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Alexander Muschik


The GDR’s approach towards Judaism 1985-1990 - a public diplomacy campaign to prevent the decline of the East German state[1]



Introduction

The founding of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) on 23 May 1949 and of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on 7 October of the same year sparked immediate competition between the two states. The Federal Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, reacted to the founding of the GDR with a statement of principle in the Bundestag: the GDR had no claim to autonomy and the West German government considered itself to be the sole representative of all Germans until such time as the country re-established its unity.[2] The Western powers refused to recognize the GDR and supported West German claims of being the sole representative of all Germans; the GDR was diplomatically recognized only by the Soviet Union and its allies.[3] In attempting to destabilize the leadership of the East German Socialist Unity party (SED), this Western non-recognition policy made it necessary for the East German communists to legitimize their rule. Even after most Western states had recognized the GDR at the beginning of the 1970s, the longevity of the East German state was still in danger, as the West German government continued to demand the unification of the German people and because, in contrast to other communist countries, the SED was unable to build its legitimacy on nationalist sentiments.

Hence, the SED stylized and cultivated anti-fascism as the founding myth of the GDR, which declared the East German state as the morally superior and therefore more legitimate Germany.[4] According to Marxist-Leninist ideology, not the ‘people’ but rather solely the representatives of finance capitalism had been responsible for fascism and war. The SED argued that by breaking with capitalism and establishing a socialist society, it had eradicated the roots of fascism once and for all. The SED thus asserted that the GDR’s Western counterpart was a fascist state, and the undeniable fact that many formerly high-ranking National Socialist Party members again occupied high positions in West German society helped to spread East German propaganda.[5] Nevertheless, the persecution of the Jews – at least in the first decades of the GDR – was never part of the communist memorial culture. The terms ‘Holocaust’ and ‘Shoah’ hardly existed in the official vocabulary of the East German state because they suggested the unique character of this historical phenomenon. This did not fit the communists' interpretation of history, which put the focus primarily on the heroism of communist opponents of Nazism. Hence, East German historiography did not consider the German Jews and their persecution themselves worthy of study, and East German school books did not – at least until the 1980s - specifically cite the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis.[6] Until the 1980s, serious preoccupation with the National Socialist crimes against the Jews was only evident in the GDR within the fields of literature and art. Several prominent films from the DEFA (Deutsche Film AG) also dealt with the persecution and the genocide of the Jews and presented astonishingly differentiated views of the Holocaust.[7] 

The German-Israeli political scientist Dan Diner has pointed out that it was actually ‘more through antifascism than through socialism that the GDR attempted to legitimize itself’ as an independent state.[8] Indeed, the anti-fascist founding myth served more than just domestic purposes. As I have shown in my PhD thesis on the triangular relations between neutral Sweden and the two German states from 1949 to 1972, the East German image campaign was addressed first and foremost towards foreign countries in order to convince them of the necessity of the GDR’s existence, which was called into question not only by the lack of political recognition in the West, but also by the absence of approval within its own population. This made it existentially necessary for the SED to gain international acceptance.[9] Therefore, East Berlin continually spent copious amounts of money on its image campaign abroad: magazines reporting on the achievements of the GDR were translated and distributed all over the world, East German sportsmen demonstrated the superiority of the socialist society internationally, cultural institutes in numerous capitals informed foreign states about GDR-culture and the East German ‘Liga der Völkerfreundschaft’ (League for the Friendship of the People) organized ‘GDR-weeks’ around the globe in order to present the GDR as an anti-fascist, peace-loving and modern state.[10]  This strategy was part of a policy which today is often called ‘public diplomacy’. Public diplomacy is defined as ‘a government’s attempt to bring about understanding for its nation’s ideas and ideals, its institutions and culture, as well as its national goals and current policies.’[11]  In the following analysis, I will demonstrate how the SED instrumentalized ‘anti-fascism’ and ‘Judaism’ for its international public diplomacy campaign. I shall focus on the period from the mid-1980s until the end of the GDR in 1990. I have studied the documents in the former SED’s party archives in Berlin and publications on this subject, both of which have received scholarly attention since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening of the East German archives.[12] 


