̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - West Germany

Opinion: Skinnydipping, spies and shortages: Deutschland 83 brilliantly evokes life in East Germany

Anonymous — Thu, 21 Jan 2016 16:29:02 +0000

SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for early episodes of Deutschland 83

One of the first things that happens in the first episode of Deutschland 83, the riveting German Cold War spy drama on Channel 4, is that Lenora Rauch – the brilliant, manipulative and obviously high-ranking Stasi officer stationed in West Germany – rushes home to East Berlin. After watching Reagan’s “Evil Empire” speech on West German television, she is convinced that NATO is preparing for an imminent nuclear attack. She calls her boss, switches off the telly and leaves her apartment.

But why on earth would she take a jar of freeze-dried coffee with her? Here is a bit of realism: many consumer goods, especially “luxury” items such as coffee, chocolate, trainers and VCRs were in desperately short supply in the East, available only at huge expense in the specialised “Intershop”, “Delikat” or “Exquisit” outlets.

This control of supply in turn reflected another desperate shortage: hard currency. ̽��ֱ��GDR, while well off in the context of the Eastern bloc, was perennially skinned for convertible (Western) currency and resorted to all manner of tricks and blackmail to get its hands on it.

West Germans could purchase gifts, for example, from cassette recorders to prefab houses, for relatives in the East or friends using the Genex catalogue, a state monopoly operating through a Swiss intermediary. In Deutschland 83, it is poignant that Lenora takes the precious coffee not to her boss (as per usual), but to her sister. She needs it to soften the blow of poaching her border guard son Martin for a crucial Stasi mission in the West.

̽��ֱ��theme of consumer goods shortage is carried through consistently, with an eye for historical detail and a tongue in cheek. Martin Rauch infiltrates the FRG as an army officer called Moritz Stamm and is overwhelmed by the choice of fresh produce in a West German supermarket and nonplussed in an upmarket restaurant when the waitress asks him what kind of steak he would like – “From the cow”, he replies. So full points for realism on consumer goods and their potential leverage.

Less realistic is the scene in which Martin, working as a border guard prior to his recruitment by the Stasi, accosts two would-be smugglers. Together with a colleague, he taunts them for their individualism, greed, and naivety: did they really think they’d get away with it? So far, so plausible – but then he lets them go, squirrels away the contraband, winks at his colleague and they share a laugh.

In reality, a border guard conscript such as Martin would scarcely have taken such risks. Who is to say that his colleague, for all the playful elbow-jabbing, is not reporting back to their superior, or worse, the Stasi? In a country of 16m people there were over 90,000 permanent Ministry of State Security employees (admittedly including spies in foreign lands, cleaners, clerical staff etc – but still a large number) and a staggering 180,000 Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter – unofficial collaborators or informants, such as the unfortunate actress wife of the dissident author in Das Leben der Anderen ( ̽��ֱ��Lives of Others)

In any case, the playfulness, complicity and laxity of the two border guards in letting off the two “parasites” is deeply misleading. In reality the smugglers would probably have faced prison, possibly re-education and certainly official ostracism – even though all they carried was an edition of Shakespeare and one of Marx.

Trabants and tatty clothes

In terms of sets and props, production values trump the likely reality of the clothes, fittings, dwellings etc. Sure, the shape of the beer bottles, the cut of clothes and the penchant for skinnydipping are all well researched, but in the TV series, it all looks rather stylish. Clothes fit and interiors are well put together – if occasionally odd or austere. ̽��ֱ��GDR, however, was a place where everything from nails to shirts, paint to nappies, curtains to cars could be hard to come by.

There was an 18-year waiting list for a Trabant in East Germany. Fsopolonezcaro via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

̽��ֱ��waiting list for a Trabant, a two-stroke, minuscule car produced virtually unchanged from the 1950s to the 1980s, was 18 years; the price prohibitive. People wore horrible spectacles (there were only a handful of models to choose from), ill-fitting clothes – and many appeared in Christmas and wedding photographs wearing the same outfit year after year.

