Identity Statement

Reference Code

HU OSA 300-3-1

Title

East German Subject Files

Date(s)

1953 - 1973

Description Level

Series

Extent and medium (processed)

45 Archival boxes, 5.62 linear meters

Content and Structure

Scope and Content (Abstract)

This series of the Radio Free Europe (RFE) archive covers a broad scope of political, economic, social, and cultural life in the German Democratic Republic between the years 1953 and 1973. Though RFE did not target the GDR with its broadcasts, it kept close tabs on the country through news clippings from Western newspapers, monitoring of East German print, radio, and television media, and confidential reports from anonymous sources within the GDR (reports labeled in the series as “items"). These sources include: the ADN (the East German News Agency); Neues Deutschland (the main GDR newspaper); Berliner Zeitung (the second largest GDR newspaper); Junge Welt (the Official Paper of the East German Socialist Youth Organization); Sonntag (an East Berlin cultural weekly); IWE Informationsburo West (the West German information service); Die Welt (located in the West German city of Hamburg); Neue Deutsche Literatur (the monthly publication of the East German Writers’ Association); Horizon (the GDR’s foreign political weekly); the New York Times; the Wall Street Journal; the Baltimore Sun; UPI News Service; and Reuters. Also included in the archive are formal RFE analysis papers compiled by Dorothy Miller, the German Affairs analyst at Radio Free Europe. Miller was also responsible for translating into English much of the materials obtained from German sources. Consequently, the East German Subject Files maintain a balance between German and English texts.
The East German Subject Files provide resources for political, diplomatic, and social historians alike. For scholars interested in the political life of the GDR, the series contains a detailed record of socialist propaganda put forth by the GDR’s founder and long-serving head of state, Walter Ulbricht. In perusing the archive, one finds in Ulbricht’s political legacy a combination of political pragmatism, as well as a cold, unshakable devotion Marxism that he used to deflect all blame for the shortcomings and obstacles his country faced.
In 1964, Dorothy Miller observed in a RFE Research Analysis Paper, “More than once Ulbricht’s training in dialectics has stood him in good stead and has helped him to represent failure as a success, and changes of policy as a consistent continuum" (Subject 1512: “1963-64"). Writing in response to an interview Ulbricht gave to Neues Deutschland, Miller was struck by Ulbricht’s seemingly abandoning overnight six years of demanding a separate peace treaty between the Soviet Union and the GDR, one that would in effect cancel NATO’s rights to a presence in West Berlin. This “training in dialectics" is perhaps an apt description for a wealth of propaganda that persists throughout the series, particularly in subject files devoted to the GDR’s foreign affairs (Subjects 1500-1505) and the unmarked files (Subjects 1507-1516) that contain numerous reports on Ulbricht’s overseas travels and speeches. From these files, three central themes emerge:

1. The West German government consisted of imperialists and ex-Nazis.

A chief recipient of Marshall Plan aid after World War II, West Germany enjoyed a post-war recovery that far eclipsed that of East Germany. Even the GDR could not deny this. When pressed to explain the discrepancy, Albert Norden, a member of the GDR Politburo replied, “It is not our fault or that of socialism that the largest raw material deposits and industrial centres are in West Germany" (Subject 605: “Communist Party-Criticism"). Beyond this initial unfair advantage, though, Ulbricht trumped up the line that West German recovery was dependent on the exploitation of its own working class, as well as that of smaller countries.
The memory of Nazi Germany is also a present theme in the series. In one instance, Ulbricht went on a tirade against NATO, accusing it of harboring ex-Nazi’s when it promoted General Hans Speidel, former Chief of Staff to German General Erwin Rommel, to Commander of Allied Land Forces in 1957 (Ulbricht, of course, declined to mention either Speidel’s expulsion from the Germany Army after his role in the July Plot to assassinate Hitler or his testimony on the side of the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials). Also on this subject, Subject 1300: “Fellow Travelers, 1958-72" covers Simon Wiesenthal’s publication of a list of names of ex-Nazis employed by the GDR government. Included in the file is a Neues Deutschland interview with Ulbricht, in which the GDR leader, seemingly unfazed by a list that connects names to precise government positions, deemed the charges vague and unspecific.
On a broader level, though, conspicuously absent throughout the series is any mention of the Holocaust. Unlike Wiesenthal and other survivors of the Holocaust—as well as most of the outside world, for that matter—Ulbricht apparently believed the Nazis’ highest crime was not institutional genocide they ordered, but rather their extirpation of communism in the 1930s, of which Ulbricht had himself been a political target.