Jewish life in the Soviet Occupation Zone/GDR after 1945

The most important Jewish institutions and places in Berlin - the former Jewish quarter around the partially destroyed main synagogue on Oranienburger Straße and the Friedhof Weißensee, Europe’s largest Jewish cemetery - were situated in the Soviet zone of Berlin. Thus, most of the Jews who returned from exile or who had survived the concentration camps settled in the eastern part of Berlin. Among them were many Jewish-German communists who wished to assist in the creation of a socialist German society. Many of the Jewish returnees were quite prominent in political and cultural affairs, such as Albert Norden and Hermann Axen (who became members of the Politburo), Alexander Abusch (Minister of Culture in 1961), Klaus Gysi (Minister of Culture from 1966 to 1973), the writers Stephan Hermlin, Lea Grundig, Stefan Heym, Anna Seghers, Arnold Zweig and the philosopher Ernst Bloch.[13] Their re-assimilation was facilitated by the fact that the first years after the war were dominated by the SED’s goodwill towards the Jewish victims of National Socialism. But this period did not last long, and even the fact that most of the Jewish returnees were communists could not protect them from renewed exclusion in the period of forced Stalinization from 1949 to 1953. The reason for this anti-Semitic wave, which touched all East European countries during this period, was Stalin’s changing attitude towards Israel. In spite of his resentment of Jewish intellectuals – resulting from internal party battles with his Jewish antagonist, Leo Trotsky – the Soviet dictator had supported the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, which he considered a point of support for the Soviet Union in the Middle East. As the Cold War began, Stalin quickly distanced himself from the Jewish state in favour of the Arab world. From that time on, the Soviet Union’s so-called ‘anti-Zionism’, meaning its negative attitude towards Israel (considered an ally of the imperialistic Western powers), and its solidarity with the oppressed Palestinians was essential to the foreign policy of the Soviet Union and its allies until the 1980s.[14] 

This also had consequences for domestic policy. In order to ‘uncover’ the ‘Zionist agents’ of the ‘World Jewry’, Moscow initiated several party purges in Eastern European countries. The victims, such as Czechoslovakian General Secretary Rudolf Slansky, were accused of ‘bourgeois cosmopolitanism’, liberalism or espionage. Of course, such purges affected the policies of the GDR, which adopted Soviet ‘anti-Zionism’ and used it in conjunction with the restitution issue in propaganda and foreign policy. The Israeli government had started early on to claim restitutions from the GDR for the crimes of the Nazis. But the SED was not willing to recognize global German responsibility for the Holocaust. East German politicians who were aware of the special nature of the genocide against the Jews, and therefore felt it a moral obligation of the German people to grant restitutions to Jewish victims, were suppressed on the grounds that they ‘claimed compensation for Jewish property with the sole aim of paving the way for the penetration of U.S. finance capital into Germany’.[15] This was the case with the former SED Politburo member Paul Merker, who was forced out of the SED – the party did not see any need to pay compensation to the Jews, as according to the official party line, the GDR was an anti-fascist state in which the roots of fascism had been permanently eradicated.[16] This interpretation of history was also meant to exonerate East German citizens of guilt or complicity in the crimes of the Nazis and, in this way, connect them with the ‘Workers' and Farmers' State’. At the same time, however, it prevented East Germans from coming to terms with their Nazi past, as for the SED, Nazism was a problem which only concerned West German society.[17]

The result of this wave of anti-Semitism was that many of the East German Jews, religious or secular, were temporarily neutralized or expelled from their positions in the SED. Therefore, many of them left the GDR and emigrated to West Germany or other Western countries. The SED’s repressive policy towards Jews first changed after Stalin’s death in 1953: the persecutions ended and most of the Jewish former party members were reinstated. At the same time, the SED started to realize the significance of Jewish life for the anti-fascist image of the GDR. From that time on, the emaciated Jewish communities received financial help from the state in order to maintain their synagogues, cemeteries, parish rooms and nursing homes.[18] 

The East German historian Mario Keßler estimates that the SED’s policy towards the Jews after the period of repression in 1953 resulted in relatively far-reaching tolerance. According to him, the SED clearly distinguished between ‘anti-Semitism’, which was officially outlawed, and ‘anti-Zionism’, a negative attitude towards Israel.[19]  The fact that Keßler spoke – at least in the period after 1953 - of a policy of tolerance towards the Jews, was strongly criticized.[20]  The West German Jewish historian Michael Wolffsohn, for example, tried - based likewise on an immense amount of archival material - to unmask the ‘antifascist legend’ and to discredit the motives of the communist German state.[21] Actually, the positions of Keßler and Wolffsohn do not differ all that greatly from one another because even Keßler clearly acknowledges that the East German Jews and the topic of anti-Semitism had been exploited and instrumentalized for purposes of the SED’s domestic and foreign policies.[22]  This happened, for example, when the agents of the Stasi, the East German secret service, carried out anti-Semitic actions in the Federal Republic at the beginning of the 1960s in order to show the world that Nazism in West Germany had not yet been conquered.[23] 

Jewish citizens were also regularly instrumentalized, having to publicly praise the GDR and demonize the Federal Republic as a fascist state. For example, according to a decision of the Politburo from April 1961, the SED wanted the leader of the Jewish Community in East Berlin to write to the American President John F. Kennedy in order to draw his attention to the anti-Semitism still existing in the Federal Republic. Internationally known East German Jewish writer Arnold Zweig was asked to publicly express his assessment of the fascist character of the West German state.[24]  This was part of the intensified public diplomacy of the SED during the second Berlin crisis from 1959 to 1961. The objective was to legitimize and justify the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 by claiming anti-fascist motives and to undermine the Western policy of the isolation of the East German state.[25] 

