A Tale of Two Germanies

In 2010, the summer I was 12, my parents decided it was time that my two brothers and I finally visit the former East Germany. One morning, my West German mother packed the three of us into a train from Frankfurt to Dresden. We spent a few nights at a hostel next to an aquatics center, which she told us probably trained athletes who used steroids as part of East Germany’s state-run doping program, and we strolled by schools where children once learned Russian as their second language rather than English.

Beyond the Wall: A History of East Germany, Katja Hoyer, Basic Books, 496 pp., $35, September 2023; After the Nazis: The Story of Culture in West Germany, Michael H. Kater, Yale University Press, 544 pp., $35, September 2023

Some weeks later, we visited Berlin, where we walked along remnants of the Berlin Wall before continuing on to the emporium of kitsch that is the DDR Museum. There, we sat behind the wheels of a Trabant—the iconic yet flimsy East German car that came to symbolize life in the socialist state—and giggled uncomfortably through an exhibit about East Germany’s nudist scene. East Germany was in the past, I intuited, and now we could laugh about it.

Much of the modern—unified—German national narrative rests on the premise that East Germany was a blip in time, an aberration of history that met its rightful downfall. Given the extent to which Germany today dwells on its World War II past, it is striking how prone many Germans are to brushing over the history of East Germany—a state that not only existed for a period much longer than the Third Reich, but also crumbled far more recently.

Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall is an attempt to correct the record. In her new history of East Germany, Hoyer, a visiting research fellow at King’s College London, posits that some of what ails Germany today is the result of a failure among the West German elite to confront East Germany’s legacy in a levelheaded and nonderogatory way. As much as authoritative figures in Germany would like to speak of the former Soviet satellite state in judgmental absolutes, Hoyer’s book is an erudite plea for empathy in grappling with the ongoing aftershocks of German reunification.

Hoyer’s appeal is bolstered by another new title: Michael H. Kater’s After the Nazis, an encyclopedic chronicle of post-World War II West German literature, film, theater, journalism, and music up to reunification. Kater, a professor emeritus at York University, Toronto, reveals West Germany as a haughty nation that never truly managed to purge Nazism from its institutions. If Hoyer seeks to redeem some aspects of East Germany, Kater reminds West Germans that they have much to be ashamed of, too.

Together, the two books serve as a useful appraisal of Germany’s much-heralded “culture of remembrance.” As Germany marks 33 years since reunification, cracks in that culture are showing. The far right is closer to power than at any point in recent memory, and activists and intellectuals have criticized the country’s failure to reckon with events beyond those that occurred during the Third Reich. Maybe, a growing cohort posits, Germans haven’t processed their history as well as they thought.

Border guards watch East Germans, driving Trabant cars, as they leave East Germany through a hole cut in a fence as they cross between the two Germanys near Ullitz, Bavaria, in December 1989. Sven Creutzmann/Mambo Photo/Getty Images

That is the history told in Western classrooms that extol the triumph of capitalism over communism in the bygone Cold War. Hoyer, who was born in East Germany in the final decade of its existence, does not contradict this narrative—she only seeks to complicate it. Her book’s title, Beyond the Wall, is a reference to most Western observers’ failure to see the country as anything but a brutal engine of Soviet might, as embodied by the Berlin Wall. She instead presents the defunct state on its own terms—good, bad, and bizarre.

That includes emphasizing how far ahead of West Germany the East was on social issues. As women in West Germany largely returned to domesticity after the war, East Germany would go on to attain the highest rate of female employment in the world, at 91 percent. Women were allowed to serve in combat roles in the military, which West Germany forbade. Abortion was readily available and legal, while it was criminalized across the border (and now remains in a legal grey area). Paid vacation was a constitutional right, and the welfare state was expansive. East Germany far outperformed both the West and reunified Germany in economic equality and social mobility: In 1967, around 33 percent of university students in East Germany came from a working-class background compared with 3 percent in the West—a figure that would never pass 5 percent before reunification.

Germans have struggled to square East Germany’s progressive social history with its repressive political past. Hoyer wants readers to sit with this tension. She posits that acknowledging positive elements of life in the country—for example, its generous parental support—does not equate endorsing its political system. This is a very difficult needle to thread in modern German political discourse, where most noncritical references to East Germany are met with accusations of Ostalgie, or the glorification of dictatorship.

