Imagining the Transformative Event as a Caucus--East Germany in Autumn 1989

International Journal of Sociology Study Volume 2, 2014

www.seipub.org/ijss

Imagining the Transformative Event as a Caucus East Germany in Autumn 1989 Hansjörg Rothe Danube University Krems, Department of Medicine, Health and Social services, Dr.Karl-Dorrek-Strasse 30, A-3500 Krems, Austria Klinikum Coburg, III. Medical Department, Ketschendorfer Strasse 33, D-96450 Coburg, Germany e-mail: rothe@online.de Received 18 April, 2014; Revised 21 April, 2014; Accepted 3 June, 2014; Published 20 June, 2014 © 2014 Science and Engineering Publishing Company

Abstract Almost 25 years after the autumn of 1989, which changed the political landscape of East Germany completely and ended 40 years of single party rule, there is still no consensus about which category should be used to describe these events. The two terms which are used most often - “peaceful revolution” and “U-turn” –are both not entirely convincing.

In this paper it is argued that these events may be characterized as a spontaneous caucus, making it the first caucus with major political consequences in modern European history. Ritualization of mass demonstrations and the “ideal speech situation” (Habermas) due to economic equality of the discourse participants are discussed as necessary pre-conditions for a spontaneous caucus to succeed.

Keywords Caucus; Revolution; Germany; 1989; Habermas; Baudrillard; Ritualizations

Introduction Most people know Philip D. Zelikow as the head of the 9/11 commission. However, he is also the author of „Germany united and Europe transformed“ (1995), a book he wrote together with Condoleezza Rice.

Almost twenty five years and at least one major transformative event in the US later, the 1989 events in East Germany (or the German Democratic Republic as it was called then) are still anything but clearly understood. This article explores the possibility to look at this event from a perspective which links it to several crucial events in European and US history of the last 150 years. Should we introduce a term here which hasn´t actually played a role in European historiography so far – could it be, that we are dealing

with a spontaneous caucus?

Revolution or Just U-turn?

Lewis Carroll famously made fun of the caucus concept in his „Alice´s adventures in Wonderland“ his „caucus race“ was a rather chaotic event with the participants not knowing when to start, where to run or when to finish – at the end the dodo declared that everybody had won. Nobody in Britain or in the rest of Europe had ever taken part in a caucus in 1865, but two years after the Gettysburg address the awareness was growing that some completely new political concepts had been developed in the USA which couldn´t been explained with the categories derived from European history.

When talking about the autumn of 1989 in Germany today, one will realize straightaway that no completely satisfactory category has been found so far to describe that event. Since it led to a change of government, ending 40 years of single party rule, the „revolution“ category obviously comes to mind first.

However, no event in history, in which nobody died, no single shot was fired and no revolutionary speeches were made had ever been referred to as a revolution 1 before. In order to overcome this difficulty the oxymoronic term „peaceful revolution“ has been introduced into today´s discourse about 1989, but many people prefer to use the term „U-turn“ instead.

This option is even less satisfactory, not only because 1

Even the Glorious revolution of 1688, which comes closest to this scenario, had seen the military invasion of England by an army of mercenaries.

51

www.seipub.org/ijss

its trivializing connotation but also because it was first used in the inauguration address of Egon Krenz, the last head of state who had belonged to the inner circle of the old regime and who replaced Erich Honecker for just seven weeks at the end of 1989. (1)

International Journal of Sociology Study Volume 2, 2014

demonstrations took place in most East German cities, headed by the construction workers of East Berlin. On June 17th 1953 Soviet tanks appeared in the streets and the demonstrations were smashed.

Similarly, when seeing old documentary movies of that time, today´s viewers are often left perplexed that this was just it: thousands of people walking slowly around the city center of Leipzig on Monday evenings after work, chanting „We are the people“ while being watched by heavily armed police. In order to explain the symbolism that was so powerful that it brought down the entire political system which had appeared rock solid despite all economic difficulties only weeks before, one has to go back to a Sunday in 1886 – in Chicago.

