Abstract
In 1987, an East Berlin punk concert was attacked by Skinheads. This event and others like it provoked sustained outcry in the German Democratic Republic in the last years of the 1980s. The political opposition transformed public outrage over Skinhead violence into broader critiques about ‘real-existing socialism’, especially by using the Western media to circumvent the state's information monopoly. Thus dialogue opened up by violence going public helped to undermine the political legitimacy of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) by giving ordinary Easterners channels to express their disappointments over state policy. In the end, the SED felt compelled to make decisions concerning state youth policy which opened up new avenues for oppositional activity, pointing to the ways in which the SED responded to momentum from below in ways which only weakened its political hegemony further. By exploring how manifestations of public violence were used to chip away at the political authority of the SED, I suggest that the ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’ and events like it help to explain why a small dissident movement was able to spread its message of discontent much more broadly.
Introduction
On 17 October 1987, a concert featuring the East Berlin punk band Die Firma and the West Berlin rock band Element of Crime took place in the Zionskirche in Prenzlauer Berg, then a borough of East Berlin. The Zionskirche was a centre for oppositional activity throughout the 1980s. Its pastor, Hans Simon, was a key figure in the East German dissident movement, and the church's basement housed the Umweltbibliothek, a library working to raise awareness of the state's harmful environmental policy by publishing samizdat literature such as the Umweltblätter and Grenzfall. 1 That evening an audience of 1000 packed the church. Shortly after 10 p.m., as the concert was ending, approximately thirty Skinheads stormed the church. Yelling ‘Sieg Heil’, ‘Heil Hitler’, ‘Communist swine, Jewish swine’, ‘Jews out of German churches’ and ‘these kinds of people should be exterminated’ (diese Sorte müßte man vernichten), the Skinheads attacked the crowd before being forced back outside. Assaulting spectators waiting for the tram, the Skins roamed the neighbourhood searching for victims while nearby residents phoned the police. But the police, despite the cries for help, instead waited silently in side streets around the church until reinforcements arrived, and even then made no arrests. When asked why they did not intervene, one officer is reported to have answered incredulously, ‘[W]ould you want to wade into such a mess?’ 2
The ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’ (Riot in the Church of Zion) is a useful event to explore the significance of public violence during late socialism in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). East German political, social and economic energy in the 1970s and 1980s was and is often characterized by inertia and apathy, especially in comparison with the tremendous socio-economic transformations which the GDR underwent under Walter Ulbricht (1949–1971) and in the final, dramatic year of 1989. Indeed, the historical literature covering the last year contributes to this perceived immobility by employing words such as ‘sudden’, ‘surprise’ and ‘speed’ to describe the events in autumn 1989. 3 These characterizations are apt; the rapidity with which the GDR, and the socialist bloc generally, collapsed was astonishing. But in describing these decades in sluggish terms, the Erich Honecker years (1971–1989) remain dull and stagnant, devoid of dynamism until the sudden popular upsurge in the final months. Studies that investigate the apparent ‘normalization’ of socialist rule and highlight both its participatory and its coercive elements likewise try to come to terms with this routine ordinariness of dictatorship. 4 Under Honecker, a compromise was reached in which citizens increasingly exchanged outward political acquiescence for relatively unobstructed private freedoms and a modest improvement in their quality of life. 5 Whilst the famed ‘niche society’ which Günter Gaus identified draws perhaps too thick a line between state and society, nonetheless, many ordinary East German citizens were able to live their lives fairly unrestricted during the 1970s and 1980s. This tacit agreement helps to explain the relative social calm experienced by the GDR during these decades. 6
Yet beneath the surface, deeper currents were disturbing the tranquility. By the mid-1980s the compromise under Honecker was breaking down as a variety of groups dissatisfied with ‘real-existing socialism’ were pressing the dictatorial Socialist Unity Party (SED) for change. In part a result of the economic calamity that was bankrupting the GDR's economy, as well as a socio-political crisis that saw a majority of East Germans turn their backs on the state, the 1980s gave rise to grassroots protest networks which coalesced into an extensive opposition movement by the end of the decade. 7 Peace activists, human rights advocates, environmentalists, feminists, members of alternative cultures – all sought to transform the GDR along more humane lines. 8 While research has illuminated the efforts of these various groups, less well-understood is how they were able to convey their messages to broad segments of the East German public. In total numbering only around 3000 members at their peak, these groups managed by the end of the decade to erode the political authority of the SED to such an extent that, when given the chance, crowds surged into this newly won political space. If scholars are to account for how the opposition of several thousand dissidents was transformed in autumn 1989 into demonstrations by half a million people, then we need to examine the means by which ordinary citizens began to voice their discontent with the SED regime, and how the opposition used any public space to publicize its demands. 9 One such means was by exploiting manifestations of public violence in order to undermine the political legitimacy of the SED.
