Tex-Mex floor-filler across the snowy fields: Ian McMillan, To Fold the Evening Star. New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2016, £8.99)
This volume starts in 1994, but McMillan (born 1956) had two books out in 1980. This does not affect the book you can buy, but possibly the contents of his Selected Poems (1987) are being taken as a separate era. It has been followed by the recent Yes But What Is This? What Exactly? and That's Not A Fishing Boat, It's A Giraffe: Responses To Austerity. He is, basically an oral poet who regards language as a mysterious substance; an equivalent of Peter Finch. Peter Porter reviewed his first collection, in 1980, in these terms: “A newer sensibility still pervades the poetry of Ian McMillan[.] Seeing both more and less than the real is McMillan’s standby; these poems of country mysteries devolve around bell-ringing, […] McMillan makes some attractive pictures with his surrealist assembly kit, and The Changing Problem marks the emergence of an interesting new talent [.]” The changes word refers to bells ringing changes. Newer compares our poet to two radical poets (“erudite and restless minds”), whose work Porter says he does not understand.
The new Selected has about 190 poems. We have to unfold the title. Evening Star is a likely name for an evening paper, the local newspaper for some town or other. The last poem has him going out to buy an Evening Star, in 1965. McMillan is punning on the gap between literal and figurative meanings of the two words. To fold a star (the evening star is actually the planet Venus) takes us into a word of dreams or surrealism. To fold the evening paper you have just bought is quite normal and unsurprising.
Many poets subscribe to the idea of a special place where there are no banal experiences or ordinary people, and suggest that this is a place where you can actually go, and which the volume of poems is a postcard from. McMillan does not do this. He is always close to everyday experience, and for example is interested in work, in the working class, in West Yorkshire. Many books of contemporary poetry can be seen as starting by excluding those realms of information. McMillan is constantly pushing back at this invisible boundary of aestheticisation – which simultaneously defines, however silently, what is not aesthetic. His ability to make the poetry itself constantly interesting is the focal point. To state the obvious, all the poems are interesting. He seems unable to write a predictable cadence.
We have to divide his work into two parts. Since he has been working since 1982 (see the cover of the Selected Poems) as a touring writer in schools, ‘provincial villages, clubs, and supermarkets’, he has a line of populist and participatory poetry, encouraging people to create word forms for themselves. Thus, he is the good conscience of poetry, making it available to everyone, going into schools and attracting a younger audience which will keep poetry alive, as opposed to becoming increasingly ancient, rigid, and attenuated. Whether the poetry grandees deserve to be continued is another question. But surrealism is the most immediate of styles, and his accessible poetry has not ceased to be original: facing people who have no idea what poetry is is one of the frontiers of newness and strangeness, and behaves often like the other frontiers. That work is collected in, for example, Perfect Catch (where ‘catch’ is what runs from one voice to another). But a large part of his work is literate poetry, for the literate, and this is what is collected in generous quantities in Evening Star.
McM has (as the third poem in the book) a documentary record of memories of someone he describes as housebound, whom he met while working for Age Concern. The memories date to the Second World War, when she was working in a factory in Leicester. This has some resemblances to a poem by Thomas Kling which I translated. Kling was working with old people, as an alternative to military service, probably in the mid 1970s. His poem deals with an old man who has Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, and the memories go back to the Eastern Front, in perhaps 1943. Kling heightens the negative elements of the experience to the point where it is all like a horror film. His poem is neo-Expressionist. McMillan does not see any element of horror or grotesque in his stories of people with limited social or economic capital.
The dominant theme of the poems, as a body, is de-industrialisation. There are good reasons for thinking that this was not chosen by the poet, but was simply the chief process unrolling in the region he lives in and in his lifetime. I note that I was born at much the same time as he was, and not very far away. This affected everybody, at least within the industrial regions (or, regions which were that until they weren’t). When I was born (so, when Ian was born), there were 14 million jobs in manufacturing, and 80% of the population was self-identified as working class. It’s not like that now. The disjuncture which so many McMillan poems exploit may also be the discontinuity between what we expect and what is actually there – a new country. His pervasive use of defamiliarisation, of the not quite real, may connect to a country which demands the use of your imagination because it wasn’t there ten years ago. You have an apparatus of social knowledge, which you may as well scrap, because reality has mutated while you weren’t looking. The defamiliarisation could also trip you into imagining a social order which we don’t yet live in – one where the powerful are not all-powerful and where economic and political power is very widely distributed, geographically and otherwise. This is a matter of personal preference. The basic techniques allow you to go there or elsewhere.
Simple language makes the poems easy to read, but the subject can be completely unfamiliar, as in ‘Deaths by ice-Cream’:
Man killed by eating whole cone too
quickly. Woman died after slipping
on ice cream, falling under bus
carrying brass band. Child dies
sitting in snow trying to cool
dripping cone. Man killed by 99
hurled from hot air balloon by
lute player. Woman died after
argument with ice cream salesman
in Fife.
The flow of information is just about ideal. The feel is like a silent comedy film, where anything inanimate becomes mysterious kinetic and hostile. I never asked in childhood if there was a 97 or a 98. And, 99 what? who counted? This nature film about the new apex predator is immediately followed by “Ted Hughes is Elvis”, which is probably McMillan’s most famous poem. Again, it is a very simple idea, but it does open up a new world. The idea gets over quickly and it is very enjoyable. How could we have failed to notice that “I’m itching like a bear in a fuzzy tree” introduced the shaggy character who appears in every Ted Hughes poem? In the poem, Elvis escapes by hitching a ride on a truck, explains to the driver that he is the Big Bopper (the one who sang ‘Chantilly Lace’) and had faked his death in the plane crash in Iowa which felled Buddy Holly and Richie Valens (‘La Bamba’). Later, he stabs Ted Hughes and begins a lucrative career as a Ted Hughes impersonator. From the same book also comes “Poem Occasioned by the High Incidence of Suicide amongst the Unemployed”. It also includes ‘Stone, I Presume’:
second stanza.’ That’s what he said,
leaning over me in the classroom,
puffing on his tweed pipe, the air
thick with twist and reek. ‘Always
start your poems with the second
stanza, my boy, and you won’t go far
wrong.’ I pondered this in my rooms
in the University. I knew,
just knew, it was the Thirties. ‘The Thirties
are a sort of second stanza, aren’t
they?’ I said to him. The air was
thick with twist and reek.
This shows the reflexivity which McMillan starts from, the sense that the poem is an artificial environment, although any environment filled with humans is artificial. He defines the older English poetry effectively but very lightly – the tweed and the pipe combine as a tweed pipe. The burning wool is like burning Old Twist, a shaggy tobacco. The poem is an object, you can fold it like the evening star. He does not follow up the idea that older, academic-conservative, poetry is absurd with a heavy notion of new poetry being Authentic. The new poem he offers is absurd and very light.
In the sky, look. That constellation there.
Round here we call it Wrecked Oil Tanker,
that constellation, because there’s no shape
to it and it’s black all around it.
Is that thing turning?
That’s a joke.
O pinpoint the Grimness for me madam.
Pointpin it. Speak into this thing.
This, call it what you like, pimple.
Speak faster than you normally would
to compensate for my dying battery.
And in a higher register than you
would normally employ. Pin pin
the Grim? Point it?
(from ‘The Grimness: BBC Radio 4, Tuesday, 8.30 p.m.’)
A number of the poems rely on word substitutions. We have to speak about ludic. This was a thing in the 1980s, often cited by people who wanted you to think they knew what the word postmodern meant. Ludic was associated in the 1960s, and the 1970s, with Edwin Morgan and George MacBeth. I mention this because they were firmly shut out from the provenance expertise, in the 1980s. You couldn’t define yourself as being super up to date if the idea you were peddling had reached a peak in 1964. It was a pretty strong idea, though. It connected with an idea that people mainly wanted to be distracted from the high unemployment and rapid impoverishment of entre regions, during the 1980s, and that art with no reference to the real was the only kind which would reduce your anxiety rather than increasing it. This part didn’t fit with Ian McMillan, since his poems incorporated passages from the real, at every opportunity. It connected up with the idea that art was a game, and that a lot of human activity was there to pass the time away. I didn’t instantly realise that a lot of people had no jobs and a great deal of time on their hands, and that games provided a way of enjoying the down time, of being sociable and genial and dexterous even if you were just waiting for the giro. Anyway, many of McMillan’s poems seem to have been constructed as part of games, and they can also be compared with poems by Edwin Morgan, Frank Kuppner, Robert Crawford, W N Herbert, and John Hartley Williams, from the same era. These poets – unless I’m making it up – realised that language could be separated from experience and manipulated like numbers: they could be written on a non-rigid surface which was then subjected to transformations, so copying, expanding, perforation, various distortions, etc. Geometry could produce the shapes of objects which didn’t exist, and poetry could do much the same. This abundance of verbal objects stood in a definite relationship to the shortages of material objects which were a feature of the period of de-industrialisation and high unemployment. It was the source of a lot of pleasure.