The autumn of 1989 cannot be understood without realizing what really happened in 1953 – the workers´ movement in East Germany had been both crushed and ritualized. Once in a year, on the anniversary of the Chicago bloody Sunday of May 1st 1886, all citizens of the GDR were expected to take part in something which looked like a mass demonstration but really was a demonstration of loyalty. Turning up at the international workers´day „demonstrations“ which were organized in every single municipality, town and village, was really regarded similarly as saying the pledge of allegiance in the US.

Pledge of Allegiance East Germany style

Omitting Phrases

The GDR had been founded in 1949 by men and women who had regarded themselves as part of the international workers´movement for all their lives and who saw this new state in the tradition of Karl Marx and his Communist Manifesto of 1848. However, with Germany being occupied not only by the Soviet Union but also by the US, the UK and France, the question of German reunification immediately became a question of which economic system such a re-united Germany would belong to. Shortly before his death in 1953, the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin had made a proposal to the Western powers, suggesting that all troops be withdrawn and a peace treaty be signed with Germany, under the condition that Germany was to stay neutral between the new military alliances of NATO and the Warsaw Treaty States. His successor Lawrentij Berija maintained this proposal, and as it turned out, the leaders of the GDR endorsed it, too – preferring a united Germany to a „small but pure“ socialist state of their own. In fact they hoped to eventually gain control of the whole united Germany, but for some time they were prepared to accept capitalism in the Western part of the supposed new state. Seeing the necessity to meet the challenge of competition with West Germany they decided to get the East German economy ready to stand the test, so they did something rather un-comradely in preparation of the expected reunification: they issued a series of austerity measures and raised the job norms, pressuring the supposedly ruling class to work more for the same money. In June 1953 this led to some counter-measures from the classic repertoire of the workers´ movement: the workers went on strike, and

All legitimacy of the East German regime was supposed to rest on the events of the mid 19th century, when the German revolution had failed and Marx wrote his Communist manifesto. (2) Its last sentence “Proletarians of the world, unite!” - was literally printed on the first page of the governmental newspaper every single day into the 1980ies. However, the spirit of those days had vanished, and in the old slogans some phrases had mysteriously gone missing.

52

When Abraham Lincoln delivered his address at Gettysburg in 1863 (3), there were quite a few Europeans present who had been involved in the revolutionary fights of the late 1840ies in Germany.

What he said on this occasion has defined the very essence of the state both in the US and in Germany ever since – at times as a vision, at other times as reality. In fact, this speech which he drafted during his train ride to Gettysburg, has become so important that every single word has defined entire political movements. There have been times when the phrase “One nation” was bitterly embattled in either the US or Germany or both, nowadays the question whether the phrase “under God” should be omitted or not may be used as a political litmus test in America. In the autumn of 1989, a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” was the goal which inspired the spontaneous de-ritualization of mass demonstrations in East Germany. Claiming to be a government of the people, the East German nomenclatura had defined the “welfare of the people” as the ultimate objective of their policy and the slogan “All for the people” had been invoked in every

International Journal of Sociology Study Volume 2, 2014

political speech as the “main task of the workers´and peasants´ state”. A government “by the people”, however, was definitely not on the agenda. This little phrase had been omitted at some point – during the revolutionary fights of the mid 19th century the Germans had still been very much aware that “of the people, by the people, for the people” belonged together in exactly the same way as Lincoln later voiced it at Gettysburg. In fact, the Swiss radical democrat and judge Emil Remigius Frey had coined the slogan “All for the people, all by the people” in 1830 already. Since Lenin´s concept of the “party of a new type” (4) , however, “all for the people” was now going to be achieved by somebody else – all by the party nomenclatura. The economic foundations of the socialist state meant that basically everything was owned by “the people”. This made political discourse so dangerous from the viewpoint of the nomenclatura: participants in such a discourse would be totally equal and therefore fulfill the conditions of the “ideal speech situation”, as it had been defined by Jürgen Habermas, many years before the actual events in autumn 1989: the four conditions are 1. All who are potential participants of discourse must have equal rights to use speech acts in such a way that discourse could be permanently open to claims and counter claims, questions and answers.

