[In its January 2 and January 9, 1978 issues, Der Spiegel, a mass-circulation weekly magazine in West Germany, published a "Manifesto" attributed to a group of oppositionists in East Germany. This group was supposed to be in the Sozialis. tische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED— Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the CP) led by Erich Honecker.
[Publication of this document caused a stir both in West Germany and East Germany. There was a flurry of supposition about the real authors of this long statement. Some attributed it to the Bundesnachrichtensdienst (BND-Federal Intelligence Service), the West German secret service; others attributed it to the Staatsicherheitsdienst (Stasi-State Security Service), the political police of the East German regime.
[Wolf Biermann, the famous Communist poet and singer who was expelled from East Germany because of his antibureaucratic views, has spoken out on this question in the open letter printed below. Biermann is convinced of the authenticity of this document, which Der Spiegel called a "Manifesto" but which he thinks is but one example of the development of thinking and debate in opposition circles in East Germany.
[Speaking out as a Communist in a magnificent language of anger and revolt against the "barren socialism of the German Democratic Republic" but also against the "bloated capitalism of the German Federal Republic," Biermann offers his contribution to this intense debate, which is of vital interest to all those fighting for socialism East and West.
[This open letter was published on January 27, 1978, in the West German daily Die Zeit. Biermann read excerpts from it at the Conference in Solidarity with the East European "Dissidents," which was held in Brussels on January 21, 1978. The translation is by Intercontinental Press/Inprecor.]
Dear Comrades,
Now the German public knows about you. Your thirty-page manuscript was published by Der Spiegel as a "Manifesto." In general, I am quite happy about it. But I would like to raise some criticisms regarding some important secondary questions.
Most of what you write accords with my experiences and with my opinions. Some of it is new and instructive for me. The description of conditions in the German Democratic Republic [GDR] hit the nail on the head. Your critique has a healthy radical spirit, and your clear GDR German would be easily understandable to the West German workers also-if they read it! If only it were published in Bild [a tabloid newspaper]!
Finally, we have the beginnings of an association of the left opposition in the GDR as well! I think that is something more fruitful than all of Havemann's articles, all my poems and songs, and Comrade Bahro's book as well.!
It will not surprise you that here in West Germany only a few individuals are se riously thinking about the contents of your document. The established social forces are not doing this. The SPD [Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands-Social Democratic Party of Germany] does not want to know about it. The CDU [Christlich- Demokratische Union-Christian Democratic Union] cannot understand it. The FDP [Freie Demokratische Partei-Free Democratic Party, the liberal bourgeois party in coalition with the SPD] would prefer not to understand it. And the German CP dares not.
So, instead of discussing your document, a flurry of speculation has developed in the mass media which is reflected in the living rooms of the citizens. The whole question is whether it was falsified or not, whether the document was an operation by the Western secret services against the Eastern ones, or vice versa, or by both against each other. In the GDR, no doubt, it will be harder for your document to get into the hands of people, but easier to get into their heads.
A cloak-and-dagger story is going around the left groups in Hamburg. Supposedly your discussion document was fabricated by the Stasi. It was passed off on Der Spiegel, according to this version, only because the GDR leadership expected a genuine opposition manifesto to appear
1. Rudolf Bahro was arrested in East Germany on August 23, 1977, after the publication of his book in the West. (Die Alternative-Zur Kritik realexistierenden Sozialismus des
[The
Alternative-Critique of Existing Socialism], Frankfurt: Europäische Verlaganstalt, 1977). He was a member of the East German CP and a leading technical expert specializing in industrial rationalization and scientific organization of labor.—IP/I
soon. The East German leaders supposedly hoped that the "pseudodebate" (as Wehner [one of the SPD leaders] put it!) that has been touched off now would so overload the media market that there would be no more interest when the genuine manifesto appeared.
All this is the sort of stupidity that comes from trying to be too clever. The same holds for the version cooked up by Nollau, former head of the Verfassungsschutz [Bureau to Defend the Constitution, the West German political police], who is a superficial thinker of a particularly ambitious type. Following its usual practice, UZ, the CP paper, shamelessly based its argument on his theories.