 In addition, the loyalty of many Jewish citizens to the GDR was also exploited to support the SED’s policy of rejecting Israel, for example during the Six Day War in June 1967, when the leading GDR journal ‘Neues Deutschland’ published a particularly aggressive declaration against Israel, signed by ‘Jewish citizens of the GDR.’[26] 

The GDR showed members of the Jewish population its gratitude for their loyalty and the international publicity they attracted to the East German ‘Workers' and Farmers' State’, allowing them to, at least after 1953, live safe and relatively privileged lives. Recognized as ‘Victims of Fascism’, they received numerous privileges, such as higher pensions or help in finding convenient housing. Their communities also received financial help. Nevertheless, their numbers dropped dramatically from about 1600 registered Jews in the mid-50s to only about 400 at the end of the 1980s.[27] 


GDR’s approach towards Judaism beginning in the mid-1980s

After a period of consolidation as a consequence of the country’s international recognition in 1972/73, the GDR suffered a profound crisis in the 1980s, economically as well as politically. The state was almost bankrupt, cities were in ruins and the East German standard of living fell even further below the Federal Republic’s. The people’s discontent surrounding the SED’s autocratic rule was growing, and thousands of East Germans demanded exit visas in order to leave the country. In addition, the SED was confronted with the reform policy of neighbouring Poland and with Michael Gorbachew’s Glasnost and Perestroika, which were refused for fear of endangering the stability of the East German state. Faced with the withdrawal of political support from Moscow, which until then had been a reliable guarantor of the preservation of the East German state, the SED had to find new allies to prevent the decline of the GDR. Moreover, the SED tried to compensate for domestic problems with foreign policy successes. In the course of the 1980s, state and party leader Erich Honecker was received in the capitals of numerous Western states, for example in Tokyo in 1981, Helsinki in 1984, Rome and Athens in 1985, Stockholm in 1986, Bonn, Brussels and The Hague in 1987 and Paris and Madrid in 1988.[28]  In order to complete his tour of the most important Western capitals, however, one invitation was still missing – that of the White House. For this reason, one of the main objectives of the SED’s foreign policy in the second half of the 1980s remained the realisation of an official visit to Washington, which would have been the climax of Honecker’s political career and the culmination of his efforts to gain acceptance for the East German state.[29]

Against the background of its worsening economic and financial situation, the SED also hoped that the American government would grant the GDR most-favoured-nation status, which would provide the GDR with trade benefits and make East German imports to the United States much cheaper. Since the exchange of ambassadors between Washington and East Berlin in 1974, the SED had not succeeded in significantly improving relations with the United States, primarily due to the SED’s refusal to pay reparations to Israel and to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.[30] The documents found in the archives of the former GDR prove that the GDR’s approach towards the Jews and Israel in the mid-80s was primarily motivated by political and economical factors.[31]  Stemming from the anti-Semitic idea Jews were ruling the world, the SED politicians thought that the American Jewry could help improve their contact with the White House.[32]  As early as 1984, the Jewish SED member Irene Runge pointed out - after having visited the United States – that ‘the influence of the American Jewish lobby should be used in order to promote GDR’s interests towards Washington’, and made concrete suggestions for ‘good-will-acts’ towards the international Jewry, for example the reconstruction of Berlin’s former main synagogue on Oranienburger Straße, which could then be propagated in the American press.[33] 

The problem, however, was that by the middle of the 1980s, very few Jews were left in the GDR, as the ‘Office for Church Issues’ (Staatssekretariat für Kirchenfragen) noticed: Communities in the GDR consisted of only 400 Jewish members who were mostly elderly and who were no longer able to ‘maintain and to cultivate their Jewish traditions and to fulfil their specific contribution to the culture, history and development of our country’. This was considered problematic not only due to the growing interest in East German Jewish life, which was especially prominent in Western countries, but also in light of the anti-fascist image of the GDR, which was at risk of being damaged. Therefore, according to the functionaries in the ‘Office for Church Issues’, it was now even more important to support the Jewish communities than in the past. They proposed to use the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the destruction of German synagogues, the so-called ‘Reichskristallnacht’ (Night of the Broken Glass) on 9 November 1988 as an opportunity to inform the Western world about Jewish life in the GDR and to demonstrate the state’s anti-fascist character. Many preparations were necessary and concrete propositions were made for this purpose:[34] 

