The Creation of Two Germanies: The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR).
The Creation of Two Germanies: The Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR)
For a number of years Britain, Russia and the United States had discussions among themselves in an attempt to agree on the principles according to which a defeated Germany was to be treated. It had been relatively easy to establish a consensus on certain "negative" aims. Thus there was no question that Germany must be demilitarized and her war industries destroyed. Those primarily responsible for unleashing the Second World War and for perpetrating war crimes were to be brought to justice. All other Germans were to be de-Nazified. The Allies also agreed that Austria, Poland and Czechoslovakia were to be reconstituted as sovereign states.
I. Allied Plans and Policies
It had been more difficult at the various wartime conferences between Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin to formulate conclusive plans concerning the future of Germany. One of the main bones of contention was whether the Reich should be dismembered or treated as a unit. As no consensus had been reached on this issue, the Allies fell back on the accord of the Yalta Conference of February 1945, which had finalized the division of the country into zones of occupation.
The question of a Peace Treaty and the future territorial shape was to be decided at a later date. In the end France was to take charge of the south-west and Palatinate; the United States of Bavaria, Württemberg-Baden and Hesse; Britain of northern Germany and the Rhineland, except for an American enclave around Bremen and Bremerhaven; and the Soviet Union of the eastern provinces of the Reich between the rivers Elbe and Werra in the west and the rivers Oder and Neisse in the east.
Special Treatment for Berlin
Berlin became divided into sectors and was administered jointly by an Inter-Allied authority chaired by the Allied military commanders there. As an Allied Declaration of 5 June 1945 reiterated, the four powers assumed supreme government authority in Germany, though without intending to annex German territory. The supreme military commanders of the four Allied contingents were to administer their respective zones in accordance with the instructions received from their governments. They were to deal jointly with all matters relating to the country as a whole. It was for this purpose that an Inter-Allied Control Council was set up, supported by an administrative infrastructure, to look after military matters, transport, finance, economic affairs, reparations, justice, prisoners of war, communications, law and order, as well as political affairs.
Detailed provisions were also published for the arrest of leading Nazis (the most prominent of whom would soon be tried and sentenced by a Tribunal at Nuremberg), the disarmament of the Wehrmacht and the internment of German soldiers. For the moment, there was no hope of the population being able to survive economically without outside help. With the agricultural East lost and the Russians unable (or unwilling) to help, the importation of foodstuffs became unavoidable. However, it was clear that millions of people could not be maintained like this for any length of time. When confronted with the practical realities of the postwar situation in Central Europe, the British and American military authorities quickly began to build up a zonal machinery for economic administration to encourage the reopening of the factories for the provision of consumer goods.
It also turned out that the extent of the damage done to industry by bombing was deceptive. Repairs could be carried out relatively quickly and many entrepreneurs, especially the smaller ones, found it easy to switch back from military to civilian production. The upward trend of the Bizonal industrial economy had set in already before the financial aid of the famous American Marshall Plan began to pour into the Western Zones of Occupation and before the Currency Reform of June 1948 had been enacted. Both these policies created the conditions of further and more rapid growth from a fairly high plateau, already reached by the beginning of 1948.
The leaders of the new superpower across the Atlantic self-confidently aspired to a world order which would be based on the principles of a competitive American-style capitalism. The Russians, on the other hand, wanted to consolidate the gains made as a result of the Second World War and may for a while even have hoped to extend their own system beyond the sphere of influence which the defeat of Germany had put under their control. The "One World" both Americans and Soviets talked about a great deal became a "half-world" organized as blocs within which East and West began to revamp the existing socio-economic and political structures and harmonize them with their own institutional arrangements. The division of Europe along the line established at the end of the war slowly took shape.
de-Nazification
At this point a fundamental contradiction between the realities of de-Nazification and the broader aims of the Western Allies opened up. A de-Nazification policy which would have taken to task those individuals who made a major contribution to sustaining the Hitler regime would have touched the social and economic power structures of the Western zones much more radically than the Allies were prepared to permit. Neither the kind of economic system nor the society which they were hoping to reconstruct could could exist without the expertise of the administrative, managerial and technical elites which had collaborated with Hitler. The beginning of the Cold War caused this contradiction to come to the surface, and once it had been recognized that it was impossible to do both, it was only logical for the tribunals to be wound up. For the developing confrontation with Russia meant "that the conservative fear of Communism gradually replace the liberal fear of fascism" (E. N. Peterson).
