A Socialist Defector. Victor Grossman
“In all you’ve been telling us about your work and activities I’ve noticed how often you mention women in leadership jobs. They seem to play a much bigger role here.” I had not been aware of it, certainly a good sign.
It would be wrong to minimize the problems and stress in the daily lives of single mothers and of working wives, too, balancing jobs, children, shopping, and housekeeping, while males, especially those of an older generation, were far too slow to grasp that they must bear a fair share in all the duties. Even the many benefits did not add up to a walk on Easy Street. What the GDR was able to do was provide women with a far greater feeling of equality, independence, and greater personal fulfillment.
I end this section with a last political nudist joke. One nude SED official, meeting another, asks: “Have you read Marx?” The other answers: “Yes, me too. Must be from the wicker beach baskets.”
24—Problems Surface
In a book lent to me by John Peet, my boss, a bestseller by William L. Shirer, I found the following:
In November 1918 the Social Democrats, holding absolute power, might have quickly laid the foundation for a lasting democratic republic. But to have done so they would have had to suppress permanently, or at least curb permanently, the forces which had propped up the Hohenzollern Empire and which would not loyally accept a democratic Germany; the feudal Junker landlords and other upper castes, the magnates who ruled over the great industrial cartels, the roving condottieri of the Free Corps, the ranking officials of the imperial civil service and, above all, the military caste and the members of the General Staff. They would have had to break up many of the great estates, which were wasteful and uneconomic, and the industrial monopolies and cartels, and clean out the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the police, the universities and the Army of all who would not loyally and honestly serve the new democratic regime. (William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Greenwich, CT: Fawcett Crest, 1959.)
Didn’t these critical words, though describing the Weimar Republic after 1918, apply all too closely to West Germany and West Berlin after 1945—and to what was not done there? And wasn’t this exactly what had indeed been done in East Germany, under the pressure and protection of the Soviets, it is true, but led by highly motivated German leftists? Why did the GDR’s path, so close to that described by Shirer and in many ways successful, end up in 1990 in failure? Was it due to damaging pressures from the great power in the east? Or to pressures from the west? How much blame can be laid on devoted and well-meaning leaders who were handed the reins after 1945 and then held them tightly till the end, marring their very remarkable achievements with blunders, autocracy, a lack of freedom and democracy? Or, as prevailing opinion-makers now maintain, was the whole damned system faulty to the core, just like its model in the USSR?
Another look at the cultural scene can provide a few hints at answers. I had discovered at the start that the basic anti-fascist, humanist foundation in the GDR was unquestionable, and for me decisive, but that problems enough remained, even when they were carefully swept under media carpets.
There was one place where the dust was not so well hidden and did cause some coughing—but also much laughter. Political cabarets in West Berlin had always aimed jabs at the GDR, hoping for guffaws from many in the audience who, before the Wall, crossed over for short visits. Then Die Distel (The Thistle), founded in 1953 as an East Berlin antidote, quickly became so popular that great luck, patience (sometimes measured in months), or a good supply of “Vitamin B” (that is, good connections) might be necessary to get tickets. At times tickets became a kind of currency, involved in swaps of hard-to-get items—no longer simple things like washrags or razor blades but rather blue bathroom tiles or rare car parts. Die Distel programs always included dutiful jabs at NATO armaments, at Adenauer, Franz Joseph Strauss, and other nasty targets, and some were quite telling. But Easterners laughed far louder at gags about problems within GDR boundaries, most commonly about the latest shortages, often goods that you could swear had always been available until you happened to need them. You might then get an almost scornful reply: “What, scissors? Why, scissors have been short for over three months!”
In one gag, soon part of the language, a polite salesman tells a customer: “I fear you are in the wrong shop, sir. This is where we don’t have T-shirts. Next door is where they don’t have tennis shoes.”
Even when consumer supply had greatly improved (though with recurring surprises), there was no lack of complaints. Some gags reflected a lasting Eastern inferiority complex about almost every domestically made product, like one about a GDR engineer winning a U.S. competition to improve a new jet plane whose wings broke off at its top speed. “Simply bore a series of holes where the wings meet the fuselage,” he submitted. “Are you crazy?” the media asked. But he offered to demonstrate it himself and proved his theory. “How did you ever get such an amazing idea?” they asked. “Where I come from I always noted one fact: even toilet paper never tears at the perforations!”
Here, again, jokes about the GDR’s little part-plastic Trabi were inevitable, like “When does the Trabi reach peak speed?”—“When it’s being towed.”
The jokes could get sharper, to general delight, but I cannot swear that this one made it to the stage:
At the end of Prime Minister Grotewohl’s official visit to China, he asked his host: “Honestly, Mao, just between us: how many still oppose your party’s policies here?”—“Keep it to yourself, Otto, but we estimate about 16 or 17 million people.”—“Oh,” replied Grotewohl, “that’s no more than in our GDR!” (population 17 million).
Hans Krause, the director of Die Distel until 1963, had a dramatic past; arrested as a soldier in 1943 for “undermining military morale,” he fled and hid in a forest area until war’s end. He had troubles later, too, though no longer life-threatening ones; his witty ensemble always balanced on the edges of what many leaders considered hostile. Jobs heading political cabarets could be short-lived; a gag about the fabled goatee of Party head Ulbricht, if not subtle enough, might mean an early end to a contract. Yet public support was so strong that most cabarets survived cuts, compromises, and management changes and kept people laughing.
Political cabaret was often closest to the brink, but filmmakers, authors, even artists and composers, were never immune. Unfriendly reviews in the official media, sarcastic “revelations” in West German radio and TV, or just word of mouth indicated that some happenings behind the scenes, after the applause died down and the crowds left for the subway, could be unhappier than some dramas on the stage, even marked by bitterness or tears.
A major achievement of the young GDR had been to win Bertolt Brecht, one of the century’s best writers, after his nasty expulsion from the United States. But for some this coup was not wholly comfortable: in 1949 some influential critics had problems with his blindly defiant Mother Courage. In 1951, with that dispute largely forgotten, came his libretto for the opera The Trial of Lucullus, in which the Roman general is judged after death by fellow ghosts in the underworld. Did his military triumphs and culinary achievements, like introducing the cherry tree, outweigh his cruelty as a conqueror? A final decision was left to the audience. But recent war criminal trials in Nuremberg, and West German attempts to repudiate them, led official critics, even President Wilhelm Pieck, to call for certainty. Brecht altered the ending, judging Lucullus guilty and condemned to eternal oblivion, not for war in general, perhaps in self-defense, but for aggressive war. This was no great problem, as he often rewrote texts to keep up with developments. When reproached by a Western journalist for bowing to government interference, Brecht asked if he could name any other government that took such great interest in an opera performance.
Brecht was saved from overly sharp criticism by his world reputation and his run-in with the McCarthyite ghouls in Washington. Indeed, his Berliner Ensemble was granted a fine, well-financed theater. And with Lucullus, the main problem was really with the music. The twelve-tone score by Paul Dessau, who often worked with Brecht, with lots of drums and unusual percussion instruments but little melody, no strings, clarinets, or oboes, was not music to the ears of Walter Ulbricht, who huffily left the première as soon as the curtain fell, missing some catcalls but also a fifteen-minute ovation. Brecht’s reply to critics who called it “dissonant,