Student Showcase: Forthcoming Guest Authored Blog Posts by Swansea University Students.

 

During July, The View East is very pleased to be hosting a ‘student showcase’, featuring a number of short articles written by history students from Swansea University.

 

During the final year of undergraduate study, many students invest a lot of time and energy into their studies and produce some really excellent work as a result. However, the vast majority of work produced by undergraduate students is generally not accessible to a wider audience. Most dissertations, essays and research projects are read only by the student themselves, their supervisor, one or two other examiners and perhaps a couple of family members or close friends who may be drafted in to proofread the finished article. Reading through some of the excellent work submitted by students I’ve worked with at Swansea University over the course of the last year led me to reflect that this was rather a shame. Hence my idea to host a ‘student showcase’ here on The View East was born, by asking some of my students to write short articles related to some of the research they had conducted over the past year.

 

The students I approached have risen admirably to the challenge! Over the next three weeks The View East will feature seven short guest authored articles. All articles have been written by students from the Department of History and Classics at Swansea University. All of the authors have recently completed the final year of their undergraduate degrees and will be graduating this month. All of the students featured here either took my ‘special subject’, specialising in the study of Eastern Europe 1945-1989 during the final year of their degree, or chose to research and write their dissertation on some aspect of modern East European history, under my supervision. All of the students featured as guest authors consistently produced excellent work over the course of the year, just a small sample of which is included here. Sadly, it was not possible to feature the great work done by all of the students I have had the pleasure of working with this year, as many (particularly in the case of my dissertation group) produced excellent research, but on topics that lie outside of the scope of this blog’s focus.

 

By way of a brief introduction, our guest authors during the next three weeks are writing on the following topics:

 

Week 1:

On Monday 11 July we begin with Harry Hopkinson’s fascinating article Sputnik: Bluff of the Century. Here Harry explores the implications of the successful launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957, not only in terms of technological and military developments but also in terms of its wider impact on the development of the Cold War.

On Wednesday 13 July we have the first of a trio of articles focusing on various aspects of the history of the GDR. In this article Rosie Shelmerdine provides a fresh and timely analysis of the 1953 East German Uprising, exploring the true nature of the rebellion by asking whether the events of June 1953 are best considered as ‘Western Provocation, Workers Protest or Attempted Revolution?’.

Our first week concludes on Friday 15 July, with James Shingler’s intriguing article ‘Rocking the Wall’, which follows on nicely from Rosie’s study of a popular uprising by exploring a rather different aspect of protest and resistance in the GDR, focusing on the impact of popular music in 1970s and 1980s East Germany.

 

Week 2:

The second week of the student showcase opens by concluding our focus on the GDR. On Monday 18 July David Cook’s article ‘Living with the Enemy’ provides an insightful and intelligent analysis of the infamous East German secret police – the Stasi.

On Thursday 21 July Nelson Duque’s article ‘Inside Ceausescu’s Romania: An Unquestionably Efficient Police State’ follows nicely on from David’s study of the Stasi by considering the repressive nature of another East European regime: that of Ceausescu’s Romania and his much feared secret police, the Securitate.

 

Week 3:

On Monday 25th July our penultimate article, written by Carla Giudice, takes us back to the immediate aftermath of World War Two by considering some of the factors that influenced the contrasting fates of three leading individuals who featured in the 1945 Nuremberg War Crimes Trials: the ‘Good Nazi’ Albert Speer, the ‘Bad Nazi’ Herman Goering and the ‘Mad Nazi’ Rudolf Hess.

In recent months there has been a renewed focus on war crimes in relation to the Balkan Wars of the 1990s, due to the recent arrest and indictment of former Bosnian Serb Army chief Ratko Mladic on charges of genocide and other crimes against humanity. On Wednesday 27th July, our final guest authored article by Simon Andrew thus provides a fitting conclusion to the student showcase, by considering some of the circumstances surrounding the bloody break up of Yugoslavia.

 

 

Building the Berlin Wall

48  years ago today, the world witnessed the birth of one of the most iconic and enduring symbols of the Cold War.

 

13th August 1961: On this morning 48 years ago,  residents of the German capital Berlin awoke to find barricades had been erected across their city overnight, dividing East from West. These hastily constructed barbed wire barriers later assumed more permanency when they were rebuilt as a solid concrete structure that came to be known as the Berlin Wall.

