Election 1990 - Strangers in a foreign country

Today (18 march) marks the 20th anniversary of the first free elections in East Germany, less than six months after the mass demonstrations that undermined the communist state, and less than five months after the opening of the Berlin Wall. It was a curious mixture of old and new (the picture shows one of the ballot papers used in the election). The alliance of newly-founded citizens' movements and parties that had originally pledged to fight free elections on a common platform has fractured under the pressure of events: the Social Democratic Party of the GDR (founded by opposition activists) has joined forces with its opposite number in the Federal Republic. Helmut Kohl's (West German) Christian Democratic Union, looking for a partner of its own, has signed up with the East German CDU, for four decades a satellite of the communist SED. with revolutionary legitimacy provided through an "Alliance for Germany" with the Demokratischer Aufbruch, and the small German Social Union. Neues Forum, once the rallying cry of the peaceful revolution has become part of the Bundnis 90 grouping, along with Demokratie jetzt, and the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights. The election has become a battle between the proponents of a rapid and a less-rapid union with the Federal Republic.

It is election day, and Jane is preaching in Greppin, the small parish hall is packed on this Sunday:

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Greppin

As I prepared for my year in the GDR I never thought that I would experience free and open elections here. Maybe I should say that I grew up with politics, my father has been for many years either the mayor or the opposition leader in our town. When the elections took place, the children of course wanted to help, it was just something we took for granted. I can still remember that last year I thought that this at least was something I would not be doing in the GDR. But now there are free elections, a wonderful thing to be happening. Yet in many of the discussions I have had, I have noticed that the closer that election day comes, the greater the uncertainty about "what comes after". It's difficult to live with uncertainty, but it was also much more difficult when we knew exactly what would happen next. Our text today (Hebrews 11:8-10) is about Abraham and how he was ready to live with uncertainty:

8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

... I don't know about you, but I would not like to spend my life in a tent. Living in tents is a dangerous business. But how can we learn to live in tents in this time of anxiety before the election. How do we learn to live with uncertainty. There's no easy answer, no promise that things will get better. But one thing is sure, God does not want us to build walls to cut ourselves off. A tent is sensitive to wind and to rain. We must be sensitive, sensitive to other people, talk about our fears.

After the service, Stephen and I go for a walk in the nearby countryside, the Dübner Heide. The GDR seems to have got used to this election, everywhere there are posters put up, torn down, posted over other posters. Then we drive to Leipzig to watch the election results with friends. the results come in. General astonishment when the results are declared: the CDU (which a year earlier had been part of the so-called "Democratic Bloc" with the SED) gets more than 40 percent, the SPD just over half that. 16 per cent for the Party of Democratic Socialism, which used to be the SED. Just 2.9 percent for the civic rights activists in Bündnis 90. Before the election, many commentators had treated an SPD victory as a foregone conclusion. I'm disappointed too, but I hadn't expected it to be different.

Selling Stasi documents in East Berlin

17 March 1990 - Tomorrow is election day in the GDR. Today, Stephen arrived back in Berlin from Seoul where he had been working at the World Convocation on Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. I go to meet him at the airport. Hiring a car (and getting his first ever GDR parking ticket for stopping to ask where he could park), we stopped off at the Gendarmenmarkt in East Berlin. Here the synods of the previously-divided Berlin-Brandenburg Protestant church were having their first joint session. Less than 100 metres away from the Französische Friedrichstadtkirche where the synod is taking place there is a queue outside an unprepossessing building, now called the House of Democracy, and home to the various civic and human rights groups. They are selling a printed volume of Stasi documents, showing how the state security ministry has systematically tried to undermine and subvert opposition activity in the GDR (second hand copies are still available on Amazon). People around the church where the synods are meeting are flicking through the slim volume - some of them to see whether they were the targets of the Stasi. Later on we head back down to Greppin, in the middle of the Bitterfeld chemical works. I'm preaching tomorrow - election day.

The 'Sinatra doctrine' and the Gorbachev factor

Archie Brown, author of The Gorbachev Factor (and no relation to Dr B. of course), has a fascinating article over on Comment is Free reminding us that just over 20 years ago, on 25 May 1989, the Soviet Congress of People's Deputies had its opening session, and that unlike previous Soviet legislatures, a majority of the members had been chosen in competitive elections:

Much journalistic anniversary coverage this year will focus on the events that made for the most dramatic pictures – mass demonstrations in central European cities and, above all, east and west Germans dancing on the wall which had divided Berlin since 1961. Yet, the most important changes, the ones which made the transformation of Eastern Europe possible, took place elsewhere – in Moscow.

Archie Brown largely discounts the idea that reform was forced upon Gorbachev by pressure from outside or the dire economic situation inside the Soviet Union - ascribing a voluntarism to Gorbachev and a small circle of top policy makers:

As a result, decisions in Moscow not only played the decisive role in the spread of communism in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, they were just as crucial in facilitating the end of communist rule in Europe 40 years later.

