The generation of the GDR

Youth between war and peace

Born during the years when the National Socialist (NS) regime took power, growing up in the presence of the exclusion and persecution of Jews, among others, and living at a time when privileges were being granted to workers and farmers, questions of origin were omnipresent in their coming of age. Nonetheless, they did not always share similar family backgrounds. While some were the children of farmers and workers, others came from families that later were pejoratively called ‘close to education’ [bildungsnah], such as teachers’ families. Politically speaking, they came from families representing orientations that ranged from involvement in the Nazi regime to social democrats and liberals. Instead, the origin they shared was geographical: they grew up either in Berlin, or in the former Eastern Territories (eastern Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia), from where they were moved after 1939, to which they fled before 1945, or from which they were expelled after 1945. All of them were later called Umsiedler [re-settlers]. None of them grew up in what later became West Germany, let alone other western European countries. ⁶

When it came to secondary education, there was the question of who would pay the significant fees levied for attending the Gymnasium – not specific to the NS regime – that would give them access to higher education and subsequently better jobs. Some parents did have the means, some did not, and some relied on the larger family network. In any event, young children grew up with the feeling that access to education was a privilege, which was reinforced by the fact that their Jewish friends were soon expelled from the Gymnasium. Other exposures to the Nazi regime during childhood varied. Official Nazi socialization and ideological training began between the ages of 10 and 14, as so-called Pimpfe in the Deutsche Jungvolk, preceding the Hitler Youth organization, in which participation was obligatory as of 1939. Even if the oath of obedience they swore to NS ideals at such a young age remained mere lip-service, the young boys and girls might have learned a sense of sociality and affective bonding to a larger ‘Volk’. ⁷ Before they joined the actual Hitler Youth organization at age 14, the end of the war was so close that none of them had to engage in war activities.

The pubertal boys’ and girls’ memories of the NS regime were rather thin, and especially so if they grew up in the countryside. National Socialism was a past that had been ‘present in a condensed, implicit, and virtual form only’, as Mannheim wrote with regard to the phenomenon of inherited and appropriated memories (1952[1928]: 295). This is notable considering that the anti-fascist foundation of the socialist state would be the single most important reference point of their future shared beliefs. One could have different notions of what socialism was supposed to be, but all agreed, until the end of their lives, that socialism was the only answer to the horrors of fascism and, by extension, the only system that guaranteed peace. Capitalism, in contrast, requires wars. ‘I was always in favour of the system. The only problem was that we did not know in which direction we should develop. We only knew, not the Nazi system’ (interview Aßmann*).

With little exposure to the NS regime, the actual memories that could nourish this shared belief were those of the end of the war, and even more so those of the difficult years after the war. Those who lived in Berlin recall more than two years of regular bombing attacks. In addition to the loss of friends or family, their homes might have been destroyed, which forced them, and sometimes their entire schools, to move to the suburbs or the countryside. Though they themselves were spared from military service, they might have had friends or brothers who had lost their lives in the last months of a hopeless war. A significant memory for those who grew up in the Eastern Territories was the arrival of the Red Army. If the NS regime did not forbid it, there was a question as to whether one would flee the Soviets, or if one would welcome them as liberators. Some decided on the former, some on the latter, though this would not make a difference, as either the Red Army or the first Polish authorities pushed them west, regardless of their attitude toward the Soviets. While they later officially held the belief that the Red Army liberated them from the Nazi regime, actual exposure to the Red Army meant walking hundreds of kilometres to the west in search of a place to stay, a family, or a farm that would provide refuge. They found it in territories of what later became the GDR, unlike others who walked further west. To varying degrees, young boys and girls were exposed to some form of violence in the winter of 1944 and the spring of 1945. These remained incisive events, which occurred at a point when they did not yet have a language to make sense of them.

It was during the 4 postwar years that their political consciousness was awakened. Coming of age during the years of poverty and reconstruction, the young aspiring men began to pose questions motivated by two notions, one ideological and the other pragmatic: first, that this should never happen again; and second, that prosperity was needed to secure a future without fascism. Soon this notion became tied to the belief that only a socialist state would be able to secure prosperity in peace. Siegfried Mechler, later a professor of finance, and an Umsiedlerkind who moved from Lower Silesia to Saxony, recalled his experiences as follows:

Back then in Dresden, on the weekends, we removed the rubble with spades and carts, there in the Wiener Straße; now and then we hit upon a bag of bones…These and other experiences as adolescents, at the age of twelve or fourteen years, have contributed, not systematically, but pointwise, to the development of a fundamentally positive attitude about a society after capitalism. And that was the programme of the SED [Socialist Unity Party]. I always wished to play a part in the party under the motto ‘this must never happen ever again’. (Interview Mechler*)

Actual triggers to this political awakening were mostly accidental, and very individual. The socialist sentiments of Hannelore Petsch, for example, later a professor of economic planning, took shape in Anklam, in the countryside of the German part of Pomerania. She had been brought up religiously by her grandmother, and first joined the Christian youth organization, the Junge Gemeinde. In the Freie Deutsche Jugend (FDJ), the SED’s youth organization, however, someone played the accordion, which led her to change her affiliation. In high school, she became the FDJ secretary, and faced extensive resistance to the SED. When she was to give a final speech as the school’s best student, she wanted to use it to pay homage to the party. The school director opposed her intention and she had to get official FDJ permission before he would change his mind. The youthful struggle for political ideas, rather than an informed education, was the only context through which one learned to understand these ideas (video Petsch c.2010).