As a professional poet since 1981, he goes into the cultural wastelands and is usually surrounded by bad poetry – which is where the language mostly lives; but takes good poetry there. He has the ear of local government, the schools and councils which want poets to reach the people and will pay very small sums, repeatedly, for a poet to do this. They have him by the ears. This is admirable when compared with other poets who plan to change the whole system of government and aim at a centre, while really being wrapped in silence and on the periphery. There is doubt a link between decentralisation and the unpredictable, rule-eluding, organisation of his poems. He reminds me of Semyon Kirsanov – a comrade of Mayakovsky, he lived out the whole era of poetic coma in his country by writing poems for children, a kind of folk-Futurism. McMillan is the visible face of poetry.
**
I didn't realise that this had come out in 2016 when I saw it in an on-line library (with no date inside). So i wrote a review but it was too late for magazine publication. So it i s being released here.
**
Wednesday, 26 March 2025
Friday, 14 February 2025
Blakean ballyhoo
Children of Albion: a moment of national humiliation?
After writing about Horovitz as hustler, I saw a copy of Children of Albion in Oxfam, so I abandoned good taste and bought a copy. I will burn it after doing some analysis. (subtitle is “poetry of the underground in Britain”). First, he has 5 women out of 63 poets. That is definitely an advance on Allott, only seven years before, with 6 women out of 85 poets. About a 1% increase, 7% to 8%. But I don’t think that specific ratio changed much in the Sixties, it was the Seventies and some stiff polemics which changed things. I think the basic lesson is that Horovitz couldn’t tell good poems from bad. I read Albion in about 1973 and I was appalled. I just thought it was complete junk. Today, I notice that he has left out Patton, Henri, and McGough. That is so bizarre. But, he wanted to be Czar of live poetry and the Liverpool crew were far more popular than he was. So that is why he left them out. Horovitz did ‘poetry and jazz’, but Christopher Logue had done it a few years before, with the Chris Kinsey Quartet. Logue was the top man for jazz poetry, song related poetry, poetry about yesterday's news, radicalism, being hip. So... Horovitz left him out too. OK, this wouldn't matter if the quality of the poems selected was good.
I was just sickened by this book in 1973. Sixty pages of Horovitz’s visibly fake, inflated, marketing prose must have put me off. The inside jacket text says “the present anthology is intended to reveal his (i.e. MH's) subsequent ten years’ involvement with the living poetry which he found all around, within and without him.” Pretentious shit! He is radically confused between selecting poetry by other people and producing an art statement in which everything relates to him (and we buy it on that basis). This stress on the self is likely to make culture disappear behind the incessant testimony of egoism. Such wording signals a profound nervousness about objectivity, abstractions, and formal intuition.
Chaloner, four poems. None of them picked up in his Collected. Not his best. Paul Evans, six poems. Four lost. But two are in his first book – OK, they are both really good. I failed to respond in 1973. My fault. John James, two poems. Both in his first book. Both good.
None of the poems has anything blakean about them. That theme is only there because Ginsberg associated Britain with “Albion”. Just a reflection of a fantasy. The poems are much more like polaroids – instant and with no mention of the past. It’s the idea which so much good Sixties poetry uses. Obviously, the polaroids often show boring people leading boring lives. (There is an exception, and it is Horovitz's own poems, mediocre imitations of Ginsberg which have a sediment of Blakeanism due to the transfer of degenerative material from the American source. He had prominently confused the marketing guy with the talent, and the publicity release with the commodity.)
The cover is beautiful. I looked at an anthology called “It’s world that makes the love go round”, (edited Ken Geering, 1968) from Corgi, but from the same era and with the same Pop approach, for comparison. It is much worse than ‘Albion’, and one has to give Horovitz that much. I liked a couple of poems from ‘World’:
stones and other things
live like statues to words
praising the sound of sticks
uncarved
pebbles uncut.
In the beginning
was it the words or the beach?
(John Porter)
and by the same poet, ‘Analogue’:
has ever a clay model
reached pseudopodial about itself
to mould its eyes to face inwards
its ears to be deaf.
He will make the shell
make it solid,
and poke out the filling
as an unnecessary suicide circuit.
Horovitz gets credit for including poems by Harry Guest, not well known at that point. The take-away from the whole schlamassel is that a terrible anthology does not prove that a whole poetic scene is terrible, instead it may just be the product of an editor who can’t tell red from green and has missed everything good and desirable. If you have someone spending six days a week on the schmoozing, the networking, the fake spirituality, the ballyhoo, they haven’t got time to read poetry. Even supposing they wanted to. “Here at last is the ‘secret’ generation of more or less British poets…” There was no ‘Albion’ era in British poetry. It is just a bad anthology. Lucie-Smith’s book came out a year later and that actually does define an era.
I am interested in finding a division between Pop poetry and the avant garde… but 10 of Horovitz’s sixty-three poets are also in Mottram’s list of the “British Poetry Revival”, five years later. So, a good portion of the avant-garde were writing Pop poetry in the 1960s, apparently. Poems became more stringent, more conceptually evolved, over a few years. The phrase about “living poetry” probably gave Mottram the stimulus for writing about a “poetry revival”. The subtext is, probably, about readings before a live audience, and to freedom from conservative artistic conventions. As an emotional utterance, it can take on many implications.
'Suicide circuit' is presumably what is attached to a "self-destruct button'. This was a real thing, for example the U2 spy plane was supposed to be destroyed by the pilot rather than have its design secrets fall into enemy hands. 'Mission impossible' had tapes which would "self-destruct in 60 seconds" -OK, that was fiction rather than Cold War fact. Wikipedia has a page on the topic, saying e.g. "The landmines have a battery and when the battery dies, the land mine self-destructs." This only applies to the expensive kind!
After writing about Horovitz as hustler, I saw a copy of Children of Albion in Oxfam, so I abandoned good taste and bought a copy. I will burn it after doing some analysis. (subtitle is “poetry of the underground in Britain”). First, he has 5 women out of 63 poets. That is definitely an advance on Allott, only seven years before, with 6 women out of 85 poets. About a 1% increase, 7% to 8%. But I don’t think that specific ratio changed much in the Sixties, it was the Seventies and some stiff polemics which changed things. I think the basic lesson is that Horovitz couldn’t tell good poems from bad. I read Albion in about 1973 and I was appalled. I just thought it was complete junk. Today, I notice that he has left out Patton, Henri, and McGough. That is so bizarre. But, he wanted to be Czar of live poetry and the Liverpool crew were far more popular than he was. So that is why he left them out. Horovitz did ‘poetry and jazz’, but Christopher Logue had done it a few years before, with the Chris Kinsey Quartet. Logue was the top man for jazz poetry, song related poetry, poetry about yesterday's news, radicalism, being hip. So... Horovitz left him out too. OK, this wouldn't matter if the quality of the poems selected was good.
I was just sickened by this book in 1973. Sixty pages of Horovitz’s visibly fake, inflated, marketing prose must have put me off. The inside jacket text says “the present anthology is intended to reveal his (i.e. MH's) subsequent ten years’ involvement with the living poetry which he found all around, within and without him.” Pretentious shit! He is radically confused between selecting poetry by other people and producing an art statement in which everything relates to him (and we buy it on that basis). This stress on the self is likely to make culture disappear behind the incessant testimony of egoism. Such wording signals a profound nervousness about objectivity, abstractions, and formal intuition.
Chaloner, four poems. None of them picked up in his Collected. Not his best. Paul Evans, six poems. Four lost. But two are in his first book – OK, they are both really good. I failed to respond in 1973. My fault. John James, two poems. Both in his first book. Both good.
