Table of Contents

0. About Studies on the DDR
1. Health Care in a Sick System
2. Historical Conditions in the Years Preceding the DDR
3. The DDR’s Comprehensive Approach to Health Care
4. Contradictions and Challenges
5. The Polyclinic: A Modern Approach to Outpatient Care
   • 5.1 From Private Practice to Polyclinics
   • 5.2 The Operation of Polyclinics
   • 5.3 An Overview of the Outpatient Sector
6. Protecting Health in the Workplace
7. Health Care for Mothers and Children
8. Vaccination Strategies
9. The DDR’s International Cooperation and Medical Solidarity
10. Why Is Socialism the Best Prophylaxis?

About Studies on the DDR

The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was a socialist state founded in East Germany in 1949 as a democratic, antifascist reaction to the Second World War and the subsequent restoration of monopoly capitalism in West Germany. The DDR represented a new Germany, one in which the land was redistributed, the means of production socialised, and the agricultural system collectivised. It established an egalitarian education, healthcare, and social system and guaranteed equal rights between men and women. It cultivated friendly and close-knit economic relationships with other socialist states and exercised political and material solidarity with countries and movements fighting for their independence in Latin America, Asia, and Africa.

The DDR’s declared objective was to establish a just society based on the principles of equality. With public ownership of the means of production as its foundation, the country developed into a powerful and efficient industrial state that used its economic surplus for the benefit of its citizens and guaranteed them a life of social security. Ultimately, the DDR was successful in realising its main socio-political goal: to satisfy its people’s growing material and cultural needs.

Why bother re-examining the DDR’s achievements, principles, and structures thirty years after its downfall? What can we learn from its alternative economic practices in today’s world, where the triumph of capitalism has exacerbated the problems of inequality and poverty and has resulted in more frequent crises? What did socialist democracy really look like? What contradictions arose during the everyday application of a planned economy? What lessons can we draw from the DDR’s ultimate demise?

With this series, Studies on the DDR, the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (International Research Centre DDR) together with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research seek to encourage a new engagement with the history and principles of the DDR. It is our goal to re-evaluate the legacy and experiences of this project of socialist construction. We use the German acronym DDR, orDeutsche Demokratische Republik,(English: GDR) specifically because it often represents a positive point of reference in many parts of the world and especially for countries in the Global South.

This educational series on the agenda and realities of the DDR explores aspects of everyday life, provides facts about the country’s social achievements, and examines the political and economic foundations of this socialist state. By reflecting on the lived experiences of daily life, which are generally left out of the dominant narrative due to the crushing victory of capitalism and the dominance of the market economy, we seek to make a useful contribution to the debates currently taking place within progressive movements. After all, millions of people around the world are still fighting for advancements that were once a given in the socialist system but were lost with its downfall.

In 1990, after the reunification of Germany, the DDR’s economy was dismantled. It was treated as a shock therapy prototype for the austerity measures that were soon imposed on other countries –and not just the former socialist states. At the same time, the DDR was politically, judicially, and morally delegitimised. The publications in this series are a rejection of the narrative propagated by enemies of socialism, both new and old, that the demise of the DDR proves the inevitable failure of socialist policy and economy. By depicting the realities of life in the DDR and by affirming the experiences of DDR citizens, we hope to remind the reader that alternatives to capitalism did and do exist.

This second publication in Studies on the DDR explores the construction and expansion of the DDR’s health care system in the decades following the Second World War. In the context of limited economic resources and fierce competition with capitalist West Germany, the DDR was able to develop a pioneering approach to medicine that placed people over profits and emphasised the importance of social responsibilities in preventing disease. The insights gained from this historical experience of building an effective, universally accessible health care system can serve as a frame of reference for those struggling towards a society organised for and by working people.

1. Health Care in a Sick System

The manner in which a society approaches issues of health reveals much about its general character. The priority given to people’s health, the degree to which individuals are protected and treated equally, and the extent to which health care is geared towards people’s real needs paints a picture of the existing social and political conditions.

Health policy cannot, however, be reduced to the system of medical care alone. It is inseparable from working conditions, nutrition, housing, and education; the character of social relationships; leisure and cultural behaviour; and a number of other factors that form the basis upon which people’s physical and mental health develop. The interrelationship between these elements was already being discussed in Germany during the early development of capitalism. An example of this was the work of the German physician Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902), the founder of modern pathology and a pioneer of what was then referred to as ‘social hygiene’ (Sozialhygiene). This field, now associated with the terms social medicine or public health, investigates the interaction between people’s health and their social conditions. Friedrich Engels, too, provided evidence of this connection in his early work on the condition of the working class in England.

‘All conceivable evils are heaped upon the heads of the poor. If the population of great cities is too dense in general, it is they in particular who are packed into the least space. […] They are given damp dwellings, cellar dens that are not waterproof from below, or garrets that leak from above. Their houses are so built that the clammy air cannot escape. They are supplied bad, tattered, or rotten clothing, adulterated and indigestible food. […] And, if they surmount all this, they fall victim to want of work in a crisis when all the little is taken from them that had hitherto been vouchsafed them.

How is it possible, under such conditions, for the lower class to be healthy and long lived? What else can be expected than excessive mortality, an unbroken series of epidemics, a progressive deterioration in the physique of the working population?’

–Friedrich Engels, one of the founders of scientific socialism, 1845

Under capitalism, health protections must be fought for in a constant struggle against economic interests. Public health policies are primarily determined by the private sector and are increasingly being reshaped by market forces. The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically revealed the serious deficiencies and unsolved challenges of health care systems today. Many states lack clear, scientifically grounded decision-making structures. Solidarity-driven cooperation within and between states is blocked above all by private economic interests. Deaths are shamelessly weighed against economic losses by political and business leaders. Throughout the world, the living and working conditions of the lowest earners make them the most vulnerable to the pandemic. In many cases, they are denied access to vaccines and medicines. The protection of private patent rights is prioritised over comprehensive care for the people. The populations of the Global South are left almost entirely empty-handed.

The overall efficacy of health care systems in the Global North is touted as an indication of their superiority, yet their potential is not fully exploited, nor is their efficacy due solely to economic strength or positive medical traditions. Instead, it is the decades-long struggle of trade unions and other democratic forces that has established minimum standards and basic care. The same forces have thereafter been compelled to defend these gains from the constant pressures of the private sector. Further, the health care systems of wealthier states are bolstered by medical personnel who have been lured away from economically weaker countries. This – coupled with the continued exploitation of the Global South – further exacerbates unequal development between the North and South. Today, the private capitalist sector is consolidating its grip on health care systems, particularly in Western economies, leading health and illness to become increasingly commodified and subordinated to profit-driven motives.

‘Health care, instead of being an accountable system, has grown into a hodgepodge of corporate fiefdoms whose central aim is to maximise profitability for venture capital investors. A profit-oriented health care system requires the physician to act as a kind of gatekeeper, deciding whether to grant or deny health care. A profit-oriented health care system is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. As soon as care serves profit, it is no longer true care’.

–Professor Bernard Lown (1921–2021), an American cardiologist and a co-founder of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW)

Since 1991, the proportion of private hospitals and beds in Germany has increased tremendously, continuing a trend of the increasing commercialisation of inpatient care which began in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, commonly referred to as West Germany) in the mid-1980s. This development gained additional momentum in 2003 with the introduction of the US-inspired billing system based on diagnosis-related groups. Under this system, hospital cases are classified into different groups to identify the ‘products’ that patients receive and to determine payment. As such, decisions regarding the treatment and length of hospital stays are increasingly made on the basis of what can be billed profitably rather than on the basis of medical criteria. The quality of health care is thus being eroded, as treatment becomes ever more dependent on patient income and public health services are slashed.

The antagonism between private-sector interests and comprehensive health care for all members of society had already been recognised in the early days of the German Democratic Republic (commonly referred to as East Germany). Throughout its 40-year existence, the DDR was able to construct and advance a fundamentally different health care system. From an initial position of great economic disadvantage, the DDR came to be ranked among the 20 largest industrialised countries in terms of economic production and living standards by the end of the 1980s. The well-being of its 16 million inhabitants was reflected by favourable, even leading values according to certain World Health Organisation measures such as the physician-to-population ratio, infant mortality, and the reduction of tuberculosis. This was despite the suboptimal structural condition of many health facilities, the scarcity of medical supplies, and restrictions on the import of medicine and technology – much of which was the result of economic sanctions imposed by the West.

The DDR was able to achieve significant advances in health care both due to the influence of progressive traditions passed down from the 19^th century and the Weimar Republic (1918–1933) and due to a radical transformation of the economic and political conditions in the DDR. This transformation enabled the young state to reorient the objectives and structure of health care around social principles while also creating new socialist relations in and outside of the workplace that improved the population’s health.

This study assesses the DDR’s health care system and traces several of its central elements, examining the significance of the DDR’s socialist character in the construction of a health care system based primarily on preventive principles. This endeavour did not proceed without its difficulties and contradictions, and the insights gained from this process of building an effective, accessible health care system within the context of limited economic resources can serve as a reference for struggles worldwide. The title, Socialism Is the Best Prophylaxis, pays tribute to a well-known quote of Maxim Zetkin (1883–1965), a physician, politician, and son of the international women’s rights activist and communist Clara Zetkin (1857–1933), that became a slogan in the DDR. In line with the focus of the DDR’s health care system, this slogan refers to the medical approach known as prophylaxis that seeks to prevent disease before it manifests.

2. Historical Conditions in the Years Preceding the DDR

Devastating social and health conditions for the urban proletariat arose against the background of industrialisation in the German Empire (1871–1918). After years of campaigning, revolutionary social democracy succeeded in introducing social health insurance in 1883. While then German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck is remembered as the founding father of state-organised social insurance, it was in fact the struggles of the working class that demanded and won concessions from the government. Bismarck never made a secret of the fact that he sought to push back the political influence of the socialist labour movement. During a session of the Reichstag, he remarked, ‘Without social democracy and without the fear that it generates in a great many people, we would not have made the modest social reforms that we had to grant today’. The introduction of this health insurance system helped to partially cover the cost of treatment, but inadequacies remained as working conditions had not improved and the workers had to pay two-thirds of the premiums. As a result, self-organised health care organisations such as the Workers’ Samaritan Federation (ASB) and the Proletarian Health Service (PGD) emerged, complementing the work of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) respectively during the Weimar Republic. These organisations emphatically demanded the further expansion of public health care.

Image 1. The Proletarian Health Service (PGD) was a self-organised health service that operated from 1921 to 1926. It was explicitly political and continued the tradition of public health by, for instance, supporting the nutrition of schoolchildren and the labour struggles to maintain the eight-hour day, especially in the mining industry and chemical factories. It further advocated for the socialisation of health care and organised concrete, practical assistance by providing health care training and education, accident prevention, and first aid. The PGD also worked closely with the workers’ sports movement to promote fitness.

.

After German fascism came to power in 1933, the Nazis began misusing medicine to enforce their racist and anti-Semitic ideology against people whom they alleged were inferior, committing crimes against humanity on an unprecedented scale. Following the unconditional defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, a catastrophic health crisis hit the German population. The prevalence of epidemics, diseases, and injuries revealed how wars continue to produce many casualties long after the end of military combat. Hospitals, sanatoriums, and the entire health care system had been destroyed in what then became the Soviet Occupation Zone (SOZ). The supply of medicines collapsed, and epidemics spread uncontrollably, intensified by a large influx of refugees and resettled people arriving from Eastern Europe. Deaths from tuberculosis in this period were twice as high as they had been prior to the war. Typhus, cholera, dysentery, venereal infections, and childhood diseases ravaged the population. The number of doctors halved compared to pre-war levels, and the training of new physicians was interrupted by the closure of universities.

From the defeat of the Nazi regime in 1945 to the founding of the DDR in 1949, the health policies of the SOZ were shaped based on 30 orders issued by the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD), which governed the SOZ from the end of the Second World War until the DDR was established in 1949. The policies were then implemented by the German Economic Commission (the central German administrative body in the SOZ) along with the newly created Central Administration for Health Care and the five regional governments in Eastern Germany. An immediate question confronting the SMAD was how to deal with the doctors and other health professionals who had supported the fascist system. Roughly 45 per cent of physicians had been Nazi Party members, many of them involved in euthanasia and the other atrocities that took place in concentration camps. Many of these individuals fled the SOZ, knowing that they would be treated more leniently in the West. The doctors who stayed posed a politically and morally difficult dilemma: enacting a blanket dismissal of health professionals –as had been carried out among judges and teachers for good reason – was out of the question, if only because of the health crisis facing the country. As a result, doctors who had not been found guilty of any crimes were allowed to continue their work, and many of them later made themselves fully available to the new health system.

Many of the doctors and health workers who were entrusted with administrative positions in the SOZ’s general administration were those who had been engaged in resistance or had emigrated or been imprisoned under the Nazi regime. Their immediate tasks were dictated by the decisions of the Allied powers in the Potsdam Agreement of 1945 and the newly legalised political parties in the SOZ. The Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) formed in 1946, unifying the two working class parties – the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) – into a single party in the SOZ and recognised the need for new health structures, especially in outpatient care. When drafting social and health policy programmes for a new, democratic Germany, the authorities in the SOZ drew on the progressive demands and experiences of the Weimar Republic period.

‘Since the full development of the health service will only be guaranteed in a socialist society, there is nevertheless a way for democratic Germany as well. […] This is the nationalisation of the health service. Only in this way can physicians, enjoying economically secure positions as well as resources guaranteed by the state, devote themselves entirely to their duties. Only in this way can the achievements of medical science be made available to the entire population. […] The preservation of the health and the productive capacity of working people is one of the nation’s most important tasks and a prerequisite for reconstruction. […] Hence, health protection must be made a matter for the state and thus for the people as a whole. The aim must be one of securing for everyone the protection of his or her health as the basis of vitality and physical fitness’.

–Health policy guidelines of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), March 1947

The task was now to establish a functioning health care system. This required nationalising health care institutions and guaranteeing the right to health care. Free medical treatment was provided through a universal health care system, and the protection of health was understood as a task for all sectors of society. Separating people’s medical needs from the private interests of capital was a decisive, central idea in providing health care for all; it was recognised that business considerations, particularly regarding freelance doctors working in private practices, ran counter to the progressive development of medicine. This observation had already been put forth by the League of Nations, an international association of states founded after the First World War and the forerunner of the United Nations.

The DDR’s emerging health care system was shaped by the experiences of the Soviet Union and its health system, the architects of which had themselves been inspired by the policy positions of the German Left during the Weimar period (1918–33). After the 1917 Russian Revolution and the Civil War (1917–22), the young Soviet Union became the first state in world history to build a health care system that guaranteed free, universal health care to the entire population, enshrining the right to free medical care in the Soviet Constitution of 1936 as one of the fundamental rights of the Soviet people. Under the model introduced by Nikolai Semashko (the People’s Commissar for Health from 1918–30), medical facilities and services were completely state funded and centrally managed, and a multilevel system of hospitals, specialty clinics, and sanatoria operated at the national, regional, city, and district levels. While aspects of the Soviet model influenced the transformation of the health care system in the SOZ, it was not simply replicated. Some of the ways in which the DDR’s system differed, for example, were the degree of central organisation and the fact that it was not financed solely by the state.

3. The DDR’s Comprehensive Approach to Health Care

‘Health policy in the DDR was understood as a totality of ideological, cultural, economic, social, and medical measures conceived of and practiced with varying intensity and quality within the public sphere. The aim was to help shape and optimise the environmental conditions of peoples’ lives in a way that both protects and fosters their health. Patients were to be treated and cared for using the knowledge and experience of modern medicine. Life was to be steadily and progressively extended’.

–Ludwig Mecklinger, the DDR’s minister of health from 1971 to 1989

The creation of socialist property relations was a crucial precondition for the DDR’s preventive approach to health care. Health-related matters such as working conditions, housing, nutrition, and education could therefore be managed by the state and its democratic decision-making structures. The comprehensive planning of publicly owned institutions made it possible to investigate and tackle everyday health risks. In this endeavour, the DDR built upon the traditions of social medicine, which approached health from a socio-political perspective and focused on the interaction between people’s welfare and their overall living and working conditions. In particular, the focus on preventive care in the workplace and for children, along with a modern concept of outpatient care, demonstrated the integrated and holistic character of the DDR’s health policies.

