The unswerving East

German intelligentsia perfected the great German society of workers andfarmers “in principle.” In reality the GDR was a rather backward, unhealthyand depressing place. But only “false consciousness” could say so.

In 1985 I was invited to give a talk at the University of Halle. In thediscussion I mentioned the progressive role of the new social movements(ecologist and feminist) in western society and remarked at one point thatone could actually smell the need for an East German ecology movement hic

et nunc (the air pollution in the Halle region was incredible). This was “falseconsciousness” on my part – a sensory illusion to be expected from a WestGerman intellectual, but not permissible for an East German Marxist, as I

was told afterwards by an East German friend. The general situation of East German intellectuals was unique. As in all

authoritarian societies the margin of allowable error was narrow. Either you walked the fine line of political correctness or you fell. The fall could be softand pedagogical (a position at a provincial university, no travel to the west)or hard and uncompromising (no career, no appropriate job). That was theusual range of threats. What was unique in this case, however, was that youcould be sent to the West German paradise with a one-way ticket. Thisbecame a regular feature of the two Germanies from 1976 onwards when

Wolf Biermann, the popular poet and folksinger, was sent over to his WestGerman friends and not allowed to come back. “He became a West Germancitizen,” said the common man on the street to the proverbial housewife,“there is no language problem; there is milk and honey, freedom andprosperity; you can’t call that exile.” Many shared Biermann’s fate and a substantial part of the critical spirit of East Germany was thus drained awayand neutralized.

In Poland and Czechoslovakia, by contrast, the seeds of an alternative civilsociety grew among Solidarity members and the Charter 77 group. There wasno second Poland or Czechoslovakia to ship unruly citizens to. East Germany

used West Germany as the alternative society of all evil, but that backfired intwo ways. First, when the moment of truth came, there was not enoughcritical human potential left, uncompromised and able to build a trulyalternative East German society. In fact, when the wall came down EastGermany acknowledged West Germany as the only alternative for all itscitizens. Second, the daily lies of East German journalism had made a cynicalhermeneuticist out of every GDR citizen. The population had learned to call“good” what the state propagandists had called “bad” and vice versa. So,

West Germany enjoyed a fantastically high reputation, surely much higherthan it deserved.

The East German intellectual was also very German. As a true Germanthinker he or she was capable of perfecting life theoretically;3 and as a genuine product of a strong state he or she had learned to believe that the bestchance to improve the social and political system of the GDR was from withinthe corridors of communist party power. Thus the East German system did

aCEEOL NL Germany




not only attract those who entered the boat and left the ship whenever itseemed opportune, but also many serious people, people with “character,”

young and not so young Germans formed in the good old Prussian tradition

of putting secondary virtues like obedience, orderliness and frugality first.Professors, writers, journalists faithfully served the cause of German

socialism as state servants in a profoundly uncivil society.4 The revolution of 1989 made them see many things much more clearly and critically. Theybegan to address problems in public which had been silenced for decades.But it was too little and too late. Questions about world-historicaldeterminism and scientific-technological progress; doubts about the success-ful transition from capitalism to socialism and the continuing externaldeformation of socialism by the capitalist world economy; reflections aboutdemocratic socialism and the (mis)leading role of the one and only party –these and many other important issues which should have been aired ten,fifteen years ago, burst into the open; but by 1989 they no longer made anydifference.

Between the Fall of 1989 and Fall 1990 (precisely between November 9/10,1989, the night the Berlin Wall came down, and December 2, 1990, the firstgeneral German election after unity) left intellectuals in both Germaniesharbored still the hope of victory. West German Social Democrats (SPD),Greens and Communists of the old-line SED - now renamed PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) - nevertheless tried to outdo each other on the party

level. East German intellectuals quickly explored all kinds of third waysbetween state socialism and advanced capitalism, i.e. a socialist alternative to West Germany. Progressive West Germans, on the other hand, toyed withthe idea of a brand-new, jointly and publicly discussed, constitution for theunited Germany (instead of a mere East German accession to the territorycovered by the West German Basic Law).5 These hopes sprang up and