All these theories are wrong. Anyone who knows the GDR from the inside knows that there are thousands of small groups of Communists who have gotten to be friends and think the same way and have the same hopes as we. And there will probably be a number of such discussion documents, which in the future the bourgeois press may well not publish with so much fanfare.
Reporters from newspapers, as well as radio and TV stations, have descended on me, asking with frenetic disinterest what my version is in this crazy game of speculation. It is hard to hold back from writing a satire of this.
I might say that the Chinese wrote the document and gave it to their friend, the forceful politician who wears a Bavarian green, feathered hat li.e.,
Franz-Josef
Strauss]. He then, while on a pilgrimage to Chile, gave it to another forceful politician, Pinochet, who then gave it to the CIA. The CIA, then, naturally, palmed it off on the BND.
The BND palmed it off on the Stasi, and the Stasi stuck you with it; so that you would sell it to Der Spiegel in order to disrupt the SPD's policy toward East Europe; so that Honecker [the East German head] could seal off the border still more firmly; and then when a CDU government took office it would retaliate by denying him any Common Market benefits in inter- German trade.
Thus, Honecker could not pass on such Common Market trade benefits to his big brother. And by means of this slightly indirect route, the Chinese would have cut off their fascist archenemy's pipeline from the West. As the Russian said to the American, the Poles are worse Jews even than the Czechs; and that means the Chinese are coming! The secret agent craze is getting to be a parlor game in both German states.
So, I will not get involved in any of the sterile crystal-ball gazing about your document. I would rather talk to you. And since I could not write to you directly, even if I got to know you, I am publishing it here in Die Zeit. This way, my letter will soon reach you.
The various parts of your document indicate to me that you come from very different kinds of experience. I think that is quite good. For this reason, however, your manuscript is something of a patchwork. It is a shame that Der Spiegel threw what you yourselves call your "mimeographed material" on the market as a "manifesto." The result of this is that many hard-to-please observers expected to find a work of the century, solidly grounded in theory, realistic, philosophically profound, politically well thought out in all points, and stylistically polished.
And now such observers have had their false hopes dashed. Marx and Engels also did not produce the Communist Manifesto at one stroke, without a chance for broader discussions and making corrections (see Engels' precursor work to the Manifesto, Grundsätze des Kommunismus ["Foundations of Communism"]. And what we epigones lack in genius, we have to make up through democratic discussion. But they expect some feat from you, in a country in a deep freeze, isolated as you are and persecuted by the political police.
Therefore, I think that it is right and proper that you devote so much space in your document to the parasitic lives of the princes of German democratic feudal socialism. Almost more than by their every. day cares, the workers are embittered by the gigantic hunting reservations of the party high priests, the bulletproof automobiles of the self-proclaimed workers leaders, and the posh private palaces they have behind the barbed wire of the luxurious concentration camp represented by Wandlitz.
It is possible that the anger against this hypocrisy, so offensively obvious in the upper echelons, will turn into a rage that can drive people to actions. Many of those who secretly read your document in the GDR will have a shock of recognition. In the many ringing passages in your recital of wrongs and of accusations, they will hear the same refrain as in the following lines of Heinrich Heine:
Ich weis, sie tranken heimlich Wein
Und predigten öffentlich Wasser.
[I know that on the sly you drank wine
While to the people you preached water.]
However, there is a problem with your philippic against the guzzling, gluttony, and whoring of the rulers. Adolf Hitler was abstemious, a great water-drinker and salad-eater. If only he and his kind had guzzled wine from morning till night, maybe so much blood would not have flowed! Instead, with good German sobriety, this vegetarian organized the grinding up of a vast amount of human flesh.
What costs the people dear is not the wine the rulers guzzle, it is not the pettybourgeois life-style of these onetime aspiring revolutionists, but rather the policy they follow. And if your manuscript is to lead to a kind of manifesto, then you have to clean the all-too-private vulgarities of Messrs. Lambertz, Honecker, and Nauman out of your text. Otherwise, we would fall into a negative personality cult around such miserable, replaceable figures.
