The working class uprising in East-Germany/Berlin June 1953

(Then again, the minister from Bonn appealed them to retain Ruhe und Besonnenheit "im Vertrauen auf unseere Solidaritaet", which brings us straight back to our other question, for what worth did that solidarity turn out to have?)

We (well, not really 'we' = my family, we thought that to be a very stupid idea!) used to lighten candles in the windows every christmas: a sign that we were thinking on our sisters and brothers in the East. And christmas parcels for them were sent at a reduced domestic traif.


I know, this doesn't answer the question, but it is so stupid, and thus worth to be remembered as well.

LOL!



Yeh, those are from before my time though, I mean, I never saw them. Just discovered Freitag a coupla years ago, either in '97 or in '99. And they often had good, essayistic pieces, and from different sides too, during the Kosovo war for example they didnt only have opponents. And I loved reading the whimsical, anecdotal mood-pieces and columns on day-to-day Berlin life on the back page, when I lived there for a few months.

But yeh its true, its pretty far to the left of course, and recently (judging from when I find myself in a German train station or browsing past their website) they've really dug themselves back into the manifesto-like approach, all about SPD and PDS party politics, boring and dogmatic in defence of all kinds of lost trad-left causes (no, Lafontaine isnt going to start a new party to the left of the SPD ... <rolls eyes>).

Still, I read some cool stuff in it. One evening, for example, in the run-up to the elections last year, I read two anecdotal-like articles that I loved. In the one, a German reminisces about his childhood-days growing up in a traditional SPD family, in a decade ruled by Kohl - that one's hilarious - and it went perfectly with what was almost like its mirror-image, an article in which a Russian reminisced about his youthful days of Thatcher-admiring, Soviet-hating political idealism in 1980s Moscow. Lemme see if I can find those links.



Well, I'm sure I haven't helped! :-D

Really? That's interesting. I think its kinda sweet, though obviously little effective. I can see why you would reject that kind of "symbol-politics". But on the other hand, perhaps that kind of thing did help keep/instill a sense of - belonging together - without which the process of "growing together again" after '89 may have been even harder ... perhaps.

I didnt mean to imply there hadnt been any solidarity from the West, btw! I meant it very specifically - that if he appealed to the protestors "to keep calm and collected in trust of our solidarity", you can take that as a cautious determination not to fan the flames (like I just did), but also as evoking some (inappropriate) expectations, huh.

Owed you these links still:

Weltwoche on '53: «Wir wollen freie Menschen sein».
Am 17. Juni 1953 gingen 500000 Arbeiter in der DDR gegen das verhasste Regime auf die Strasse. [..]

Those two Freitag articles:
- Es tut mir Leid
Die SPD und der Opel Ascona sind zwei Seiten einer Medaille. Geschichte einer tiefen Bindung
- Klüger, enttäuschter und verständnisvoller
Eine Erzählung über rechts und links, diesseits und jenseits der Mauer, einst und jetzt

Also ... longer ago, like, first half of the 90s, one bookstore here had another Berlin weekly on sale, 'Wochenpost' I think it was. That was pretty good, too, but I've never found it again - do you know it, did it go broke?

As far as I know (and could find out about it), 'Wochenpost' joined 'Die Woche' ... and finally both disappeared in the early 90's.

And thanks for the links!

Great thread.

I wasn't even born when the East German uprising, but I think I know a couple of reasons of why the Marxist left in the 60s-70s-80s gave it so little importance, compared with Budapest or Prague.

These reasons have nothing to do with political correctness.

Reason number one is that they were Germans. The Unified Socialist Party of Germany was not seen as similar to the Soviet Union Communist Party, or the Cuban or Hungarian brethren.
The stereotype was that the Germans, deep in their hearts, were right wing. The legend was that the HitlerJúgend (sp?) converted entirely into the Communist Youth, and changed their shirts from brown to blue. The legend said that the Italian and Greek comrades were betrayed at Yalta, and that the Polish and German parties were Stalin's artificial creations.
In that sense, the worker's revolt of 1953 seemed "logical". Either they were socialdemocrats rising against the right-wingers Communist simulators, or -after all- German people, not interested in Socialist goals.
The thing was to keep the conscience clean. Those prejudices helped.

Reason number two was given here: both the Hungarian and Czech rebellions seemed to have accomplished something in the minds of these left wingers among which I dwelled: they "proved" to us that the people had libertarian goals, within Socialism; they "proved" that people wanted Socialism with a human face. The German uprising "proved" nothing.

fbaezer

Your first reason confuses me a little bit.
At least here in the Federal Republic, the SED was seen as what it was: a communist party.

Germany always right wing? Well, those people, who believed this legend didn't know a lot of German history, I suppose.

But it really may have been a reason.

[an aside: just the first Spanish gold medal in Barcelona!]

Walter, you are forgetting Communist "doublethink".

It was easier to forget Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Liebneckt, and say, "well, those East Germans are not left-wing, because left-wing is Good; they are really Nazis in disguise", than to think "hmm, something must be wrong with the whole Communist system".


Plus I have a couple of annecdotes from that time, that helped feed the legend, and are quite telling about our East German Communist "brethren":

A Mexican comrade, from the "Red Set" was visiting DDR. In an aside, a high ranking DDR officer asked him:
"Comrade Adolfo, when were you born?".
My friend answered:
"I know where you're getting at. I was born in 1941. My father's name is Adolfo and he's a Spanish Communist who found refuge in Mexico".
The East German replied:
"Actually our Adolph was quite a good leader. His big mistake was to choose wrongly when he fought the Soviet Union."