II. Creation of political parties
Nor did de-Nazification and "collective guilt" assumption square too well with the policy of permitting some people to found parties and other political organizations. On the other hand, from the point of view of integration it made sense to hold elections, first at local and later at regional level, to encourage political activity and to allow the constitution of Länder governments on the basis of parliamentary majorities. The first steps were usually taken at the local level. But like-minded people soon established contact with each other beyond the locality. Their parties became ...
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II. Creation of political parties
Nor did de-Nazification and "collective guilt" assumption square too well with the policy of permitting some people to found parties and other political organizations. On the other hand, from the point of view of integration it made sense to hold elections, first at local and later at regional level, to encourage political activity and to allow the constitution of Länder governments on the basis of parliamentary majorities. The first steps were usually taken at the local level. But like-minded people soon established contact with each other beyond the locality. Their parties became active on a regional and zonal and finally on an inter-zonal level.
Free Democratic Party
This is certainly how various Liberal groups sprang up in all three zones before forming the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in December 1948. Compared with the other major parties, the FDP stood on the right of the political spectrum and some of its regional groups championed an unashamed nationalism. As to the organization of the economy, a certain amount of planning was widely deemed to be unavoidable although personal initiative, free competition and private ownership were seen as essentials.
Christian Democratic Union
Intellectually more substantial were the ideas advanced by a number of political groups which finally merged to constitute the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). Catholics who had been associated with the Center Party in the Weimar Republic, together with a number of theologians, were among the prime movers behind this party. But both the groups in the Rhineland and the circle which emerged in Frankfurt agreed that it would be a mistake to re-establish a purely denominational organization.
This time Protestants and Catholics were to be united under one roof. The mainstream of the CDU came under the spell of the advocates of a neo-liberal market economy like Ludwig Erhard. Ideologically and sociologically the Party remained a heterogeneous and in many ways opportunist movement which, apart from middle-class professionals, industrialists, businessmen and farmers, also retained a working-class membership. On the other hand, the bürgerliche groups increasingly came to dominate the political orientation of the CDU. This was even more true of the Christian Social Union (CSU), the Bavarian branch of Christian Democracy.
Social Democratic Party
The third large political party to emerge in the Western Zones of Occupation was the SPD. Ideologically much less flexible than the CDU, Social Democracy was a "moralistic" party which tried to appeal to the politically and historically educated and thoughtful person as well as its old working-class clientele. Its ethos was possibly best embodied in the personality of its leader, Kurt Schumacher, who had emerged from eleven years in a Nazi concentration camp an even more unbending politician than he had been in the Weimar period: passionate, at times demagogic, but equally devoted to rational argument and backed by the moral authority of his anti-Nazi record.
The lesson to be learned form the experience of fascism was to build up a democratic socialism. After 1945 it was events and the policies adopted in the Soviet Zone of Occupation that destroyed the chances of the democratic socialists in the SPD to succeed with their reforms or ever to leave the 30-35 percent "ghetto".
II. The Russian Zone of Occupation
There is is considerable doubt that Stalin and his advisers knew exactly what they wanted to achieve when they moved into Germany to assume control of the Zone allocated to them. At least they appear to have kept an open mind concerning the future of the Reich as a whole. But even with regard to their Zone it was by no means clear from the start that a Soviet-style economic and political system would be imposed by force. The Russian interpretation of National Socialism was to some extent responsible for this ambiguity.
Stalin had always seen the Hitler regime more as an outgrowth of the crisis of "monopoly capitalism" in Germany than as a movement of the "masses". What he wished to destroy therefore was the socio-economic power structures which, he believed, had given birth to and maintained fascism. Accordingly, de-Nazification in the Russian style was not the ideological screening of millions of people; rather it was used to oust the economic and social elites from their pre-1945 positions. This policy, it was hoped, would also generate popular support among the rest of the population which was to be governed by a Soviet-backed, though not necessarily Sovietized, new leadership.
A. Political parties
It was hence not sheer cynicism when, a mere four weeks after the armistice, the Soviet authorities cleared the way for the founding of political parties which, as the decree put,
"have as their aim the final extermination of the remnants of fascism and the fostering of the foundation of democracy and civil liberties in Germany as well as the development of the initiative and the self-activity of the broad masses of the population".
The communists were to be one of these parties. Since the end of April, a number of KPD exiles had been brought back to the Soviet zone to establish contact with former comrades who had returned from Britain, had worked underground, or had been liberated from the concentration camps. One of the possibilities which they began to explore was the formation of a unified working-class party.
There was a strong desire not to perpetuate the fatal split of the Weimar period. But the speed with which the KPD was refounded after the publication of the decree, by the Soviet military authorities on 9 June 1945, put paid to the idea of unification.