None of the poems has anything blakean about them. That theme is only there because Ginsberg associated Britain with “Albion”. Just a reflection of a fantasy. The poems are much more like polaroids – instant and with no mention of the past. It’s the idea which so much good Sixties poetry uses. Obviously, the polaroids often show boring people leading boring lives. (There is an exception, and it is Horovitz's own poems, mediocre imitations of Ginsberg which have a sediment of Blakeanism due to the transfer of degenerative material from the American source. He had prominently confused the marketing guy with the talent, and the publicity release with the commodity.)
The cover is beautiful. I looked at an anthology called “It’s world that makes the love go round”, (edited Ken Geering, 1968) from Corgi, but from the same era and with the same Pop approach, for comparison. It is much worse than ‘Albion’, and one has to give Horovitz that much. I liked a couple of poems from ‘World’:
stones and other things
live like statues to words
praising the sound of sticks
uncarved
pebbles uncut.
In the beginning
was it the words or the beach?
(John Porter)
and by the same poet, ‘Analogue’:
has ever a clay model
reached pseudopodial about itself
to mould its eyes to face inwards
its ears to be deaf.
He will make the shell
make it solid,
and poke out the filling
as an unnecessary suicide circuit.
Horovitz gets credit for including poems by Harry Guest, not well known at that point. The take-away from the whole schlamassel is that a terrible anthology does not prove that a whole poetic scene is terrible, instead it may just be the product of an editor who can’t tell red from green and has missed everything good and desirable. If you have someone spending six days a week on the schmoozing, the networking, the fake spirituality, the ballyhoo, they haven’t got time to read poetry. Even supposing they wanted to. “Here at last is the ‘secret’ generation of more or less British poets…” There was no ‘Albion’ era in British poetry. It is just a bad anthology. Lucie-Smith’s book came out a year later and that actually does define an era.
I am interested in finding a division between Pop poetry and the avant garde… but 10 of Horovitz’s sixty-three poets are also in Mottram’s list of the “British Poetry Revival”, five years later. So, a good portion of the avant-garde were writing Pop poetry in the 1960s, apparently. Poems became more stringent, more conceptually evolved, over a few years. The phrase about “living poetry” probably gave Mottram the stimulus for writing about a “poetry revival”. The subtext is, probably, about readings before a live audience, and to freedom from conservative artistic conventions. As an emotional utterance, it can take on many implications.
'Suicide circuit' is presumably what is attached to a "self-destruct button'. This was a real thing, for example the U2 spy plane was supposed to be destroyed by the pilot rather than have its design secrets fall into enemy hands. 'Mission impossible' had tapes which would "self-destruct in 60 seconds" -OK, that was fiction rather than Cold War fact. Wikipedia has a page on the topic, saying e.g. "The landmines have a battery and when the battery dies, the land mine self-destructs." This only applies to the expensive kind!
Wednesday, 5 February 2025
Riddle; ding?
In BF I quote Molly Vogel’s poem:
Silent is my dress when I bow to earth; pluck me
for pleasure and watch me blush; witness the birth of neither
nymph nor satyr. I am barren with seeds; watch me dismantle
my own throat. Who savours me pressed in wind? My vellum
pinion spews life. Shorn, my woolly husk unfurls like a mollusk.
I stand singular with many, mimic of mimicry.
- but could not propose a solution to the riddle. Robert Hampson emailed me.
"Dear Andrew,
I am currently working my way through your Beautiful Feelings. I have a former colleague who is an expert on Anglo-Saxon riddles, and she was very taken by the poem by Molly Vogel, which I sent her.
She noted it as a response to Exeter Book riddle 7 - and suggested the solution might be the Medusa Mushroom? She found this page with some details that seemed suggestive - particularly about the cluster and the blushing:
https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/medusa/ “
Riddle 7 is taken to be about a swan. It contains a line about silence, but also refers to dress which makes a sound (swogan). This is taken to refer to the creaking of feathers when the swan is flying. The word ‘hraegl’ refers to feathers rather than more generally to ’array’. Robert says further:
“The opening lines riff off Riddle 7 (where the solution is 'a swan' - hence, perhaps, 'pinions' later (with 'vellum pinions' as the constraints of the medieval page). The transformation of swan into mushroom would link to the reference to Ovid - and I wonder if transformation is the key to 'Medusa'. (Medusa also features in Ovid's Metamorphoses.)
Do mollusks unfurl? I imagine a snail emerging from its shell - and then I wonder about the 'woolly husk'. If I google 'shorn woolly husks', Google gives me advice about cutting the fur of woolly huskies ... From swan to mushroom, from swan to husky - 'singular with many'.
Mollusks have 'great morphological diversity' - which seems appropriate. Their body is called a 'mantle' ('Watch me dismantle my own throat'). The soft bodies, the gills ... remind me of mushrooms.”
My colleague, Jennifer Neville, has written quite a bit about OE Riddles.”
How a mushroom can be like the Medusa I am unclear.
I am not sure we have hit the jackpot here. Where is the “shorn/ my woolly husk”? But the ”blush” is the red tinge when the Medusa is bruised. The state of being neither nymph nor satyr would refer to an organism neutral in gender, so a mushroom rather than a plant, since plants have gender. I looked up the Medusa and it is one of the Amanita family. I am familiar with Amanita muscaria but that does not seem to fit well. I think the answer may be a book, and the 'vellum pinions" are indeed pages of a manuscript. (Pinions would mean wings rather than bonds.) 'Singular with many' could refer to the pages of a library. Hides have hair on one side which gets shorn off to make vellum for writing, so that could be the "woolly husk". The 'blush' could be rubrication, red-letters. I am not getting a real "ding ding ding feeling" about this solution.
Silent is my dress when I bow to earth; pluck me
for pleasure and watch me blush; witness the birth of neither
nymph nor satyr. I am barren with seeds; watch me dismantle
my own throat. Who savours me pressed in wind? My vellum
pinion spews life. Shorn, my woolly husk unfurls like a mollusk.
I stand singular with many, mimic of mimicry.
- but could not propose a solution to the riddle. Robert Hampson emailed me.
"Dear Andrew,
I am currently working my way through your Beautiful Feelings. I have a former colleague who is an expert on Anglo-Saxon riddles, and she was very taken by the poem by Molly Vogel, which I sent her.
She noted it as a response to Exeter Book riddle 7 - and suggested the solution might be the Medusa Mushroom? She found this page with some details that seemed suggestive - particularly about the cluster and the blushing:
https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/medusa/ “
Riddle 7 is taken to be about a swan. It contains a line about silence, but also refers to dress which makes a sound (swogan). This is taken to refer to the creaking of feathers when the swan is flying. The word ‘hraegl’ refers to feathers rather than more generally to ’array’. Robert says further:
“The opening lines riff off Riddle 7 (where the solution is 'a swan' - hence, perhaps, 'pinions' later (with 'vellum pinions' as the constraints of the medieval page). The transformation of swan into mushroom would link to the reference to Ovid - and I wonder if transformation is the key to 'Medusa'. (Medusa also features in Ovid's Metamorphoses.)
Do mollusks unfurl? I imagine a snail emerging from its shell - and then I wonder about the 'woolly husk'. If I google 'shorn woolly husks', Google gives me advice about cutting the fur of woolly huskies ... From swan to mushroom, from swan to husky - 'singular with many'.
Mollusks have 'great morphological diversity' - which seems appropriate. Their body is called a 'mantle' ('Watch me dismantle my own throat'). The soft bodies, the gills ... remind me of mushrooms.”
My colleague, Jennifer Neville, has written quite a bit about OE Riddles.”
How a mushroom can be like the Medusa I am unclear.
I am not sure we have hit the jackpot here. Where is the “shorn/ my woolly husk”? But the ”blush” is the red tinge when the Medusa is bruised. The state of being neither nymph nor satyr would refer to an organism neutral in gender, so a mushroom rather than a plant, since plants have gender. I looked up the Medusa and it is one of the Amanita family. I am familiar with Amanita muscaria but that does not seem to fit well. I think the answer may be a book, and the 'vellum pinions" are indeed pages of a manuscript. (Pinions would mean wings rather than bonds.) 'Singular with many' could refer to the pages of a library. Hides have hair on one side which gets shorn off to make vellum for writing, so that could be the "woolly husk". The 'blush' could be rubrication, red-letters. I am not getting a real "ding ding ding feeling" about this solution.
