Agony & Barbed Wire - The Grim Reality of Former East Germany

On October 3, 1990, West Germany and East Germany became one state again after 45 years of post-war division. Just one year earlier, many East Germans could not imagine that the socialist dictatorship would soon come to an end. Head of state Erich Honecker had claimed that the Berlin Wall would still be standing in a hundred years. Many were happy about the freedom, about being able to visit their relatives and friends in the West, and also about no longer having to queue for shopping. Others, who had lost their power and privileges, were of course less happy about this development.

East Germany was a dictatorship, a state of injustice that oppressed and patronized its citizens in many ways. There was no independent judiciary, no administrative jurisdiction. Citizens were only subjects and could not legally prosecute the state and its actors. The paranoid state leadership hindered every free spirited person in their professional advancement and private happiness. The regime went so far as to cage its citizens behind barbed wire and concrete and to have refugees shot at the border.

All this must not be forgotten, because, as the saying goes, those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Yet thirty years after German reunification, the memory of the East German regime hardly plays a role. One reason for the historical ignorance is a lack of knowledge, paired with a diffuse sympathy for the idea of socialism.

The author Steffen Blaese, himself born in the GDR, takes a critical look at the past, at what was good and at what was not. Concise, authentic, sometimes humorous, and with an unfortunately unavoidable bit of bitterness, he takes us through the reality inside the self-proclaimed workers' paradise. He tells of the retreat into the private sphere and of life in illusions, of deprivation and decay, surveillance and repression, and finally of the peaceful revolution and the collapse of the GDR and what psychological consequences the dictatorship has for millions of Germans to this day.