Authors

George Bodie¹;  ¹ University of Cambridge, UK

Discussion

Socialist Internationalism was a fundamental component of everyday life in the GDR. Although often dismissed as a largely top-down, propagandistic phenomenon, in reality the GDR’s solidarity regime was one that asked a great deal of its citizens. East Germans were expected to contribute time, effort and money to socialist internationalism, donating wages, working extra shifts or donating possessions.

The recipients of solidarity changed over time. While early on the GDR’s existence internationalism was largely centred on West German workers, this focus faded along with hopes for socialist German unification. As decolonisation shifted the global balance of power, especially from the turn of the 1960s, postcolonial nations or national liberation movements fighting anti-colonial struggles became the focal point of internationalist efforts in the GDR. Vietnam would be the largest recipient of aid, although throughout the Cold War several other nations and movements would also receive attention, from Chilean socialists to the Namibian national liberation movement SWAPO.

Rarer was the practice of solidarity with the nations of Eastern Bloc. While postcolonial nations and national liberation movements were framed as the victims of imperialist forces who needed the support of the socialist world, the bloc was not usually presented as being in need of support. Natural disasters were a rare exception to this rule, but even then in terms of the percentage of resources and time and attention devoted to them these campaigns were a very small fraction of those with the extra-European world.

A single, notable counter example to this is represented by the solidarity drive with Poland at the beginning of the 1980s. This campaign – a response to economic crisis in Poland that saw extreme shortages of supply, rationing and concurrent resistance to the regime, eventually resulting in the establishment of martial law – encouraged GDR citizens to donate money and make their own care packages to be sent to Polish children.

This paper will focus on responses to the campaign, principally sources from the GDR’s secret police force, the Stasi. It will show that GDR citizens reaction to this drive differed from other, extra-European solidarity drives. Although all solidarity campaigns in the GDR tended to produce mixed responses, from resistance to appropriation and enthusiastic engagement, the Polish solidarity campaign was notable in the volume of criticism it drew.