We are documenting here the speech that Egon Krenz, General Secretary of the SED and Chairman of the State Council of the GDR in the autumn of 1989, gave last Saturday at the event “75 Years of the GDR. What Remains?” organized by the Junge Welt in the Berlin Babylon cinema. (jW)
Dear attendees,
My greetings go to all friends, all comrades, all sympathizers who have come to commemorate the founding of the German Democratic Republic. It was the Buchenwald oath: never again war, never again fascism, that was the foundation on which the GDR was founded on October 7, 1949.
I greet the representatives of all age groups, especially those who—like me—experienced the GDR from the beginning to the end, you who gave so much of your vitality—in the belief that by strengthening the GDR you would serve the good in Germany. There are quite a few who, despite attempts to delegitimize them, profess their support for the GDR, so that the head of the so-called “SED State” research group, which is not particularly friendly towards us, has to admit that to this day it has not been possible to “get the GDR out of people’s hearts.” Older people would always say that the GDR was “our home.”
I send my warmest greetings to you, the younger generations who, despite slander and numerous historical falsifications that can also be found in school books, are interested in the German workers’ and farmers’ state and its politics. In this society you will come across many untruths about our state, which no longer exists. But I can assure you: We, who were there with our hearts, wanted to change the world and create a better Germany. So that no mother would ever again cry for her son. Unfortunately, for many reasons, including our own, we have not yet succeeded. Much remains unfinished business.
And yet I think: We were like pioneers, we planted the seeds. We will certainly not live to see the harvest. But I hope that you and your peers, your children and grandchildren will not forget that for 40 years there was an anti-fascist state in East Germany that had learned the lessons of two world wars and was a real alternative to capitalism and war.
Therefore, my request: preserve what is left of the GDR’s legacy. It is not wealth that is kept in secret accounts. It is social values such as respect, empathy and fairness that support and hold together a just society, a society in which man cannot be another man’s wolf. Do it better than we could. But: when you talk about our weaknesses, please also remember Brecht’s poem “To those born later“:
But you, when the time comes,
That man is a helper to man
Remember our
With forbearance.
Sharp contrasts
Dear attendees,
There are many reasons to like the GDR. And also some to sharply criticize its shortcomings. But above all, the word peace stands. The GDR never waged war. It was the German state of peace. In this context, I would like to recall the state telegram from Moscow to President Wilhelm Pieck and Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl on the founding of the GDR. I quote it because it succinctly expresses the historical mission of the GDR:
“The formation of the German Democratic Peace-Loving Republic is a turning point in the history of Europe.” And further: “There is no doubt that the existence of a peace-loving democratic Germany alongside the existence of the peace-loving Soviet Union excludes the possibility of new wars in Europe.” How true, how clear, how timely!
As long as the Soviet Union, to which we owe the liberation of Germany from fascism more than any other, and the GDR at its side, there was peace in Europe. What a contrast! The USSR had barely been destroyed when, on March 24, 1999, NATO bombed sovereign Yugoslavia, which had been occupied by the fascist German Wehrmacht just over half a century earlier, without a UN mandate and with West German participation. The “Green” Federal Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer had no shame in concealing this attack, which was in violation of international law, on the grounds that a second “Auschwitz” was to be prevented. To this day, the life lie of an allegedly “humanitarian foreign policy” is used by his also “Green” successor to justify arms deliveries to Ukraine on an unprecedented scale, instead of pushing for negotiations with Russia.
How hypocritical and one-sided the policies of the current federal government are was also recently shown in the UN General Assembly, which passed a resolution with a large majority of 120 states to improve the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and called for an immediate ceasefire, while the Federal Republic was one of the 45 states that abstained.
When it came to “war and peace,” there was never neutrality in the GDR. War propaganda and racial hatred, including Russophobia, were forbidden in the GDR. Our state doctrine was: “Never again must war start from German soil.” True to the GDR anthem, the second verse of which said: “Let the light of peace shine so that no mother will ever again weep for her son.” It would have been simply unthinkable in the GDR to call on the population to become “war-ready.” In our country, especially in the training of young people, education for peace was a priority.
These were not just confessions or empty words, as we proved in the autumn of 1989 when the GDR guaranteed that events would be non-violent. The call to the armed forces of the USSR to “stay in the barracks” did not come from Gorbachev, but was a sovereign decision of the GDR, which the history falsifiers dispute. However, we had no idea at the time that the German government would then bring its relationship with Russia to its lowest point since the end of the Second World War and retrospectively declare the victor of 1945 to be today’s loser.
Trust destroyed
I am convinced that many East Germans had thoughts like this before they cast their votes in the state elections. Their vote does not mean, as some commentators believe, that East Germany has now become “brown”. Rather, it is a signal to all established parties: finally listen to us! We do not want any new arms deliveries to Ukraine and Israel. We do not need any new missiles! We want peace! This is the only way to seriously undermine the AfD’s position, which it has been so eagerly drawing on for some time.
Within a historically short period of time, West German governments destroyed the trust that had been built up between Germans and the peoples of the Soviet Union in the Soviet occupation zone and later in the GDR. Now West German politicians and the media are stirring up hatred of the Russians, the last time I experienced it as an eight-year-old in the final phase of the Second World War. The old enemy image—the “Russians” are to blame for everything—and the myth of dangerous Russia are resurrected. People are being made afraid, as if its troops were already close to the Oder.
Every reasonably educated German knows that Germany fought against Russia and the Soviet Union in two world wars, but that Germany has never been invaded by Russia. The Russians and the Red Army have only come to Germany twice in recent history, once against Napoleon and once against Hitler. How that ended is well known.
