Fifty years on, the events of June 1953 in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) were treated with a deluge of remembrance in the German media. Since the spring of 2003, hardly a week passed without some commemoration on conferences, in print media articles, TV dramas, internet features of the strikes and demonstrations in Berlin and dozens of other East German towns and cities, which Soviet tanks swiftly crushed.
Yet, especially in western Germany, there was a striking dichotomy between the commemorative activities of political representatives and historians and the comparative absence of popular interest. In the old (western) Federal Republic, 17 June 1953 was described as the peoples uprising against the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party / SED) regime, and had long been declared the Day of German Unity.
However, this national holiday, which usually coincided with beautiful early summer weather, for decades prompted many West Germans to take a trip to the greenery outside the cities, rather than listen to the official commemorations of their politicians.
This day of unity was abolished in the year of reunification, 1990, and gave way to the new national holiday, 3 October, which commemorated the event.
This step followed a certain logic: German unity, one of the demands of the demonstrators in 1953, had at last been achieved. By 1993, the media response to the 40th anniversary of 17 June 1953 was a rather muffled one, even though historians who had gained access to the archives of the SED and GDR leadership were able to present some new research about the events.
A decade further on, the 50th anniversary was met with far greater political interest, although the last decade has added only local and individual details of the uprising to historical knowledge. Why then do official politics, historiography and the media today attribute such renewed significance to this event?
The answer can be found in the current political context. In 1993 the political class of the Federal Republic of Germany was still confident that, after the GDR became part of West Germany in a political, legal, economic and administrative sense, the mental unity of all Germans was assured.
But ten years later, a mental wall still divides east and west. Opinion polls confirm that a majority of East Germans still think that socialism is a good thing, only badly managed by the SED leadership. Ostalgie, the nostalgic retrospective view of the apparent or real positive sides of the GDR no unemployment, greater social equality and security, work-family compatibility is widespread; and cinematic dramas which take the everyday life of the GDR and its people seriously, like Goodbye, Lenin reach millions of viewers.
In contrast to this deep residue of popular sentiment, the 50th anniversary commemorations are a welcome instrument for official memory to demonstrate that the GDR was a state without the rule of law, that the SED did not have any support in grassroots movements, and that the GDR could only survive for decades with the backing of Soviet rifles.
Centre stage: the working class
Against the weight of this official memorialisation, a distinctive East German historical interpretation of the events can be discerned. At the time, of course, the GDR authorities regarded the uprising as a fascist coup detat. They supported this argument with evidence of lynch mobs and hooliganism, and the alleged Nazi past of over a tenth of those convicted after the uprising.
Today, however, the argument emanating from marginalised East Germans historians in pamphlets and lectures (most of these historians were banned from German universities and research institutes after unification) is that the 17 June events were a workers revolt caused by the threat of a general increase in production targets in factories. The authorities responsible for this increase were the SED and the conformist leadership of East Germanys trade unions. The economic demands of the workers, so the argument goes, soon evolved into political ones.
Thus, the East German workers sought to do more than get rid of production targets; they also sought the end of the government responsible for this production target policy and of the trade unions closely linked to the SED leadership. Wage cuts were the last thing that the workers at the workbench expected from a socialist government which had proposed the official slogan of workers at the lever of power.
These workers, East German historians argue, determined the character of the June events with their protests, even though representatives of other groups (office clerks, retailers, housewives) joined the protest as soon as the workers took to the streets. Of the 1,240 persons later convicted for their actions 85% were workers, and so were most of the 50 people killed during the June events (the exact numbers remain disputed).
In both east and west, German workers were historically deeply opposed to performance-related wages. Yet in both areas after the second world war, trade unions dispensed with this traditional opposition in the face of the need to reconstruct the country. However, unlike in the GDR, West Germany succeeded in imposing a tightly organised work regime and Taylorist production norms until the mid-1950s, while at the same time wages continually rose and there were modest improvements in the welfare of workers.
The SED, too, had realised by 1948 that the reintroduction of production targets bore fruit in industrial branches in which the transformation from time-related to performance-related wages led to salary increases for workers, and so the party leadership had tried to combine both forms of wages. Why then did the government divert from this policy in the spring of 1953?
From economics to politics
The reason for the change in direction can be traced to a year earlier. In the spring of 1952, the Soviet ruler Joseph Stalin demanded further investments from the SED leadership, on top of the annual reparation shipments to the Soviet Union, amounting to millions of Deutschmarks in defence spending. This was caused by Stalins conviction that the cold war already the site of a savage war in the Korean peninsula over the previous two years was about to become an armed territorial conflict in Europe also.
The SED obeyed, and tried to build up an East German army by imposing heavy taxes on and expropriating middle-class enterprises and large farms, which had become superfluous for the proclaimed construction of socialism. Later, the regime also withdrew grocery coupons from the personnel of these institutions (until then, these coupons had guaranteed state provision of basic needs for all citizens).
All this, however, was still not enough to meet the states financial needs. Thus in the spring of 1953 the (officially ruling) working class had to make its very own financial contribution. The government decreed a campaign for strict economies, entailing wage reductions as well as increases in grocery prices. The threat to living standards was real and severe.
The general increase of production targets, which in fact cut wages, then triggered the workers revolt. The striking workers demanded that the SED and trade union leadership resign; they combined these demands with calls for free elections and the creation of a unified German government.
What they meant, however, was not a reunification in the shape of a merger with the dominant political and social system of West Germany the eventual outcome in 1990 but the election of a united German government that would be more accountable to workers interests than the existing governments of West and East Germany. Clear up your crap in Bonn, were doing it ourselves in Berlin-Pankow!; this rallying cry of some striking East German workers of 17 June 1953 demonstrated their independent demands.
The political party in West Germany whose programme came closest to these demands was the oppositional Social Democratic Party of Germany(SPD). Its chairman Erich Ollenhauer led the federal election campaign of 1953 against the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) with called for an economic democracy and a political order of social justice. The East German striking workers replied to this with a slogan referring to the respective leaders of the two states (Walter) Ulbricht and (Konrad) Adenauer go home, we will only talk to Ollenhauer.
If German unity had indeed been achieved in 1953 through all-German elections, the West German federal chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, and his CDU party would probably have been the losers. The crushing of the workers revolt, however, meant a reinforcement of Adenauers policy of integration between West Germany and its western allies, which he in any case favoured over German unity. Without doubt, Adenauer was one of the victors of 17 June 1953.
East German historians today go on to argue that the one million workers who engaged in the mass strike against increased production targets did achieve a victory. The targets were repealed after 1953, wages rose and the provision of consumer goods significantly improved. This had become possible because of the reversal of Soviet policy towards the GDR. The politicians who had risen to power in Moscow after Stalins death strove to reduce tensions between east and west and thus reduced the GDRs defence burdens. From 17 June 1953 a different future became possible; an event that had its roots in severe economic pressures and policies created a political response that helped overcome them.
Translated from the original German by Julian Kramer
