VG

What I want to make very clear, while addressing criticisms of the GDR, is that it was under terrible pressure from the very start. This pressure came from two sides. It came from the West but also from the Soviet Union. Of course, it was really only thanks to the USSR that German antifascists were able to throw out the Nazis and the capitalists, which they couldn’t have done on their own. And in the postwar period, since most had been in prison or in exile, they had no power — even if they had a moral claim to govern — so they needed the Soviets to lift them to office. But the USSR also put its own demands on the GDR and in many ways limited its potential.

There were also economic factors that placed an increasing strain on the state. The GDR had a leading machine tools industry, but it struggled to keep up with the development of electronics from countries like Japan and the United States. The Soviet Union had its own focuses and couldn’t provide as much support as the GDR would have needed, but of course, the political situation also limited its ability to import from the West. So this tiny country had to provide all its own research and development in electronics in order to keep up with international standards.

There was a similar situation for military technology. The GDR’s leaders felt they needed to keep up with the West, and it cost them greatly.

When Erich Honecker took over as SED party secretary in 1971, one of his main promises was to build 3.5 million homes by 1990. By 1987 they had built around one million, which was no small feat, but was not on pace as promised, and it cost the state a lot of money.

The cost of these different areas of state investment meant investment in consumer goods was lacking, and a lot of what the GDR did produce was sold to the West to make up for the shortage of funds and Western currency. It couldn’t keep up.

The pressures that resulted from this economic situation led to people’s growing dissatisfaction with their living conditions and an increasing envy of the West. In turn, the people’s dissatisfaction led to growing concerns, within the government, that people would try to leave, and it responded by increasing the reach of the Stasi.

The repression a state enacts is related to the threat it perceives, and the amount of repression people are willing to put up with is directly related to their level of satisfaction. If people are satisfied, the state has no need to worry about dissent since complaints are unlikely to stick. When the dissatisfaction was on the rise, they started to increase repression, making the situation even more unpleasant and adding to the pressure on the GDR’s legitimacy. This created a negative spiral which was hard to reverse. People were pacified somewhat by the improved living conditions of the 1970s and early 1980s, but after 1985 things began to stagnate, largely because of the economic issues I just mentioned.