One reason why the ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’ is a good illustration of the erosion of SED political legitimacy is because popular music was a constant source of conflict throughout the forty-year history of the GDR. 10 Following the arrival of rock and roll in the GDR in the 1950s, attempts by young East Germans to consume Western popular music had caused continuous friction in the workers’ and peasants’ state. In the 1950s, authorities were scandalized by the behaviour of rock and roll fans. 11 In the 1960s, several East German cities experienced large-scale riots initiated by Beat bands and fans, disturbances that Honecker used as part of his power struggle with Ulbricht. 12 In the 1970s, the unruly Blues subculture, whose members had a penchant for travel and a boisterous lifestyle, was a constant thorn in the side of the regime. 13 Indeed, several of the most spectacular clashes between state and society in the history of the GDR occurred over popular music. While the 1965 Leipzig Beat Riots are the most famous, the 1956–1958 Halbstarkenkrawalle (‘riots by Halbstarke’, mostly male adolescents) and the 7 October 1977 riot on the Alexanderplatz in East Berlin, when youths brawled with police during a performance by the rock band Express Berlin, are several among many. 14 A scant three months before the ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’, state authorities had attacked East German youths gathered near the Berlin Wall on Unter den Linden to listen to a David Bowie, Eurhythmics and Genesis concert then taking place in front of the Reichstag in West Berlin. 15 In part, conflict over popular music occurred because the SED regime had invested substantial energies and scarce resources in the educational potential of popular music. As a means of cultivating the ‘socialist personality’ and inculcating the proper values of an East German citizen, popular music was to help the SED shore up its political and cultural legitimacy among young people. 16 As such, music was a critical component of the state's ‘educational dictatorship’ (Erziehungsdiktatur). 17 While the state achieved a modicum of success with the popularity of ‘Ostrock’ in the 1970s, most efforts to produce East German musical forms fell flat, as Eastern youths consistently favoured Western music and bands over home-grown talent, a frustrating reality for state officials. 18 Conflict over popular music was just one of many tensions between youth and the state, a reason why the SED regime constantly looked upon its young citizens with a peculiar mix of ‘hope’ and ‘fear’. 19
The significance of the ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’ thus lies in the ways in which the event forced the SED to respond to popular demands emanating from below. Some scholars continue to utilize the totalitarian model of top-down control to describe the GDR, even though such an interpretation reflects regime aims and aspirations rather than realities. Events such as the ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’, by contrast, illustrates how change was likewise being driven from below, often resulting in adjustments which weakened the SED. 20 As a well-known incident from the last years of the GDR, the Zionskirche attack, regarded as emblematic of the hypocrisy and bankruptcy of the SED state, has featured prominently in recollections of these final moments of socialism. Along these lines, commentators have frequently focused on the attack itself and not on how the opposition used the event to challenge the legitimacy of the state and socialism. 21
By contrast, I argue that the Zionskirche attack was not only symbolic of state crisis but also characteristic of the opposition's efforts to undermine the political legitimacy of the SED. In the aftermath of the violence, dissidents took advantage especially of the Western mass media to open up public space for dialogue. East German citizens used that space to voice criticisms of state socialism, thereby transforming the narrow issue of youth violence into a larger critique of ‘real-existing socialism’. By demanding answers and accountability from the SED, East German citizens helped to enlarge the room for discussion beyond the control of state authorities. 22 Throughout the 1980s, the opposition was increasingly able to transform social conflicts into larger discussions about the legitimacy of socialism, and public violence played an important role in this process. For forty years, the SED had used violence, actual or threatened, as a means of safeguarding its power, but in the last years of the regime, members of the political opposition increasingly used public violence to undermine the SED. As a result, I believe we can usefully distinguish between the event and its consequences: while the violent act itself was inspired by racism and prejudice, the results, perhaps paradoxically, worked to pluralize debate, and help, in a peculiar way, to carve out space for dialogue in the GDR.