Image 2. A district health inspector measures sound frequencies in a residential area in order to develop methods for reducing noise pollution. The medical fields of social, occupational, and communal health were responsible for monitoring and safeguarding the health standards of the population’s working and living conditions.

.

By organising health care institutions as state-owned entities, the DDR overcame the separation found in many capitalist countries today between publicly funded health services and the large, privately organised sector of outpatient and hospital care. The elimination of private forms of ownership enabled the integration of preventive, therapeutic, and aftercare measures that yielded better results for patients. Furthermore, the country’s numerous and diverse medical institutions – from hospitals and clinics to pharmacies and research centres – could now cooperate with one another as part of a unified network led by the Ministry of Health.

The hospital network in the DDR was steadily expanded to improve accessibility for citizens throughout the country. The tiered system, made up of the communal, municipal, and regional administrative divisions, sought to provide basic care in municipal hospitals, while specialised treatment would be administered in regional hospitals or national institutions and universities. Prior to the Second World War, churches played a significant role in maintaining and operating hospitals throughout Germany. Rather than dismantling these structures, the DDR worked with the clergy to ensure that emergency health care would be available in all areas of the country. Thus, of the 539 hospitals in East Germany in 1989, 75 remained under the jurisdiction of churches, though they too were integrated into the state’s planning system.

The DDR also sought to overcome the historically uneven distribution of doctors across rural and urban areas. After graduation, every physician received both their licence to practice and secure paid employment and was required to work for several years in an area where doctors were particularly scarce based ona commitment made at the beginning of their studies. This policy, referred to as the steering of graduates (Absolventenlenkung), was the DDR’s solution to a serious problem that still besets many countries today.

‘There came a point when we were told: “ You have committed yourself to serve where society needs you”. Many who studied in Berlin then tried everything possible to stay in Berlin to avoid going to Cottbus or Bitterfeld, for example, into the brown coal district, into the dirt. I said to myself: “Well, these are people who have a right to adequate medical care. They shouldn’t be abandoned there, so I’ll do it”. For me, it was fulfilling a promise that I had made in return for being able to study free of charge. We even received a scholarship that allowed us to study without financial difficulties. Such an obligation does not contradict my understanding of fairness in any way, even today. It was perfectly acceptable to me’.

–Dr. Rüdiger Feltz, a practicing neurosurgeon

To finance its health care system, the DDR introduced a broad social security scheme that covered health, accident, and pension insurance and was managed by the workers themselves through the Free German Trade Union Federation. This integrated, state-organised model replaced the fragmented and profit-oriented insurance systems that still operate in many capitalist countries today. Individuals in the DDR paid up to 10 per cent of their monthly wages to the scheme, though contributions were capped at 60 Marks per month for workers. Enterprises then matched the contributions of their employees, and additional state subsidies covered any shortfalls.

The political weight given to health care in the DDR is also illustrated by the country’s extensive legislation on this issue. The universal right to health care regardless of one’s social situation (which had already been anchored in the DDR’s first constitution in 1949) was enshrined in the two subsequent constitutions of 1968 and 1974. The DDR thereby realised Article 25 of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states that every human being has ‘the right to a standard of living adequate for health and well-being […] including food, clothing, housing, medical care, and necessary social services and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age, or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control’.

The DDR guaranteed not only basic health-related rights and duties in the sphere of medical care, but also in the spheres of work and education. Equal rights for women as well as health protection for children, youth, and the elderly were also codified. This included internationally commended legislation that decriminalised homosexual acts in 1968 (though they had already been exempt from legal prosecution since the 1950s) and legalised abortion in 1972. Other significant statutes included the introduction of state liability for health damages caused by medical procedures (1987) and the ‘dissent solution’ for organ transplants (1975), which established a presumed consent model for organ donation that required individuals to opt out.

The DDR’s health care system was a highly complex sector that was gradually and systematically developed over the course of four decades, employing nearly 600,000 people –roughly 7 per cent of the total workforce – by 1989. In addition to hospitals and outpatient clinics, this sector included medical teaching and research facilities; specialist institutes; emergency services; scientific societies; medical publishers and journals; health education facilities; and, last but not least, an extensive pharmaceutical industry. With thirteen enterprises, three research institutes, and approximately 15,000 employees, the Kombinat GERMED –meaning ‘combine’, a sort of socialist corporation – produced some 1,300 different medical products, meeting 80–90 per cent of the DDR’s pharmaceutical needs while also exporting medical products to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries. The domestic demand for medicines was communicated to suppliers not through market forces but through the calculations of district pharmacists. Pharmacists, like physicians, were free from profit-oriented considerations in their work, and medicines were provided free of charge to all citizens. Close collaboration between pharmacists and physicians enabled them to tailor patient care and adjust medications if supply shortages occurred.

Image 3. In 1950, there were 1,694 pharmacies in the DDR, of which 1,266 were privately owned. By 1989, there were 24 private pharmacies and 2,002 public pharmacies managed by the Ministry of Health. Each of the DDR’s 15 regions was overseen by a head doctor and head pharmacist. On the district level, local pharmacists were responsible for monitoring the distribution of medicine according to unified standards.

.

4. Contradictions and Challenges

The development of the DDR’s health care system was not free from conflicts and challenges. Contradictions between the country’s health care objectives and its economic capacity meant that stated goals and aspirations could not always be achieved. Health policies reflected both the economic difficulties facing the country and shifts in political priorities. For example, when the Unity of Economic and Social Policy was introduced in 1971 to increase access to consumer goods and services, the health sector initially benefited from extra funding. Yet this shift in investment policy away from the industrial sector created imbalances in the planned economy that were ultimately felt in the health sector, too. This was apparent, for instance, in the wear and tear on hospitals and the scarcity of certain medical supplies and equipment, which made health workers’ day to day tasks more difficult. In its final years, the DDR was no longer able to import modern medical technology developed in Western industrialised countries to the extent needed, in part due to the embargo imposed by the West. While innovative diagnostic and therapeutic methods enabled the DDR to make progress against certain diseases that had previously proven difficult or impossible to treat by conventional methods, these efforts were often hampered by a lack of equipment.

In the 1980s, bottlenecks in the supply of materials as well as differing views on how to tackle urgent health issues led to intensified policy debates. The preventive approach to care and the conviction that all social sectors had a role to play in public health remained decisive underpinnings of government policies. Yet, disputes arose around the question of which disease-causing conditions could and should be prioritised. For instance, at times there was an emphasis placed on measures that sought to change unhealthy behaviours in order to combat problems such as obesity, alcohol abuse, and an increase in smoking amongst the youth. This approach of focusing on individual behaviours that contribute to health issues was criticised by social medicine specialists, who instead focused on improving the population’s overall living and working conditions. Such debates reveal that everyday difficulties and strategic questions were open to political discussion, which often took place in bimonthly regional physicians’ meetings and biannual municipal physicians’ conferences, among other venues.

The West’s hostility towards the DDR affected the development of its health system in many ways, exerting an ideological, political, and economic influence on the DDR’s health workers and structures. This had a particularly notable impact on the country’s access to medical and technical material as well as international research initiatives. In addition, West Germany actively poached East German doctors by encouraging them to migrate westward. Physicians who had enjoyed cost-free education and training in the DDR were attracted to the West by better pay or by their reluctance to participate in the social transformations underway in the East. This dynamic impacted the DDR from the outset: the exodus of doctors following the Second World War was so massive that it would have required at least five additional graduating classes of all DDR medical schools to compensate for the loss. This was similar to the situation in Cuba, where – apart from doctors like Che Guevara who committed themselves to the revolution – many doctors left the island for the United States after 1959. This phenomenon of ‘brain drain’ – in which physicians and other highly educated or skilled professionals emigrate from those countries where they are most needed – and its consequences for the Global South are generally brushed off or sold as a positive aspect of globalisation.

Until the border between East and West Germany was closed in 1961, the DDR was also pursuing its pioneering health programme in ‘competition’ with the FRG, which preserved the private practice model and deliberately used high salaries and privileges to incentivise well-trained doctors to leave East Germany. The DDR was thus faced with the same difficulty that confronted the Bolsheviks after the October Revolution: how could the specialised professionals and intelligentsia, who had been privileged under capitalism, be won over to the construction of socialism? Given the high levels of emigration, the SED decided to make concessions to the medical intelligentsia in the late 1950s, utilising material incentives to encourage doctors to work and live in the DDR. Despite these challenges, further shifts away from private practices to public employment prevailed in the following years. Although several thousand doctors left the DDR before the Wall was built in 1961, by 1988 the number of physicians in the country (around 41,000) had more than tripled since 1949, putting the DDR’s physician-to-population ratio on par with the other industrialised states in Europe.

As the experiences of the DDR and other socialist states have revealed, the societal transition beyond capitalism is never a simple linear development. Constructing a comprehensive and people-oriented health care system cannot happen overnight. Radical transformations must contend not only with a country’s economic limitations, but also with traditional conceptions of social roles and status. The scale of the brain drain from the DDR, for instance, led the government to make certain compromises in its mission to break the intelligentsia’s long-held monopoly of the medical profession. When drawing lessons for the future, we cannot isolate such compromises and shortcomings from their historical context. That is what differentiates constructive and progressive analyses from those that merely seek to smear and deride socialism.

5. The Polyclinic: A Modern Approach to Outpatient Care

5.1 From Private Practice to Polyclinics

Under the capitalist model of health care, outpatient care is commonly provided by independent doctors in individual private practices that are scattered throughout cities and towns. Progressive medical traditions have, however, long criticised this model as having two significant limitations. Firstly, self-employed doctors are economically dependent on sick patients seeking out treatment. That is, they are financially incentivised not to prevent disease but to treat symptoms after they manifest. Secondly, the rapid advance of science has greatly improved medical diagnostics and treatment capabilities, but these new methods require access to the latest technology and expertise. Since individual practices cannot house the diverse equipment and staff demanded by modern medicine, patients are referred to separate specialists or diagnostic centres, often creating inefficiencies and discrepancies in diagnoses. In the DDR, polyclinics were developed to overcome these issues in outpatient care.

As the name implies, polyclinics were facilities in which multiple medical specialties collaborated under one roof to prevent and treat a wide variety of diseases. More specifically, polyclinics were defined as publicly owned outpatient facilities containing at least the following six specialist departments: internal medicine, oral medicine, gynaecology, surgery, paediatrics, and general medicine. Many polyclinics also housed clinical diagnostic laboratories, physiotherapy departments, and medical imaging facilities. In addition, polyclinics embodied the conviction that, to be effective, outpatient medical care had to be severed from personal economic considerations. Physicians and staff working in polyclinics were publicly employed and thus freed from their traditional economic dependencies on the sick. With a secured position and a reasonable income, doctors could focus first and foremost on preventive care.

It was again the transition away from private ownership that enabled this fundamental reorientation of the outpatient sector, which plays an important if not decisive role in the capacity of a health care system to serve the entire population. Effective outpatient care ensures that the medical help people need is directly and rapidly available where they live, from prevention and therapy to aftercare and rehabilitation, which helps to minimise inpatient stays in hospitals and ideally prevents illness in the first place. The clustering of medical departments, technology, and laboratories under one roof helped to overcome bureaucratic and financial obstacles that plagued private practices. At the same time, this design facilitated more effective collaboration between medical professionals from different fields.

‘Does not […] the real freedom of the physician consist in the fact that they are given the means to secure the health of each individual citizen without limitation? By building up the state health system, physicians are no longer economically interested in people falling ill; they can instead genuinely act as the guardians and preservers of health’.

–Speech at the National Health Conference in Weimar, 1960

Smaller institutions embodying the same approach as the polyclinic were called outpatient centres (Ambulatorien) and typically housed at least three different departments: general medicine, internal medicine, and paediatrics. More than a third of the outpatient facilities were affiliated with hospitals and university clinics to promote medical collaboration. Consultation centres and state-owned individual practices operated in more remote locations but were organisationally linked to polyclinics for support.

Transforming the outpatient sector presented unique challenges both in terms of infrastructural requirements and the new roles of health care workers, unlike the hospital system, which had a longer history of public ownership. There was, for instance, considerable scepticism and even resistance to the idea of polyclinics among physicians. The radical idea of publicly employing medical specialists to work together under one roof sharply contrasted with the deeply rooted self-perception of the ‘freelance’ doctor who works for him or herself.

Several forerunners of large medical complexes served as inspiration to the DDR’s polyclinic system, such as the House of Health in Berlin, constructed in 1923 during the Weimar Republic. Architects of the DDR’s Bauakademie (Academy of Civil Engineering) began to develop and refine similar projects in the 1950s under the leadership of then President Kurt Liebknecht. When the DDR’s immense housing construction programme was announced in the early 1970s, it specified that polyclinics or outpatient centres were to be incorporated into the new estates. Larger polyclinics were built in Berlin as well as in other big cities, each staffed with upwards of 50 doctors.

Conservative physicians’ associations had already begun systematically opposing calls to establish polyclinics during the Weimar era, and they resumed this offensive after the end of the war in 1945. The DDR’s policymakers sought to demonstrate the advantages of the new model by expanding the technical capabilities and laboratories in polyclinics. This was a gradual process; for many years, private practices continued to provide a large portion of outpatient care.

It ultimately proved possible to gradually win over medical professionals to the concept of the polyclinic: by 1970, only 18 per cent of outpatient physicians were in private practice, compared to well over 50 per cent in 1955. The rapid construction of efficient outpatient facilities throughout the country made the significant practical advantages of the new system evident. The contrast between outpatient health care in East and West Germany gradually widened over the four decades following the founding of the DDR: by 1989, the vast majority of West German outpatient doctors were still operating in private practices, while almost all of their East German counterparts were publicly employed by that time.

5.2 The Operation of Polyclinics

Physicians and staff working in polyclinics were employed and remunerated by the state, removing personal economic motives from the doctor-patient relationship and the medical decision-making process. In contrast to private practices, polyclinics established unbureaucratic cooperation between individual specialties. Under capitalist health care systems, self-employed outpatient physicians have generally been (and often still are) solely responsible for medical decisions, whereas the collaborative structures in polyclinics made it easier for specialists across different disciplines to discuss complicated cases or, for instance, the prescription of new medications and recommendations for new types of therapy. This interdisciplinary collaboration also provided a framework in which the relationship and communication between preventive, therapeutic, and aftercare measures could be strengthened and brought closer together. Laboratory and medical imaging services could be requested immediately and were usually available within a short time or even during the consultation itself. Polyclinics were also able to house superior medical equipment, mainly because common usage was more cost-effective than individual use in private practices, and a uniform filing system for patient records was maintained to reduce inefficiency and miscommunication between specialists.

On average, polyclinics staffed 18 to 19 physicians, which allowed them to extend hours of operation and continue to provide care even when individual doctors were sick or on holiday, unlike in private practices. In addition, this allowed physicians to provide more extensive care to their patients, as they could couple their normal consultation hours with on-site visits. Paediatricians, for instance, were able to conduct regular check-ups in childcare centres while other doctors took charge of walk-in consultations in polyclinics.

‘The fact that a doctor always has to worry about how to secure their income and is dependent on sick people coming to them cannot be the solution. Another solution must be found. Namely, to understand doctors as well-paid employees of the state who can conduct their duties independently of their income. That was one of the basic ideas in the DDR. A second was that the modern development of science no longer corresponds to the model of private practice. I need structures where I can access the laboratory, X-ray machines, and specialists. These two basic ideas led to the gradual creation of polyclinics, or outpatient centres. It was a long process, and one that faced resistance’.

–Dr. Heinrich Niemann, a specialist in social medicine and former policymaker

The new model of employment in outpatient care greatly improved the collegial atmosphere in the health sector. Staff were guaranteed fixed working hours, in-house health care, communally organised meals, and joint holiday facilities for themselves and their families. Importantly, physicians, assistants, and nurses were all employed as staff members; they were treated equally in accordance with labour laws and were organised within the same trade union. These measures gradually helped erode professional hierarchies.

Image 4. Dr. Heinrich Niemann remembers: ‘At the beginning of the 1980s, the large Dr. Karl Kollwitz Polyclinic was built in the working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. The doctors who had already been working there in private practices did not go into polyclinics with flying colours. Of course, they knew that the moment they worked in such a large facility, a different mode of operation, a new way of working together would be necessary. […] Yet, this is the only way that a unity can be established between therapeutic, rehabilitative, and preventive measures. Still today, a private practice can only achieve this to a limited extent’.

