Berlin. A warm, sunny early evening in June. I’m having a few beers with a group of fellow foreign students. Our spartan residence, a tower block on the Franz-Mehring-Platz, near the Ostbahnhof had a rudimentary bar, but because of the glorious weather we’ve spilled onto the pavement. I’m with my room mate, Jaroslav, and half a dozen of his Czech friends. International students from all over mingling creating a familiar buzz of cheery chatter. Jarda and his pals swapping stories in Czech. Suddenly we become aware of a group of about 20 young men cross the road from the streets opposite and approach us. Local ‘lads’, Berliners - young men probably aged 20-30. Shaven and/or spiky heads, black teeshirts and trousers, leather belts, studs and doc martin style bovver boots. Skinheads. Maybe a hint of punk crossover style. From their demeanour it is clear they are not here to fraternise. Now just a few metres away, they hear my friends conversing in Czech - and immediately seem to assume its Russian. Their faces twist in disgust, one shouts “Scheiss Russen”, another “Russen raus” and suddenly a growling, threatening chant erupts: “Deutsch arisch, Russisch barbarisch, Deutsch arisch, Russisch barbarisch, Deutsch arisch, Russisch barbarisch...”.
Raised arms and pointing in a mixture of football hooligan gesture and quasi fascist salute. We stand transfixed, aghast, adrenalin flowing, tensing up, preparing for a seemingly inevitable fight. However, after a minute of this increasing raucous chanting, they suddenly seem to decide against a physical attack. With a noisy flurry of obscene gestures and shouts of “Russen raus”, they move on up the street, disappearing into side streets once again, leaving us stunned, taking deep breaths, trying to digest what has just happened.
Was this a group of xenophobic AfD supporters celebrating the 2024 European election results? Football thugs at the Euros 24? No, this was 44 years ago, in early June 1980, in what was then East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic.
When the wall seemed to rest
I had been in the GDR since the previous September as a graduate student - one of very few students from the West to spend two semesters there during what were probably the most self-confident years of this grim Soviet puppet regime. A period when the Wall seemed to rest, both literally and metaphorically, on increasingly firm foundations. In June 1980 I was now approaching the end of my stay behind the Iron Curtain, and had never experienced anything like this before.
We have another beer. My Czech friends, whilst shaken, are pretty phlegmatic - “Germans...stupid...thinking we were Russian! Of all people.” A shrug. They were not strangers to anti-Russian sentiment themselves. Anyone who had witnessed the visceral atmosphere in the ice-hockey matches between the CSSR and the USSR in the late 1960s and 1970s would not be surprised. East Germans I knew were disgusted that in 1968 German troops supported the Soviet repression of Dubcek’s Prague Spring. Thirty years after the previous invasion of Czechoslovakia.
But my own immediate reaction was both shock and astonishment. The brazenness of this anti-Russian sentiment! Here I was in the capital city of the socialist dictatorship of the GDR, eternally bound to the Soviet Union in socialist brotherhood, in which the ‘glorious’ Soviet Army were the ‘liberators’ from Nazism, and for whom the Soviet Union was the socialist paradise. But a society in which the military held ultimate control, in which the Stasi and Volkspolizei could arrest, imprison and torture with impunity those who did not adhere to the communist party line. And yet this group of thugs seemed able to do so, in broad daylight, without a policeman in sight and, astonishingly, just a couple of miles down the road from Berlin Lichtenberg and
Fast forward ten years or so, in the 1990s, post-reunification, and many in the West were and shocked to read about the vicious attacks on foreign nationals and asylum seekers in the former states of the GDR. How could this be? Having spent a year there from 1979 to 1980, I wasn’t surprised. Racist attitudes, xenophobia and associated underlying violence existed throughout the history of the GDR, though were rarely expressed so openly as I experienced on that day in June 1980.
We can’t justify this behaviour, but can we explain it?
Anti-Soviet resentment loomed large but unspoken at all times. It wasn’t the first incident of anti-Soviet feelings I had become aware of. When I arrived in Halle / Saale in September 1979 the Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan. The wonderful black humour of the Eastern bloc soon kicked in. The shoulder flashes of the Soviet conscripts uniforms bore what looked like the letters CA, Cyrillic for SA, or Soviet Army, in Russian. “What do the letters CA on the Soviet uniforms stand for?”, a theology student asked me. Without waiting for my reply. “Camping in Afghanistan…!” Sardonic laughter. Black humour was one of the few safety valves of life under communism.