The attack revealed to the GDR public for the first time the existence of East German youth subcultures modelled on Western music cultures. 23 Both the West and later East German mass media reported extensively on the attack and subsequent court cases. While at first the SED tried to deny the events, the regime was quickly forced to acknowledge the existence of a fascist subculture in the anti-fascist state, an admission that inaugurated the first sustained discussion of the Nazi past and present in the history of East Germany. 24 The most important consequences of the Zionskirche attack were SED's efforts to integrate youth subcultures more effectively into state structures, endeavours that radically reshaped East German youth policy by allowing previously excluded youth – punks, Skinheads, Heavy Metal fans – to take advantage of the vast array of institutions and organizations which the state provided for youth, such as the FDJ youth clubs (Freie Deutsche Jugend, Free German Youth) or of recording possibilities with Amiga, the state record company. 25 Although I lack the space here to detail the consequences of this reversal in SED youth policy, suffice it to say that these groups only used the suddenly available opportunities to challenge the SED further: thus the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’ of youth violence, in the end, only exacerbated the existing situation. 26
Anatomy of Socialist Youth Violence
Autumn 1987 has generally been viewed as a key moment in the history of the opposition movement in the GDR. 27 If Honecker's state visit to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in September 1987 was the high point of his regime, the subsequent months may represent the beginning of the end for socialism in East Germany. The Zionskirche attack on 17 October forced the state to admit publicly for the first time that Nazism had not been eradicated in the anti-fascist state. 28 Then, on the night of 24–25 November, the Umweltbibliothek was raided by security forces. Printing equipment used to publish samizdat was seized, and five dissidents were arrested. 29 On 17 January 1988, activists attempting to unfurl banners that carried among other words, the famous saying of Rosa Luxemburg, ‘Freedom is always … freedom for the one who thinks differently’, were arrested during the annual memorial march for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The next day, protests were recorded in nearly forty cities across the GDR. 30 Several prominent dissidents who had been arrested, such as Freya Klier and Stefan Krawczyk, agreed to ‘voluntarily’ leave the country. 31 The public outcry over these events was significant, and activists sought to use them to force the regime into a dialogue about reforming the state. 32 At the same time, the SED leadership was desperately trying to resist the reforms which Mikhail Gorbachev's calls for perestroika and glasnost had inaugurated across Eastern Europe: as SED ideologue Kurt Hager famously put it in an interview with Stern in April 1987, just because your neighbour put up new wallpaper, did not mean that you had to. 33 It was in this context of heightened conflict between the opposition and SED, in which state power was deployed so openly, and the general changes gripping the eastern bloc, that the Zionskirche attack and subsequent outcry should be understood.
