A day of anniversaries

11 March 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of the GDR dissident Robert Havemann and the 25th anniversary of the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev to power as general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. According to the German Resistance Memorial Centre, Havemann, born in Munich in 1910, became involved during the Nazi period in the socialist resistance group Neu Beginnen. Together with Georg Groscurth, Robert Havemann, Paul Rentsch, and Herbert Richter, Havemann tried abortive attempts to make contacts with the Allies, and in the summer of 1943, Havemann, Groscurth, Richter and Rentsch wrote a number of programmatic texts, naming their group Europäische Union (European Union). Havemann was sentenced to death in Nazi Germany, but the sentence was not carried out because as a scientist he was judged to be undertaking important work for the war effort. One of his fellow prisoners in Brandenburg prison was Erich Honecker, who would take a leading role in the GDR after the Second World War and head the SED from 1971 to 1989.

Havemann was arrested on September 5, 1943 for his involvement in aiding victims of persecution and as the leading mind of the Europäische Union. He was sentenced to death on December 16, 1943. As his research work appeared indispensable for the Nazi arms industry, he received a stay of execution. Havemann was liberated from Brandenburg-Görden penitentiary by the Red Army in 1945. After the war, he joined the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), but became critical of the regime in the wake of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956. Expelled from the SED in 1964, Havemann lost his post in 1965. He was placed under house arrest from 1976 to 1978. Havemann was one of the most vocal critics of the German Democratic Republic up to his death in 1982.

Havemann had been sentenced to death in Nazi Germany, but the sentence was not carried out because as a scientist he was judged to be undertaking important work for the war effort. In 1982 he and Rainer Eppelmann were influential in launching the "Berlin Appeal". The text, which helped mobilise a peace movement transcending the East West divide, called for the Allies to withdraw from the two German states, to guarantee non interference in the affairs of the two states, and for the creation of a nuclear weapon free zone. Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg has a tribute here.

On 11 March 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev was elected general secretary of the CPSU. Within5 years, the Soviet Union ended its involvement in Afghanistan, and East Germany stood on the brink of free elections. Back in 2009, I posted on the "Gorbachev factor" (Archie Brown), noting how according to Brown (no relation), reform was not 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.

Peace prayers still needed in Dresden

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the firebombing of Dresden in the closing months of the Second World War. In the years that followed Dresden became a symbol of the horrors of war, but also a sign of reconciliation through its links with Coventry in Britain. In the 1980s in the GDR, the anniversary of the fire bombings became a focus for independent peace activists, with a tradition of peace prayers that began, at the time of the Swords into Ploughshares patch and the call for a civilian alternative to military service. In 1982, a group of peace activists called for a silent march through Dresden to mark the anniversary. Fearing trouble with the authorities, the Protestant church organized a peace forum at the Kreuzkirche, a once barock decorated church that was rebuilt after 1945 with no attempt to hide the scars of the bombing. More than 5000 people packed the church for the forum of and then walked to the ruins of the Frauenkirche to place burning candles amid the rubble of the destoryed church. In the years that followed, 13 February became a fixed date for peace prayers. In 1984, while a student in Berlin I attended the peace prayers which were addressed by Colin Semper, the then provost of Coventry Cathedral. Two years later, the anniversary of the fire bombing was the occasion for the Dresden ecumenical groups, the Stadtökumenekreis, to launch the idea of an Ecumenical Assembly for Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation. The first session of the assembly took place in Dresden to coincide with the anniversary at which more than 10000 submissions were received from throughout the GDR on issues of justice, peace and creation. The assembly culminated in April 1988 in Dresden with a series of 12 texts calling for changes in the GDR and at the global level.

In recent years, however, the 13 February anniversary in Dresden has become known for other - and less happy - reasons through Neo Nazi demonstrations. East German bishops have called for people to join peace prayers and a human chain in Dresden to counter right-wing extremism. Yesterday a German-wide association "Church for democracy and against rightwing extremism" was founded stating that "racist, anti-Semitic and anti-democratic standpoints are not reconciliable with Christian faith".

