Slaying History's Golden Calves (1): The Myth of Socialism/Communism

In this first instalment, we'll discuss the problematic remembrance of the really existing socialism and the GDR in particular

I found the below essay quite revealing, both professionally speaking as well as due to its relevance for the Covid régime: why are historical left-wing régimes lionised (e.g., the Jacobins, the USSR, and here—the German Democratic Republic, or GDR) and current ones treated with still some reverence (Cuba and North Korea come to mind, to say nothing about Venezuela) when their record is, well, shall we say spotty at-best?

To be fair, it’s also hard to assess these régimes even-handedly as they shape-shift over time, with the differences between, say, the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin being a prime example—and a far cry from its later iteration under Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko.

That said, let’s briefly consider the one historical Communist-in-name régime that works (so far) ‘better’ than its peers: China. What about them, one might ask?

Well, for starters, the main difference is—massive economic and technological exchange on a scale unseen in history. Nothing like this ever existed in the annals of the 20th century in terms of Western hostility versus the Soviet Union; then there’s the official policy under Nixon of (ab)using China to score points vs. Moscow; and, finally, China’s labour force played a decisive role in the annihilation of the esp. American working class from the late 1970s onwards (yep, you read this correctly—‘Neoliberalism’ began under Carter).

None of this is unknown, as is the track record of left-wing nightmarish régimes in terms of freedom and liberty; note that I’m not keeping score here but that I’m merely observing—the Western track record wasn’t all that better, generally, but with a crucial difference that lends itself towards my salient point: while Western ‘capitalistic’ countries tended to shield their own populations from the worst abuses while engaging in horrible crimes abroad, ‘communistic’ countries did essentially the same, albeit their totalitarianism was more focused on the domestic population (to keep them in line).

And I shall re-iterate, this is a model for the understanding of different régimes, an ideal-type (Max Weber), which doesn’t exist in reality.

And, no, this isn’t about passing judgement—I do consider it obvious which of these two meta régimes was objectively better for the ‘in-group’. A lot of this behaviour, though, came about due to their being an alternative, however horrifying Soviet-style communism actually was (esp. during the Great Depression).

And this brings me to the point I’m trying to make: since the end of the Cold War, though, that ‘alternative’ is no longer, hence there’s literally no restriction on the behaviour of (formerly) Western, nay, globalist élites. And these people have no convictions or morality either.

Finally, after this long and winding introduction, here’s what I’ve got for you today: the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published a long-ish piece about the glory days of—the GDR, asking ‘why [it] gets ever rosier’?

Below, I’m offering a translation, with emphases and [snark] added, as well as a meta explanation in form of a hypothesis. Enjoy (/sarcasm).

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Why Does the GDR Get More and More Beautiful?

Historian Stefan Wolle directed the GDR Museum in Berlin for almost 20 years. He says the defunct state becomes more beautiful in the memories of many with each passing day that it no longer exists.

By Markus Wehner, Frankfurter Allgemeine, 4 April 2025 [source; archived]

When something is already far away, it can come very close again. So close, in fact, that it looks completely different than before. Stefan Wolle has had this experience. The historian has written numerous books and articles about the GDR and headed the GDR Museum in Berlin [added this link: check it out] for almost two decades. Today, he is amazed at the strange renaissance the defunct East German state is experiencing: ‘We are currently experiencing a great wave of positive memories of the GDR’, says 74-year-old Wolle at a meeting at the GDR Museum in Berlin. The supposed beauty of the GDR is being emphasised more and more and has now achieved cultural dominance:

With every year passing year, the GDR becomes more beautiful.

[this image accompanies the article; it shows the depot of the GDR museum]

Two opposing versions of the GDR now exist: on the one hand, the evil dictatorship with the Stasi, automated shooting devices at the border [the former Iron Curtain, incl. the Berlin Wall], and dead [sic; that should be killed] people along the Wall. On the other, the version of the GDR that has emerged from memory. In it, people were nicer and friendlier, less concerned with possessions, and family and friends played a greater role—a lost, more comfortable world. ‘This latter image doesn’t stand up to empirical evidence in any respect’, Wolle argues. But it’s about a feeling [the word in German to relate it is—Ostalgie, which is a portmanteau/wordplay deriving from East = Ost and nostalgia = Nostalgie]. It can’t be addressed with facts about deaths at the Wall, inmates of GDR prisons, or the economic figures of the workers’ and farmers’ state [and as such, perhaps this escapist quality—feelings—is why far-left nonsense has such a powerful hold over the ‘woke’?].