A few weeks later the Social Democrats constituted themselves in Berlin under the leadership of Otto Grotewohl. The East German CDU and a Liberal Party (LDPD) emerged shortly afterwards. But what surprised people even more than Soviet openness was the contents of the first KPD proclamation. It stressed that the situation was not suited to introducing a Soviet-type system in Germany. Instead of nationalization, private enterprise and personal initiative were to be encouraged.
B. Reparations
Whatever disagreements over long-term strategy may have existed in the Kremlin, it appears that the Russian government saw the revival of the zonal economy as one of its most urgent tasks. Starvation was even worse than in the Western zones. The Soviet Union was in no position to ship large amounts of supplies to their occupation zone. On the contrary, it was important to restart German production not only to enable the Germans to help themselves, but also to extract a contribution to the rebuilding of war-torn Russia.
Stalin was keenly interested in reparations and by the end of 1946 the equipment of some 1,400 industrial enterprises in the Soviet Zone of Occupation had been wholly or partially transported to the East. In the following year a further 200 firms were converted into so-called Soviet Joint Stock Companies. As these companies produced about one quarter of the total output of the East German industrial economy, a tangible percentage of wealth was siphoned off from the zonal economy.
C. Land Reform
Whereas these policies depressed the living standards of the entire population more or less with equal harshness, Stalin also began to make structural changes in the East German economy which hit the propertied classes. One of the first of these measures was to expropriate without compensation some 7,000 estate owners who owned about 2.5 million hectares of land. A further 600,000 were confiscated from people who had occupied prominent positions in the Third Reich. Two-thirds of this land (some 2.1 million hectares) were subsequently distributed to half a million land laborers, peasants and refugees from the East. The remaining third was administered by the local authorities.
Although this large-scale redistribution of land did not always create viable agricultural entities, the effect was doubtless tremendous; it destroyed the economic power base of large-scale agriculture and no doubt helped to create a favorable disposition towards the Soviet authorities among the beneficiaries of the land reforms.
It is also indicative of the general popular mood that Soviet policies received the support of the major East German parties. Even the CDU favoured them in principle although it insisted on the payment of compensation. There was evidently also some groundswell for taking industrial enterprises into collective ownership. Thus, in 1945, workers in many places spontaneously formed committees to take over factories and organize the resumption of production.
D. Nationalization of industry
In the spring of 1946, a concerted attack on the industrial property structure was launched from above. It started in the State of Saxony and on 30 June 1946 a plebiscite was held to approve or reject the nationalization of those "firms and enterprises which profited from the war or are owned by Nazi criminals, active Nazis or war profiteers." The proposal, cunningly worded as it was, received the support of over three-quarter of the electorate. Subsequently expropriations of industrial enterprises were initiated also in other parts of the Soviet zone.
In the meantime a purge of the judiciary had begun which led to the removal from office of the overwhelming majority of judges. The educational reforms abolished private schools and proclaimed open access to education irrespective of social background and status. It is not too difficult to see that these and other measures resulted in a ploughing-up of the previous distribution of wealth and influence. Many of those who were expropriated moved to the Western zones, swelling the ranks of embittered and virulently anti-Communist refugees.
The beneficiaries of these radical policies, on the other hand, were, to say the least, not averse to the changes and few recognized their double-edgedness. Economic restructuring could of course form the basis of a democratic political system of the kind the Social Democrats envisaged; alternatively, the purge of the economic, administrative and professional elites could be used for the conquest of major power positions in order to build up a one-party dictatorship relying on a newly created intelligentsia.#
E. Formation of the Socialist Unity Party (SED)
The latter solution appeared to be relatively remote in 1945. Even the KPD proclaimed itself to be opposed to the introduction of this type of regime and openly competed with other parties for electoral support. Presumably the East German Communists and their Soviet backers hoped for a time that they would emerge as the strongest party. It was for the same reason that they resisted continuing pressures by Social Democrats to form a united working-class party.
However, by the end of 1945 it was all too depressingly clear that a "democratic" strategy would not result in absolute KPD majorities. Just as in the Western zones voting behavior was guided by tradition and memories of the past, suspicions of the Communists were deeply ingrained and it was perfectly possible to vote for other parties. The Cold war was beginning in earnest. The Soviet position in the Eastern zone had to be consolidated by different means. The Social Democrats were the first to experience this change.