Already in December 1988 at the United Nations, Brown notes, Mikhail Gorbachev had spoken of "the binding nature of the freedom of choice" of system for the people of every country. That applied, Gorbachev stated, both to socialist and to capitalist countries.

Yet what Brown does not note is the way in which this "freedom of choice" was having some perverse effects. Hungary had announced the dismantling of its section of the Iron Curtain with Austria (though this did not mean, of course, freedom of movement across the border) while in Poland, Jaruzelski had agreed to semi-free elections resulting in a de-facto non-communist government. Yet in the GDR, as epd notes on its splendid day-by-day account of the revolutionary year 1989, the police in Leipzig were continuing to seal off the streets around the Nikolaikirche to prevent protests after peace prayers. By ditching the Brezhnev doctrine for the Sinatra doctrine (the eastern European countries can do it, "their way"), Gorbachev was effectively saying that it was up to the local communist parties to decide what to do. In Poland, the party decided to seek a great national consensus, while the Hungarian party tried to reinvent itself as the avant garde for reform. In the GDR, however, the Socialist Unity Party oscillated between cracking down on dissent at home and a limited East-West opening up, as witnessed by the Berlin Philharmonic on 30 May 1989 giving its first concert in East Berlin since the building of the wall.

Arguably, it was the dialectic between Gorbachev's policy making in Moscow and the way in which relations between the state and the peoples would play out in eastern Europe that provided the template for the events of autumn 1989.

From 'paper folding' to free elections

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the fraudulent local elections in East Germany in 1989 that mark the beginning of the end of the GDR (or should that be the end of the beginning of the end of the GDR??) which mobilised activists throughout the republic to go to polling stations, make unofficial tallies of the results and compare these to the officially published results. The picture shows Egon Krenz announcing the results next to an image of peace prayers to protest against the elections, and a newscaster on the election results programme.

Of course, few people believed that the 99% score for the Socialist Unity Party (SED) and its allies really represented the people's will, but for the first time in recent history there were people willing to say so and to bring forward the proof. There were always regional variations in voting of course, but hardly ever, if at all, did the official version of popular acclamation fall below 90%. There was also sometimes a macabre delight in "poor" poll results. I can remember watching the 1984 "results programme" in the Bohemian quarter of Prenzlauer Berg when my friends were delighted that the district again scored the lowest official turnout and the lowest number of "yes" votes for the official candidates. Five years later, there was increasing discontent about the facade of elections that transcended the usual circles of known activists. Even members of the Christian Democratic Union and the Liberal Democratic Party - two of the "block parties" allied to the SED and that followed its dictates - began to get agitated about the elections and the way they were organized (of course even if they had published the real results the SED would have had a huge victory, but the concern was to ensure that it received a triumphalistic result).

Hans Michael Kloth in his book, "Vom 'Zettelfalten' zum freien Wählen", (From 'paper folding' to free elections) hes set down the nine-months chronology from these rigged elections to the free parliamentary elections of March 1990. The title refers to the fact that in GDR times voters were simply expected to take the list of candidates, fold it in half, and place it in the urn, without even going to the voting booth.

The Evangelical Church in Central Germany as part of its "Holy Disorder" campaign, has taken a different path by opening a blog site for people to share their recollections of the1989 elections and their significance for the popular protests. Christoph Kähler, then a theology professor in Leipzig, and now a bishop, describes the elections as being unlike anything he had experienced before. Instead of slightly anxiously taking the ballot form and demonstratively going into a polling booth, as at previous polls, there was now a queue of people who were waiting for an opportunity to exercise their right, constitutionally-guaranteed but in practice ignored, of taking part in a secret ballot. Other people didn't bother waiting but sat at tables taking a pencil to the preordained list of candidates. Kähler's wife went to the count to try and keep a tally of no votes - "the almost 100% approval that appeared in the newspapers the next day was so obviously fake that it brought the political dissatisfaction with this system of lies to a new high point".

Christian Dietrich describes the fraudulent elections as marking the beginning of the role of the Leipzig peace prayers as a ritualised space for protest. With fellow students in February 1989 he decided to form an "Initiative for the Democratic Renewal of Society" to call for the SED to be de-elected (this Stasi document includes information about these efforts). Hearing that he was being searched for by the security forces he left Leipzig shortly before the elections and went back to his home town of Jena, where a protest demonstration on the eve of the elections was being broken up by police. The day after the elections (a Sunday) protesters gathered in the Leipzig Nikolaikirche for the peace prayers. Rows of police surrounded the church to prevent a demonstration forming that would march to the centre of the city. But there were other views too. Sinnie writes that she regularly took part in the "paper folding" exercise - although she was unhappy about many things she approved of the GDR's peace policy, and the fact that East German soldiers did not serve abroad. Since unification, she writes, all the parties are the same and you have just as little influence on what they do. She no longer votes as a protest against the Bundeswehr taking part in foreign missions: "Now I'm very curious to see if my contribution, which departs from the party line, will be placed in this forum."