The Kremlin's Shabby Client
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
The Kremlin's Shabby Client Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany By Charles S. Maier Princeton. 376 pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News...
...This need must also be met, at a time when western Germany is beset with its own economic and social woes...
...Bonn's policy included enormous ransom payments for thousands arrested by the secret police...
...The "Ossies" now have human rights and the rule of law after 60 years of dictatorship, but also the unemployment and disruption that so sweeping a transition involves...
...In West Germany, he shows, it anchored the idea that the GDR was an acceptable and permanent state...
...It opened letters, tapped telephones and collected gossip...
...Seventeen years before the end, economic advisers warned Erich Honecker that the country was beginning to sink into disastrous debt...
...the sinister, the sordid and the hilarious...
...It seems remarkable that such practices shoul d have been disregarded by foreign partisans, and perhaps even more remarkable that there should be today in eastern Germany any nostalgia for "the good old days...
...The Stasi had 90,000 officials and 174,000 unofficial spies who put together more than a million files on suspects, possible suspects and friends or family of either...
...He has mined state and Socialist Unity Party archives that became available after the fall...
...Some thought they might use this unsuspected dynamism to reverse their betrayal by the regime and build Socialism with a human face...
...In what must be unique in the history of police work, Maier records, "They wiped the chairs on which they had seated suspects called in for questioning and then put the small rags into glassjars as a smell collection in case they ever needed dogs to track them down...
...Economically, all of this was extremely important to the GDR...
...The GDR remained the Soviet Union's chief trading partner and supplier of machine tools and electronics...
...Serious, liberal journalists, discovering a new patriotism in East Germany and a pride in "Socialist achievements," dismissed talk of unification as quixotic and even reprehensible...
...that marked the regime...
...Morally and practically, moreover, both larger patron and smaller client fell farther and farther behind a world moving away from smokestack industry into information and services...
...The GDR was derided from the first as being neither German nor democratic nor a republic...
...to teach political writers and statesmen to be cautious in their speculations...
...It began as the Soviet occupation zone of the defeated German Reich, and for 40 years it remained the centerpiece in the Kremlin's game to consolidate and expand Soviet influence in Europe...
...The overwhelming majority, though, wanted unity...
...An industrial policy of blind production turned the great rivers into sewers and poisoned earth and air, infecting and crippling scores of thousands...
...We are fortunate that a scholar of Maier's scope has disentangled the mass of fact, fear and pretense surrounding this unprecedented event, and has given thought to its implications...
...And they fled again in 1989, precipitating the final crisis...
...that would have been the only reason for independence...
...Willy Brandt said, "What belongs together will grow together...
...That is the new chapter, which Maier calls "Anschluss and Melancholy...
...Once the disciplines of the Cold War were removed, all that remained in Moscow and East Berlin was flab and confusion...
...Neither he nor anyone else anticipated the growing pains...
...Towns, cities and the countryside decayed...
...The curtain went up," he is quoted as saying, "and the stage was empty...
...an idea that had been germinating in Willy Brandt, now West German Chancellor, since the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961...
...The regime doled out little rewards, especially to its active adherents, and stifled the prospects of those it felt it could not trust...
...Maier masterfully tells the story of the GDR largely in terms of the people...
...Its citizens had fled by the hundreds of thousands until the Wall was built, with minefields, barbed wire and trigger-happy guards deployed through the middle of Germany...
...They dealt with the GDR as a respectable counterpart, giving it credits, grants and various subsidies amountingto many billions of marks...
...It was demonstrably the creature of the Soviet Union...
...Patriotism...
...Still, he worked to find a modus vivendi with the new reality and conceived Wandlung durch Ann?¤herung, "change (even transformation) through rapprochement...
...for both Germanys...
...Listed as the world's tenth-largest industrial producer, it was the powerhouse of Comecon, the economic organization meant to provide autarky for the USSR and its satellites...
...The GDR was a dictatorship imposed on the people, less brutal than the Nazis but intellectually even more coercive...
...There will be material for another book...
...This was perhaps the one country on earth where the national anthem was not sung: Soviet policy had changed after the words, extolling German unity, had been written...
...Still, its collapse in 1989 came as a surprise...
...To begin it, Maier cites de Tocqueville on the French Revolution: "No great historical event is better calculated...
...But his reflections on revolution and on civil society are stimulating as well as substantial...
...Politically, too, it was a gift, for which the East gave nothing in rerum...
...for never was any such event, stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable yet completely unforeseen...
...The exodus through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the ascending scale of protest marches in Leipzig and elsewhere, impromptu and unorganized, saw the long-passive, wary population making history...
...The process of dissolution was cumulative and slow...
...Although this eventually proved itself an illusion, successive governments in Bonn, including that of Helmut Kohl, found nothing better...
...Much has been written about how the end came, particularly the multilateral, leveraged diplomacy that moved Moscow to withdraw from its prized asset...
...The new relationship was marked by Ostpolitik...
...Over all was the machinery of oppression, culminatingin the secretpolice...
...In response, he at once forbade publication of financial data...
...Maier comes to no conclusion about the inevitability of the GDR's demise, but what he describes leaves no other conclusion...
...It directed its agents to seek "disintegration" of opponents by "systematic discrediting of reputation" and "sowing of mistrust and mutual suspicion...
...Charles S. Maier tells why...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent The German Democratic Republic was the wretched product of the Cold War...
...Each finds it easy to grumble about the other...
...When the material leads the author into history, sociology or microeconomics, his comments grow perhaps somewhat heavy for the nonprofessional reader...
...Dissolution is the mot juste for what took place in 1989, rather than revolution or liberation (although these impulses helped to move it along...
...This is no simple tale...
...They chose to overlook reality...
...Nevertheless, the facade was maintained even as the rot spread within...
...and this is even more important for dealing with the consequences...
...East Germans' clothes, houses and lives in general were shabby...
...But those Ossies who talk about the old "achievements" (essentially, child care and abortion on demand in the first trimester) must have something else in mind, perhaps a sense of identity and solidarity...
...Maier touches only lightly on Ostpolitik...
...In the 1970s and '80s, the GDR gained international recognition, including membership in the United Nations...
...In each case, what there was of initial revolutionary ?©lan gradually turned to ashes, burned out by ideological and social contradictions that could be resolved only by purges...
...But, as Maier explains colorfully and at length, Comecon was a sham, resting on the circulation of raw materials and second-rate or downright shoddy goods...
...Established by force, both were held together, as Soviet purge trials prosecutor Andrei Y. Vyshinsky once put it, by "compulsion and persuasion...
...The Federal Republic has transferred more than a trillion marks to clear away the multiple wreckage and lay the groundwork for a new society...
...At the end of the day, it was they who pushed the props out from under the rotten structure...
...And that would seem to apply in equal measure to the Soviet Union...
...The "Wessies" groan at the tax and debt burdens this entails...
...The intent was to stabilize the GDR and encourage the regime to liberalize living conditions for its people...
...Konrad Adenauer's strategy of ostracism fell away in an era of d?©tente between the West and the Soviet bloc...
...Minutes of the Politburo and the Council of Ministers as well as the files of the Stasi (the Ministry of State Security) expose the mixture of the banal and the surreal...
...Both countries moved inexorably down the road to economic rain in the straitjacket of central planning...
...it was an economy of shortage struggling to buy what it badly needed on the world market...
...Brandt was shocked and disillusioned by the lack of response from the Western allies...
Vol. 80 • May 1997 • No. 9