You describe the economic chaos in the GDR so aptly. Why are you nostalgic for Ulbricht's "New Economic System of Planning and Direction"? I do not think that Stalinist mismanagement of the economy can be cured by any capitalist enemas. A more rapid introduction of capitalist norms in the process of production and exchange in the GDR, even if it is accompanied by revolutionary phrases, will only result first in arousing false hopes in the people and then in giving them a bad headache.
To the extent that the GDR becomes a copy of the West German welfare society, most people in the end will prefer the attractive original to the miserable copy. The neo-Stalinist bureaucracy wants to use both Western sugar and the Eastern knout to keep the people content and off their back. But they are only arousing counterrevolutionary dreams. Isn't it crazy but logical that it is the Stalinist old fogies who are supplying their subjects with a liberal mess of pottage, with blue jeans, Intershop chocolate, and tariff-free coffee from the West in order to get them to sell their revolutionary birthright?
On this question, it seems to me that your position is neither fish nor fowl, neither capitalism or socialism. I agree with Comrade Havemann that we could win the competition with capitalism if we finally stopped running toward it. But I think it is good that you raised the question of the law of value again, the problem of prices and real costs.
The answers could not be provided, however, by small persecuted and outlawed opposition groups. Genuine scientific discoveries are not made in back rooms. Fruitful answers can be found only by the entire people through its living, selfdirected historical process. You are familiar with this thought of Rosa Luxemburg.
It is pharisaical and stupid for some wiseacres without any sensitivity or practical experience to reproach you because your manuscript is so eclectic, jumbled, and contradictory. It is a bold beginning, nonetheless, for a wider-ranging discussion. The harsh words many use about you are only an expression of the sort of passion that comes from self inflicted suffering. Here in the West, all too many newly converted leftists get high on identifying with the sufferings of those far away and adorn themselves with other people's wounds.
No, precisely the parts in which you shout out ill-considered words will be better understood by ordinary people than those of the left-skewed half-educated illuminati. Such persons are obviously not familiar with Georg Büchner's Hessische Landbote. He not only argued and polemicized against the gang of princes, he denounced them in the rough language of the people. And what about Luther? How he flayed the pope and his clique for their loose and luxurious lives!
But let's get back to the content of the document. You complain about the destruction of the GDR's own aerospace industry. However, was it not fortunate that after billions of marks were poured down the drain, this ambitious and irrational prestige project in Dresden was discontinued? But how can I be sure about this and how can you, since this point could only be clarified by public discussion in the GDR?
In any case, in real political debates, what is important is not just which arguments are better but what interests are at stake. And where big material interests are involved, disputes are conducted not by means of arguments alone. Try to explain to a capitalist the nature of capitalist exploitation! Try to explain to a GDR high priest the nature of Stalinism in terms that could be fed into a computer! Try to tell a class or caste whose life depends on two and two equaling five about your own addition! You will be erased, along with your arithmetic.
And so I do not agree with you that if Marx were living today that he would "reject the theory of class struggle as outmoded." To the contrary, because of this fundamental truth, our high priests would not just put a bullet in any computer print-out Marx might make; they would put a bullet in the back of his neck.
The almost Chinese anti-Sovietism in many of your passages, you would be interested to know, very much offended my Spanish comrades. You cannot base yourselves on Carrillo, because his attacks on the USSR are more discriminating. To be sure, Carrillo does not live in a country occupied by the Soviet army.
If you get a chance, please read the section in my Wintermärchen [a long satirical poem] about the two Red Army soldiers on the border running through Germany. After twelve years of keeping my mouth shut, as you have to in the GDR, that is still my position today in the West.
I do not think that we should let anyone force us into taking hysterical attitudes toward our own cause, toward the Soviet Union, the GDR, or the party. We have to bear the contradiction both in love and in hatred. We cannot try to conjure it away either, as many high functionaries in the East German CP do. When they are among themselves and have had a few drinks, they tell the most disgusting anti-Soviet jokes. The phrases about friendship that these people have to swallow during the day, come out at night as anti-Russian shit.
