A state that owns every publisher, theatre, gallery, orchestra, newspaper and printing press has an unusual relationship with its artists: it cannot ignore them, because it employs them, and it cannot quite destroy them, because it needs them for legitimacy at home and prestige abroad.
The GDR took culture seriously to a degree that is difficult to convey now. It subsidised theatre and publishing lavishly, printed poetry in editions of tens of thousands, and treated a novel as a political event. The consequence was that dissent, when it came, came through culture and through the one institution the state had never managed to absorb.
The writers
The founding generation came back from exile as convinced communists — Brecht, Anna Seghers, Arnold Zweig, Stefan Heym — and their presence gave the new state a moral authority in the arts that West Germany, full of people with compromised pasts, could not match. Brecht got the Berliner Ensemble and a theatre, and stayed carefully ambiguous about the events of June 1953, in a poem suggesting the government dissolve the people and elect another that he did not publish in his lifetime.
The generation after them produced the real literature. Christa Wolf's Der geteilte Himmel (1963) took the division of Germany as a personal catastrophe and was published; her Nachdenken über Christa T. (1968) was effectively suppressed. Heiner Müller's plays were banned and staged by turns. Ulrich Plenzdorf's Die neuen Leiden des jungen W. (1972) put a Salinger-reading dropout on the East German stage and became a sensation.
The system was not simple censorship but negotiation. A manuscript went to the publisher, then to the Ministry of Culture for a print permit, and the argument that followed could last years and could be won. Writers learned to encode, and readers learned to decode, and an entire literary culture ran on a shared understanding of what a sentence was actually saying. Wolf's own position remains contested: a critic of the state from within it, she was found after 1989 to have been briefly an informal Stasi collaborator in the late 1950s, and was extensively attacked for not having said so earlier.
Biermann
The rupture came on the 16th of November 1976. Wolf Biermann, a singer and poet who had moved from Hamburg to the East as a convinced communist in 1953 and had been banned from performing since 1965, was permitted to tour West Germany — and while he was there, the Politburo revoked his citizenship and refused to let him back.
The response was unprecedented. Twelve leading writers, including Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Sarah Kirsch, Volker Braun and Jurek Becker, signed an open letter of protest and gave it to Western agencies. Over a hundred more signed within days. The state responded with expulsions from the writers' union, publication bans and pressure to emigrate, and over the following years a part of the GDR's literary and musical talent left — Kirsch, Becker, Reiner Kunze, Manfred Krug, Nina Hagen and many others.
The significance is that the bargain broke. Until 1976 a critical writer could tell himself he was improving socialism from inside it; after Biermann that position was much harder to hold, and the cultural intelligentsia's loyalty, which the state had spent twenty-five years cultivating, was gone. The people who organised the opposition in the 1980s came from this milieu.
Biermann sang in Leipzig again in December 1989, three weeks after the Wall opened.
The church
The Protestant church was the only large institution in the GDR that the state never controlled, and everything that happened in 1989 happened through it.
The relationship was formalised in 1978, when Honecker met the church leadership and agreed a formula — the church within socialism, neither against it nor merely alongside it — which gave the churches legal space, access to Western funding, and their own printing under church imprint, which was exempt from state censorship.
Into that space moved everything the state would not permit elsewhere: the independent peace movement, which adopted the Schwerter zu Pflugscharen emblem in 1980 — swords into ploughshares, from a Soviet sculpture at the United Nations, which made it awkward to ban — the environmental groups documenting the catastrophic pollution of Bitterfeld and the lignite districts, the human rights circles, and the conscientious objectors who served as unarmed construction soldiers.
The Nikolaikirche in Leipzig held Monday peace prayers from 1982. In September and October 1989 the congregations spilled into the square outside, and the demonstrations that followed grew from a few thousand to 70,000 on the 9th of October and several hundred thousand by the end of the month. The security forces were deployed and did not fire. Pastor Christian Führer's later remark — that the state was prepared for everything except candles and prayers — is a slogan, and on the 9th of October it was very nearly literal.
Sport, and the pills
No small country has ever won so many medals. At Montreal in 1976 the GDR, with a population of under seventeen million, took 40 golds to West Germany's 10 and finished second to the Soviet Union; at Seoul in 1988 it finished second again, ahead of the United States.
It was a deliberate programme of state prestige. Children were selected at eight or nine through school screening, sent to the sports schools of the Kinder- und Jugendsportschulen system, and trained full-time under a structure that was properly funded and genuinely expert. A good deal of GDR sports science was real and was adopted everywhere afterwards.
And from 1974 it was systematically combined with doping. State Plan 14.25 authorised the administration of Oral-Turinabol, an anabolic steroid, to athletes across the programme — including minors, generally without their knowledge, often described to them as vitamins. Perhaps ten thousand athletes were involved. The consequences documented since include liver damage, cardiac disease, infertility, gynaecological injury, virilisation, and children born with disabilities; a support association for the victims has been running compensation claims for thirty years.
The trials in the 1990s convicted doctors and officials, mostly with suspended sentences. The medals have not been reallocated. It is the clearest case in the volume of a genuine achievement that cannot be separated from the harm done to produce it — which is, in a smaller compass, the argument about the whole country.
End of Chapter VI