The Only Winning Move by Max Johansson

Author:Max Johansson
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Sea Lion Press
Published: 2017-12-24T23:00:00+00:00

FIVE

"CHAPTER XI: Life in the East

While the GDR government does its best to deny the fact, the GDR outside East Berlin is almost as different from East Berlin as West Germany is from West Berlin. Indeed, the Western government and the Allied powers still do not recognize East Berlin as part of the GDR, insisting that it remains occupied by the Soviets and administered by the GDR and that only an international convention could change this fact. The GDR considers East Berlin a special municipality titled “Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR” (Berlin, Capital City of the GDR), divided into eleven boroughs, with a mayor and council each in addition to the city-wide government. The remainder of the republic is divided into fourteen districts (confusingly, the German word Bezirk is used to denote both these districts and the boroughs of East Berlin – I have used separate translations to accentuate the distinction between the two), which are in turn divided into 191 rural and 27 urban circuits (Kreise – these are sometimes also called “districts” in English, particularly in a West German context), and finally the rural circuits are further divided into some 7,500 local municipalities whose borders are based on those of the pre-war cities and Prussian Union parishes.

The GDR is a small country – in geographic size it’s roughly comparable to the state of Tennessee – and with this comes a relative lack of geographic diversity, but there is a general north-south progression where (in general) the northern regions are flatter and more agricultural while the south is hillier (culminating in the Ore Mountains on the border with Czechoslovakia) and more industrial in character. The former state of Saxony – now the districts of Leipzig, Dresden and Chemnitz – is home to a large proportion of the GDR’s industry, and has produced a significant enough part of the republic’s leadership that its distinctive regional accent has become associated with the GDR in West German comedy. This is not without merit, as the state was known before the war for its extremely left-wing political leanings, being one of the last parts of the country not to vote for the Nazi Party during its rise in the early 1930s. Neighboring Thuringia – the districts of Erfurt, Gera and Suhl – is similarly industrialized, and a number of its industries remain famous on both sides of the Wall (most notably the optics manufacturer VEB Zeiss Jena).

North of these lie the great lignite fields which are probably the first thing that springs to mind for most people when East German industry is mentioned. The districts of Halle, Cottbus and Frankfurt (Oder) are reshaped constantly by great hulking machines that tear open the country itself, forcing entire villages to move out of their path or face complete destruction, all for the sake of the brown compressed peat that powers the GDR’s industries and heats its homes. For all its publicity, this industry still only takes up a portion of the land, and the remainder is

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