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
DDR-Krimis
DDR 2
am reading a book on crime in the DDR. The author, Wolfgang Mittmann, records that he was for 30 years a policemen in the Volkspolizei. He was writing in the 1990s, essentially, and looks back on the period with a bias in favour of objective facts, and an acquired disinterest in Marxist ideas. Once you get rid of the Marxism, the daily life of the DDR citizens becomes intensely interesting – inclining their economic endeavours, and also their crimes. Mittmann was a product of the DDR and speaks the language of its citizens, in the deepest sense. The book has been published under two titles and so I have inadvertently bought two copies under different titles. One is Tatzeit. The cover of the 1995 version ascribes 34 years' service to Mittmann.
He gives us 80 pages about the career of a smuggler named Schützendorf (not his real name). After 1948, a good part of his activity was smuggling eastern industrial goods into the West. This is interesting, because it shows how the East could export into the Federal Republic, at least up to a certain point. This possibility evidently declined, but in the early 1950s the problem was the exchange rate – goods sold in eastern shops for so many east-Marks cost about one-sixth as much as the same goods acquired through regulated cross-border trade, paid for in western marks (D-marks). The smuggling affected the DDR's conventional export business. Schützendorf is recorded, by Mittmann, as smuggling optical goods, office machines, silk, porcelain, and lace. Quite a broad range of products! The question for us is, then, how this advantage was lost, so that by 1989 the DDR had very limited exports, and almost everything collapsed after the 1990 currency reform (and reunification).
Schützendorf became famous partly through a trial involving his career smuggling goods into Spain, and through a 1959 DDR film “Ware nach Katalonien” (goods to Catalonia) which put his adventures on screen (in some form).
Mittmann records how the tradition of “DDR – Krimis (cop stories)” may have been started by someone called Preussler in 1949. The original format was little booklets (Hefte) of 20 pages. The style drew on traditions of Weimar detective stories, but obviously had to have a Marxist tinge in order to get access to paper and to retail outlets inside the DDR. This connects with an interest of mine in European low culture – obviously, the big story is the dominance of American imports, and the limited exportability of “popular” products from one country to another, but the details are quite absorbing. A simplifying theory is that the Communist Bloc did not have popular culture, because it was incompatible with Communist ideals about everyone liking high culture, and because all consumer industries were under-developed and badly funded. That is not the whole story. The Hefte series was called “Geschichten, die das Leben schrieb”. Obviously there was a line of DDR detective novels and TV shows. They are one of the little things people miss about the old DDR.
I don't have information on when the DDR government decided that it would not accept payment for exports in East-marks. Evidently, there was a moment when the idea of “hard currency” was invented. And, evidently, the exchange rate problems (the two marks, still identical up to June 1948, rapidly evolved to have an exchange rate of almost 6 to 1) gravely reduced the purchasing power both of East German citizens, paid in eastern Marks, and of eastern firms, earning revenue in eastern Marks but needing hard currency to buy components and equipment outside their own small country.
I am not sure how Spain came into the operation, but I suppose that Spain had at that time a grave difficulty with foreign exchange, and a deep need for industrial goods not made domestically. Cameras are a relatively precision-made good, normally obtained as imports, in most countries. So there was probably a fat tariff on imported cameras. Put that together with a supply of east German cameras, a car with Swiss plates, and some under-paid customs officials, and you possibly have a business. ‘Ware nach Katalonien’ is on YouTube but only in a version with a spoken Russian translation slapped on top of it. I did watch five minutes, but my Russian is nowhere near up to it. I did see an old lady travelling on a train to the west, a cop searches her handbag, it has a pair of binoculars in it… this was how S smuggled the optical equipment, many people carrying small consignments. That was the 1950s. Later, he retired from crime and lived on Mallorca – an early exponent of the German interest in the Balearics. He made a lot of money out of a car rental business for tourists. (Handbag is sumka, I did get that much.)
Mittmann also writes about a “show trial” of eight businessmen in 1949, the so-called “Conti Affair”. They were the board of a big firm which owned many subsidiaries, mostly in the West, but which had its registered headquarters in Dessau. Faced with sequestration by the Occupying Power, they broke up the firm and transferred control of the western branches, only, to a new holding company. The Communist administration decided to treat this as if it had been the theft of a hundred million marks, as if the directors had been smuggling potatoes across the zonal border. It was presented as theft from the working people of the east, even though all the property transferred was in the western Zones. The accused all got fifteen years in jail. This was in January, 1949, a few months before the transfer of power from the Soviets to a notionally independent local, one-zone, government. The real point of the trial, possibly, was to intimidate the non-communist parties, who were getting the majority of the votes. Brundert, the minister in the regional government who had approved the break-up, was a member of the SPD, the social democratic party. Putting him in the dock, defaming his party as criminals, was part of the SED (communist) Party’s election campaign. Conti was mainly operating gasworks, so sequestering everything would have given the communists a grip on a key part of the West German economy. The three Western Allies would never have allowed this. Nor would they have allowed, during an economic crisis, the shareholders living in their Zones to be deprived of their shares by such an uncompensated sequestration. The directors had not broken any law known to the other Occupying Powers.
The prosecuting lawyer was Hilde Benjamin, sister-in-law of Walter Benjamin, a Stalinist culture critic. Walter’s essay “Linke Melancholie” is an attack on the SPD, as ineffective because they didn’t follow the Moscow Line. It is the same attack that Hilde was making on Walter Brundert, in 1949, and getting him fifteen years in Bautzen. Voters preferred the SPD, and that is why Stalinists had to pretend that they weren't talented and idealistic.
Hilde was a prosecutor in show trials, which, because they have so little to do with jurisprudence or factual testimony, have to be seen as part of literature. They are conspiracy theories staged as thrillers. Benjamin H looked, in photographs, like the villain of some film noir. She looks like a cross between Akim Tamiroff and Edward G Robinson.
I looked up the Potsdam Conference page of Wiki, and one of the provisions in the agreement is "8.The Soviet Government renounces all claims related to reparations on shares in German enterprises, which are sited in the Western Occupied Zones in Germany. That same applies to German foreign assets in all countries, except for the cases indicated below in section 9." ("Die Sowjetregierung verzichtet auf alle Ansprüche bezüglich der Reparationen aus Anteilen an deutschen Unternehmungen, die in den westlichen Besatzungszonen in Deutschland gelegen sind. Das gleiche gilt für deutsche Auslandsguthaben in allen Ländern, mit Ausnahme der weiter unten in § 9 gekennzeichneten Fälle.) - Potsdam agreement.
I have read elsewhere that there was a part of the Potsdam Agreement which gave the Soviet Union 25% of the shares of firms in West Germany. It was part of the agreement on war reparations - compensation for "scorched earth" tactics inside the Soviet Union's territory. My guess is that this idea was discussed, by the Three Powers, and that is why the clause in the actual agreement specifically describes that this claim has been renounced. Otherwise, section 8 has no force. Obscure. However, the conclusion is that the Conti trial was a complete fake. No crime had been committed and the 15-year jail sentences were an act of terror.
He gives us 80 pages about the career of a smuggler named Schützendorf (not his real name). After 1948, a good part of his activity was smuggling eastern industrial goods into the West. This is interesting, because it shows how the East could export into the Federal Republic, at least up to a certain point. This possibility evidently declined, but in the early 1950s the problem was the exchange rate – goods sold in eastern shops for so many east-Marks cost about one-sixth as much as the same goods acquired through regulated cross-border trade, paid for in western marks (D-marks). The smuggling affected the DDR's conventional export business. Schützendorf is recorded, by Mittmann, as smuggling optical goods, office machines, silk, porcelain, and lace. Quite a broad range of products! The question for us is, then, how this advantage was lost, so that by 1989 the DDR had very limited exports, and almost everything collapsed after the 1990 currency reform (and reunification).
Schützendorf became famous partly through a trial involving his career smuggling goods into Spain, and through a 1959 DDR film “Ware nach Katalonien” (goods to Catalonia) which put his adventures on screen (in some form).