One Soviet practice that nurtured socialist sentiments systematically, instead, was a gift given to all families, as a way of breaking with the formerly bourgeois privilege of education: no more fees were charged for students returning to high school. In addition, a new schooling institution was created that integrated workers and farmers without a high school degree into universities. Since 1946, one could go to a ‘pre-study institution’, which in 1949 was transformed into the so-called Workers’ and Farmers’ Faculty (ABF), modelled after the Rabfak in the Soviet Union. For three years, workers’ children received a stipend to allow them to prepare to attend universities, to which they would be granted privileged access. Though there was an official application procedure, students were also solicited away from their professional training. Siegfried Apelt, for example, later a professor of statistics, entered the ABF at the Humboldt University without completing an application, since his father was a metalworker. Note that in order to break with the established bourgeois privilege of having access to higher education, young students often had to defy their proletarian parents. Without a higher education themselves, parents tended not to support the educational ambitions of their children and preferred vocational training.

When I graduated from the eighth grade, the director said I should go to high school because I had good grades. But my father said that I could do that later, and should first learn a proper trade. Thus I learned toolmaking. During the third year at professional school, the director came and asked ten of us if we wanted to go to the ABF…Again, my parents had reservations. Nobody in our family had studied before; ‘maybe that’s a waste of time’. This was the position of my parents’ generation. (Interview Mechler*)

But not only devotees decided to enrol in economics. Georg Aßmann, later a professor of sociology, worked as chief assistant in the central trade organization. In 1951, he received a letter from Jürgen Kuczynski, then a well-known professor of economics at the Humboldt University, trying to recruit him as a student of political economy. He was promised a stipend of 200 Marks, food and accommodation. Aßmann was only slightly politicized and wished to become a boxer, but he could not resist the offer. There were surely also others, who, like Klaus Kolloch, later a professor of finance, simply filled their parents’ shoes, as would occur also in other historical circumstances. Kolloch’s father had graduated from the College of Commerce in Berlin and wished for his son to do the same. In 1946, the private College of Commerce was merged into the newly founded economics faculty at the Humboldt University. It was not exactly his father’s shoes that Kolloch would fill.

The extent to which the future professors of economics were politicized by 1949 varied, as did their reasons for studying economics. Some were conscious of the fact that economics was central to the new political system; others chose it for the same pragmatic reasons as students do in other circumstances – it promised a decent job. There was one feeling that they all shared, however, when sitting in their first lectures in Spandauer Strasse: the feeling of gratitude for having been given access to higher education. This gratitude, as we will see in the next section, made them prone to the indoctrination that awaited them, namely indoctrination into Stalinism. Dieter Klein, later a professor of the political economy of capitalism, recalled:

We were fully convinced that our studies were a kind of gift from those who earned the money in the society, a gift, as it were, from the working class. We were thus greatly motivated during this strange time between the rise of new hopes and hopeless dogmatism. We were convinced that things had to be as they were, sometimes wondered what was being offered to us, but by and large passed our studies in deep faith; it was only now and then that I was held back by my wife, who was more down-to-earth than I was with my aloof principles. (Video Klein, 2009*)

Studying in the new state

In 1949, after a democratically humble parliamentary election, the GDR was founded, and the single-party power of the SED established. Approaching the age of 20, the young men and women went to the university as the first GDR cohort. They were thus the first cohort after the ‘second’ university reform, which, next to the break with the bourgeois privilege of education, based all sciences on the ideas of Marxism–Leninism, and submitted them to the goals of building up a socialist state. ⁹ As was common for an academic career in the GDR, the majority of the future professors of economics at the Humboldt University studied economics at this very university. Considering that political economy was to provide the scientific basis for the new party’s regime, it provided sufficient occasion to identify with the young state. In the third of 4 years, one out of 4 specializations had to be chosen: public finance or industrial economics for the more pragmatically oriented students, and political economy or economic history for the more politically minded students. This first GDR cohort of economists, notably, was also the last cohort brought up on Stalinist doctrines; those beginning their studies in the late 1950s would have felt the effects of de-Stalinization.