The brazen Skinhead attack clearly took the regime by surprise. 34 While internecine fighting among youth cultures beyond state control was not necessarily unfavourable from the SED's point of view, vigilante justice flouting the state monopoly on force had the potential to set a dangerous precedent. Punk music and its culture had crossed over the Berlin Wall via the Western mass media and personal contacts with Western youths, and had been appropriated by young East Germans who sought alternatives to state-sponsored youth culture. By 1980–1981, the East German punk scene, which had sprouted up in East Berlin, Erfurt, Halle and Weimar, was a small but thriving nationwide subculture. Holding concerts in attics, basements and churches with cheap or homemade equipment, East German punks wrote songs condemning life under ‘real-existing socialism’. 35 Although the punk subculture never numbered more than 2000 adherents, it nevertheless aroused considerable consternation within the SED and state security (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, MfS, Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi) due to the public nature of the scene and its anti-socialist ideological posture. In 1983, after a series of incendiary concerts and articles in the Western press, the SED cracked down on the East German punk scene. Ordering the Stasi to move ‘Hard against Punk’ (Härte gegen Punk), Minister for State Security Erich Mielke sought to break the subculture once and for all. After a year-long campaign of terror, by 1984 the Stasi had nearly broken the East German punk scene by sending youths to jail, to army barracks or over the border. 36 By 1986, however, the punk scene had recovered, as jailed youths and those serving in the army had finished their time and returned home, and new members filled out the depleted ranks. Moreover, in the intervening time, a host of other youth subcultures now emerged alongside punk: Skinheads, New Romantics, Heavy Metal fans and Goths (Grufties in East German parlance). But these new conflicts spoke to the larger loss of control being experienced by the SED in the last stages of its existence as subcultural developments set the stage for the attack on the Zionskirche.
Until the ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’, Skinheads had never assaulted activists associated with the opposition movement who had Western contacts and channels for circumventing the SED's media monopoly. The Zionskirche attack was not the first Skinhead attack on punks. As in West Germany, East German Skinheads had arisen in the early 1980s in the context of a growing punk music scene, though at first it was considered mostly an aesthetic and fashion choice. 37 Both the punk and the Skinhead movements had initially occupied the same alternative space as anti-SED youth subcultures rooted in performative working-class identities and communities. But the two subcultures grew increasingly hostile to each other as they adopted positions on opposing ends of the political spectrum. 38 Swelling the Skinhead ranks were football hooligans and neo-Nazis with links to white supremacist groups who infused their ideology of hatred and violence into the subculture. As in the West, many Skins were also former punks, as both subcultures shared hatred directed against the state and a penchant for provocation: shouting ‘Heil Hitler’ in an anti-fascist state was perhaps even more provocative than ‘No Future’. By 1987, fights between groups of punks and Skins were frequent, although authorities, perhaps fearful of acknowledging the existence of Nazism in a state claiming to have vanquished fascism, downplayed these incidents as youthful scraps rather than political quarrels. 39 That police had watched the assault without intervening suggested to victims at the time that the regime at least tacitly supported the Skinheads, although there is no evidence to be found in the Ministry for State Security archives to support these occasional claims. 40
The first reports on the Zionskirche attack appeared in the West. Picking up the story on the Evangelical Press Service wire, West German newspapers began reporting on 20 October 1987 that several dozen Skinheads had stormed the Zionskirche during a punk concert and had assaulted numerous concert-goers. The Tagesspiegel, a West Berlin daily, mentioned that similar events had taken place at previous punk concerts, as did reports broadcast by RIAS II (Rundfunk im amerikanischen Sektor, Radio in the American Sector). 41 The East German media, by contrast, kept silent. On 20 October and again on 27 October, meetings were held in the Umweltbibliothek and one hundred people signed an Eingabe (petition) to the GDR Staatsrat (State Council) to complain about the lack of police action on the evening of the attack. 42 At the Samariterkirche in November, dissident Pastor Rainer Eppelmann led a service devoted to discussing the dangers of Nazism in the GDR. 43 Later that same month, East Berlin theologian Rudi Pahnke, in an article in the Frankfurter Rundschau, condemned the development of an indigenous East German neo-fascism. 