Ten years before the changes ..

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the decision at the NATO meeting at which the western Alliance agreed its "dual track decision" which threatened the deployment of additional nuclear arms from 1983 onwards in the event that the stationing of SS-20 missiles had not stopped by that time. This was both a symptom and a cause of the tension between East and West. In the GDR this was reflected in the militarisation of education and that would find another episode later in December 1979 with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up an unpopular government having difficulties in stemming an insurgency. To mark the anniversary, a conference has been held in Rome on “The Euromissiles Crisis and the End of the Cold War". Among other things, the conference has attempted to:

explore the impact of the crisis on the evolution of the Cold War as a whole, and possibly on its winding down. Did the deployment of the missiles, as the so-called Reagan victory school has been arguing, really contribute to the Soviet strategic defeat and to the Western “victory”, thanks to its superior economic, political, and strategic cohesion? Did it facilitate the emergence of those factors which would help overcome the East-West division throughout all European societies, by promoting a new level of civic awareness, raising a new consciousness across Europe of the dangers of the Cold War, and indirectly linking for the first time Western peace activists with Eastern dissent? Or did it actually prolong the Cold War, as some other historians have argued, by forcing upon an already dying bipolar international system a new round of rearmament and military expenditures that actually helped –at least for a few years– the survival of the Soviet system by offering the Soviet leaders a pretext to mobilize its last resources and call its public opinion to arms to defend the motherland against this renewed imperialist challenge?

In other words, the Euromissiles crisis has to be seen in the wider context of the militarisation of East-West relations that followed the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. In the German Democratic Republic, this was reflected in an increasing internal militarisation of society through which the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) sought to reinforce control over public life, witnessed for example in the 1978 decision on pre-military education in schools. At the same time, the SED used the discourse of peace (understood as opposition to Western military policies such as the US plans for a Neutron Bomb) as an ideological justification for such internal militarisation.

The effect of the twin-track decision of December 1979 could be seen, at one level, as creating a new justification for this dialectic of peace rhetoric and internal militarisation. Equally, if not more important, however, was that the decision spawned a new type of transnational social protest. This helped to promote a collective movement identity both ‘temporally’, by allowing individual protest events to be perceived as components of a longer lasting action, and ‘transversally’, by helping those who were engaged to feel linked ‘by ties of solidarity and ideal communion with protagonists of other analogous mobilisations’ (Della Porta/Diani 1999: 8). This transnational social protest transcended narrowly political opposition to previous political campaigns for disarmament, reaching out to previously unmobilised sectors of society.

In the GDR, opposition to the internal militarisation of society had come not least from within churches, and not least because of the existence of a cadre of Protestant pastors with a strong anti-militarist attitude due to their personal refusal to carry arms in the National People's Army. The transnational social protest movement created by the 1979 "twin track" decision offered a wider framework within which campaigns against militarisation of GDR society could be placed, and for more thoroughgoing political demands. At the same time, this mobilisation represented an ideological challenge to the SED's use of the discourse of peace, and created a basis for links between opposition to militarisation and other forms of dissent. An important factor in this development of political dissent was the attempt by activists in the GDR to build links with movements in other European countries, both to the West, as with the "personal peace treaties" between GDR and Dutch peace activists, and to the East, as in the contacts between GDR peace activists and political dissent in Czechoslovakia.

Far from the 1987 Treaty of Washington marking an end in the GDR of the political crisis unleashed by the twin-track decision, the period from January 1988 to October 1989 was marked by a new stage in political mobilisation in the GDR and attempts by the SED not seen in previous years to suppress such dissent. This culminated in the 1989 "peaceful revolution" which drew both on the protest repertoires developed in opposition to the militarisation f society and the political demands that grew out of the transnational social protest movement unleashed by the Euromissiles decision.

Reference: Della Porta, D. and M. Diani 1999, Social Movements, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.