In the early 1950s, there were many models for being a GDR citizen, and it was not yet clear what being committed to socialism meant in practical terms. These were the years of the first party cleansing in the SED, the forced exclusion of social democrats, and of communists returning from western exiles. Days after the formation of the GDR, Eva Altmann, a leading economist, permitted a vote about the legitimacy of the GDR after an intense debate among the then-present students at the economics faculty at Humboldt. The majority voted that it was not legitimate (see Zschaler, 1984: 162). Soon, however, those who wished to apply the Soviet model and accepted Stalinism as the leading dogma gained power. ‘Learning from the Soviets means learning to win’ was one of the mottos. In 1953, conflicts between the FDJ and the competing Christian youth organization, the Junge Gemeinde, led to a declaration of the latter’s being illegal (Vogt, 2012: 202–6). At meetings of the FDJ, young students kept a chair free for ‘Comrade Stalin’, who was re-elected as chairman each week. ¹⁰

But the most important factors of socialization into the new state were the role models provided by their professors. After many of the ‘bourgeois’ professors left the university in 1950, it was difficult to fill the faculty positions with those who were fully committed to the party line, which resulted in a trade-off between political loyalty and academic quality that was clearly felt by the students. Even politically loyal teachers were not always party members. Moreover, the very profession of an academic created tensions between socialist dedication and the individualism and idiosyncrasy of vision, inspiration and intuition that was traditionally associated with this profession. It was not obvious how academics fitted into the GDR. The teachers’ shared anti-fascism might have created common ground, but had been nourished by different war experiences and became manifest in different intellectual cultures.

The central chair for political economy was held by one of the leading representatives of the Stalinist doctrines in the young GDR: Robert Naumann (1899–1978). ¹¹ As the vice-rector between 1951 and 1964, and adviser to the Ministry of Education, Naumann was responsible for designing the much-criticized introductory Marxist–Leninist curriculum. Having spent the years of the war in the Soviet Union, he had forgotten much of his German, to the extent that he could only read his manuscripts aloud with an awkward accent. He proclaimed ‘as if from the pulpit’ (video Klein, 2009*) the history of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He brought his lectures from the Soviet Union, where students went to university after 10 years of schooling, in contrast to 13 years in the GDR. Intellectually, he was hardly inspiring, yet he had the highest authority. ‘He was an outsider, but also powerful and dangerous. He got stuck in the past; I experienced this with other anti-fascists too. They continued where they stopped during the Weimar Republic’ (interview Apelt*). ¹²

Stalinist dogmatism was something the future professors would struggle against for the rest of their lives – a ‘primary stratum of experience’ in Mannheim’s terms (1952[1928]: 298). Once again, it was their experiences with National Socialism that could excuse their readiness to be indoctrinated into these ideas – while others, 15 per cent of the GDR population (2.6 million), including some of their fellow students, left the country in the 1950s.

People like me who came out of the Nazi era with some conscience, and had experienced liberation by the Red Army, who would then be told fibs about the history of the party that was not put in the context of other information, could do nothing but believe it. Everyone around me threw themselves into the breach with full conviction, even if one had just come out of the Gulags. For a long time I just did the same. (Video Klein, 2009*)

Students also learned that Stalinism was not the only possible lens for understanding the young state. Naumann presented the socialist teachings in the context of broader European cultural history. A very different intellectual style was represented by Jürgen Kuczynski, who had returned from exile in England. Kuczynski, a leading economic historian, was, like Naumann, a central supporting figure of the early GDR. He represented an old-school academic, a type of scholar who had not sprung from the womb of the proletarian movement alone. Naumann treated him with suspicion, which sometimes led to open conflicts in front of students.

Next to Kuczynski, students were inspired by the Hungarian László Radványi, alias Johann Lorenz Schmidt, another early GDR intellectual (1900–78). Schmidt returned from Latin American exile after he had been sentenced to death in Hungary. With the air of glamour of his wife, the famous novelist Anna Seghers, he taught the theory of imperialism in the spirit of Georg Lukács. His international insights were appreciated, as they put the official narratives into context. Early on, Schmidt criticized the overly Soviet orientation as irrelevant for the GDR economy, a position that many students internalized (1954). Another very prominent socialist thinker who soon gave up to engage further in the GDR was Joseph Winternitz. Coming back from exile in Britain, he soon returned to Britain again, because his wife, allegedly, had become ill; students knew, however, that he felt limited in his intellectual freedom after speaking out in favour of the Tito communists (Universitätsarchiv der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin [hereafter UA], personal folder ‘Winternitz’; ¹³ Müller-Enbergs et al., 2006: 1095). As public finance would become the most important pillar of the faculty, Ernst Kaemmel (1890–1970) needs special mention. He initiated most of those who would become the future finance professors into this field. He was married to a half-Jewish woman, was divorced from her, and remarried her after the war. He moved from West to East Berlin out of political conviction. But since he had previously worked for the NS Reichsfinanzverwaltung until 1941, he had little credibility as a socialist. ¹⁴

It was the conflict between these two intellectual styles – Naumann’s dogmatism and others’ intellectualism – that made apparent, for the first time, the gap between loyalty and relevance. A decisive moment that concealed this gap, however, came with the seminars on reading Marx’s Capital (those taught by Heinz Mohrmann and Hans Arnold are fondly remembered). Reading Marx was an eye-opener for many students, and introduced them into a highly valued debating culture that was lacking in Naumann’s lectures. ‘It was a matter of finding contradictions, not only a transfer of knowledge; attitudes were formed’ (interview Mechler*). Whatever happened, the belief in Marx’s critique of political economy was never questioned, despite the repeatedly frustrated attempts to derive protocols for running the socialist state.