The Soviet military was everywhere, if not always visible. During my year in the GDR I was based initially in Halle, an old university city on the river Saale, west of Leipzig, famed then as now as the birthplace of GF Handel. My student room, shared with two others, was on a campus across the road from the sprawling Soviet Army barracks. A no-go area for all locals. Well almost - apart from the ‘Magazin’, the Soviet military run shop situated in amongst the officers’ accommodation, selling groceries, cigarettes, alcohol. which to my amazement, we could use. Walking five minutes past the main gate to the barracks, round the corner from the main road, and suddenly the scene seemed to be 1.000 km to the east. Dogs wandering, a pile of rubbish smouldering in the middle of the courtyard between the two and three storey blocks of flats - and the poky shop with jars of pickled vegetables, tins of smoked fish, bread and vodka. Was that some fresh fruit..?! All in Russian but we could pay with Ostmarks. And it was open on a Sunday, when all the German shops were firmly shut.
Such was the threat of hidden violence though, that Soviet conscripts were never allowed out on their own. Officers and NCOs yes, to a degree. But I would often board the tram by the barracks and would wait whilst a platoon of a dozen conscripts, clearly from their faces from all states and countries of the Soviet Union, climb aboard and sit in sullen enforced silence, two by two, with the NCO at the back. These poor brutalised young men barely moved as the tram lumbered into the city centre, where on a command they disembarked and were taken to one of the shops to buy a souvenir. For the Soviet proletariat, the GDR was like the West. They could not be trusted to be on their own, for fear of theft, drunkenness and fights.
Soviets in East Germany, seen as invaders, not liberators
Amongst my German student friends stories circulated of Soviet soldiers being found strung up on trees in the adjacent forest, either by locals or the result of suicide. Other stories of Soviet vandalism, violence and traffic or rail accidents in which locals were killed or maimed were rife. A student friend in Halle who had spent time with some Soviet soldiers during his conscription years, related how, after a few drinks, their ‘socialist brothers’ had opened up about the incessant bullying and brutalisation of Soviet conscripts by their NCOs and officers. Rumours abounded, but based on elements of truth - and of course unreported in the Communist controlled media. Some things don’t change.
So, not far below the surface, the Soviets, portrayed in GDR communist propaganda as the liberators, were seen as invaders, occupiers, looters, oppressors, colonisers. A deep resentment of Russians, the Soviet Union and all its member states and Warsaw Pact allies - the other.
The young men I encountered in 1980 were unambiguous skinheads. But in vilifying [verunglimpfen] ‘Russians’ they were using an inverted form of the morality and ethos they had been imbued with throughout their youth in communist GDR. Communist states rely on a systematic militarisation of all levels of society in the eternal struggle against the own Other - imperialist class enemies.
The GDR encouraged an authoritarian, hierarchical upbringing, suppressed emotional development, cloaked in a pervasive respect for the military and all its values. This was reinforced in primary and secondary schools through the choice of reading materials, the involvement in the Young Pioneers and for teenagers, the Free German Youth. All young people were required to do military service, where they were told unequivocally that the overriding task of the armed forces of the GDR was to ensure that the “global peace offensive (sic) of socialism in the class struggle with imperialism was militarily guaranteed.”
The GDR conscript was a “soldier of the socialist revolution”. He was educated literally to “hate”. Seven pages of a government manual of socialist military ethos was devoted to “der Hass” - hatred. Specifically, “hatred of the imperialist class enemy.” Institutionalised hatred. The working class was conducting a “struggle against the utterly parasitic and rotting social order” of imperialism. This struggle required “revolutionary passion, and the deep conviction of the justness and victorious nature of socialism combined with last not least a hatred of the imperialistic class enemy.” This ‘socialist’ hatred was a manifestation of an antagonistic class society, they claimed.
“There could be no class peace or class harmony between two antagonistically opposed classes. This class conflict does not merely create this hatred, it determines its character and role in this class struggle.” It is therefore a morally justified hatred. Against imperialism with all its “lackeys, parasites, fascists, executioners and traitors”. The authors of this manual quoting a Soviet academic, AF Schischkin, in an outburst of apparent Newspeak. “Hass - das heisst lieben… Hass erleichtert, Hass schafft Gerechtigkeit, Hass veredelt.” “Hatred - means to love…Hatred provides relief, Hatred brings justice, Hatred ennobles.”
This incessant propaganda, the creation of an enemy it was justified to ‘hate’, where hatred was even a virtue, undoubtedly infected the attitudes of the Berlin skinheads.