 .

5.3 An Overview of the Outpatient Sector

Outpatient care was a central component of the DDR’s preventive approach to medicine, and its expansion and success in ensuring that all citizens received medical coverage not only during emergencies but throughout the course of their lives arguably represents the most revolutionary aspect of the country’s health care system. In order to achieve this, a vast network of infrastructure was developed in neighbourhoods, workplaces, childcare centres, and rural locations. Through public ownership and the planned nature of the economy, it became possible to shape living and working conditions around health considerations.

By 1989, this network was made up of 13,690 outpatient facilities, 626 of which were polyclinics. Roughly one in four of these polyclinics operated within industrial enterprises, using the workplace as a site to provide consistent, quality, and accessible healthcare to the labour force. Of the almost 19,000 doctors working in the outpatient sector by 1980, 60 per cent were employed in polyclinics, 18.5 per cent in the smaller outpatient centres, and just 11 per cent in individual medical practices.

Image 5. Community nursing was a highly skilled and valued profession. The nurses were well acquainted with the residents in their region and performed important medical services during house visits such as carrying out examinations, dressing wounds, administering medicines and injections, and arranging for a doctor’s assistance when necessary.

.

In order to extend preventive care to rural areas and scattered villages, rural outpatient centres were built and staffed with up to three doctors, with the number of these facilities rising from 250 in 1953 to 433 by 1989. In many towns, physicians worked in public medical practices or temporarily staffed field offices to provide residents with consultation hours and home visits, while mobile dental clinics visited remote villages to provide all children with preventive care. In addition, the profession of the community nurse was developed in the early 1950s to alleviate the initial shortage of doctors in the countryside, with the number of community nurses expanding from 3,571 in 1953 to 5,585 by 1989. This extensive rural infrastructure helped to provide less densely populated regions with medical services comparable to what was available in urban areas.

‘There was no separation between care work and social work in community nursing, so it was a completely logical development for the nurses that social services became part of the health sector in 1958. […] In villages where there was no doctor, the community nurse was responsible for everything related to health, social, and hygiene matters. Some became members of the local council, and a few became deputy mayors’.

–Dr. Horst Rocholl, a former municipal physician

The DDR’s revolution in outpatient care went beyond the construction of infrastructure. Comprehensive reform was also carried out in the educational system to break down traditional barriers and hierarchies in the field. This included, among other measures:

0. 0. • Providing tuition-free education and fixed stipends to cover students’ living costs and ensure that medicine became accessible to the working class and peasantry.
      • Implementing socio-political measures such as comprehensive childcare and distance education programmes to make medical professions more accessible to women, who, from the late 1970s onwards, often made up more than 50 per cent of medical students in the country.
      • Turning nursing and caretaking into highly qualified and respected professions through intensive academic training programmes.
      • Making higher education in medical specialties available to all physicians.

However, after 1990, the FRG’s private practice model was rigorously imposed on East Germany, undoing the DDR’s achievements in the outpatient sector. While many East German professionals were stripped of their credentials after the DDR was incorporated into the FRG, no one dared to seriously question the qualifications of East German health professionals: in cases where they were barred from practicing, the motive was almost always political. Furthermore, the liquidation of the polyclinic system represented ‘the greatest blunder in health policy’ after unification, as Dr. Heinrich Niemann argued before the Health Committee of the German Parliament in 1991 –an assessment corroborated by the precarious state of the health system in Germany today. While the FRG made it possible in the late 1990s for outpatient doctors to work as employees rather than freelancers, these clinics are almost exclusively under private ownership and lack a unified structure, and their commercial orientation marks a significant regression from the integrated and publicly funded outpatient facilities of the DDR.

6. Protecting Health in the Workplace

In East Germany, workers’ health was given great importance from the very beginning. In 1947, during the period in which Germany was still occupied by the four Allied powers, the Soviet Military Administration issued Order No. 234, which stipulated that workplaces with more than 200 employees were to set up medical stations, while those with more than 5,000 employees were to establish enterprise polyclinics. Within three years, 36 enterprise polyclinics had been set up, and by 1989, they numbered more than 150. The enterprises themselves were responsible for maintaining the rooms, furnishings, and operating costs of these health facilities while the state health system provided and oversaw the medical staff and equipment. This point represents a decisive contrast to the occupational health care that is offered in some private companies today: in the DDR, the medical professionals overseeing occupational health and safety were employed by the public health system, not the enterprise within which they worked. As such, it was the interests of the workers, not the employers, that guided their medical decisions.

In the DDR’s first constitution in 1949, legal protections for workers’ health were laid out alongside the extensive social insurance system. In the subsequent constitutions in 1968 and 1974, these protections were expanded, and their implementation was overseen by the workers themselves: the Free German Trade Union Federation, present in all enterprises and institutions of the DDR, was tasked with monitoring the enforcement of legal provisions and reporting on their effects. By law, the workplace represented much more than merely a source of income. Enterprises provided the framework in which employees could pursue cultural and intellectual interests alongside recreational activities. Workers’ brigades were encouraged to attend cultural and sporting events, discuss political developments, and visit holiday camps maintained by the enterprises. The DDR’s Labour Code of 1977, for instance, contained clauses to protect and promote both the physical and mental health of employees. This legislation further demonstrates that the interests of working people determined the direction of the economy.

As with the outpatient sector, the system of occupational health was gradually expanded. By 1989, it covered 7.5 million workers from 21,550 enterprises, or 87.4 per cent of all working people in the DDR. Institutions specifically dedicated to this field – such as polyclinics, outpatient centres, and medical stations operating within enterprises – employed some 19,000 health care professionals. Occupational medicine was also established as a major field of study, with approximately one out of seven outpatient doctors specialising in this field. The Central Institute for Occupational Medicine employed physicians and scientists to research work-related illnesses and develop preventive measures, and the importance that this sector carried in the DDR is evidenced by the fact that the FRG had only half as many occupational health specialists, despite the West German labour force being three times larger than its equivalent in the East.

In certain professions, employees were exposed to hazardous substances and/or particularly arduous physical conditions. Health officials campaigned to reduce the number of such jobs, and enterprises were obliged to report on the measures they were taking to combat harmful conditions. Yet, in certain sectors of the East German economy, such as heavy industry, production processes posed unavoidable threats to workers’ health. By 1989, roughly 1.69 million workers remained exposed to harmful pollutants and stresses such as excessive heat, noise, or vibrations. To minimize the injuries that often resulted from such jobs, the DDR provided targeted care to exposed workers. Of the 7.5 million workers monitored under the occupational health system in 1989, roughly 3.34 million received care that was tailored to the specific conditions in which they worked. For example, regular hearing tests were conducted for those working in construction, while regular lung examinations were conducted for those employed in chemical plants. Alongside these measures, specialist occupational health inspectorates monitored enterprises’ compliance with safety standards and specified limits for harmful substances or work stresses.

Image 6. An occupational health inspection measures noise, temperature, humidity, and lighting conditions. In 1981, a strict obligation was placed on enterprises to report on the conditions of high-risk workplaces and to take measures to reduce these risks. Together, these reports created a solid database through which affected employees could be monitored, protected, and provided with targeted care. The data was also used to exert greater pressure on politicians and enterprises to reduce and, if possible, prevent the harmful side effects of work.

.

The field of occupational health was particularly important in the context of the FRG’s trade embargo, which caused the DDR to rely heavily on the only energy source readily available in East Germany: brown coal, a lignite-based substance that emits considerable pollution when burned. This economic necessity, alongside shortfalls in technical modernisation in some enterprises, led to special exemptions being permitted regarding harmful exposures in some workplaces. Occupational health and safety thus became a contentious field as officials debated which priorities should be set. Ludwig Mecklinger, the DDR’s minister of health from 1971 to 1989, recognised this dilemma, stating that health policies were inevitably restricted by economic necessities and external factors.

Work-related mental stress was another key issue in the DDR and became the focus of the field of occupational psychology. Here, significant findings were made by the scholar Winfried Hacker, who focused his research on the psychological regulation of labour activity in the context of socialist society, where the greater satisfaction of people’s needs requires increased labour productivity. According to Hacker, work should be designed in such a way that not only maintains workers’ health, but also fosters their psychological development: work that is dull and detached from workers’ lived realities will lead to alienation, whereas a healthy relationship with work must be multi-dimensional and allow workers to develop both themselves and the products of their labour at the same time. To explore these ideas, Hacker and his team of researchers developed methods to identify objective characteristics in the workplace that positively impacted health and psychological development and to measure how they affected subjective perceptions. Although Hacker’s proposals were not implemented on a large scale, his research set the standard in occupational psychology. Hacker’s work differed from the predominant approaches to occupational psychology under capitalism, which prioritise increasing the efficiency of work processes rather than the development of employees’ health and mental state.

Today, the weakening of trade union power and the rise of precarious employment has led to a deterioration in working conditions in most capitalist states. While there have been advances in the production processes themselves, new health burdens are constantly emerging, particularly in connection with digital workplaces, along with agriculture and food industries. As such, the importance of occupational health has only increased, and the experiences of the DDR in this field remain relevant not only from a medical point of view, but also by demonstrating that a fundamentally different approach to health protection in the workplace is possible.

7. Health Care for Mothers and Children

In East Germany, women enjoyed access to first-rate health care, comprehensive childcare, and guaranteed employment. These social achievements meant that by 1989, the employment rate among women had reached 92 per cent. At the same time, from the 1970s, East Germany also had a higher birth rate than the West largely due the continuous expansion of the country’s social and health infrastructure, which enabled women to both pursue employment and raise a healthy family.

The development of this infrastructure was established in the DDR’s legislation, which proved to be consistently more progressive than in the FRG, where patriarchal laws reflected bourgeois familial concepts such as the stay-at-home mother. The DDR’s 1950 Law on Mother and Child Protection and the Rights of Women, for instance, prescribed an extensive expansion of day care and health care facilities for children, explicitly supporting single and working mothers. While in 1956 only 10 per cent of children attended childcare facilities, by 1990 nearly 80 per cent of eligible children attended a crèche (from the age of 0 to 3) and 94 per cent attended kindergartens (from ages of 3 to 6). At the time, these were some of the highest rates of childcare coverage in the world. Women’s committees within trade unions were instrumental in introducing and overseeing new laws to address the need to balance family and work responsibilities. One result, for example, was the establishment of enterprise kindergartens directly connected to the workplace. Through the socialisation of childcare responsibilities, mothers were able to work while also raising children and thus develop economic independence from their partners. This was reflected in East Germany’s divorce rate, which remained significantly higher than in the FRG throughout the DDR’s 40-year existence. This trend was dramatically reversed after 1990, when women’s employment levels fell sharply in the former DDR.

Childcare facilities also played a central role in the health policies of the DDR. These institutions were actively monitored by the Ministry of Health and, in the case of crèches, even placed directly under its responsibility rather than that of the Ministry of Education. This made it possible to create integrated social and health standards to further children’s wellbeing, such as regular paediatric visits to crèches to carry out vaccinations and periodic medical check-ups conducted directly in kindergartens and schools, making health care an integral part of children’s everyday lives. In this way, maintaining good health and detecting potential health issues became a social responsibility that was no longer left to parents alone.

In 1965, the Law on the Unified Socialist Education System made health a central pillar of education and laid out qualification requirements for personnel in crèches, kindergartens, and schools. Child psychology and pedagogy were emphasised in training programmes for crèche personnel. Early childhood development was acutely observed by educators to assess, for instance, children’s adaptation to their familial and social environment. When necessary, crèche personnel arranged for consultations with parents to discuss practical recommendations for everyday care. The Professional Paediatric Association (Medizinischen Fachgesellschaft für Pädiatrie) also convened regular interdisciplinary working groups together with childcare personnel to assess the state of crèches and kindergartens. These groups drew up policy proposals and legislative amendments as well as suggestions for pilot projects.

Image 7. In the DDR, strict norms were developed and enforced to ensure appropriate pedagogical methods, infrastructure, and open spaces at children’s facilities. New housing developments, such as the one in Rostock featured here, were required to include large open spaces for children.

.

In addition to providing free childcare to all families, the DDR strove to break down cultural taboos and promote the health of women and children, regardless of their circumstances. The 1965 Family Code, for instance, eliminated the discriminatory legal category of ‘children born out of wedlock’ while emphasising the role of both parents in raising a child. The 1972 Law on the Termination of Pregnancy also contributed to women’s self-determination and family planning by introducing free and legal access to contraceptives and abortions within the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. In contrast, the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany contains a clause criminalising abortion to this day, and, since 1976, women have been required to attend a compulsory counselling session in order to receive an exemption.

Pregnant women in the DDR were guaranteed comprehensive pre- and post-natal consultations to aid and monitor mothers and their children. By 1989, there were more than 850 pregnancy consultation centres throughout the country to guide expectant mothers in medical and social questions. After birth, some 9,700 maternity consultation centres regularly examined infants and assisted the parents in their new roles. Periodic medical examinations then accompanied children all the way to adulthood. Importantly, dental care was also integrated into preventive screenings in kindergartens and schools, again in contrast to most health systems today in which dental health is not publicly guaranteed and is instead left to the financial resources and discretion of parents. Taken together, these structures and policies helped to ensure that family planning and childhood development could unfold independently of economic considerations.

Image 8. A paediatrician carries out an examination in a rural outpatient clinic. In addition to the early detection of health abnormalities, the assessment of a child’s preparedness for school was also part of the preventive screenings. Confidential documentation of all such examinations and findings on health and development accompanied children from birth to graduation.

.

8. Vaccination Strategies

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the inequalities and inefficiencies of vaccination production and distribution in the capitalist world today. On the one hand, intellectual property rights have been prioritised over public health, leading to vaccination apartheid in which countries in the Global North have amassed enough doses to vaccinate their populations three times over, while most states in the South are prevented from reproducing these same vaccines themselves. If it were not for South-South cooperation headed by countries such as Cuba and China, vaccination rates in poorer states would be far lower than they already are. On the other hand, in a twist of irony, the same states stockpiling vaccines in the Global North struggled to convince a quarter or even a third of their populations of the efficacy and safeness of immunisation against COVID-19.

As in many other socialist states, the DDR was able to achieve particularly high vaccination rates during its four decades of existence. A clear example of this was the campaign against the polio virus. In 1961, while West Germany was still registering over 4,600 cases of polio, East Germany had reduced its number of cases to less than five. The DDR made use of an oral vaccine produced in the Soviet Union and subsequently offered 3 million doses to the FRG, but the latter declined. While East Germany recorded its last polio case in 1962, cases continued to be recorded in West Germany until the end of the 1980s.

Image 9. Vaccinations were a part of the regular medical screenings that accompanied children from birth to adulthood. Health care was guaranteed in crèches, kindergartens, schools, and holiday camps, right through to apprenticeships and university studies. This photograph documents the administering of a new polio oral vaccine in the form of drops.

.

The differences in the speed and effectiveness with which the two German states tackled polio stem from two fundamentally different approaches to immunisation. In the DDR, as in most other socialist states and some Western countries, childhood vaccinations had been mandatory since the early 1950s, and all children received a series of standard vaccinations set by the Ministry of Health. These vaccines were administered to children directly in crèches and schools, while adults were vaccinated in the workplace. Individuals who did not want to be vaccinated or have their children vaccinated (which primarily occurred for religious reasons) could obtain an exemption after consultations with a physician and regional health officials. Vaccinations and health care more broadly were thus treated as a social task in the DDR, and a wide range of societal actors, whether doctors, teachers, or parents, ensured that all children received preventive medicine and care.

In the FRG, in contrast, vaccinations were recommended but not mandatory, and it was the responsibility of the families to arrange appointments with their paediatricians for vaccinations. The Standing Committee on Vaccination (STIKO), an honorary commission of medical experts, made vaccination recommendations which doctors were then asked and paid to administer, but public vaccination programmes were not implemented in schools or at the workplace. Hence, for doctors in the FRG, the incentive to vaccinate is primarily financial rather than medical.