2. All who participate in the discourse must have equal chances to present interpretations, to make assertions, recommendations, explanations and corrections and also equal chances to problematize (problematisieren) or challenge the validity of these presentations, to make arguments for and against.

3. Participants express their attitudes, feelings and wishes equally by representative speech acts (repräsentative Sprechakte).

4. Participants have equal chances to order and resist orders, to promise and refuse, to be accountable for one's conduct and to demand accountability from others. (5) As soon as these conditions are fulfilled, the “ideal speech situation” turns into a powerful tool – its agreements are absolutely binding. In other words, as soon as „the people“ (who owned everything in the state and whose welfare was the only purpose for the state to exist) would be able to agree on certain issues on their own, all tools of repression were bound to just crumble and disappear. From 1953 to the late 1980ies the ritualized international workers´ day demon-

www.seipub.org/ijss

strations seemed to prove the supposed coherence between citizens and government which was so important for the self-characterization of the socialist state. But then suddenly everything changed: The Monday demonstrations of 1989 developed out of weekly meetings of prayer for peace in a church at Leipzig. Traditionally these meetings had been attended by many citizens who had applied for permission to move to West Germany. Now the “iron curtain” had become permeable in Hungary, and the prayer meeting participants grew in number.

Eventually they decided to step out of the church onto the streets.

“We are the People” At first, in a period several months before the fateful autumn events, there were continuous attempts of the state to quell these pivotal demonstrations, using brutal police force and activities of the secret service.

State owned media tried to denounce the participants as „rowdies“ or troublemakers, a minority against whom „the people“ had to be protected. It soon became clear that this was all about numbers – the number of participants in these calm walks, which challenged the government simply because the government hadn´t organized them. The climax was reached when 70,000 people walked on Monday the 9th of October 1989 and several army battalions stood by without using their overwhelming might for the protection of „the people“ against this alleged minority. In the GDR context, this was a international workers´day demonstration - “by the people”. When on the following day state media reported about the number of participants, giving a plausible estimate for the first time – in fact the number which used to be played down was suddenly even exaggerated – it became clear that the people chanting „We are the people“ were no longer a minority threatening „the people“, but that they in fact represented the majority.

They had won the caucus.

Which question had been decided in the caucus? The question was: Who represents „the people“- the socialist nomenclatura, or the people chanting „We are the people“.

The ritualization of the workers´movement in their perverted international workers´day demonstrations had backlashed against the ruling party, and one might argue that the caucus – which the de-ritualized demonstrations turned into – is in fact a ritualized fight between competing crowds in itself. We know that the caucus as it exists today in US political life developed out of roots dating back to 53

www.seipub.org/ijss

the early 18th century and probably to the time before the first Europeans had arrived. The very term „caucus“ was most likely derived from an Algonquin word. The old Germanic tribes had similar events called “things”. It is intriguing to speculate that the precursors of these meetings took place on the battlefield, with the smaller crowd just giving in after counting themselves and their opponents, for the sake of future conviviality. There are many examples of ritualized fights even in the realm of non-primate mammals and birds, as we know since the discoveries of Konrad Lorenz.