Mittmann records how the tradition of “DDR – Krimis (cop stories)” may have been started by someone called Preussler in 1949. The original format was little booklets (Hefte) of 20 pages. The style drew on traditions of Weimar detective stories, but obviously had to have a Marxist tinge in order to get access to paper and to retail outlets inside the DDR. This connects with an interest of mine in European low culture – obviously, the big story is the dominance of American imports, and the limited exportability of “popular” products from one country to another, but the details are quite absorbing. A simplifying theory is that the Communist Bloc did not have popular culture, because it was incompatible with Communist ideals about everyone liking high culture, and because all consumer industries were under-developed and badly funded. That is not the whole story. The Hefte series was called “Geschichten, die das Leben schrieb”. Obviously there was a line of DDR detective novels and TV shows. They are one of the little things people miss about the old DDR.
I don't have information on when the DDR government decided that it would not accept payment for exports in East-marks. Evidently, there was a moment when the idea of “hard currency” was invented. And, evidently, the exchange rate problems (the two marks, still identical up to June 1948, rapidly evolved to have an exchange rate of almost 6 to 1) gravely reduced the purchasing power both of East German citizens, paid in eastern Marks, and of eastern firms, earning revenue in eastern Marks but needing hard currency to buy components and equipment outside their own small country.
I am not sure how Spain came into the operation, but I suppose that Spain had at that time a grave difficulty with foreign exchange, and a deep need for industrial goods not made domestically. Cameras are a relatively precision-made good, normally obtained as imports, in most countries. So there was probably a fat tariff on imported cameras. Put that together with a supply of east German cameras, a car with Swiss plates, and some under-paid customs officials, and you possibly have a business. ‘Ware nach Katalonien’ is on YouTube but only in a version with a spoken Russian translation slapped on top of it. I did watch five minutes, but my Russian is nowhere near up to it. I did see an old lady travelling on a train to the west, a cop searches her handbag, it has a pair of binoculars in it… this was how S smuggled the optical equipment, many people carrying small consignments. That was the 1950s. Later, he retired from crime and lived on Mallorca – an early exponent of the German interest in the Balearics. He made a lot of money out of a car rental business for tourists. (Handbag is sumka, I did get that much.)
Mittmann also writes about a “show trial” of eight businessmen in 1949, the so-called “Conti Affair”. They were the board of a big firm which owned many subsidiaries, mostly in the West, but which had its registered headquarters in Dessau. Faced with sequestration by the Occupying Power, they broke up the firm and transferred control of the western branches, only, to a new holding company. The Communist administration decided to treat this as if it had been the theft of a hundred million marks, as if the directors had been smuggling potatoes across the zonal border. It was presented as theft from the working people of the east, even though all the property transferred was in the western Zones. The accused all got fifteen years in jail. This was in January, 1949, a few months before the transfer of power from the Soviets to a notionally independent local, one-zone, government. The real point of the trial, possibly, was to intimidate the non-communist parties, who were getting the majority of the votes. Brundert, the minister in the regional government who had approved the break-up, was a member of the SPD, the social democratic party. Putting him in the dock, defaming his party as criminals, was part of the SED (communist) Party’s election campaign. Conti was mainly operating gasworks, so sequestering everything would have given the communists a grip on a key part of the West German economy. The three Western Allies would never have allowed this. Nor would they have allowed, during an economic crisis, the shareholders living in their Zones to be deprived of their shares by such an uncompensated sequestration. The directors had not broken any law known to the other Occupying Powers.
The prosecuting lawyer was Hilde Benjamin, sister-in-law of Walter Benjamin, a Stalinist culture critic. Walter’s essay “Linke Melancholie” is an attack on the SPD, as ineffective because they didn’t follow the Moscow Line. It is the same attack that Hilde was making on Walter Brundert, in 1949, and getting him fifteen years in Bautzen. Voters preferred the SPD, and that is why Stalinists had to pretend that they weren't talented and idealistic.
Hilde was a prosecutor in show trials, which, because they have so little to do with jurisprudence or factual testimony, have to be seen as part of literature. They are conspiracy theories staged as thrillers. Benjamin H looked, in photographs, like the villain of some film noir. She looks like a cross between Akim Tamiroff and Edward G Robinson.
I looked up the Potsdam Conference page of Wiki, and one of the provisions in the agreement is "8.The Soviet Government renounces all claims related to reparations on shares in German enterprises, which are sited in the Western Occupied Zones in Germany. That same applies to German foreign assets in all countries, except for the cases indicated below in section 9." ("Die Sowjetregierung verzichtet auf alle Ansprüche bezüglich der Reparationen aus Anteilen an deutschen Unternehmungen, die in den westlichen Besatzungszonen in Deutschland gelegen sind. Das gleiche gilt für deutsche Auslandsguthaben in allen Ländern, mit Ausnahme der weiter unten in § 9 gekennzeichneten Fälle.) - Potsdam agreement.
I have read elsewhere that there was a part of the Potsdam Agreement which gave the Soviet Union 25% of the shares of firms in West Germany. It was part of the agreement on war reparations - compensation for "scorched earth" tactics inside the Soviet Union's territory. My guess is that this idea was discussed, by the Three Powers, and that is why the clause in the actual agreement specifically describes that this claim has been renounced. Otherwise, section 8 has no force. Obscure. However, the conclusion is that the Conti trial was a complete fake. No crime had been committed and the 15-year jail sentences were an act of terror.
Monday, 6 January 2025
Colonisation of the former DDR?
Colonisation of the former DDR?
Kolonialiserung der DDR
I have been struggling with the proposal that the former DDR regions (Land is close to the un-English word Land, so we can refer to the five new Länder as the 5NL) were pressed into a colonial status by the new, expanded, Federal Republic, after 1990. This is the thesis of a 1995 book edited by Vilmar and Dümcke.
The simple reason for this classification is that, out of 8.5 million (steady) jobs in the 5 NL as at 1990, 3.7 million had been cut, lost, got rid of, by 1994. It is not credible that an autonomous country would have accepted a process like this, so the proposed answer is that the territory of the DDR had, once the DDR ceased to exist to protect them, been subject to a government which did not regard them as citizens.
The de-industrialisation was supervised by the Treuhand. When the DDR was abolished, it owned almost the entire economy. Its holdings were, generally, transferred into the hands of the Treuhand (“public trustees”). This was like a government, except that it was not run by elected officials, and that its managers were almost entirely interested in financial results. It originally had about half the economy, so 4 million jobs.
Before the Wall came down, the DDR had had low wage rates and its own currency. This had an exchange rate, on the open market, but to translate east German wages into the new D-Mark would have been to make them rather poor people. The conversion rate, when the east-Mark was got rid of, raised wage levels by a factor of roughly four. (The open market exchange rate between East and West currencies was about 8 to 1, and the rate which the Federal government imposed was two to one.) Employers were obliged, complying with existing and legally binding job contracts, to pay wages at this level. This almost instantly made their products too expensive to sell. This step had nothing to do with market values at all. The logical consequence would have been to close down all the East German producers, since their prices were uncompetitive.
The DDR economy had been running down for ten years or so before 1990. (Some say, twenty years.) The reasons for this gross failure of leadership are complex. It was the outcome of a network of their failings, and very hard to fix. The quality of the plant, in east German factories, was so poor that it was logical, as a next step, to close all the factories down.
West Germany had factories covering the whole spectrum of goods and found it quite easy to expand their output by 20%, to satisfy the new lands. Farming was one of the sectors where this didn’t apply – along with service sectors, like teachers. The logical next step was to close down all the east German factories.
The DDR economy had been the specialist manufacturing region for the artificial Warsaw Pact system. All the other communist-satellite countries bought their goods in large quantities, so that the DDR was an industrial export economy. After 1990, the new countries rejected the Warsaw Pact ordering of things. They wanted to buy on world markets, and in fact were quite resistant to buying East German goods on the old pattern. But also, they were short of hard currency. And also, the new D-mark pricing made the goods deeply unattractive. So, the stable DDR export market vanished. The logical next step was to close down all the factories which had produced for export.
The DDR had no interest for packaging or marketing. In the old world, there was a permanent shortage of almost all consumer goods, so people would buy whatever was available. Its goods were deeply unattractive. (Cameras are the big exception to this.) By 1991, they also had the stigma of the old communist world, something which by now was the most unfashionable thing in the whole world. So, the Trabant car ran quite well, but nobody who had the choice would buy it. The logical step was to close down all the factories which produced consumer goods as clunky as the Trabant, and to replace the product with West German cars, etc., which customers actually wanted to buy.