The focus of today’s political discourse on the legality of mandatory vaccinations underestimates and often fails to recognise the crucial practical question of how the state can fulfil its obligation to organise vaccination for all citizens in an efficient and safe manner. However, there remains a question as to whether or not the basic conditions for a mass vaccination programme have been established in a given society. These include:

0. 0. • Securing the resources to ensure that all citizens can be vaccinated. More specifically, this means producing or acquiring enough doses for all citizens, ensuring that facilities are safe and accessible, and employing enough medical personnel to administer the vaccines.
      • Coordinating and monitoring vaccinations in an integrated system. One of the reasons why certain diseases continue to spread despite vaccination campaigns is that individuals forget to arrange a second or third vaccination necessary for full immunisation. This is a serious limitation of voluntary-based immunisation strategies in which individuals must keep track of and arrange their booster shots themselves.
      • Maintaining the public’s trust in vaccinations and in the institutions and actors that provide them – that is, the state, pharmaceutical producers, and medical professionals. For instance, are private companies receiving public funding to develop vaccines that they will then patent and profit from, or is the state researching and developing vaccines that will be accessible and beneficial to all?

Mandatory vaccinations in the DDR were ultimately met by a public that was highly willing to be vaccinated. The use of coercion to increase vaccination rates – a hotly debated issue today – was thus not an issue in East Germany. Similar circumstances are evident in Cuba today, where the COVID-19 vaccination rate (roughly 90 per cent of the population) is one of the highest in the world, and yet no coercive measures have been employed.

Mandatory vaccination was understood in socialist East Germany not as a one-sided legal obligation for the citizen, but as the duty of the state and its medical institutions. Monitoring and achieving vaccination coverage to the greatest extent possible was a central priority for health care professionals, especially for physicians and authorities at the municipal level. Alongside the immunisation services that were integrated into workplaces, kindergartens, crèches, and schools, permanent vaccination centres were established where citizens could obtain information and schedule appointments for additional voluntary vaccinations, such as against influenza viruses. To this day, the willingness to be vaccinated against influenza remains significantly higher in East Germany than in the West.

Despite temporary difficulties in the production or import of vaccines, the DDR guaranteed universal child immunisation up to its dissolution in 1990. Furthermore, the number of diphtheria cases was drastically reduced, the fight against measles was advanced through booster jabs despite temporary setbacks, and the introduction of a vaccination against tuberculosis for all new-borns helped to significantly reduce the number of cases. The FRG, which had always been in a stronger financial position than the DDR, was also able to eradicate many childhood diseases, but its campaigns often progressed far more slowly than in East Germany, as is evident with the poliovirus.

The dismantling of the DDR’s health care system after 1990 was accompanied by a decline in the willingness to be vaccinated and a rising prevalence of diseases that had previously been in decline. With the transition to a health care system oriented around the private sector, immunisation has once again become an individual responsibility left to the discretion of patients and their general practitioners rather than centrally organised state institutions. Though various factors contribute to the emergence of epidemics, the reappearance of tuberculosis and measles cases in the East of unified Germany after 1990 is tragic proof of the efficacy of the DDR’s vaccination strategy. So too is the particularly low vaccination rate against COVID-19 in Eastern Germany today, which is largely a product of a crisis of confidence in the government and the wider health sector.

9. The DDR’s International Cooperation and Medical Solidarity

Image 10. In the late 1960s, after a long period of imposed diplomatic isolation, an increasing number of countries (mostly from the Global South) announced official relations with the DDR. In 1973, the DDR was admitted to the United Nations and participated constructively in its various bodies and organisations such as UNESCO and the World Health Organisation.

.

This photograph shows the arrival of workers from the city carrying a banner that reads ‘Colleagues from the Karl Liebknecht Berlin transformer factory are helping the first production cooperative with the harvest!’ The 1945/46, democratic land reform in the Soviet Occupation Zone secured food supplies in the dire post-war period while also fundamentally changing the system of land ownership in East Germany. Roughly 560,000 small farms emerged from the redistribution scheme, but they were often poorly equipped and supplied. Urban industrial and craft enterprises stepped in to help with the harvest in the emerging agricultural cooperatives.

On 8 May 1973, the DDR became a recognised, equal, and active member of the World Health Organisation (WHO) alongside 145 other states. The FRG had been a member of the WHO since 1951 and with its claim to be the sole representative of Germany had hindered the DDR’s international cooperation in the field of health and its access to international resources. Following its admission in 1973, the DDR became a proactive contributor to the WHO, hosting the organisation’s 1981 Regional Meeting for Europe along with numerous WHO workshops. It was also actively involved in the WHO’s Health for All by the Year 2000 programme, especially on the concept of primary health care at the 1978 International Conference in Alma-Ata. DDR experts were sent to the WHO as delegates, while foreign students came to study in the DDR on WHO scholarships. Furthermore, fifteen medical institutions and projects in the DDR were certified as WHO Collaborating Centres, which supported the WHO’s global programmes by conducting research, collecting data, and fostering the exchange of scientific and practical experience.

In addition, cooperation between the socialist states was intensive but also limited by differences in each country’s capabilities. The DDR, for instance, supplied many medicines as well as medical equipment to the Soviet Union and its allies, while several thousand doctors from the DDR received specialist training in these countries.

Image 11. In this article, copied from an entry in Dr. Rüdiger Feltz’s Nicaragua diary on 15 March 1986, the Nicaraguan press reports on the construction of the Carlos Marx Hospital, which started as a triage tent and was soon expanded into a fully functioning hospital. The hospital’s construction as well as the training of its staff and provision of its equipment and medicines were organised by DDR officials and financed by donations from DDR citizens. It was one of East Germany’s largest solidarity projects.

.

The DDR’s internationalist solidarity with countries throughout the Global South included numerous projects in the health sector. There were contractual agreements with over 40 countries and national liberation organisations, such as the South West African People’s Organisation (SWAPO) and the African National Congress (ANC). The spectrum of the DDR’s medical internationalism included supplying medicines and equipment, deploying doctors and nurses overseas, training and further educating international personnel in the DDR, and building and operating hospitals.

For example:

0. 0. • The DDR-Vietnam Friendship Hospital, today the Viet-Duc (German-Vietnamese) Hospital, in Hanoi, Vietnam was supplied with medical materials by the DDR as early as 1956.
      • The Carlos Marx Hospital was built in Nicaragua in the 1980s and largely operated by DDR medical and technical experts. By 1989, there were approximately 90 employees working there, including 25 doctors and 23 mid-level medical staff from the DDR.
      • Over 50 doctors and specialists from the DDR constructed and operated the Metema Tropical Hospital in Ethiopia from 1987 to 1988 to treat drought victims.
      • Angola received 27 ambulances through DDR solidarity donations in 1975. In a rehabilitation centre in the capital city of Luanda, DDR medical personnel treated wounded combatants of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The centre also operated as a school to train local nurses and doctors.
      • The DDR sent specialists to Cambodia (the 17 April Hospital), Mozambique (the towns of Chimoio and Tete), Algeria (Frenda, Mahdia, and Oran), the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (Aden), and Guinea (the orthopaedic-technical centre in Conakry). DDR paediatricians also treated patients at the National Union of Tanganyika Workers’ clinic in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Image 12. The DDR’s Dorothea Christiane Erxleben Medical School, named after Germany’s first female medical doctor, emphasised medical pedagogy. The objective was to train students so that they could in turn teach trainees in their home countries, thereby promoting the development and autonomy of local health care systems.

.

Furthermore, doctors from countries throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America received specialist training in the DDR, and about 700 overseas patients were treated in the DDR every year. Nurses and other mid-level medical professionals also received training in the DDR, most often at the Dorothea Christiane Erxleben Medical School, which drew roughly 2,000 students from more than 60 states and national liberation movements during its 30-year existence. The DDR’s medical internationalism was characterised by both immediate aid and a commitment to supporting the long-term development of self-sustaining medical services in the emerging nation states.

‘Contract workers from Poland, Mozambique, Mongolia, and other countries had always been employed in processing plants in the meat industry. As a rule, workers should have been examined for fitness in their home countries before coming to the DDR. Nevertheless, during our recruitment examinations, we often detected serious illnesses of the lungs, liver, kidneys, etc. But these patients were never sent back. Instead, they were admitted to special clinics where they were treated free of charge, sometimes for months. This was practical solidarity in the DDR. What a huge contrast [with health care] after “reunification” in 1990, when, for example, a desperate father from Russia approached me with his child suffering from a tumour. Doctors from the Charité Hospital were willing to operate on him, but the funds could not be secured. In the media today, we often hear people begging for money to help seriously ill children from abroad, which always makes me sad and angry at the same time. The “impoverished” DDR never had to beg for such humanistic gestures!’

–Dr. Renate Rzesnitzek, a radiologist in the enterprise polyclinic of the Berlin meat combine

10. Why Is Socialism the Best Prophylaxis?

With the incorporation of East Germany into the FRG in 1990, the DDR’s 40-year endeavour to construct a fundamentally different health care system was brought to an end. The medical infrastructure and staff of the former DDR were engulfed by the West German system, which had itself been caught up in a wave of neoliberal commercialisation since the mid-1980s. Corporate hospital chains emerged throughout Germany in the decades that followed, and the private practice model of outpatient care was reimposed on the East. The profit motive came to dominate the medical profession once again, as Irene, a former nurse employed in one of the DDR’s polyclinics, recounted: ‘By 1993, physicians had begun to set up their private practices. After my chief doctor had attended a class on self-employment, she said to us, “I learned today that there are three principles of self-employment in the new system. First, we must always be kind to the patients so that they like to come to us. Second, we must discover what we can earn from the patient. How much revenue will they generate for us? And the third principle: We cannot allow them to get healthy”. That was my experience of the system change after 1990, and it has been my overall feeling in the health sector ever since’.

The reimposition of commercially oriented medical practices in East Germany has made the contrast between capitalist and socialist health care all the clearer. While the market turns diseases into commodities and patients into customers, socialist medicine seeks to prevent the disease and illness to begin with, making human well-being its guiding principle. As in other socialist states such as Cuba, prevention remained the guiding principle of the DDR’s approach to health care throughout its existence. Once the profit motive had been eliminated from both medicine and the economy, there was no reason why individuals and workers should be allowed to get sick.

In the DDR, political emphasis was placed on social medicine – that is, the systematic recognition and combating of the socio-economic determinants of health and illness rather than an approach that merely focuses on how these manifest at the individual level. While both social and individual medicine provide crucial perspectives for preventing and treating illness, policies aimed at improving the population’s health will inevitably be restricted if the general social context and root causes of disease are disregarded.

‘Throughout my political life… I have seen the world through the eyes of a doctor, for whom poverty, misery, and disease are the main enemies. That’s how I came to communism, and that’s how I was lucky enough to experience in the DDR a health and social system that established an impressive framework, a social and health system for the whole population such as I had never seen before. […] I am not uncritical of the former DDR and do not glorify its past. […] But one thing I know for sure: it would never have pushed me away from the ideas of socialism, for I arrived at them via unforgettable experiences under capitalism. […] The best, most humane and scientific medicine ultimately remains helpless under conditions of social misery. The state of the world today provides the most compelling and horrific evidence of this. But the reverse is also true: even the best social environment is powerless in the face of disease if it lacks medicine of the highest scientific and humanistic order.’

–Ingeborg Rapoport (1912–2017), a professor of paediatrics who held the first chair in the academic field of neonatology in Europe, emigrated from Nazi Germany to the US as a medical student, and resettled in the DDR in 1952.

Outpatient care, which has been a central focus of this study, reflects most strikingly the distinction between a capitalist and a socialist health care system. Outpatient facilities and professionals in East Germany were integrated into all areas of society, from workplaces and schools to urban neighbourhoods and rural villages. The country’s various medical institutions were connected through an integrated network that promoted cooperation rather than competition. This extensive infrastructure functioned as an early warning system that could identify and counteract harmful developments wherever and whenever they emerged. The field of occupational health care was particularly important in this respect since it allowed the links between work and illness to be scrutinised and addressed. Similarly, the integration of preventive care in childcare and educational institutions turned health matters into a social responsibility that was shouldered not only by parents but also by teachers, physicians, and public officials.

What stands out in the East German context are the achievements in health care policy despite the difficulties facing DDR society. Situated on the frontlines of the Cold War, the country was heavily sanctioned and struggled to import modern medical technology and equipment. At the same time, working conditions were strained by the necessities of reindustrialisation after 1945, which often entailed arduous labour and exposure to brown coal pollution. The DDR’s early years were also marked by a serious labour shortage in the health sector as medical professionals were lured westward. Yet, despite these challenges, the socialist state was able to make use of its limited resources to progressively improve the social situation and health of the population, and, in the process, the medical profession was revolutionised to break down traditional hierarchies. The field of medicine was opened up to the working class and peasantry, while the transition from private practices to polyclinics helped to erode the privileges of physicians over nurses and assistants as former employers and employees became colleagues.

These successes were made possible by two major political developments. First, health was made into a societal priority in East Germany after the Second World War. While in the Weimar era health policies had to be fought for by trade unions and conceded by the capitalist class, the DDR was a workers’ and peasants’ state; health, social, and cultural rights were enshrined in the country’s constitution, and the enforcement of these rights was overseen by workers themselves. The second factor was the socialisation of property relations in East Germany, which created the framework for an integrated health care system. The state’s centralised organisation of industry, housing, medicine, and education meant that health objectives could be discussed and implemented in relation to other social, economic, and political objectives. A comprehensive link was thus established between health policy and all areas of society, creating for the first time a practical basis for such discussions (despite often fierce policy debates) .

Today, to justify the privatisation of health care systems worldwide, we are told that markets ensure the most efficient allocation of resources in society. Yet, as the COVID-19 virus claims millions of lives and ravages the enfeebled health sectors of even the richest states, the inefficiency of the market and inhumanity of private ownership are more evident than ever. The DDR demonstrated that an alternative is possible –one that places human well-being at its centre, driven and managed by working people. Even under conditions of severe economic constraint, socialism has proven that preventive care, effective treatment, and dignified employment can be guaranteed for all. Indeed, embargoed Cuba continues to prove this point today, not only providing exemplary health care for its people but also serving those in need around the world. The health care systems of the future will find their blueprints in the socialist societies of those states like Cuba and the DDR.

Acknowledgements:

This study was produced in collaboration with Dr. Heinrich Niemann (b. 1944), who worked as a specialist in social medicine in the DDR and served as district councillor for health in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, Berlin during the 1990s. The section on occupational psychology was co-authored with Dr. Klaus Mucha, an occupational psychologist. We also received important inputs from interviews with Dr. Herbert Kreibich (b. 1943), a specialist in occupational health care who led the DDR’s Central Institute of Occupational Medicine from 1983 until 1990; Irene (b. 1940), a former nurse in the DDR who worked in a polyclinic in sports medicine prophylaxis and in an enterprise outpatient clinic (she has asked for her surname to be withheld for personal reasons); and Dr. Rüdiger Feltz (b. 1958), a specialist in neurosurgery who was a practising physician in the DDR and today in the Federal Republic of Germany. All the interviews were conducted between May and November 2021 in Berlin.

Bibliography

Image Credits

About Studies on the DDR

The German Democratic Republic (DDR) was a socialist state founded in 1949 as a democratic, antifascist reaction to the Second World War. It redistributed land, socialised the means of production, and collectivised the agricultural system. This socialist state established an egalitarian education, healthcare, and social system, and guaranteed equal rights between men and women. It cultivated friendly and close-knit economic relationships with other socialist states and supported countries fighting for their independence in Latin America, Asia, and Africa by showing international solidarity.

The establishment of a just society based on the principles of equality was the DDR’s declared objective. With public ownership of the means of production as its foundation, the country developed into a powerful and efficient industrial state that used its economic profit for the benefit of its citizens and guaranteed them a life of social security. Ultimately, the DDR was extremely successful in realising its main socio-political goal: the satisfaction of the growing material and cultural needs of its people.

But why bother re-examining the DDR’s achievements, principles, and structures thirty years after its downfall? What can we learn from the DDR’s alternative economic practices in today’s world, where the triumph of capitalism has exacerbated the problems of inequality and poverty and has resulted in more frequent crises? What did socialist democracy really look like? What contradictions arose from the everyday application of a planned economy? What lessons can we draw from the DDR’s ultimate failure?