Excourse: Ritualization (6) Most workers in the US were probably unaware of the ritualized international workers´day demonstrations in East Germany, while most GDR citizens did not know that the first international workers´day had been an event with real fighting in Chicago, on May 1st 1886 or “bloody Sunday”. The caucus might well be a ritualization of a fight being avoided between two crowds, with the smaller one just giving in after counting themselves and their opponents. Counting is in fact one of the oldest arts of mankind. In Southern Germany a 35,000 year old ivory figurine with number signs has been excavated, and counting the number of approaching enemies was probably a very useful skill in the early stone-age. We know ritualized fighting behavior between couples of nesting birds, and at that stage it gets difficult to identify the borderline between social and inherited patterns. Konrad Lorenz was awarded the Nobel prize for his discovery that behavior in humans, which we might be inclined to call a social ritual, may well be inherited – such as our sympathetic feelings for animals like Koala bears (even adult ones who can very well look after themselves) because we just have to like them with their big round heads, big eyes and small noses (baby scheme or “Kindchenschema”). The triggers or “releasers” make sense because of our instinct to protect our offspring who display similar features. Lorenz compared the ritualization of fights between pairs of female and male ducks for a nesting place with the creation of symbols in human society. He argued that social tradition and genetic inheritance might result in similar mechanisms after long periods of time, and that the function of these rituals is the attenuation of aggression. However, even in those inherited instinct-rituals of animal behavior it may happen that the original pattern is altered if the individual animals perceive conflicting signals so that new activities override the normal

54

International Journal of Sociology Study Volume 2, 2014

sequence of movements. Similarly, when dealing with a new situation, old ritualized behavior may be applied first and then eventually altered and adapted into a new pattern – like a caucus being developed out of the well-known ritualized international workers´day mass demonstration. (end of excourse).

Tautologies The very slogan “We are the people”, powerful as it proved to be in the autumn of 1989, also foreshadowed the problems lying ahead. From a logical point of view, the phrase turned into a tautology in exactly the same moment when the new consensus was accepted by society as a whole: “The people are the people“ equals A=A in its logical structure. And the tautology is absolutely and irresistably true. As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard had written in 1976 already: „Any system approaching total operationalization is doomed. The system saying ´A=A´ or `2+2=4` will reach both total power and total ridiculousness, I.e. imminent subversion – a small finger will suffice to topple it. Everybody knows the power of tautology, which drives the pretension of the system into complete sphericity...“ (7) The image of total power in connection with tautology is in fact deeply rooted in the Old Testament, as the description of Himself which God offers to Mose when talking to him out of the burning bush: I Am Who I Am (Exodus 3,14). This translation, however, is already problematic, because in the Hebrew “Ehjéh ’Aschér ’Ehjéh” the name is a tautology as well, but “I Will Be” instead of “I Am” is possible, too.

While there is no way to argue against tautology, it is always only a small step away from triviality. In the context of East Germany 1989 this means that as soon as the consensus was reached that the demonstrators had won the caucus and were in fact “the people”, no argument was possible against their statement however, the whole discourse of society had been boiled down to just this single phrase in order to achieve the broadest possible coalition. This phrase „We are the people“ was just what anybody of “the people” could identify with. All meaning had to be sacrificed in order to find a slogan that everybody of „the people“could agree upon. So the irresistible power of the tautology could be employed, but the price that had to be paid was a certain feeling of hollowness on the day after.

The ambiguity of tautologies between absolute truth and triviality corresponds to the contradictory

International Journal of Sociology Study Volume 2, 2014

opinions about the “vox populi” (voice of the people) in history. In some of the oldest mythical texts of Ancient Greece, attributed to Homer (Odyssee) and Hesiod (Works and Days), equivalents to the Latin proverb “vox populi vox dei” may be found. Both texts refer approvingly to the phrase, asserting that it is indeed a god who speaks through the voice of the people. Seneca the Elder, a Roman writer of the 1st century B.C., argues similarly: “…crede mihi, sacra lingua populi est” – believe me, the voice of the people is sacred. (8) On the other hand, the very opposite of these statements may also be found in Ancient times usually attributed to some famous ruler. From the dozens of quotes just two examples from German history shall be given here: In the 9th century A.D., Alkuin, the adviser to Charlemagne, gives as the 9th of his advises to the emperor the sentence: “Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit” (9)(One shouldn´t listen to those who say that the voice of the people is sacred, because the people in their inclination to making noise are always close to insanity). Finally Otto von Bismarck, among others, has been quoted as remarking “vox populi vox Rindvieh”, which is more or less equivalent to the English saying “vox populi –Halfpenny”.

