Life in the DDR
At any time between the end of WWII and the fall of the Berlin Wall, life in the DDR was sometimes better at times and sometimes worse. I will be able to bring a few anecdotes to my class discussion about what life was like in East Germany. One of my German professors escaped from East Berlin in the 60s and I still remember most of his story. I visited Berlin for the first time as a college student during the summer of 1991 and stayed for a couple of days in an apartment in the former East Berlin. The owner of the apartment still had to light a fire under the hot water tank to heat water and had a garden hose running from the hot water tank to the bathtub. The entire former East was black with soot because everyone still burned brown coal in their homes and factories to heat their houses, cook, and generate power for factories. I also lived and taught school in Magdeburg for two years and was enthralled by the stories of growing up in the DDR. There was money enough but often not enough goods to buy. If a line formed on the sidewalk, people would stand in it in order to receive whatever it was that was being distributed. For example, you might stand in line and receive a pair of shoes that weren’t your size, but you would take the shoes anyway so that they could later be bartered for something else. The Soviets didn’t invest much money in East German factories, and when the wall fell in 1989, the technology and machinery found in the factories was the same as it had been after the Soviets rebuilt right after WWII. For this reason, many factories were simply closed down after reunification and production moved to the west. In the DDR’s planned economy, all farms, including land, livestock, and farm equipment were not privately owned, rather the farms were common properties of the state. In many areas of East Germany churches were destroyed in order to make room for modern buildings and many city parks and green areas were also new places for concrete, high-rise apartments. Endless waiting was also part of life in the DDR. Eighteen-year olds would sign up for an automobile because it could take up to 20 years to finally receive a Trabant. Young couples would wait three years or longer for a larger apartment, people would have to wait until retirement to apply for the opportunity to travel to West Germany, and there was no telling how long someone might have to wait for a telephone line.
All of this doesn’t even begin to touch on what the ever present Staatssicherheitsdeinst, or Stasi, did. Between 1945 and 1950, 160,000 East Germans disappeared in the Soviet camps. Many of them were never heard from again and only after the last of the camps closed in 1956, were some of them able to return home. My own next door neighbor in Künzelsau was taken prisoner by the Soviets in 1945 and sent to a work camp in Poland and then to the Soviet Union. He was finally released in 1954 and returned to Germany. In 1989 over 90,000 people worked for the Stasi. That number equates to one informant per every 180 citizens. Between 1975 and 1989 more than 200,000 collaborated with the Stasi. They read peoples’ mail, wiretapped telephones, recorded conversations, and kept files on the comings and goings of their neighbors.4
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