The History of the Stasi: East Germany's Secret Police, 1945-1990 by Jens Gieseke

Author:Jens Gieseke [Gieseke, Jens]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2014-01-29T22:00:00+00:00

From the Berlin Wall to CSCE

With the building of the Berlin Wall, the fate of fundamental resistance to the GDR was sealed once and for all. The collectivization of agriculture had broken the last great social potential for revolt. The classic organizations of resistance such as the Eastern offices of the West German parties, the Investigating Committee of Free Jurists, and the Combat Group Against Inhumanity had likewise lost their bases under the intense persecution of the 1950s. This also went for secondary schools and universities, where time and again, and for a relatively long time, groups of “bourgeois” youths protested against discrimination and SED rule in the form of political pamphlets, etc.

The sealing of the border to the West cut off contacts to Western organizations and—perhaps more importantly—buried the option, most likely present in the minds of many individuals until then, of heading West in the event of a serious confrontation with state authorities. At the same time, the “secret founding day of the GDR,” 13 August 1961, and the feeble or, rather, nonexistent reaction of the West must have elicited resignation on the part of those who still had hopes of SED rule ending soon and the two German states being reunited. The considerable size of this group of people is evident from the many protests in the days and weeks after the border was sealed and the harsh wave of arrests carried out by State Security.

The potential for political and social resistance was, of course, not done away with entirely, but the option of active protest had largely become a lost cause. Western efforts to aid the escape of East Germans resulted in a number of spectacular operations in the first months and years after the Wall went up, such as the building of tunnels between West and East Berlin, damaging in a lasting way the image of the GDR. Fundamental resistance in the GDR was limited to rare individual acts such as lathe operator Josef Kneifel’s bomb attack on the Soviet tank monument in Karl-Marx-Stadt, intended as a protest against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. All in all, however, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the wave of arrests that followed effectively broke the resistance of the population.

What remained was a hard-to-quantify potential for resistance. Many individuals who probably would have gone West eventually had the border remained open were now suddenly faced with a new reality that they had to come to terms with somehow. The SED leadership abandoned its unyielding course in a matter of months, proclaiming its new mantra of the “socialist human community.” By the same token, the introduction of compulsory military service in January 1962 created a new area of conflict, which developed into a permanent focal point of political protest and conscientious objection in the form of the “construction solider” movement and, later, the demand for a Social Peace Service (Sozialer Friedensdienst—SoFD).

From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, there were two essential socio-moral milieus which turned out to be sources of resistance and deviant behavior.

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