"Stalinism and fascism are twins," you write. Honecker and company are portrayed as "Nazis painted red." Aren't you letting your justified hatred lead you into mixing up concepts? Equating fascism and Stalinism suits many former Nazis just fine, because it puts their crimes in a more favorable light. This obvious error also plays into the hands of cynical Stalinists.
Yes, under Hitler, 163,000 Communists were liquidated. Yes, under Stalin, two million Soviet comrades were liquidated. Of the eleven members on the Politburo [of the German CP] headed by Thälmann, six were liquidated by Stalin's henchmen and five by Hitler's. Yes, alongside the six million Jews who fell victim to Nazism you have to put the twenty million (the lowest estimate I know of Soviet citizens who were murdered by Stalin (excluding those killed in the Second World War). But what do these figures mean?
No, fascism was and is a bourgeois dictatorship whose purpose is to defend the capitalist mode of production against the people. Stalinism was and remains a socialist revolution dying of bureaucratic syphilis. This illness can be fatal, but only if it is treated like a common cold! No, equating fascism and Stalinism obscures the more important fundamental distinctions.
From the moral standpoint, Stalinism is not just as bad as fascism; it is far worse. In this case, all the barbarism is carried out in the name of ideas on which the peoples justly pin their hopes. So, don't write that fascism and Stalinism are twins. They are children of quite different parents, even though they may appear the same to eyes blinded with tears. Fascism is the bloody sunset of bourgeois society. Despite everything, Stalinism has not been able to drown the hopes and real possibilities for socialism in blood. Look at Prague in 1968! You yourselves should look at it, and the hundreds of thousands in the GDR who think and feel the same way we do!
Your proposals for establishing a demilitarized and neutral united German state in the near future remind me of plans Stalin had, although he had no serious intention of carrying them out! I do not understand how you could fall for this now. How can you conceive of a marriage between the crippled socialism in the GDR and the bloated capitalism of the Federal Republic of Germany [FRG]? I would not care to see any of the children of such a union. Such monsters would also be a terrifying sight for the neighboring peoples.
But, who knows, it looks like I'm so stuck in the rut of my own way of thinking that your proposals for establishing a "Berlin-Mark" [i.e., a Berlin currency acceptable in both German states] seems infantile to me. Perhaps it is a good thing if by raising childish questions we keep
Der Spiegel
WOLF BIERMANN
bringing things that are apparently excluded before the public as possibilities. Brecht wrote:
Keinen Gedanken verschwende
Auf das Unabänderbare!
[Waste no thought
On what cannot be changed!]
If we reexamine this maxim from the standpoint of Brecht's own method of thinking, then we have the dialectical counterpoint to this half-true truth. What in unchangeable becomes unchangeable because we waste no thought on it! But, to go further in the text, I can't conceive of the sort of "all-German free general elections for a national assembly and... a gradual harmonizing of laws in all spheres of society in both states" that you demand.
Even if, as the precondition for this, the high priests in the GDR had been expropriated and removed from power, the big and small bourgeoisie would still hold all their well-developed positions of power in West Germany. And the workers movement would still suffer from its great weakness. How could there be free elections under these conditions?
And to go back to the GDR. Where did you get the idea that a population that has suffered bitterly for long years under the party high priests would opt in such free elections for complete freedom as we understand it and not for the lesser freedom offered by the exploiters? It can't be done that way.
First, there has to be a kind of Prague Spring in the GDR, one that succeeds and lasts and is not defeated by the argument of tanks! First, a socialist party has to develop in West Germany that is very different from the present Social Democratic Party. First, a Communist movement has to grow up independent of the
GDR. First, the citizens initiative groups [broad activist movements around various questions such as nuclear power] have to develop fully. Only then can we seriously take up the question of the reunification of Germany. Otherwise, all German dreams will be dreams of the past.
Here in the FRG, I see what the left is. It has no influence on the decision-making process in this society. Many of the squabbling sects talk like people who have gotten used to the fact that practically nobody listens to them. It is as the poem says:
Und die Linken hassen einander
Mehr als den Klassenfeind
Eh wir uns nicht selber einen
Wird Deutschland auch nicht geeint.
