The German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, was the socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet-occupied zone of post-war Germany. It existed alongside the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), then West Germany, for 41 years during the Cold War. The GDR was a satellite state of the Soviet Union (USSR), which took responsibility for the security of the GDR. A workers’ uprising against the system on 17 June 1953 was suppressed by Soviet troops leading to around 55 deaths. The GDR regime constructed the Berlin Wall and closed borders to the west on 13 August 1961. These borders were not breached until the peaceful revolution of 1989. The socialist regime resigned following the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 and the GDR formally ceased to exist on 3 October 1990 when the Constitution and institutions of the FRG were extended to the east on the occasion of German unification.
Area: 108,333sq km; capital: East Berlin; population: 16.4m. (1989).
Initially founded in 1949 with a democratic constitution, the GDR evolved into a centralized socialist state through constitutional changes in 1968 and 1974 which defined it as the socialist state of the German nation and committed it to common ownership and strong relations with the USSR. The GDR came to be dominated by one party, the Sozialistische Einheitspartei (SED—Socialist Unity Party), as in the multi-party elections the allocation of seats in the Volkskammer was fixed in advance of polling day, ensuring that the SED was always the largest party. Thus, the highest organ of the SED, the Politbüro, dominated decision-making in the parliament and Council of Ministers. Walter Ulbricht was head of the SED in 1949–71, Erich Honecker in 1971–89 and Egon Krenz in October-November 1989. The secret service of the GDR—the Ministry of State Security or Stasi—was also accountable to the Politbüro. Established in 1950, by 1989 this organization employed more than 91,000 full-time staff for a population of 16.4m.
The socialist planned economy of the GDR was the strongest economy in the COMECON (Council for Mutual Aid and Assistance), the trading bloc for the states of Eastern Europe, but it lagged behind that of the FRG, particularly in terms of productivity. The GDR lacked natural resources and suffered from a poor infrastructure and outdated capital in industrial plants. The uprising that took place in 1953 was a protest against excessive production demands imposed on workers, and the Berlin Wall was built in 1961 to stem the exodus of skilled workers and professionals.
While the GDR had close relations with the USSR, its relationship with the FRG was initially antagonistic as the FRG refused to recognize the political system and sovereignty of the GDR. This changed on the election, in 1969, of Willy Brandt, whose Ostpolitik led to détente and the peaceful co-existence of the two German states. In the 1980s the hardline SED resisted the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of glasnost and perestroika and any kind of opening up of the political system. Thousands of GDR citizens fled to the west in the summer of 1989 via the newly opened Hungarian-Austrian border and civil rights movements began to demand freedom to travel and democratic reform of the GDR state. The regular ‘Monday demonstrations’ in Leipzig, which in October 1989, involving as many as 1m. protesters, overshadowed the GDR’s 40th anniversary celebrations, which Gorbachev attended. On 9 November the SED announced in a press conference that it would follow the lead of other Eastern European states and open up its western border for travel. This led to the fall of the Berlin Wall, democratic elections in March 1990, reform of the GDR under Minister-President Lothar de Maizière, and German unification on 3 October 1990.
This is the complete article, containing 618 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