With the beginning of my studies a new world opened up; for the first time I came into contact with Marxist philosophy, political economy, and historical materialism. The world suddenly lay open to me! For the rest of my life, however, I never gave up thinking about the contradictions between an excellent theory and its practical use. (Video Kolloch, 2008*)

The worker protests of 17 June 1953 occurred only several hundred metres from the faculty. There was no way they could not have witnessed the Soviet tanks and the protestors’ gunshots. Deeply enmeshed in Stalinist beliefs, however, and having just turned 20, they might not have had the larger perspective needed to reflect on their newly acquired beliefs. Others in the same age group, certainly those who threw stones at the Soviet tanks, were capable of such reflection. However, it is hard to imagine that the students bought into state officials’ propaganda, according to which the protests were a western intrigue.

Careerism

The years during which the future professors wrote their dissertations and habilitations were the years between Stalin’s death in 1953 and the aftermath of building the wall in 1961. During this decade, massive efforts were made to stabilize the new state. It was a decade of ongoing Sovietization and de-Stalinization following Khrushchev’s turn in 1956, a decade of agricultural expropriation, a decade of societal and party cleansing, a decade in which GDR citizens witnessed the running-down of the protestors in Hungary on the one side, and the economic miracle in West Germany on the other side. In this decade, the young state showed plainly what thorough measures would be needed to win the ongoing class struggle, measures that would remain deep in everyone’s minds when later imposing self-censorship. In the context of the universities, as we see below, these measures became manifest in the race against so-called ‘revisionists’. Many of those in the same age group ‘worked up the material of their common experiences’ differently (Mannheim, 1952[1928]: 304) and left the country. As a result, in 1961, the wall was built. In 1963, at the VIth SED party congress, Ulbricht announced the New Economic System that promised fundamental reforms – which, ironically, referred back to many of the ‘revisionist’ ideas denounced earlier. As difficult as this decade was for the young state, it was equally as welcome to those who were committed to it. The doors for the first cohort of students ready to espouse the cause of the party were wide open. ¹⁵ Their professional promises were great and precious. Young economists were meant to carry on the spirit of the GDR’s founding fathers. In the face of the envisioned institutions and the lack of individuals carrying them, their gratitude for having received an education would now turn into an obligation to give back to the state – meaning to be ambitious members of society seeking a career. Gratitude turned into career opportunism.

To write a dissertation and a habilitation was to come intellectually of age. The most important source of intellectual independence for future economics professors was the new openness resulting from de-Stalinization. Dissertations and habilitations represented for many the attempt to negotiate the boundaries between Stalinism and a more democratic socialism. This experience of being liberated from one’s early indoctrination into Stalinist ideas, combined with debates about the nature of a socialism specific to the GDR, was constitutive for the future professors’ intellectual identities. Seizing the differences between (Stalinist) dogmatism and the real issues of building up socialism in a divided Germany was this generation’s major task for creating socialist prosperity in peace. It was in this very same spirit, as we are going to see, that this generation also lost the struggle for preserving the state.

The front line at which this negotiation took place within the faculty was still formed by the opposition between Robert Naumann and other, less Soviet-oriented, professors. Naumann ran the Institute for Political Economy with a firm hand, and felt entitled to debunk and even dismiss colleagues who did not obey the party line. ‘Under Naumann’, Klein recalled, ‘it was impossible to express oneself freely’ (video Klein, 2009*). Klein wrote his dissertation on ‘the integration of financial capital in Western Europe’, defended in 1961 (see Klein, 2015). Even if he criticized the first attempts at European integration as a case of monopolistic state capitalism, the fact that he granted some perspective on the further existence of this union was reason enough for Naumann to call the thesis ‘revisionist’. The same accusation appeared later in the university newspaper, such that some party fellows at the university would no longer talk to Klein (ibid.). At the age of 30, this was the first time Klein personally felt the limits of the party’s regime.