But if the GDR of Deutschland 83 appears less run-down and shabby than it really was, the same is true of Mad Men’s 1960s Manhattan – and if the Elastoplast glossiness makes us more likely to take in this engrossing Cold War spyfest, who cares? For while the plot takes some liberties, it faithfully sticks to the overall facts, the poetic truth, of GDR life.

That Martin has no idea of his father’s identity or whereabouts is realistic – single parenthood was normal, carried no stigma and could count on comparatively generous state support. That Martin would know the score of the West German football cup final is also realistic – most GDR citizens had access to West German TV and watched it despite official strictures not to do so. ̽��ֱ��protocol of a regional committee of the ruling Socialist Unity Party that we teach as part of our course on the reconstruction of Germany notes that moving the regular meeting slot is all but inevitable, as otherwise members would leave “in order to catch the seven o’clock news on West German television”.

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Other examples of realism abound. That advanced medication like the immunosuppressant crucial to Martin’s mother’s kidney transplant would be hard to get by (partly because its purchase diminished hard currency reserves)? Realistic. That such treatment was de facto the privilege of the elites in the “state of the workers and peasants”? Realistic. That, partly as a consequence of such perks, the Stasi attracted some of the best and brightest? Realistic. Stasi officers such as Lenora or her boss, the awesomely named Schweppenstette, could well have been razor sharp, flexible, if necessary charming and generally very good at their jobs.

Young East German border guard Martin Rauch is coerced into spying for the Stasi. Channel 4

That they rode roughshod over the private lives of citizens? Realistic, too. In an understated but chilling scene, Lenora, Schweppenstette and a sidekick come to the Rauch family home to interview and recruit Martin. They don’t so much as knock. Martin is not awake, but summoned to the kitchen in his pyjamas. ̽��ֱ��nonchalance of this invasion and its air of brusque, unquestioning and unquestioned power conveys a GDR reality, just as the fact that Lenora will exploit family ties for her political ends does. Of course the TV series presents a condensed, dramatised account. But ideology did trump family loyalty, in official policy and often enough in the reality of GDR citizens.

Fond memories

It is less paradoxical than it may seem that, nonetheless, most people were happy in the GDR, most of the time. This, too, Deutschland 83 gets right. It was not just the stability and social security, nor the fact that the state provided public goods free of charge that inspired such identification and for some even patriotism.

As long as you heeded the rules, which for the majority of Germans under Communist rule meant no conscious blinkering, more a routine of moving within the parameters set by the state, there was no particular reason not to be happy. In the GDR, people made friends, fell in love, argued with their parents, fretted about wedding arrangements, moved to a different city to study, had favourite movies and songs.

That much of this normalcy was questioned and to an extent invalidated by reunification inspired a good deal of the longing that Germans call “Ostalgie”. And that Westerners frowned upon such regrets – “But … it was a dictatorship!” – only cemented it. Ossis didn’t hanker after the Stasi – how could they? – but they did mourn the loss of the everyday GDR that framed their lives and which reunification had swept away, from the layout of traffic signs to the old brands of chocolate and gherkin.

Even after the decommissioning, to all intents and purposes, of the Sonderweg thesis, the Third Reich remains the reference point of German history, implicitly or explicitly. While that is warranted, it has some problematic side effects, not least that in comparison to the Holocaust and Hitler, almost any other kind of state crime looks relatively benign and explicable.

It is here that Deutschland 83 seems to me particularly successful: it is even-handed and almost sympathetic in suggesting that the GDR’s intrusive and cynical policies, vis-à-vis the West and its own citizens, were motivated by the perceived threat of nuclear annihilation.

At the same time, it makes crystal clear that the operation of a successful secret intelligence network of the kind that places and directs Martin Rauch depends on exploiting precisely the kind of liberties and legal safeguards that the GDR denied its own citizens, or routinely flaunted. There are many lessons in that, not least concerning our own attitudes to the reach of security organisations that we rely on, but whose remit we should not renege on monitoring.

Henning Grunwald, Lecturer in History, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Henning Grunwald (Faculty of History) discusses how accurate the representation of life in Cold War era East Germany is in Channel 4 drama Deutschland 83.