44 Radio stations RIAS II and DLF (Deutschlandfunk, German Radio) moderated several programs on the subject of Eastern fascism over the following weeks and invited speakers such as Pastor Eppelmann to discuss the rise in racist behaviour amongst East German youths. 45 An ‘Anti-Nazi-Liga’ (Anti-Nazi-League) was founded in the Zionskirche in November, and the radical West Berlin anti-fascism organization ‘Antifa’ promised help against any future Skinhead attacks. 46 Punks in cities such as Halle would eventually form ‘Skinhead-Destruction-Units’ (Skinhead-Vernichtungs-Kommandos, SVKs), essentially gangs of street-fighters looking to brawl with Skinheads. 47 Within two weeks of the Zionskirche attack, FDJ officials were receiving complaints from members clamouring for a state response, and these complaints were forwarded to Egon Krenz, Erich Mielke and other top SED officials. 48
Soon, other incidents involving Skinheads convinced authorities of the need to radically reshape state youth policy, showing how pressure from below was forcing change at the top. Authorities had already recorded a five-fold increase in acts of violence of an extreme right-wing nature between 1983 and 1987. 49 Not a week after the Zionskirche incident, on 22 October 1987, a group of Skinheads tried to attack homosexuals on Alexanderplatz. 50 Swastikas were soon found painted on walls in the toilets of an NVA (Nationale Volksarmee) barrack in Storkow near East Berlin. 51 Authorities recorded a further nine Skinhead attacks during November and December, and 45 youths were found guilty of ‘expressing fascist or racist remarks’ under § 220 (Öffentliche Herabwürdigung, ‘public defamation’) over the course of 1987. 52 Between November 1987 and February 1988, the Jewish cemetery on Schönhauser Allee was vandalized repeatedly, and gravestones were damaged and daubed with fascist slogans. 53 The decisive incident, however, occurred on 1 November in the town of Velten in Oranienburg, a small northern suburb of East Berlin. That evening, a group of between eighty and one hundred youths, among them a considerable number of Skinheads, threw a party in the restaurant ‘Weimann’. Shortly after midnight, after being repeatedly threatened for attempting to stop the party, the owner phoned the police. When officers arrived, the youths attacked the police and were dispersed only after one of the officers managed to fire several warning shots into the air. As the injured officers recovered inside the restaurant, several youths returned and quietly vandalized the police patrol car. 54 While an attack by Skinheads on punks was a somewhat ambiguous act, an assault against police officers was not.
The regime's response to the Zionskirche attack and the rising Skinhead threat was twofold. The first prong sought to distance the Skinheads from the GDR by initiating a judicial inquiry and launching a propaganda campaign that attempted to blame the West for the attack, a traditional response by the SED to any manifestation of ideologically-suspect activities. The second prong, however, sought to integrate youth subcultures more fully into state structures and thereby de-politicize them. And with the failure of the first response to find any substantial resonance among the public (in both East and West Germany), authorities were convinced of the need to fully support the second solution which marked a radical departure for state youth policy.
Despite their outward silence, officials frantically sought answers to the sudden Skinhead menace. On 22 October, five Skinheads were arrested for their role in the Zionskirche attack, and by the end of November, four of them stood trial in Berlin-Mitte on charges of § 215 Rowdytum (‘hooliganism’). 55 The events were widely reported in both the East German and Western mass media. In the intervening weeks, the regime had settled on a public trial with coordinated press coverage and the involvement of church authorities. 56 The show trial would demonstrate that the regime was not soft on fascism and would act as a warning against any future neo-Nazi activity. In addition, the public nature of the trial would demonstrate state transparency to the West at a time when outrage over the regime's raid on the Umweltbibliothek was high. 57 On 4 December, the presiding judge handed down jail sentences ranging from one year for the youngest defendant to two years for one of the supposed ring-leaders of the attack. 58
Despite the guilty verdicts, citizens were livid. In the first instance, Easterners questioned the silence of the GDR media regarding the Zionskirche attack, and a report on youth opinion to the FDJ Zentralrat (Central Council) noted that, once again, early reporting in the West on the event had decisively influenced public opinion negatively towards the SED. 59 Letters inundated the Eastern press as readers complained that the sentences were far too light for an anti-fascist state. One remark typifies the outrage: ‘I find the series of events that took place in the Zionskirche outrageous. But the absolute cherry on top was the sentence. Absolutely insufficient! Such people need to be shown who's the boss’ (wo der Hammer hängt). 60 The Neues Deutschland headline that reported the sentencing – ‘Short prison sentences for rowdys’ – confused readers, who wondered whether it was intended ironically. 61 Even Honecker began receiving petitions from irate citizens demanding firmer action, and he arranged for a number of officials to meet with outraged letter-writers in an attempt to placate public opinion. 62
