There is a commemorative plaque in the city centre of Jena, a historic town in Thuringia, eastern Germany. Its text reads:
On 17 June 1953
20,000 people in Jena rose
to change their society.
The uprising was crushed
Alfred Diener (26 years of age)
was shot dead
As alleged mob leader.
What kind of society was this, and what does the plaque mean by change? Its text is oblique, obscure, evasive and therefore offensive to the participants of the uprising. Why did its authors not simply say what actually happened: that Jena was one of the places in the artificial, partial state that was the German Democratic Republic (GDR) where people demonstrated for freedom and reunification against dictatorship, and where they were crushed by the Soviet occupying force and state power?
The Socialist Unity Party: German in form, Soviet in content
Although the essence of this story is well known, people are only just becoming aware of its wider political context; in particular, the fact that the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany /SED) had been transformed into a political party of a new, Soviet type after what the historian Hermann Weber called the forced and fraudulent post-war unification of the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party(SPD). The GDR owed its very existence solely to the Soviet Union. What the SED called elections was in fact a case of election fraud from the very outset of the state.
The key to the explosion of June 1953 lies in the intensifying Sovietisation in the eastern part of Germany that occurred from the summer of 1952. After consultation with Joseph Stalin in April 1952, the second SED party conference from 9-12 July had announced the planned construction of socialism with state power as the driving force.
After the conference, the already high level of political terror increased. The SED pushed through the nationalisation of industry and collectivisation of agriculture largely on the grounds of alleged breaches of tax and trade law. If we dont find anything, we should foist something on them; this is one of the telling utterances made by the head of criminal police in Merseburg, a small town in Thuringia, and recently found among documents from the period.
The party was clearly also trapped in a pathological enemy fixation to choose the (still pseudo-legal) path of expropriations. However, in some cases it preferred to go through the legislative system. In October 1952, the pseudo-Parliament of the German Democratic Republic, the Volkskammer (Peoples Chamber) passed the Legal Constitution Law, the Code of Criminal Procedure Law, and the National Property Protection Law.
The Legal Constitution Law stipulated that jurisdiction serve the constitution of socialism; the Code of Criminal Procedure Law swept away the principle of the independent judge; and the National Property Protection Law set the minimal punishment for national property offences at one year imprisonment. (Ordinary people were sent to jail for the most trivial crimes, like picking up a grapevine). Prisons filled up quickly; from 31,000 inmates in July 1952 to 66,400 in May 1953.
The Workers and Farmers Party decreed a 10% wage cut (in the guise of a 10% production target increase); this only reinforced other terror measures and the paroxysm of hate propaganda which ruled all public life. In 1952 alone, 135,988 citizens left East Germany (according to official figures); West German emergency camps counted 182,393. The number climbed sharply in the first half of 1953.
On 5 March 1953, Joseph Stalin died. The new Soviet leadership became increasingly uneasy about the situation in the GDR. The SED was forced to accept new instructions from Moscow on 2-4 June, and on 9 June it ruefully announced its New Direction, meaning a radical change. The signal was clear: the regime was demoralised and shaken. But the wage cut was not reversed, and the combined result was the construction workers strike on Berlins Stalinallee on 16 June 1953.
The workers marched to the House of Ministries on Leipzigerstrasse and shouted: Free elections! Down with the government! The Soviet Union concentrated troops in Berlin as early as 16 June consisting of the 12th tank division and the 1st and 14th mechanised division, with 500 tanks in all.
The next day, the uprising exploded across the German Democratic Republic. There were demonstrations in more than 700 towns; martial law was declared in 167 of the 217 administrative districts. The Soviet Union added thirteen divisions to the three already stationed in Berlin. The power of the SED had returned to its roots, as the renowned German journalist Karl Wilhelm Fricke aptly observed.
Law in the service of politics
There was violence: a lynch murder in Rathenow; four members of the Volkspolizei (the GDR police) and the Staatssicherheit (the secret service, or Stasi) lost their lives in mysterious circumstances; Soviet troops shot twenty-four people dead (some through stray bullets); the Volkspolizei executed twenty-seven; the Soviet authorities killed eighteen; the GDR sentenced four people to death, and two of these sentences were carried out.
Meanwhile, Soviet courts sentenced and deported between 500 and 700 people to the Soviet Union, some to Vorkuta. The dialectical nature of things meant that instead of having a demoralising effect, this helped to spark off the Vorkuta rising in July 1953; the arrival of the German prisoners showed their Russian counterparts that resistance was possible. Although this revolt was also crushed, like 17 June 1953 its impact was lasting.
The SED-controlled courts changed their approach from the period before the New Direction. Previously there had been sentences on the grounds of the National Property Protection Law and Article 6 of the Constitution (incitement to boycott and similar offences); SED judges who wanted to hand down sentences according to the Criminal Code had been reprimanded. Now the system differentiated between an honest worker and a counter-revolutionary or even fascist provocateur.
