East Germany was created out of the Soviet occupation zone in the aftermath of World War II. It was essentially an artificially created state, a state not born from any sort of nationalist movement but merely a barrier for the Soviets against the West. Did East Germany ever attempt to develop its own creation myth or “backstory” to the nation itself? Or was German national history/mythos seen no differently to how it was in West Germany (excluding the communist doctrine of course)?
I teach seminars on the self-image and tradition of the Bundeswehr and on the inner-German division, so I can answer this question with a bit of a focus on the military and how it was shown in East German media.
Note: NVA is the German abbreviation of the Nationale Volksarmee, the East German People's Army. Defa was the East German state owned film studio. Bundeswehr is the military of West Germany and reunited Germany, founded in 1955. The NVA was absorbed into the Bundeswehr in 1990. SED is the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the Marxist-Leninist party ruling the GDR. The SED was created by the Soviet military administration by forcing the communist party (KPD) and the social democrats (SPD) to join.
The official founding myth of the GDR was anti-fascism. According to [1] there was a huge dissent between those communists who fled Germany before 1933, especially to Moscow and those who stayed in Germany. Either imprisoned in concentration camps or living in the underground. The Moscow-group won the internal power struggle and with them their trauma of surviving Stalin's great terror. The ruling party SED legitimised it's existence and her power over the GDR by claiming to be anti-fascist. Their reasoning was that fascism is an extreme form of capitalism and every form of capitalism will inevitably lead to fascism. Therefore, West Germany shouldn't exist and East Germany is the legitimate Germany.
The fact that communists have been victims of the Nazis has been morally extended to all of East Germany. With this conclusion, the SED also removed the moral responsibility for all German crimes from the GDR and all it's people. Stalin's great terror was officially ignored during these years, but played a role in the decisions made by Walter Ulbricht and his comrades.
Communist theories and ideals drove the SED and led to the self-image of being the legitimate Arbeiter- und Bauernstaat (workers' and farmers' state) [2] that overcame the social classes of Prussia [3] and put the power officially into the hand of the people. In reality, the GDR was a dictatorship of the ruling party SED and even called itself [4] Dictatorship of the proletariat, as coined by Marx [5]
Probably the most important event in the history of the GDR and SED was the uprising of the 17th June 1953. After the deterioration of living standards in the GDR the SED raised the work quotas and cut the wages. This lead to a strike of construction workers in Berlin and the chemistry triangle around Halle/Bitterfeld and in Dresden, Leipzig and Magdeburg. The uprising was crushed by the police and tanks of the Soviet military under martial law, leading to 55 deaths and ca. 20 more unexplained deaths [7].
The uprising itself traumatised the SED, since the working class revoked it's trust into the government. The president of the GDR, Otto Grotewohl, called the uprising a fascist putsch, organised by the West [8]. The East German media and later historiography followed and claimed that the "imperialist-fascist" West was behind the uprising.
One of the consequences of the uprising was the erection of the Berlin wall and the closing of the inner German border. This was mostly done to prevent the migration of skilled East Germans to West Germany and prevent an economical collapse of East Germany. However, Walter Ulbricht called [9] the Berlin Wall Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, translating to anti fascist protection wall/rampart, continuing the myth that East Germany was the anti fascist utopia of a modern Germany without any responsibility for the Nazis.
The closing of the inner-German border led to the introduction of the general draft for the East German people's military NVA. While a paramilitary police force (Kasernierte Volkspolizei) was already set up in 1948 by the Soviet Military Administration, the military NVA was only founded in 1956. The NVA was officially not considered to be in the tradition of the Prussian-German Militarism, yet they relied -- like the West German Bundeswehr -- on former Wehrmacht personnel. Until 1960 all remaining East German officers who already held an officer's rank in the Wehrmacht were retired from the NVA and only those officers who served in the Wehrmacht as enlisted man or NCO could stay [10].
Since the SED saw the NVA not as a successor to the Prussian-German militarism and the Wehrmacht, they had to find other role models. Which were [11][12][13]:
It's interesting to see, that the Bundeswehr also considers the Prussian military reforms of 1807-1814 as one of the official traditions. The NVA created two orders named after 2 of those reformers, the Blücher- and Scharnhorst-Order.
Another difference between Bundeswehr and NVA is the resistance against the Nazis. The Bundeswehr considers the conspirators of the 20th July plot to be worthy as a traditional line. The public swearing in ceremony of the Guard battalion in Berlin will usually happen on the 20th July in the Bendlerblock, the building were Stauffenberg et.al. were shot after the failed coup.
In East Germany, the military resistance was mostly ignored or the members where shunned as Prussian nobility. In place of the 20th July conspirators, the SED idolised the communist fighters of the Interbrigades in the Spanish civil war and especially for the navy the Kiel mutiny of 1918. For more info on the self-image of German warriors, I highly suggest Sönke Neitzel [14].
Those official traditional lines were often portraied in East German media. One example is the movie Die Fahne von Kriwoj Rog about communists in the Mansfeld mining region hiding a communist flag sent to them as support by communists from the Ukrainian town of Kriwoj Rog. The movie is based on a true story and was turned into a b/w movie by Kurt Maetzig. It shows how the upright communists even work together with social democrats to hide the red flag from the Nazis and how the SA attacked the communist mining workers in 1933. At the end of the movie, they also show how the region is (historically correct) occupied by the US military. The commanding officer of the US army is shown as some kind of cliché capitalist, who wants to buy the legendary red flag. But the upstanding communists of course defy this offer and wait until the Soviet army arrives. Once the Soviets took over, they bring out the flag and start walking towards the Soviet officers waving the flag and singing Brüder zur Sonne. While the whole movie is based on historic events that pretty much happened as shown, one can clearly see the East German cultural politics and influence of the SED in this movie. It is a great source to analyse the self-perception of the East German Government and how they wanted the people to see themselves.
Another great book (and two movies) is Nackt unter Wölfen (Naked among Wolves). Written by Bruno Apitz, who was imprisoned in Buchenwald and witnessed how the communist resistance in the camp hid and protected a 5 year old Polish boy. The book is based on the story of Stefan Jerzy Zweig, who survived Buchenwald, but it is by no account an historic accurate description of the events. Apitz was a contemporary witness and already altered the story for the book. According to Susanne Hantke, the book went through several stages of editing and was aubject to influence by the cultural policy of the SED. It is also a great source to analyse the East German cultural policy, since the very successful movie adaption of Frank Beyer (1963) was remade in 2015, changing parts of the plot. In the 1963 movie the camp inmates free themselves with an uprising, while in reality they were freed by the US military. This was another "artistic freedom" or manipulation of history to superelevate the communist resistance and ignore the US. It is also interesting to see that the book and movie are very well known in East Germany and that the book was often read in East German schools, while it is pretty unknown in West Germany.
See the attached list of movies for more movies I let my students analyse during our seminars.
While it is debatable if there is a distinct East German/West German identity, here are 3 statistics to show some differences between East and West Germany, 20 years after reunification