With this series Studies on the DDR, the Internationale Forschungsstelle DDR (International Research Centre DDR) together with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research seek to encourage a new engagement with the history and principles of the DDR. It is our goal to re-evaluate the legacy and experiences of this socialist state. For this reason, we use the German acronym DDR, or Deutsche Demokratische Republik, (English: GDR) specifically because it often represents a positive point of reference in many parts of the world and especially for countries in the Global South.

This educational series on the socialist agenda and realities of the DDR explores aspects of everyday life, provides facts about the country’s social achievements, and examines the political and economic foundations of this socialist state. By reflecting on the lived experiences of daily life, which are generally left out of the dominant narrative due to the crushing victory of capitalism and the dominance of the market economy, we hope to make a useful contribution to the debate currently taking place within progressive movements. After all, millions of people around the world are still fighting for advancements that were once a given in this socialist system but were lost with its downfall.

This first publication in Studies on the DDR will briefly outline the formation of the DDR and its economic circumstances from the country’s inception to its end. In order to fully understand the specific DDR brand of socialism, we must highlight the historical conditions from which it emerged. The DDR was born in times of crisis in the aftermath of a devastating war as Germany – the instigator of the Second World War – was divided in two. It is imperative that we examine the DDR in its relationship to West Germany, which it opposed in the ensuing Cold War between the communist and capitalist systems.

In 1990, after the reunification of Germany, the DDR economy was dismantled. It was treated as a shock therapy prototype for the austerity measures that were soon imposed on other countries – and not just the former socialist states. At the same time, the DDR was politically, judicially, and morally delegitimised. The publications in this series are a rejection of the narrative propagated by enemies of socialism, both new and old, that the downfall of the DDR proves the inevitable failure of socialist policy and economy. By depicting the realities of life in the DDR and by affirming the experiences of DDR citizens, we hope to remind the reader that alternatives to capitalism did and do exist.

 Risen from the Ruins

With the victory of the anti-Hitler coalition and the defeat of German fascism on 8 May 1945, a new international balance of power was reached. One of the four victorious powers coming out of the Second World War was the Soviet Union, which had been a socialist society since the 1917 October Revolution. The country consistently implemented the joint decisions of the allied powers for the creation of a democratic Germany in its own occupation zone.

In the wake of the dissolution of the anti-Hitler coalition and the beginning of the Cold War between the Eastern and Western Blocs, two German states emerged. In 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany was founded, a bourgeois parliamentary democracy in whose state apparatus and economy perpetrators of the Nazi dictatorship assumed influential positions. In the same year, the founding of the German Democratic Republic as an antifascist-democratic state heralded a complete break with the imperialist past in East Germany. Its alternative concept of social order was inspired by the Soviet Union, but the construction and design of the new state was in the hands of German communists who had learned many lessons from the two world wars.

German Imperialism in the Twentieth Century

During the First World War, the highly industrialised and economically prosperous German Reich had already started to divide up the world and secure markets and raw materials for itself. It had also joined in on the colonial practices of other European powers, exploiting and oppressing people on the continent of Africa as well as in Asia and Oceania, fighting and even committing genocide against the Herero and Nama people in what is today Namibia.

The First World War ended in 1918 with the November Revolution, when workers and soldiers wiped out the monarchy in Germany. This led to the establishment of a parliamentary republic and brought an end to Germany as a colonial power. Though the German emperor was ousted, the generals remained; it was only later, when the Nationalist Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was formed, that the reactionary elite of the politically and economically unstable republic eventually saw that their time had come. The Party’s goals were fully in line with the expansionist interests of German monopoly capitalism, the large-scale landowners, and the military.

In 1933, the National Socialist Party took over the government with Adolf Hitler as its leader. Within a few months, the fascists set up a dictatorship that annihilated internal political opponents by banning political parties and trade unions and imprisoning communists and trade unionists. They took away the rights of the Jewish, Sinti, and Roma people as well as homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and people with disabilities and began to systematically murder them. With an enormous military armament programme, Hitler initiated preparations for a war that would allow German imperialism to achieve world domination, conquer territory in the east for ‘members of the German nation’, and obliterate the ‘Bolshevik subhumans’.

The Second World War began in Europe with the German Wehrmacht’s attack on neighbouring Poland on 1 September 1939, driven by the German Reich and its axis powers Italy and Japan. This war was waged by systematically destroying and liquidating civilian populations – such as twenty million Chinese people in Manchuria and six million Jews in Europe – in the most brutal of ways. Soldiers from the colonies of the allied forces were also among the overall seventy million killed during the Second World War. Great Britain in particular recruited soldiers from its colonies, whose participation in the fight against fascism is largely rendered invisible to this day.

Two years after the beginning of the war, the anti-Hitler coalition was formed by the major powers of the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and the United States to fight as an alliance against fascist aggression. The Soviet Union, however, bore the brunt of the war: two thirds of the fascist divisions were concentrated on the Soviet-German front, and it was here that the most decisive battles were fought. The Wehrmacht and the Schutzstaffel (SS) were relentless in carrying out the order to destroy the conquered territories all throughout Eastern Europe. This scorched earth tactic left behind destruction on an unimaginable scale: in the USSR alone, over 70,000 villages and towns and 32,000 industrial facilities were razed to the ground. More than 26 million Soviet citizens were murdered during this brutal campaign of destruction.

After the Red Army troops fought the Battle of Berlin, the Wehrmacht was forced to surrender unconditionally on 8 May 1945. This marked the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Second World War came to an end on the Western Front. However, this did not necessarily mean that the war was over in other regions. In Asia, for instance, the Second World War had begun as early as 1937 with Japan’s war against China in occupied Manchuria, but it did not end in 1945 with the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US.

Instead, the end of the war in Europe gave the British, the French, and other colonial powers the ability to focus on crushing independence movements in their colonies. France did this, for example, with bloody massacres in Algeria and with its war against Vietnam, which had been proclaimed independent by Ho Chi Minh in 1945 after the surrender of the Japanese occupying forces. The United States not only continued this war, but also resumed opposition against the partisans fighting in the Philippines who had continued to resist the Japanese occupiers for three years after U.S. forces withdrew in 1942. They were now facing their old colonial rulers once again. However, there were also instances in which colonial powers that had been weakened by war withdrew from their colonies, opening up new possibilities. India, for example, won its independence in 1947, and in China, the civil war ended in 1949 with the victory of Mao Tse-tung’s revolutionary People’s Army over Chiang Kai-shek’s troops.

By April 1945, troops of the anti-Hitler coalition had liberated most of the territories occupied by the fascist Wehrmacht. The Red Army opened its offensive on the capital of the German Reich and the fierce ‘Battle of Berlin’ ended with the complete military defeat of Nazi Germany. This photograph shows two Red Army soldiers in the Reich Chancellery, Hitler’s last command post. At their feet lies the toppled symbol of fascist power, the imperial eagle above the swastika.

In Germany, the main allied powers of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, the United States, and France created four occupation zones when the war ended, following the agreements of the anti-Hitler coalition. These zones divided Germany – as well the capital, Berlin, which was located in the Soviet occupation zone – into areas subordinate to the respective victorious powers. The heads of state of the victorious USSR, the United States, and Great Britain met in Potsdam in July 1945 to discuss how to proceed with the defeated Germany and debated the future of the country. Their decisions, backed by France, were aimed at weeding out German fascism by its economic and ideological roots, preserving Germany as a unified whole, and establishing it as a neutral zone. The basic political principles that guided the allies are referred to as the ‘Four Ds’ of the Potsdam Agreement:

1. Denazification measures sought to remove all Nazis from relevant positions and punish war criminals.
2. Demilitarisation sought to completely disarm and destroy the German arms industry.
3. Decentralisation sought to crush the concentration of economic power among monopolistic businesses.
4. Democratisation sought to restructure public life.

The Soviet Union knew that it had to ensure that there would never be another war waged against them by the Germans, but preventing future German aggression was also in the interests of the Western allies. Realistically assessing its coalition partners, the Soviet Union was not yet aiming for its occupation zone to be reconstructed according to socialist principles. Its goal was to create a demilitarised, civil-democratic republic that lived in peace with its neighbours and was not involved in any confederation. This was intended to create a non-aligned, neutral state as a buffer zone to Western Europe.

After the unconditional surrender of the German Wehrmacht on 8 May 1945, the victorious powers of the anti-Hitler coalition assumed sovereignty over the German Reich. As agreed at the Crimea Conference of the Allied heads of state (Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt) in February 1945 and as stipulated in the Potsdam Agreement in August later that year, Germany was subsequently divided into four occupation zones, as shown in this map.

While the Soviet occupation zone began implementing the Four Ds, the Western zones only partially kept the agreement. The joint decisions that had previously been agreed upon became a nuisance, especially when they interfered with issues of private, capitalist ownership. Adherence to the Potsdam Agreement thus became a red line between the different zones. In the East, large companies were transferred to public ownership, and Nazi war criminals were dispossessed of their property, convicted, removed from all institutions, and excluded from assuming important positions in society. In contrast, Western allies forbade expropriation initiatives, and the West depended on the Nazis as seasoned ‘experts’ for which they were economically rewarded in the form of relevant employment. Large businesses that had previously helped the fascists take power were left untouched, as were positions of economic power within German monopolies.

Though all of the occupying powers at the Potsdam Conference had made demands to disempower monopolies and large corporations, these demands were only met in the Soviet Occupation Zone, where around 10,000 businesses were expropriated without compensation. These enterprises became the property of the people and formed a publicly owned production sector alongside the remaining private capitalist enterprises that supplied about a quarter of the country’s total industrial production.

Meanwhile, in the West, the political and military agenda was to safeguard the interests of big business in the three Western occupation zones and to secure the global power of the United States on the European continent. Towards this end, the U.S. military concocted a frightening narrative of communist world domination. A war with the Soviet Union was as good as certain and a test of power was imminent. In March of 1946, British politician Winston Churchill was already redefining the new spheres of influence and began to speak of the ‘iron curtain that [had] descended across the continent’, drawing a line ‘from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic’. The Cold War between the Western powers and the Eastern Bloc had begun.

In 1962, the Democratic German Report, an English-language journal based in the DDR, published a map listing the countries in which former members of the Nazi party were working as ambassadors for the Federal Republic of Germany. Despite the end of the Third Reich’s reign of terror, the ‘old elites’ quickly re-emerged in the young Federal Republic. Functionaries of the Hitler regime were appointed to influential positions in the judiciary, universities, the army, and corporations.

U.S. President Truman terminated the war coalition with the Soviet Union one year later. The deeply rooted political and economic conflicts that ensued led to the dissolution of the anti-Hitler coalition and subsequently to the establishment of two German states: a capitalist state on the one hand and, on the other, a state that prepared the ground for socialism by expropriating private capital. In 1948, the Western European states of France, Great Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg founded the Brussels Pact, which was then presented as a mutual assistance pact against renewed German aggression. In 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) came into being after ‘requesting’ military assistance from the U.S.; with this development, the U.S. secured its ability to act in Europe against the alleged military threat from the Soviet Union.

In the West, the conservative middle-class political parties pushed for the establishment of an independent state in the interests of the private sector and corporations; such a state could only be capitalist. In 1948, the Western Allies created a ‘trizone’ out of their occupation zones and divided Germany with a currency reform. The introduction of a new currency tied to the U.S. Dollar, the Deutsche Mark (DM), established an economic area based on capitalist principles, from which the Soviet Occupation Zone was excluded. The Trizone became a West German separatist state in May 1949 with the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), also referred to as West Germany.

The West German economy recovered quickly from the aftermath of the war through the massive accrual of capital under the U.S. Marshall Plan (an investment program for the reconstruction of Europe). It was not long before West Germany had grown into the strongest economic market on the continent. With its rearmament and the establishment of an army under the leadership of hundreds of former Nazi military members as well as its entrance into the NATO military alliance, West Germany became a European outpost and protector of U.S. hegemony. From the moment it came into existence, it was one of the most important centres of action in the Cold War against the socialist states.

After the end of the war, Berlin was divided into four sectors and placed under the control of the British, American, French, and Soviet occupying powers. Free movement within the city was permitted until August 1961, when the construction of the Wall brought westward migration to an end.

New Antifascist Democratic Beginnings in the Soviet Occupation Zone

After the Second World War ended, the Allied Control Council, made up of the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces of the four winning powers, took over governance in Germany. Orders and directives were carried out at the discretion of the commander-in-chief of each respective occupation zone. Each occupying force also had the right of veto, which allowed them to choose their own path.

The Soviet Union did not export the Soviet system to its zone of occupation when it liberated Germany from fascism; rather, it placed the building of an anti-fascist democratic state in the hands of German communists. As early as June 1945, newly established antifascist democratic parties, unions, and mass organisations began operations with permission from the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD). In 1943, a number of German communists in Soviet exile had founded the anti-Nazi ‘National Committee for a Free Germany’ with German prisoners of war. With the end of the Second World War, several of the committee’s campaign groups returned to Germany to help reorganise public life and build German administrative bodies in accordance with the decrees of the SMAD. Some of the committee’s members took on key roles in the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Excerpt from ‘Construction Song’ (1948) by communist writer Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956):

Everyone likes a roof over their head
so advice to construction isn’t bad.
For our own good cause we must create,
at very first a brand-new state.
Gone with the rubble, something new be built!
For ourselves only we must care
and come right at us, those who dare.

In their Appeal to the German People for the Construction of an Anti-Fascist-Democratic Germany from 11 June 1945, the KPD called on the German people to lead the ‘fight against hunger, unemployment, and homelessness’ and to change the previous ownership structures to ‘protect the workers against unbridled entrepreneurialism and excessive exploitation’. By joining all democratic forces, the KPD, together with the other newly formed parties, created an antifascist democratic bloc. In 1946, the two workers’ parties, KPD and SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany), united to form the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED), the leading political party in the Soviet Occupation Zone, and later in the DDR. This resolved a decades-long schism within the working class, which had undermined its ability to fight against the existing ruling order.

In 1945, land reform was launched in the DDR and the feudal Junkers (landed nobility with immense property holdings who had held significant power in the Prussian-German military) had their land expropriated without compensation. Estates of more than 100 hectares, as well as the properties of all Nazis and war criminals, were transferred to a state land trust. More than half a million agricultural workers, resettled individuals, and landless farmers received a piece of property to call their own from this trust.

In autumn 1945, the German Central Administration for National Education was established at the behest of the SMAD. Its task was to create antifascist, secular, and socialist education and school systems. A comprehensive state school system was created that granted the equal right of education to all children for the first time ever. Teachers who had ties to the Nazis were fired from their positions and, in a very short time, around 40,000 young people who had not been tainted by the fascist system were trained to become new teachers.

In accordance with the resolutions of the Potsdam Conference, provincial and state administrations in the Soviet Occupation Zone issued decrees to disempower and expropriate major corporations and large landowners. This poster from June 1946 encourages participation in a referendum concerning the Law on the Transfer of Enterprises Owned by War and Nazi Criminals to the Property of the People.

The Establishment of the DDR   

The newly established Federal Republic of Germany declared itself the only successor of the German Reich and the true representative of all Germans. This included the claim to areas east of the Oder and Neisse rivers in today’s Poland, which had been part of the German Reich. After the end of the war, these areas were placed under Polish administration and the new border was then decided in the Potsdam Agreement. However, the border was not recognised by West Germany, which maintained its nationalist claims.

Meanwhile, in East Germany, the administrative functions that were initially carried out by the Soviet military authority were transferred to the newly founded German People’s Council. Shortly after the foundation of the FRG, the German People’s Council met in the Soviet Occupation Zone on 7 October 1949 and founded the German Democratic Republic (DDR). In its first statement, the new republic expressed a commitment to peace, social progress, and friendship with the Soviet Union and all peace-loving states and movements.

 The German People’s Council

The German People’s Council was a political committee and SED initiative that was composed of representatives of the various parties and mass organisations in the Soviet Occupation Zone in 1947. It was organised similarly to a parliament and a special committee in the People’s Council drew up the draft of a constitution. The People’s Council convened at the Congress of the People on 7 October 1949 and established itself as the provisional Volkskammer (DDR People’s Parliament); in October 1950, the first vote was held. The Volkskammer would remain the parliament of the DDR and the country’s highest constitutional body until 1990.