Something comparable could be said about every single other dissertation written in fields other than political economy. The very fact of the relative independence of these fields was suspicious to Naumann. Erwin Rohde, later a professor of finance, recalled:

With Naumann having established the Faculty, there was a great preponderance of political economy. During his reign, political economists had considered themselves the guardians of the Holy Grail of Marxism–Leninism. And we others – statisticians, industrial economists or financial economists – were ideologically weak and had to be controlled if we were hostile or hurtful to the party line. (Video Rohde, 2009*)

The Department of Finance again needs special mention, since it would later be the most important field within the faculty. At Naumann’s initiative, the department adopted the curriculum of the Soviet Union, with a rather high degree of specialization. It was clear to a young assistant, Erwin Rohde, that one could not apply the Soviet model irrespective of the local context in Germany that, in contrast to the USSR, already had a developed fiscal and financial system. The political economy of the GDR was seen as special and could not be reduced to the Soviet example. ¹⁶

The attempt to transfer the Soviet findings of a rather backward country to us has led to our ultimate failure. We had no chance to build a decentralized control system. We should have involved the central bank policy as an instrument of planning and management of the national economy. (Video Rohde, 2009*)

Through these and similar experiences, the young assistants clearly understood that their careers would depend on party approval. Since the late 1950s, party representatives sat on most university committees (Vogt, 2012: 145–57). With the addition of peer pressure, there was a shrinking possibility of anyone who was not a party member at this point becoming a professor. ¹⁹ Conversely, without career ambitions, one could easily avoid frictions with the party system. Those who did not aim to become professors were left alone, and were thus free to conduct research in tenured middle-ranking positions. Party membership implied taking over responsibilities in certain party functions. ‘In those days, one not only had to work hard to become a professor, but also had to earn it by showing one’s gratitude for being given unwanted functions in the party’ (video Kolloch, 2008*). ²⁰ One of the demanding functions was, for example, serving as FDJ secretary of the faculty (Apelt, then Mechler). Some assistants, like Klein and Aßmann, even served full-time as FDJ secretary at the university level. Even if party careers seemed to be a necessary condition for career advancement, they were not, as everyone emphasized, a sufficient condition. Since 1960, after a decade of rather liberal hiring policies due to the shortage of socialist professors, the habilitation again became a mandatory requirement (UA 1584). ²¹

Aßmann is one telling example of how party functions, careerism and the experience with ‘revisionism’ met in these years. After completing his undergraduate degree in 1955, he received a visit at home by two party members who asked him to become the FDJ’s university secretary for the coming 6 years. He did not wish to be employed at the university, but could not refuse such an offer. The post came with a heavy workload. In the midst of the protests in the fall of 1956, when veterinary medicine students wished to study in the West and abolish the Marxist–Leninist basic studies, he had to negotiate on the front lines. Students were supported by senior physicians and went to the sector border for a demonstration (Vogt, 2012: 2019; Wolle, 2006). Aßmann was sent there to convince his fellow-students of the importance of the official party line for the training of veterinary doctors. After his post ended in 1961, he expected to be named head of the Local Planning Commission of Friedrichshain. Instead, he received a letter informing him that he was to become the university’s second party secretary for the next three years – again a full-time job. At the end of this period, in 1964, he became involved in the so-called Havemann affair – a professor of chemistry who held revisionist ideas about the limited use of Marxism for solving problems of the natural sciences (see Middell, 2012: 300–10). Havemann was expelled from the party, lost his chair and was put under arrest. As a result, Werner Tzschoppe, the university’s loyal first party secretary, and so Aßmann too, were dismissed. Even Robert Naumann resigned as vice-rector, as he feared that he would be held equally responsible. Eight years later, however, after Aßmann had written his dissertation and habilitation, there was no doubt about promoting him to professor.

In 1961, in response to the increasing emigration of high-skilled labour, the Berlin Wall was built. The young assistants, nearing 30 years of age, were at the tipping point of their careers, with clear prospects of being promoted to professorial status. ‘The wall provided the security of planning one’s career and private life for all those who accepted the conditions of the GDR’ (Middell, 2012: 274*). However, the wall also increased the pressure of responsibility: ‘Now, we could no longer blame someone else if something went wrong in the GDR’ (interview Apelt). With little influence from western universities, the GDR would develop its own intellectual culture with its own forms of specialization. Middell speaks of the ‘elimination of the international criteria of evaluating scientific performance’ (2012: 335*). It was the generation at hand that carried this national intellectual culture.

Those born in the early 1940s, still to be integrated into the state, responded differently to the wall’s erection. At the same age as those born in the early 1930s were acquiring a sense of gratitude for the privileges the new state offered the labour class, many of those born 10 years later were stunned at the measures the state had found necessary to enact in favour of the labour class.

Professors’ daily lives

The state of the GDR and the careers of our protagonists at the Humboldt University seemed to have stabilized by the mid-1960s. But the reforms went on. Indeed, the remainder of their professional lives involved ongoing attempts to implement reforms, with the imperative of increasing their practical relevance for contributing to the further evolution of the socialist state. GDR science represented one big ‘construction area of reforms’ (Middell, 2012: 291 ff.; also J. Wagener, 1998). The hopes that had been projected onto the young adults had by now been internalized and generalized as a constant commitment to implementing change that would improve the state.