withered away in one year. National unity was achieved by a formal EastGerman declaration of accession on October 3, 1990, soon thereafter theSocial Democrats received their worst election results in thirty years; theGreens and the PDS almost disappeared, and any mandate for new

experiments with socialism was soundly rejected.East Germany has become history now. Its protective isolation has been

broken open. The East German life-world with its own language, culture,behavior etc. is rapidly decomposing. Things that made sense yesterdaymake less sense today and will be forgotten tomorrow. A world has come toan end. A concrete Wittgensteinian “life-form” which had allowedintellectuals to actively create and develop an appropriate language game hasall of a sudden collapsed. The small world of the GDR has ceased to resonateon the wavelength of its native brain-workers. An elaborate system of reference has vanished, the game is over and those who are left behind begin

to think, speak and write in a void - until they realize that they had betterreorient their thinking and adapt their language to the new environment. Asin 1945, many turned around in 1989 and began to play the dominantlanguage game; they became known as “Wendehälse“ (turncoats; literally„turning necks“). The rest of the East German Left still mourns the loss of




the GDR (not as it was but as it might have been) and wonders how to makesense of life in the context of the victorious Federal Republic of Germany,known among its detractors as the “bank with a flag.”

Some of these East German left intellectuals have started to scratch theirheads and ask questions about the past, the history of Stalinism, Leninismand Marxism. They are not shaving their hairy socialist skin, but they want tounderstand what went wrong with Marxian philosophy when it became anofficial “ism,” and with the wonderful project of socialism when it was madeinto a government “plan.” The specter of socialism has been driven outalmost everywhere but in Germany. Germany is still haunted by socialism “inprinciple.” Some German idealists agree with Daniel Bell and say:“Socialism, in the classic sense, has not failed, for it was never tried.”6 A fewrealists, however, find it more appropriate to assess the socialism that hadbeen tried and did fail. They are bound to come up with interesting studies.

Recent German history in general is destined to become a hot topic. Eachof the two Germanies had been struggling with its own “unmasterable past,”7

be it Nazism or Stalinism; both Germanies designed a new national identity;each country was involved in the politics of memory; both parts of Germanyhad tried to undermine the other and, at the same time, forged a working relationship with the other amidst the world-historical conflict of the Cold

War – all this, a stark beginning in 1945 and a stunning conclusion in 1990, theopening of archives, different interests and common roots should certainly

benefit the craft of German historiography, nationally and internationally. The flip side for the Germans, however, is the provincialism which comes with such a heavy dose of self-centered introspection.

In the 1840s the European restoration forced Marx and Engels to enjoy the world perspective of imperial(ist) Britain. Today nobody is forced to think big or breathe cosmopolitan air. The disenchanted Marxist can settle down in“Krähwinkel,“ his German Gotham, and ignore the issues of the wider

world. This would be unfortunate because Marxian thought was not meant tobe „local knowledge.“ The demise of „really existing socialism,“ as we usedto call it ironically, demonstrates beyond doubt that most people prefer the

constitutional freedom of the individual in the West and, also, the betterconditions of life in Munich as compared to Dresden, for instance. However,elementary logic forbids us to think that because „A“ was wrong, therefore,„B“ must be right. Capitalism is not proven right because Communism was

wrong. The western way is not perfect and has serious problems on a worldwide scale. That may be a trivial truth. But not so trivial is what I wouldprescribe to all of us everywhere: to advance the project of a „universalcivilization“ (Naipaul) which must be ecologically viable on the one hand andcomposed of an increasing number of civil societies on the other.

The following four articles and one letter are a small sample of the East

German discussion which began after the shock of 1989. In view of theconcentration of competence and talent in the SED/PDS, Praxis Inter- national has chosen to document the discourse of people who had been closeto the “Apparat,” but also to various programs of reform-communism and

western critical thought.