First, Connect with Positive Feelings

The private [sic; I find this the literally most telling aspect] GDR Museum on the banks of the Spree near the cathedral in downtown Berlin [Mitte] finds itself in a similarly contradictory situation. The museum thrives on memory and re-encounter. There are rooms there that resemble those in a GDR prefab apartment, with typical furniture, kitchen appliances, and characters from GDR children’s television. Wolle’s approach is to connect with positive feelings and only then address the problematic aspects of the system [note the discrepancy to, say, how right-wing (not a fan) régimes are remembered: it’s always, as a rule, the other way round]. The graphics and texts in the GDR apartment attempt to achieve this. Wolle wrote most of them himself, often with an ironic undertone that not all visitors like.

The approach initially targeted former residents of the GDR [image, as a thought experiment, a museum like that (private, with an emphasis on the positive feelings first) in bombed-out Germany c. 1945]. But the museum’s visitors, more than half a million a year, have changed. Not only do many who grew up in the former Federal Republic come, but also a growing number of later generations who know little about the division of Germany [they also know less and less about what transpired before 1949]. Furthermore, the GDR Museum is a tourist magnet. ‘Foreign tourists are generally unbiased, interested in a state that collapsed, and what life was like there’, says Wolle. Today, it’s also about imparting basic knowledge, from the four occupation zones to the construction of the Wall and the role of the SED and Stasi [SED = Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, the GDR’s Socialist Unity Party; Stasi = Staatssicherheit, the GDR’s domestic state security forces]. Even German schoolchildren generally know little about the GDR [here you’ll see what I meant before]: ‘For some, Walter Ulbricht was the first Chancellor, and Hitler built the Wall’, says Wolle, and then has to laugh at himself. The complaints of older people about the ignorant youth are a classic [that doesn’t mean it’s not true…].

Wolle’s parents were convinced communists, but he himself lost faith in the socialist cause early on [if he’s 74 in 2025, he was born in 1951; see his Wikipedia proile]. Like many children of East German officials and intellectuals, he had difficulty fitting in [go figure], witnessing the disillusionment of his parents and grandparents, who had actually wanted to build a better German state [if ‘only’ after the defeat in WW2 and due to the fact that Hitler’s identical aspiration ended in smouldering ruins]. Because two fellow students denounced him [for his ‘intellectual arrogance’, as Wikipedia notes], he was forced to work as a production worker for a year in 1972 before [being permitted to] continuing his history studies at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

For him, the personal turning point had already come before: the Prague Spring of 1968, when the Soviet Union and its sister states, including the GDR, invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the democracy movement [here’s an inconvenient factoid: the Czechoslovak ‘Prague Spring’ régime desired a ‘socialism with a human face’, not ‘democracy’]:

That's when everything collapsed for me, very quickly and radically. It could never be mended [well, I’d add that the way more brutal repression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising happened when Wolle was 5 years old; incidentally, that atrocity didn’t change the Eric Hobsbawm’s mind about his faith, communism]. By the time the Wall fell, Wolle had long since abandoned the idea that reforms could create an independent, democratic GDR, albeit ‘without a sense of triumph, rather with a slight melancholy in his heart’. [talk about critical distance to one’s object of enquiry].

‘Ask Dr. Wolle’

After reunification [which was, technically, a less-than-friendly take-over of the GDR by the West German gov’t], the historian became an educator [orig. Aufklärer] on the GDR. His YouTube videos titled ‘Ask Dr. Wolle’ [orig. Frag Dr. Wolle] have garnered ten million views. In unspectacular clips lasting about three minutes, Wolle, always dressed in the same light beige jacket and blue shirt, talks about jeans in the GDR, the joys of the Westpaket [added the link; check it out] (a package of [West] German bread and butter [because the GDR really sucked at producing adequate numbers of consumer goods]), GDR cuisine (‘plenty and greasy’), and life in a housing project, but also about serious topics such as right-wing extremist skinheads in the GDR, suicides, and the dissolution of the Stasi. Even in his retirement, Wolle plans to continue making films.

One of his favourite ‘Ask Dr. Wolle’ episodes revolves around children’s books from the GDR. There were many beautiful ones, often fairy tales, as in all socialist states. As children’s book authors, writers could escape the demands of writing within the canon of socialist realism [my aunt, born in the late 1950s in Austria, once told me that secondary school books ‘informing’ Austrian kids about life beyond the Iron Curtain, held that ‘the West’ meant that the wife wouldn’t have to work, hence she had the freedom to look after the children, as opposed to really existing socialism whose hallmarks incl. ‘free universal daycare’: funny that, eh…]

The GDR’s anti-fascism was genuine, says Wolle—and at the same time, it was exploited. Some things emerged that were well done [it’s literally the same argument that’s tongue-in-cheek made about Hitler’s—or any other historical—régime: it wasn’t all bad, eh?]. Wolle recently rewatched Frank Beyer’s 1963 film ‘Naked Among Wolves’ [orig. Nackt unter Wölfen, based on Bruno Apitz’ 1958 novel of the same name], which depicts the resistance in the Buchenwald concentration camp between February and April 1945. The film’s role is an one-sided glorification of the communists:

Of course, I know very well today where history was distorted. But I must admit, I couldn’t escape the pull of this film.