[And the left groups hate each other
More than the class enemy,
Until we ourselves unite,
Germany will not be united.]
And, dear comrades, things can last a long time the way they are before such changes come; they may last longer than we. But I think it is good in our day-to-day political activity not to maintain a shameful silence about the question of reunification, as is done by all those who have a say now both East and West.
Over the years in my poems and songs, I have never avoided the question of reunification. But there is a difference between not letting questions that are important for the future be forgotten and arousing exaggerated hopes that can all too quickly turn into exaggerated disappointment.
"All struggles for power in the GDR," you write, "have been tied up with the national question. ..." Right, but for this reason every one of these revolts ended with a triumph of Stalinist reaction.
"We insist on the right to follow our own German national road to socialism." As I read this sentence in your work, I thought of Martin Andersen Nexö [a Danish "proletarian" novelist]. During the period of the friendship pact between Hitler and Stalin, he returned to Denmark from a revolutionary tourist's visit to the Soviet Union and innocently explained to the outraged exile Brecht the idea the Soviet comrades had put in his head-Hitler was the German road to socialism! And the comrades of the German CP just had to reeducate themselves!
And you know about the way Teddy Thälmann, remote-controlled by the Comintern, tried to go Hitler one better and be more nationalistic than the "National Socialists." You know what a still-born thing Thälmann's "national Communism" was. You base yourselves here on Eurocommunism. But if the French comrades insist that socialism in France has to be red, white, and blue [the colors of the French flag] or there won't be any social. ism, this does not represent nationalism. This is a rather reflex reaction to the heavy-handed tutelage of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which has reduced its sister parties to being appendages of Soviet foreign policy. This reflex plays a still greater role in the GDR, as is also shown by your document. But we cannot drive out the Stalinist devil with the nationalist Beelzebub.
You call yourselves the BDKD [Bund Demokratischer Kommunisten Deutschlands-League of Democratic Communists of Germany]. How do you conceive of the form of organizing such an illegal association? I would eat my hat if there are more than twenty of you. As a general rule in the GDR, when more than ten persons interested in politics come together, there is almost certainly a spy among them. There is scarcely any other country in the world that politically needs such a gigantic and technically highly developed network of informers, or can economically support it.
As soon as your organization is taken seriously, the race begins between the hare and the hedgehog.? And in our small and well-ordered GDR, where every radish has a number and place assigned to it, Mielke's firm [the secret police] will always be able to say, like the hedgehog in the fable, "I be here already."
So, why do you adopt such an anachronistic organizational form as an associa tion of comrades working conspiratorially? You reject Leninism with a wave of the hand, and then you go ahead and imitate its idea of the party, one that might have been fine against the tsars but is not much use against modern bugging devices. And even if by some miracle you avoid informers, won't a conspiratorial cadre party automatically become trapped in the same dogmatic vicious circle that we want to escape from?
I think that the comrades in Poland have found better ways. The Committee for Social Self-Defense works openly; and precisely because it does not take any special precautions to protect itself, it is the better protected by public opinion in its own country. Why for so many years were they held back from putting me and Havemann in jail? If we had formed an illegal organization, which the Stasi tried by means of agents provocateurs to get us to do, we could have made it much easier for them.
In Czechoslovakia, they have the Charter 77 movement. Of course, the Husák club is defending itself with desperation and brutality, but you can see with how little success!
I have discussed these questions with my comrades in the Spanish Communist Party. They explained to me that during the Franco period, when the CP was outlawed, the famous Workers Commissions worked half openly. This organizational form slipped through the fingers of the police apparatus, and was able to carry on political activities that hastened the fall of fascism more than the older forms of struggle, which the state apparatus had been trained to deal with.