One of the primary policy goals of the DDR was to avoid unemployment, and the Party could tell works managers exactly what to do. So the managers had no interest in raising productivity by shortening pay-rolls. When the Wall fell, DDR concerns were mostly over-manned to an incredible degree. One effect of this was that nobody really got paid very much. But, once wages floated to something like a West German level, getting rid of most of the staff was a logical step even in the firms which stayed open and made a success of it.
The DDR did not have a financial sector as such. It had five-year plans. None of its factories, or concerns, had organic relationships with a financial institute. West Germany had plenty of banks, and savings, but the mutual trust needed for a long and delicate campaign of travelling, through losses and job cuts, towards a shining quarterly profit, was simply not there. The pipe leading from the accumulated savings of many people, to saving the jobs which they relied on for wages, did not exist. The relationship between concerns and banks was critically weak. The usual remedies were not going to be applied. Local managers couldn't even put a loan application together. “Trust me and I will repay you in five years’ time.” That works better if the borrower and the banker went to school or university together, or have an experience of shared success.
Some people were willing to invest in uncertain eastern German concerns. But that capital supply was finite. You could perhaps have privatised the whole lot over 20 years, but trying to do it over 3 years destroyed the sales price. In a model where you either sold the firms or closed them down, the pace of the plan was fatal.
This is the background for the course which the Treuhand followed. An early evaluation was that, of all the businesses (Betriebe) which they controlled, one third could be privatised quickly, one third needed rehabilitation (“Sanierung”) before being privatised, and one third offered such problems that a buyer was unlikely to be found. The preferred method was management buy out (MBO also in German terminology). However, veterans of a communist economy were not always equipped to thrive in a market economy where you had to make a profit and where low-quality goods were not going to find buyers. A lot of the buy-outs failed within a few years.
It is unusual for a large region to be quite without local specialised products. It is very surprising that the DDR turned out to be like this in 1990. Part of the background is the effective reaction of German industrialists to expropriation by the Soviet occupying regime, in 1945 and for a few years afterwards. We can see that the firm Zeiss of Jena was expropriated, but that there was a Zeiss concern which started up in West Germany, and that this or similar processes removed the status of the optical industry as a specialism of the east, exporting to all other parts of Germany (and other countries, too). My speculation is that, after D-Day, at latest, industrialists faced the idea of a deluge. They were concerned to rescue what could be rescued, ready to re-start in a post-deluge world, with extensive devastation. My guess is that this involved making copies of technical drawings and hiding these documents, in fire-proof stores, in several places. This may be a fantasy, or may explain how families could re-start expropriated concerns out of reach of the Red Army (and, after 1949, the “democratic republic”), and re-create the inherited businesses. Rapidly, after 1945, wage levels in the West rose above those in the East. Because the border was still open, skilled workers could migrate out of the Soviet sector, and in practice the former bosses could re-create entire factories to replace the ones which they no longer owned. This drain of skilled workers was a major factor in the early history of the DDR. The BRD developed, in this way or in some other way, a full-spectrum industrial economy, which had no need of East German products in 1990 (or rather, was in competition with them). So the 5 NL had no market-leader industries in 1990. They were absolutely vulnerable. The firms of the west could just expand production by 20% and satisfy the new demands of the eastern consumers, without developing new sectors. The “new lands” could thus lose their whole manufacturing sector in a short time. This process of 1990-4 had been prepared by neglected processes of 1945-51 (or maybe even earlier – in 1944, perhaps).
Zeiss, of Jena in the east of Germany, began with making lenses, but expanded into cameras when they came along. The Eastern Zeiss looked like a very successful east German concern. But, after 1990 they were subject to West German law, and according to that law they did not own either their patents or their brand name. The Western firm of Zeiss owned those. Zeiss-East was in a difficult position. The Zeiss family (and their bankers) were apparently very successful in starting up new factories, after 1945, in the West. The Western Zeiss took over the “socialised concern” Jena-Zeiss after 1990.
The Dresden camera VEB, Pentacon, (a merger of several firms) had sold a lot of cameras prior to 1990 – my father owned one (a Practica, probably), and many people in Britain owned one. It was a source of great surprise that they didn’t thrive after the end of the DDR. Wiki says “Liquidation began on October 2, 1990 (one day before official reunification), and production ceased on June 30, 1991. By then it had shed nearly three thousand employees to retain a total of 3331 - the next day all but 232 were laid off.” I don’t know why it failed, but I do know that a lot of their cameras had Carl Zeiss (East) lenses. Wiki also says that someone (who?) estimated that Pentacon had 6,000 employees but could have produced the goods with only 1,000. Digital photography was about to take over that sector, and the east was strikingly weak at IT. The Dresden firm was in no position to grow into a digital age. Something similar applied to the print industry. East Germany had impressive printing firms, with a long history. But, in the 1980s and 1990s, digital typesetting and printing was taking over rather rapidly. Firms with powerful IT skills took over the market, and the DDR's lag in anything to do with integrated circuits was a fatal handicap. The sector was doomed to shed large numbers of jobs, and in fact entire firms. But the rapid liquidation of Pentacon is still a puzzle to me.
When the Treuhand itself was wound up, it had a deficit of 275 billion D-marks. (Also stated as 264 billion.) So, even after selling businesses off for many billions, they had spent that much either patching up or closing down the others. They had started off by owning the east German economy, effectively, so that figure is also a count of how much the West spent to refloat the East. To build a solution which would have “rehabilitated” so much that you didn’t shed 3.7 million jobs would have cost a multiple of that. To sum up, the solution chosen was to pay, federally, all the welfare costs for the new unemployed, but not also to pay for re-equipping all those rusting factories. Money always poured from West to East (and still is, given the higher unemployment in the eastern five Lands). In the early 90s, East Germany was a capitalist country without capital. Can we define the East German economy as being worth minus 275 billion D-marks? That seems a bit superficial, but it is hard to escape the implications of that negative. If there was more wealth, where did it go?
The argument for a collusive exploitation of the east is quite weak, but also depends on a belief in certain decisions which would have been secret and deniable if they were actually taken. Proving them out of existence is virtually impossible. Proving them into existence – almost as much. Obviously, Western manufacturers stood to benefit from potential competitors disappearing, but they were not the sources of finance, and the argument that they could prevail on banks, and the federal government itself, to act against their own interests and withhold necessary (and profitable) loans is strained and wholly unproven. The Treuhand most probably aimed to reduce its own deficit, first and foremost. They sold off “legacy” firms to anybody who would put the money up. Of course, buying a loss-making firm is always a specialised decision.
Another question is why nobody foresaw the economic collapse of the 5 NL before it happened. This is a trick question. For example, Beatrix Fautz reports Regine Hildebrandt, the minister for social affairs of the post-Communist but pre-unification government of Lothar de Maiziere, as predicting mass unemployment if the market-shock policies were followed. Some people knew that the local industries were uncompetitive and needed years of subsidy and tariff protection. The date is 21/6/1990. De Maiziere was told that he was going to impoverish the population of the country he was ruling, but proceeded to sign off the abolition of that country (and the end of his responsibility for a disaster). The relationship of his eastern CDU party to the federal CDU looks like a colonial situation of dependence, and fear of independent action.
De Maiziere didn’t really have a mandate, and didn’t really have a party with a relationship of trust with the electorate. The electorate did indeed want re-unification, as fast as possible. Democracy hadn't really started up yet. If we think of a country which has a dictatorship that crushes every other kind of political activity or discussion, the country goes into a deep-freeze. Then something external comes along which wipes out the dictatorship, prevents the “ruling class” nurtured by it from any kind of political activity. They troop into the deep-freeze. At this point you have a country with no government. It is utterly vulnerable. That situation may not last very long. But, for that interval, it was like being a colony – no government of its own. And the damage was done between 1990 and 1994, during the lifetime of the Treuhand. It is embarrassing to think of Hildebrandt, and however many other people who foresaw that the 5 New Lands would de-industrialise in a simplistically market/ competitive regime. There was no pipe by which their knowledge could be connected to a more social economic policy.
