Fighting Honecker's Stagnation
SHANOR, DONALD R.
EAST GERMAN ACTIVISM Fighting Honecker's Stagnation By Donald R. Shanor East Berlin AROUND THE TIME officials from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were agreeing to new human rights...
...But there are signs that perestroïka is causing strain in the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), with younger and more pragmatic officials urging liberalization...
...A police state can be run with only 10 per cent of the population supporting it—and this they have...
...Less than 1 per cent of those permitted to leave stayed in the West...
...The competition with the SED-controlled media was stepped up last year when mas, the U.S...
...Protesters in East Berlin have demanded that municipal candidates proposed by the Party answer questions on how they would treat urban renewal and social services...
...One reason is that most East Germans are able to pick up West German television stations, and therefore have analternativenewssourceanyway...
...The further liberalization of travel regulations is based partly on past experience...
...The peace activists, with sensitive political antennas and long experience in quiet dealings with the ruling group, are taking advantage of this stress in the Party...
...Unfortunately, we're still waiting.' His sentiments have been expressed with more fervor at the protest demonstrations that occasionally interrupt the enforced tranquility of life in the GDR...
...station in West Berlin, began broadcasting a television morning show to the East...
...A second reason, the current economic stagnation, is also an explanation for the tacit tolerance of some peace and human rights activism...
...And consumer complaints are multiplying, despite bright spots like the introduction of cash machines and the development of an advanced microchip...
...East Germany, after long enjoying the Communist bloc's best living standard, has had to reduce growth targets two years in a row...
...EAST GERMAN ACTIVISM Fighting Honecker's Stagnation By Donald R. Shanor East Berlin AROUND THE TIME officials from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were agreeing to new human rights guarantees at the Vienna Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe last January, another arm of the government was eavesdropping on the offices of the outspoken East Berlin pastor Rainer Eppelmann...
...All these efforts to secure a voice in running the country are being chronicled by a network of mimeographed and printed newsletters and small newspapers that manage to survive and get circulated even when the government censors or confiscates the church press...
...In the case of education, the church has been outspokenly critical of stressing obedience rather than teaching young people to act and think independently...
...Retaliation against the movement, as well as against independent writers, scientists, and that popular GDR protest institution the ballad singer, is something all East Germans have learned to live with in the 40 years since the founding of their state and the Federal Republic of Germany...
...Honecker is trying to keep out perestroïka...
...East Germany's underground press has not yet attained the distribution or sophistication of its counterpart in Poland, but it is clearly a worry for officials...
...Younger leaders in the SED worry about losing power, or inheriting the empty shell of a Communist Party as the Polish loyalists have...
...Pensioners have had travel privileges for years because the government hopes they will stay abroad and save it money...
...The GDR leadership is struggling against the fact that the status quo is being reassessed," a West German government official said recently...
...Ignoring warnings from the regime, church groups across the nation discussed a manifesto criticizing "an educational system that battles individualism and creativity from cradle to university...
...The "Gorby effect," as West German commentators call the reverberations in both German states from the Kremlin's change of course, may be fairly effectively blocked in the East by President Erich Honecker and his aging lieutenants, who say the GDR was ahead of the Soviet Union in carrying out reforms...
...Why do they permit it...
...One underground paper, the Environment Letter, reported last winter that scattered strikes and resignations from the Communist Party followed the regime's decision to ban the Soviet journal Sputnik because it contained attacks on Stalinism...
...But you can't have much of an economic future with a policy so repressive that it leads to resignation and emigration...
...Because of the movement's strength, East Germany became the first country in the Soviet bloc to abolish the death penalty...
...A third group has urged peace and human rights candidates to run independently...
...Activists have similarly taken on the sham elections that keep SED politicians permanently in power...
...Donald R. Shanor, apreviouscontributorto the The New Leader, iscurrentlystudying the East Cermanpeace movement for the U.S...
...Signs that the GDR is experiencing an internal crisis are growing," says a Bonn government specialist on East Germany...
...For the first time, the GDR statistical handbook last year began publishing information on pollution...
...While officials insist pressure from below has nothing to do with it, the GDR is becoming a marginally better place to live...
...The chant is the same, whether the demonstrators are disappointed rock fans or peace activists: "Gorbachev, Gorbachev...
...The public harassments continue, but at the same time the movement has gained concessions in the areas of human rights and the environment...
...Yet their main success may be the broadening of the movement's concerns—first from peace to human rights, and lately to claiming a voice in governing the state...
...He defended the continuing construction program, but was exposed to expressions of concern about safety...
...About 30,000 East Germans left the country legally in 1988, triple the number of the previous year, and so many are on waiting lists that the government has made the figure a state secret...
...Their gains in the '80s, despite the government's persecution, have indeed been remarkable...
...Peace activists began to challenge the authorities in the 1960s, and can point to many victories alongside their reverses...
...Trade with West Germany has remained flat, allowing for inflation, since 198 5. West German business people say that East German products are old-fashioned and hard to sell...
...Institute of Peace...
...In an unprecedented series of meetings in Dresden in February, active-duty soldiers and officers of both German armies talked about how to reduce the mutual image of an enemy on the other side of the border...
...The East German mark, officially on a par with the West's, is being sold in the streets for as much as eight to one...
...Thewidepublicacceptanceofthe decision, they maintain, is at least in part attributable to their campaigns against militarism...
...in 1989, more people ofthat age will be allowed out of the country...
...They know that Hungary and Poland are being Westernized and that Germany can't stay as it is...
...We had hoped that perestroïka would reach our country, too," ayoung East German computer scientist told me outside East Berlin's Zionskirche...
...Five million trips were made across the border in 1987 and 6.8 million last year (plus an undetermined number of repeat visits, which are common in Berlin...
...About a million of these trips were made by people of working age...
...Although Honecker has said that the Berlin Wall will not come down, he has permitted increased travel to the West for tourists and those with families there...
...The official attitude here is clearly out of step with the new policies in Moscow...
...The church in Saxony has called for closed polling booths and related guarantees of a secret ballot...
...Another 11,000 fled...
...Such material was previously classified a state secret, too...
...Church peace groups have noted that Honecker's announcement of a 10,000man unilateral reduction in the Armed Forces was something they had pressed for (and the regime had opposed) since 1982...
...More liberal travel provisions and a growing network of dissident media are also the result of activists' pressure and work...
...It has thus emerged that a third of the trees in East Germany are dying from acid rain...
...Other members of the group have been censored, harassed, imprisoned, and forced to emigrate...
...The irregular leaflets produced by Leipzig's Initiative for Societal Renewal have meanwhile denounced neoStalinism in the GDR...
...But emigration, some of it arranged for by Western hard currency payments, is increasing...
...A leading figure in East Germany's growing independent peace movement, Eppelmann has since discovered a second tap...
...The East German military men told their Western counterparts that earlier crackdowns on independent peace campaigns in the GDR had been a mistake...
...Another recent first was the appearance of an official of the GDR nuclear power agency at a conference of antinuclear church members...
Vol. 72 • March 1989 • No. 6
