The Last Gasp of Socialism: Economics and Culture in 1960s East Germany

German Life and Letters 63:3 July 20100016-8777 (print); 1468–0483 (online)

THE LAST GASP OF SOCIALISM:ECONOMICS AND CULTURE IN 1960s EAST GERMANY

ANDREW EVANS

ABSTRACT

East Germany’s history can be broadly divided into two eras: Firstly, the 1950s‘Aufbau’ period, in which the need to build a socialist society for future generationswas emphasised – a project that involved a Stalinist approach, in which ideologicalcommitment was central to political concerns. Secondly, the so-called ‘real-existingsocialism’ of the 1970s, in which social stability, a sense of belonging and Honecker’s‘unity of economic and social policy’ were the watchwords.

The reforms of the NOS, or New Economic System – introduced in 1963 andabandoned at the end of the decade – marked the transition between these twoperiods and aimed to ensure the state’s economic survival. This paper will examineboth the economic and cultural policy of this period in order to contextualisethe NOS and to demonstrate that it was emblematic of wider trends in Europeanhistory. I will also argue that the NOS was perhaps the most important turning pointin GDR history. It typified the regime’s new approach to reconciling its desire tomaintain control with the need to modernise the GDR. This period simultaneouslyrepresented the last gasp of revolutionary socialism, a doomed attempt to solve thestructural problems of the Stalinist model and a foreshadowing of Honecker’s GDR.

Die DDR-Geschichte wird oft in zwei Perioden geteilt: Wahrend dem Aufbau desSozialismus der 1950er Jahre ruckte das Ziel in den Mittelpunkt, eine sozialistischeGesellschaft fur die Zukunft aufzubauen. In dieser stalinistischen Zeit stand dieIdeologie im Zentrum aller politischen Entscheidungen. In der Periode dessogenannten realexistierenden Sozialismus der 1970er und 80er Jahre war dagegendie DDR zunehmend durch andere Konzepte gekennzeichnet: soziale Sicherheit,die ‘Einheit von Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik’ und das Heimatgefuhl.

Die Reformen des NOS (Neuen Okonomischen Systems), das 1963 eingefuhrtund am Ende des Jahrzehnts wieder aufgegeben wurde, fungierten als Ubergangzwischen den zwei Perioden und stellten einen Versuch dar, das okonomischeUberleben des Staates zu garantieren. Der vorliegende Beitrag untersucht dieWirtschafts- und Kulturpolitik dieser Jahre, um das NOS in einen Zusammenhangmit der europaischen und der DDR-Geschichte zu setzen. Das NOS wirdals wichtigster Wendepunkt der DDR-Geschichte interpretiert. Die Reformenverkorperten die dringende Notwendigkeit, die DDR zu modernisieren, undgleichzeitig einen Versuch der SED, ihren Kontrollanspruch aufrechtzuerhalten.Sie waren gleichzeitig letzter Atemzug des revolutionaren Sozialismus undVorwegnahme der Honecker-Ara.

Nearly all societies take a middle road between, on the one hand, thelaissez-faire free market, which allocates goods to each according to theirwork, or at least to the profit they make from it, and, on the other

C© The author 2010. Journal compilation C© Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 20109600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

332 ECONOMICS AND CULTURE IN 1960s EAST GERMANY

hand, communism, which promises to allocate goods to each according totheir need. The GDR, which by its own definition was located somewherebetween capitalism and communism, repeatedly faced the problem ofreconciling economic and political objectives. The search for a solutionoften caused upheaval in both the economic and cultural spheres, mostnotably during the era of the New Economic System (NOS),1 introducedin 1963 and abandoned by the end of the decade. This paper will examinethe extent to which the economic reform was connected to the politicaland cultural spheres in the early 1960s. The NOS, championed by WalterUlbricht, heralded a new focus on building socialism with economicmechanisms and levers. The role of material incentives was increased ina way that significantly altered the central planning system. The culturalsphere, meanwhile, was dominated in the early 1960s by two phenomena:the ‘Bitterfelder Weg’ campaign, which set out to overcome the separationbetween literature and real life by encouraging writers to spend time inthe factories, and a period of liberalisation that was designed to win theloyalties of a younger generation. The more liberal approach suggesteda less dogmatic attitude to youth trends in music and literature. Oneimportant question that these economic and cultural developments raiseis that of their compatibility with the GDR’s political system. For as long asthe SED was unwilling to give up its dominance, any economic and evencultural reform had to set out not only how it would transform the GDR,but also how it would leave the political model intact. The answer presentedby theorists writing in the GDR’s economic, cultural and political journalswas to reorientate SED ideology towards the socialist present and away fromthe construction of the anticipated communist future. This means that theNOS era can be seen with some justification as the bridge between theUlbricht and Honecker eras.