 

In essence, Berlin had already been divided for 16 years,since the post-War Potsdam Conference (July-August 1945), where the respective leaders of the victorious Allied powers (the USA, USSR and UK) formally agreed on the division of occupied Germany, and the German capital Berlin (which lay deep within the Soviet area of control), into four separate ‘zones of influence’.  As their wartime camaraderie quickly faded and the Cold War took hold, tensions soon became evident, as had been demonstrated by the Berlin Blockade (1948) and the Soviet crackdown on workers revolts in East Germany in 1953. The Berlin Wall, however, was something new. On the 12th August SED leader Walter Ulbricht signed an official order closing the border, and as a result, on the morning of 13th August 1961, residents of East Berlin awoke to find barriers cutting across streets and through neighbourhoods,  dividing them from their friends and family in the Western sector. Police and soldiers were on the streets patrolling the barricades, while most people reacted with confusion and after 15 years of communism, resigned acceptance, as some rather bemusedly waved to their former neighbours, people they could still see, but no longer reach. Berlin was now divided, not just ideologically and politically, but physically. On 15th August the first concrete blocks were laid, and construction of the famous wall began.

 

The Building of the Berlin Wall:

 

 

The border dividing Berlin soon developed from the rather rudimentary barbed wire rolls hurridly unfurled, to its more common recognisable form: comprising a 27 mile long concrete structure, marked by periodic watchtowers and staffed by armed guards who had orders to shoot anyone attempting to breach the wall on sight, while other guards undertook foot patrols along its perimiter, accompanied by trained guard dogs. Travel between East and West was only possible through official checkpoints, with a special travel permit issued by the SED required. The reality meant that most East Berliners would remain ‘walled in’ for the next 28 years, as the SED publically proclaimed that leaving the GDR was ‘an act of political and moral backwardness and depravity’, although this didn’t stop the SED sometimes forcibly shipping dissidents off into exile to West Berlin, essentially using it as a dumping ground for ‘troublesome elements’ within the GDR.

 

1963: US President Kennedy makes his famous ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ speech in West Berlin:

 

 

The official East German justification for the Berlin Wall was that it was an ‘anti-fascist protection mechanism’ built to protect East Berliners from evil outside forces that threatened to undermine the stability of their ‘socialist people’s paradise’. In truth however, the wall was clearly erected to keep people in, rather than to keep people out. Between 1949-1961 almost 2.5 million East Germans had left for the West, and in July 1961 alone, shortly before the border was closed, 30,000 citizens of the GDR had crossed Berlin to enter the Western zone. Figures such as this meant the GDR risked ‘collapse by emigration’. This mass-exodus of Germans from East to West is the most popularly cited reason for the building of the Wall, and while it is clearly a valid argument, a recent book throws some new light on Ulbricht’s decision to close the border. In Driving the Soviets Up The Wall: Soviet-East German Relations 1953-1961 (2005, Princetom University Press) Professor Hope Harrison uses evidence from recently declassified Soviet and GDR documentation to argue that part of Ulbricht’s rationale behind building the Berlin Wall was to increase tensions with the West and thus ensure the Soviets were obligated to continue supporting the GDR. Overnight, the division of Berlin became a fait accompli and while the Western powers issued verbal condemnation of Ulbricht’s actions, they were unwilling to take any firm action that may risk a confrontation with the USSR (Kennedy was said to have remarked that ‘a wall is better than a war’ when told about developments in Berlin).

 

June 1987 – US President Ronald Reagan makes his famous speech demanding ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ at the Brandenburg Gate:

 

 

For the next 28 years, the Berlin Wall would act as the principal symbol of the Cold War division of Europe. Between its initial erection in August 1961 and the fall of the Wall in November 1989, many East Germans attempted to breach the Wall and cross into the West despite the obvious dangers:  using forged documentation, concealed in vehicles or even simply trying to climb over the wall and run across the border. Some were successful, but many others were not: official estimates state that around 136 people lost their lives in attempts to breach the wall, however earlier this week an activist  group estimated that the total number of people killed trying to flee from East to West Germany between 1945 and 1989 could total up to 1,347 (see here and here for further details about  these figures).

 

With so much attention focused on commemorating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Wall in November this year, itcould be easy to overlook the anniversary of  it’s initial construction, but earlier this week the 48th anniversary of the building of the Wall was commemorated in Berlin. On 12th August a service was held at the Chapel of Reconcilliation, part of the Berlin Wall Memorial Centre on Bernauer Streeet (the scene of some of the most dramatic attempts to escape ‘over the wall’), while in a separate ceremony a plaque was unveiled in memorium of some of the Wall’s victims, people who died trying to escape into West Berlin. Speaking at this memorial service, German Pastor Manfred Fischer perhaps summed up the legacy of the Wall most poignantly, when he stated that the Berlin Wall ‘divided our city right through its heart. It divided Germany. It divided Europe‘.

