POLITICS: Germany Remembers its ‘French Revolution’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Jun 16 2003 (IPS) - The world held its breath when Soviet tanks rumbled on to the streets of East Berlin 50 years ago to break up a workers rebellion. Briefly, it seemed that the communist German Democratic Republic could disintegrate into chaos and bloodshed just four years after the workers’ state had been established.

World War II had ended eight years earlier, and much of the communist-run state was still in ruins. East Germany had become the Cold War frontier to the West, with more than 400,000 Russian troops based in the "Soviet Zone" to maintain order and discipline.

What triggered the workers revolt and how important an event historically was it to prove? The appearance of hundreds of Russian tanks on the streets of East Berlin, Magdeburg, Halle and Leipzig had one swift effect: it ended what chances there were of Walter Ulbricht, the much loathed East German "Stalinist" leader being forced to resign.

In the Kremlin, the Soviet leadership decreed that ditching Ulbricht, a dour, uninspiring communist functionary, would be viewed in the East Bloc as admission that communism in the German Democratic Republic had failed – an idea unthinkable in Moscow.

So Ulbricht survived eastern Europe’s first big post-war revolt, in which a million angry workers took to the streets. The bloody saga of Budapest would follow three years later.

Not until almost 20 years later would Ulbricht finally be ousted by another Stalinist hardliner, Erich Honecker, who himself would be deposed by Egon Krenz in the dying months of the Socialist state in October, 1989.

The upheavals around the 1953 strikes are the focus of much attention in reunited Germany today as writers, intellectuals, historians and politicians deal with the historical significance of the event.

Several books coinciding with the anniversary have been written this year, and countless debates, lectures and symposiums organised. On television, several documentary films are dealing with the anniversary, which still manages to arouse controversy.

In the years when the division of Germany and its erstwhile capital still appeared to many to be a temporary one, the revolt had its roots in the growing imposition of communist ideology in Stalinist East Germany. The Church was under pressure, food ration cards had been withdrawn for non-state workers, and forced collectivisation of agriculture had begun.

Then on June 11, 1953, the communist Council of Ministers decided on a ten per cent increase in work hours, which effectively meant a reduction in wages.

Construction workers building new apartment blocks on the Stalin Allee, now Karl-Marx-Allee in east Berlin, downed tools. By June 17 a rash of spontaneous strikes spread across the country.

The East German authorities accused Western agents of stirring up trouble, and RIAS (Radio In The American Sector of Berlin) was accused of "fascist provocations."

Author Stefan Heym, who wrote a book on the 1953 East German uprising ‘Five Days in June’ was at first critical of RIAS, but later accepted he had not known all the facts.

Heym, who died 18 months ago aged 87, states in his book that the German Communist Party (SED) was largely to blame for the events of 1953, claiming that its picture of workers was an "idealised one".

Marianne Birthler, an ex-Green minister argues that while the demonstrations were triggered by a dispute about "work norms", they were also a cry for "free elections, democracy and German unity."

A million people had joined the protests – more than the number that participated in the French Revolution, which had started over a dispute about the price of bread, she said.

Birthler, now a government-appointed commissioner investigating the vast trawl of secret service archives kept on citizens’ lives during the communist era says people are now realising the importance of June 17 in post-war German history.

For decades, she says, East German schoolchildren had been misled about what happened in 1953, and were told it was "a fascist coup attempt." Equally in West Germany, the date had proved "an uncomfortable symbol" for some, after being made a public holiday, and dubbed ‘German Unity Day.’

Historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalszuk in her recently published book ‘June 17 1953. A German Uprising’ terms it "a truly democratic uprising, and one of the great democratic movements in German history."

Demonstrators had spontaneously raised their voices "for the good of the people," and had taken to the streets in search of a better government and better living conditions at the start of what would turn out to be "a failed socialist experiment," she says. As for the East German government, its leaders reacted by seeking refuge "behind the occupying Soviet troops" from the wrath of their own people.