A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
the Countryside
Conflicts and differences under the surface were never absent in the ferment of GDR cities; for a few years they were far sharper in the countryside. They began in the first postwar year in connection with dividing up the landowners’ estates, as I learned from my father-in-law in my wife’s village. He was a carpenter, and before Hitler a union man, a Social Democrat. He was also a member of a Slavic minority nationality in that region, the Sorbs, who had been oppressed for centuries, but especially by Hitler, and were seen as allies by the Soviets. All street signs and shop or office signs were bilingual. His rural village, even before the Nazis took power, had probably never known a single Communist and not many Social Democrats either, which may explain why the Occupation officers appointed him provisional mayor. Most of the land confiscated from the owner (a titled lower-ranking princess who moved west) was split into new farms averaging twelve to fifty acres. Non-farming village people like my father-in-law also received small plots, just enough for urgently needed vegetables and, after a few years, a number of small farm animals, maybe one hog, a nanny goat, a ewe with lambs, some geese, chickens, and rabbits. For a majority, especially in the cities but also for those rural mayors who remained honest, the first years were extremely cold and hungry. Renate recalled her family’s luck, during a meager, hungry Christmastide, when her father found a rabbit frozen in the snow.
The mayor had no easy job, for on one hand the Soviets demanded full quotas from the farmers to feed hungry people in the cities, while relatively prosperous farmers wanted to sell as much as possible privately, at much higher, illegal, prices. Another crucial question, also involving the mayor and the Soviet staff, was determining who in the village had been a vicious brutal Nazi and who had simply gone along, as opportunists, doing little or no harm to others. All such matters made life for the mayor—and the Soviets—a series of tightrope acts.
After 1952, when the decision was made to move toward socialism, the first Agricultural Production Cooperatives (LPG) farms were started up, distinguished from Soviet “collective farms” because the members pooled land, farm buildings, and eventually herds but maintained ownership rights to the amount of acreage they had contributed. The growth of the LPGs was very slow; successful farmers tended to stay private whereas the cooperatives attracted less experienced or less industrious farmers, which meant that many of them failed to prosper. By 1960 at most a third had joined up. In that year the national leaders decided to force a solution to the problem of uncertain harvests and resulting shortages. It exerted strong, sometimes extreme pressure on all farmers to join the LPGs, including making it difficult for reluctant private farmers to get credit, charging them higher prices when they rented farm equipment, and even setting up loudspeakers near the homes of especially recalcitrant farmers. Some absconded westward. Others gnashed their teeth and joined.
And some were quite willing, like a woman I spoke to, a leader in starting an LPG in her village. She compared the effort with a horse and a repainted stable door. “It’s new for him and he resists at first.” She also used a metaphor about a cow giving birth: “Sometimes it’s necessary to grab the emerging calf by the legs and give it a helping pull.”
“And now,” she told me, “as a member of a cooperative I can count on regular hours when I do farm work, and health and pensions are now covered. I get a regular paid vacation; for the first time since my honeymoon we can now visit the seaside—only 30 kilometers from here. I have a seat in the farm council where we make decisions and vote for the chair, a secretary and a treasurer.”
At first, the going was not easy, and farm production slumped, worsened by two years of bad, wet weather. There were more shortages, even of Germany’s staple food, potatoes, and people were not yet used to eating rice or pasta. There was a popular joke series in the Eastern Bloc in those years, resembling in its question-and-answer form the “knock, knock” jokes in the United States, but always involving “questions to Radio Yerevan” with naive biting responses. Like: “Question to Radio Yerevan: When we move past socialism to the higher goal of communism, will we still be using money?—Answer of Radio Yerevan: ‘No, there won’t be any of that either.’” Now there were farm-based additions: “What is the meaning of the word ‘chaos’?—Sorry, Radio Yerevan does not deal with questions regarding agriculture!”
These shortages, probably a factor in the mass departure of so many people in 1961, may have been part of the reason it was found necessary to build the Berlin Wall—to save the GDR’s existence.
There were also other mistakes along the way, like overstressing the cultivation of corn. And yet, perhaps surprisingly, farm families became so accustomed to the new cooperative teamwork methods that within two or three years they got to like them and produced more and more, surpluses of milk, butter, meat, and the customary fruits, vegetables, and grains. Though each member family could keep a cow and calf or pig and smaller animals, care of the herds became more hygienic, more efficient and more profitable. Farm families now had some leisure time, while the increasingly productive LPG farms had sufficient labor power for rewarding projects on the side, like horse-breeding, honey, hops, or weaving and basketry. A growing number of young farmers attended free agricultural colleges and became experts, and cooperative farmers in the GDR became an increasingly prosperous sector.
Another aspect was noteworthy. In West Germany, bad weather, the rivalry of mega-farms, and price pressure from discount chains forced many to give up their farms, less dramatically yet sadly reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s great Dust Bowl Okie novel Grapes of Wrath. In the GDR, aside from that rough, tough year of change, 1960, purchases, prices, and sales were guaranteed, assistance was provided when necessary, and no family was forced to give up farming against its will.
Thirty years later, after the demise of the GDR, most farmers rejected the chance to regain their private fields and tried every way to stay together in some legally permissible cooperative farm. It was not made easy for them, though some old baronets and other lords got friendly support in attempted comebacks.
22—More Defiance and More Progress
As the republic kept growing, its planned economy made it possible to pay special attention to backward areas. Old Chancellor Otto von Bismarck allegedly joked that “when the world goes under I want to move to Mecklenburg because everything there happens fifty years later.” This region south of the Baltic had been the poorest and most feudally backward in all Germany, until GDR planners altered its status remarkably. New industries were developed based on growing supplies of agricultural products from the new LPG farms, on shipyards like the one described above, and other new sectors. In Eichsfelde, another traditional poverty corner so down-and-out it was a world source of organ-grinders and other oompah musical beggars, a large new cotton spinning center offered thousands of job opportunities in the region, especially to women previously cut off from almost any employment.
Big new industrial centers were constructed in many regions, north, east, west, and south, with public transportation costing a pittance connecting the jobs with high-rise homes. Young couples from all over were attracted to such centers, with their clean, new nurseries, kindergartens, and schools, medical centers, cultural and sport facilities. The supermarkets and department stores at these key project sites were also better supplied with hard-to-get imported goods.
The concentration was on basic industries: mining, coke, iron and steel, energy, transportation equipment, and machine tools. After a rough start making simple plows the farm equipment industry was developed until it could supply more and more complex machinery for cultivating potatoes, grain, sugar beets, oilseed, and dairy products. But the concentration on basics and foodstuffs left less investment money or labor power for making consumer goods, an imbalance that gradually improved but was never able to meet demand, while too many well-designed, high-quality GDR-made goods—hair-dryers, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners—were exported to West Germany, where mail-order companies sold them at very low prices. That even included greatly desired delicacies like eel, calf’s liver, and very good beer. Western wholesalers and retailers paid for these good things well below value in the hard “Western” marks or dollars so desperately needed for the import of vital raw materials—and, occasionally, limited imports of fashionable, modern goods to reduce the dissatisfaction of GDR consumers.
Yet undeniably,