Suddenly the SPD found itself pressed to negotiate a merger of the two working-class parties. When these negotiations were opened just before Christmas 1945, Grotewohl and his entourage evidently still hoped that the KPD could be persuaded to return to the path of democratic virtue. Yet this optimism was dwindling rapidly as blunt pressure was unashamedly applied on all sides. In the end, resistance seemed futile. The forced merger of the two movements into the Socialist Unity Party (SED) took place at a joint meeting on 21/22 April 1946.
What eased the way for the SPD leadership to enter into this shot-gun marriage was the simultaneous proclamation of a "special German road towards socialism", different from the generally unpopular Stalinist path. Moreover, the executive of the new party was composed equally of representatives of the KPD and SPD. One reason for the creation of the SED was the impending local and regional elections.
Prospects of a left-wing, though not a Communist, victory in the autumn of 1946 were deemed to be good. To be sure, the CDU and LDPD were formidable forces to be reckoned with. But there were ways of undermining their position, and throughout the summer the Soviet occupation authorities did their best to hamper the campaigns of these parties, while granting privileged status to the SED. Tampering with newsprint allocations was one device. It did not help much.
The SED gained 49 percent of the vote in the Saxon elections, with the LDPD and CDU holding 22 and 21 percent respectively. But what was particularly galling to the SED leadership was that the Left failed to gain the absolute majority in the cities. This pattern repeated itself in the local elections in Thuringia and Sachsen-Anhalt. The party's performance in the regional elections of October 1946 was even more disconcerting: the SED was denied the absolute majority in all five provinces.
Having failed to win a popular mandate for a "German road towards socialism", the SED, supported by the Soviet authorities, abandoned its earlier strategy altogether. The Cold War was by now in full swing and, just as the Western Allies had begun to stabilize their own zones of occupation, Stalin decided to integrate his zone into the emergent Soviet bloc. More and more the Stalinists in the SED leadership were coming to play a prominent role. The CDU and LDPD were "synchronized" and forced to recognize the primacy of the SED. Those politicians who disagreed were unceremoniously ousted. The prison cells were filling up with men and women who resisted the conversion of the Eastern zone into a "people's democracy".
In the political sphere, this process culminated in January 1949 when the SED was formally proclaimed to have been transformed into a "new-type party" which adhered to the principles of Marxism-Leninism. In the industrial sphere, the experimentation with models of economic democracy, which had started in the factories in 1945, was slowly throttled. By the end of 1948, the Works' Councils had been dissolved or put under the control of the SED-dominated centralized Freier Deutscher Gewerkshaftsbund (FDGB). The Soviet Zone of Occupation had effectively become a copy of the Stalin dictatorship.
F. Toward a planned economy
Corresponding measures were taken on the economic policy front and the move towards a planned economy accelerated. A prerequisite of this was the further nationalization of industry and commerce which had begun in 1946. Two years later the share of private industry in industrial production had shrunk to 39 percent, with the Soviet Joint Stock Companies and the state-run companies sharing the rest. Also during 1948 the newly constituted German Economic Commission (DWK) established a state-owned trading organization (HO) which competed against private retailers. As HO shops were often given first place in the queue for supplies, the system established another technique for squeezing out private business.
In 1948 retailers still commanded 82 percent of the trade, but it did not take long for HO shops to dominate the market. The intermediate trade fell almost completely into the hands of the state organization even more quickly.
The last sector of the economy to come under attack was agriculture. It had been decentralized only a few years before when some 500,000 new farms were created during the land reforms. Now these small farmers were pressed into collectives. Following the Soviet pattern, the first Machine Tractor Stations (MTS) were built up in Mach 1949, and by 1953 collectivization was in full swing.
The whole system of collectivized agricultural and industrial production came to be supervised and directed by a large bureaucracy which produced its first program at the end of 1948: the Two-Year Plan for 1949-50. The targets were hopelessly unrealistic and envisaged an increase in production of 35 percent and in productivity of 30 percent. The only way of coming anywhere near these targets was to increase pressure on the population to work more for less money, with severe consequences.
III. The Shaping of the FRG
In 1948/9 the Western zones of occupation took a big step in the direction of an American-style competitive market economy. Just as there was a correspondence between economic and political organization in the East, the Western zones developed links between the economy and the political system. At a time when the SED was changed into a "new-style" party, German representatives in the Western zones of occupation began to draw up a constitutional document which established parliamentarianism on an inter-zonal scale.
A. Weimar and Bonn constitutions compared
The drafters of the Basic Law, while agreeing on the essentials of a parliamentary representative system, were preoccupied with the lessons to be learned from the Weimar experience. It is instructive to compare the Weimar Constitution with the document which became the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.
