Fallen Elites by Andrew Bickford

Author:Andrew Bickford [Bickford, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology
ISBN: 9780804773959
Google: sGgXtAEACAAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-03-09T05:26:23+00:00

UNIFICATION AND THE MILITARY LABOR MARKET

Although not usually considered as such, a military is a labor market, and soldiers are workers who worry about their careers, advancement, and their positions and power within that market. Like other types of careers, a military career includes intense competition for positions, billets, commands, and postings. While West German politicians celebrated the idea of the “Army of Unity,” Bundeswehr officers worried that their jobs and careers were threatened by the prospect of a flood of NVA officers entering the new military. Accustomed to the security and dominance of their positions, Bundeswehr officers did not welcome the idea of having to compete with NVA officers for positions and billets in the post-unification army. The NVA represented a threat to the dominance of the Bundesewehr, and its claims of legitimacy within the FRG before unification. This was true of the post-unification Bundeswehr as well; NVA officers were seen as a threat to the status quo and to the position of Bundeswehr officers within both the FRG and the NATO military structure. While there were major ideological differences between Bundeswehr and NVA officers, Bundeswehr officers were afraid that an influx of NVA officers would severely impact and damage their careers and material well-being. As Lapp documents, statements by Bundeswehr officers during the run-up to the dissolution of the GDR concerning NVA officers joining the Bundeswehr made clear some of the potential problems of military unification and the overwhelmingly negative opinion held by Bundeswehr officers of their East German counterparts:

• I don’t want to have anything to do with members of a party army and traitors.

• I’ll never take orders from a former NVA officer.

• They learned to operate under completely different operating principles.

• A lot of informants [Maulwürfe] of the former Ministry of State Security and the KGB were in the NVA. Should we allow ourselves to be infected by those who have gone under cover?

• For every former NVA officer that we do not permanently accept into the Bundeswehr, we can keep an officer of the “old” Bundeswehr in light of the upcoming armed forces reduction.4

After unification, the majority of NVA officers found themselves in dire economic straights: removed from their careers, they were forced to contend as best they could with a completely new economic system, learn its tricks and logic, and face policies of symbolic and economic marginalization that complicated matters even further. Officers blamed their experiences on a combination of political, economic, and symbolic factors: they were quick to conceptualize their unemployment as a concerted effort on the part of West German elites to marginalize them because of their membership in the SED and their positions as officers in an antifascist army. In 1995, the Arbeitsgruppe Geschichte der NVA (Working Group for the History of the National People’s Army) distributed a series of surveys and questionnaires to over ten thousand former NVA officers. The results of the survey showed that, based on their experiences since unification, a large majority (87.8 percent) considered themselves second-class citizens because of service in the NVA.

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