Their professors’ lives had indeed begun with a major reform, the so-called ‘third reform of higher education’ (see Middell, 2012: 310 ff.). The general idea, as conceived by the party, meant breaking with the traditional organization of academic disciplines, in order to increase the university’s productive forces. New so-called ‘sections’ were created in addition to, and also in replacement of, the former faculty structures. At their core, these sections were a complex unity of various former disciplines that were structured around social and economic problems, rather than around intellectual specializations. Economics was still prominent enough to warrant its own section. The university was supposed to be run like a business, and officially had the status of a firm [Betrieb] with explicit business rules (UA 1653). The reform also reinforced the institutional separation of research and teaching. Universities, comparable with liberal arts colleges, were to focus more on teaching, and the institutes of the Academy of Sciences, specifically after the academy reform of 1972, would focus on research. The curricula were unified for the entire GDR, replacing the traditional lecture calendar. Each discipline had a Council for Research at the Academy of Science and an advisory board at the Ministry of Education that designed the curriculum. After Honecker came to power in 1971, curricula and research became subject to regular 5-year plans.

In the course of this third university reform, the very existence of the entire economics faculty at the Humboldt University was at stake. The Higher School of Economics in Karlshorst/Berlin (HfÖ), which at first specialized only in economic planning, had developed into a respectable economics university. The relationship between the Humboldt and the HfÖ was largely competitive. Facing the utilitarian imperative of the university reform, two institutions in the same city with the same purpose were considered unnecessary. Given that there were fewer students at the Humboldt faculty, closure was considered, as was tearing down the building. After the departmental groups failed to agree on a new specialization (UA 1651), a decisive move that secured their continued existence was the foundation of a new curriculum in military finance. Rohde, dean between 1964 and 1968, gave lectures at the university for officers of the military academy. His goal was to introduce economic principles into the military’s wasteful financial system. In addition to providing advanced learning classes for military staff, Rohde created a full-time curriculum. Since military finance was already being offered at the Humboldt, and only Halle and HfÖ offered other financial degrees, it was agreed that the faculty would specialize in training public servants in finance. Hans Wagner, one of Rohde’s predecessors as dean, was against this specialization, as it would result in the relative disempowerment of political economy. Nevertheless, in 1968, the entire public finance department of the HfÖ, about 30 faculty members in total, moved from Karlshorst to the Humboldt University. ²² These renegotiations of the third university reform stabilized the faculty’s structure. About 33 core professors experienced few faculty changes until 1990; the career opportunities of those born 10 years later, consequently, were significantly lower. ²³

Their daily lives as professors are telling regarding the context in which they were conducted: the Honecker era. Characteristic of Honecker’s regime was his attempt to achieve state approval through a consumer-oriented and ultimately wasteful economy (see Zatlin, 2007). His economic policy increased the existing contradiction between ideological loyalty and pragmatic prudence, a contradiction that could be resolved only by neutralizing reform efforts through a huge bureaucracy, while moving the strategically relevant but ideologically less acceptable activities into secrecy. It is for this reason that the 1970s and 1980s, in spite of the reformist spirit, appear in hindsight to be a long ‘grey continuum…The scientific landscape dawned inactively towards its own erosion’ (Middell, 2012: 331 f.*). Participating in both bureaucracy and secrecy, the Humboldt’s economists experienced Honecker’s regime as a turn inwards to their own ‘collective’ defined (and redefined) by specific responsibilities and bearers of vital secrets – far from anything that resembled the intellectual life of a bourgeois professor. ²⁴ The GDR generation was ready to live under the contradictions of Honecker’s regime, mindful of the fact that this was the world that they themselves had created.

The socialist intelligentsia now settled in that space, which it had itself brought about. A massive wave of hiring of professors between 1968 and 1972 related to the new university structures pushed that change further. The character of the traditional Ordinarius was not only institutionally, but also habitually marginalized – which did not exclude that individual representatives of the new Intelligentsia could fill this gap, and develop their own enthusiasm about bourgeois professorial behaviour, which as an exceptional phenomenon could even find approval. (Middell, 2012: 345*)

Retiring jointly with the state

To think of Berlin in the fall of 1989 is to think of those cheering at, and on, the Berlin Wall. For the GDR generation, these events, however, caused mixed feelings. ‘We were pondering joy, hope, but also fear’, Klaus Kolloch, who would become the first freely elected dean, recalled (2001a: 296*). In Klein’s words: ‘It was one of the most chaotic, but also one of the most beautiful times.’ The joy was that the state was willing to accept, finally, the reforms, without using force. The year 1989 represented a peaceful change, without the violence they recalled all too well from 1953, 1956, 1961 and 1968, and from June 1989 in Beijing. This peacefulness in fact proved their inner conviction that a new generation would take over their reformative spirit, and continue building up a better, more democratic socialism. Many of the hope generation shared an enthusiasm for the political change out of a feeling of pride that their state had proved itself more adaptive and open than ever before: ‘The revolution was peaceful, since a consensus prevailed up to the top that the old generation [the founding fathers] came to an end. Nobody wanted the demonstrations to be beaten down because the system was so ready to reform itself!’ (interview Gurtz*).