A Mandated Friendship Becomes a Mentality

In today’s political landscape in the East, Wolle sees such influences from the GDR still at work. For example, among the BSW’s [Bündnis Sarah Wagenknecht, a faction that split off the GDR’s former SED party, which exists under the name of Die Linke = The Left] eastern voters, who are often older women, ‘Grannies for Peace’ [Omas für den Frieden]: ‘They very often fight for their own biographies’, Wolle says, adding that they had been involved in the system as teachers or pioneer [mandatory youth movement] leaders. Perhaps some things weren’t right in the GDR, even in their eyes:

But now they say: we were still a peace state [orig. Friedensstaat] and secured peace, including with the construction of the Wall on 13 August 1961.’

Love for Russia and the Soviet Union also plays a special role in the East [imagine—a prostrate and defeated Third Reich, with many persecutions and pogroms vs. German civilians carried out by the Soviet and other East European communist forces—is the foundation of that ‘love for Russia and the Soviet Union’]. In addition to the romanticised glorification of Russia, which is older and also widespread in West Germany [an artefact of military defeat], there is also the mandated friendship between the GDR and the Soviet Union in the East. ‘It’s astonishing how deeply such mentalities influence people’, adds Wolle. Anti-Americanism is the flip side of that coin.

Wolle finds it difficult to explain the AfD’s great success in the East. He sees a ‘continuum of mentality history’ when it comes to the question of migration. In the isolated GDR, there were hardly any foreigners. When contract workers from Angola, Mozambique, or Cuba arrived, they were often harassed in the GDR’s provincial towns. They weren’t allowed into bars or discos, and there were many serious fights because people feared they might approach German women. The SED leadership had little knowledge of these excesses [oh, sure, about 1/3 of the GDR population informed on their neighbours on behalf of the Stasi—I’m not buying that one].

In Wolle’s eyes, something else is even more important for the AfD’s success in the East: defiance. Television and radio, but also many online media, are perceived by many in East Germany as mouthpieces of the West. ‘What you see on the evening news is still the West's broadcaster.’ [and somehow I find this a rather good explanation: due to their experiences under the heels of Soviet-style tyranny, East Germans distrust mainstream media; it’s quite comparable across Eastern Europe…]. And the media’s rejection of the AfD then leads many to a defiant reaction: ‘They say: we won’t let Berlin, the West, tell us what to do, and we’re voting for them right now’, says the historian, who describes himself as a loyal SPD member [and ignores the stark economic and social realities of the former GDR where, instead of the ‘blossoming fields’ promised by Helmuth Kohl upon ‘reunification’, we see domineering of West Germans, way less opportunity, and a constant bashing of the GDR].

Wolle himself doesn’t see any benefit in the East German defiance. He is enthusiastic when he returns to his hometown of Halle an der Saale today:

In 1989, it was a place in decline; everything was dirty and broken. After forty years of socialism, it looked like it had been through a war [that is the track record of communism/socialism everywhere it has ever been tried].

Today, he says, Halle is a beautiful, charming city. He feels [sic] the same when he travels to small towns in Thuringia, Saxony, or Saxony-Anhalt; everywhere the facades have been renovated, there are shops, cafés, and restaurants. The country is unrecognisable after 35 years, he says, because millions have flowed in from the West. Many older East Germans receive high pensions, go on vacation abroad three times a year, and have two large cars parked in front of their renovated house. ‘And at the same time, they lament that they live in a region that has been left behind.’ The whining greatly annoys Wolle. And that’s why, if he had one wish, he would like to build a socialist theme park for everyone who still mourns the loss of the GDR. ‘There, you can live for a week as it really was in the GDR.’ [beware of historians claiming to be able to ‘splain’ ‘how it really was’, which is, of course, what Leopold von Ranke held]. Of course, no one would be shot at the Wall and the barbed wire, Wolle says, adding:

But you’d have to line up at the bakery in the morning, then at the butcher’s, and there’s no fruit or vegetables. Besides, an informant report would be written for the Stasi about your own misconduct [which is why I don’t buy the above-voiced notion of ‘SED leaders didn’t know].

