East Germany and the Frontiers of Power

Introduction 3for gatekeepers. The dying Roman Empire tried to tackle it by tying peasants tothe land by serfdom. Later, in the age of mercantilism and absolutism, as the NewWorld threatened to drain the Old, states further regulated subjects’ movements,legislating against the emigration of skilled artisans. By the late eighteenth centurypassports were obligatory to enter European countries, and by 1914 to leavethem too.⁹ Yet Enlightenment theorists such as Carl Ferdinand Hommel warned‘against having to make a prison of the state ...The very proscription againstventuring outside the land renders the inhabitants all the greedier to leave theirfatherland and serves only as a warning to foreigners not to settle within it’.¹⁰Natural patriotism would instead furnish the necessary ties. Even in the age ofsocial Darwinism between nation-states, the intellectual father of Lebensraum,the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel, still conceptualized state frontiers asfluid and organic, filtering membranes to keep the body politic ‘healthy’.¹¹Few governments had contemplated blocking this interface completely, untilthe advent of state communism. From 1919 Soviet travel abroad required policepermission, and during the 1920s a stringent border regime operated undersecret police control.¹² Border violators faced up to three years’ imprisonment,or treason charges if heading for capitalist states. In 1932 the USSR evenintroduced an internal passport system. It was little surprise, therefore, when in1948 Russia voted against freedom of movement as an automatic human rightunder the United Nations’ convention.¹³ Nor was the United States immunefrom temptations to control citizens’ movements, albeit more selectively, forinstance in the Internal Security Act of 1950. But it was East Germany thatattacked freedom of movement most systematically. The 1963 UN special reporton emigration singled out the ‘Chinese wall’ in Berlin as the worst offender inmodern-day history: ‘whereas Governments once erected walls to keep foreignersfrom entering a country, today walls are built—both figuratively and literally—tokeep nationals hemmed in’.¹⁴ Indeed, the GDR’s 1968 constitution abolishedArticle 10’s previous right of emigration, guaranteeing freedom of travel only‘within the state territory’.¹⁵ The Berlin Wall had become the wall of walls,a reductio ad absurdam of the modern state’s obsessive desire to regulate itsinterior.Yet not all frontiers are visible. Our language is suffused with bordermetaphors reflecting power structures and no-go areas every bit as real as⁹ John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999), 21–121.¹⁰ Cited in Rolf Henrich, Der vormundschaftliche Staat: Vom Versagen des real existierendenSozialismus (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1989), 175.¹¹ John Prescott, Boundaries and Frontiers (London: Croom Helm, 1978), 15–16.¹² Dowty, Closed Borders, 69–70. ¹³ Ibid., 112.¹⁴ JoséD.Inglés, Study of Discrimination in Respect of the Right of Everyone to Leave any Country,including his Own, and to Return to his Country (New York: United Nations, 1963), 4 and 58.¹⁵ J. K. A. Thomaneck and James Mellis (eds), Politics, Society and Government in the GermanDemocratic Republic: Basic Documents (Oxford: Berg, 1989), 50–67.