 

 

Adventures in Stasiland

I recently read Anna Funder’s book Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall (Granta Books, 2003). Funder, an Australian journalist who lived and worked in Berlin for a couple of years in the late 1990s, became fascinated by the experiences of people in the former GDR during her stay, a place where, as Funder  describes ‘what was said was not real and what was real was not allowed, where people disappeared behind doors and were never heard of again, or were smuggled into other realms…’.

Anna Funder's book 'Stasiland' provides 'a journey into the bizarre, scary, secret history of the former East Germany that is both relevant and riveting' (The Sunday Times)

Funder provides a well-researched overview of the scale and scope of the Stasi in the former GDR presenting some interesting (and at times quite mind-boggling) facts and statistics: in just 40 years the Stasi generated the equivalent of all records previously produced in Germany since the Middle Ages; laid out upright and end to end the files the Stasi kept would form a line 180km in length; when the wall fell the Stasi had 97,000 official employees and an additional 175,000 informers in a country of 17 million people, giving a ratio of one Stasi officer or informant per 63 citizens (a higher ratio than the KBG in the Soviet Russia at the peak of Stalin’s terror and, if part-time informers are added to the total of Stasi representatives in the GDR, some estimates place the ratio as high as 1 Stasi representative per 6.5 citizens). She describes the methods employed  to keep citizens of the GDR under such close surveillance: the boxes of fake wigs and moustaches found in Stasi offices to assist surveillance operations (one former Stasi officer she interviewed demonstrated ‘a sense of fun’ about his former occupation describing the joy of choosing different disguises by coming into work and deciding ‘who shall I be today?!”) and the list of observation signals displayed in the old Stasi HQ (‘like a choreography for very nasty scouts’ observes Funder).

But this was not a simple case of grown men harmlessly living out their boy-hood spy-game fantasies (and Stasi officers were – almost overwhelmingly – male). Other methods employed by the Stasi were legally and morally suspect even in the totalitarian climate of what was allowed in the communist GDR. The ‘standard practices’ applied of course: mail would be opened and inspected, telephone calls intercepted and residences and hotel rooms bugged – but the Stasi even went as far as to develop a method of connecting individual typewriters to the print they made (‘as if to fingerprint thought’ Funder muses sombrely). Smell sampling was also widely employed as ‘evidence’, interrogation subjects were frequently subjected to sleep deprivation to gain ‘confessions’ (which was technically illegal, even in the GDR) and following the death of a number of communist-era dissidents from a rare kind of cancer in the 1990s – all of whom had been held in Stasi prisons around the same time – evidence was uncovered of the use of radiated tags and sprays to ‘mark’ people and objects that the Stasi wanted to track. The full extent of the Stasi’s penetration into East German society will probably never be known – despite the opening of Stasi files to the public in August 1990 and continued revelations about their activities being uncovered today, in the panic during the events of November 1989, the Stasi were ordered to dispose of many of their ‘most incriminating files’,  which were shredded and destroyed (Funder describes how over 100 burnt out shredders were discovered in a room at the fomer Stasi HQ in Normenstasse, Berlin following the collapse of communist authority in the GDR).

All of this is, of course, fascinating. But what really makes Funder’s book is the ‘human element’: the personal stories she collects from people who had lived in the former GDR and their experiences of dealing with the Stasi. Funder draws perspectives from both sides, speaking to those who represented and actively participated in the power structures of the old GDR (including numerous ‘Stasi-men’ who she contacts though newspaper adverts) and also to some of those who opposed, rejected or confronted the regime in various ways. She is always clear about the importance of this material, stating that ‘for anyone to understand a regime like the GDR, the stories of ordinary people must be told’. So we are told the stories of Herr Winz, Herr Christian, Herr Bock and Herr Bohnsack (all former Stasi employees), of Hagen Koch (who had been appointed as Eric Honecker’s ‘personal cartographer’ and had personally walked the streets of Berlin in August 1961 to paint the line where the Berlin Wall was then erected) and of Carl Eduard von Schnitzler (who had presented Der Schwarze Kanal (‘The Black Channel’) a propaganda programme broadcast across the GDR from 1960). Conversely, Funder also explores the experiences of those such as Miriam Webber (who became an ‘enemy of the state’ after an attempt to cross the Wall into West Berlin when she was just 16, and whose husband Charlie later died in mysterious circumstances whilst being held in Stasi custody), Julia (Funder’s landlady who was targeted by the GDR after establishing a long-distance relationship with an Italian man and pressured to inform on her friends and family)and Frau Paul (whose seriously ill baby was being treated in a hospital in West Berlin when the Wall was suddenly erected, who was later arrested and imprisoned by the Stasi and offered the chance to visit her son if she agreed to act as their ‘bait’ in a sting operation to arrest someone they were after while she was there – she declined their ‘offer’ and as a result would not see her son until he returned to East Berlin several years later, a virtual stranger to her).