I am certain that if the Federal Republic’s Foreign Minister had said in the 1980s, as the current Foreign Minister has done, that we are waging “war against Russia” and want to “ruin Russia,” he would have been fired on the spot by a Chancellor like Helmut Schmidt. Willy Brandt, Herbert Wehner, Helmut Schmidt, Egon Bahr and others are rightly praised for their policy of détente. But that is only half the truth. These personalities did not create détente on their own. They needed partners, and that included the Soviet Union and the GDR. Without the GDR’s peaceful foreign policy, Willy Brandt and others would not have been able to pursue a policy of détente. We agreed with them that it was better to negotiate with one another a hundred times than to shoot at one another once, as Erich Honecker has repeatedly stated.
When I met Mikhail Gorbachev in the early 1990s to inform him that the West German judiciary had initiated over 100,000 political investigations against GDR citizens, he told me about a conversation he had had with Chancellor Kohl. He had told him, “Mikhail Sergeyevich, we met a foreign people over there in the East. They are completely different from us.”
That was and is the worldview of the old West German political elites and their heirs, who to this day do not allow a historically correct view of the GDR. For them, their capitalism is the only salvation—the norm—and the best thing they can imagine. The fact that there were people in the East who found it better to live without capitalism, for whom elbowing was not the dominant factor when it came to human relationships, but who lived a social coexistence every day—that absolutely did not and does not enter the heads of the GDR haters who dominate the mainstream in politics and the media.
Living Memory
At the end of the GDR there were around 16 million inhabitants. We have since become fewer. This means that today there are up to many millions of individual views on the GDR. However, the sovereignty of interpretation based on personal experience should be left exclusively to these citizens themselves and not to a media “reappraisal industry” or even to Pastor Gauck, who equates twelve years of Nazi barbarism with 45 post-war years in East Germany or the GDR.
If it were up to these people, the GDR would remain in people’s memories as just “a bunch of millions of oppressed creatures”, locked behind a wall with a “dilapidated economy”, surrounded by “stuff and mustiness and the state security”. No. The GDR was not like that!
As long as those in power do not understand the roots of East Germans, that many of the former GDR citizens are simply not prepared to have their lives explained to them from the West and to accept that they were on the wrong side of history, as long as their biographies are dragged through the mud, the established parties and their ideologists will not be able to understand the voting behavior of many East Germans.
The legacy
Despite everything, the GDR proved in the center of Europe that life without capitalists was possible even in highly industrialized Germany. The building blocks of our policy included concepts such as land reform, through which hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced persons were given land and thus a basis for survival. The legacy of the GDR includes the expropriation of Nazi and war criminals and the conversion of their means of production into public property, which was often sold off by the Treuhand after the “turnaround” “for a song.”
What we also leave behind are generations of new teachers, who at first sometimes still spelled “Blume” with an “h”, and the new lawyers, who often came from so-called “simple backgrounds”; generations of women who were able to live and work with equal rights and who did not have to ask their husbands whether they could pursue a career or open a bank account. I am reminded of many academics whose careers were only made possible by breaking down class and educational privileges and who were often able to complete worker and farmer faculties without a high school diploma.
What we are also leaving behind are thousands of homes, including the proven fact that housing and land are not there to line the pockets of speculators, and that having a “roof over one’s head” is not a blessing but a human right.
However, we did not leave behind some of the things that many people complain about today: The GDR had no unemployed people; even the less hardworking were helped to obtain a vocational qualification. Young people met in youth clubs—less often at gas stations or train stations.
We have not left any billionaires to posterity, but neither have we left any beggars or drug addicts. And finally: perhaps neo-Nazis existed in hiding. But they only raised their Reich war flags after they had received them from the West and the new state power looked on as if powerless and granted them the “freedoms” that had been denied them until then.
The GDR collapsed in the battle of systems. Our dream of developing socialism was also shattered by our own weaknesses: inadequate information policy, lack of use of constitutionally guaranteed democratic rights, gaps in services and bureaucracy, and often narrow-mindedness. Reality became increasingly distant from the ideals, something that large parts of the population were no longer willing to accept in 1989/90.
In hindsight, we know that since the GDR failed as a social corrective, social coldness has increased. The already existing gap between rich and poor is getting bigger and bigger, and the gap is now downright obscene. Clientele parties are embezzling the coffers of the common good. But resistance is growing. Social interest from almost all spectrums of society is forcing the bourgeois parties to discuss the most extreme excesses. If only they were conducted as energetically as is the method of devaluing GDR biographies, including the blanket hunt against former employees of the GDR’s security organs, which are used to let off steam from their own problem kitchen! The GDR is not suitable as the Cinderella of German history.
What the GDR was, why it was founded, what historical achievements it had, what position it occupied internationally, how both German states were always on the brink of a possible nuclear war in a cold civil war, what the reasons were for the defeat of the GDR and what will remain of it—these are fundamental questions of German post-war history, indeed of European and world history—and much, much more than a “footnote in history” and also much more than the “green arrow”.
Judging objectively
You could accuse me of idealizing the GDR. That may be true. But in reality I am simply pleading for something that should be taken for granted, namely that scientists, politicians and media professionals, most of whom were socialized in the Federal Republic, should finally make an effort to form an objective and historically fair judgment about the GDR.
We are still alive—the contemporary witnesses. And when we are no longer here, our experiences will still remain in the memories of our children born in the GDR. And there were plenty of them, because the GDR was also a child-friendly country. But I cannot and will not give up the belief that this world of war and exploitation will not remain as it is now and that “the sun will shine more beautifully than ever over Germany,” as the GDR anthem says.