I

The more economic approach to socialism heralded by the NOS was notan entirely new phenomenon. Its clearest precedent can be located inSoviet Russia a few years after the October revolution. Lenin’s 1921 NewEconomic Policy (NEP) was in some senses a forerunner of the GDR’sNOS. In response to the near collapse of the Russian economy, Leninintroduced reforms which granted individual peasants the right to selltheir produce on a free market, gave companies back the right to makeemployment decisions, reduced government spending and restored the taxsystem. Lenin’s change of strategy to the NEP represented his recognitionof the need to reach an accommodation with the people on whose labour

1 German: ‘Neues Okonomisches System’ (NOS), sometimes extended to NOSPL: ‘NeuesOkonomisches System der Planung und Leitung der Volkswirtschaft’.

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ECONOMICS AND CULTURE IN 1960s EAST GERMANY 333

power industrialisation depended, and a tacit acknowledgement that worldrevolution was not about to break out and help Russia to overcome itseconomic backwardness. The NEP gave Soviet socialism a lasting economicflavour: the system was driven not by the political project of givingpower to the working class, but by the economic project of constructingthe economic conditions for socialism under tight Party control. Thesuggestion implicit in the NEP was that true socialism would have to waituntil the economic conditions for it had matured.

In the GDR, too, socialism was always an economic project, albeit onewhich struggled to achieve the economic success it desired. Instead ofemerging from a revolution, GDR socialism was imposed from outside anddefined by what the SED termed the ‘Aufbau des Sozialismus’. This termis particularly apt since the word ‘construction’ perfectly illustrates the wayin which the early years of the GDR were defined by the SED’s desire tocreate economic conditions that could sustain the state’s existence underParty control. This period was, above all, defined by the need to increaselabour productivity. At the same time, however, the SED struggled to makeGDR citizens identify with a system that had not put power in their hands inany convincing sense. Every attempt by the SED to legitimise itself througha focus on economic construction was hampered by the fact that theeconomy was not productive enough to make this plausible. As a result, theSED faced a dangerous balancing act: On the one hand, it had to promoteperformance-based pay and oppose what it called the ‘noch immer nichtuberwundenen Tendenzen der Gleichmacherei’.2 On the other hand,it knew that the economic pragmatism embodied by tough productiontargets and low wages could endanger the Party’s political position. Thelatter problem became all too clear on 17 June 1953 when workers tookto the streets to protest, in part, at an increase in production targets,forcing concessions in economic policy and demonstrating that they werestill capable of exercising an indirect form of political power. From thebeginning, then, the GDR was hamstrung by a dilemma between increasinglabour productivity at all costs and establishing political legitimacy.

It is in the context of this dilemma that we should see the reforms ofthe early 1960s. The New Economic System, which represents the climaxof this period of ‘Aufbau’, was conceived as an attempt to simulate theworkings of the market and make the economy more dynamic. Firstly,the way in which the success of enterprises was measured would focusprimarily on profit. This profit would then be linked to performancebonuses to provide an incentive structure. The use of profit as the chiefeconomic indicator was conditional on a price reform to ensure thatprices more accurately reflected production costs. The government wouldretain control of planning the GDR’s long-term economic objectives, while

2 The FDGB deputy leader, Rudolf Kirchner, in 1950, cited by Peter Hubner, Konsens, Konflikt undKompromiß. Soziale Arbeiterinteressen und Sozialpolitik in der SBZ/DDR 1945–1970, Berlin 1995, p. 55.



enterprises would gain more authority over the detail: their investmentfunds, supply chain, marketing and distribution. The direct bureaucraticmode of planning was to be replaced by a so-called closed system ofeconomic levers, which did not amount to a free market, but attemptedto imitate market mechanisms.