In 2003, a planned documentary television series about everyday life in East Germany (also known as the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) produced by broadcaster RTL was roundly denounced by many commentators and civil society organizations well before its release. The nongovernmental organization Help blasted it as a “GDR dictatorship-trivialization and belittlement show,” and Spiegel wrote of an “Ostalgie revue.” That same year, former West German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt publicly called East Germans “whiners” for lamenting the economic difficulties of reunification.

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Hoyer deftly makes a case that these sorts of knee-jerk reactions are reductive and harmful. When Germany was reunified, East Germans were not “asked to return to something they were once part of but to blend into a West German state that had evolved without them.” This new reality, she writes, was “sink or swim.” The 2,000 women who served in the GDR’s armed forces, for example, saw their livelihoods evaporate into thin air. From 1989 to 2007, the German government slashed 60 percent of public daycare spots for children under the age of 3 in the Eastern states, reducing women’s labor force participation and overall social mobility.

To bemoan the social insecurity that came with German reunification is not to condone East Germany’s political system, but rather to call out the lack of grace with which the Federal Republic accommodated its new citizens. West Germany’s interior minister at the time—a member of the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU)—refused to make compromises in negotiating reunification or integrate any East German socioeconomic structures into the Federal Republic; instead, he arrogantly declared that “this is not the unification of two equal states.” There is a reason that East Germans continue to trail their Western counterparts on virtually every social and economic metric—and, in some cases, have flocked to support populist political parties.

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, has echoed Hoyer’s point. Two years ago, in an address marking 31 years since reunification, Merkel referenced those East Germans who found themselves at a “dead end” in 1990. “These depressing stories are also a part of our history,” she said. “We can’t ignore or forget them … because the reunification of our country is not a completed process.”

An observation tower stands in Modlareuth, Germany, at the former border between the two Germanys on Aug. 11, 2014. Jens Schlueter/Getty Images

In response, Stalin sought to neutralize Germany for perpetuity and made antifascism East Germany’s “foundational dogma.” Framed this way, East Germany’s repression is no more excusable, but it makes a bit more historical sense.

East Germany’s denazification fared far better than its paltry equivalent in the West, Hoyer argues. (The American philosopher Susan Neiman, a leading scholar on German memory culture, offered the same assessment in a 2021 interview with Foreign Policy.) Stalin extracted reparations from East Germany that doomed its nascent economy, hollowing out industry and barring erstwhile Nazis—a large swath of the population—from gainful employment. Hoyer cites estimates that Stalin rid East Germany of 60 percent of its production from 1945 to 1953.

Meanwhile, in After the Nazis, Kater, a German Canadian historian who partly grew up in West Germany’s early years, details how the U.S. and British military governments’ opposition to war reparations enabled West Germany’s economy to boom but let most former Nazis off scot-free. Efforts such as the Nuremberg Trials of 1945-46, Kater argues, focused on a small group of “hard-core Nazis” and bred resentment rather than remorse among most of the populace.

For most of its existence, Kater writes, West Germany was bound up in a victim complex, as older Germans equated their own wartime suffering with that of Jews and continued to harbor deep antisemitism. Former Nazis lined the mastheads of most leading newspapers and held important academic positions. Kater tells of his own research into the Third Reich being stonewalled by professors who had been implicated in Nazi crimes.

Over time, younger generations of activists and intellectuals began to challenge these norms, but it was only after reunification that the Holocaust would be confronted head-on. The German Historical Museum was founded as late as 1987, and Berlin’s expansive Holocaust Memorial opened in 2005.

Politics was no better: Among many shocking details, Kater mentions Article 131 of West Germany’s 1949 Basic Law, which required former Nazis to be reinstated into Germany’s bureaucracy. Roughly one-eighth of the first Bonn parliament was composed of former Nazis, and Germany’s first postwar president, Theodor Heuss, had supported Adolf Hitler’s regime.

Most of these officials were accommodated into the ranks of the CDU and, as in Heuss’s case, the pro-business Free Democratic Party. These parties never went through any sort of formal reckoning with their Nazi members; they just died out. As recently as this summer, the CDU’s Bavarian sister party declined to fire—and even defended—the state’s No. 2 politician after he faced credible allegations of antisemitism.