To add insult to injury, Hans-Dieter Schütt, editor at Junge Welt, the popular youth paper of the FDJ, enraged readers with a column suggesting that dissidents protesting the recent raid on the Umweltbibliothek and Skinheads from the Zionskirche attack were one and the same: attempts by the class enemy to undermine the East German state. 63 The state prosecutor, under orders from Krenz and Honecker, quickly appealed the sentences, and on 22 December, all four defendants had the lengths of their prison sentences doubled. 64 Between November 1987 and July 1988, in nine separate trials, a total of 49 youths between the ages of 16 and 25 were given sentences ranging from five months to six and a half years in prison for violent activity. 65 But despite the frequent trials and lengthy sentences, the judicial proceedings did little to placate GDR citizens. ‘How can it [right-wing behaviour] be possible after these youths have received a socialist education?’ was typical of many questions directed towards Junge Welt. 66
Citizens did not want long prison sentences but rather frank discussions about fascism in the GDR, and the public indignation provided the opposition with an entry-point to carve out public space for criticism of the regime. The regime was clearly uncomfortable acknowledging that some East German youths were fascist Skinheads. Many of the internal memoranda circulating between the offices of Honecker, Krenz and others related to whether the youths – ‘rascals’ was Günter Schabowski's choice term – had actually uttered fascist slogans. 67 Desperate to deflect attention from any hint of domestic fascism, the regime eagerly seized upon revelations that a number of West Berlin Skinheads had attended a party at ‘Sputnik’, a restaurant in East Berlin, prior to the Zionskirche attack and had encouraged their East German comrades to storm the church and disrupt the concert. While the first Skinhead trial had focused more on the individual case histories of the four defendants – and as an unspoken corollary, on the indigenous evolution of fascism in the GDR – the later trials made much more of the Eastern Skinheads’ supposed ‘Western connections’, even going so far as to suggest that the attack was ‘inspired’ by the dozen West Berlin Skins present at ‘Sputnik’. 68 Despite evidence confirming that nearly all the Western Skins had left for West Berlin prior to the Zionskirche attack, the judge, prosecutors and East German media seized upon their presence to highlight the dangers posed by the increased numbers of Westerners visiting the GDR. 69 SED authorities even attempted to extradite the West Berlin Skinheads to the GDR to stand trial for their participation in the Zionskirche attack. 70 Media reports drained the Zionskirche attack of any political motivation by persistently referring to the perpetrators as ‘rowdys’ or ‘criminals’.
While the regime tried to placate public opinion, rhetoric about harmful influences from the West and concomitant talk about the need for increased border control diluted any positive effect that the long prison sentences were having on the battlefield of public opinion. As the numerous petitions and protest letters reveal, people desired a real confrontation with Nazism in the GDR, not long jail terms for a few dozen thugs. 71 Schütt especially drew the ire of the public, so much so that, for the first time in GDR history, dissident Vera Wollenberger brought libel charges against Schütt and Junge Welt. 72 In his column, Schütt had suggested that the Church should be considered an ‘enemy’ because of its ‘support’ from the Western media. This notion brought up painful memories among church leaders of the Kirchenkampf during the 1950s. 73 Pastor Simon lodged an official protest with the state press office regarding the treatment of his parishioners by the East German media, as did the Evangelical Student Congregation. 74 East Berlin youth pastor Wolfram Hülsemann, in a formal protest letter to Junge Welt that circulated within the East German Protestant churches and in a series of radio interviews, contested the further insinuations of Schütt and the state that the Zionskirche attack was a singular incident, a claim he regarded as an attempt to divert attention away from fascism in the GDR. 75 Despite a number of meetings between Junge Welt editors and clergy – in addition to numerous letter exchanges with irate readers endeavouring to calm the emotions Schütt's article had raised – the damage to the credibility of state institutions had been done. 76
Rethinking Youth Policy in the GDR