* The East German state-owned travel agency should, together with the ‘Office for Church Issues’ and the Jewish community of Berlin [East], prepare tourist excursions to sights and commemorative monuments in Berlin showing Jewish life in the past and present.
* A guide to Jewish sites in Berlin [East] should be edited for distribution in the embassies and for foreign tourists at the border.
* An international press conference should be arranged in the spring of 1987 in the international press centre in Berlin [East] where, among others, the president of the Jewish communities of the GDR, Siegmund Rotstein, should participate.
* Commemorative plaques should be hung in honour of Jewish victims and resistance fighters against fascism and in remembrance of the history of the Jews in Berlin [East].
* The ‘Neue Synagoge’ should be reconstructed; the beginning of the reconstruction should be celebrated in the context of Berlin’s 750th anniversary.
* In order to support and cultivate Jewish life and to inform foreign countries about Jewish life in the GDR, the cultural and scholarly institution ‘Centrum Judaicum’ should be established within the ‘Neue Synagoge’.
* Jewish communities of the GDR should appoint a main professional secretary residing in Berlin [East] to manage the growing tasks of the Jewish communities.
* The offer from the USA to send a rabbi to Berlin [East] should be accepted to revitalize Jewish life in the GDR.
* The Jewish nursing home in Berlin [East] should be renovated, and financial support for Jewish cemeteries and museums in the GDR should be intensified.

These propositions, which the ‘Office for Church Issues’ developed in cooperation with the foreign ministry, were realized in the following years. In September 1987, the Jewish Community in East Berlin appointed its first rabbi in more than twenty years. After only eight months, however, Rabbi Isaac Neuman, an American citizen, left the GDR, claiming that disagreements between him and the Jewish community had made his position untenable. This was a setback for the SED, which had hoped to use him to establish contacts with the American Jewry. Hence, the SED worked to strengthen its contacts in the World Jewish Congress (WJC) in the following months.[35]

In May 1988, the high-ranking, Jewish-born SED politician Hermann Axen, responsible for international affairs in the Politburo, accepted the invitation of the Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, which had been instructed by the State Department to invite him. The American government did not want to officially receive Axen for fear of enhancing the GDR’s international prestige. Axen had clear political instructions: he was to negotiate with the Jewish Claims Conference and convince certain American politicians, such as Trade Minister William Verity and Foreign Minister George Schultz, to grant the GDR most-favoured-nation status. As the SED knew that this goal was unreachable as long as the GDR was unwilling to pay reparations to the Jewish Claims Conference, Axen proposed a ‘package deal’. Pointing out the economic difficulties of the GDR, he explained that the GDR wished to demonstrate solidarity with the Jewish victims of the Holocaust by granting them ‘financial assistance’ (he avoided using the word ‘reparations’), but that this money first had to be earned by expanding trade with the United States. According to Axen, it was therefore necessary for the GDR to obtain most-favoured-nation status. Although the GDR was not willing to reverse its earlier refusal to pay reparations and only intended to grant humanitarian aid on a limited scale, American politicians initially did not seem averse to Axen’s propositions and even the American Jewry supported the GDR to some extent.[36]

Edgar Bronfman, the President of the World Jewish Congress, among others, was invited to East Berlin by Erich Honecker on 16 October 1988. Honecker awarded Bronfman with the ‘Stern der Völkerfreundschaft in Gold’ (the Friendship Star of the People in Gold), the highest decoration awarded by the GDR.[37]  For his part, Bronfman showed the GDR his gratitude by supporting the SED’s image campaign directed towards the Jews and openly advocated the building of ‘bridges (...) between the GDR and the people and government of the Israeli state.’[38]  On 31 October 1988, he publicly stated that he was ‘deeply impressed’ by the new Germany, and in an interview with the American magazine Newsweek on 31 October 1988, he said that ‘from a Jewish point of view there is no reason for the United States to deny the GDR the most-favoured-nation status’ and that ‘he could see nothing that might preclude a visit by Honecker to the United States.’[39]  The motives behind the World Jewish Congress’ support of the GDR are not quite clear.[40]  Bronfman certainly felt flattered after having been received in the GDR like a statesman, but he also had private economic interests. During his visits he discussed possible future business relations between the GDR and his whiskey company Seagram with the East German Minister for Foreign Trade.[41] 

Two weeks later, the 50th anniversary of the so-called ‘Reichskristallnacht’ was celebrated over the course of three days with numerous commemorative events (8 November through 10 November 1988). In the presence of several Jewish guests from the United States and Israel, the GDR had organized commemorative speeches, exhibitions, concerts and theatre performances all over the country.[42]  The ‘Centrum Judaicum’ was founded on 10 November in order to create a centre for the preservation of Jewish culture and history in East Germany. The same day, the cornerstone for the reconstruction of Berlin’s former main synagogue, the future seat of the ‘Centrum Judaicum’, was laid by Erich Honecker. According to Angelika Timm, an East German historian who served as a Hebrew-German interpreter during meetings between GDR and Israeli representatives, the SED had, first and foremost, political and economic intentions. Moreover, the commemoration ceremonies were also ‘a definite turning point in the ambivalent process of rapprochement between East Germany and Israel’, as, for the first time, representatives of Israel were officially invited to the GDR, including the director of the Holocaust Memorial and Research Institute of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and Yosef Burg, former Israeli Minister of the Interior and Religious Affairs.[43] 

