It is a truism that appearances can be deceiving and such is the case with the Nationale Volksarmee (NVA) and its uniforms. A number of Cold War commentators used the NVA's goose-stepping and resemblance to the old Wehrmacht's uniforms as evidence that the SED was a reincarnation of authoritarian Prussian mores of drill and regimentation. But really is not a sustainable thesis. For one thing, the NVA and its Kasernierte Volkspolizei predecessor used modified stocks of existing wartime German uniforms partly out of expediency. The Soviets tended to be parsimonious in the early decade towards rearming the GDR, so some old-style equipment managed to filter its way into the ranks. There were stocks of some old Wehrmacht uniforms that could be quickly tailored for the protection of the socialist state. The quasi-coal scuttle M56 NVA helmet was an update on a wartime design that was to save steel, so not surprisingly, the NVA adapted it.

But even more damning to the Red Prussia thesis, at least with regards to military matters, much of the "Prussian" components of NVA drill and uniform were Soviet in origin. The goosestep was part of the Red Army's drill. While the goose step had made its way into imperial Russia via Prussia, the NVA's adaptation of this march was more reflective of how it was taking its cues from the Soviets. Additionally, much of the training, command structure, and ethos the NVA took from the Red Army, not Wehrmacht or its imperial ancestors. The NVA's boots and collar tabs had some lines of continuity, but this speaks more to path dependency than a deep-seated Prussianness. Using existing stocks of uniforms in its early decades locked the NVA into a certain appearance as it became difficult to change them.

This does not mean though that the martial legacy of Prussia was absent within the NVA and the wider GDR. The German past posed a set of unique problems for the SED dictatorship. On one hand, its ideology stressed that the Marxist-Leninist state had allowed Germany to break free of its reactionary past. GDR historical discourses often stressed that unique socioeconomic conditions created a peculiar Sonderweg that promoted aggressive expansionism by German capitalism that culminated in Hitler's drive to the East. The socioeconomic restructuring the SED carried out had broken this peculiar wheel of German history.

The problem for the SED was that it had a rival across the inner German border that claimed to be the true representative of Germany and the noble aspects of the German past. As a number of Cold War contemporaries put it, Poland without Communism would still be Poland. The GDR without Communism would be the FRG. This forced the SED to try and find a usable past in which there were Germans who fit as prototypes of the socialist Germany the SED created.

The Prussian army was a strange bedfellow to the SED's official view of the past. Although GDR historians would often stress the Prussian army as a weapon of reaction, the SED would celebrate the Napoleonic era Prussian military as spiritual forerunners of the SED. The SED claimed the Prussian reformers Yorck, Scharnhorst, and Gneisenau as their own because these men sought to create a people in arms and did not follow the whims of heir Junkers class. The NVA likewise struck several thousand Blücher-Orden (Order of Blücher) which it would award to the NVA in wartime. Much as the how the Soviets celebrated tsardom's Napoleonic generals, the SED claimed the reform-era generals could step outside of the halo of their socioeconomic class and try and push the development of history towards a progressive end. It also helped that the Prussian reformers found a natural ally in imperial Russia. The narrative of Germans making common cause with Russians to defend their homes and turn back a ruthless foreign invader from the West simply had too much resonance for the Cold War for the SED not to use. The SED celebrated both the Convention of Taurrogen and the Battle of Leipzig as key historical events in which Germans did work with progressive forces (ie the Russians) against tyranny. This celebration of the reformer's indiscipline in the name of patriotism also fed into the outsized role the wartime Nationalkomitee Freies Deutschland and Bund Deutscher Offiziere played both in the formation of the NVA and its approach to the war. The SED used membership in the NKFD as one of the clearing houses for the charter generation of the NVA and the wartime NKFD often stressed it was following in footsteps of Yorck's disobedience in 1812/13. The NKFD pushed a narrative that responsible German officers had a higher duty to German culture and the SED further celebrated this even though the actual impact of NKFD during the war was quite meager.

This selective reading of German history was of a piece with the wider SED attempt to craft a usable past. This resulted in a somewhat erratic and patchwork pantheon of German heroes. Musicians like Beethoven and Bach were precursors to the SED, as was Luther, but the wider trajectory of German history had to fit into a schematic narrative where triumphant reactionary capital created fascism and continues in the FRG. Thus the SED's German heroes were often tragic figures despite all of their accomplishments because they could not alter this Sonderweg's trajectory.

Sources

Bickford, Angelina. Fallen Elites The Military Other in Post-Unification Germany. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011.

Corum, James S. Rearming Germany. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Keubke, Klaus-Ulrich, Manfred Kunz, and Jean Molitor. Uniformen der nationalen Volksarmee der DDR 1956-1986. Berlin: Brandenburgisches Verlagshaus, 1990.

De Quesada, A. M. Uniforms of the German Soldier: An Illustrated History from 1870 to the Present Day. London: Frontline Books, 2013.