The Skinhead attacks and public outcry finally convinced the regime that the Stasi was no longer effectively combating negativ-dekadente Jugendliche (‘negative decadent youths’). The public outrage and repeated acts of Skinhead violence persuaded the regime that if it could no longer achieve state goals with the stick, then perhaps the carrot – co-optation – could help de-politicize youth subcultures. 77 Following the Velten assault, the SED Central Committee's Department for Security Questions (Abteilung für Sicherheitsfragen) prepared a detailed report on the event. 78 After reviewing the incident, the memorandum offered a number of suggestions for curbing such behaviour in the future. Arguing forcefully that state youth policy ‘must also reach youths who shut themselves off consciously from our politics and organize with like-minded people in specific groups’, the report called for a comprehensive overhaul of current policies. 79 There were to be redoubled efforts to promote socialist behaviour at schools, businesses, restaurants, FDJ youth clubs, dances and sporting events. 80 The FDJ was charged with the task of increasing its efforts to win young people to socialism through ‘meaningful leisure activity’, while the East German media was pressed to condemn any hint of fascism, violence and terror. 81 The Stasi and police were to intensify their efforts to maintain the socialist peace and to ‘disband’ any ‘negative groups’. 82 In particular, the report called for public transparency, to counter any negative effect that Western media coverage was having on domestic GDR affairs: ‘The GDR press should be aggressively informed about special incidents concerning negative groups that appear in public, to prevent rumours, and to strengthen the state's authority and the co-operation of citizens in the hindering and ending of such actions’. 83
The report made a deep impression on the SED leadership, especially on Krenz. At the time, Walter Friedrichs, the long-time head of Leipzig's Central Institute of Youth Research, was bombarding Krenz (former head of the FDJ) with studies lamenting the political apathy of GDR youth. 84 On 17 November, Krenz, then head of SED security affairs, received the memorandum and suggested to Minister of the Interior Friedrich Dickel that this would be an appropriate time to prepare proposals for a shift in youth policy by the FDJ and other mass organizations. 85 Gerd Schulz, head of the Central Committee's Youth Department, assured Wolfram Herger, head of the Department for Security Questions, that the FDJ Central Council would evaluate the report with particular care. 86 All parties involved agreed with Herger that a ‘comprehensive assessment of the situation’ was necessary before Honecker's up-coming speech to the first secretaries of the GDR's districts, scheduled for February 1988. 87 The result of these deliberations was the 2 February 1988 Politbüro ruling, ‘Information from the Central Council of the FDJ about Attempts by the Class Enemy to Intensify Political and Ideological Influence on Youth’ and ‘Measures to be Undertaken by the FDJ for the Improvement of Political and Ideological Work with All Young People’. 88
Whereas ‘Information …’ recapitulated traditional SED concerns about the subversive nature of Western cultural policy and products – radio, television, music, fashion – that inspired youth cultures in the GDR which were detrimental to socialism, ‘Measures …’ was designed to integrate previously excluded youths into the East German collective in the hope of curbing the spate of recent anti-state activity. There was to be a complete reorientation of SED youth policy, with the FDJ playing the leading role. The goal was to integrate especially those GDR youths, such as Skinheads, who rejected state organization and socialism. As the report underlined, despite the successes of the FDJ, ‘
According to the 2 February 1988 decree, political and ideological work in the FDJ youth clubs to date had been lax, a situation that contributed to the difficulties which the GDR was now experiencing. As the ruling lamented: The mood in some youth clubs is not always oriented towards the development and strengthening of socialist ways of life and behaviours. There are also signs that youth club admission is contingent on the [outward] appearance of youths. These youths [‘outsiders’] are thereby further isolated and pushed away.
95
The decision to integrate supposedly hostile youth subcultures – a complete about-face from prior history – should not be considered a contradiction but rather a logical outcome of the SED's understanding of youth. Young people were regarded as empty vessels, beings that could be influenced and manipulated either positively or negatively. That youths could be won back to socialism through proper education and organization was the unswerving belief of the SED. Arguing that many youths, ‘in their outward appearance and in their behaviour do not appear extreme’, ‘Information …’ suggested that ‘[t]here are youths who change their outward appearance only during leisure time and devote themselves only briefly and less intensely to the groups’.
