ONKEL DIETER UND TANTE GRETEL (Part 4)
No sooner had the guns fallen silent in 1945 than the Soviet Union exacted retribution from the sector of Germany under their occupation. East German factories that had survived the bombs and the squall of the invading forces, began to be systematically dismantled and shipped to the USSR.
In both the Western and Eastern occupation zones German citizens were put to work to restore some semblance of order. The rations allocated for German folk were a fraction of that allocated by the Allied powers to their own troops. There were calls to make Germany pay for the horror of war that had ravaged Europe for nigh six years – calls not unlike those that rang out after the previous World War and which had, in a perverted outcome, precipitated a second conflagration. In the Soviet sector the conditions for Germans were, however, worse than in the other three zones of occupation – by some degree!
1945 and 1946 were particularly harsh times for ordinary folk just trying to eke out a meagre living and survive day by day. The Allies were preoccupied with the Nuremberg Trials of Hitler’s principal henchmen. Other, lesser figures fingered as perpetrators of “War crimes” and “Crimes Against Humanity”, were subjected to trials all over the territories that had been occupied by the Nazis at various stages since the early ‘30s. The gross violations of human rights that had taken place in the many concentration camps (death factories) throughout the Third Reich were held up to the light of scrutiny, and the perpetrators were executed in another wave of bloodletting across Europe. Traitors and collaborators were also sent to the gallows or incarcerated in droves. The burden of blame and guilt settled uneasily on the ordinary folk. They had either been bystanders who turned a blind eye to the excesses of the dictators, or had been scared stiff by the perpetrators and for a host of reasons remained silent – stricken by fear of retribution on their families or under pain of death themselves.
Between 1945 and 1949 a new, but divided, Germany was slowly rising from the ashes of the Second World War. It was in East Germany that both Dieter and Gretel found themselves coping with their formative years in a society ravaged by the spectre of war and its aftermath. Gretel spoke freely about her time in East Berlin with her mother where she grew up as a teenager of the 1950s. The privations of a child in a defeated nation had an impact on her that she never quite shook off. By May 1949 it had already become clear that West and East Germany were on separate trajectories – the three western occupation zones merging into West Germany and the Soviet zone under Stalin’s heel as a Communist state. After an Airlift in response to Stalin’s Berlin Blockade in which the Soviets attempted to strong arm the West into abandoning their claim to West Berlin, an uneasy truce between the two sides emerged. By October 1949 the Federal Republic of Germany (West) and the German Democratic Republic (East) were established. The GDR became a pliant Soviet satellite state under the firm control of dyed in the wool Marxist-Leninists. The likes of Wilhelm Pieck, Otto Grotewohl, Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker did the bidding of the Soviet Union with alacrity.
For a child growing up in East Germany during the 1950s it was not an easy time. The enforced redistribution of land and the nationalisation of businesses under the Marxist economic and political aegis killed any prospect of prosperity. In West Germany the USA outspent the Soviets and reconstruction forged ahead. The United States Marshall Plan pumped in millions of dollars to kick start western capitalist economies after the War. Market forces and healthy competition stimulated growth, wealth and a prosperous consumer driven economy. The GDR was doomed to stagnate and it soon became clear that it would become the poor cousin of its western neighbour.
Dieter and his Mutti were stuck in Dresden during most of the 1950s – the return of East German citizens to East Berlin being actively discouraged – even forbidden. It was somewhat less evident for the young lad to grasp the extent of deprivation in East Germany, than it was for Gretel who lived in East Berlin with her mother. The people of Berlin could readily identify the stark difference emerging between East and West, living cheek by jowl, as it were, with their western neighbours. They were poor and knew they were poor, because the evidence of prosperity was across the street from them in a manner of speaking. Nevertheless, it eventually dawned on the folk in the rest of East Germany (and Dieter in Dresden) that something was amiss as they continued to plod away for low wages and in deprived circumstances. Throughout the 1950s East Germans were voting with their feet as they migrated across towards West Berlin in thousands. Dieter joined the groundswell of ordinary Germans finding their way to Berlin from whence the leap to western prosperity could be made with relative ease. He and his Mutti had to jump through several bureaucratic hoops before they made it to the East German capital – securing permission to relocate and then secure a job in East Berlin was no mean feat in those days. Once there, the crossing to West Berlin could still be made, until the Berlin Wall was constructed as the ultimate impediment to the exodus from the GDR (in August 1961). The flood of migrants was denuding East Germany of its labour force and the GDR suddenly stemmed the tide. Dieter “jumped ship”, as it were, before the barbed wire, the soldiers and the wall blocked the exodus. Gretel and her Mutti lingered a trifle too long and found themselves languishing in East Germany.
The Wall! It went up with stunning suddenness and too rapidly for those who had still been toying with the idea of migrating to West Germany to make the leap. On the night of 12 to 13 August 1961 barbed wire sliced through Berlin – about 45km of it. Soldiers of the GDR backed up the barrier with guns. Concrete soon replaced the wire and the communist state extended the structure all the way around West Berlin that was situated like an island in the heart of East Germany. Along the rest of the borders with West Germany the GDR barricaded themselves behind fences and obstacles – keeping their citizens in, was their main concern.
By the time the wall went up, Gretel was about 23 years old and working as a typist. Her Mutti was employed as a checking clerk in one of the state run agencies. Both had stable jobs and didn’t by that time struggle to get enough food or clothes. They shared a room in one of the tenements (Mietskaserne) that the GDR hastily provided for working folk as a response to a shortage of accommodation in the wake of the War’s devastation. It was rudimentary to say the least – shared ablutions, shared kitchen space and very densely populated with more people to a unit than was sensible, or sanitary. The construction of the Wall emphasised that the GDR was keeping people in, because what was on the other side was better. People who might not have left their jobs for an uncertain future in the west, were now certainly persuaded that life outside the GDR was worth escaping to. Gretel’s Mutti considered her life in East Berlin to be acceptably stable at her age and would not make a run for it. Gretel, though, at the age 23 felt that she should make an attempt to get out of the drudgery of the GDR – and perhaps persuade Mutti to join her later.
Tante Gretel explained that it was in her attempt to leave the GDR that her path crossed that of Dieter’s. He was determined to help East Berliners escape, from the moment he had crossed the great divide and was then cut off from his friends in East Germany by the Wall of Shame.
[The confluence of circumstances that brought the two together will be the subject of the next story]
©Paul M Haupt
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