After the commemorations, the SED expected a breakthrough in its negotiations with the Jewish Claims Conference on the ‘package deal’. But East German plans to gain most-favoured-nation status in exchange for its readiness to pay 100 million US dollars failed in the wake of public protests among American Jews and especially Jews in Israel, where many considered a ‘charity gift’ to be an unacceptable trade for helping to ‘rehabilitate the GDR’.[44]  The SED therefore became especially interested in improving the image of the GDR in Israel. At the beginning of 1989, the East German State Secretary for Religious Affairs, Kurt Löffler, visited Israel accompanied by two officials from the Foreign Ministry. Their official task was to strengthen and solidify contact with the World Jewish Congress, Yad Vashem and other cultural and scientific institutions in Israel as well as to promote the positive image of the GDR ‘as an anti-fascist German state who honours the Jewish victims of the Holocaust’.[45]  The East German diplomats were invited by World Jewish Congress President Edgar Bronfman, who had arranged for unofficial meetings between the East Germans and a member of the Israeli government (the Minister of Religious Affairs) and a high representative of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The Israelis made clear that ‘Israel would not be ready to establish diplomatic relations with the East German state until the latter recognized its historical responsibility regarding the Nazi crimes against the Jews and stopped its cooperation with hostile Arab regimes and Palestinian terror organisations.’ But it wasn’t only the Israelis who set preconditions for their readiness for diplomatic recognition. According to a resolution of the SED Politburo from February 1989, ‘the GDR should take steps toward establishing diplomatic relations depending on Israel’s position regarding a solution of the Middle East conflict.’[46] 

Political developments in the GDR during the summer and autumn of 1989, when thousands of East German citizens fled to the West via Hungary and Czechoslovakia, led SED politicians to fundamentally change their foreign policy towards Israel. At the end of 1989, the GDR hoped to establish diplomatic relations with Israel without any preconditions.[47] But the Israelis remained distant towards the East German approach. Actually, it was easier for the SED, relying on the Jewish fear of a united Germany, to mobilize Israeli-Jewish support against the movement for German reunification, which East and West Germans alike had increasingly demanded following the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. That same month, Jewish communities in the GDR published a declaration in which they expressed their support for the preservation of the two German states: even Jewish organisations and communities in the United States and Great Britain expressed their resistance to German unification.[48]  Edgar Bronfman, the President of the World Jewish Congress, also remained true to the GDR: three weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he sent Maram Stern, who in 1987 was appointed the designee of the World Jewish Congress for contacts with the GDR, to East Berlin.[49]  During his conversation with East German Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer on 30 November 1989, Stern asserted that ‘the question of (German) unification was not on the agenda. The WJC would do everything in its power to prevent it. The lessons of history still applied. Although it was difficult to take such a position in public, President Bronfman would exert his influence in this direction in the U.S. and elsewhere.’ Moreover, Stern emphasized his conviction that ‘despite pronouncements to the contrary, the State Department did not take a favourable view towards reunification.’[50]  He recommended that the GDR attempt to make contact with West German Christian Democratic politician Lothar Späth, who was ‘less committed to reunification than Chancellor Kohl’, adding that the ‘WJC will do everything possible to strengthen the GDR politically and economically’ because ‘the WJC is and will remain’ a friend of the East German state.[51] 

It seemed that the SED hoped to slow or even prevent German reunification with the help of the World Jewish Congress.[52]  For this reason, Foreign Minister Oskar Fischer consequently gave Stern ‘full powers to communicate his good intentions to the Israeli side.’[53]  By the end of January 1990, initial talks between representatives of the GDR and Israel had been held in Copenhagen. The East German diplomat Rainer Neumann confirmed that the GDR ‘was prepared to admit responsibility of East Germans for Nazi crimes committed against Jews (...). Unfortunately, the economic situation of the GDR’, according to Neumann, ‘precluded the payment of reparations and compensation; only humanitarian gestures were conceivable.’[54]  The Israeli diplomat Michael Shilo explained the preconditions that had to be met before Israel would establish official relations with the GDR. East Berlin would have to recognize that the East Germans were also responsible for the Holocaust and Shilo awaited ‘concrete measures to demonstrate the GDR’s readiness to take responsibility for the past, including publications, educational measures, cessation of military support to the PLO, and serious talks on the reparations and compensation issue.’[55] 