If the NOS represented a new stage in the economism of the SEDmodel, the challenge it presented to the Party was how to reconcile thisproductivist pragmatism with the ideology on which it based its politicallegitimacy. In the early years of ‘Aufbau’, the construction of the economywas combined with a cultural project of modernisation, in which the Partytried to construct socialist consciousness in the minds of the working class.The role of ideology and culture at this time was to legitimise the hardwork and poor conditions of the ‘Aufbau’ period in the name of a utopiancommunist future. In fact, however, ideology and culture soon began totake on a more complex relationship with reality. A central tenet of theSED’s economic doctrine, for example, was the belief that it had abolishedthe creation of value by the market. Actual economic policy, meanwhile,did not entirely reflect this anti-market ideology and often led to unwantedside effects. The SED’s ‘Neuer Kurs’, for instance, with which it reacted tothe growing public discontent in 1953, aimed to placate workers by raisingwages and reversing the increases in productivity targets. The problem withthis, however, was that the Party did not realise that it could not look for anon-market definition of value while simultaneously using money to try tobuy legitimacy for the regime. By paying more wages for a given quantity oflabour, the regime had effectively increased the value of that labour. Theeffect of these wage increases was, according to the GDR’s own figures, atwenty per cent rise in the money supply between 1953 and 1954, raising thepurchasing power of consumers.3 Since the SED was hardly likely to admitthat value in the GDR could be determined by exchange, it was unwilling toraise consumer prices and so excess demand soon translated into chronicsupply shortages.

It was not only the economic sphere in which ideological currency tookprecedence in the transactions of everyday life. The doctrine of socialistrealism enforced in the cultural sphere led the Party to encourage literatureto reflect a successful socialist economic and political order that did not yetexist in reality. The literary products of this process could then, the Partyhoped, be used as evidence that its version of reality did in fact exist. In asense, the GDR existed almost as a stage-managed reality: a state foundedon a symbolic construct of socialist consciousness that was supposedlyemerging among its people and made visible in its literature, but that alsostructured people’s existence in a wider sense since GDR socialism was theonly official reality offered to them. That is to say, whether or not people

3 Peter C. Caldwell, Dictatorship, State Planning and Social Theory in the German Democratic Republic,Cambridge 2003, p. 39.



actually felt that their consciousness was ‘socialist’, this consciousness hadalready been chosen for them by virtue of the fact that they lived in theGDR.

II

The question that has been left largely unanswered by research on theNOS is how economic reforms, with their promise to further increase theemphasis on economic pragmatism and market-like mechanisms, could beintroduced without threatening to undermine this ideological construct ofsocialism. In 1958, when the economists Arne Benary and Fritz Behrens hadfirst proposed a model along the lines of the later NOS, their suggestionswere understandably considered a dangerous divergence from the Partyline.4 However, by looking at 1960s official GDR journals on political,economic and literary theory,5 it is possible to discern a number of attemptsto reconcile the economic pragmatism of the NOS with SED ideology.The theoretical developments this entailed form a strategy that can bedescribed as modernisation in stasis. Although never admitted by thejournal contributors, the theoretical basis for this kind of modernisationowed something to the distinction between ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’made by Georg Lukacs in his literary theory.6 If the GDR of the ‘Aufbau’years could not always take the outer appearance of a socialist state, theSED effectively believed that socialism could still exist ‘in essence’. Whatmight appear in the NOS, for example, to be the reinstatement of capitalistconcepts, could, when looked at from the ‘correct’ perspective, reveal theunderlying essence: socialism’s arrival at a more mature stage of historicaldevelopment.

It was this same distinction between appearance and essence that alsomade possible the Party’s more flexible approach to the cultural sphere inthe early 1960s. In 1963 the party published a new ‘Jugendkommunique’entitled ‘Der Jugend Vertrauen und Verantwortung’, the most well-knownpassage of which concerned itself with the ideological significance ofdancing: ‘Wir betrachten den Tanz als einen legitimen Ausdruck vonLebensfreude und Lebenslust. [. . .] Welchen Takt die Jugend wahlt, ist

4 Jonathan R. Zatlin, The Currency of Socialism: Money and Political Culture in East Germany, Cambridge2007, p. 48.5 Einheit, Die Wirtschaft, Neue Deutsche Literatur .6 For Lukacs, good writers have the ability to see appearances from a perspective that enables themto discern the essence of reality. They achieve this by discovering and portraying the ‘typical’: that is,by illuminating society’s underlying contradictions, and the dialectical relationships between them,which drive historical development. The GDR misappropriated these ideas when it tried to createa propagandistic brand of socialist realism. See Peter Zimmermann, Industrieliteratur der DDR. VomHelden der Arbeit zum Planer und Leiter , Stuttgart 1984, pp. 82–3.



ihr uberlassen: Hauptsache, sie bleibt taktvoll!’7 The statement perfectlysummed up the new approach to youth culture. GDR citizens were free tochoose their own rhythm, even one that borrowed heavily from the popmusic of the capitalist West, provided that, in essence, they committedthemselves to SED socialism. This idea of inward conformity stood inmarked contrast to the later ‘Beatverbot’, initiated in 1965, when theregime demanded a show of outward conformity and GDR youth were oncemore forced to dance to the Party’s tune.

