East Germany and the Frontiers of Power

Introduction 7which deals with it as a series of sensational escape stories.³¹ Such approaches candegenerate into minutiae, like those obsessively recorded by the photographeranti-hero of one Wall novel who:spent too long on technical views of the barrier, cinder-block walls, layers of concreteslabs, lines of barbed wire on struts, walled-up windows in border houses, guards onthree-storey towers, with dogs in the field of fire. He tried for wire nets on roof ridges,sightscreens, shooting stands, because what attracted him about this border was howmuch more multifaceted and striking things looked when a city was split in two . . .³²The author, Uwe Johnson, who himself had fled the GDR, was clearly makinga point about the western media’s selective vision. But I would suggest thatsomething similar has been happening with historical writing on Germany’sdivision. Twenty years after its demise, we often cannot see the Wall for thebricks.At the other extreme, however, ‘anti-totalitarians’ have treated the Wall as ametonym for a reductionist, black-and-white stereotyping of the GDR, and thusa foil for greater historical complexity. One volume on state and society in EastGermany punningly titled itself The Limits of Dictatorship.³³ According to itseditors, however, GDR history was ‘more than the history of an untrammelleddictatorship protected by a border of concrete and barbed wire’.³⁴ There werehistorical legacies and collective mentalities, as well as the sheer chaos of theearly postwar years to consider. The economy also placed severe constraints onparty rule. External limitations in the guise of the Soviet Union meant that EastGerman leaders were not masters of their own destiny. Even after August 1961,‘The Wall remained a simultaneous monument to power and impotence’.³⁵ Theinfluential American historian Charles Maier has also advocated a broader view:‘The Wall at the frontier had made possible all the walls within; the GDR hadbeen a regime of walls, the most effective being those within its citizens’ heads’.³⁶Even before it fell, GDR dissidents labelled it ‘the tip of the iceberg’ of a moregeneral ‘demarcation syndrome’.³⁷ More recently still, Thomas Lindenberger³¹ Alan Shadrake, The Yellow Pimpernels: Escape Stories of the Berlin Wall (London: Hale, 1974);Anthony Kemp, Escape from Berlin (London: Boxtree, 1987); Bodo Müller, Faszination Freiheit: Diespektakulärsten Fluchtgeschichten (Berlin: Links, 2000); Christopher Hilton, The Wall: The People’sStory (Thrupp: Sutton, 2001).³² Uwe Johnson, Zwei Ansichten (1965; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1992), 140.³³ Richard Bessel and Ralph Jessen (eds), Die Grenzen der Diktatur: Staat und Gesellschaft in derDDR (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996). The German ‘Grenze’ connotes both frontierand limit.³⁴ Ibid., 9. ³⁵ Ibid., 11.³⁶ Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 56.³⁷ Gruppe Absage an Praxis und Prinzip der Abgrenzung, ‘Recht ströme wie Wasser’, citedin Hans-Jürgen Fischbeck, ‘Das Mauersyndrom: die Rückwirkung des Grenzregimes aufdie Bevölkerung der DDR’, in Deutscher Bundestag (ed.), Materialien der Enquete Kommission‘Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland’ (Baden-Baden:Nomos/Suhrkamp, 1995), v/ii: 1188–211; 1190.