The new state defined itself as a state of workers and farmers and political power was held by the working class and its leading party, the SED. The National Front, a coalition of parties and mass organisations, ensured that all social groups would have influence on and participate in political processes. The DDR’s first constitution enshrined the achievements of the antifascist democratic revolution. It declared that the working class and its allies should exercise state power; that monopolies and large-scale land ownership should be abolished; that a national people’s economy should be created; that all citizens should have the right to employment and education; and that women should have equal rights. Promoting peace and international friendship became the guiding principle of state policy. As expressed in the DDR’s national anthem written by the poet Johannes R. Becher:

Risen from the ruins
And facing the future,
…
The whole world longs for peace,
Extend your hand to the people of the world.

Creating an efficient and powerful economy, however, posed an existential challenge for the new state. An initial five-year plan projected an increase in the labour productivity of state-owned enterprises, a doubling of industrial production, and an increase in the amount of state-owned property. The remaining 17,500 private capitalist enterprises were included in the economic development plan via economic, financial, and tax policies. This first five-year plan helped the DDR switch to long-term socialist economic planning and laid the groundwork for the development of a socialist system, which it finally adopted in 1952.

This photograph shows a mass rally with the Free German Youth that marked the founding of the German Democratic Republic in the Soviet occupation zone. Six months before that, in May 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany had been founded on the territory of the three western occupation zones. The DDR broke with Germany’s imperialist past, defined itself as a workers’ and farmers’ state, built socialism, and integrated itself economically and militarily into the Eastern Bloc alliances.

In 1950, the DDR joined the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (RGW/COMECON), which had been founded in Moscow the year before. The council was a coalition for economic cooperation established between the Soviet Union and the new people’s democratic states of Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and Czechoslovakia, and it was later joined by other states, including Cuba and Vietnam. Its economic conditions were determined not by capitalist market competition, but by socialist cooperation. The goal of COMECON was to create a shared zone for the people’s democracies and to coordinate their national economic plans. Their economic, scientific, technological, and cultural cooperation was settled in numerous bilateral agreements. In the same year, the DDR recognised the border between Germany and Poland along the Oder and Neisse rivers as a permanently valid ‘peace border’ as stipulated in the Potsdam Agreement. In doing this, the country took an important step towards reconciliation with their former enemies and – unlike West Germany – gave up all claims to the former eastern territories of the Third Reich.

By the mid 1950s, both German states were integrated into the Eastern and Western Blocs respectively. This alliance system influenced each country’s economy, politics, and military. In 1955, the DDR became a member of the Warsaw Treaty, the military alliance of Eastern Bloc states and a mutual assistance pact between socialist states that was exclusively defensive in nature and held peace in Europe as its primary goal. During this arms race forced by the West, the DDR – as a borderland to Western Europe – was a highly sensitive area for the threat of a potential war, sitting at the forefront of the systemic confrontation between communism and capitalism.

This twenty-fifth anniversary stamp of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) depicts the flags of its member countries, including the Mongolian People’s Republic (in 1962) and Cuba (in 1972). To strengthen the Eastern Bloc’s economic cooperation and power, socialist states created COMECON in 1949. Its aim was to achieve effective specialisation and division of labour, as well as the gradual alignment of the very different economic conditions of its member states. The founding countries included the Soviet Union, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary. The DDR joined in 1950.

DDR citizens lived in a country that kept peace and pursued peaceful policies. At the same time, they were citizens of a German state that waged war. … The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the longest peaceful period that Europe had ever experienced. Just a few months later, conflict returned to a continent that had been free of the torments of war since 1945. The border between the two German states was gone, but … the triumph of bourgeois democracy mostly just created new borders. Borders that did not previously exist between the Czechs and the Slovaks or between the peoples of the former Yugoslavia, not to mention the borders that today traverse the former Soviet Union. Many violent conflicts and tens of thousands of deaths resulted from these new boundaries. In 1990, the post-war period ended for the East Germans, and a new pre-war period began.
– Matthias Krauß, East German journalist, 2018

A Good Economy – but for Whom?

Economic success is generally measured by revenue and profit. Although these metrics were important for the DDR, they were not at the heart of its economic policy. The country’s production goal was to constantly improve the people’s living and working conditions, not to help the rich and private landowners increase their profits. The fact that the DDR cared about and spent billions on social issues such as housing, holiday leave, childcare, and healthcare is simply unfathomable in today’s neoliberal, profit-oriented paradigm. The economic history of the DDR shows us what it looks like when the needs of the people are given fiscal priority.

The Starting Point for the East German Economy after 1945

At the end of the war, more than a quarter of all homes in East German cities had been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable by allied airstrikes. The use of infrastructure, and thus the supply of raw materials and food, was dramatically limited by the destruction of roads, railways and bridges. In addition, huge assets were taken to West Germany as company owners and senior employees of the former Nazi state fled to the Western zones in order to escape punishment or expropriation.

In violation of the decisions of the Potsdam Conference, the Western occupation zones soon stopped reparations payments to the Soviet Union, which, as the country most damaged by the war, had to withdraw these resources from its own occupation zone. Two thousand and four hundred East German companies were dismantled, including almost the entire motor vehicle industry and more than half of the electrical and iron industries, as well as the heavy machinery and construction industries, and everything was relocated to the USSR. To supply the population in its own country, the Soviet Union also took goods that had been produced in the Soviet Occupation Zone that were supposed to provide for the people of DDR. All in all, seventy percent of pre-war industrial capacity was no longer available, which meant that living standards and productivity in the East were only nearly half of what they were in the West.

In the first eight years after the war, almost a third of all East German production was prevented from contributing to the country’s own economy as a result. Additionally, inequalities in industrial capacity that had been passed down from before the war only became greater with the division of Germany. Machine production for mining as well as steel foundries and mills were located in West Germany. In fact, the entire raw materials industry, including the coal and steel industry, was located there, leaving the Soviet Occupation Zone/DDR completely cut off from all of these resources. This situation put planners in the East German economy at a disadvantage, which they sought to compensate for by increasing productivity.

The peace-seeking youth of the world convened in the war-torn city of Berlin for the Third World Festival of Youth and Students in 1951. This photograph shows visitors gathering to attend the festivities at Alexanderplatz, a public plaza in the city centre that had been destroyed by the war. In 1979, almost thirty years later, the chairman of the World Peace Council, Romeh Chandra, bestowed the honorary title ‘City of Peace’ upon Berlin.

Without interruption, great efforts and many privations on the part of the population were necessary to build up the economy. The DDR rebuilt its own heavy industry from the ground up, and in record time. As a result, the production of daily necessities such as clothing and food items initially took a back seat. It was not until 1958 that the country could stop rationing its food supply; these were among the hardships caused by the war.

Little by little, West Germany cut off the intra-German trade that was so important for the DDR. Even when individual companies still managed to conduct business with the DDR, West German authorities levied a variety of sanctions against them, and loans were withdrawn or special taxes were charged. However, most disruption tactics focused on sabotaging contracted delivery quotas and interrupting deliveries. These measures threw sand in the gears of intra-German trade, destroying the DDR’s only possibility for obtaining raw materials and durable equipment that their partners in Eastern Europe could not produce because of their own economic hardship. Moreover, West German companies traditionally manufactured products that were custom tailored to the needs of East Germany; only these companies were able to produce to the same standard of goods and offer duty-free deliveries of goods from nearby. There was no duty to pay because West Germany did not recognise the DDR as a state and therefore not as a foreign country either. In this way, West Germany’s exclusive mandate policy functioned as a lever of economic extortion.

With only seventeen million inhabitants, the DDR was a small country that could only compete in science and technology by partnering with experts internationally. However, the Cold War and embargo policy prevented them from participating in specialised and cooperative projects around the world. This is precisely what happened when the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (CoCom), led by the United States starting in 1949, blocked the export of Western technology into the Eastern Bloc. This prevented the East from having a part in technological advances and from hiring international labour in the fields of science, research, and development. The DDR would require immense resources as well as both scientific and technological development in order to fill in the gaps that these embargo measures left in the country’s economy.

This image features the standardised system of electronic computers being developed and manufactured at the VEB Kombinat Robotron in Dresden. Changes in technology in the 1960s posed new challenges for the DDR’s economy. Head of state Walter Ulbricht consequently declared the mastery of the scientific-technical revolution as a fundamental task for the DDR. Six socialist states subsequently worked together in the research and production of powerful computing systems within the COMECON framework of the Unified System of Electronic Computers (also known as ES EVM). The West’s embargo policy forced the COMECON states to produce their own microelectronic base at incredibly high costs.

West Germany developed guidelines in the mid-1950s through the Hallstein Doctrine to economically isolate and further weaken the DDR. Every official recognition and establishment of diplomatic relations with the DDR was to be understood as an ‘unfriendly act’. Any state that questioned West Germany’s exclusive right to the sovereign representation of Germany was threatened with a variety of economic and political sanctions and the breaking of diplomatic ties. The Hallstein Doctrine became a huge impediment to trade: DDR passports were not recognised; diplomatic relations, embassies, and trade and payment agreements were forbidden; and a restrictive licensing policy was imposed.

West Germany’s unchecked access to raw materials and assets from the war, combined with its refusal to make reparations payments, gave the country a fundamentally different economic starting point after the war. This structural advantage could be seen through the West’s decisive industrial locations, considerably lower reparation payments, and unhindered access to raw materials. In addition, the United States pumped capital into the Federal Republic, providing for a quick resuscitation of the economy and better conditions for the West German people. This inequality also led many people to emigrate from the East to the West. Fifty percent of those who left were young and highly qualified. In the 1950s alone, a third of all academics left the DDR. This was an enormous loss, as their education had been financed by the state they were leaving and they were urgently needed to rebuild the country. With the construction of the Wall in 1961, the DDR leadership sealed off the route via West Berlin into West Germany and stopped further emigration.

The DDR’s Economic Achievements

In the 1950s, the large gaps in the production chain caused by the war and reparations continued to loom over the DDR’s economy. The economic isolation of the DDR led to pragmatic choices: if there was no iron coming from the West, then it had to be mined locally, no matter how poor the quality or how expensive it was to produce. If no coal or oil was available, then they used the only thing left: brown coal. Brown coal, or lignite, was the only raw fuel that was available in the East in significant quantities. Though using it was not environmentally friendly, there was no alternative due to external circumstances. The creation of the DDR’s own iron, steel, and machine industries as a basis for its industrial development was the main focus of development in the DDR’s early years. The first Five-Year Plan therefore envisaged doubling industrial production between 1951 and 1955.

The enormous factories that were built all over the republic as a result brought young people into previously sparsely settled regions. New villages and towns were built and became home to thousands of people. In forty years, the DDR fundamentally changed the face of the formerly underdeveloped agricultural region of East Germany. With the gradual stabilisation of the East German economy and the growth of production, the country was able to attract an ever-increasing volume of investment. In the years between 1950 and 1960 alone, this volume increased more than three-fold.

This photograph shows the arrival of workers from the city carrying a banner that reads ‘Colleagues from the Karl Liebknecht Berlin transformer factory are helping the first production cooperative with the harvest!’ The 1945/46, democratic land reform in the Soviet Occupation Zone secured food supplies in the dire post-war period while also fundamentally changing the system of land ownership in East Germany. Roughly 560,000 small farms emerged from the redistribution scheme, but they were often poorly equipped and supplied. Urban industrial and craft enterprises stepped in to help with the harvest in the emerging agricultural cooperatives.

The DDR also had the ambitious goal of overcoming the economic and social differences between the northern and southern regions and eradicating the inconsistencies between urban and rural industrialisation. The degree of industrialisation in the south was significantly higher than in the north. In order to reconcile the disparity between urban and rural areas, the DDR developed a new agricultural system, which was characterised by land reform and the collectivisation of the means of agricultural production. The country soon began to develop and expand its energy-producing regions in traditionally agricultural areas and built large-scale industrial plants which at the time were among the most modern in Europe. It also built new power plants, including the largest lignite refining plant in Europe in 1955.

Modern production centres increasingly changed the face of regions that previously had barely been able to feed their impoverished populations. On the Baltic coast, for example, the development of the maritime and port industries accelerated and the fishing and shipbuilding industries became the driving force in the region. Large fish processing plants and suppliers for ship construction and maintenance were set up while imported goods underwent industrial processing. As port facilities steadily grew, these advances boosted trade in the region and the northern regions were able to catch up with the rest of the country.

Even though the DDR started out with unfavourable conditions and many structural disadvantages, the country achieved an average economic growth of 4.5 percent in its forty years of existence. Despite this, it still generally lagged behind West Germany. Back then, as today, the failure of the planned economy was cited by the West as the reason for this shortcoming. This perpetuates the myth that there is no alternative to the market economy. The available figures, however, force us to question this narrative; at no point in the forty years of the DDR’s existence did economic growth stagnate or decline, despite uneven starting conditions.

The country also had a considerable capacity for research and development. For every 1,000 industrial workers, twenty-three were employed in these fields, putting the DDR on par with other Western industrialised countries. Although more funds were available for research in the West, DDR research still registered 12,000 patents in 1988 – the seventh largest amount worldwide. As a result, the DDR was able to increase its industrial production by a factor of 12.3 by 1989 and quintuple its gross domestic product to 207.9 billion euros in today’s terms, making it one of the fifteen leading industrialised countries in the world at the time.

Half of the DDR’s national income was generated by foreign trade. In 1988, the DDR exported and imported two-thirds of its goods to and from the socialist economic zone and to a total of over seventy states, with West Germany as its largest western trading partner. Such a high volume of exports was a sign of considerable integration into the world of international trade, making the DDR the sixteenth largest producer of exports globally and tenth largest in Europe. Through determined economic planning, it proved possible to keep imports and exports in balance throughout the forty years of the country’s existence.

The East German Mark (Mark der DDR) was a domestic currency that was not convertible in foreign trade or international travel. In order to get freely convertible currency, which the country urgently needed for purchases on the world markets, the DDR often sold its goods at excessively low prices below their actual value. This led to an arrangement in which West Germany would supply the DDR with large quantities of chemical and other raw materials (coal, coking coal, crude oil) and then buy refined products (motor gasoline, heating oil, plastics) cheaply. Incidentally, the environmental impact of these refining processes was absorbed by the DDR.

This DDR stamp from 1981 shows solidarity with the anti-imperialist liberation movements. Stamps in the DDR often featured motifs dedicated to revolutionary events, anti-fascism, and international solidarity. The West German postal service refused to deliver letters carrying certain stamps, such as those from the ‘Invincible Vietnam’ series. Conversely, the DDR postal service, as well as those of other socialist states, refused to forward mail carrying stamps with revanchist themes.

In order to improve the foreign exchange situation, numerous state-owned companies in the DDR were commissioned from the 1970s onward to manufacture products for Western companies under the Permitted Production scheme, in part by using raw materials supplied by the West. This allowed Western companies to profit from the low wages in the DDR, though it is futile to compare wages in the East and West without taking into account factors such as the ‘second pay check’ provided to DDR citizens in the form of subsidised prices for rent and basic foodstuffs as well as free social services.

The DDR used the money from its exported products to pay for both the import of crucial raw materials as well as for the construction of modern facilities needed to build up its economy. It constructed these facilities with the help of capitalist trading partners, though these foreign partners did not receive a financial share in the constructed facilities, as is customary with capital exports. This prevented foreign capital from gaining a foothold in the DDR.

The DDR’s Internationalism

Even as the DDR’s reputation as a reliable and fair economic partner grew worldwide, it was still denied international legal recognition outside of the socialist bloc countries up until the early 1970s. The DDR’s support for liberation movements against colonial powers – i.e. for national movements against post-colonial dependence and imperialistic intervention in former colonies – ensured growing sympathy in developing countries where the DDR made a name for itself as a champion in the fight against neo-colonialism and imperialism. Western foreign policy was comparatively anachronistic: colonies were held onto with an iron grip; apartheid regimes were maintained; the fascist remains of Salazar’s Portugal and Franco’s Spain were supported into the 1970s; there were constant attempts to install dictatorships and puppet regimes in former colonies and dependent territories; and constructs such as ‘South Vietnam’ were enforced through mass murder. Western States secured their temporary and bloody victories in ways that had very little to do with democracy, freedom, and human rights – even according to their own standards.