The articles of Reinhard Mocek (“From Patriarchal Socialism to SocialistDemocracy”) and Michael Brie (“The General Crisis of AdministrativeCentralized Socialism”) have been taken from the first issue of the journal

Initial which had been published under the title “Sowjetwissenschaft” (SovietSocial Science) until 1989; it changed its name in 1990. The essay by LutzMarz (“Illusions and Visions”) appeared last year in the Kommune, a WestGerman forum for left-leaning alternative thought. Hans-Peter Krüger‘sarticle („Radical Democratization“) is based on a talk he gave in February1990 at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt; it was published in a Suhrkamp volume, edited by Rainer Deppe, Helmut Dubiel and UlrichRödel (Demokratischer Umbruch in Osteuropa, Frankfurt 1991). HorstPoldrack’s letter from Leipzig details the current sweeping out of Leftism informer East German universities – a very testing experience for him andcountless other academics.

Hans-Peter Krüger sympathizes with Habermas‘ theory of communicativeaction and tries to overcome the concept of class struggle with „discursivesolutions“ for social conflicts. Lutz Marz approaches the problem of socialism with Ernst Bloch (who was rehabilitated in the GDR, together withRobert Havemann, in November 1989). Michael Brie and Reinhard Mocek are scouts of the third way; they try to avoid the pitfalls of both undemocraticcommunism and modern capitalism, in order to save a socialist GDR. In fact,all these authors wrestle, in one way or another, with the historical dilemma

of the GDR, which was finally ready to sincerely answer demands for reformbut not really capable of handling too much of it (since the only identity andraison d‘etre of the GDR vis-a-vis West Germany was to be a socialist stateon German territory or not to be).

NOTES

1. Cf. H.-P. Krüger, „Rückblick auf die DDR-Philosophie. Ost-Berlin in den 70er and80er Jahren“ in: Frankfurter Rundschau, February 23, 1991. See also N. Kapferer, DasFeindbild der marxistisch-leninistischen Philosophie in der DDR, 1945-1988 (Darmstadt,

1990).2. Heinz Heitzer, GDR: an historical outline (Dresden, 1981), p. 248.3. Wolfgang Engler, a young East German philosopher (b. 1952) who left the SED in

1989, writes in “Auf dem Weg zu einer Gesellschaft der Individuen?” (Toward a society of individuals?), Weimarer Beiträge, vol. 36, 1990, No. 7, p. 1061 (my translation): “It wasemotionally satisfying to know that one was living in a society which offered principledsolutions (“Prinziplösungen“) for the elementary antagonisms of capitalism, especially withregard to political power and economic property relations. Whatever the practical status of these solutions: the ideals of the ‚real‘ socialist democracy, the ‚factual‘ socialization, werepreserved as unimpeachable and floated like radiant suns over the swamps of our dailypolitical and economic life. There were always humans who defended the idealizedprinciples against their miserable implementation.“

4. Cf. Heitzer, op. cit., p. 116: “In confrontation with reactionary theories andunscientific views, Marxism-Leninism gained supremacy in many disciplines [in the late1950s], notably in the social sciences. Increasingly, members of the new intelligentsia thathad emerged from the working class assumed positions of responsibility. At the same time, a growing number of intellectuals with a bourgeois background, most of them eminent

specialists, shed lingering doubts and reservations and committed themselves to the building




Redigitized 2004 by Central and Eastern European Online Library C.E.E.O.L.( www.ceeol.com )

of socialism in what was a very complicated process. A contributing factor was the many

clarifying talks which members of the SED Central Committee’s Politbureau conducted with

the intelligentsia.”

5. The controversy focused on two options provided by the West German Basic Law,articles 23 and 146. The path to unity based on article 23 offered “unification by accession”

not requiring major constitutional changes because East Germany would simply adapt the

existing Basic Law of West Germany, a kind of political “capitulation” indeed, whereas the

other path, provided by article 146, offered unification as a consequence of a new political

order emerging from a substantial act of self determination and constitution-building in both

Germanies. A combination of both articles was also suggested, that is, accession followed by

a constitutional referendum.

6. “On the fate of communism,” in: Dissent, Spring 1990, p. 188.

7. Cf. Charles S. Maier, The unmasterable past: history, holocaust, and German national

identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).

1.1 - schäfer, wolf - too late and too little. east german democratic socialism (en)

Documents