Dieter Klein was in the thick of the events in the fall of 1989. He participated in organizing the protest by critical SED members that took place on 8 November 1989. Shortly thereafter, he was part of the organizing team for the extraordinary congress of the SED held on 8–9 and 16–17 December. At this congress, Gregor Gysi was elected the new head of the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) – the new name of the SED – and called for the continued sovereignty of the two German states. Klein contributed with a speech describing the new programme of the party based on his research on the theory of modern socialism (Klein, 1989). He advocated a ‘third way’ as an alternative to capitalism and party socialism, which he still associated with Stalinism. From the beginning to the end of their careers, the GDR generation tried to escape the spectre of Stalinism though never realizing that they could not do so without relying to some extent on dogmatism. Klein speaks for his generation’s style of reasoning when saying:

How shall we deal with that which we have achieved in the GDR? Considering the forty years of GDR history, according to me, we have reasons to doubt its model of society; we have, however, no reason to consider the work of the postwar generation as failed. (Klein, 1989*)

In the year before the unification treaty was signed, the common expectation of the majority of citizens of the GDR was a reform of their state from within [Selbstreform], rather than the end of it. In the first faculty meetings, there was agreement that the local strength, compared with West German departments, lay in the faculty’s diversity, which should remain the focus in future. Despite its specialization in public finance, the faculty hosted business administration, demography, ecological economics, economic history, computer science, economic pedagogy, law and economics. In January 1990, the staff agreed on a new profile for the faculty that focused on the location of Berlin as an intermediary between East and West. One wanted to meet the ‘tasks of Berlin as a central European hub for economic integration in the European community’ (Schmerbach and Günter, 2010: 402*).

During the following summer months, negotiations about the future of the GDR squashed hopes for realizing this profile. In September 1990, the unification treaty was signed. Western politicians understood the voice of ‘the people’ differently, and dismantled core institutions of the GDR. The unification treaty defined the reasons for extraordinary contract terminations that could be applied until October 1992 – publicly elected offices, special tasks in the SED, and detectable activities as ‘unofficial collaborators’ for the secret police. Such terminations made up only 10 per cent of the dismissals in all disciplines at the Humboldt, with the number of economists dismissed being below this average (Ash, 1999: 336; Jarausch, 2012). Some of the ‘unofficial collaborators’ left without being asked, others tried to get by. Rudolf Mondelaers, for example, made it into the Restructuring Commission (Berufungs- und Strukturkommission, BSK), before being identified as a previous employee of the secret police.

More importantly, some institutions linked with the previous regime were supposed to be ‘phased out’ [Abwicklung] – that is, institutions were to be closed with an incremental plan for replacing them, if necessary. One of the ‘hasty policy decisions’ (Ash, 1999) made by the Berlin Senate was unseen in history: ideologically laden departments would be subject to being phased out, while others would not. Authorities thus drew a clear line between ideology and science at the junctures of disciplines: philosophy, history, education, law and economics had to be phased out. While some disciplines received a free pass into the realms of autonomous science, others were a priori subjected to doubts about professional competence and political correctness. Thus, some months after the reunification in January 1991, all previously tenured contracts were converted into temporary contracts. This allowed for the possibility of applying for one’s own post in competition with others. De jure, this showed a willingness to exploit the given potential, but de facto, this decision was equivalent to a lay-off, because the requirements of the positions made it impossible for most professors to win back their positions. In the GDR, publishing in a western journal required the permission of the authorities and was by no means encouraged. For many, this law must have felt like being given the chance to survive by being thrown into a cage of hungry lions. Deterred, many left voluntarily, and took advantage of early retirement. The age limit was continuously reduced from 65 to 60 and then to 55, which gave the entire GDR generation, as has been discussed in this article, the opportunity to retire. ³¹

Those who tried to stay witnessed the most radical cleansing in the history of the faculty: a cleansing more radical than those that had occurred in 1933 and 1945 (see Düppe, 2015; Rudder, 1997; Jarausch, 2012; Ash, 1999). Very soon, western research standards and teaching practices were enforced. Hardly anyone from the previous regime was believed to fit into western economics. For the younger generation in their mid-40s, this reform meant a radical rupture of their careers, falling from an elite status to someone suspected of being politically inept (Busch, 2002; Bollinger, 2002). Some sat in the lectures of West German visiting professors, to learn about shifting demand and supply curves, in preparation for competing some months later with economists who had received their PhDs in Bonn or Boston.

The air became even thinner in the spring of 1991, when it became clear who would run the Restructuring Commission and decide who would re-obtain their jobs: Wilhelm Krelle. Krelle was the founding father of West German mathematical economics at the University of Bonn, and had brought up an entire generation of mathematical economists who held dominant positions in West German faculties (Düppe, 2016). Krelle, clearly against Marxism and a conservative in political terms, was one of those economists for whom method counts more than content, which contrasted starkly with the methodological eclecticism and pragmatic imperative prevailing in the GDR. Any other economist would have been more sensitive to the potential in Berlin. One spoke of a ‘clear-cutting’ [Kahlschlag], a ‘human drama’ (Kolloch, 2001a: 298). ³² ‘All attempts to rescue some of the ideas of the older educational system that were worth keeping were futile’, one of the members reported (ibid.). Apelt was one of the few who applied for his own job. He was ranked fourth. In 1993, of all the professors, only the economic historian Lothar Baar, and of all junior positions, only Bärbel Gertich and Ulrich Busch were still active at the faculty. Klaus Kolloch, as dean, would stay on for some years in an extraordinary post. He would be there until 1998, though he mainly mourned for the good old times. ‘The new faculty was not a pleasant collective. There was a constant struggle against one another, struggles for assistants, for raising funds, even for rooms. The new faculty is by no standard comparable with what we have experienced together’ (video Kolloch, 2008*).