During the period when the GDR experienced economic and culturalmodernisation, through the NOS and the ‘Jugendkommunique’, the Partywanted its artists, economists and ordinary citizens to mediate between therealms of appearance and essence, to see appearances in such a way thatallowed them to grasp the underlying socialist essence that had apparentlybeen constructed in the GDR. Journal contributors used a variety ofarguments to mediate between essence and appearance. Most importantly,the reforms could only be introduced by distancing the NOS from twoother strands of thought. This meant that the journals had to undertake asort of economic de-Stalinisation, by stating that Stalin was wrong to rejectout of hand such capitalist mechanisms as commodity production andthe law of value. Secondly, they had to distance themselves from so-calledrevisionism. As soon as the NOS began, the SED was forced energeticallyto counter suggestions that central planning was being watered downin favour of a little more market spontaneity. In a 1964 article in thejournal Einheit, Herbert Wolf goes as far as to reject the suggestion thatmarket measures were a temporary, transitional measure before the arrivalof communism:

Eine neue Spielart der revisionistischen Gegenuberstellung vonVolkswirtschaftsplanung und Marktbeziehungen besteht in der voneinigen Okonomen vertretenen These, der Sozialismus sei seinem Wesennach nur ein Ubergangsstadium zwischen Kapitalismus und Kommunismusund enthalte demzufolge logischerweise sowohl Elemente der historisch-ablebenden burgerlichen Ordnung wie auch Merkmale des allmahlichentstehenden Kommunismus.8

It is not hard to speculate as to why Wolf so vehemently rejects thisexplanation of the NOS. There was clearly a problem with introducingeconomic mechanisms that seemed at first sight to run counter tothe Party’s ideological and political intuitions: the more successful theybecame, the more calls would have grown to expand the NOS and decrease

7 Cited by Marc-Dietrich Ohse, Jugend nach dem Mauerbau. Anpassung, Protest und Eigensinn (DDR1961–1974), Berlin 2003, p. 72.8 Herbert Wolf, ‘Zu einigen Fragen der bewußten Ausnutzung der okonomischen Gesetze desSozialismus’, Einheit, 19/4 (1964), 28–42 (36–37).



the areas of Party control. Instead, Wolf therefore sees the NOS as a maturesystem that cannot be defined with reference to capitalism and communismalone:

Naturlich ist der Sozialismus seiner historischen Stellung nach einUbergang vom Kapitalismus zum Kommunismus. [. . .] Aber ebensoeindeutig ist fur jeden Marxisten-Leninisten, daß die sozialistische Ordnungin diesem historischen Prozeß bereits eine vollig neue Qualitat derOrganisation der gesellschaftlichen Produktion und des Charakters derProduktionsverhaltnisse darstellt.9

For Wolf, the NOS is no mere transition phase containing outdated butnecessary ideas of capitalist economics. Rather, it represents, in essence,socialism’s coming of age, its development into a coherent, complete andpotentially long-term social system in its own right. Viewing the NOS inthis way enabled many contributors to argue that the reform programme,despite decentralising economic control, was, in fact, increasing the SED’sability to control economic and social life in the GDR as a whole. GDRtheorists were therefore able to invoke the NOS in order to fend off whatthey considered ‘worrying developments’ elsewhere in the Eastern bloc. Atthe 1963 Kafka conference in Czechoslovakia, for example, a fierce debateraged over whether it was possible for alienation to exist in socialist societiesas well as in capitalism. This could hardly be ignored since sympatheticbooks on Kafka had already been published in the GDR in the early 1960s,as well as a 1962 article in the journal Sinn und Form by Ernst Fischer, oneof the delegates at the Kafka conference.10 In 1964, writing in the journalNeue Deutsche Literatur , Hans Koch launched a counter-attack, using theeconomic reforms to dismiss the idea of ‘politische Entfremdung’ in theGDR. For Koch, one of the GDR’s most prominent cultural functionaries,the NOS represented the achievement of a society in which people couldcontrol their own socialisation, instead of having it thrust upon them byhistory:

Mit dem neuen okonomischen System der Planung und Leitung derVolkswirtschaft ist von der Partei fur den entscheidenden Bereichunseres gesellschaftlichen Lebens eine neue hohere Stufe derwissenschaftlichen Beherrschung, Leitung und Kontrolle dieser unserereigenen Vergesellschaftung geschaffen worden.11