Thus, politically motivated criminal law continued to be used. There was a mixture of sentences, abandoned trials, verdicts of not guilty set against draconian punishments. In the spring of 1954, the events of 17 June had resulted in 1,526 prisoners; of these, two were executed, three served life sentences, thirteen had been sentenced to ten to fifteen years imprisonment, 99 persons had got sentences of five to ten years, 824 had got one to five years, and 546 less than one year.
But the case of Ernst Jennrich, a gardener from Magdeburg, illustrates that the regime had not abandoned its old methods. The district court could not prove his participation in the uprising, so it only gave him a life sentence. By command of the Supreme Court the verdict was changed into a death sentence, and this was carried out.
The SED leadership had very quickly agreed on the formula of a fascist or counter-revolutionary coup attempt as an explanation for 17 June. However, this caused internal difficulties. The worried head of the Stasi, Ernst Wollweber, concluded in November 1953 that we have not succeeded so far in fulfilling the task we have been given by the Politburo of finding the henchmen and organisers. They never did.
The uprising remained ever-present in the leaderships awareness in subsequent years; every 17 June prompted increased security alerts. Will 17 June erupt tomorrow? asked one comrade minister timidly in the summer of 1989. And of course this is exactly what happened, though this time, the Soviet Union did not intervene.
A changing political memory
In West Germany, 17 June was quickly declared a national holiday in the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the revolt, although the events themselves could not be properly researched. The evolving symbolism of this holiday is clear from the regular bulletins published by the federal government.
For some years after 1953, the bulletin reports on thousands of commemorative events, torch marches and ceremonies. By the mid-1960s these had gone. Soon, there were complaints that 17 June was simply being used as an excuse for a day off work. One of the few politicians who took the issue of the separation of the two German states personally, the much-criticised federal president Heinrich Lübke, said in 1961 (in a comment directed at trade unions): From the very beginning we should not have celebrated this day as a holiday but as a day of sacrifice and service whose proceeds should have gone to the people in the Soviet zone, and if this were not possible to the developing world.
By 1989 things had changed again. The western SDP politician Erhard Eppler, who had an intimate knowledge of the GDR, spoke of something like a GDR mentality in the country east of the Oder-Neisse line:
If I am not mistaken, this mentality was stronger two years ago. But presumably there is still a majority in the GDR whose hope is not directed at the end, but at a reform of the state. However, if the leadership of the SED remains complacent and blind to reality this majority could turn into a minority in two years time It is clear that the SED is treading on thin ice. However, the ice is not only thin but thawing. As the Cold War melts away I want the citizens of the GDR to participate in the internal affairs of their own state. But they should do so not in a way that fits in with SED policy, nor in the way we would like to see, but in a way which they themselves deem right and necessary.
In the course of those West German decades, the image of 17 June has changed. It was first, perhaps naively, perceived as a popular uprising for freedom, law and unity. Over the years, this gave way to a new interpretation of it as a workers uprising. Current research has returned to the earlier view, but now on the basis of empirical material. People everywhere except those East German historians whose predominantly economistic view is exemplified by Jörg Roesler now seem to conclude that it was a popular uprising aimed at political liberation from dictatorship, and German reunification.
As a characteristic example (if not sufficient proof), I would like to quote what Paul Othma, the strike leader in the heavy industrial centre of Bitterfeld, shouted across to his colleagues after a guilty verdict from the Halle district court in October 1953: Dear friends, when I see your beaming faces today I would love to hug you and press you towards my chest. The day of liberation is here, the government is gone, the tyranny is over.
The message from Jena to Germany
I would like to conclude where I began, with Jena. Recent impressive conferences in the eastern German cities of Magdeburg and Halle on the June 1953 rising have concluded that Jena was a centre of resistance. Of the five Stasi headquarters in the GDR which were stormed, one was in Jena; Jena citizens liberated the local prison and therefore made the call for freedom of political prisoners a reality; people on the 17 June demonstration in Jena sang the all-German hymn; at the beginning of July there was even a second strike wave in Jena. This, in short, is something altogether different from the change in society, to which that botched commemorative plaque refers.
On 22 March 2003, the Jena section of the Ostthuringer Zeitung wrote that Karl Heinz Johannsmeier, who was sentenced to six years in prison for his part in the uprising, and who now lives in the United States, had helped create a memorial in Jena. Consisting of four glass steles some four metres high, it stands between the town hall and the church. Its intention is to restore the memory of the many citizens 400,000 who were held in prison for years; the three million people who fled the German Democratic Republic and the fact that human rights meant nothing in that state.
The 50th anniversary of 17 June 1953 is over now. Of course it would have been better if the day had remained a national holiday. But it is to be hoped, at least, that it will not be remembered as a GDR event, but rather as one that belongs in the collective memory of German and indeed of European history as a whole.
Translated from the original German by Julian Kramer.
