Behind the Iron Curtain: Western travelers and correspondents in East Germany 1945--1972

My dissertation is a history of the Soviet occupation of Germany and the first two decades of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany), based on the published travel stories of Western correspondents, journalists, and other visitors. I argue that perspectives on the social, economic, and political developments in East Germany have been overly restricted by scholarly preoccupations with the establishment, dysfunctions, and ultimate failure of the East German dictatorship and economy. While not denying the ultimate coercive power of the regime and its Soviet backing, I show that contemporaries viewed developments in the Soviet Zone/GDR, and East Germans' experience of them, within a larger ideational and geopolitical framework. In turn, by elaborating that framework, I try to add to our understanding of both the history of the GDR and the evolution of the "mental world" of the East German population. This involves firstly the uncertainty and open-ended sense with which the Western press evaluated the Soviet occupation of Germany, a stark contradiction to the received story in most scholarly accounts. Contemporaries mapped a "twisted road to the GDR" filled with more possibility, and more worry as well. Soviet motives, both within their zone and in Germany as a whole, were a matter of massive speculation, and strange as it may sound today, debate on them was most always based on the assumption that Germany would not be permanently divided. Nevertheless, in that same period visitors were beginning to describe a "different world" east of the "iron curtain." Their observations help reconstruct aspects of daily life and the "mental horizons" in which they existed. In particular, they suggest that East Germans resentment and disapproval of West Germany, along with their acceptance and even appreciation of Eastern social welfare policies (if not communist ideology itself), was creating in the Eastern population a sense of separateness and difference from West Germans long before the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. They also show that a measure of social stability, based on that same general approval, was evolving from at least the mid-1950s---the foundation of what later was called an East German "state identity." Along the way, however, I present other views on the GDR as well, many of them the work of West Germans, refugees returned to the region, or staunch anti-communists. These authors show how difficult it was for many contemporaries to believe East Germans truly supported "socialist achievements" (as the regime's social welfare system and state-run industry and agriculture were often called), or could freely choose to identify with life in the GDR in any way. But as the GDR became more economically and politically stable in the mid-to-late 1960s, even more critical visitors joined an emerging consensus among travelers that the GDR must at least tacitly be accepted in the West. I argue that many of them tried to make this idea more palatable to Western audiences (and perhaps themselves as well) in two ways: (1) by categorizing the East German economy not as an alien, communist imposition, but a rather weak, uninspiring and unthreatening imitation of capitalism, and (2) by describing the state and society as traditionally German, suggesting that the people and the regime were reaching a kind of symbiosis around the concepts of an orderly society and the celebration of skilled, productive work and labor discipline. Over the years, East Germany became less foreign to visitors than its foreboding barriers, the Berlin Wall and the "iron curtain" might suggest. Instead, it became a kind of alter ego of the modernizing Western world on the one hand, and (for most visitors) an emerging state and society that must be accepted and understood on its own terms.