A crucial feature of the NOS as it was defined in journals likeNeue Deutsche Literatur was a theoretical reach that went well beyond

9 Ibid., 37.10 Wolfgang Emmerich, Kleine Literaturgeschichte der DDR , Leipzig 1996, pp. 180–1. Books on Kafkawere published by Klaus Hermsdorf in 1961 and Helmut Richter in 1962.11 Hans Koch, ‘Funf Jahre nach Bitterfeld’, Neue Deutsche Literatur , 12/4 (1964), 5–21 (18–19).



the economic sphere. The journal contributors appealed simultaneouslyto notions of Party control and democratisation, moral commitmentand materialist individualism. These elements were combined using therhetoric of unity, with which seemingly contradictory ideas could bereconciled. In order to reconcile the SED’s new economic mechanismswith its cultural and ideological claims to legitimacy, journal contributorsfrequently referred to a unity of material and moral factors.12 In thisrespect, the NOS has much in common with policies that began in thelate 1950s, most notably the ‘zehn Gebote der sozialistischen Ethik undMoral’ announced in 1958.13 The socialist Ten Commandments entreatedGDR workers to see their individual labour as social labour, expended inthe cause of socialism and their fellow citizens. The somewhat vague anduninspiring commandments reflect the dilemma of the ‘Aufbau’ years: Onthe one hand, the need to increase labour productivity at all costs, and onthe other, the desire to establish legitimacy for the SED by defining moralitywith reference to the socialist present rather than the communist future. In1958, motivation was to be provided not only through the ‘zehn Gebote’,but also through the promise to overtake West German production ofimportant consumer goods in the period of the next plan. Here, then,can be seen the origins of the unity of material and moral factors withwhich the SED hoped to transcend the egoism of capitalism, while atthe same time offering material incentives to individual workers. A fewyears after the ‘zehn Gebote’, this unity of material and moral factorswas, according to the economist Karl-Heinz Jonuscheit, formalised bythe NOS:

Die materielle Interessiertheit steht nicht im Gegensatz zur sozialistischenMoral. Die Arbeiter, die an der Produktionssteigerung materiell interessiertsind, d.h. ihre eigenen materiellen Interessen mit den gesellschaftlichenverbinden, handeln durchaus im Sinne der sozialistischen Moral.Unmoralisch handeln nur jene, die bestrebt sind, sich einen hoherenAnteil am gesellschaftlichen Produkt zu ergattern, ohne mehr zu leisten.Diese noch anzutreffenden Tendenzen widersprechen dem Sinn undInhalt des sozialistischen Prinzips der materiellen Interessiertheit. Sie sindBestandteile einer burgerlichen Denkweise, gegen die unsere Werktatigenbesonders im Produktionsaufgebot so erfolgreich den Kampf aufnahmen.14

12 This phrase seems to be adapted from Khrushchev’s speech at the twenty-second Party Congressof the CPSU which called for the correct fusion of material and moral incentives. See for example,Karl-Heinz Jonuscheit, ‘Genugt unser System der wirtschaftlichen Rechnungsfuhrung noch dengegenwartigen Anforderungen?’, Einheit, 17/10 (1962), 8–19 (19).13 For the full ‘zehn Gebote’, see for example Matthias Judt (ed.), DDR-Geschichte in Dokumenten.Beschlusse, Berichte, interne Materialien und Alltagszeugnisse, Berlin 1997, pp. 54–5.14 Karl-Heinz Jonuscheit, ‘Das okonomische System der Planung unserer Volkswirtschaft, das Prinzipdes demokratischen Zentralismus und die materielle Interessiertheit’, Einheit, 18/5 (1963), 59–68(63).



While this is a good example of the references to the union of materialand moral factors that pepper these issues of Einheit, it also reveals theintangible nature of this union. If anything, Jonuscheit seems to water downthe already somewhat vague treatises of the ‘zehn Gebote’. The requestsimply that workers should not expect more pay if they do not expandtheir output not only asks little in the way of political and ideologicalcommitment, but, despite Jonuscheit’s claim to the contrary, is hard todistinguish from the ‘burgerliche Denkweise’ from which his article triesto distance the NOS.

