Radio GDR Podcast: Attila the Stockbroker

In my latest contribution to the Radio GDR podcast, I had a chance to speak with Attila the Stockbroker, an English poet, musician and songwriter with roots in the punk movement and socialist politics. During his forty year career as independent artist, Attila has produced numerous albums and books and performed more than 3,800 shows including many in the GDR and, after unification, eastern Germany.

In this conversation, Attila vividly recalls his visits to the East, the people whom he met there and aspects of the Workers and Peasants State which were an inspiration and other which left him disgusted.

You can hear our chat via your preferred pod platform or by visiting the new Radio GDR website at: https://radiogdr.libsyn.com/attila-the-stockbroker.

Radio GDR Podcast: The Human Rights Dictatorship

© Estate Sibylle Bergemann, OSTKREUZ; Courtesy Loock Galerie, Berlin

From an outside perspective, it would seem that human rights would be an idea that the East German regime would have had great difficulty reconciling itself with. However, in a conversation I had with Dr. Ned Richardson-Little for the Radio GDR podcast, the author of The Human Rights Dictatorship: Socialism, Global Solidarity, and Revolution in East Germany explained how the ruling SED Party fostered the development of a concept of human rights which was compatible with the socialist regime’s domestic and international aims and rejected a liberal individualist understandings of such rights.

Hear how human rights evolved within SED from a subject the Party was uncomfortable with to one which, for an extended period of time, played a key role in helping secure support for the socialist project in the GDR. He also unpacks how human rights were understood within the population and the role human rights discourses played in bringing down ‘real existing socialism’ in 1989.

Check out the episode by clicking here.

Dr. Ned Richardson-Little is a Freigeist Fellow at Universität Erfurt, Germany, where he leads a project on international crime and globalization. Some of you may have encountered him on Twitter @HistoryNed handle or his blog “Superfluous Answers to Necessary Questions”

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Radio GDR Podcast: Victor Grossman on why the GDR failed

Victor Grossman and I on Berlin’s Karl-Marx-Allee, April 2023

Here it is, the much delayed, long-anticipated second part of my interview with Victor Grossman for the Radio GDR podcast.

Victor is an American Communist who defected to the East Bloc at the height of the “Red Scare” in 1952. Once on the other side of the Iron Curtain, he found himself in the GDR, a country that would be his home until it ceased to exist in 1990. While a strong supporter of “the socialist project”, Grossman is clear-eyed about the GDR, its achievements and shortcomings.

In our first chat, Victor explored the achievements of the GDR.

This time, he turned his attentions to the failings of ‘real-existing socialism’ and it made for a fascinating conversation. You can listen to this episode, click here.

Victor is a truly interesting man and if you want to learn more about him and his remarkable life, I can heartily recommend both his books: A Socialist Defector: From Harvard to Karl-Marx-Allee and Crossing The River: A Memoir of the American Left, the Cold War and Life in East Germany.

Field Trip: Berlin / Friedrichshain

This past May, I was able to visit Berlin and spent part of my time there exploring the area around People’s Park Friedrichshain and what was Lenin Square. This GDR-era still resonates strongly in this part of the former East Berlin, so join me as I go in search of these sites.

Radio GDR Podcast: Christa Wolf’s “They Divided The Sky”

I was recently able to sit down with Dr. Luise von Flotow, a professor in the University of Ottawa’s School of Translation and Interpretation, to discuss They Divided The Sky her excellent English language translation of GDR author Christa Wolf’s 1963 novel Der geteilte Himmel. Our chat is now online through Radio GDR, the English-language podcast dedicated to all things East German and you can find it here: https://radiogdr.com/they-divided-the-sky-christa-wolf-episode-12/ 

Wolf’s novel is great place for those looking to get a sense of everyday life in the GDR during the “Construction Years” of the late 1950s and early 1960s and Dr. von Flotow was able to share some interesting insight into the work, its translation history and why it remains a vital piece of GDR culture.

Marzahn: The Pros and (All The Mod) Cons

Anyone with an interest in the GDR quickly encounters mention of Marzahn, a massive housing estate located on the northeastern edge of the East German capital Berlin. Made up of approximately 60,000 prefabricated concrete apartment units housed largely in high rise tower blocks, Marzahn was built over approximately fifteen years beginning in the mid-1970s to provide modern housing options for tens of thousands of East Berliners. Supporters of the socialist system saw the district as concrete evidence (I couldn’t resist!) of the state’s commitments to its citizens’ welfare and a tangible example of what the socialism could achieve. For critics, however, Marzahn’s seemingly endless blocks of anonymous, monotonous apartment blocks recalled the sort of dystopian world conjured up George Orwell in his totalitarian critique 1984.

While I didn’t get to Marzahn during the GDR era, I’ve had the chance to visit a view times over the past twenty years or so and been able to see first hand some of the remarkable changes that it has undergone since reunification in 1990. Before turning to my impressions, however, allow me to present a brief history of the district.

Marzahn: Heaven or Hell?

Berlin – Marzahn; This postcard presents Marzahn, an Berlin housing estate and the largest of its kind in the GDR (Bild und Heimat, 1989).

