The wall, in its first hours, was barbed wire and concrete blocks laid in a thin line by police and construction workers. In the days that followed, it was reinforced. Within a fortnight there was a continuous concrete barrier 1.8 metres high. Within a year there were watchtowers. Within five years there was a "death strip" — a second wall a hundred metres behind the first, with the intervening zone of raked sand, anti-vehicle ditches, dog runs, automatic firing devices, floodlights, and a roadway for border patrols. The whole system grew, over the next twenty-eight years, into the most elaborate frontier defence ever constructed in peacetime. It surrounded West Berlin completely, a 155-kilometre ring through the centre of a single city.
The human cost was significant from the first week. The young East German tailor Günter Litfin was shot dead in the Humboldthafen on the 24th of August 1961, eleven days after the closure, trying to swim across the canal to the Western sector. He was the first of at least 140 confirmed deaths at the Berlin Wall. (The Berlin Wall Memorial Centre lists 140 as the strict definition; broader counts that include the inner-German border across the rest of the country put the total at around 1,000.) The most photographed death was that of Peter Fechter, an 18-year-old bricklayer who was shot in the pelvis trying to climb the wall at Checkpoint Charlie on the 17th of August 1962. He fell back into the death strip and bled to death over the course of an hour while West Berlin spectators screamed for help and the East German guards refused to approach. The photograph, taken from the West, is one of the iconic images of the Cold War.
Economic stabilisation
The wall did, however, accomplish its principal purpose: it stopped the workforce exodus. Within two years of its construction, the East German economy had stabilised. The Second Five-Year Plan (1956-60) had been a disaster; the Seven-Year Plan (1959-65) had been abandoned in 1963. The New Economic System (NES), introduced in 1963, was a partial liberalisation that gave state enterprises greater autonomy in pricing and production decisions and incentivised efficiency. Between 1961 and 1970 East German industrial output approximately doubled. By the early 1970s the country had achieved a standard of living that was — by Eastern Bloc standards — quite respectable. It had become, depending on which statistics one trusted, the tenth or twelfth largest industrial economy in the world.
The relative success had three causes. First, the workforce that the wall had retained was, on average, well educated, well disciplined, and committed to the tradition of careful German craftsmanship. Second, the planned economy could direct resources efficiently when it had clear goals and competent managers. Third, much of the country's industrial base was geared toward export to the Soviet bloc — particularly to the Soviet Union itself, which absorbed substantial amounts of East German machine tools, optical equipment, ships, and consumer goods on barter terms favourable to the GDR.
The Olympics and international recognition
East Germany's most visible achievement of the 1960s was in sport. The country, with a population of 17 million, produced Olympic medallists at a per capita rate higher than any other country in history. At the 1968 Mexico City games the GDR won 25 medals (9 gold). At Munich in 1972 it won 66 medals (20 gold), finishing third in the medal table behind the Soviet Union and the United States. At Montreal in 1976 it won 90 medals (40 gold), finishing second. The performance was the result of a deliberate state programme of identifying athletically gifted children at age six, channelling them into specialised sports schools (Kinder- und Jugendsportschulen, KJS), and providing them with the most scientific training regimen in the world.
It was also, as later trials would establish, the result of one of the most systematic state doping programmes in sports history. The Staatsplanthema 14.25 ("State Plan Theme 14.25"), conducted from 1974 onwards, administered anabolic steroids — particularly the chemical Turinabol — to several thousand East German athletes, many of them children. The medical consequences for the athletes — particularly the women, who suffered virilisation, infertility, and a range of long-term health problems — are still being litigated in German courts. The programme is one of the things East Germany cannot, in any sensible reading, be exonerated from.
Cultural opening, with limits
The 1960s also saw a partial cultural opening. The state, under Ulbricht's slogan "Socialism in colour," began to invest more heavily in consumer goods, in modern architecture, and in cultural production. The Karl-Marx-Allee — the broad ceremonial avenue running east from Alexanderplatz, lined with neo-classical residential blocks in the Stalinist "wedding-cake" style — was completed in 1964. The Berlin Fernsehturm (TV Tower) at Alexanderplatz, 368 metres tall, was completed in 1969 and would for the next twenty years be the tallest structure in Germany. The Palace of the Republic, built on the site of the demolished Berlin Stadtschloss between 1973 and 1976, would become the seat of the East German parliament (Volkskammer) and a popular cultural venue.
Literature flourished, within limits. Christa Wolf published Divided Heaven in 1963 — a novel about a young East German woman whose lover defects to the West, told with surprising honesty about the costs of division. Anna Seghers, the country's most internationally famous writer, was still active. The Leipzig book fair was held every spring. A subsidised cinema produced about thirty feature films a year, some of which (Konrad Wolf's I Was Nineteen, 1968; Frank Beyer's Jacob the Liar, 1975) were genuinely important works. Songwriters like Wolf Biermann pushed the boundaries of state tolerance, until he was eventually expelled in 1976.
Ulbricht's removal
By the late 1960s Ulbricht — now in his late seventies — had become, in Moscow's view, an embarrassment. He had begun to fancy himself as a theorist of socialism, publishing essays that suggested East Germany was developing distinctive forms of socialism that did not require Soviet tutelage. He had quarrelled with Brezhnev. He had opposed the Soviet-led 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia (in private — in public he had supported it). He had begun to advocate, against Moscow's wishes, a measured opening to West Germany under Willy Brandt's new Ostpolitik.
In May 1971 Brezhnev forced Ulbricht's resignation. The new General Secretary was Erich Honecker, a former Saarland communist who had spent the Nazi years in prison and had risen through the SED youth organisation. He was fifty-eight years old. He would run East Germany for the next eighteen years.
To his era we now turn.
End of Chapter III