Also Klein was able to remain at the university, but not in economics. He anticipated that his peace research would soon no longer fit into the new profile of the economics faculty, and founded, in February 1990, before reunification could have been foreseen, the Institute for Interdisciplinary Civilization Research. He prepared for the coming university reform with an enlightened critique of capitalism, envisioning a double modernization of the West and the East, in contrast to grafting the western onto the eastern model of society. Many prominent political scientists visited the institute (such as Jürgen Habermas and Cornelius Castoriadis). Nevertheless, the Berlin Senate decided that this institute should also be ‘phased out’, because it did not have the structure of a (West German) political science institute. As a former vice-rector and district secretary of the SED, Klein was supposed to leave the university. However, Neidhardt, a liberal social democrat and head of the Berlin Social Science Research Centre, was the chairman of the Restructuring Commission in sociology, and well-disposed towards Klein. After several positive reference letters from all over the world and remarkable student support, Klein got a so-called excess professorship for the ‘economic foundations of politics’ in the sociology department. He left the university in 1999. During the 10 years after the fall of the wall, Klein published an astonishing number of articles and books (Klein, 2015). It was his most prolific period. He continued working for the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, the think tank of the PDS, then Die Linke. Until 2008, he led its ‘future commission’ where foundational programmatic issues were discussed. He did not give up hope.

Another post-1990s success story is that of Johannes Gurtz from finance. Convinced that the practical skills the economics faculty represented were not limited to the system of the GDR – a conviction resulting from the never-accomplished unity of the productive and ideological functions of political economy – Gurtz launched his own private school outside the new academic regime, a teaching institution for local administrators called the ‘Local Educational Institute’ [Kommunales Bildungswerk]. With the knowledge of the old system, this was an ideal advanced learning institute for channelling the old provincial administration into the new system. The same ‘clients’ who had previously been taught at the faculty would now be taught at the institute. Some of the former professors could occasionally give classes. This degree of self-confidence is unique to the generation born in the 1930s, in stark contrast to those born 10 years later, for whom the reunification of the two German states often meant a fall from the status of social elite to social welfare.

Afterthoughts

The hopes of building up a socialist state failed. Hardly anyone from this generation, however, fell into melancholia. Some were interested in engaging with the new state, others lived their retirement lives in quietude, but hardly anyone changed his or her mind. The two basic sentiments of their early careers, their gratitude towards the liberators and the faith that socialism is the superior answer to the failure of Nazism, never left them, even after the fall of the state. They show pride when speaking about their past, but are also willing to admit errors – both deeply ingrained in their generational being. As if out of a compulsion to repetition, they continued thinking in terms of the tensions between the ideological and practical functions of economic knowledge, between beliefs and tools.

Universities were designed as a productive force for realizing the goals of the socialist state. In this respect, one believes that one could have done better, and regrets that one did not question the belief in the party-based regime earlier on. ‘We all know that it was highly problematic that one’s own thinking would so easily be stamped as tribal factionalism and accused of deviation. Whenever we wanted to put forth decent ideas we faced collisions that were totally unnecessary. This sprang from the basic structure of a system with a ruling party’ (video Klein, 2009*). Tietze put it this way: ‘Friends, we should look into our own court! We are all complicit [mitbeschuldigt (sic)] in that we have tolerated this controlling system. And since socialism has only gone temporarily, according to me, we should learn from these lessons in order to avoid such tendencies next time’ (video Tietze, 2010*). In a further self-critical note, Klein calls for epistemic modesty:

Today, when we consider alternatives, we should think of economics as a melange of scientific analysis and a searching and learning process…The scientist must consider himself as someone who takes part, as a mediator of shared experiences. This is very different from the view we once had, that we are those who know how things ought to be done. (Video Klein, 2009*)

The careers of the GDR generation began in gratitude, a feeling that transformed into loyalty, careerism, duty and unbroken hope. What remained at the end of their careers, in contrast to the humiliation that the younger generation experienced, was again a feeling of gratitude:

I am fully satisfied with my career. I had a job in which one always had to be creative, and in which I was always surrounded by young people. Let me put it this way: I am grateful that my professional activities under socialist relations of production could contribute to comradely cooperation and mutual assistance. All the time since I was in school, I was lucky in all the collectives in which I was active, and in which I always felt at ease. (Video Kolloch, 2008*)