Many journal contributors, however, sought to define the essence ofsocialism by using the idea of unity in a wider sense. In April 1964,the second Bitterfeld Conference introduced a new cultural agenda,calling for writers to construct what was described as the ‘sozialistische[s]Menschenbild’. Fred Staufenbiel, an academic who, in the 1960s, wasparticularly interested in the relationships between culture, science andtechnology, seized on the conference as a cultural counterpart to the NOS.Writing in the June 1964 issue of Einheit, Staufenbiel calls for an ‘objektivbegrundete Einheit von wissenschaftlich-technischem Fortschritt undsozialistischer Kulturrevolution’.15 In this way, he counters any suggestionthat the growing importance of science, technology and economics wouldlead to a convergence between capitalism and socialism.16 For Staufenbiel,the cultural sphere will play a crucial role in making these economic andtechnological changes act in a socialist way, and it is this unity of cultural,technological and economic spheres that will form the major differencebetween the capitalist and socialist worlds. He suggests that there needs tobe a cultural basis to the idea that the NOS has managed to make individualinterests identical to social interests: while there is nothing wrong withemploying economic mechanisms, the GDR still needs literature in orderto show people what is socialist about the state and to develop the moral aswell as the material interests of the individual. Staufenbiel explicitly statesthat the Bitterfelder Weg is the counterpart of the NOS because socialismis not a coherent system in its own right without this cultural dimension:

Das neue okonomische System der Planung und Leitung unsererVolkswirtschaft, die ‘Grundsatze fur die Gestaltung des einheitlichensozialistischen Bildungssystems’ sowie die Perspektive unserer Kultur- undKunstentwicklung, wie sie auf der zweiten Bitterfelder Konferenz dargelegtwurde, muß man als Einheit betrachten. Sie stellen zusammen jenes Systemvon Maßnahmen dar, das erforderlich ist, um die Werktatigen zur bewußtenAnwendung der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklungsgesetze zu befahigen unddie Technik sowie die fortschreitende Wissenschaft, die immer mehr zur

15 Fred Staufenbiel, ‘Wissenschaftlich-technische Umwalzung und sozialistische Kulturrevolution’,Einheit, 19/6 (1964), 3–18 (8).16 Ibid., 5.



unmittelbaren Produktivkraft wird, standig besser zu beherrschen und zumWohle des Volkes nutzen zu konnen.17

Although culture makes an appearance in Staufenbiel’s article as anecessary supplement to economic policy, the Bitterfelder Weg was attimes a double-edged sword for the SED. On the one hand, the campaignrequired writers to follow the SED’s agenda. On the other hand, sendingwriters into the factories had the potential to challenge the SED’s viewof the GDR from above with stories of real life on the ground.18 Thisambiguity was resolved in some articles by subtly changing the meaning ofthe Bitterfelder Weg. The greater realism to which writers should aspirecould be found not simply by portraying everyday life as it appeared,they claimed, but by discovering the socialist essence that lay behindthese appearances. While the Bitterfelder Weg called for more realism inliterature, contributors to Neue Deutsche Literatur were determined that thismust not be confused with the suggestion that literature should reflectthe disharmony and conflict of everyday life in the GDR. This approachappears to have been shared by Walter Ulbricht who claimed that manyGDR writers were ineffective because they had become bogged down bythe minor and irrelevant problems of the socialist model: ‘Sie verbeißensich oft in schwierige und zeitweise auch unangenehme Teilerscheinungen,die bei uns hie und da noch anzutreffen sind.’19 In a 1963 article on PeterHacks’s controversial play, Die Sorgen und die Macht, the literary theorist,Horst Redeker, argued that an enthusiasm for visiting factories and writingabout workers did not constitute the Bitterfelder Weg in its true sense. ForRedeker, the author had both to write about the problems of ‘Aufbau’, onthe one hand, and the solutions to these problems, on the other. Accordingto Redeker, authors would only be able see these solutions by identifyingthemselves with the progressive forces that were to be found only in theParty.20 Only from the perspective of the Party, then, could authors see thetrue essence of the GDR.

The solution that the NDL editor, Wolfgang Joho, offered to this probleminvolved a similar shift in artistic perspective. Joho called on authors topresent a more complete picture of the totality of the GDR; in Joho’slanguage to present a ‘Sinnbild’ rather than an ‘Abbild’, an approach helikens to climbing a tower:

Am zufallig aufgespurten Stoffe klebend, schildert der Kunstler zwar, waser in den Straßen sieht, versaumt es aber zu oft, auch auf den Turm

17 Ibid., 6.18 Zimmermann, p. 134.19 Walter Ulbricht cited by Wolfgang Joho, ‘Das hohe Ziel der gebildeten Nation und die Steine aufdem Weg der Literatur’, Neue Deutsche Literatur , 11/1 (1963), 8–18 (16).20 Horst Redeker, ‘Die Dialektik und der Bitterfelder Weg’, Neue Deutsche Literatur , 11/5 (1963), 64–80 (74).



