BERLIN—A crowd gathered at the Babylon Theater here Saturday for an annual memorial for Dean Reed, the American “rebel,” rock star, and filmmaker who famously defected to “East Germany” (the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) in 1972. Those in attendance were among Reed’s most ardent fans, of whom he had many thousands in the GDR when he died in 1986.
People who were around 20 years-old when the Berlin Wall fell—those who lived in and were educated in the socialist GDR—have spent the more than quarter-century since the demise of that country living under capitalism in a different Germany. Being old enough to remember what life was like in the GDR, they are perfectly situated to make comparisons of the two different social systems. At the Reed memorial, I had the opportunity to speak with a number of them.
These former GDR citizens, referred to these days as “Ossies,” a short for the German word “ost,” meaning east, said some things that were not surprising, but also others that were completely unexpected.
Heike Zastrow, who was exactly 20 when the Wall crumbled in 1989, was slicing cake to be served during intermission when I spoke with her.
“I wasn’t political at all and I didn’t like the steady talk of politics coming from the leaders,” she said. “I also hated that I couldn’t travel, I couldn’t go where I wanted to go.” Once the border around West Berlin, which was in the middle of the GDR, was closed in the early 1960s, most GDR citizens under retirement age could not travel freely to the West. Permission was granted for various reasons, but it was not the rule.
“But I have to say,” Zastrow said, “that I had a very good life in the GDR and that I had a very good education there.” I asked her to elaborate.
Another GDR citizen I interviewed had quite a different story. She came to the GDR as a three-month-old child and has been a German ever since. “I know no other country,” she said.
She also had praise for the free education system in the GDR, saying it had prepared her well for her chosen field of printing and publishing. At an early age, she started and remained at Neues Deutchland, a major GDR newspaper, doing typography and design.
She had complaints, however, about aspects of life in the GDR. One was that she felt the schools, equipped as well as they were to build knowledge and skills, were not adequately equipped to deal with children with special problems.
She had behavioral problems as a child, and in her schools the emphasis, when it came to behavior problems, was on conformity rather than searching for solutions. “I made it through though even though it would have been better if there had been more help from the schools,” she said.
None of her misgivings, however, seemed to have soured her on the idea of socialism.
She was asked to explain further.
One of the speakers at the memorial, a man who knew Reed personally, was Victor Grossman, known to People’s World readers as a frequent writer and reporter on European affairs.
Grossman was a young factory worker in Buffalo, N.Y. when he was drafted during the Korean War. He was stationed in Germany, where he learned that as a left activist he was about to be arrested and jailed in a McCarthyite campaign in the military that was running parallel to the hysteria back in the U.S.
The jail term would be five years and the fine $10,000 for having failed to list allegedly subversive organizations to which he had belonged. The story is complicated, but he fled the army base and ended up, like Reed, living in the GDR and has remained in Germany ever since.
Grossman’s experience is quite unique. He lived the first 20 years of his life under capitalism in the U.S., the next 40 under socialism in the GDR, and the last 27 under capitalism in a united Germany.
The biggest difference, according to Grossman, was in the area of job security. “In Buffalo, it was out of the blue that Fedders laid 200 of us off. That’s it, we were out of work, livelihood gone. In the GDR, you never, ever had to be afraid that you would be kicked out onto the street. Even if a job was phased out, the system was fully in gear to get you the next job without you ever suffering loss of pay or pension benefits or anything else. You can’t imagine how good it is to be free of that economic anxiety,” he said.
For some brief but shining years, the GDR was achieving more and more of the aims of socialism. The powers-that-be today are afraid of this. They don’t want people to know that there was an actual world in which fear of joblessness was gone, poverty was eliminated, women had equality, racism was illegal, and no child went hungry.
Grossman did just that, having graduated from Karl Marx Stadt University as a trained journalist. He went on from there to teach and write several books in the GDR.
None of this means there were no problems, Grossman said, and he had some of the sharpest criticisms voiced in the interviews on Saturday night.
Yet today, more than a quarter-century after the demise of the GDR, there is a persistent campaign here and all over the West against that country. Every official tour of Berlin is sure to include some anti-GDR points of information.
“Why do you think that is?” I asked Grossman. Why continue to vilify a country and a government that disappeared decades ago?