Kommentar

This textbook was published at a time at which the leadership of the East German ruling party SED considered the economic groundwork for the commencement of a “socialist era” to have been successfully laid by means of the collectivisation of agriculture, which itself followed the creation of a large-scale industrial sector “owned by the people” (volkseigene Betriebe). It was also a time in which the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 had established a geopolitical boundary cutting through Germany and marking the frontier between east and west in Europe (Schmid 1982: 335). The two-part textbook for year 10 of schooling in the GDR was written by a team of authors headed by Stefan Doernberg1 in line with the new curriculum of 1966 and published by the GDR’s state textbook publishing house, Volk und Wissen². One of the key characteristics of the curriculum reform of 1966 was that it introduced the practice of textbooks being developed in parallel with curricula; in other words, the textbooks created on the basis of the new curricula appeared at around the same time as the curricula themselves (Schmid 1979: 58f; Mätzing 1999: 273).

The textbook commences in the post-1945 period and concludes with the year 1961, which represents a minor deviation from curricular stipulations.³ Its introductory text, in line with the socialist trope of “class struggle”, interprets the confrontation between socialism and imperialism as a clash between “the forces of peace” and those of war and accords to it the status of the central issue in global politics (p. 10). The textbook’s discussion of the foundation of the GDR and its evolution to 1961, along with international developments in relations between the opposing western and eastern blocs, are the two areas on which the book principally focuses; it also presents thorough discussion of developments in the Federal Republic of Germany, to which it refers as Westdeutschland.4

The passage in this document discusses the negotiations which took place at the beginning of the 1950s around the potential establishment of a pan-European defence force, a “European army”, whose purpose was to incorporate the Federal Republic of Germany into the western military alliance, and whose origins lay in the project to establish a “European Defence Community” proposed by the then French prime minister René Pleven in 1950.5 The text of the document is in the chapter of the textbook entitled “Transition to the building of socialism [Aufbau des Sozialismus] – the GDR’s national mission” (pp. 170-175). The textbook contrasts this “mission”, which the authors consider to have brought about “a turning point in German and European history” (p. 188), with the various stages of the process of western European integration from 1948 to 1958, i.e. until the Treaty of Rome came into force. A table on p. 145 provides a concise summary of this development, which is detailed in a separate chapter entitled “The economic and political contradictions of the imperialist system come to a head (1950-1958)”. It is indicative of the book’s tone and intent that the table lists the “Pleven project”, which eventually failed in 1954 and which it subjects to particularly critical comment, alongside existing or continuing alliances.6

In the authors’ view, the formation of “supranational communities” which they considered to have their origins in the “American idea of what Europe was to be” (p. 146), and the “tendency towards internationalisation” observable in western Europe, arose from the “objective basis” of the rapid development of production capacities and (industrial) progress after the Second World War. This notwithstanding, the authors assess these supranational developments as “an expression and a product of state monopoly capitalism in the second stage of the general crisis” of imperialism (p. 144). The textbook asserts that the principal aim of these alliances was to be the establishment of an economic fundament on which to launch an aggressive military pact system directed against the Soviet Union, and categorises the “Pleven project” of a European defence community as part of this “resurgent militarism”.

This remilitarisation of Westdeutschland, however, which the textbook formulates as a concerning development, had more profound historical roots: The principal tenets of the agreement concerning Germany that was concluded in the context of the Treaty of Rome were the lifting of Germany’s occupied status and the restoration of the Federal Republic to full national sovereignty.7 It was not least the perceived risks of a rearmament of Germany which the establishment of a pan-European defence force was intended to substantially reduce, simultaneously driving the project of European unity. The “European army” had been conceived of as, alongside the Schuman plan, the key support to a future union of the peoples of Europe which would protect western Europe against a feared attack by the Soviet Union.8

The students at East German upper secondary schools (Erweiterte Oberschulen) who used the textbook learned little from its truncated and one-sided presentation of the issues about the background to this stage of European integration. The textbook claims that the West German economy had been infiltrated by “coal and steel barons” and by the “convicted war criminals” and former Nazi military officers of the Second World War who aimed to remilitarise Westdeutschland in order to place obstacles in the path of socialism’s progress and provoke another war (p. 173). In the GDR, the General Treaty signed by Konrad Adenauer in Bonn in 1952 was regarded as a “General Treaty for War”, whose sole purpose was to prepare the ground for nuclear warfare.9 In this context, the textbook places considerable emphasis on the fact that a number of important figures in the economic, administrative and military fields in Nazi Germany had regained positions of influence in the early Federal Republic. Its use of this circumstance to support its thesis of the “fascist infiltration” of West Germany allows the textbook to draw conclusions which ignore the new, different quality of western European integration.10

