I’ve posted a few times over the years about a trip I made with my partner to Leipzig in East Germany back in 1984, and I confess that the now-defunct country retains a kind of fascination for me. My rather banal judgement then and now is that the country, though marked by annoying shortages and inefficiencies, had a standard of living sufficient to give people an acceptable life in material terms, but that its lack of freedom, political repression, retention of its population by coercion were all unacceptable. I recently revisited an exchange I had with Tyler Cowen, 17 years ago, and I still think I was basically right and find it ironic that it was me, the leftist, championing freedom against the “libertarian” fixated on living standards.

I’ve just read Katja Hoyer’s wonderful Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990, which I would recommend to just about anyone. She traces the DDR from its origins to the fall of the Berlin Wall. The people who initially led the country were, of course, communists. But Hoyer reminds us that they were communists of a particular kind: the exiles who were left after Stalin had murdered most of them (he killed more of the German communist leadership than Hitler did). As such, they were cautious and conformist to a fault, and unlikely to strike out independently. They were also leading a ruined society, occupied by Soviet troops, with few natural resources and where, in contrast to the West, the victorious occupying power indulged in reparatory plunder rather than development aid. It was also a society initially seen as provisional, pending unification, and Hoyer argues convicingly that Stalin’s offer of a neutral unified Germany in 1952 as a means of preventing a NATO-aligned West Germany was sincere (though unlikely to succeed).

Obviously, the great stain on the country was the Wall and the militarized frontier, together with the murders of those who tried to escape and the system of extensive surveillance ran by the Stasi under Mielke (very much a state within a state). But Hoyer makes the case that once the option of emigration was blocked, people basically got on with building their lives and made a society that worked, where things gradually got better and where there was a surprising degree of pluralism and disagreement for what was effectively (though not officially) a one-party dominated state. Most people, after the upheaval of WW1, Weimar and Nazi tyranny, weren’t that keen on politics as a solution to their problems, and though the extreme exploitation of labour during reconstruction in the 1950s led to revolt and repression, things eased from the 1960s onwards.

One of the things that Tyler Cowen and I both noticed about 1980s East Germany was that the shelves in the shops were empty. We both drew the conclusion that this was a permanent feature of the system. But Hoyer argues that it was, rather, a symptom of the particular crisis of the 1980s. Of course, things were never good in consumer terms compared to the neighbouring West Germany, where many East Germans had relatives. Paradoxically, greater liberalisaton and exposure to Western culture also gave people a taste for what they were missing and fuelled dissatisfaction. Particularly interesting is the great Coffee Crisis of the 1970s, where an absence of foreign exchange made it hard to supply the real thing and the state tried to enforce consumption of a ersatz-adulterated alternative. Such was the disgust provoked that the East Germans engaged in one of the most successful programmes of development aid in history, creating the Vietnamese coffee industry from scratch (the world’s second-largest producer) in order to satisfy domestic consumption. Sadly for the DDR, the coffee plants only became mature from 1990. Too late, too late.

Hoyer also explores the dynamics of East Germany’s relations with its two most important external partners: the Soviet Union and West Germany. To put it simply: West Germany had money and cultural proximity; the Soviets had tanks and the ability to remove East German leaders they got tired of (such as Walter Ulbricht, sidelined on the pretext he was two old when younger than Joe Biden is now). The East German leaders, navigating this tension, increasingly tried to steer their own course, with limited success. Then, as now, energy dependence on Russia was an issue, with the alternative being the environmentally disastrous brown coal. (Much too in the book on music, fashion, and the rest.)

As I said, I stick by my judgement that it is the lack of freedom (including freedom of movement) that ultimately condems East Germany as a society rather than its constricted living standards (its citizens were still richer than most people on the planet). On living standards, it is worth remembering that the country was competing with the West during a period when Western societies were undergoing an amazing expansion in the amount and variety of consumer goods. Things look somewhat different today as the UK, France, Italy (to name but three) have been stuck at the same level for nearly two decades. The DDR did not succeed in providing its population with a cornucopia of consumption, but it did deliver the ability for people to get decent housing, to start a family, to have affordable childcare, for women to participate in the workforce to a degree that West Germany could not achieve. (Many things got better with reunification, the relative position of women got worse.) Societies like the UK and France today are not improving materially, young people cannot get decent jobs, find homes in which to bring up families, cannot afford childcare and our health services are creaking. To get anywhere, people have to engage in anxiety-producing competition in higher education to get the available good jobs (where success might depend on family money getting you past an unpaid “internship”). Moreover, we’re going backwards on the dimension of freedom with regression on democracy, rights to protest, human rights and a dramatic increase in state surveillance of the population, made possible by the internet. I’m not saying that the East German communists were right (they were not!) but the comparison to the West looks quite different in 2024 than it did in 1989.

One thing that made me a bit reluctant to read Hoyer’s book is her propensity to write for right-wing British outlets like the Telegraph, Spectator and Unherd (to be fair, she also writes for the Guardian). But the book is remarkably objective, balanced and unideological. One thing I’ve noticed with people who come from the former East is that they can be surprisingly hard to fit into a conventional left-right spectrum. Perhaps that isn’t surprising given their experiences and those of their families. Anyway, if you are a leftist (as most CT readers probably are), don’t be put off: this is a magificent piece of work.