Marzahn by night, December 1985 (photo: Bundesarchiv 183 1985-1219-021)

Oberhof: The GDR’s Socialist Winter Paradise

It must be the grip that winter has had on us here in Toronto, but I recently began to troll around for a seasonally appropriate theme to post on. I quickly decided to write on Oberhof, a small town in the upper reaches of the Thüringian Forest which has achieved a certain profile as a winter sport site. I’d encountered Oberhof in my reading in its role as the training headquarters for many of the GDR’s elite winter sport athletes including its bobsledders, lugers, cross-country skiers, biathletes and ski jumpers, but I had heard that it was a beloved holiday destination as well. However, when I started digging, I was amazed to find the extent to which the history of this small town distilled so many of the developments which characterized GDR-era.

Oberhof in 1980 – clockwise from top left: Rennsteig Hotel, View of Hotel Panorama, Luisensitz Holiday House, View from Rennsteig and “Fritz Heckert” Holiday Hotel.

Oberhof found its way on to the radar of the East German leadership even before the state itself was founded. This was due in large part to the fact that one of the leader’s of Socialist Unity Party (SED), Walter Ulbricht, had come to know Oberhof during the Weimar period when he had led the German Communist Party in the region. A dedicated exerciser, Ulbricht particularly enjoyed hiking and skiing the area’s trails. When authorities decided to host a Winter Sport Championships in the Soviet Zone of Occupation in January of 1949, Oberhof was selected to host the event, the success of which apparently demonstrated to Ulbricht how sport might be instrumentalized as a means of cementing his and the SED’s popularity.

Hieu L.: A Foreigner Worker’s Life in the GDR, Pt. 1

In my former job as the Coordinator of the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at Toronto’s York University I supervised a number of German students in Canada on exchange who were assigned to our office as student assistants. For the first few years I was at York, the students I worked with were all white, had “German” family names and could trace their connection to Germany back over many, many generations. But in more recent years this began to change and our German students often came with family names betraying a variety of ethnic and cultural heritages. I greeted this development as a reflection of the fact that the German academy had begun – finally – to reflect the multicultural reality of the society around it.

That said, I was more than a little surprised when one year the C.V. belonging to our new German student bore a distinctly Vietnamese name. I immediately wondered whether Minh L. was from the family of a former East German guest worker as this was the provenance of many people of Vietnamese background in the united Germany. Reading on, the dates and locations suggested that this might be the case.

Vietnamese guest workers from “Banner of Peace” shoe factory march in the 1988 May Day parade in Weissenfels (photo: courtesy of Minh and Diu L.).

However, this remarkable aspect was quickly overshadowed by an entry in the C.V. which showed that from 1993 to 1999, Minh had attended elementary school in that most notorious of eastern German towns, Hoyerswerda! (For more on Hoy, click here for my earlier post on this subject) This was only two short years after German authorities had caved to several days of anti-foreigner pogroms by neo-Nazis and their sympathizers and removed all former-GDR guests workers and refugee seekers from the town. Neo-Nazis subsequently declared Hoy a “national liberated zone” (German: national befreite Zone) and the town became synonymous with the wave of xenophobia and violence that surfaced in the early years after German unification.

The mind boggled.

“You had to think on two tracks”: One family’s survival strategy within GDR state socialism

Last year while searching eBay for potential new acquisitions to my collection of GDR ephemera, I came across some used school notebooks, a rather unusual find but one which had me excited as I’m always on the lookout for items which have a clear personal angle. When they arrived, I discovered that the notebooks were from 1970 and had belonged to a grade 1 girl with the rather distinctive name of Kordula Striepecke. While the notebooks for her mathematics and German class were unrevealing, young Kordula’s notebook for Heimatkunde, a sort of introduction to civics, told a rather interesting story.

Kordula Striepecke’s notebook from grade one Heimatkunde, or introductory civics (photo: Jo Zarth)

International Workers’ Day, May 1st, as subject of a dictation (photo: Jo Zarth).

A picture of a typical GDR prefab apartment block with Soviet and East German flags festooning the balconies as was the practice on May 1st and the Republic Day (October 7th) (photo: author).

Illustration from Kordula’s Heimatkunde notebook; it accompanied a dictation on spring (photo: author)

Dictation on Vladimir Lenin (photo: Jo Zarth).

This East German Life: A Different Johanna Goldberg, Pt. 3

This post completes a series of entries on the life of Dr. Johanna Goldberg, a physician from the eastern German city of Schwedt. It is based on an autobiography written by Dr. Goldberg (Vom Prügelkind zur Ärztin/From Whipping Boy to Doctor) and a number of email exchanges I’ve had with her over the past year. I’ve chosen to present this biography in considerable detail as it illustrates a number of aspects of East German life very well.

For the first part of her biography, click here. You’ll find the second part here.

When last heard from Johanna, she had just graduated from medical school at Jena’s Friedrich Schiller University . . .

Working Life – Things Aren’t So Bad (Berka)

Central Clinic in Bad Berka where Johanna G. pursued her specialist training from 1961-1969 (photo: Tnemsoni, Wikicommons)

After her husband’s academic plans were derailed by his recurring TB, he decided to complete an apprenticeship program as a caregiver at a clinic in Bad Berka which specialized in treating severe TB cases. In order to be with her husband, Johanna decided to apply to complete training as a lung specialist at this same clinic. Once accepted here, Goldberg quickly distinguished herself and was invited by the Senior Doctor to complete a PhD qualification under his supervision. During the nine years the couple spent in Bad Berka, Goldberg completed both her specialists’ training and her PhD studies. And were that not enough, she also managed to bring into the world the couple’s first child, a son.