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̽��ֱ��Wall behind the Reichstag, (East) Berlin, Germany (1989/312)

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̽��ֱ��speech that never was – Thatcher papers for 1984 open to the public

sjr81 — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 16:32:52 +0000

Draft pages of her intended speech – grabbed from the wreckage of the Grand Hotel following the attack on the Prime Minister on October 12, 1984 – detail how Thatcher planned to warn the country from the podium of the Conservative Party Conference that Britain faced ‘an insurrection’.

̽��ֱ��‘speech that never was’ went on to suggest that the Labour Party was the ‘natural home’ of forces whose ambition was to tear the country apart ‘by an extension of the calculated chaos planned for the mining industry by a handful of trained Marxists and their fellow travellers’.

Her own handwritten notes for the speech, released today by the Churchill Archives Centre (www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives) and online at the Margaret Thatcher Foundation website (www.margaretthatcher.org ), suggest plans to link what she regarded as militant mining communities to General Galtieri – the Argentinian dictator defeated during the Falklands War of 1982. ̽��ֱ��note, released for the first time, reads: “Since Office. Enemy without – beaten him & resolute strong in defence. Enemy within – Miners’ leaders…Liverpool and some local authorities – just as dangerous…in a way more difficult to fight…just as dangerous to liberty.”

Chris Collins from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, the only historian to date to have had unrestricted access to the papers, said: “It was a speech which would have been remembered as controversial and would have eclipsed the ‘enemy within’ speech (delivered in private to the backbench 1922 Committee) Indeed it was intended to do that.

“There’s a certain irony that an act of great violence actually softened this speech. In the end, the original speech was torn up and later taped back together, probably by Thatcher herself, who was a dab hand with Sellotape.”

Among the other 40,000 papers being released online and at Churchill College, are documents which reveal the Prime Minister’s deep sense of foreboding about her fate at the hands of the Conservative Party she ruled, prophesising events of seven years later when she would be forced to resign as PM.

She told her secretary John Coles that: “My party won’t want me to lead them into the next election – and I don’t blame them.” Collins said he was amazed to find Mrs Thatcher imagining her own downfall just days after the 1983 General Election victory. ̽��ֱ��account, written when Coles left Number 10 in June 1984, also reveals that Thatcher’s doubts ran in parallel to a ‘decline in her energy’ after the election win.

More light-hearted pages from the 1984 archive reveal the prickly saga of a rose called Margaret, detailing – in a scene that could have been lifted straight from the scripts of Yes Prime Minister – how an innocent flower sparked a potential diplomatic incident between West Germany and Japan.

̽��ֱ��drama began in innocent enough fashion when a West German horticultural association asked for permission to name a rose after Margaret Thatcher, delighting officials in Whitehall wishing to perhaps promote a softer side to the ‘Iron Lady’.

However, the Prime Minister had forgotten an agreement of six years earlier, signed while Leader of the Opposition, that had given a Japanese firm license to grow the original ‘Margaret Thatcher Rose’.

̽��ֱ��clearly wounded Japanese firm wrote to the PM’s office and the Whitehall machine acted swiftly to pour oil on troubled diplomatic waters. ̽��ֱ��incident provoked many pages of notes between Whitehall and Foreign Office officials. In the end, it took a letter from private secretary Charles Powell to draw matters to a close. His reassuring tones of diplomacy to the slighted Japanese company headed off any threats of legal action and potential embarrassment to the Thatcher office.

Andrew Riley, Archivist of the papers at the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “This release of papers gives us a vivid insight into life at Downing Street and into Mrs Thatcher’s state of mind during a very difficult year, both personally and politically.

“ ̽��ֱ��papers provide fresh insights into the often bitter coal strike of 1984, as well as newly released materials on the impact and aftermath of the Brighton bomb.”

Papers opened to the public today reveal how the Brighton bombing stopped Margaret Thatcher from widening her infamous ‘enemy within’ rhetoric to include not only the striking miners but also the wider Labour movement and Party.

It was a speech which would have eclipsed the ‘enemy within’ speech.

Chris Collins

Churchill Archives Centre

A Sellotaped page from the speech that never was. Homepage image: Miner's strike, 1984 by Nick Sarebi (CC: Att)

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page. For image rights, please see the credits associated with each individual image.

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