uber die Stadt zu steigen, von dem er einen Uberblick uber das Ganzegewinnt und so die Moglichkeit, die Einzelheiten im Zusammenhang mit derEntwicklungstendenz kennenzulernen.21

Here, then, Joho is able to make the double criticism that authors arein a sense being too realistic and presenting some uncomfortable truths,but on the other hand not realistic enough since they are unable to seethe full picture of socialism. By stating that the solution to this is a betterpresentation of how the part fits into the whole, he ensures that his callfor greater realism does not pose a threat to the ideological picture of theGDR constructed by the Party. The portrayal of events or characters thatappear not to reflect socialism, therefore, does not necessarily contradictthe author’s demonstration of the essence of GDR socialism.

Ironically, those pieces of literature that followed this change inperspective often did not so much depict the achievement of a harmonioussocialist system as reveal the fact that this system was little more than anideological construct. Here, many GDR authors seem, in the 1960s, to haveengaged, perhaps unwittingly, in their own distinction between essence andappearance. This can be seen in Erik Neutsch’s Spur der Steine, an epicnovel published in 1964, which seems particularly suited to legitimisingthe NOS. Neutsch’s working-class hero, Balla, is motivated, through theeconomic modernisation he helps to implement at his workplace, tobecome politically committed to SED socialism. Balla ends the novel as aParty member and ambassador. However, the novel’s suggestion that thereis an intrinsic link between the NOS and socialist consciousness is somewhatillusory. As Peter Zimmermann has pointed out, what appears to be anexample of the self-emancipation of the working class, is, in its true essence,a story of Balla’s social climbing. The novel illustrates less the achievementof a classless and harmonious system of socialism than the disappearanceof the working class from the narratives of many GDR authors.22

Meanwhile, numerous journal contributors believed that the BitterfelderWeg movement launched in 1959 had given literature a new essenceof completeness that they described as a ‘neues Lebensgefuhl’.23 Thisphenomenon was not confined to literature. For Silvia Schlenstedt, aGermanist at the Humboldt University, the concept of ‘Lebensgefuhl’drew on the feeling that socialism was maturing into self-evident reality:‘Sozialistisches Lebensgefuhl’, she commented, ‘vertieft und verbreitetsich [. . .] mit der sich verwirklichenden moralisch-politischen Einheit desVolkes.’24 So successfully, in her view, was society becoming moulded into a

21 Joho, p. 15.22 Zimmermann, pp. 186–8.23 See for example Wolfgang Joho, ‘Macht und Verantwortung der Literatur’, Neue Deutsche Literatur ,11/8 (1963), 5–11 (8).24 Silvia Schlenstedt, ‘Entwicklungsprobleme der Lyrik seit dem V. Deutschen Schriftstellerkongreß’,Neue Deutsche Literatur , 11/9 (1963), 55–71 (60).



cultural and political unity that Schlenstedt did not see the ‘sozialistischesLebensgefuhl’ merely as something emerging from conscious thought, butrather as a reflexive response to GDR socialism:

Nach unserer Ansicht muß unter neuem Lebensgefuhl die Fulle derprimar emotionalen Reflexe der menschlichen Beziehungen unter unserengesellschaftlichen Verhaltnissen verstanden werden, die sich mit einem mehroder weniger hohen Grad von Bewußtsein verbindet.25

The moral, political, even emotional, unity of the GDR populace that isposited by these journal contributors arguably represents the origins ofthe ‘sozialistische Menschengemeinschaft’, an idea that would become partof the official ideology in 1967. In this sense, the NOS era can be saidto have given rise not only to the expectation that the GDR’s economicproblems would finally be overcome, but also that the SED would achievean ideological and cultural hegemony over the GDR populace.

For all the theoretical gymnastics, however, it is doubtful that the journalcontributors can be said to have delivered a coherent theory of socialismfor the NOS era. The most noticeable confusion arises over the role ofideological commitment, which is not adequately explained by the so-calledunity of material and moral interests. From as early as the first year of theNOS, Einheit contributors had begun to warn against seeing the NOS as anautomated or technocratic system. ‘Dieses neue okonomische System wirdin der Praxis nicht von selbst wirksam’, proclaimed Hans-Joachim Braunand Claus Kromke in the August 1963 edition, ‘Es muß in den Kopfender Menschen leben.’26 As an economist and assistant of Gunter Mittag,Kromke was one of the figures charged with implementing the NOS. Thefrequency with which this argument is repeated suggests, however, thatthere were other economic functionaries in the GDR who saw the NOSin technocratic terms. In the journals, too, there is a palpable uncertaintyabout the role of ideological commitment, even within individual articles.Hans Boeck, for example, initially argues that material incentives willprovoke conscious reflection among GDR citizens about their own rolein the productive process.27 Just a few pages later, however, his vision ofthe NOS seems to become decidedly more technocratic, suggesting thatthe Party’s economic policy is capable of building socialism regardless ofpeople’s conscious convictions:

Der unmittelbar gesellschaftliche Charakter, den die Arbeit im Sozialismuserhalt, außert sich auch in der Tatsache, daß unabhangig davon, inwieweit

25 Ibid.26 Hans-Joachim Braun and Claus Kromke, ‘Fur eine praxisnahe Behandlung theoretischerProbleme der Leitung sozialistischer Betriebe’, Einheit, 18/8 (1963), 29–37 (29).27 Hans Boeck, ‘Wissenschaftliche Leitung und sozialistische Arbeitsmoral’, Einheit, 19/7 (1964),63–71 (68).



der einzelne dies bereits versteht, die Arbeit zur Durchsetzung derWirtschaftspolitik der Partei und der Staatsmacht dient; sie ist diekonkreteste, unmittelbarste, wirksamste Form der Ausubung der politischenMacht durch die Werktatigen. In der Arbeit pulsiert am starksten dasLeben und wachst die Kraft der sozialistischen Demokratie, werden diesozialistischen Beziehungen taglich hergestellt und gefestigt.28

Rather than relying on culture to assert the socialist identity of the GDR,Boeck’s article sees the principle of material incentives in themselves as theembodiment of the unity of individual and social interests. The beauty ofthe NOS seems for him to reside in the fact that it can operate regardlessof ideological conviction.

III

The reaction to the NOS by journal contributors discussed here was toseek to limit the reforms’ political dangers by accommodating the NOS intheir theories. This approach both provided space for economic and evencultural liberalisation to take place, and aimed to prevent this liberalisationfrom undermining the political, cultural and economic order the SED hadconstructed. However, the long-term implications of the NOS were arguablymore damaging than its protagonists could have anticipated. The officialjournals had sought to mediate between the socialist essence they believedthe GDR embodied and the less than socialist appearance of everyday life,art and economics in the NOS era. In recasting socialism as a coherent andlong-term social and economic system in its own right, however, they set arisky precedent. During the 1970s and 80s, the vision of socialism as a unityof material and moral factors was translated into the assumption that themoral fibre of the nation could be constructed using economic incentives.In his ‘Einheit von Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik’, the incoming GeneralSecretary, Erich Honecker, made this idea the hallmark of his economicpolicy. The belief behind the ‘Einheit von Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik’was that social welfare policies could be used to motivate GDR citizens toincrease productivity. In the Honecker era, then, the essence of socialismseemed increasingly to be located in the SED’s determination to createthe appearance of a wealthy consumer state. By recasting socialism as apresent-oriented, coherent and workable system of economic incentives,the SED had begun to treat its ideology not as a means of legitimisingshort-term pain for long-term gain, but rather as a force that compelledit to undermine its economic base in order to offer the social welfare levelsthat real-existing socialism demanded. As Jonathan Zatlin has described,the GDR in the 1970s and 80s was increasingly torn between the ‘profligacy’

28 Ibid., 71.



of Honecker, who sought to increase living standards with little regard tofinancial accountability, and the ‘parsimony’ of his Economic Secretary,Gunter Mittag, who resorted to commodifying and monetarising theplanned economy in order to make ends meet.29

The reason that the NOS can justifiably be seen as the last gasp ofsocialism, then, is that it reveals both the GDR’s ability to reform itselfand the limits to this reform. The perennial problem of how to reconcileeconomic productivity with political legitimacy informed both Ulricht’s eraof ‘Aufbau’ and Honecker’s ‘Einheit von Wirtschafts- und Sozialpolitik’.In order to solve this problem, the journal contributors of the early 1960sattempted to develop a holistic vision of socialism by making the market-like mechanisms of the NOS compatible with the SED’s cultural andpolitical model. This marriage of economic and political goals, materialand moral factors, forms the bridge between the Ulbricht and Honeckereras. While it arose as a means of justifying the economic pragmatism of theNOS, it evolved in the later years of the GDR to undermine the economicfoundations of SED socialism.

29 Zatlin, pp. 104–5.


The Last Gasp of Socialism: Economics and Culture in 1960s East Germany

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