A response to Rosenberg's thesis on colonialism in East Germany - Dorothy Rosenberg's article in Sept. 1991 Monthly Review - includes Rosenberg's counter-argument to the authors

After the East German regime bloodily crushed the June 1953 worker's insurrection, the revolt was blamed on "fascist thugs" from West Berlin. How else to explain why a workers' government was turning its guns on the working class? These events allegedly prompted Bertolt Brecht to comment wryly, "The government has no confidence in the people. Perphaps it should dissolve the people and elect another." Unlike Brecht, many on the left accepted Walter Ulbricht's justification because they wanted to believe socialism was being created; they refused to entertain the possibility that the East German working class was rejecting it. An external enemy was found upon whom the events could be blamed, a convenient scapegoat allowing people to delude themselves as to the real underlying causes of the rebellion.

Unfortunately, Dorothy Rosenberg ("The Colonization of East Germany," MR, September 1991) employs the same sort of spurious reasoning as did Ulbricht nearly forty years ago. By arguing that the process of unification has been a "classic case of colonialism," Rosenberg has latched onto a convenient and emotive political slogan that sounds good but is empty of content. While her words are reminiscent of Frantz Fanon, this simplistic allusion to European colonial conquest as being comparable to West German absorption of the old GDR stretches credulity. Hyperbole aside, one can, as Fanon did, reasonably identify colonialism at least in its "classical" form, with invasion, violence, murder, brutality, racism, forced labor, destruction of indigenous cultures and, quite often, simple extermination.

Rosenberg is clearly not trying to invoke other uses of the term colonialism, neither the "neo-colonialism" nor the "internal colonialism" variety. She is trying to make a comparison between the recent German unification and the expansion of Euro-America to Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the process she trivializes the colonial experience, exhibiting little knowledge of the actual history of "classical colonialism." For this she owes at least a rhetorical apology to those many millions who were its actual victims.

In Rosenberg's scheme, the reason no independent, democratic, and socialist East German emerged from the collapse of the SED distatorship in 1989 was that West Germany "annexed" the country and imposed a "colonial administration." The problem actually was that the opposition movement, which had been instrumental in bringing down the profoundly undermocratic SED government, had never struck deep roots in East Germany society. A political vacuum developed. Rosenberg's sympathies lie with the progressive opposition movement. For what is is worth, ours lie in the same place and even extended to leafleting and campaigning for Bundnis 90 in Leipzig in the run up to the March 1990 elections. Unfortanately the only thing uniting the spontaneous national movement that developed late in 1989 was a deep and abiding hatred of the system under which they had lived for forty years.

It was the East German masses (workest!) who spontaneously stopped shouting the opposition movement's democratic slogan, WIR sid das Volk! (WE are the people) and replaced it with Wir sind EIN Volk! (We are ONE people). It was these masses who fundamentally changed the political discourse after the opening of the Wall in November 1989. West German political parties did indeed exploit the situation to their own ends. However, they did not derail at the moment of victory a chance for a reformed socialism to emerge. Thea people of East Germamy simply wanted to hear no more talk of socialism, reformed or otherwise. We may think they should have known better, we may think them mistaken; but, from the point of view of the East German masses, the shortest path to a world of material consumption they had only dreamed about and wished deeply to become a part of was to chant, march, and ultimately vote overwhelmingly to become a part of West Germany. When thet saw that opportunity , they took it. The fact that they were to feel the less enjoyable aspects of capitalism only after the deal was done is beside the point.

Nowhere in the history of colonialism, as far as we know, were those about to be colonized given an opportunity to choos their governors in a free election. East Germans virtually begged to be allowed in. On March 18, 1990, they gave 75 percent of their votes to pro-unification parties. Two months later, when unemployment was already rising dramatically, factories already closing, and the old GDR economy entering a free fall, the voters, this time in local (East) elections, gave Kohl and the unification parties roughly the same percentage. At that time a resounding vote of dissatisfaction with the direction of affairs could have broken the unification juggernaut's momentum. The PEOPLE chose not to. The first all-German elections were held in December 1990, after currency union (July) and political union (October). Again, in the midst of disastrous economic conditions and with the political purges already getting underway, thepeople of the Eastern parts of Germany again voted for Helmut Kohl andhis conservatives.

What Rosenberg presents as a wholesale violation of civil and political rights ("the oppressed native") in Eastern Germany has actually been limited to large-scale purges in the academy, police, security services, judiciary,a nd state bureaucracy; they very social categories most instrumental in implementing the rule of the old dictatorship. While there were many exceptions, the academin intelligentsia as a whole was nearly supine in the face of the party and consistently attempted to provide an intellectual rationale for its continued rule. Jens Reich, himself a GDR academic, former SED member, longtime dissident, and a founder of New Forum, has said: "The (GDR) interlligentsia are cowards. It's rule . . . We have a lot of guilt for the situation we are in now.'

The police, judges, and bureacracy implemented the dictatorship's rule. All these categories did so in exchange for privileges fromt he regime. These privileges, particularly the right to travel, continuously infuriated the East German working class who were locked up behind the Wall. This largely explains why the East Germans themselves are the most demanding in calling for revenge against the previously privileged, a process which is also ongoing in other Eastern European countries. In early all these purges, due process has been denied and there have been innocent victims. There are laso a large number who deserved exactly what they got even if one is outraged, as are we, with the lack of due process. The point is that these political dismissals apply to only a minuscule percentage of the East German population. The rest have the same political and civil rights as do West Germans.