These individual stories all combine to provide some intriguing insights into life in the former GDR, but what is perhaps most fascinating is the degree to which they illustrate that its history cannot be understood in simple black and white. Instead, a massive grey area exists when attempting to explain or understand the system that developed under communism, and the motives of those who chose to participate in, or oppose it. So while many of the former Stasi-men show little regret or remorse about their former roles (‘We had people everywhere!’ proudly proclaims Winz, while von Schnitzler still steadfastly maintains that the Berlin Wall was ‘humane’), their stories reveal how many of them too were damaged despite – or because of – their involvement in the system.  So Christian was arrested, imprisoned and later demoted to manual work on a building site for three years after he failed to disclose his extra-marital affair to his superiors (‘Any one could have an affair of course’ he explains, in an attempt to describe the perverse logic behind his arrest ‘but EVERYTHING had to be reported’) and it emerges that Koch ran into problems when he married a girl who the Stasi viewed as ‘GDR negative’ and was later arrested when he attempted to resign from the Stasi, while his wife was forced to divorce him under threat of losing their son if she did not (they later re-married).

Conversely, despite several people recounting their awful experiences with the Stasi, many former citizens that Funder spoke to continued to display significant amounts of nostalgia – or ‘Ostalgie’ – for the former GDR now that it no longer exists. Post-socialist development and re-unification have failed to live up to the expectations that many held in 1989, and ironically, many mourn the loss of ‘security’ they now associate with the GDR in a time when people recall that ‘prices were lower, everyone had work and transportation was free’. The current system is ‘better than the Weimar Republic and better than Hitler, but bring back the Communists!’ one elderly woman confides to Funder, and even Julia, who was targeted and persecuted by the Stasi, talks of the rise of problems such as unemployment, drugs, homelessness and prostitution which she still identifies today with ‘the West’ and seems to equate the fall of the Berlin Wall with the loss of her own personal security (for reasons that become apparent as her story unfolds).

You get the sense that Funder is trying her hardest to remain impartial, but nevertheless some of her frustration with this ‘Ostalgie’ does come through when she talks of the post-communist ‘myth’ that has emerged about how life was better in the GDR in many respects because ‘if you didn’t buck the system then it wouldn’t harm you’ – despite the stories she collects clearly demonstrating the opposite – and the tendency of some she encountered to present the GDR as ‘simply a harmless welfare state that looked after people’. As a result, while the primary focus of Stasiland is to explore life in the period before 1989, some interesting contemporary perspectives also emerge, particularly in relation to the existence of ‘mauer im kopf’ or ‘the wall in the head’ that still appears to influence many in Germany today.

Stasiland is available from Amazon.co.uk:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stasiland-Stories-Behind-Berlin-Wall/dp/1862076553

Looking Back on the Berlin Wall.

University College London (UCL) have an interesting podcast available on their website. Entitled ‘Looking Back on the Berlin Wall’ the podcast contains a short (fifteen minute) interview with  Mary Fulbrook, Professor of German History at UCL, who has previously published several works on the GDR and is currently working on a Leverhulme funded project focusing on Germany from the First World War to the reunification of  East and West in 1990,  entitled ‘Living Through Dictatorships’.

In the interview, Professor Fulbrook discusses her own insights into events leading up to and surrounding the East German revolution, explores the shifting symbolism of the fall of the Berlin Wall over the past twenty years and highlights some of the lasting legacies of the events of 1989.

You can listen to the interview as an MP3 or download and listen via itunes by clicking on the relevant links here:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0905/09052203

‘Communist Timewarp’ Found in Germany.

In what could be a scene straight from Wolfgang Becker’s hit film ‘Goodbye Lenin!’ (2003), an architect surveying buildings in the (formerly East German) city of Leipzig opened the door to a flat to discover it had apparently lain untouched since the 1980s.

Mark Aretz, seemingly the first vistor to the flat in over twenty years, was surveying the site for renovations and has described how he opened the door and stepped back into a ‘veritable East German timewarp’, where the kitchen was stocked with old GDR grocery brands, communist-era Juwel cigarettes and Kristall vodka. A calender hanging on the wall was turned to August 1988 – around fifteen months before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The full story is yet to unfold, but letters found in the flat suggest that the occupant was a man aged 24 who was in some trouble with the East German authorities. It also seems that whatever his reason for leaving, it was sudden – a bag of shrivelled bread rolls lay open on the kitchen table.

The Berliner Morgenpost have published a feature on the recent discovery – the article is in German, but also includes a series of fascinating photos of the flat:

http://www.morgenpost.de/vermischtes/article1022103/Verlassene_DDR_Wohnung_in_Leipzig_entdeckt.html