Here in the West, citizens initiatives are becoming more and more important. In America, who forced the Americans to end the Vietnam war? I think that all forms of rank-and-file democratic organization are taking on greater importance. Such forms have more vitality and are capable of more rapid self-correction. They are open to persons of differing views, and they are like a bag of fleas that no thought-control policeman would care to watch over. But who knows? Perhaps wide-ranging discussion of your bold action will lead to discovery of forms of political action in the GDR that will not be so easy for Uncle Erich [Honecker] to deal with.
Your description of "existing socialism" also warmed the heart of the CDU. The GDR has exactly the kind of socialism that bourgeois reactionaries like to see-a repellent, frightening police state, which sells its unfortunate subjects to the enemy for hard currency and locks up or locks out its Communist critics, a state whose symbol is not the hammer and sickle but the club and the gag.
But what too few people in the West see is that part of the reality of this "existing socialism" is also that it not only constantly tramples on socialist hopes but to a still greater extent inspires them. The lesson of the Prague experience was not the tanks! It was shown in this case how much easier it is under this kind of halfsocialism to make a revolutionary leap than it is in a well-established capitalist state.
Many of the reactions to your manuscript here were thought-provoking; most of them were outrageous or lamentable. But one was ridiculous. Perhaps you heard about it over the BBC. By means of astute textual analysis and ideological meditation, Wolfgang Harich, as a lone genius, figured out who cooked up the whole damned thing. It was Biermann.
Harich apparently thought that no one believed the crude official BND version; but he noted that our chiefs would be happy to find the author in the FRG, so that they would not have to search in vain in the GDR. And so he came on an idea that could have come from the servile brain of Peter Hacks. Who knows, maybe H. plagiarized H. Regardless of how it came about, it irritates me that you put Harich alongside Bloch, Bahro, and Havemann [in a list of critical socialists].
It was a good thing Bloch did not have to see this. But Havemann knows only too well what apparently is unknown to you and to most people in the GDR. We know Comrade Walter Janka, a veteran Communist who fought in Spain. He was imprisoned twice in Bautzen, once under Hitler, once under Ulbricht. He informed us that Harich did not even come up to the level of a petty crook.
To gain a few minor privileges, Harich informed on people to the police, and thus saw to it that Walter Janka was sent to Bautzen again, and for years. Harich not only violated Communist morality but even the code of thieves. No self-respecting safecracker, pimp, or matricide would have anything to do with him. Harich suffered, but others went through more and did not turn into swine.
It is a shame that Harich's book Kommunismus ohne Wachstum ["Communism Without Growth "] is not available in the GDR. In this work, he states openly what the most reactionary bureaucratic high priests think only in private. He tries throughout the book to prove that only total worldwide Stalinism can save humanity from the catastrophe toward which the Club of Rome thinks it is going.
When Harich once told me that he was grateful to the party leadership that they unmasked him in time and locked him up, thereby saving him from worse crimes, I thought of one of Brecht's last poems on Ulbricht, the "man of steel," and the prostituted muses:
Wenn der Eiserne sie prügelt,
Singen die Musen lauter.
Aus gebleuten Augen
Himmeln sie in hündisch an.
Der Hintern zuckt vor Schmerz
Die Scham vor Begierde."
[When the man of steel beats them,
The muses sing louder.
They look on him with doglike devotion, out of blackened eyes.
Their backsides twitch with pain
Their private parts with a mercenary lust.]
In conclusion, dear comrades, there is something worrying me that I would like to get off my chest. Do not let all the speculation about the genuineness of your "Manifesto" tempt you into proving it! I appeal to you to remain anonymous. Who would gain anything if you were first locked up and then locked out? Your document is circulating, and in the GDR as well. It will encourage many people and inspire them to further thought. Too many people are already being broken in our jails, and too many in the West as well. We want to think over what organizational forms are best suited to the conditions in the GDR.
Dear comrades, I think that the policy of détente between East and West will continue. And with it, the tensions in both East and West will increase. The coming class struggles will be on a bigger scale and more bitter in nature. But, as the master says, contradictions represent hopes.
Notes
2. In this fable, the hedgehog challenges the hare to a race across a field. But the hedgehog does not even try to run. His mate is already on the other side of the field, and the hare cannot tell the difference between the two.—IP/I