The new East German government led by Hans Modrow, who had transformed the former state party SED into the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) in December 1989, reacted immediately with a letter addressed to Edgar Bronfman and Jitzhak Schamir, the Israeli Minister President. In this letter, Modrow officially acknowledged co-responsibility for the crimes of Nazism; concerning the question of reparations, however, he repeated the old East German position that the GDR had already fulfilled all of its duties outlined by the Potsdam Treaty. Nevertheless, he recognized the GDR’s moral duty towards Jewish survivors and confirmed that the GDR was ready to show solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust.[56]  In order to underline its sincerity, the Modrow government granted a payment of 100,000 German marks to the Israeli aid organisation Amchra, which helps Holocaust survivors, in February 1990.[57]  For the Israeli side, however, this symbolic gesture was not at all sufficient. They argued that the Federal Republic had paid two thirds of the reparations and that the GDR should pay the rest.[58]  In spite of this setback, the PDS did not stop trying to mobilize the international Jewry against German reunification. In as late as February and March of 1990, Gregor Gysi, the new leader of the PDS, who was himself of Jewish descent, appealed to the World Jewish Congress for financial investments to uphold the independence of the GDR, as ‘Jews in particular should have an interest in preserving the two German states.’[59] 

In the meantime, Israel’s Foreign Minister had visited the West German capital and was told ‘that the West German government did not support the establishment of relations between the GDR and Israel and that unification of the two Germanys was expected very soon.’[60]  Indeed, the decline of the East German state could no longer be stopped. On 18 March 1990, the first free elections in the GDR were held. The winner was chancellor Kohl’s conservative party, the ‘CDU’, and Lothar de Maizière became the GDR’s last Prime Minister. On 12 April 1990, the East German Volkskammer, elected freely for the first time, asked ‘the Israeli people to forgive us for the hypocrisy and hostility in the official GDR policy towards the Israeli state, [and] to forgive us for the persecution and degradation Jewish citizens were exposed to in our country, even after 1945’.[61]  In order to demonstrate the sincerity of its wish for reconciliation with the Jews, the last GDR government decided in July 1990 to allow the immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union fleeing the increasing anti-Semitism found there.[62]  Three months later, on 3 October 1990, the two German states were unified.


Conclusion

The anti-fascist founding myth and the GDR’s specific policies towards Jews should be viewed against the background of the rivalry between the two German states: while the Federal government in Bonn claimed to be the sole representative of the German people, the SED claimed that the GDR was morally superior and therefore the more legitimate state. In view of the fact that many Nazis had reoccupied high positions in West German society after the war, the GDR propagated its anti-fascist image with some success. Even numerous Western leftists long believed that the East German ‘Workers' and Farmers' State’ was the better Germany. This is also why the East German Jews were ready to place their Jewishness in the service of the state to testify to its anti-fascist character.

After the reunification, a discussion arose between East and West German Jews about their roles in their respective societies, strongly resembling the general debate after 1990. While both West German Jews and non-Jews accused their compatriots in the former GDR of having served the communist system, the East Germans tried to justify and explain themselves. The West German Jewish historian Michael Wolffsohn, for example, blamed the East German Jews for their far reaching collaboration with the SED and their strong loyalty towards the GDR. In his monograph ‘Die Deutschlandakte’, written in a quite emotional way, he emphasizes the fact that the GDR exploited the Jews for its own political purposes. He also addresses the Jewish communists who served the East German state. According to him, the SED’s anti-fascism, as well as its approach towards Judaism in the 1980s, was outright hypocritical, as it had not been instigated by a feeling of moral obligation towards the Jews but rather for other reasons.[63]

The long-standing president of the Jewish community in East Berlin, Peter Kirchner, embittered by the ‘rather autocratic and gruff way’ that small East German Jewish communities were joined to the ‘Central Council of Jews’ in (West) Germany,[64]  rejected Wolffsohn’s assertion as a ‘disparaging simplification’[65]   and defended the former East German state and the party leader’s commitment towards Jewish communities.[66] The East German historian Annette Leo also accused Wolffsohn of polemics and simplifications. Leo, who descended from a secularized Jewish family in the GDR, tried to explain the East German Jews’ attachment to their state. She pointed out the difficulties faced by those Jewish communists who had survived the concentration camps or returned from their exile countries in order to build a new society. Internalising the East German anti-fascism without sufficiently calling it into question, they were convinced they were serving the better German state.[67]

For the younger East German generations who had not lived through the war, however, the narrative concerning the anti-fascist past of their political leaders no longer sufficed to legitimize their rule in the 1980s. The people of Leipzig, East Berlin and elsewhere in the GDR who had demonstrated for welfare, liberty and political participation had no confidence in the old SED politicians and their capacity to resolve the country’s problems. On 9 November 1989, exactly one year after the commemorative ceremonies of the 50th anniversary of ‘Reichskristallnacht’, held in order to enhance the anti-fascist image of the GDR and to stabilize the SED’s rule, the Berlin Wall fell.

After Germany’s reunification in 1990, the reconstruction of the Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße was one of the few GDR projects that was continued in reunified Germany. On 8 May 1995, the date celebrating the end of the Second World War, the ‘Centrum Judaicum’ was inaugurated in the reconstructed synagogue by German President Roman Herzog. Three years before, the federal government had decided to extend the already generous entry allowances for Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union enacted by the late GDR government. This introduced a renaissance of the German Jewry. Since then, their numbers have quadrupled, and there are now more than 120,000 registered members. New synagogues have also been built and Jewish communities, schools, cultural associations etc., have been founded throughout the country.[68] Increasing and revitalising Jewish life in Germany was considered by the federal government to be important in order to emphasize the country’s democratic and pluralistic character and to push aside fears of a nationalist and xenophobic unified Germany which many Europeans shared at the beginning of the 1990s.