As well as failing to do justice to the process of European integration in its historical context, the textbook neglects to present any alternative ideas of what “Europe” could be like. Recent research findings have indicated that the GDR’s policy on Europe was limited to implacable rejection of the movement towards integration seen in the west of the continent. The GDR’s self-declared “European mission”, which it claimed arose from its “responsibility to [itself] and to Europe”, consisted in the conviction that it was better able to meet the needs of the peoples of Europe than was the Federal Republic. In the 1960s, it aimed for a “step-by-step rapprochement between the two German states”, with an ultimate end of unification on a socialist basis (Schmidt 1995: 152-157). Likewise, historical research in the GDR in the 1960s, which focused primarily on the Aufbau des Sozialismus and the international Communist movement, did not occupy itself a great deal with European issues, with only a handful of published works of research dealing with the history of Europe’s capitalist countries and the US. These works included an analysis of the background to Franco-German rapprochement in 1938 and a discussion of the driving forces behind and the impact of contemporary British policy on Europe (Schilfert/Einhorn 1970; Mätzing 1999).

The authors allege that the process of western European integration, which was in their view contradictory, frequently unsuccessful and increasingly militaristic in nature as it progressed, had fuelled the development of the Cold War. Questions of security in Europe were certainly of interest to Doernberg and his team of authors; that said, they approached such issues from a decidedly East German perspective, their aim being to demonstrate to students the global action of the “principles of the development of societies towards socialism and communism” and instil in them a “socialist and internationalist historical consciousness” (Mätzing 1997: 141, 145). The textbook places its detailed discussion of how the GDR came into being within this unfolding of the global system of socialism, in line with the thesis posited in the first keynote document issued by the SED after 1961, the Nationales Dokument of 1962.

After Erich Honecker’s succession to power at the beginning of the 1970s, following Walter Ulbricht, the buzzword of “internationalism”, referring not to a form of citizenship of the world, but rather to global solidarity among the proletariat, gained in currency, enabling the history of the “German socialist nation” to be linked more closely to world history, yet not interpreted in a European context; this was the way GDR history went on to be presented to students in new textbooks issued in the early 1970s (Mätzing 1999: 97).

Ewa Anklam

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¹ Dr Stefan Doernberg (1924-2010) was a professor and the long-time director of the German Institute for Contemporary History (Deutsches Institut für Zeitgeschichte) in east Berlin. He took a distance degree in history at Lomonossow University in Moscow; his research interests were primarily in the field of European security and international politics. From 1970 onward, Doernberg was successively the secretary, general secretary and finally vice-president of the GDR’s committee for security in Europe. See the obituary by E. Crome in: Welttrends. Zeitschrift für internationale Politik 73 (2010), 18, p. 109; Barth u.a. (1995), p. 139. The team that worked on the textbook also included, among others, Lothar Below and Rudolf Graf.

² The Volk und Wissen publishing house was founded in 1945 and remained the GDR’s only educational publisher throughout the history of the state.

³ The GDR curriculum stipulated that “unit 6” was to teach the years 1961 to the present in year 10, while the Second World War was to be taught earlier, in year 9 of schooling.

⁴ “Unit 5”, according to the curriculum, included topics such as “The development of West Germany (Westdeutschland) into Europe’s principal site of war”.

⁵ On 25 October 1950, the French government unveiled a plan to establish a European defence force which was to include German units; a treaty to this effect was signed on 27 May 1952 by France, Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the Benelux states, which had already joined together to form the European Coal and Steel Community. The plan failed when the French Assemblée Nationale refused to ratify the treaty. Cf. Der Spiegel 8 (1951).

⁶ Textbooks in the Federal Republic, by contrast, left this stage of European integration out of summary tables of the process.

⁷ After France rejected the EDC treaty, the Federal Republic remained formally under occupation until 1955, receiving full sovereignty with the Paris Treaty of 5 May 1955.

⁸ See the newspaper article “Erster Schritt zur Europa-Armee” (“A first step towards a European army”) in Die Welt, 10 May 1952. Online: http://www.ena.lu/.

⁹ Ibid. Cf. Schmidt (1995), pp. 152 ff.

¹⁰ In the context of the plans to establish an army for Europe, the book discusses the emergence of militaristic organisations in the Federal Republic, in which people were involved who had formerly served as generals under Hitler. The book also claimed that former officers of the Nazi military were to be part of an elite reserve force in a planned West German army (p. 174). Cf. Mätzing (1997), pS. 145.


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