One “scare” process which didn’t happen was the compensation of the expropriated. The arrival of the Red Army saw very wide-scale dispossession of the upper class, for example of landed estates, houses, factories, shares. Such people set great store by their possessions, and their stake in the Cold War, which lasted up to 1990 in the end, was to reclaim their rightful possessions from the Bolshevik horde. That applied not only to the 5 New Lands, but also to the areas, such as East Prussia or Silesia, which had once been German but which were Polish after 1945 or 1946. They had high-powered lawyers and detailed inventories. This was a big argument against re-unification. However, even the CDU party didn’t take all this seriously by 1990. The really angry people had died off (I don't mean to be unkind). The seizures didn’t happen, although I believe compensation was paid in certain cases. The legislation was actually worded in terms of compensation to the politically persecuted, and included compensation to the "victims of fascism" (if they could be found). So, if you fled the DDR, or also if you got into politics and were sent to jail, the State took your house. Under the "Vermögensgesetz" you could then claim it back. So, a few thousand people in the New Lands found that their house didn't belong to them. People regained their houses, where still standing, and could charge rent to the existing tenants. But this was a country full of post-war blocks of flats.
Eastern Germany was not an overseas territory, was not ethnically different from the “dominant” country, has a population entitled to vote, and has benefited from large, one-sided, flows of welfare payments from the “dominant” country. None of this applies to genuine colonies, obviously. To sum up, putting the 5 “new Lands” into the category of colony is imprecise, and raises debating issues which are tiring, and finally stop being productive. Putting them in a category of “the former communist countries of eastern Europe trying to develop into market economies” is more natural and more productive.
The feeling of many inhabitants of the 5 NL, three decades later, about the re-unification process, was that they had been relegated to second-class status, and that the federal government was quite happy for them to fail in life. This disaffection is now being expressed by votes for disaffected, anti-liberal, right-wing parties – previously the NPD and now the AfD. The distrust in the Republic and its major parties echoes the initial disillusion with the re-unification process in 1990-94.
I thought earlier that the East German opposition had been very impractical in not foreseeing how their country could transition to a democratic state without everyone losing their job. I thought they were hypnotised by Marxism, and by quasi-Marxist critiques of Marxism. But that is not fair. Really, the groups which wanted a protected economy, with a slower transition to closer ties with West Germany, stood in the (pre-unification) election of 1990 and only got 5% of the vote. The east German voters were seduced by certain ideas of the West, put over by unrefined images and unsubtle media, and gave their trust to the West. The West then sent people to abolish the 3.7 million jobs we mentioned. A more painstaking and successful process was possible, but did not suit the CDU/CSU government and the West German business community, the only two groups who really had a say in those pivotal four years.
Vilmar and Dümcke, eds., Kolonialiserung der DDR Norbert Pötzl, Der Treuhand-Komplex.
Kolonialiserung der DDR
I have been struggling with the proposal that the former DDR regions (Land is close to the un-English word Land, so we can refer to the five new Länder as the 5NL) were pressed into a colonial status by the new, expanded, Federal Republic, after 1990. This is the thesis of a 1995 book edited by Vilmar and Dümcke.
The simple reason for this classification is that, out of 8.5 million (steady) jobs in the 5 NL as at 1990, 3.7 million had been cut, lost, got rid of, by 1994. It is not credible that an autonomous country would have accepted a process like this, so the proposed answer is that the territory of the DDR had, once the DDR ceased to exist to protect them, been subject to a government which did not regard them as citizens.
The de-industrialisation was supervised by the Treuhand. When the DDR was abolished, it owned almost the entire economy. Its holdings were, generally, transferred into the hands of the Treuhand (“public trustees”). This was like a government, except that it was not run by elected officials, and that its managers were almost entirely interested in financial results. It originally had about half the economy, so 4 million jobs.
Before the Wall came down, the DDR had had low wage rates and its own currency. This had an exchange rate, on the open market, but to translate east German wages into the new D-Mark would have been to make them rather poor people. The conversion rate, when the east-Mark was got rid of, raised wage levels by a factor of roughly four. (The open market exchange rate between East and West currencies was about 8 to 1, and the rate which the Federal government imposed was two to one.) Employers were obliged, complying with existing and legally binding job contracts, to pay wages at this level. This almost instantly made their products too expensive to sell. This step had nothing to do with market values at all. The logical consequence would have been to close down all the East German producers, since their prices were uncompetitive.
The DDR economy had been running down for ten years or so before 1990. (Some say, twenty years.) The reasons for this gross failure of leadership are complex. It was the outcome of a network of their failings, and very hard to fix. The quality of the plant, in east German factories, was so poor that it was logical, as a next step, to close all the factories down.
West Germany had factories covering the whole spectrum of goods and found it quite easy to expand their output by 20%, to satisfy the new lands. Farming was one of the sectors where this didn’t apply – along with service sectors, like teachers. The logical next step was to close down all the east German factories.
The DDR economy had been the specialist manufacturing region for the artificial Warsaw Pact system. All the other communist-satellite countries bought their goods in large quantities, so that the DDR was an industrial export economy. After 1990, the new countries rejected the Warsaw Pact ordering of things. They wanted to buy on world markets, and in fact were quite resistant to buying East German goods on the old pattern. But also, they were short of hard currency. And also, the new D-mark pricing made the goods deeply unattractive. So, the stable DDR export market vanished. The logical next step was to close down all the factories which had produced for export.
The DDR had no interest for packaging or marketing. In the old world, there was a permanent shortage of almost all consumer goods, so people would buy whatever was available. Its goods were deeply unattractive. (Cameras are the big exception to this.) By 1991, they also had the stigma of the old communist world, something which by now was the most unfashionable thing in the whole world. So, the Trabant car ran quite well, but nobody who had the choice would buy it. The logical step was to close down all the factories which produced consumer goods as clunky as the Trabant, and to replace the product with West German cars, etc., which customers actually wanted to buy.
One of the primary policy goals of the DDR was to avoid unemployment, and the Party could tell works managers exactly what to do. So the managers had no interest in raising productivity by shortening pay-rolls. When the Wall fell, DDR concerns were mostly over-manned to an incredible degree. One effect of this was that nobody really got paid very much. But, once wages floated to something like a West German level, getting rid of most of the staff was a logical step even in the firms which stayed open and made a success of it.
The DDR did not have a financial sector as such. It had five-year plans. None of its factories, or concerns, had organic relationships with a financial institute. West Germany had plenty of banks, and savings, but the mutual trust needed for a long and delicate campaign of travelling, through losses and job cuts, towards a shining quarterly profit, was simply not there. The pipe leading from the accumulated savings of many people, to saving the jobs which they relied on for wages, did not exist. The relationship between concerns and banks was critically weak. The usual remedies were not going to be applied. Local managers couldn't even put a loan application together. “Trust me and I will repay you in five years’ time.” That works better if the borrower and the banker went to school or university together, or have an experience of shared success.
Some people were willing to invest in uncertain eastern German concerns. But that capital supply was finite. You could perhaps have privatised the whole lot over 20 years, but trying to do it over 3 years destroyed the sales price. In a model where you either sold the firms or closed them down, the pace of the plan was fatal.
This is the background for the course which the Treuhand followed. An early evaluation was that, of all the businesses (Betriebe) which they controlled, one third could be privatised quickly, one third needed rehabilitation (“Sanierung”) before being privatised, and one third offered such problems that a buyer was unlikely to be found. The preferred method was management buy out (MBO also in German terminology). However, veterans of a communist economy were not always equipped to thrive in a market economy where you had to make a profit and where low-quality goods were not going to find buyers. A lot of the buy-outs failed within a few years.