Rosenberg attempts to keep her colonialism thesis afloat by presenting the latest scapegoat for socialism's failure: the fat, stolid, conservative, rich, aggresive, and nearly xenophobic West German. She presents a lengthy litany of negative characteristics that purports to be an accurate description of the postwar West German state while plucking the strings of the still vivid historical memory of German fascism. By associating "then" with "now" she insinuates into her essay the idea that there have been no real changes in (West) German political culture over the last half-century. Evoking the specter of Nazism, it becomes easy to attribute to this discredited "enemy" any and all evil. The point here is not to amount a defense of bourgeois Germany, but to argue that a clear understanding of what it is and what it is not is necessary so as not to confuse an analysis of the real suffering, dislocation, exploitation, arrogance, and instances of political revenge nad repression that have been an integral part of the unification experience.

Space prohibits an extensive discussion of all of the inaccuracies contained in Rosenberg's essay. We will thus briefly address only the most serious:

(1) Rosenberg paints an all-encompassing picture of xenophobia and racism among West Germans. We would only point out in this regard that xenophobia is rearing its ugly head throughout Europe (and elsewhere), not just in Germany. Politically neo-fascist parties are making much more headeay in France, Italy, and Belgium, The French National Front is projected to take 20 percent in the upcoming parliamentay elections. A much more interesting question, which Rosenberg ignores because it does not fit her agenda, would be to ask why German xenophobia is vastly more virulent in the East, where the people have been subjected to forty years of so-called socialist internationalism, than in the West where, ostensibly at least, the dominant political ideology has been four decades of bourgeois nationalism. This question applies to the rest of Eastern Europe as well.

(2) Clearly Germany is not an immigrant country such as the United States, for example. Nevertheless, 20,000 foreigners who are neither ethnically German nor connected by marriage become German citizens annually and legislation is virtually certain to pass during the current parliament that will allow non-Germans born in Germany to become citizens. Whether they will accept is another question and there is more than a whiff of northern European chauvinism in Rosenberg's assumption that they even want to. For yearss various polls have shown that less than 7 percent would accept were it offered.

(3) Certainly foreigners cannot vote in German elections, bu that is hardly a German exceptionalism since it is true of nearly all other countries in the world including the rest of the European Community and the United States. Foreigners can and do join the German civil service. Only the top 40 percent of the German bureaucracy is reserved for German citizens. Compare that with the rest of the European Community and the United States.

(4) Rosenberg's assertion of "limited" German contact with foreigners is inexplicable. Prior to unification, over 8 percent of the West German population consisted of legally resident foreigners: Turks, Italians, Spaniards, Greeks, Yugoslavians, Arabs, Asians, and Africans. In some cities like Berlin and Frankfurt, they approach 25 percent of the population. Then there were the million-plus residents via various NATO military agreements. Since 1988, West Germany has taken in more foreigners, all of whom are elgible for the extensive social welfare system including health care, than any of the twenty-four other member countries of the OECD, including the United States. In 1991, Germany accepted over twice as many applicants for asylum as did France, Italy, and Austia combined! All this in a unified country roughly the size of Montana. Presently there are well over 5 million legally resident foreigners in Germany compared to 3 million, for example, in France. There are thousands of refugees with pending asylum applications and untold thousands more living and working illegally. Limited contact, indeed!

(5) Rosenberg's remark about West Germans being required to carry "internal identity documents" is loaded with a wording precisely intended to evoke an image of a goosestepping Gestapo checking papers. Actually it is a plastic card about the size of an American driver's license with mostly the same general function. Similar "internal identity documents" are required in France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Denmark, and some other European countries as well as around the world.

(6) Rosenberg's comments about German social welfare's comparing unfavorably to northern Europe (Sweden's alone is measurably better); its apprenticeship system's deriving from medieval guilds (more a system of lavor allocation and a subsidy to small business, but producing a lower youth unemployment rate than the rest of the European Community, the United States, and Japan); and its low rate of female labor force participation (lower only than that of the United Kingdom and Denmark in the European Community, the same as France, lower than that of the United States, but with a much lower than average rate of female unemployment) are simply added distortions in order to create the desired effect. A culprit! A Red Herring?

In her essay, Rosenberg claims an insight into East Germany based on living there for a year, an insight not generally gained by West Germans who, she says, knew little of the country. What the unification process has clearly shown is that Helmunt Kohl, regardless of what one may think of him, his principles, and his politics, had a much deeper intuitive understanding of the East German working class than most people, Dorothy Rosenberg included.

It does the left no good to chase revolutionary illusions, substituting scapegoats and cliches for clearheaded analysis. We must recognize exactly what went wrong with "actually existing socialism." This system's claiming to be socialist was destroyed in Eastern Europe generally and in East Germany specifically first and foremost by its own internal contradictions, not by events or actors external to it--West Germans or anyone else. Socialism has not disappeared from history no matter how loudly triumphalist capitalism, itself mired in stagnation and crisis, shouts its victory. However, if socialists continue to search for excuses instead of reasons, this re-emergence will be delayed and the realization of a better form of socialism will be pushed even further into the future.

Brigitte H. Schulz is assistant professor of political science and international relations at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. William W. Hansen is president of International Research Associates and part-time lecturer in politics at Trinity College.

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