. The President, unlike Ebert and Hindenburg, became largely ceremonial. The Chancellor was the strong figure of the executive.
2. It was also made considerably more difficult to topple an elected government. Under the Basic Law, a "constructive vote of no-confidence" is required, that is, the opposition is obliged to present its own alternative chancellor to be voted into office on the occasion of the confidence vote.
3. Federalism is another marked feature of the Basic Law. The individual Länder have a considerable degree of autonomy, especially in educational and cultural affairs. They also have a direct say, through the Federal Council (Bundesrat), in the legislative process and in certain cases even command veto powers.
However, just as in earlier German constitutions, the Basic Law does not merely regulate the technicalities of the governmental process; it is also a document of the aims and compromise between divergent political forces. These are best reflected in the first twenty articles of the Basic Law. This section contains the classic civil liberties, such as freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of religious belief.
Articles 6 and 7: marriage, family, church
The Churches re-emerged from the Third Reich with their moral authority surprisingly unscathed and even enhanced. They operated as highly organized pressure groups in German politics well before the drafting of the Basic Law. Their influence can be traced directly in the wording of Articles 6 and 7. The former clause refers to the special protection to be given to marriage and the family; the latter is concerned with the importance of religious instruction in state schools and with Church-endowed private eduction. However, Articles 6 and 7 must also be seen as part of an elaborate compromise, which the two main political forces behind the drafting of the Basic Law, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, concluded during the constitutional debates.
As far as the fundamental principles of economic organization were concerned, the ideas of the CDU gave way to the concepts of a neo-liberal market economy. The western SPD and the trade unions close to it, by contrast, continued to promote a democratic socialism, which involved economic planning and the nationalization of basic industries. The climate of public opinion, but also the direction of Allied and particularly American policy, had become very unfavorable to the realization of economic reforms. However, in alliance with the Christian Socialist wing of the CDU, the Social Democrats were still strong enough in 1949 to force a quid pro quo upon the other parties in return for agreeing to Articles 6 and 7.
Article 20: welfare state
It is against this background that the working of Article 20 ("The Federal Republic is a democratic and social federal state") must be seen. This is one of the immutable clauses of the Basic Law. It means that there is no going back on the principles of democracy, social welfare and federalism, short of a breach of the constitution itself.
Article 14 and 15: open to revision
More controversial were Articles 14 and 15. The former clause, while guaranteeing private property, is designed as a constant reminder that property is not merely an individual right, but also carries with it social obligations. Above all, it must not be misused. Finally, Article 14 legalized expropriation in the interest of the commonwealth, provided an appropriate parliamentary majority can be found and compensation is paid.
This clause is reinforced by Article 15. It stipulates that "land, natural resources and means of production may be socialized and transformed into public ownership or other forms of nationalization by a law which regulates the kind and extent of compensation". The implication of this is that the fathers of the Basic Law, in concluding their compromise, agreed not to close the door forever on changes to the existing socio-economic order. They did so because they saw the Basic Law as a provisional constitution, should a peace treaty ever be signed between the wartime enemies of the Reich and a reunified Germany.
Articles 14 and 15 were also incorporated as a result of pressures not to block irreversibly the possibility of adopting an economic system other than the liberal-capitalist one, should there be legislative majorities in favor of such a change. As Gerhard Leibholz, an eminent judge at the Constitutional Court, put it in December 1970:
"In subscribing to the idea of a Sozialstaat, the fathers of the Basic Law did not opt for a specific economic system nor for a specific social order....The existing economic order is rooted in a decision by the law-makers which may be replaced and reconstituted by another decision if it places a greater emphasis on social policy."
B. Elections to the Bundestag
The Basic Law was proclaimed with the approval of the Western allies on 23 May 1949 and in August elections were held for the Federal Parliament (Bundestag). The results confirmed the trend of the previous years towards a system in which the Social Democrats and Communists would remain in a minority. The two parties gained 29.2 and 5.7 percent of the votes respectively. The CDU/CSU emerged as the largest party (31.0%), with the FDP obtaining a respectable 11.9 percent. Some 22 percent of the electorate voted for splinter parties. So, while the working-class movement was back in its Weimar ghetto, the other social groups were far from being united.
By the arithmetic of the election result, the CDU/CSU, if it wanted to form the first government of the Federal Republic, was forced to enter into coalition not only with the FDP, but also with some of the splinter parties. On September 1949, Konrad Adenauer, the chairman of the CDU, finally succeeded in cobbling such a coalition together. He was voted into the office of Federal Chancellor by a majority of one.
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