And not just the skinheads. As a guest of the Liga fuer Voelkerfreundschaft der DDR (The League for Peoples’ Friendship of the GDR) I was invited to East Berlin in October 1979 to join in - at a very low level - the celebrations to mark the 30th Anniversary of the GDR. After witnessing military parades, torchlit processions, and waving at Honecker and his cronies on the podium I made my way back to the station for a train to Halle. It was sunny and warm and I stopped for a beer at an outside table. Two Volksarmee conscripts in uniform were also enjoying a beer on their way home on leave so we engaged in conversation. They were student age, seemed pleasant, we seemed to get on well. But it quickly became clear they were on message. We talked about the potential for war between NATO and Warsaw Pact. Would they shoot me if they saw me on the other side? Of course. You are the imperialist class enemy. Prost.
A paramilitary society
Communist society was built on the notion that it was permanently in a state of war or struggle (Kampf) against the class enemy. “Klassenkampf”. Rituals, uniforms and language of Nazism were recycled for Communism. The glorification of the military was ubiquitous. Nazi “Rassenkampf” morphed into socialist “Klassenkampf”. The Holocaust whilst not denied, was downplayed, even sidelined. When I visited Buchenwald in 1979 the explanatory labels and explanatory texts barely mentioned the Jews.
All was geared towards unconditional love of the socialist fatherland and unconditional hatred of its foes, real or imagined. From 1949 onwards the GDR pushed an incessant militarisation of the whole of society, led by the Party’s Youth Organisation the Freie Deutsche Jugend, whose ethos, rituals and style echoed those of the Hitlerjugend. The "Gesellschaft für Sport und Technik", (Society for Sport and Technology) instituted in 1952 was a paramilitary mass organisation specifically designed to provide military style education and drills, in schools and elsewhere, to ensure young people were channeled into hierarchical and blind obedience protecting the state.
A third factor in 1980 was the complete lack of experience of liberal democracy. The democratic failings of the Weimar Republic had scarred many of the pre-war generation who then welcomed Hitler and National Socialism. That in turn was replaced by Stalinism, a form of dictatorship that, unlike National Socialism, had almost no popular resonance whatsoever. Bluntly, the GDR citizens of 1980 of all generations had no experience of living in a liberal democracy.
However, through the influence of Western TV, media, film and music, which despite official suppression, created a desire for elements of rebellion in young people of the Warsaw Pact countries. Skinheads or similar groups had been around for some time in the GDR.
In an extraordinary if brief instance of inadvertent openness the GDR authorities initially permitted the screening of the prescient 1963 DEFA Film Die Glatzkopfbande (‘The Baldheads Gang’), in which murdering leather clad Yul Brynner lookalikes terrorise the popular Baltic resort Ruegen. Permitted initially as a critique of non-socialist values, it was quickly withdrawn. Skinheads ‘proper’ were one of the UK’s less salubrious exports and became part of the GDR sub-culture in the late 1970s, via West Germany. Gangs of ‘Prussians’ fought ‘Saxons’, and they all fought the foreigners - the ‘Kanaken’ - and hippies (the ‘Mueslis’).
Inevitably perhaps, as in the west, GDR skinheads were drawn to football matches, where they could enjoy the strength of the tribe. I lived on the route from the railway station to the 1. FC Chemie Halle stadium, then in the GDR Oberliga and so when Lok Leipzig or FC Berlin came to play you noticed. Football matches formed outlets for antiauthoritarian or racist resentment but interestingly, when back at work, skinheads were often initially seen as hard-working and were appreciated by employers. Racism existed openly in the 1960s, such as that directed against Algerian workers at Schwarze Pumpe.
It could also manifest itself suddenly, when cracks emerged, and was often linked with apparently pro-Nazi views. In March 1977 pupils from the Ho-Chi Min Oberschule in Leipzig rioted in a cinema when shown the anti-Nazi Buchenwald film drama Nackt unter Woelfen (Naked amongst Wolves). The showing was part of preparations for the obligatory school trip to Buchenwald, but under the cover of darkness pupils rioted, treating Nazism as a joke and indirectly rebelling against the GDR. In the same year a Leipzig headteacher found Nazi obscenities stuck to her chair.
It was ironic that elements of right-wing extremism could develop in areas that were some of the most watched and infiltrated such as the tower blocks in Berlin Lichtenberg where the men I met came from. As supporters of FC Berlin, the Stasi boss’ own team FC Berlin.
This often led to the opposite. Children of military personnel and the political apparat, faced with the often blatant hypocrisy of party cliques could become contemptuous of their parents’ generation and brought on a rebelliousness which could become extreme in the other direction. When the state tried to clamp down, it hardened attitudes and made skinheads another category of opposition to the state.
Even the most unobtrusive and threatening foreign workers could become the enemy. They were sent to the GDR to work or study by the socialist partner states in the Third World - such as the Vietnamese. Demonisation of Vietnamese for example, some of the least intrusive and threatening foreigners. The group of Vietnamese students in my student tower block seemed subdued and kept to themselves. My own room mate was Lenaud, a postgrad chemist from Guinea, another communist satellite state. A gentleman, but he too experienced sullen racism outside the university laboratory. The Third World was politicised by the communist state in a way which led to students and guest workers being seen by some as representatives of socialist domination, rather than people with shared values.
