LFTVD - Deutschland 83: Homework Research Task

Task: Please research historical, economic and social/cultural context for East Germany in the early 80s? Write up a paragraph for each section and come prepared to share what you've learnt on first day back. 

Consider: What was life like? What did young people do for fun, like, listen to? What was education like? Why was there so much tension and suspicion? Why did people want to escape the East? On the other hand, why did people like and respect the Republic? What was the relationship between the citizens and the government/stasi nearing the end of the cold war? How did they view the West? 

• Life in the 80s:

1. There was a lot of surveillance, and most people lived double lives, in the sense that they learnt early that what you say and do at home is one thing, but what you're allowed to say publicly or in school is quite another.
2. For example, many people watched western television at home, but that's not something you'd explicitly mention at school.
3. Salaries were very low however life-essentials where subsidized and very cheap.
4. As a result, things like bread and rent was affordable, but whenever you needed to buy something at actual world-market-prices it was insanely expensive.
5. "Western" products where popular, books from the west where popular to the point where there'd be waiting-lists for borrowing them, and you'd get in trouble with your classmates if you held onto one for 2 days too long.
6.  Equal rights where good for the time. Most women worked. There was affordable child-care available.
7. Unemployment was non-existent -- but many people where in jobs of questionable use, in short, the state would "invent" work rather than leave people idle.

• Childhood life in East Germany in the 80s:

1. There were no bananas. You could only get them once or twice a year, and you’d only be notified of their availability by word of mouth.

2. You couldn’t buy strawberries from a store. If you wanted them, you had to go and work in the fields picking them for hours. You were allowed to buy a certain portion of the ones you picked.

3. Luxury items were priced way out of proportion to people’s salaries. A black and white TV might cost 10 times a person’s monthly salary; a 200g bag of coffee would cost around $20.

4. If you wanted to buy a car you had to wait years. Like, 10-12 years. So people who turned 16 (although you had to be 18 to drive) would put their orders in to get their mitts on a car when they were in their late 20s.

5. You could only watch one of a few state channels, but radio waves know no walls (well, except maybe lead ones), so those close to the border were able to pick up signals from the West.

6. Every child was part of the Pioneers: Grades 1-4 were Blue Pioneers, 5-7 were Red Pioneers, and grades 8-10 graduated to the Free German Youth (FDJ).

7. Her home had no bathtub or shower, only a sink and a toilet.

• The Berlin Wall:

The Berlin Wall formidably expressed the barriers between Eastern and Western views and culture. Eastern Germany was occupied under the Soviet Union and was communist, while Western Germany thrived under a capitalistic ruling. Large amounts of illegal immigration were going on as Easterners fled through other countries such as Hungary, Austria, and Czechoslovakia to the capitalist Europe and the free world. This prompted the government of East Germany to erect the wall separating the two cultures on August 13, 1961. Berliners were shocked when they woke up one morning and the border between east and west was not just a political boundary but now a physical boundary as well.

Westerners replied in an outcry of their beliefs with things such as graffiti on the wall, something that was not tolerated on the other side. While western Berliners could go up to the wall and touch it, guards prevented eastern Berliners from coming to close to the wall in fear that they were trying to escape.

President Ronald Reagan challenged West Germany and Mikhail Gorbachev in his Bradenburg Gate speech to tear down the wall and unite the two parts of the city into one. Protests in the West against the Soviet Government broke out in September of 1989, at first wanting to get out of the region and then deciding they wanted to stay but they wanted a change.  This demonstration of rebellion was heightened in the Alexanderplatz Demonstration where over half a million gathered on November 4th to protest for a change. The significant date of the fall of the wall was on November 9th, 1989 when at midnight the Communist rulers of East Germany gave the okay for the gates and checkpoints along the wall to be opened for free passage.  The wall was eventually torn down by eastern and western Berliners to physically unite the two halves of the city, with civilians taking hammers to the wall and symbolically climbing the wall to hug people on the other side. East and West Germany reunified on October 3, 1990 to form a single German state.

• The Government:

The “Volkskammer” (the “parliament”) was situated there and of course there was West-Berlin, there other side of the city where you just couldn’t get, no matter how hard you tried. At certain points in time there have been events on the western-side of the wall like concerts (Springsteen I think) so people gathered as nearby as possible and tried to listen.