Stefan Wolle pauses. He thinks, there would probably be many volunteers who would try it out because they knew that after a week it would all be over. That’s the difference: ‘Back then, we didn't know when it would end. Or how it would end.’ [oh, wait, you can literally make the same argument about Hitler’s Germany pre-Sept. 1939]

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Bottom Lines

I found this quite ambiguous—it’s a bit like Stockholm syndrome having a former GDR citizen doing all this; the contrast to how the West treated former acolytes of Hitler is quite telling—some were executed, many were quietly permitted to continue as before, albeit for new masters (see Operation Paperclip), and any kind of nostalgia for that old régime continues to be suppressed.

Now, I’m not in favour of glorifying anything about Hitler’s Germany, but as a thought experiment—just imagine a ‘theme park’ where people could live the ‘National Socialist experience’ for a week—and you’ll notice the immediate knee-jerk reaction of our indoctrinated, addled minds.

I do find it strange, and, speaking professionally as a historian for a moment, too, that there were two kinds of abominable ideological régimes in 20th-century Europe, with one of them being roundly condemned while the other is still somewhat glorified.

So, what about the Red Army’s triumph over Hitler’s Wehrmacht in WW2? Doesn’t the former constitute hard evidence of the righteousness of one world-system over the other?

I’m, for one, unsure about that one; now, don’t misconstrue this as a defence of National Socialism, but let’s not forget that these two ideological régimes are literally spawns of the same bosom. Don’t take it from me, though, here’s this notion explained by none other than Adolf Hitler:

I have learned a great deal from Marxism. I admit that without hesitation. Not from that boring social theory and materialist conception of history, not at all from that absurd nonsense…But I’ve learned from their methods. Only I seriously went about doing what these little tradesmen and secretary minds timidly started. The whole of National Socialism is implicit in that. Just examine it closely…These new methods of political struggle do go back to the Marxists in their essentials. I needed only to take over these methods and develop them, and in essentials I had what we needed. I needed only to pursue consistently what the Social Democrats interrupted ten times over, because they wanted to carry out their revolution within the framework of a democracy. National Socialism is what Marxism could have been had it freed itself from the absurd, artificial link with a democratic system.

(The quote is found in Joachin Fest’s Hitler biography on pp. 186-7 [my German original; I’m reproducing the English translation], and Fest located it in Rauschning, Gespräche mit Hitler [see here for the translation], pp. 174-5.)

So, any discussion about socialism, the GDR, and whatever came of it is—woefully inadequate if not undertaken in a broader, comparative setting.

And that setting invariably has to include, among many other things, a clear understanding of the origins and inter-relationships of the 20th century’s main contending ideologies (listed roughly in chronological order):

• Marxism and how it morphed—evolved, if you will, from its original, mid-19th-century formulation (‘organic world-revolution’) to the ‘vanguardist’-elitist, cult-like Leninist-Stalinist variety around 1900 (specifically after the failed 1905 Bolshevik uprising in Russia)

• Managed Liberalism as a system of managing mass society first emerged in the run-up to WW1 as many European countries, as well as the US, gradually widened the franchise to include universal male suffrage and, in the war’s aftermath, widened it to also include women; the most researched case study is perhaps the US in WW1, with the Creel Commission and esp. Edward Bernays’ Propaganda (first ed. 1928) being the prime markers; with the end of WW1 and, in the US context, the abrupt stoppage of state-managed economy, that form of control was largely disbanded

• Fascism kinda grew out of the pseudo-intellectual (sic) petty bourgeois milieux centred around a variety of cafés in Fin-de-siècle Vienna, with Mussolini adapting this ‘vanguardist’-elitist, cult-like’ posture in the aftermath of WW1; instead of ‘the people’, fascism—which, for all intents and purposes, also includes National Socialism—idolises ‘the state’ (consisting of ‘the people’); in many ways, fascism is an adaptation/amalgamation of both above forms of governance, taking from the former (socialism) centrally managed economy and society and from the latter (managed liberalism) the retention of limited forms of private property, albeit the individual is always incorporated into the collective of ‘the people’

Note that of these three 20th-century meta-ideological currents, ‘only’ managed liberalism is still around, and, whatever its merits relative to the other two—which are probably without question while competition lasted—since the end of the Cold War, a heady triumphalist has led ‘the West’, which whole-heartedly took over managed liberalism after WW2, to become more and more tyrannical.

With the emergence of China as a main force from around the 1980s onwards, though—whose system bears the hallmarks of both the trappings of Leninism-Maoism while, economically, it resembles more and more Hitler’s pre-WW2 Germany—a kind of competition is on once more.

Among the reasons why our world is becoming weirder by the minute, it seems, is that China’s main opponent—that would be the US-led ‘West’—bears the hallmarks of managed liberalism, although the latter also incorporated many of the policies of fascism, in particular National Socialism, after WW2.

And we’ll enquire in more detail about this conundrum in the next posting.