This suspicion also led to an alienation from education.
The SED pushed education as one of its main battlegrounds in the ‘class war against US imperialism’. Young people across the social spectrum from the traditional working classes to the university educated increasingly saw education more as a form of oppression than emancipation. At best something to get through. Schools and other educational institutions were named after communist role models, such as Wilhelm Pieck or Ernst Thaelmann, but also Soviet heroes. The children of my friend Johannes attended the Yuri-Gagarin-Oberschule, situated in a tiny village in Thuringia. For them the name itself was an alienating emblem of state oppression. Communists from further afield were also honoured such as in the Ho-Chi-Min-Oberschule in Leipzig. All of this fuelled the anti-communist and anti-foreigner resentment.
The SED state looked east, to the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw Pact states, and to the south, known in liberal parlance as the Third World. SED glorifying the Cubans, Vietnamese, Angolans Guineans for example, turned them in the eyes of many young people into symbols of dominance and oppression rather than liberation. Thus, foreigners, especially non European foreigners and, post 1989, asylum seekers were seen as part of this oppression.
Young people increasingly looked West. Access to Western media, music and film and cultural influences reinforced this - Radio Luxemburg, RIAS Sender Freies Berlin, Deutschlandfunk, as well as West German TV. This could be naive. But every nuance became significant, even the wearing of Levis. (Only obtainable for hard currency) “Jeans”, as Ulrich Plenzdorf’s character Edgar Wibeau (in Die Neuen Leiden des jungen W) states, “are a state of mind, not a pair of trousers.” One of my student friends had nothing on his wall except a tired but revered poster of Vienna. Another had nothing on his bookshelf except three cans of Coke, all empty - but a poignant, if naive political and social statement, a silent personal political protest. Others were more active: Crateloads of fan letters to western radio stations and rock fan clubs were intercepted by the Stasi.
The macho culture of industrial labour, combined with the incessant militarisation of society, led by the party youth organisation, the FDJ, Free German Youth, produced a negative variation in society and the workplace - the rise of the “Rowdy”, bullying at work. Resistance through riot, through carnival and misrule.
In October 1979 I was taken by Johannes to the Zwiebelmarkt in Weimar. Originally a traditional autumn country market, this had grown where thousands travelled to Weimar to celebrate the humble onion and eat the ‘onion cake’, a warm savoury tart. And drink. Under communism it had become a flashpoint for excessive drinking and a gathering point for young people from far and wide in the GDR. On my visit we enjoyed the onion cake and had a beer, but the town was full of increasingly inebriated youngsters looking for action under the tight surveillance of a heavy police presence. A sense of resentful physical energy was barely repressed and an outbreak of “Rowdytum” narrowly avoided.
Back to the skinheads in Berlin 1980. Has this explained why? Maybe it has provided some background. There is always a reason. One of the black jokes doing the rounds in East Germany was: “Why does socialism place the worker at the centre of all things?” “So his arse can be kicked from all sides.” And for energetic adolescent men looking for a hitherto frustrated purpose in life, being a member of a far right group provides a sense of belonging to a tribe which can be exhilarating and gives a sense of importance. That is a warning - both universal and timeless.
One question remains. Why does the AfD seem to wish to appease Putin when, in the light of the above, one would expect them to despise all things ex-Soviet? And when the now despised political establishment in Germany under Schroeder, then Merkel, seemed to fall over backwards to accommodate him. But Putin is perhaps seen as a new direction - the nationalist strongman they wish to emulate in Germany. Perhaps they realise that if Germany is to be a nationalist stronghold it cannot fight Russia. The lesson of Napoleon was not learnt by the Kaiser or by Hitler. If Germany fights Russia it will lose. If you appease them you stay strong. And, remembering the Hitler-Stalin pact, Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic states and everyone else suffers. Where are you now my skinhead friends from the Franz-Mehring-Platz 1980? How I’d love to see how you’re doing and ask what you’re thinking now!
John D. Halliday Edinburgh 2024
Zitierweise: John D. Halliday, "The Rise of the AfD - a Surprise?" Deutschland Archiv, 18.10.2024 Link: www.bpb.de/553458. Alle Beiträge im Deutschland Archiv sind Recherchen und Sichtweisen der jeweiligen Autoren und Autorinnen, sie stellen keine Meinungsäußerung der Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung dar. (hk)
Ergänzend:
Lalon Sander und Andreas Speit,
Wilhelm Heitmeyer,
Martin Debes,