Abstract

In 2009, Germany celebrated two great commemorative events: The 60th anniversary of the Federal Republic (West Germany) and the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which led to the end of German division and of the Cold War. Against the background of these events, this article analyses how the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) tried to prevent the decline of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) through an extensive image campaign, which was supposed to improve the country’s anti-fascist image and which included a far-reaching approach towards Judaism in the 1980s. The SED attempted – albeit without success – to mobilize Jewish and American support in order to stabilize its own rule and to extend the longevity of the GDR.



[1] This article is based on a lecture given at the conference ‘Recasting the peaceful revolution of ‘89’, held in Stockholm, 22-24 October 2009.
[2] Statement by Chancellor Konrad Adenauer in the Bundestag, 21 Oct 1949, in: Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik, vol. II: 2, 1949 (Munich, 1996), p. 214.
[3] William Glenn Gray, Germany’s Cold War. The global campaign to isolate East-Germany 1949-1969 (Chapel Hill, 2003).
[4] Herfried Münkler, ’Antifaschismus als Gründungsmythos der DDR. Abgrenzungsinstrument nach Westen und Herrschaftsmittel nach innen’, in Manfred Agethen et al. (eds), Der missbrauchte Antifaschismus. DDR-Staatsdoktrin und Lebenslüge der deutschen Linken (Freiburg, 2002), pp. 79-99.
[5] Jutta Illichmann, Die DDR und die Juden. Die deutschlandpolitische Instrumentalisierung von Juden und Judentum durch Partei- und Staatsführung der SBZ/DDR von 1945 bis 1990
(Frankfurt/Main, 1997), pp. 134-183, 320.
[6] Thomas Fox, Stated Memory. East Germany and the Holocaust (Rochester, 1999), pp. 14, 21.
[7] Paul O´Doherty, The portrayal of Jews in GDR Prose Fiction (Amsterdam, 1997); Fox, Stated Memory, pp. 97-144.
[8] Fox, Stated Memory, p. 37.
[9] Alexander Muschik, Die beiden deutschen Staaten und das neutrale Schweden. Eine Dreiecksbeziehung im Schatten der offenen Deutschlandfrage 1949-1972 (Münster, 2005).
[10] Nils Abraham has exemplarily analysed GDR’s public diplomacy towards Sweden from 1972 until its end in 1990: Abraham, Die politische Auslandsarbeit der DDR in Schweden. Zur public diplomacy der DDR gegenüber Schweden nach der diplomatischen Anerkennung 1972-1989 (Münster, 2007).
[11] Hans Tuch, Communicating with the world. U.S. Public Diplomacy overseas (New York, 1990), p. 3.
[12] See Peter Maser’s research survey: Maser, ‘Juden in der DDR’ in Rainer Eppelmann et al. (eds), Bilanz und Perspektiven der DDR-Forschung (Paderborn, 2003), pp. 217-225.
[13] Karin Hartewig, Zurückgekehrt. Die Geschichte der jüdischen Kommunisten in der DDR (Köln, 2000).
[14] Angelika Timm, ’Ein ambivalentes Verhältnis. Juden in der DDR und der Staat Israel’, in Moshe Zimmermann (ed), Zwischen Politik und Kultur - Juden in der DDR (Göttingen, 2002), pp. 22-23.
[15] Angelika Timm, ‘The Burdened Relationship between the GDR and the State of Israel’, Israel Studies 2, 1 (1997), p. 22-49, here p. 29.
[16] Jeffrey Herf, ’Antisemitismus in der SED. Geheime Dokumente zum Fall Paul Merker aus SED- und MfS-Archiven’, Vierteljahrszeitschrift für Zeitgeschichte, 42 (1994), pp. 635-667.
[17] Jeffrey Herf, Devided Memory. The Nazi past in the two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 162-200.
[18] Timm, ambivalentes Verhältnis, p. 28.
[19] Mario Kessler, Die SED und die Juden – Zwischen Repression und Toleranz. Politische Entwicklungen bis 1967 (Berlin, 1995), pp. 150-151.
[20] Lothar Mertens, Davidstern unter Hammer und Zirkel. Die jüdischen Gemeinden in der SBZ/DDR und ihre Behandlung durch Partei und Staat 1949-1990 (Hildesheim, 1997), p. 13.
[21] Michael Wolffsohn, Die Deutschlandakte. Juden und Deutsche in Ost und West. Tatsachen und Legenden (Munich, 1995), p. 388.
[22] Kessler, Die SED und die Juden, pp. 150-151.
