November 2019 saw the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, with our imperialist media led by the BBC producing its normal anti-communist propaganda to mark the event. Unsurprisingly nothing was reported on the consequences of 30 years of destruction of industry, jobs and culture in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), consequences that expressed themselves in two recent surveys carried out in the former GDR. An official German government survey reported that 62% see reunification as a failure, including 80% of people younger than 40, and 57% feel like second class citizens. The other showed that 67% of people justifiably feel that their living standards are inferior to those living in the West. One of the political consequences of this destruction of society has been the rise of the the far right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party which has gained over 20% of the vote in many parts of the East.
In autumn 1989, mass demonstrations in the major cities of the GDR, which followed similar events in other countries in Eastern Europe, called for democratic reforms in the state and led to the dismantling of the ‘Berlin Wall’ on 9 November 1989. The demands of the demonstrations were not for ‘reunification’. In a survey carried out in December 1989 by Der Spiegel, 71% wanted a democratic GDR not ‘reunification’. Reflecting those sentiments, on 26 November, thirty-one citizens of the GDR launched ‘For Our Country’, a statement which called for the continued independence of the GDR and the building of a socialist alternative to West Germany. The appeal was signed by approximately 1.2 million GDR citizens. Failing this, the authors predicted that the GDR would be swallowed up by West Germany with the destruction of the material and moral values of socialism, which is exactly what happened. The result was not the reunification of a Germany agreed between two equal states, but the annexation of the GDR by West Germany and the destruction of socialism and the social gains the people had made. The ‘unification agreement’ which came into force on 3 October 1990 saw the effective erasure of the GDR from a political map.
On 1 March 1990 West Germany set up the Treuhandanstalt agency to privatise all state businesses and assets in the GDR. It was responsible for 4.1 million workers, 45% of the overall workforce, working in 8,000 businesses at 32,000 sites. Within three years, 71% of the workforce had been forced to find other jobs or were unemployed. By the time the agency was wound up in December 1994, 2.5 million jobs had gone and the old GDR had been de-industrialised. According to Christa Luft, who was the last economics minister in the GDR, this was ‘the largest ever destruction of productive capital in peacetime’. West German investors and companies bought up 85% of East German productive sites. The privatisation process was a ‘wild west’ of corruption and embezzlement as German capitalists lined up to steal the GDR’s assets. In 1998 a government commission estimated that between three and six billion Deutschmarks had been embezzled during this process! Today manufacturing jobs in the east of Germany are approximately 25% the level of 1989. As Social Democratic Party politician Richard Schroder, cynically expressing the imperialists’ interests, put it in 1990, ‘Better to achieve unity with a ruined economy than remain in the Soviet bloc with a half ruined one’.
It wasn’t just industrial jobs that were lost, scientific and research posts were decimated based on an ideological hatred of socialism. Between 1989 and 1992 72% of scientists in the former GDR lost their jobs; full time jobs fell from 140,567 to below 38,000. In 1990 a document from the Academy of Sciences stated, ‘We must eradicate Marxist ideology through structural and personnel reforms’. This massive de-industrialisation and decimation of society has led to not just a loss of millions of jobs but also to a depopulation of the east of the country. In 1989 the population of the GDR was 16.7 million; today it is around 14.7 million. Between 1991 and 2017 it is estimated 3.7 million people left. Many have returned but 66% of those who haven’t are women. Over 60% of the people leaving were under 30 years of age, causing a rise in the average age of the population and a declining birth rate.
The GDR had the highest rate of female employment in the world, after ‘unification’ they were the first to be made redundant. Abortion on demand was legalised in the GDR in 1972 with women having access to all forms of birth control. Today in Germany abortion is illegal unless women submit to various ‘counselling’ sessions or on grounds of medical necessity. In the GDR free kindergarten places were guaranteed for all children; today they have to be paid for. In the state of Saxony, which has around four million inhabitants, over 1,000 schools have been closed since 1989.
In our article in FRFI 212 marking 20 years since the fall of the Wall we finished with a conclusion that still holds today,
‘The Socialist Workers Party held meetings to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the socialist states. Like many others on the British left they supported Lech Walesa’s Solidarnosc in Poland, which the US now acknowledges it advised and directed. Abusing the name of socialism the left aligned with imperialism. Within a year of the fall of the Berlin Wall the US and British armies were waging the First Gulf War and have been in a permanent state of war ever since. Such is the adverse effect of the collapse of the socialist countries on the global balance of class forces and it is nothing for workers to celebrate.’
Bob Shepherd
Acknowledgement to Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2019, for certain facts and figures.