In contrast, the DDR supported a number of liberation movements. Among them were the Vietnamese People’s Army during the Vietnam War; the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) in Nicaragua; the Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO); the Zimbabwe African People’s Union; the African Independence Party of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC); and the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). While the West was slandering Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress (ANC) as terrorists and ‘racists’ and conducting business with the apartheid regime in South Africa – even providing arms shipments – the DDR supported the ANC, provided the freedom fighters with military training, printed their publications, and cared for its wounded. After black students in the township of Soweto launched an uprising against the apartheid regime on 16 June 1976, the DDR began to commemorate international Soweto Day as a sign of solidarity with South Africa and their struggle. In the former German colony of Namibia, the DDR supported the fight for independence and took in several hundred children so that they could grow up in safety and receive an education. When the DDR eventually dissolved, these young people were deported back to Namibia by unified Germany, leaving them to fend for themselves.

This image from 1972 shows cooperative farmers handing over a flag of solidarity to the ambassador of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. ‘Solidarity hastens victory’ was the motto under which the citizens of the DDR expressed their solidarity with the Vietnamese people and against the United States’ criminal war. Enthusiasm to donate for the cause of the Vietnamese was extraordinary: by 1975, more than 442 million East German Mark had been collected. The victory of the North Vietnamese troops on 1 May 1975 was celebrated in the streets of Berlin, singing ‘Everybody on the street, May is red, everybody on the street, Saigon is free’.

The DDR’s international positioning and commitment to solidarity was not just a matter of foreign policy or the work of civil society groups – it was a widespread mass phenomenon throughout society that was deeply embedded in everyday life. Friendship among nations was reflected in huge, artistically designed murals as well as in letters and stamps. Donations from citizens were collected centrally through the DDR’s Solidarity Committee, which received a total of 3.7 billion East German Marks between 1961 and 1989. Fundraising was organised primarily through the mass organisations, such as the Free German Trade Union Federation of the DDR, in which workers contributed through a variety of solidarity actions. Purchasing solidarity stamps and working above the target and donating the extra wages to the solidarity fund are two among many such examples.

The heroes of independence movements in the Global South were well-known to DDR citizens, even as the West continued to portray them as criminals and uneducated beggars who would have no future without the help and guidance of the West. The names and fates of people like Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Ahmed Sékou Touré, Julius Nyerere, Agostinho Neto, Samora Machel, and Nelson Mandela were known and celebrated in the DDR. Solidarity was even extended to those in the belly of the beast; when Angela Davis was tried as a terrorist in the United States, a DDR correspondent presented her with flowers for Women’s Day. In a much greater display of solidarity, students in the DDR led the One Million Roses for Angela Davis campaign, during which they delivered truckloads of cards with hand-painted roses to her in prison. The judge was impressed and every child in East Germany knew who Angela Davis was.

In 1973, the Free German Youth (FDJ), a member of the World Federation of Democratic Youth, hosted the Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students in Berlin. 25,600 guests from 140 countries met with eight million young DDR citizens to celebrate, discuss, and advocate for world peace and international cooperation. Among the guests was Black Power activist Angela Davis (here in the grandstand next to People’s Education Minister Margot Honecker and Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova).

Though their stories are not as well-known, there was nonetheless a huge number of DDR citizens – young people, students, scientists, and workers – who took part in solidarity projects all over the world. Between 1964 and 1988, sixty friendship brigades of the Free German Youth (the DDR youth mass organisation) were deployed to twenty-seven countries in order to share their knowledge, help with construction, and create training opportunities and conditions for economic self-sufficiency. A number of these projects still exist today, though some have taken on different names, such as the Carlos Marx Hospital in Managua (Nicaragua), the German-Vietnamese Friendship Hospital (Hanoi, Vietnam), and the Karl Marx Cement Factory (Cienfuegos, Cuba), to name but a few.

At the same time, many young people from all over the world came to the DDR to study. The first foreign students were eleven young Nigerians who had attended the World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin in 1951. When the British colonial government refused them re-entry to their home country, they were offered admission to the University of Leipzig. The preparatory class in which they were taught the German language developed into the Herder Institute, where foreign students took a one-year language course to prepare for their studies. More than 22,000 students from 134 countries graduated from the institute, which also sent lecturers to foreign universities.

The special attention given to African states and anti-colonial movements was reflected in the increasing number of students. Overall, more than 50,000 foreign students successfully completed their education at the universities and colleges of the DDR. The studies were financed by the DDR’s state budget. As a rule, there were no tuition fees, a large number of foreign students received scholarships, and accommodation was provided for them in student halls of residence. The DDR also welcomed children, such as those from Namibia who were brought to safety from the dangers of the war of independence. The School of Friendship (Schule der Freundschaft) was also planned in the late 1970s to provide schooling and vocational training in the DDR for 899 children and young people from Mozambique beginning in the 1980s.

In addition to the students, many unskilled workers – so called contract workers – came to the DDR from allied states seeking job training and work in production. The Agreement on Education and Employment for Foreign Workers brought workers primarily from Mozambique, Vietnam, and Angola as well as from Poland and Hungary. After the dissolution of the DDR, these contracts were terminated, which meant that most of these workers lost their residence permit and did not receive pending wages or compensation. Though West Germany had previously backed temporary work migration, at the end of the 1980s Western European headlines declared that ‘the boat was full’ as right-wing parties enjoyed increasing success and – once the DDR was absorbed – West Germany prepared to abolish the right to asylum.

Up until the very end, the DDR worked towards deepening its commitment to internationalism. The number of foreign contract workers grew from 24,000 in 1981 to 94,000 in 1989. In the same year, China indicated that it wanted to greatly increase its number of contract workers in the future. This would have been very opportune for the DDR, which – unlike in the West at that time – did not have a big enough labour force. China, along with the other socialist states, likewise stressed that it could only stand to benefit from a growing East German economy. This same year, all foreigners in the DDR received full municipal voting rights and began to nominate candidates themselves. This form of participation is denied to non-citizens in present-day Germany.

Yet another vivid example of international cooperation between socialist states was the relationship between the DDR and Vietnam. In order to guarantee the supply of coffee, whose rising world market prices strained the DDR’s limited foreign exchange reserves, the DDR invested heavily in coffee cultivation in Vietnam by supplying material, exchanging with experts, and developing technical and social structures, some of which still exist to this day. This cooperation created the foundation for Vietnam to be the second-largest coffee producer in the world today.

Unlike today’s trade relations between capitalist states, the DDR did not simply buy into a country; it cooperated with its trading partners. The maxim applied here was that the DDR did not set blanket guidelines; rather, it determined what cooperation with its partner countries would look like depending on their respective economic needs. This was an international economic system that aimed at cooperation and the promotion of sovereignty rather than competition and dependence.

This kind of solidarity work provided a stark contrast with the West’s development aid, through which richer nations leveraged their resources to maintain their position of power and enforce the sales of their own industries at the expense of the development of others. Since the West’s supposedly selfless acts are motivated by a hunger for profits rather than a commitment to solidarity, this alleged altruism tends to be imperialist in that it places conditions for aid under capitalist auspices, from which corporations stand to benefit. In contrast, the DDR, together with its socialist allies, acted as equals and as needed. In the countries where it provided aid, it supported the establishment of economic self-reliance by helping to build local industries and infrastructure according to the needs of the respective country, such as by training people.

After the freedom fighter and first prime minister of an independent Congo Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961, Leipzig’s Free German Youth division built a monument in his name in front of the Herder Institute, where foreign students were preparing for their studies. The street was renamed ‘Lumumba Street’ in a ceremony with Congolese students.

This attitude and these actions of the DDR received international political recognition. The first country outside the Eastern Bloc to give diplomatic recognition to the DDR was the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar (later Tanzania) in 1964. The DDR subsequently sent ships full of construction materials as well as engineers and construction workers to the republic. These workers set up two large, prefabricated housing districts on the archipelago of Zanzibar that to this day provide highly sought-after housing for around 20,000 people. This triggered a breakthrough in international recognition throughout the Global South. In 1969, Sudan, Iraq, and Egypt established diplomatic relations with the DDR, and in 1979, the Central African Republic, Somalia, Algeria, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and Guinea followed suit.

Under the pressure of this wave of recognition, West Germany’s new coalition government of Social Democrats and the Liberal Party abandoned the Hallstein Doctrine in 1969 and tolerated the legal recognition of the DDR. However, it still maintained to the bitter end that every DDR citizen was foremost a citizen of their country. Between 1972 and 1974, when Western states began initiating diplomatic relations with what it referred to as the ‘second German state’, the DDR had already achieved what it had been fighting for throughout the last twenty years: international recognition.

In June of 1973, both West Germany and the DDR were accepted into the United Nations, where the DDR consistently campaigned against nuclear weapons, advocated for international security and disarmament, and played a decisive role in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, among other initiatives.

The British protectorate of Zanzibar won its independence in 1963. The following year, the United Republic of Tanganyika and Zanzibar became the first state outside the Eastern Bloc to officially recognise the sovereignty of the DDR. Civil engineers and building materials were subsequently sent from the DDR to Stone Town, a neighbourhood in the capital Zanzibar, and two large apartment blocks were built. Although somewhat aged now, the apartments are still much sought after, and the area is referred to as ‘Berlin’.

‘Produce More, Distribute Fairly, Live Better!’

The DDR’s socialist plan was based on the Marxist view that a socially just society could only be created by using socialised means of production. Socialist ownership had three possible forms: public property owned by the whole society, cooperative joint ownership by worker collectives, and property owned by social organisations. The constitution stipulated that the operation of private business enterprises, which continued to exist to a lesser extent, must ‘satisfy social needs and serve to increase the welfare of the people’. Furthermore, ‘private business partnerships to establish economic power’ were not permitted. These constitutional principles were rigorously enforced and, by 1989, public ownership in industry and skilled trades had risen to 98 percent.

The People’s Property

1. 1.  The following resources are considered national public property of which private ownership is prohibited: mineral deposits, mines, power stations, dams, large bodies of water, natural resources found in continental shelves, industrial companies, banks, insurance institutions, state-owned goods, traffic routes, means of transport by rail, sea, and aviation, the post office, and telecommunication installations.
   2.  The socialist planned economy guarantees that public property is used with the aim of achieving the best results for society. The socialist planned economy and socialist commercial law serve this purpose. The use and management of national public property take place fundamentally through state-owned enterprises and state institutions. The state can transfer its use and management by contract to cooperative or social organisations and associations. Such transfers must serve the interests of the general public and increase social wealth.

– Article 12 of the 1968 Constitution of the German Democratic Republic

The DDR’s approach to economic management was also closely tied to the issue of ownership. In the socialist planned economy, economic and social processes were centrally governed by the state and the leading party. Businesses were given concrete scheduled tasks regarding the amount, structure, and distribution of their products and were also allocated the funds needed for investment, the labour force, and materials. National economic goals were mostly scheduled in prospective plans over a period of five years, and the necessary development of economic capacity was planned as well. In keeping with the principle of democratic centralism, the authorities’ economic plans were first given to the combine enterprises (Kombinate) and farms and then decisions were taken based on their feedback.

Kombinate

From the end of the 1960s, individual state-owned enterprises in industry as well as the construction and transport sectors were gradually merged into larger economic units called Kombinate, or ‘combines’. In 1989, around eighty percent of all employees worked in combines. In the combines – a sort of ‘socialist corporation’ – the production, sales, and distribution of a single industry, or even complementary branches of production in different industries, were brought together. The combines had institutes and capacities for research and development and cooperated with academies and universities. The aim of forming a combine was to create more favourable production structures, introduce new types of technological solutions, and improve centralised control. The enterprises belonging to a combine, like the combine as a whole, received their planning tasks from the State Planning Commission.

The planning authorities determined the prices of all goods and services so that uniform prices were set for all consumer goods throughout the DDR. Likewise, the training of skilled workers and university cadres was also centrally planned and carried out in accordance with economic requirements and designated deployment areas. The DDR was based on the principle that permanent full employment was both the best social policy and a human right. An indispensable part of socialist society in the DDR was therefore the right and duty to work, a value that was enshrined in the constitution: ‘Every citizen of the German Democratic Republic has the right to work. They have the right to a job and the right to choose it freely according to the needs of society and their personal qualifications’.

The declared objective, which was further specified in numerous legal provisions and economic policy concepts, was to organise work in such a way that everyone participated in the work according to their abilities and received their individual share of the national product according to their performance. This socialist performance principle ensured that individuals’ contributions to society determined the degree of social recognition they received for their work. In this way, the DDR saw itself as a meritocracy which applied the principle ‘from each according to their abilities, to each according to their contribution’ – an adaption of Karl Marx’ ‘from each according to ability; to each according to need’ first outlined in his 1874 Critique of the Gotha Programme. An important instrument of labour was the Socialist Competition, the first of which was launched in 1947 in a number of state-owned enterprises in the Soviet Occupation Zone under the slogan ‘Produce more, distribute fairly, live better!’. In it, members of a workers’ collective committed themselves to increasing productivity in order to fulfil the plan particularly quickly or above target.

This photograph shows members in a work brigade at the VEB Mikromat Dresden drafting a protest resolution to condemn the neo-Nazi attack on a Soviet soldier at the West Berlin Red Army Memorial in November 1970. ‘My workplace, a battle station for peace’ was a slogan in the DDR’s factories. The concept of work as securing not only individual livelihood, but also the well-being of the community and even the existence of the workers’ and farmers’ state was central to the socialist work ethic and lifestyle. So too was the notion that the individual can only fully develop in a community together with others, and that work constituted the nucleus in this development of personality. As such, joint cultural activities and political discussions in the work collectives became part of everyday life.

The rights and duties of working people – such as joint decision making in businesses, involvement in shaping working conditions, and respect for the dignity of the working class – were laid down in a Labour Code, likely the only one of its kind in the world.

Collective company agreements were signed annually between management and labour collectives, which served both to meet the specifications of the plan and to improve the working and living conditions of the workers. Ninety-eight percent of workers were members of the Free German Trade Union Federation. Concrete arrangements were agreed upon between the company trade union leadership and company management in order to ensure the health and social welfare of workers; to shape working conditions; to develop intellectual, cultural, and sporting activities; to promote training; and to continue education. Particular attention was also paid to shaping working conditions; developing intellectual, cultural, and sporting activities; promoting training; and continuing education, particularly for women. After discussing the plans at company union meetings, they were implemented and then reviewed at general meetings twice a year by the union’s accountability team and company management. These collective company agreements guaranteed that workers were involved in the management and planning of the company.

Citizens of the DDR lived with a high level of social security. Everyone was guaranteed a source of work and a place to live. The state provided billions of marks in subsidies for rent and basic foodstuffs, while low rents and stable prices for consumer goods, electricity, water, and transit ensured a comfortable daily life. In the beginning of the 1970s, a housing construction programme was launched in a major effort to solve the social problem of insufficient housing. While up till then the maxim had been ‘To each an apartment’, the goal now became ‘To each their own apartment’. However, the focus on building complex new housing units, as well as the creation of social infrastructure with schools, kindergartens, sports facilities, polyclinics, stores, restaurants, and cinemas, minimised the capacities for the necessary renovation of old inner-city neighbourhoods. Even so, over a million homes were rebuilt and two million new homes were constructed. In the DDR’s final twenty years, half of its citizens were able to relocate to a new home.

Education and healthcare were free, and a wide range of educational, cultural, and leisure activities were accessible to everyone. The DDR also led the world in terms of women in the workforce: in 1989, ninety-two percent of all women were employed and almost fifty percent of all university students were women. It was possible for working mothers to have a career and a family through special socio-political measures such as the maternity year, household day (a paid holiday for tending to housekeeping chores), special study programmes for women, state assistance for new mothers, comprehensive childcare, and education services for children. The DDR was also a child-friendly state. Kindergarten, day-care centres, school meals, summer camps, and sports activities were affordable for everyone or provided free of charge.

This image shows an inner-city development from the 1960s in the centre of Berlin. The right to housing was enshrined in the constitution of the DDR. In 1973, a comprehensive housing construction program became the centrepiece of a series of social policy measures. New housing estates were built in almost every city and included social infrastructure such as schools, kindergartens, sports facilities, polyclinics, stores, restaurants, and cinemas. Housing remained affordable, with rents frozen at the 1936 level. The average DDR household spent about 5 percent of its income on housing.