In any case, after the first democratic elections in the East German GDR quite a few of the state owned enterprises were sold to private investors for symbolic amounts of money – not quite Halfpenny, but one (West) German Mark in many instances, so that the equality in economic terms rapidly melted away.

Outlook The disappearance of the Berlin wall and the massive military confrontation including nuclear weapons on both sides was a major achievement. Twenty five years later it has to be stressed, that nuclear war had been a real threat, which had almost started by chance several times, due to technical errors. Michail Gorbachev´s movement of “transparency” (glasnost) and “reconstruction” (perestroika) had paved the way, but Germany may still take pride in the autumn of 1989, when this wall was teared down without a single casualty. Recent years have in fact seen great economic turmoil in Germany, and even a revival of Monday demonstrations in 2010 with tens of thousands of participants. These demonstrations were aimed against a series of austerity measures called “Hartz IV

www.seipub.org/ijss

reforms” which had been performed to render the German economy more competitive – since these reforms had been implemented by the social democratic party, which used to be the oldest workers´ party in Germany, one may well compare them to the 1953 job norm raise in socialist East Germany.

In 2010 the impact of the Monday demonstrations was by no means similar to those in 1989, though, since the economic foundations of society were now completely different.

Conclusions If the transformative events in autumn of 1989 had been a spontaneous caucus, as I have argued, it would have shown the universal applicability of direct democracy for the condition humaine. If combined with economic equality, the “ideal speech situation” may be achieved and crisis turned into chance in the discourse of any community, without a breakdown of national security.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I thank Prof. Ludwig Morenz, Bonn, for comments on the article.

REFERENCES

Baudrillard, Jean. «L’ échange symbolique et la mort», Paris 1976 (7) Dümmler, Ernst (1895) « Epistolae Karolini gevi (II) », Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Berlin (9) Habermas,

Jürgen

« Theorie

des

kommunikativen

Handelns », Frankfurt a.M. 1981 (5) König, J. « Über die Wirkungsmacht der Rede », Göttingen 2011 (8) Krenz, E. «Inauguration speech of Egon Krenz as General

of

the

Central

committee

of

Secretary the

SED

(Antrittsrede von Egon Krenz als Generalsekretär des ZK der SED) » www.cvce.eu/content/publication/2002/9/.../publishable_ de.pdf, 1989 (1) Lenin, W.I./ Stalin, J. « Hauptmerkmale der Partei neuen Typs », Offenbach, 2000 (4) Lincoln, A. « The Gettysburg address » http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc =36, 1863 (3)

55

www.seipub.org/ijss

Lorenz, Konrad « So-Called Evil – on the natural history of aggression (Das sogenannte Böse – zur Naturgeschichte der Aggression)», München 1974 (6) Marx, K. « Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei », London, 1848 (2) Hansjörg Rothe was born in Leipzig, Saxony (then German Democratic Republic), studied medicine at Martin Luther University Halle 1986-1992, and wrote his doctoral thesis ("Comparison of placentar and renal dipeptidases 3.4.13.19. and its influence on pharmacokinetics of ampicillin") 1995 at Martin Luther

56

International Journal of Sociology Study Volume 2, 2014

University. He worked in medical house officer posts in the British National Health Service from 1995-1997, was a renal registrar at St. Helier Hospital London 2001-2002 and afterwards clinical study co-ordinator and AMGEN renal research fellow 2002-2005 at Division of Nephrology and Hypertension, Brookdale University Hospital & Medical Center, New York.

Since 2005 he has been consultant nephrologist at the Kuratorium für Dialyse und Nierentransplantation (Germany), since 2010 at Klinikum Coburg (III. Medical Department. His main research area is pharmacogenetics in nephrology, he teaches pharmacogenetics at Danube University Krems.

Dr. Rothe is a member of the Austrian Association of Nephrology and the Anglo-German Medical Society.