Life in East Germany: the cultural evolution behind the Iron Curtain

Amid the darkness of economic hardship and state-sponsored fear, East Germany could also be a society of opportunity and hope. Katja Hoyer explores why the black-and-white comparisons with West Germany do not tell the full story, and profiles some of the people who bring this full, complex picture to life

By Katja Hoyer

Published: Friday, 12 May 2023 at 12:00 am

The warm summer air hummed with music and energy. Drums sent rhythmic undercurrents through the streets as young people danced, debated, sang and kissed. Alcohol flowed freely. Ideas were exchanged in dozens of languages as concerts, marches, floats, talks and spontaneous jam sessions combined to give the sense of a bustling festival.

This gathering of idealists and dreamers was held not at Woodstock or Glastonbury but in East Berlin, where 8 million people flocked between 28 July and 5 August 1973 to attend the 10th World Festival of Youth and Students. Its tagline: For Anti-Imperialist Solidarity, Peace and Friendship.

More than two decades had passed since East Germany, formally known as the German Democratic Republic (GDR), had been established on 7 October 1949 as a socialist counterpoint to its capitalist neighbour in the west, the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), founded in May of the same year. During that time, the two German states had coexisted in tense competition, straddling the faultlines of the Cold War.

East and West Germany: evil versus good?

We like to think of the world around us in clear categories, and the divided Germany is no different. The west began to see the GDR and the FRG as black-and-white versions of Germany – a vision that lasts to this day. Where the West is portrayed as a functioning democracy with a prosperous and free society, the East is seen only as an oppressive dictatorship whose planned economy caused so much misery that people had to be walled in to make them stay.

One was good, the other evil – and any attempt to complicate the picture of the evil also throws up uncomfortable questions about the nature of good. For western observers, it is therefore as tempting to be as cynical about the 1973 Youth Festival today as it was at the time.

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A few days before it began, the West German political magazine Der Spiegel called the upcoming event a “propaganda show of Eastern European state communism”. The same outlet concluded in a 2008 feature that “a few little freedoms were granted – so that the great restrictions might fall into oblivion”.

The image of a summer of colour, noise and youthful exuberance jars uncomfortably with the more familiar vision of a grey, subdued and crumbling world unfolding behind the Iron Curtain, so it is explained away. The festival was an anomaly, a falsehood, at best a respite from the oppressive drudge that must have been the norm. But, as exploring the lives and stories of a diverse cast of characters reveals, the real story is much more complicated.

“I felt very close to the country at that moment”

Those heady days of music and debate in 1973 were widely remembered as an exciting time. Uwe Schmieder, who was 13, experienced the festival as if in a dream. He was technically not old enough to participate in events organised by the Free German Youth (Freie Deutsche Jugend; FDJ), the GDR’s mass organisation to which the vast majority of young people between the ages of 14 and 25 belonged.

But his local group from the small town of Zeitz needed another drummer, so Uwe donned the FDJ’s cornflower-blue shirt and proudly beat his marching drum in the heart of East Germany’s capital. Uwe found the atmosphere “intoxicating,” recalling “the peace, friendship and the chants… I felt very close to the country at that moment”.

Many young East Germans felt the festival proved that the state in which they had grown up had arrived in the world. Just a few weeks later, on 18 September 1973, East Germany would be admitted into the United Nations alongside West Germany. The previous year, both states had already acknowledged each other’s sovereignty in the so-called Basic Treaty. By the end of the decade, the GDR had embassies in nearly 200 states. It seemed to have become a country like any other.

Founder of the state: Walter Ulbricht

As if to emphasise that a new era was dawning, the state’s founder and long-time leader Walter Ulbricht died at the age of 80, while the Youth Festival was under way. He was a communist of the old guard, who had experienced the calamitous first half of the 20th century. A carpenter by trade, he had fought in and against the First World War, taking part in the 1918 November Revolution that helped topple Germany’s monarchy.

During the 1920s, he became a rising star of the German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands; KPD) and one of its members of parliament. His heated verbal battles with the Nazis’ head of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, ended in brutal brawls between their followers – a dark sign of things to come.

As was the case with many fellow communists, Ulbricht had to flee Germany when Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933. Ulbricht spent the Second World War exiled in Moscow, where he survived Soviet leader Josef Stalin’s deadly political purges. That was no mean feat. Of the nine German members of the KPD’s politburo who had gone into exile in the Soviet Union, only two were still alive at the end of the war: Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, who later became president of the GDR.

Of the nine German members of the KPD’s politburo who had gone into exile in the Soviet Union, only two were still alive at the end of the war

Ulbricht survived because he had proved his worth to Stalin, working tirelessly to undermine the German war effort. At the 1942–43 battle of Stalingrad, in which the men of Germany’s Sixth Army, freezing and starving to death, were surrounded by enemy troops, Ulbricht’s high-pitched voice had blared into their numb ears. Giant speakers had been rolled up to the front line so that Ulbricht could inform his compatriots that their fight was futile.

One of Stalin’s men sceptically supervised the proceedings, and as Nikita Khrushchev – then working as an intermediary between Stalin and his generals – chuckled at supper: “Well, Comrade Ulbricht, it doesn’t look as if you have earned your dinner tonight. No Germans have surrendered.” But Ulbricht had earned Stalin’s trust.

The division of Germany

Together with nine other men, he was deployed back to Germany on 30 April 1945, the day Hitler shot himself in his bunker beneath a ruined Berlin. It was Ulbricht’s taskforce that would attempt to raise a new and radically different country out of the smouldering ashes of the old. Stalin originally held him back, thinking it would be easier to exploit the resources of a neutral country that wasn’t his responsibility.

Once the two Germanies were set up as separate states in 1949, though, there was no going back. Ulbricht was allowed to fulfil his lifelong dream: to build socialism on German soil. Many Germans, particularly those of the younger generations, wholeheartedly bought into the idea of building a better country after the horrors of militarism and Nazism.

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Regina Faustmann was 16 in 1951, and had already experienced her fair share of upheaval. Her father had died in 1945, leaving his wife to look after their three children just as the Red Army was advancing. Now it was time for Regina to roll up her sleeves. She began an apprenticeship as a chemical lab technician at a local tyre manufacturer. It was not what she had dreamed of doing with her life – she had wanted to become a seamstress, like many in her family before her – but that didn’t work out. She needed to help support the family.

At that point, a handsome young tyremaker named Günther entered Regina’s life. Together, they began to frequent the new theatres, dance clubs and cinemas that were springing up everywhere. Both had joined the newly established FDJ. Though a Catholic, Regina felt included in the wide range of activities on offer, which she undertook alongside her Protestant and non-religious peers, including those who had previously been enthusiastic Hitler Youth members.