100
The point here was clear: ‘The preference for individual music styles is to distinguish between political and moral behaviours in individual groups’.
101
To avoid any misunderstanding, ‘Information …’ underscored this belief even further: ‘
‘Information …’ and ‘Measures …’ were not isolated pieces of legislation but rather, they represented SED youth policy going forward. Ten days later, during Honecker's address to the first secretaries of the GDR's districts, he highlighted the importance of leisure activities in SED youth policy and the importance of integrating all youths into socialist society. Referring to current political and ideological work, Honecker stated unequivocally that in the GDR, ‘[t]here is no social degradation, no “marginal groups” or “social outcasts”. Socialism needs everybody and has room for everyone’, a clear reference to the recent legislation. 103 The mixture of politics and popular music had resulted in state and youth conflict in the GDR for nearly forty years, but the 2 February 1988 decree stood traditional SED youth policy on its head. Distinguishing between outer fashion and inner ideals, the SED and FDJ were to go to enormous lengths to accommodate youth subcultures in the last years of the GDR. According to ‘Measures …’, ‘In accordance with the proven principles of socialist youth policy, in order to strengthen its diverse impact among youths, young people should be judged not by their appearance or their specific views in matters of fashion and music, but by their attitude towards socialism and their benefits for society’. 104 What had seemed inconceivable a few years earlier, now quickly became reality.
Conclusion
The ‘Krawall in der Zionskirche’ was both a reflection of changes taking place at the grassroots of East German society, and an impetus towards further changes which worked collectively to undermine the SED regime. Indeed, in important ways, the emergence of Skinhead violence near the end of the 1980s – violence foreshadowing the murderous activity by neo-Nazi Skinheads against foreign asylum seekers that would take place in reunited Germany in the early 1990s – contributed to the collapse of the East German state. 105 While I do not want to trivialize the experience of those who suffered the horror and danger of right-wing aggression, when seen on a larger scale, the actual physical attack itself is less significant than memories of this event in the popular imagination would seem to suggest. But the discourse that arose as a result of the violence, the outrage that the attack provoked among GDR citizens, and the response of the state to the Skinhead challenge are significant. The Skinhead violence and subsequent debate were catalysts for the voicing of discontent with the regime, and thus we can perhaps talk about public incidences of violence helping to open up new channels for criticism that worked to chip away at the SED state. Additionally, and perhaps most interestingly, although the state responded to the violence by cracking down on the Skinhead subculture, it also shifted GDR youth policy in an attempt to integrate previously isolated youths much more firmly into state structures. In so doing, however, the SED invited a host of alternative groups into state structures and, in trying to appease disgruntled citizens, implemented solutions that only exacerbated existing tensions by creating new opportunities for groups critical of the regime to protest against the SED.
While Stephen Kotkin is certainly correct in suggesting that civil society in Eastern Europe was more a ‘consequence’ than a ‘cause’ of 1989, nonetheless, over the course of the 1980s, the opposition movement was increasingly able to mobilize broad segments of the East German citizenry towards more active criticism of the SED by transforming narrow conflicts into more general condemnation of state socialism. 106 Nothing was perhaps more effective in this regard than public violence. Activists used these events to stimulate public dialogue and scrutiny of the political legitimacy of the SED, and faced with broad-based censure of its actions in the East and in the West, upon which the GDR was becoming more dependent economically, the SED increasingly rejected coercion in favour of accommodation. 107 Indeed, it can be argued that in contrast to the repressive crackdown of pro-democracy students by Communist authorities on Tiananmen Square in June 1989, the GDR experienced no ‘Chinese solution’ in the autumn of 1989 precisely because the SED leadership and local party apparatuses had lost not only their monopoly on violence but also their control of the very discussion of violence. 108 Public violence was thus a critical avenue, it turns out, by which the political opposition was able to broadcast widespread discontent with the SED regime, as well as help to carve out space for dialogue between state and society concerning the conditions of ‘real-existing socialism’ in the last years of the GDR.