A man carrying a Soviet flag walks past a preserved section of the Berlin Wall after a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of its construction in Berlin on Aug. 13, 2021.John Macdougall/AFP via Getty Images

A consistent theme across both books is that it has been mostly left-leaning thinkers and politicians who have pushed Germany to the right side of history. Conservatives long stood in the way of not only denazification, but also of détente between East and West Germany. This is worth underscoring as Germany’s left-leaning government, led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD), takes flak from much of the world for its initially halting response to Russia’s war in Ukraine, as well as for the SPD’s history of Ostpolitik, or rapprochement with the Eastern bloc.

Both Hoyer and Kater point out that Ostpolitik was motivated at least as much by a desire to improve relations between East and West Germany as it was by anything to do with the Soviet Union. Bonn’s Ostpolitik was mirrored by East Berlin’s Westpolitik. That the two states saw a way to work with each other benefited both German publics, who had been opposed to the externally imposed division of their country from the start.

Among other accomplishments, Ostpolitik and Westpolitik scrapped the Hallstein Doctrine, which prevented West Germany from establishing diplomatic relations with states that recognized East Germany and had disproportionally harmed East Germany’s economy. Most critically, Ostpolitik and Westpolitik enabled both Germanies to become United Nations member states in 1973. The SPD’s position was so fruitful that conservative politicians later took up the mantle, too. In 1987, CDU Chancellor Helmut Kohl decided not to modernize missiles stationed in West Germany in the name of peaceful coexistence with the East.

Three years later, Germany reunified not because of then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s “tear down this wall” speech (which Hoyer calls “a publicity stunt”), but because of yearslong efforts by Germans on both sides to move closer to one another. Kohl and his East German counterpart, Erich Honecker, had developed a strong interpersonal relationship. The SPD and East Germany’s Socialist Union Party published a joint paper calling for an end to the Cold War. East Germans themselves voted for reunification in their first and last democratic elections in 1990.

For a people trapped at the confluence of competing power structures for much of the 20th century, Ostpolitik and Westpolitik were some of the first levers that postwar Germans could pull to assert their national autonomy. Rapprochement between the two Germanies was not looked upon favorably by Moscow, which saw Bonn’s rising stature in West Berlin as a drain on its influence. Hoyer recalls Honecker rebuffing Soviet demands that he rein in Westpolitik with the quip, “Good luck, dear comrades, with your perestroika, but we will walk our own path.”

A West German couple embraces in front of the Berlin Wall prior to it being taken down during the collapse of communism in East Berlin on Nov. 10, 1989.Stephen Jaffe/Getty Images

I expected to hear tales of terror, but the woman’s response was measured: While she was thankful for her new political freedoms, she missed the simplicity of life in East Germany. There, she said, everyone had a job and housing. Nobody worried about where their next meal would come from. And friends weren’t trying to one-up each other with shiny acquisitions.

That memory came back to me while reading Hoyer’s book because it encapsulates the complexity she seeks to unpack—and normalize—for her readers. Hoyer’s history is one big plea for a “both/and” framing of East Germany. Kater’s volume aids in this insofar as it exposes the tepid pace of sociocultural progress in West Germany, which likes to think of itself as the more enlightened of the two. But it also does so more subtly, through Kater’s dismissive attitude toward East Germany.

Though Kater wrestles effectively with the unresolved legacy of Nazism in West Germany, he uses the same condescending tone that Hoyer so resents when discussing the East. On numerous occasions, he references actors in the Eastern Bloc simply as “Communists” without nuance or explanation of their political beliefs.

French cellist Gautier Capucon performs at the Berlin Wall Memorial after official guests attended celebrations of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the wall in Berlin on Nov. 9, 2019.John Macdougall/AFP via Getty Images

And while Hoyer repeatedly engages with developments in West Germany to put those in East Germany into context, Kater hardly explores East Germany at all. His posture is unsurprising. Just look at how poorly Beyond the Wall has been received by the intelligentsia in Germany, where it was released in May and promptly blasted by reviewers across the political spectrum as little more than a bound dose of Ostalgie.

Yet as Kater’s volume demonstrates, the pace of cultural change can be sluggish. Just as it took Germany decades to begin to process Nazism, the same could be true of efforts to disentangle East Germany’s legacy from the reductive frameworks of the Cold War. Despite being derided by critics, Beyond the Wall has still managed to climb numerous bestseller lists across Germany. The German political and media establishment may wish to cling to their own narrative of the country’s half-century of division, but many German readers seem to be craving something new.