| 8 mins read
SUMMARY
- East Germany was absorbed into the Federal Republic of Germany rather than becoming an independent democratic state, resulting in Western German elites filling major political, judicial, and academic roles.
- While East Germany had significant accomplishments (such as childcare, employment, and Olympic success), these were consistently undermined by systemic issues. The region struggled to find its own political centre of gravity.
- Thirty-seven years later, political representation for eastern Germany remains contested, with figures like the AfD leveraging regional grievances.
On 9 November 1989, Günter Schabowski, a member of the Politburo, the highest decision-making body of East Germany's ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED), gave what was probably the most consequential press conference in German history. Towards the end of what appeared to be an otherwise unremarkable appearance before international journalists, he announced new regulations allowing East German citizens to travel abroad. Asked when the rules would take effect, he hesitated, consulted his papers and delivered the words that would make him famous: “As far as I know, immediately, without delay.”
Within hours, thousands of East Berliners had gathered at the border crossings. People could suddenly walk across the border, visit relatives or celebrate on the Kurfürstendamm. The images went around the world.
Yet watching the entire press conference, rather than just its celebrated final minutes, reveals a more complicated story.
Schabowski, confronted with questions about his own responsibility, acknowledged that he had helped sustain the very policies now being criticised.
Schabowski also reflected on the possibility of learning from past mistakes. Children who had been beaten, he suggested, could either repeat the violence as parents or choose a different path. And, rather unexpectedly for a senior communist official, he quoted an old German saying: “Man proposes, God disposes.”
After the press conference, he expressed a remarkably coherent expectation in English, responding directly to a British journalist: people would increasingly be convinced that it was better for them to remain in East Germany, because the processes of change were already producing results.
This was not an entirely irrational hope. Since 3 November, East Germans had been able to leave for West Germany through Czechoslovakia.
So, from Schabowski's perspective, preventing people from leaving was no longer an option. Instead, he hoped to regain control of the process and build a new socialist East Germany.
A revolution without its own ruling class
Across much of Central and Eastern Europe, the collapse of communist rule did not mean the disappearance of everyone who had worked within the old political system.
Some reinvented themselves as social democrats, others entered business or public administration. Their political pasts remained controversial, but they were not necessarily excluded from the new order.
East Germany followed a fundamentally different path.
The German Democratic Republic did not become an independent democratic state. It joined an already existing one: the Federal Republic of Germany, complete with its political parties, legal institutions, administrative structures and professional elites.
The change was particularly visible in politics. Of the five minister-presidents governing the eastern German states in 1992, three had come from West Germany: Kurt Biedenkopf in Saxony, Bernhard Vogel in Thuringia and Werner Münch in Saxony-Anhalt.
Similar developments occurred in public administration, the judiciary, the media and universities. At universities, the transformation was especially painful. Departments were reorganised, qualifications reassessed and many staff dismissed or replaced. While political loyalty had influenced academic careers under the SED, not every researcher who lost a position had supported the dictatorship.
While it is hard to deny that the Federal Republic possessed expertise that the GDR lacked, this also established a lasting asymmetry: the people who had brought about the political revolution were not necessarily the people who would lead the society that emerged from it.
The country of endless buts
What was forgotten remarkably quickly was that East Germany had its share of remarkable achievements. Even though almost all came with a but.
At the 1988 Seoul Olympics, East Germany finished second in the medal table, ahead of the United States. But its sporting success was overshadowed by systematic doping.
The GDR had a highly educated population. But academic freedom was restricted, and professional careers were often influenced by political loyalty.
East Germany guaranteed employment, provided heavily subsidised housing and maintained an extensive system of largely free childcare. But its economy was inefficient, housing was often in short supply, and many buildings were falling into disrepair.
The buts were, in many cases, fundamental. Yet after reunification, they often came to define how East Germany was remembered, while its achievements received far less recognition.
When qualified professionals could be recruited into its democratic institutions from the West, this limited the opportunities for East Germans to demonstrate that they could themselves become the architects of a different society.
What happened to Bündnis 90?
In the autumn of 1989, East Germany's emerging opposition movements were central to the protests that eventually brought down the SED dictatorship. Among the most important was Neues Forum, founded in September, which sought to create a public space for political discussion outside the control of the ruling party for people who had lived under dictatorship and wanted to transform their own society.
In February 1990, Neues Forum joined with Demokratie Jetzt and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights to form Bündnis 90.
Many initially imagined a democratic, reformed East Germany rather than its immediate absorption into the Federal Republic. By March 1990, Bündnis 90 received just 2.9 per cent of the vote in the first free Volkskammer election. At the first all-German federal election in December 1990, an eastern alliance of Bündnis 90 and the Greens nevertheless won eight seats in the Bundestag. They formally merged in 1993.
Yet the political centre of gravity increasingly lay in the West. Although the Greens became one of Germany's most prominent progressive forces, despite some prominent Bündnis 90 figures and its East German origins, the movement became absorbed by the social and political culture of western Germany.
The generation that never knew the Wall
Thirty-seven years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the question of who speaks for eastern Germany remains politically charged.
The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has built a substantial part of its appeal in the eastern states around the claim that the region's experiences, interests and identity have been neglected by Germany's established political institutions.
This is certainly not a sufficient explanation of the party's success. Immigration, economic insecurity, opposition to government policy and broader European trends in right-wing populism also matter, let alone the fact that today's East Germans certainly do not share a single political outlook.
But the question of recognition has become an important part of the political debate. One of the most striking figures in this development is Ulrich Siegmund, the AfD politician who may become the new minister-president of Saxony-Anhalt.
Siegmund was born on 25 October 1990, just three weeks after German reunification. If elected, he would become the first minister-president of a German state born after reunification.
One can be quite certain that he is not the kind of political future Schabowski had envisioned. The irony lies in the fact that his opponents would not have imagined it either.