My Cuban cousin was in DDR in his honeymoon (you can say he wasn't low in the nomenklatura scale, since he was allowed to travel outside Cuba), his guide -a card-carrying member of SED- asked him, in an aside:
"I don't understand, Comrade, why, if you are white, decided to marry a black woman".
My cousin was left wordless.
(His wife is white, of southern Spanish descent).

Hey fbaezer, good to see you come round (did you come here through the link I put on the Roundtable?)



That's funny, that people would think that. After all, the GDR was one of the rare Sovietblock states that could claim a famed and vibrant Communist history; the KPD had had a sizable following after all, and some famous leaders. The only other "satellite states" where the Communists could point to such an extent of pre-war "indigenous rootedness" would be the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria.

In Romania, for example, pre-war communist politics was near non-existential. The party had had no more than a few hundred members in the entire country before it took over power. They virtually had to invent a Communist party there. Same for Estonia, for example. And you're right about Poland, too.

No, I wouldnt say leftists here kinda glossed over East-Germany as not having any "real" communists or constituting artifical communism - it was especially the GDR that still attracted apologetic fellow-travellers, beyond the Communist Party, here, until embarassingly late dates (early eighties).

Same surprise about the "right wing at heart" observation. East-Germany and Czechia, as the only industrialised countries, after all had quite a leftist tendency, overall, before the Nazis took over, with both a strong Social-Democrat and a strong Communist party. (Czechoslovakia was the only country, of those where there were relatively free elections directly after WW2, where the Communists managed to become the biggest party).

Now Romania, Poland and Hungary, those can more easily be said to have been instinctively right-wing countries. In Hungary, even while they controlled the power ministries, the Communists didnt manage to 'achieve' more than a sixth of the votes in the post-WW2 elections, with the Social-Democrats getting another sixth and all the rest of the votes going to the Small Landowners Party and conservative allies - and that was probably still a whole lot better than how they would have fared in Poland or Romania.

East Germany should by comparison have been fertile ground, especially as in those first years the out- and out-opponents were still free to just move out, to the West. That makes the symbolic value of the workers' rejection of the Communist state there in '53 all the bigger, I think.

The point about the different ways in which West- and East-Germany "processed" the Nazi past 's been explored again quite a lot in Germany in the 90s, mostly in response to the way small-town East-German youth has flocked to the extreme-right/Nazi movements.

The obvious point is that, though the GDR branded itself the counter-Nazi state by definition at a time when, in the FRG, mid-level Nazis were quietly integrated into the system, it was in the FRG that the Nazi past ended up being exhaustively discussed, researched and questioned, a generation later. While in the GDR the rejection of the Nazi past remained of a manifesto-like sloganism, that could be shrugged off as easily as the rest of the system's paraphernalia by an increasingly alienated population. The really difficult questions of responsibility and guilt, cause and effect, individual and collective role, never got to be seriously fleshed out there. Its fair enough to say the East-Germans were hardly as thoroughly de-nazified as the West-Germans, notwithstanding all the rhetoric. (Walter, am I making sense?)

Wholly apart from how the Stasi literally did 'adopt' a lot of former Nazi agents and youths, wholesale - they had just the right skills, after all.

<ahem>. I don't really know how all that fits in with your point. <blush>.

Oh yes, you were talking of why the Marxists chose to gloss over this episode. I don't think that held true for Germany itself, at all, for one - I mean, they didnt, there, I think. (Walter?). But I get your overall point, though - I'd just juggle the examples a bit around, myself ->



I have to rely on what I read and what my parents told me, but as far as I know, the contrast here in Holland was more between Hungary '56 and Prague '68. The Hungary uprising caused an uproar here (the offices of the Communist newspaper were attacked and beleaguered), and the Labour party, which at the time was very pro-American, joined in the fierce condemnation. But it wasnt much 'commemorated' by any of the New Left'ers of the sixties and seventies, at all, while Prague '68 was positively celebrated. The difference was exactly of the kind you describe, but only with Hungary '56 in the role where you put Berlin '53. In the Prague 68-ers, people like my parents saw kindred souls: pacifist idealists longing for a "socialism with a human face". The grim, desperate battle of the desperadoes taking a last (armed) stand in '56 Budapest, on the other hand, didnt fit in anything as nicely with their world view, and was buried in history a bit more. (And occassionally discredited with references to a suggested crypto-fascist/Horthyist revanchism about it, nothing of the like could be insinuated about '68).

But let's put the spotlight down the other way, too, though. Its not an uprising that seems to have elicited a great mass of passion or loyalty among right-wingers (outside Germany), for long, either - its not just the Marxists who can be said to have glossed over/forgotten Berlin '53 in a way that Budapest '56 or Prague '68 weren't. Is that, apart from the obvious reasons - it didnt last as long, wasnt as massive, didnt lead to any of the far-reaching government & policy changes Nagy and Dubcek personified - also because it was a workers' revolt? It initially focused on working conditions, workers' rights, and so on, after all, and steel workers marching into town to protest their harsh workloads may not be the kind of image a Reageanite heart will typically burn for ... ? <grins>

Of course the protestors quickly enough came with more farreaching demands (free elections etc). But with Budapest '56, sympathetic observers could, furthermore, also see a heroic fight for national independence, while the Polish resistance of the Eighties also involved the passion of Catholic religious conviction - causes beyond liberal democracy itself that might make a conservative heart beat faster. Whereas Berlin '53 - any causes that could be associated with the revolt beyond democracy, per se - starting with reunification - would automatically have been a bit awkward for non-Germans to celebrate, no?