[23] Lothar Mertens, ’Antisemitismus vom MfS. Dokumente aus der Gauck-Behörde’, Tribüne 33, 132 (1994), pp. 42-45. Illichmann (Die DDR und die Juden, pp. 143-148) has pointed out that it has still not been irrefutably proven that the Stasi really was responsible for painting swastikas on West German synagogues and other anti-Semitic activities in the Federal Republic, as Michael Wolffsohn claims (Wolffsohn, Deutschlandakte, pp. 17-30).
[24] Wolffsohn, Deutschlandakte, pp. 17-30, 40-46.
[25] Muschik, Die beiden deutschen Staaten, pp. 134-148.
[26] Timm, ’ambivalentes Verhältnis’, pp. 28-29.
[27] IIlichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, p. 228.
[28] Hermann Weber, Geschichte der DDR (Munich, 2000), pp. 333-356
[29] Wolffsohn, The World Jewish Congress and the end of the German Democratic Republic, edited by German Historical Institute, Occasional Paper no. 3 (Washington, D. C., 1991), p. 12.
[30] Christian Ostermann, ’Die USA und die DDR (1949-1989)’ in Ulrich Pfeil (ed.), Die DDR und der Westen. Transnationale Beziehungen 1949-1989 (Berlin, 2001), pp. 165-183, 177.
[31] See, for example, Illichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, pp. 319-334; Wolffsohn, Deutschlandakte, pp. 323-326; Mertens, Davidstern, pp. 383-384.
[32] Illichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, p. 260.
[33] Ibid. p. 288.
[34] Federal Archives Berlin (Bundesarchiv-SAPMO), DY/30/9051: ‚Information zu Problemen der jüdischen Gemeinden in der DDR (Büro Werner Jakowinsky), 21 Sept 1986.’
[35] Illichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, pp. 237-238.
[36] Ibid. 289-294.
[37] Wolffsohn, World Jewish Congress, p. 13.
[38] Quoted in Timm, ‘Burdened Relationship’, p. 38.
[39] Quoted in Wolffsohn, World Jewish Congress, p. 18.
[40] IIlichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, p. 295.
[41] Wolffsohn, World Jewish Congress, p. 19.
[42] Harald Schmid, Antisemitismus und Judenverfolgung. Die ‚Reichskristallnacht’ als politischer Gedenktag in der DDR (Göttingen, 2004), pp. 18-19; Illichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, pp. 260-273.
[43] Timm, ‘Burdened Relationship’, p. 39.
[44] Ibid.
[45] IIIichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, p. 303.
[46]Timm, ’Burdened Relationship’, p. 39; Illichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, p. 305.
[47] Stefan Meining, Kommunistische Judenpolitik. Die DDR, die Juden und Israel (Münster, 2002), pp. 503-514.
[48] Mertens, Davidstern, pp. 152-154.
[49] Wolffsohn, World Jewish Congress, p. 12.
[50] Quoted in Wolffsohn, World Jewish Congress, p. 16.
[51] Ibid. pp. 14, 16, 19.
[52] Ibid. p. 23.
[53] Ibid. p. 21.
[54] Quoted in Timm, ‘Burdened Relationship’, p. 42.
[55] Ibid.
[56] Illichmann, Die DDR und die Juden, p. 307.
[57] Ibid. pp. 308-309.
[58] Ibid. p. 311.
[59] Quoted in Wolffsohn, World Jewish Congress, p. 16.
[60] Timm, ’Burdened Relationship’, p. 43.
[61] Ibid.
[62] Ulrike Offenberg, Seid vorsichtig gegen die Machthaber. Die jüdischen Gemeinden in der SBZ und der DDR 1945-1990 (Berlin, 1998), pp. 267-270.
[63] Wolffsohn, Deutschlandakte, p. 13.
[64] Offenberg, Die jüdischen Gemeinden in der SBZ/DDR, pp. 270-273; Mertens, Davidstern, p. 154.
[65] Schmidt, Antisemitismus, p. 126.
[66] Wolffsohn, World Jewish Congress, p. 22.
[67] Annette Leo, ‘Als antifaschistischer Staat nicht betroffen? Die DDR und der Holocaust’, in Berndt Faulenbach and Helmuth Schütte (eds), Deutschland, Israel und der Holocaust. Zur Gegenwartsbedeutung der Vergangenheit (Essen, 1998), pp. 89-104, here pp. 90-92. See also Vincent v. Wroblewsky, Zwischen Thora und Trabant. Juden in der DDR (Berlin, 1993). Wroblewsky, born in France in 1939 to German Jewish emigrants who after the war returned to Berlin (East), has interviewed eight former GDR-citizens of Jewish descent about their attitude towards their state.
[68] Rainer Hess and Jarden Kranz (eds), Jüdische Existenz in Deutschland heute: Probleme des Wandels der jüdischen Gemeinden in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland infolge der Zuwanderung russischer Juden nach 1989 (Berlin, 2000).


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