These social benefits took up a large part of the country’s economic, labour, and investment capacity, but this also meant that society was no longer divided according to how much property one owned and the gap between rich and poor was minimised. The DDR was an equal society, a community based on solidarity. In the words of the East German writer Daniela Dahn, it was a society in which ‘togetherness mattered more than possessions’. There was no neighbourhood for the rich. Instead, everyone existed on the same playing field. There were no elite schools, just free education for everyone and support for gifted children. There was a rich cultural life accessible to everyone. Nobody was left behind. Homelessness and unemployment were virtually non-existent. It is precisely these aspects of socialism in the DDR that will be further examined in subsequent issues in this series, Studies on the DDR.

Socialist Ideals, Sobering Conditions, Open Questions

‘The worst socialism is better than the best capitalism’, wrote Peter Hacks, a poet who migrated from West Germany to the DDR. ‘Socialism, that society that was toppled because it was virtuous (a fault on the world market). That society whose economy respects values other than the accumulation of capital: the rights of its citizens to life, happiness, and health; art and science; utility and the reduction of waste.’ For when socialism is involved, it is not economic growth, but ‘the growth of its people that is the actual goal of the economy’.

Contradictions in the Practice of a Planned Economy

‘If you want to set up a new and better social system, you should learn this lesson: It only works if the majority of the people benefit from it. We learned that good working and social conditions are quickly taken for granted. People succumb to the seduction of ownership and consumption if they think that another system can offer them something better. … The DDR’s social system had as its declared goal the ever-growing material and cultural satisfaction of its people. This goal was supposed to be achieved through sharply rising productivity. If it could have surpassed capitalism in production, then socialism would have been the victor. … The people were encouraged to accomplish this task in the 90s. But it was an unrealistic and misguided goal. Unrealistic because a leading capitalist country that exploits people and nature, such as West Germany, cannot be surpassed in productivity and efficiency. Misguided because, in a socialist society, mass consumption should not be life’s main purpose. This insight eluded socialist leadership in Europe, and therefore they could not impart it to their people. The people recognised that this was a false promise and were no longer willing to tolerate the illusion. They wanted to be taken seriously and took to the streets under the slogan “We are the people”’.

– Klaus Blessing, economist and department head of mechanical engineering and metallurgy in the central committee of the SED

The unlimited world of the goods of the West and its pop culture produced ever new needs, especially among the youth of the DDR, which were considered ‘unsocialist’ because of their association with capitalism. Economic plans could not keep pace with the aspirations of many citizens for Western consumption levels, which led to frustrations. These were intensified when, starting in 1974, DDR citizens who had convertible currency – for example, as gifts from relatives in West Germany or even through income from their own international activities – were able to buy Western imported goods in special stores called Intershops. On the part of the political leadership, the expectation that social policy achievements of the state would directly increase the working people’s willingness to perform, and thus increase labour productivity, was not borne out. Expenditure on subsidies ate away at economic output without stimulating production to the same extent while competition with its Western neighbours repeatedly prompted the DDR to take social measures which it could not afford.

‘Competition between social systems was no longer about life goals – it became about consumption standards. But if the battle with a world of superior cultural offerings was to be won at all – and one can ask whether this was ever really possible – then at least it would not have been based on their own consumer goods production, but on an alternative value system that focuses on the development of humankind as a whole and its culture’.

        – Hans Heinz Holz, Marxist philosopher

With the aim of giving more daily visibility to the connection between individuals’ work performance and their respective economic and social standing, a process of economic modernisation began in the 1960s. A new economic system of management and planning was designed, which, through profits and bonuses, made companies more performance-oriented and at the same time more responsible. This concept, however, did not find resonance in any of the DDR’s fellow socialist countries. There was still a lack of coordination in scientific and technological development among the COMECON members.

The principle of ‘unity between economic and social policy’ formulated in the beginning of the 1970s took for granted that enough would be produced and that it would be produced efficiently. However, worsening foreign economic circumstances strained the national economy, particularly in regards to rising energy costs. Between 1970 and 1990, the price of oil rose thirteen-fold and the cost of mining brown coal doubled.

The energy industry was at the centre of economic planning in the 1950s. The Gaskombinat Schwarze Pumpe (Black Pump Gas Combine), pictured here in 1974, became the largest lignite refining plant in the world. A new town, Hoyerswerda, was built for the 16,000 employees of the Kombinat. Lignite was practically the only domestic natural resource in East Germany and its extraction freed the DDR from dependency on Western imports. It remained the country’s most important energy source until 1990.

Despite this, the government stuck to its promises to provide social benefits and did not question the exceptionally high subsidies it paid for consumer prices and rents. The result was that urgently needed modernisations never happened, such as in the raw material and chemical industries. A national economic and social policy for the benefit of the population can only exist if there is a high proportion of socially owned property. In the DDR, this proportion was so high that it hindered initiatives in skilled trades, small businesses, and retail trades. One of the problems with the economy was that plans and balance sheets were always tight and often exaggerated, leaving very little margin of error for unexpected developments.

DDR citizens looked at the ‘rich’ West and began to compare it to their own standards of living. But many were loath to evaluate the purchasing power of their money according to the cost of the goods needed for daily life. In the DDR, a 5,000-Mark price tag on a new colour TV may have been a source of frustration, but the fact that two kg of bread cost only one Mark was taken for granted. Basic foodstuffs and goods for daily use were subsidised, while the prices for non-essential products were intended to cover costs and generate a profit. This connection was not obvious to large sectors of the DDR’s population. Furthermore, there was no official exchange rate between the East German Mark and the West German Mark. The DDR Mark was an exclusively domestic currency, but a comparison of relative prices of the same everyday goods in the East and West concluded that the purchasing power of the Mark in the DDR in 1990 was actually eight percent higher than the purchasing power of the Deutsche Mark (DM) in West Germany.

The Economic Pillage of the DDR

The first socialist German state was exposed to prejudice and attempts at delegitimisation both during and after its existence. Today, Germany’s politics of remembrance paint a picture of a ‘totalitarian dictatorship’ with its ‘feeble economy’. The country’s remarkable economic performance and social indicators are denied and the widespread narrative of the takeover of a bankrupt state persists.

However, the DDR was not as ‘run-down’ as is claimed. There were some old and inefficient factories, but there were also highly productive ones. Half of all industrial equipment was less than ten years old and more than a quarter was not even five years old – remarkable figures when compared with those of other countries. There were many modern enterprises with machinery that had been partly imported from the West and partly produced by the DDR’s mechanical engineering industry or by special combine enterprises. These enterprises could have remained in operation, but when the DDR dissolved, the Trust Agency, which was put in charge of the DDR’s economy, rapidly privatised the DDR’s enterprises and eliminated East German competitors.

In order to counter the persistent myth that the DDR was bankrupt, it is worth looking at debts in West and East Germany: In 1989, the DDR’s debts to non-socialist states amounted to some twenty billion DM. After German unification, so-called ‘old debts’, which consisted of housing construction loans and internal state budget debts, were included in the calculations of the DDR’s domestic debt. This brought the DDR’s total domestic debt to eighty-six billion DM. Furthermore, in the DDR’s planned economy, companies had to pay their revenues to the state. The state transferred investment funds from these revenues back to the agricultural and industrial enterprises. These transfers, as independent economic units, were internal accounting procedures which were not booked as ‘debts’ in the overall system; they balanced each other out and therefore should not be counted as part of the debt balance. Other socialist states owed the DDR nine billion DM. In summary, the total domestic debt can therefore be estimated at around seventy-seven billion DM.

The Trust Agency

The Trust Agency was founded in 1990 during the unification process to privatise the DDR’s state-owned enterprises according to the principles of the market economy and to liquidate those that were ‘not competitive’. It took over 8,500 companies with 45,000 locations that employed some four million people and privatised 6,500 companies, selling them far below their value – often for the symbolic price of a single West German DM. Around eighty percent of these companies were sold to West Germans, fifteen percent to foreign investors and five percent to East Germans. Two thirds of all jobs in East Germany were lost, even though West German buyers were subsidised by the state. Violations of the conditions of the liquidation process – such as job retention – went unpunished and many of the labour rights that the West German trade unions fought for were abolished in that process. This was an approach that still, to this day, leaves eastern Germany economically weaker than the West and causes persistent social inequality. As a result, there are now only 850,000 industrial jobs in the territory of the former DDR, four to five times fewer than there were in the DDR. In the agricultural sector, the land taken over by the Trust Agency gained the attention of speculative buyers around the world and local farmers were unable to afford the rising land prices. Agricultural companies from West Germany and other EU countries now own this land.

In 1990, the West German Trust Agency appraised the economic value of the DDR at around 600 billion DM. However, this calculation does not include public property such as water and power plants, mineral deposits, or land, all of which account for a substantial amount of fixed assets. In addition, the Trust Agency took over almost 4 million hectares of forest and agricultural land, which was appraised at 440 billion DM, as well as extensive residential property, wealth belonging to political parties, and mass organisations and other assets. An additional 240 billion DM of state administrative and financial assets can be added on top of the DDR’s total assets in the form of buildings, plots of land, and foreign assets, the latter being worth one billion DM. Putting together all these figures, some of which are only estimates, it is clear that the East held assets with a total material value of some 1.4 trillion DM. That was the true economic value of the DDR.

Selling off the economy unleashed a wave of destruction on the country’s industrial sector that had not been seen since the Second World War. This led to a tremendous increase in wealth for West German corporations and formerly expropriated landowners. Unemployment and structural discrimination caused almost four million (mostly young) people to leave East Germany. The birth rate fell drastically and the dismantling of the economy and of society in general left previously prosperous regions in ruins. Schools, offices, cultural institutions, and public utilities were closed down in villages throughout East Germany. The infrastructure deteriorated. West German politicians had promised ‘flourishing landscapes’, but what grew instead were deindustrialised regions and poverty.

Many citizens soon became disillusioned. Quite a few of them had taken to the streets in 1989 for a ‘better socialism’ with demands for more democracy and the self-confident slogan ‘we are the people.’ The idea that some of the social securities of socialist society could be carried over into capitalist Germany proved to be an illusion, of course; instead, they soon found themselves economically cut off and often in precarious living conditions. Their life achievements were discredited and rendered invisible.

This growing dissatisfaction was exploited by right-wing circles in the old Federal Republic. Right-wing structures had always existed there, often fought only half-heartedly. The ‘vision’ of a re-emerging Greater Germany based on right-wing ideas now found its advocates in much broader circles of society in the course of German unification, while the media and politics put all their efforts into continuously discrediting left-wing ideas after the alleged failure of the socialist project.

The wealth looted from the East also paved the way for Germany to become the hegemonic power of a Europe that to this day continues to treat workers from Eastern Europe like second-class citizens, systematically put Africa at an economic disadvantage, and literally drown people at its external borders. It is important to fight against this imperialism but also to recognise where it comes from and what alternatives might be possible. The history of economic development in the DDR, for example, shows what is possible under socialism – even under adverse conditions.

The economic efficiency of the DDR and its achievements in the field of social policy briefly described here will be elaborated on in future studies with concrete examples of what policy and daily life looked like. These historical achievements can inspire new ideas on how to create a just world as we address today’s pressing challenges. In this way, experiences from the DDR can be put to practical use from their historical context in order to better face the irreconcilable contradiction of living a dignified life in a capitalist society.

Bibliography

Badstübner, Evemarie (ed.). Befremdlich anders – Leben in der DDR [Strangely different – Life in the GDR]. Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2000.

Blessing, Klaus. Die sozialistische Zukunft. Kein Ende der Geschichte! Eine Streitschrift [The Socialist Future. No End of History! A polemic]. Berlin: Edition Berolina, 2014.

Bollinger, Stefan and Reiner Zilkenat  (eds.). Zweimal Deutschland. Soziale Politik in zwei deutschen Staaten – Herausforderungen, Gemeinsamkeiten, getrennte Wege [Twice Germany. Social Policy in Two German States – Challenges, Commonalities, Separate Paths]. Neuruppin: edition bodoni, 2020.

Bollinger, Stefan and Fritz Vilmar (eds.). Die DDR war anders. Eine kritische Würdigung ihrer sozialkulturellen Einrichtungen [The GDR was different. A critical Appraisal of its socio-cultural Institutions]. Berlin: edition ost, 2002.

Brecht, Bertolt. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe [Large annotated Berlin and Frankfurt edition]. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993.

Communist Party of Germany. ‘Aufruf des Zentralkomitees der Kommunistischen Partei an das deutsche Volk zum Aufbau eines antifaschistisch-demokratischen Deutschlands‘ [Appeal of the Central Committee of the Communist Party to the German People for the Construction of an Anti-Fascist Democratic Germany]. 11 June 1945.
https://www.1000dokumente.de/index.html?c=dokument_de&dokument=0009_ant&object=facsimile&l=de

Dahn, Daniela. ‘Zerschlagene Hoffnungen – die Ostdeutschen in der falschen Gesellschaft‘ [‘Shattered Hopes – East Germans in the Wrong Society‘]. Neuruppin: edition bodoni, 2020, p. 313-328.

De La Motte, Bruni and John Green. Stasi State or Socialist Paradise? The German Democratic Republic and What Became of it. London: Artery Publications, 2015.

Gesetz der Arbeit zur Förderung und Pflege der Arbeitskräfte, zur Steigerung der Arbeitsproduktivität und zur weiteren Verbesserung der materiellen und kulturellen Lage der Arbeiter und Angestellten. [Law of Labour for the Promotion and Care of the Labour Force, for the Increase of Labour Productivity and for the Further Improvement of the Material and Cultural Situation of Workers and Employees]. 19 April 1950.
http://www.verfassungen.de/ddr/gesetzderarbeit50.htm

Ghodsee, Kristen R. Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence. New York City: Bold Type Books, 2018.

Hacks, Peter. Marxistische Hinsichten. Politische Schriften 1955-2003 [In Marxist terms. Political Writings 1955-2003], edited by Heinz Hamm. Berlin: Eulenspiegel Verlag, 2018.

Krauß, Matthias. Die große Freiheit ist es nicht geworden. Was sich für die Ostdeutschen seit der Wende verschlechtert hat [It has not become the great freedom. What has worsened for East Germans since Reunification]. Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2019.

Kunze, Thomas and Thomas Vogel (eds.). Ostalgie International – Erinnerungen an die DDR von Nicaragua bis Vietnam [Ostalgia International: Memories of the GDR from Nicaragua to Vietnam]. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2010.

‘Report on the Tripartite Conference of Berlin’. Library of Congress. 2 August 1945.
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/us-treaties/bevans/m-ust000003-1224.pdf

Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro (ed.). „Unsere Opfer zählen nicht“ – Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg [‘Our Victims Don’t Count’: The Third World in World War II], edited by Recherche International e.V. Berlin: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2012.

Wenzel, Siegfried. Was war die DDR wert? Und wo ist dieser Wert geblieben? Versuch einer Abschlussbilanz [What was the GDR worth? And where has this value remained? An attempt at a final balance sheet]. Berlin: Das Neue Berlin, 2000.

Unentdecktes Land e.V. (ed.). Unentdecktes Land – Die Ausstellung. Katalog [Undiscovered Country: The Exhibition. Catalogue]. Berlin: self-published, 2019.

Image Credits 

P. 1: Wikimedia Commons / Gerhard Voigt

P. 8: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R77793 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 9: Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 10: Democratic German Report, Vol. XI, No. 2, January 19th, 1962

P. 12: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, B 145 Bild-F003014-0002 / Brodde / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 14: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte, EB-Nr. H 1997/12/0124 / Boehner Werbung Dresden

P. 16: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S88796 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 17: Wikimedia Commons / Joachim Rieß

P. 19: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-11500-1944 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 21: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-R0117-0004 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 23: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-15844-0008 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 25: Wikimedia Commons / Lehmann

P. 27: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-L0726-0031 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 28: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-M0804-0717 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 31: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-81057-0001 / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 32: Sigrun Lingel, 2012

P. 35: Wikimedia Commons / Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J1109-0032-001 / Häßler, Ulrich / CC-BY-SA 3.0

P. 37: Illustrierte Geschichte der DDR, Berlin 1984 / Günter Schmerbach

P. 40: Wikimedia Commons / Deutsche Fotothek / CC-BY-SA 3.0