2. West Germany and the United States were “revanchists" actively preparing for war against the communists who had been “victorious" in World War II.

In his accusations of militarism on the part of the West, Ulbricht was responding to the re-introduction of general conscription as well as the placement of nuclear weapons in West Germany. Here Ulbricht tried to make the best of a daunting geopolitical reality. For as a result of NSC-68 in 1950, the United States did indeed place itself on wartime footing with regard to defending Western Europe from a perceived Soviet threat. At the heart of its strategy was to hold onto West Berlin, the “island in a sea of communism" that conventional weapons seemed less and less able to defend. Given what he saw as the peaceful nature of communism—for all nations’ transition to communism, according to the communist ideology Ulbricht outlined in his speeches, was a natural and inevitable process—Ulbricht sought to paint the West as the aggressor and thus portray his own remobilization (general conscription in the GDR was implemented in 1963) in East Germany as a strictly defensive posture (Subject 300: “Armed Forces").

3. Capitalist espionage was the sole reason behind the exodus to the West. On a broader scale, all instances of crime, corruption, or shortcomings in the GDR could be attributed in some way to the corrosive influence of Western culture.

Political historians will undoubtedly be interested in how Ulbricht could explain the embarrassing mass exodus to the West that culminated in the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, a solution that succeeding in closing the border but not in stopping many GDR residents’ desire to escape. For those scholars interested in the Berlin Crisis years of 1958 to 1961, the series provides insight not only into the emigration of doctors and other members of the professional class, but also the concurrent agricultural crisis. Subjects 200-215 are devoted to agricultural issues, chronicling how Ulbricht’s campaign for full collectivization led to a crop failure in 1960, which then translated into a backlog of production of pork, milk, and eggs the next year. In response, Ulbricht blamed the West. When the Berlin Wall went up in August of 1961, Ulbricht deemed it a means of keeping Western agents from luring East Germans away from their homes. The East German Subject Files from this time chronicle Ulbricht’s defense of the wall, as well his other strides to combat Western influences: for instance, his effort to get communist youth organizations to spy on the older generation to root out those opposed to collectivization; his campaign to prevent any influence of Western formalism and abstract art in East German culture; and even his directive to force clowns to incorporate socialist standards into their act (Subject 800: “Culture").
Diplomatic historians will also find in the East German Subject Files insight into East German foreign relations, particularly East-West German relations from the Adenauer years up to and through Ostpolitik, East Germany’s relationship with the Soviet Union, and its relations with the rest of the Warsaw Pact countries. The case of East Germany was unique in that Ulbricht attempted to pursue statecraft with other countries while the Soviet Union placed a ceiling on what he could actually achieve. In the series, one gets an idea of this special status during Ulbricht’s quest for international recognition of the GDR. With this goal in mind Ulbricht sought to portray East Germany as the leader of the Soviet satellites. Along these lines, one finds in the series documented tensions between East Germany and Czechoslovakia, East Germany and Yugoslavia, as well as some salvos Ulbricht directed at the Soviet rival for the proponent of world socialism, the People’s Republic of China. The limits of East Germany’s self-determination, however, are no more apparent than in the Dorothy Miller letter cited above. Speculating on the possible reasons for Ulbricht’s abandonment of the demand for a separate East German peace treaty, Miller concluded that the Soviet Union, having come to the realization that it was not worth upsetting the status quo on the issue of Berlin, ordered Ulbricht to drop the issue unceremoniously.
In 1969, Ulbricht’s reign was approaching an end, while West Germany’s Ostpolitk, led by Georg Kiesinger, and later Willy Brandt and Egon Bahr, was on the rise. By this time, the fruits of Ulbricht’s quest for international acceptance were clear: only Iraq, Cambodia, and Sudan recognized the legitimacy of the East German state. The series records for subsequent years traced the gradual breakdown of resistance to Ostpolitik as Ulbricht’s power waned, increased negotiations between East and West Germany (Subject 1505: “Foreign Relations—Relations with West Germany"), and a movement toward some East German participation in the United Nations.

