Fear in public and private in East Germany

Now is an interesting time for the study of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), more colloquially known as East Germany. It should also be said that it is an interesting time for the study of Eastern Germany, part of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Alternative für Deutschland, (Alternative for Germany; AfD) had strong electoral performance in the European Parliamentary elections in the East, shortly after Maximillian Krah of the AfD had suggested that not all in the Waffen-SS were criminals. Later, the party came second in Brandenburg and Saxony, and won in Thuringia. Significant attention, at home and abroad, is being paid again to the East. 

Similarly, Katja Hoyer’s Beyond the Wall had received wide coverage, with its new outlook on the East in terms of the literature available in English. Whilst Hoyer casts light on the positive aspects of the GDR, this is the opposite to the approach taken by Geipel. Geipel, a former athlete who fled to the West, instead fuses her own journey into her family’s past with the history of the east of Germany, illuminating a culture of silence before theorizing on its impact on the modern success of the AfD and the rise of Pegida. 

Geipel begins with the discussion of her grandparents. Weaving their story with that of Germany in the Nazi period, the text takes us first to Riga, Latvia. Her grandparents’ personal letters show a banality not unlike that Arendt notes of Eichmann, with requests for furniture and a return from work. Outside the home, however, the atrocities of the National Socialist regime were being carried out – from the establishment of the Riga Ghetto to the massacres in the forest at Rumbula. One only needs to walk through the streets of Berlin to see evidence of this, with the Stolpersteine frequently showing Riga as the final destination for those they memorialize. Yet as Geipel notes, this was neither a topic of conversation in the home, nor was this referred to in the denazification paperwork put forward after the conclusion of the Second World War.

This is the beginning of a theme throughout the text – silence. From Ulbricht and Pieck’s silence on those suffering in the Soviet Union, to the end of denazification, the early GDR is presented as a society in which unspoken truths regarding the past were commonplace. Later, it is suggested that another factor was contributing to this silence – fear. With the rise of Honecker and Mielke, the architects of the Stasi, a culture of terror was born. Geipel here returns to home life, identifying how her father had become an IM (informeller Mitarbeiter, unofficial collaborator), an informant for the Stasi. This is a particularly compelling section of Behind the Wall; by showing how the terror at home at the hands of her father was a microcosm of the terror in wider society at the hands of the Stasi he collaborated with. Fear in private, fear in public. Geipel therefore can be seen to suggest that the silence was inevitable. This is an argument that fits with much of the wider literature, with works such as Anna Funder’s Stasiland similarly highlighting the role of the Stasi and the fear it created. 

Turning to the years post-unification, Geipel identifies this as a period of opportunity – new experiences, new cities, all of which had been closed off for the preceding years. With the end of the government in Bonn however, the previous fear is replaced with violence as a central theme. From the National Socialist Underground’s emergence from children of the GDR to neo-Nazi terrorism, to the hate-fuelled riots in Rostock, and the massacre at a school in Erfurt, Geipel argues that the early experience of the unified Germany was one marred by violence in the east. With this violence, continues the silence of the prior two periods – the GDR consigned to history, but with an absence of truth and openness about what had occurred during the Communist years. Geipel puts it succinctly: “Historical truth rolls off the GDR like water off a duck’s back” (p. 157). 

Despite this, what follows is the weakest section of the book. Geipel suggests that Eastern Germany suffered as a victim of circumstance after reunification, an interesting idea that unfortunately is not explained in appropriate depth. Similarly, it is suggested that this region suffers from violence as a result of this combination of silence and circumstance – something Geipel associates with the rise of Pegida, the AfD and even the Reichsbürger. Such ideas are common in current discussion of the AfD’s success in the former GDR, but there is a danger here of determinism. By drawing on Decker and Brähler’s notions of authoritarian attitudes to explain the rise of the AfD in the former GDR, Geipel risks a continuation of the notions of German exceptionalism, the Sonderweg (special path), that is sometimes put forward to explain the history and politics of Germany. It is important to note that the AfD does not lack votes in the West either, and nor are extreme right parties an exclusively German phenomenon. 

By combining the personal and the political, Geipel crafts a unique addition to the historiography of the GDR and its successor regions. Combing through the past, from her grandfather’s time in Riga, her father’s status as an IM for the Stasi, and her late brother’s reluctance to explore the past, Geipel convincingly paints silence as the omnipresent feature of East Germany. In many ways, whilst the method here varies, Geipel’s conclusion in this respect is akin to prior works on Eastern Germany. This is a strength of the text, and something it does well. What follows however, is not as strong, with many conclusions on the relevance of these to the modern success of the AfD among others being under explored and under explained comparative to the history-focused sections. Further depth in this regard would have reinforced the conclusions, albeit even without this the text is a good read for anyone interested in German history.