A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
got married in 1955, I spoke to my wife about buying a refrigerator. “What for?” she asked. She had grown up without one, with a corner in the cellar and various tricks to keep foodstuffs cool. By the 1960s even villagers like her had learned what fridges and later freezers were good for. I was proud to have been quick and lucky enough to get one of the first new taller models. My consumerist pride was soon deflated, however, when my mother, on her first visit from New York, commented, “What a cute little fridge!” By the end of the decade almost every family also had at least such a “cute little fridge.”
As for TV sets, their penetration, if somewhat later than in the United States or the FRG, was soon so swift that virtually every family had a set, except for those intellectuals who rejected them in favor of reading books or the like. For a while, there was a snag with color TV; most people wanted only the brand with two reception systems so they could pick up West German television. Such viewing was officially regarded as a “no-no” until well into the 1970s, but by then almost everybody watched such channels as much as they wanted. Only in two areas, around Greifswald in the northeast and Dresden in the southeast, was “West” reception technically difficult; as a result, until antennas got higher and more receptive, the latter area bore a sarcastic nickname: the “Valley of Blissful Ignorance.” With most GDR viewers able to regularly watch both East and West news reports, some U.S. visitors found them most likely “the best informed people in the world.”
As far as cars went, the little steel-frame, part-plastic bodied Trabants, or Trabis, were no rivals for Western brands. One Radio Yerevan joke I recall was: “Can a Trabi attain a speed of more than 110 km/h (about 68 mph)?”—The radio’s answer: “It depends on how high you drop it from.”
All the same, with few foreign cars available and all of them very expensive, the waiting time for a new GDR-made Trabant or a larger Wartburg was amazing, sometimes more than a decade, and a cause of plenty of anger and, as always, more jokes. In one, a wealthy American tells a friend: “You know, I was able to order this fancy German car called a Trabant. It must really be something! Just imagine, it’s so sought after there’s a ten-year waiting list! And when I mailed them the dollar sum they were kind enough to send me a small plastic model in advance—which actually works!”
Indeed, dollars could make a very big difference, and such gags caused as much teeth-gnashing as laughs. But used cars were easily available, often lined up on special parking lots with legible notes in each car detailing kilometer count, condition, price, and address. Oddly enough, a used car, at an unregulated bargaining price, often cost more than a new one, for which one had to wait so long but whose price, like nearly all prices, was nationally fixed. After finally getting a first new car, one could order the next one six years in advance, and with a spouse also ordering, it was possible to keep on trading old for new every three years if desired. That’s how I came to own four Trabis, one after the other. Neither they nor the Wartburgs could match those glossy Western dream-cars so admired by Easterners when they zipped past, or inspected when parked at a curb by some visitor or, most frequently, envied in West German TV commercials. Renate never loved my Trabis, which were bumpy and loud, but I was happy with them; for simpletons like me they were easier to care for, requiring neither oil (which came mixed in with the gasoline at designated pumps) nor water, since the motor was air-cooled. Many East Germans grew attached to their little vehicles and took such good care of them, washing them assiduously every weekend (there were no carwash facilities as yet) that some cynics maintained that East German fathers spent more loving care on their Trabis than on their children.
Life did keep improving in the 1960s and 1970s. Though West German, American, and other media offered grim descriptions after brief, superficial visits, one leading West German journalist, Joachim Besser, no leftist, wrote surprisingly honestly about a two-week tour in 1966. Here are excerpts:
The economy of the GDR is going through a boom period. Everywhere you go you hear about the labor shortage. Everywhere I read the “Help Wanted” placards—shop assistants, typists, garage hands, workers are sought. The phrase “economic miracle” is certainly applicable to the present state of affairs….
I visited Eisenhüttenstadt, with 40,000 inhabitants. There is the same picture here as in Schwedt, but here the picture is complete. The Eisenhüttenstadt combine turns out 1.5 million tons of pig iron annually. The ore comes from the Soviet Union, the coal from Poland. The new town is a fine town, a town which can be lived in. The buildings are light and friendly, there are good hotels and restaurants, a theater, cinemas and sports grounds. The shops too are good and tasteful.
But … there is naturally a parallel expansion of the old industrial centers of Saxony…. Everywhere you go you see factories of a smaller size.… And new housing is not confined to the key points either. I saw the fascinating reconstruction work in Magdeburg, wandered through Chemnitz, today Karl-Marx-Stadt, and admired the modern form in which the center of the city is being rebuilt. Our modern town planners would be pleased to see what is being done, particularly in Chemnitz. Many of the mistakes made in West Germany have been avoided. There are no residential quarters right on the main roads, and new buildings are set well back, allowing space for the growing traffic of the future. Here it will not be necessary to tear down the buildings again to widen the roads, as in so many West German cities….
In restaurants I ate as well as in the Federal Republic, and in every case more cheaply. The menus in the luxury hotels are first-class; but I also ate in village inns, in quick-lunch restaurants, and in all cases the prices were between 10% and 30% lower than in West Germany. (Joachim Besser, Kölner Stadtanzeiger, December 3, 1966, trans. in DGR, December 23, 1966, 182–83.)
Besser goes on to describe the assortment of groceries on sale, generally good but varying from place to place, with a shortage of some items in some areas, and of oranges everywhere, but plenty of poultry, preserved foods, and, especially in the north, every variety of fish. In comparing standards with his own Federal Republic, he finds that “we are a decade ahead, but if you compare it with Poland or Czechoslovakia then it is the GDR which is well ahead.”
Such improvement worried the men in Bonn. In December 1955, West Germany announced its “Hallstein Doctrine”: “Formal recognition of the GDR by a state with which the Federal Republic entertains diplomatic relations would represent an unfriendly act.” Tough consequences were threatened: a break in relations (except for the USSR, one of the “Occupation powers”). With West Germany economically far stronger than the GDR, the threat was effective. In 1957 Bonn broke relations with Yugoslavia after it rejected a secret bribe offer of big trade credits and recognized the GDR. Bonn broke with the new Castro government in Cuba for the same reason. But the threats worked well with Sri Lanka and newly independent Guinea, which had planned to establish relations with the GDR. When Bonn warned that all promised aid money was at stake, Guinea toed the line and quietly withdrew its diplomat from East Berlin. One side note was that recognition of West Germany required acceptance of its claims to “1937 borders,” with slices of Poland and the USSR. Very few noticed that the Foreign Office official whose name was used, Walter Hallstein, had been a prestigious Hitler-era professor and member of various Nazi-front organizations, or that Wilhelm Grewe, who actually worked out the doctrine (and later became ambassador to Washington until John F. Kennedy threw him out) had been an enthusiastic Nazi Party member from 1933 until 1945.
The Hallstein Doctrine gradually became counterproductive; it cut Bonn off from Eastern Europe (except for its friend Romania) and increasingly from the Arab world which, after the Six Days War in 1967, objected to West German support for Israeli occupation of the Palestinian West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan area. Arab-GDR connections grew closer and when, after a bloodless coup, a new government in Iraq decided to defy Hallstein in 1968, then-Foreign Minister Willy Brandt saw it as a warning omen and dropped the doctrine.
23—Nudity and Equality
Not only was a doctrine dropped in those days, but garments too, and by an amazing number of GDR citizens. I am referring to beach nudism, known as FKK, Freie Körperkultur, translated as Free Body Culture. After 1990 many of the West German vacationers who swarmed to the Baltic beaches of East Germany were often surprised if not greatly dismayed by the mass enjoyment of nakedness in the GDR—and they saw to it that it was strictly limited.