Social historians will find within the East German Subjects Files glimpses into the everyday life of citizens of the GDR. Subject files 800-809 are devoted to East German literature, music, dance, art, and criticism. Included in this section of the series is a report about an East Berlin performance of Beethoven’s opera, Fidelio, during which the audience’s applause overwhelmed the orchestra in response to odes to freedom made by the singers, whose roles are those of eighteenth century Spanish prisoners, as well as a translation of a statement put out by the East German government denying the reported high level of applause. Also pertaining to social life in the GDR is Subject 1200: “Exiles," which chronicles East Germans who defected or attempted to defect to the West. One such file is of a twenty-five year old man who successfully drove across the border out of fear that his wife was about to turn him in to the police for making derogatory statements about communism in their home.
Social historians may also be interested in the GDR’s response to the influx of Western culture. Files in Subject 806: “Culture—Music, Opera, Dance, Composer’s Union, and Folklore" document the GDR’s efforts to repel the “cultural barbarism" of Western jazz and rock music. Wary of the expenses incurred by having to pay music royalties to the West—not to mention the very principle of supporting such an overtly capitalist practice—East Germany imposed limits on the percentage of Western music disc jockeys could program in any given week (an edict that consequently led to a hit parade of Eastern popular music whenever crowds were at their slimmest). In 1968, the GDR’s official party newspaper, Neues Deutschland, warned readers that pop tunes could actually “influence peoples’ feelings to the extent that they become counter-revolutionaries." Popular musicians like John Lennon, Bob Dylan, and Joan Baez, all of whose music contained some reference to social protest, were singled out by the GDR press as possibly subversive—an ironic indictment, given the similar charges to which these musicians were prone in their own home countries.
The GDR’s concern about the invasion of Western popular music even led to state-run attempts to create spectacles of music and dance that would in its leaders’ minds more accurately reflect socialist principles. Examples of these projects are described in an RFE Background Report, “Dancing to orders in East Germany," in Subject 806: “Culture—Music, Opera, Dance, Composer’s Union, and Folklore." They include: “The New Ulysses," in which a post-war German soldier weathers the storm of rock and roll establishments and black market slums to find home in Stalinstadt; and also a full-length ballet depicting a vindictive (and victorious) peasant uprising after a feudal landlord’s invocation of jus primae noctis with a village bride. As for how music from the West compared to the new communist music, Hans Eisler, himself a devoted communist and the composer of East Germany’s national anthem, had this to say: “As bad as it is, it’s better than anything you write here."
Finally, social historians will find in the series records of education in the GDR. While Subjects 1000-1002 are devoted to education issues in East Germany, perhaps the most telling passage occurs in Subject 804: “Formalism," in a report of a Forum held in East Berlin on the obstacles to success of socialist art schools in the GDR. Responding to previous examples cited, one participant remarked, “It is also difficult when students feel themselves to be chosen people—stupid, arrogant people who claim that an individualistic norm has been created for them. These students who behave as if they have outstanding talents are an impediment to the socialist development of our art schools. They require a large amount of time, effort and work and have become used to being continually protected and looked after."

Accruals

Not Expected

Conditions of Access and Use

Conditions governing access

Unknown

Languages

English, German

Description Control

Archivist's note

Processed by Tibor Szigeti, January, 2003; described by James Wilson, June, 2003.