It is unusual for a large region to be quite without local specialised products. It is very surprising that the DDR turned out to be like this in 1990. Part of the background is the effective reaction of German industrialists to expropriation by the Soviet occupying regime, in 1945 and for a few years afterwards. We can see that the firm Zeiss of Jena was expropriated, but that there was a Zeiss concern which started up in West Germany, and that this or similar processes removed the status of the optical industry as a specialism of the east, exporting to all other parts of Germany (and other countries, too). My speculation is that, after D-Day, at latest, industrialists faced the idea of a deluge. They were concerned to rescue what could be rescued, ready to re-start in a post-deluge world, with extensive devastation. My guess is that this involved making copies of technical drawings and hiding these documents, in fire-proof stores, in several places. This may be a fantasy, or may explain how families could re-start expropriated concerns out of reach of the Red Army (and, after 1949, the “democratic republic”), and re-create the inherited businesses. Rapidly, after 1945, wage levels in the West rose above those in the East. Because the border was still open, skilled workers could migrate out of the Soviet sector, and in practice the former bosses could re-create entire factories to replace the ones which they no longer owned. This drain of skilled workers was a major factor in the early history of the DDR. The BRD developed, in this way or in some other way, a full-spectrum industrial economy, which had no need of East German products in 1990 (or rather, was in competition with them). So the 5 NL had no market-leader industries in 1990. They were absolutely vulnerable. The firms of the west could just expand production by 20% and satisfy the new demands of the eastern consumers, without developing new sectors. The “new lands” could thus lose their whole manufacturing sector in a short time. This process of 1990-4 had been prepared by neglected processes of 1945-51 (or maybe even earlier – in 1944, perhaps).
Zeiss, of Jena in the east of Germany, began with making lenses, but expanded into cameras when they came along. The Eastern Zeiss looked like a very successful east German concern. But, after 1990 they were subject to West German law, and according to that law they did not own either their patents or their brand name. The Western firm of Zeiss owned those. Zeiss-East was in a difficult position. The Zeiss family (and their bankers) were apparently very successful in starting up new factories, after 1945, in the West. The Western Zeiss took over the “socialised concern” Jena-Zeiss after 1990.
The Dresden camera VEB, Pentacon, (a merger of several firms) had sold a lot of cameras prior to 1990 – my father owned one (a Practica, probably), and many people in Britain owned one. It was a source of great surprise that they didn’t thrive after the end of the DDR. Wiki says “Liquidation began on October 2, 1990 (one day before official reunification), and production ceased on June 30, 1991. By then it had shed nearly three thousand employees to retain a total of 3331 - the next day all but 232 were laid off.” I don’t know why it failed, but I do know that a lot of their cameras had Carl Zeiss (East) lenses. Wiki also says that someone (who?) estimated that Pentacon had 6,000 employees but could have produced the goods with only 1,000. Digital photography was about to take over that sector, and the east was strikingly weak at IT. The Dresden firm was in no position to grow into a digital age. Something similar applied to the print industry. East Germany had impressive printing firms, with a long history. But, in the 1980s and 1990s, digital typesetting and printing was taking over rather rapidly. Firms with powerful IT skills took over the market, and the DDR's lag in anything to do with integrated circuits was a fatal handicap. The sector was doomed to shed large numbers of jobs, and in fact entire firms. But the rapid liquidation of Pentacon is still a puzzle to me.
When the Treuhand itself was wound up, it had a deficit of 275 billion D-marks. (Also stated as 264 billion.) So, even after selling businesses off for many billions, they had spent that much either patching up or closing down the others. They had started off by owning the east German economy, effectively, so that figure is also a count of how much the West spent to refloat the East. To build a solution which would have “rehabilitated” so much that you didn’t shed 3.7 million jobs would have cost a multiple of that. To sum up, the solution chosen was to pay, federally, all the welfare costs for the new unemployed, but not also to pay for re-equipping all those rusting factories. Money always poured from West to East (and still is, given the higher unemployment in the eastern five Lands). In the early 90s, East Germany was a capitalist country without capital. Can we define the East German economy as being worth minus 275 billion D-marks? That seems a bit superficial, but it is hard to escape the implications of that negative. If there was more wealth, where did it go?
The argument for a collusive exploitation of the east is quite weak, but also depends on a belief in certain decisions which would have been secret and deniable if they were actually taken. Proving them out of existence is virtually impossible. Proving them into existence – almost as much. Obviously, Western manufacturers stood to benefit from potential competitors disappearing, but they were not the sources of finance, and the argument that they could prevail on banks, and the federal government itself, to act against their own interests and withhold necessary (and profitable) loans is strained and wholly unproven. The Treuhand most probably aimed to reduce its own deficit, first and foremost. They sold off “legacy” firms to anybody who would put the money up. Of course, buying a loss-making firm is always a specialised decision.
Another question is why nobody foresaw the economic collapse of the 5 NL before it happened. This is a trick question. For example, Beatrix Fautz reports Regine Hildebrandt, the minister for social affairs of the post-Communist but pre-unification government of Lothar de Maiziere, as predicting mass unemployment if the market-shock policies were followed. Some people knew that the local industries were uncompetitive and needed years of subsidy and tariff protection. The date is 21/6/1990. De Maiziere was told that he was going to impoverish the population of the country he was ruling, but proceeded to sign off the abolition of that country (and the end of his responsibility for a disaster). The relationship of his eastern CDU party to the federal CDU looks like a colonial situation of dependence, and fear of independent action.
De Maiziere didn’t really have a mandate, and didn’t really have a party with a relationship of trust with the electorate. The electorate did indeed want re-unification, as fast as possible. Democracy hadn't really started up yet. If we think of a country which has a dictatorship that crushes every other kind of political activity or discussion, the country goes into a deep-freeze. Then something external comes along which wipes out the dictatorship, prevents the “ruling class” nurtured by it from any kind of political activity. They troop into the deep-freeze. At this point you have a country with no government. It is utterly vulnerable. That situation may not last very long. But, for that interval, it was like being a colony – no government of its own. And the damage was done between 1990 and 1994, during the lifetime of the Treuhand. It is embarrassing to think of Hildebrandt, and however many other people who foresaw that the 5 New Lands would de-industrialise in a simplistically market/ competitive regime. There was no pipe by which their knowledge could be connected to a more social economic policy.
One “scare” process which didn’t happen was the compensation of the expropriated. The arrival of the Red Army saw very wide-scale dispossession of the upper class, for example of landed estates, houses, factories, shares. Such people set great store by their possessions, and their stake in the Cold War, which lasted up to 1990 in the end, was to reclaim their rightful possessions from the Bolshevik horde. That applied not only to the 5 New Lands, but also to the areas, such as East Prussia or Silesia, which had once been German but which were Polish after 1945 or 1946. They had high-powered lawyers and detailed inventories. This was a big argument against re-unification. However, even the CDU party didn’t take all this seriously by 1990. The really angry people had died off (I don't mean to be unkind). The seizures didn’t happen, although I believe compensation was paid in certain cases. The legislation was actually worded in terms of compensation to the politically persecuted, and included compensation to the "victims of fascism" (if they could be found). So, if you fled the DDR, or also if you got into politics and were sent to jail, the State took your house. Under the "Vermögensgesetz" you could then claim it back. So, a few thousand people in the New Lands found that their house didn't belong to them. People regained their houses, where still standing, and could charge rent to the existing tenants. But this was a country full of post-war blocks of flats.
Eastern Germany was not an overseas territory, was not ethnically different from the “dominant” country, has a population entitled to vote, and has benefited from large, one-sided, flows of welfare payments from the “dominant” country. None of this applies to genuine colonies, obviously. To sum up, putting the 5 “new Lands” into the category of colony is imprecise, and raises debating issues which are tiring, and finally stop being productive. Putting them in a category of “the former communist countries of eastern Europe trying to develop into market economies” is more natural and more productive.
The feeling of many inhabitants of the 5 NL, three decades later, about the re-unification process, was that they had been relegated to second-class status, and that the federal government was quite happy for them to fail in life. This disaffection is now being expressed by votes for disaffected, anti-liberal, right-wing parties – previously the NPD and now the AfD. The distrust in the Republic and its major parties echoes the initial disillusion with the re-unification process in 1990-94.
I thought earlier that the East German opposition had been very impractical in not foreseeing how their country could transition to a democratic state without everyone losing their job. I thought they were hypnotised by Marxism, and by quasi-Marxist critiques of Marxism. But that is not fair. Really, the groups which wanted a protected economy, with a slower transition to closer ties with West Germany, stood in the (pre-unification) election of 1990 and only got 5% of the vote. The east German voters were seduced by certain ideas of the West, put over by unrefined images and unsubtle media, and gave their trust to the West. The West then sent people to abolish the 3.7 million jobs we mentioned. A more painstaking and successful process was possible, but did not suit the CDU/CSU government and the West German business community, the only two groups who really had a say in those pivotal four years.
Vilmar and Dümcke, eds., Kolonialiserung der DDR Norbert Pötzl, Der Treuhand-Komplex.
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