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.

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.