Berlin
Can East Germany find a "third way" between capitalism and socialism? The question was laid squarely on the table at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, and around it gathered a group of social scientists, the first East-West meeting of its kind since the opening of the Wall on November 9, and probably the first since the Wall went up 28 years ago. The chairman introduced the East Berliners as members of "what I believe is still called the Marxist-Leninist Institute for Sociologv"--a joke, meant to break the ice. "As a matter of fact, we dropped the Marxist-Leninist part a few weeks ago," came the reply from the senior Eastern sociologist.
The ice was broken. Then an economics professor from West Berlin tossed out a provocative statement. There is no third way, he said. You can have a planned economy or a market economy, but mixtures will not work. They become mired in bureaucratic intervention and can't cope with the flow of information in the computer age, to say nothing of the problem of matching supply and demand. Not so, said a young East Berliner. Socialism is like Christianity; it has never really been tried. East Germans did not practice socialism; the GDR already had a mixed economy--the Schalck System. That brought a laugh. The Easterner was alluding to the scandal that finally forced the entire Politburo of the GDR, including General Secretary Egon Krenz, to resign on December 3: the revelation that Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski, the secretary of state for foreign trade, had been using public money to run a private business in the arms trade. Schalck Golodkowski fled the country. Top members of the Communist Party were put under house arrest. And East German television, which used to be a joke and now is an addiction for millions of Germans on both sides of the borders, flooded the GDR with images of high living by the highest leaders of the Party.
A special assembly was called on December 8 to reconstitute the Party and to select a new set of leaders, but will anyone follow? The moral bonds that once attached the Party to the people have snapped. There has been a revolution.
“Revolution” was the term applied by the East Berliners at the institute to events of the past couple of weeks. They described the earlier explosion of November 4 to 9 as a pre revolution, or Vormdrz, an allusion to the Central European eruptions of 1848, the parallel most frequently cited in these parts. First the bleeding of the population from emigration by means of Prague and Warsaw, then the Leipzig demonstrations, then Gorbachev's visit and the near-miss of a Tiananmen Square massacre in Berlin, then the climactic rally of November 4, the fall of Honecker, and the "fall" on November 9 of the Wall: it was a spectacular sequence of events. But the real shift of power took place the following month, when the Party declared itself bankrupt and the first apparatchiks went to jail.
This view of events gave some urgency to the next point on the agenda: If the Communist Party has really lost its grip on power, what is the future of socialism in the GDR? Socialism has no future, said the economist from the West. Why not? replied a young sociologist from the East. We can keep our medical service, our social security, our protection against unemployment; and at the same time we can allow limited investment from the Bundesrepublik, taxing profits to pay for the social services. There are many possibilities advocated by many people in the Party's rank and file: feminism, ecology, a breakup of the state into self-governing communes.
The West Berlin professors looked a little startled at this prospect, which summoned up the radicalism on their own campuses rather than a notion of a viable economy. Mixed systems don't work, insisted the economist. Socialism is retreating before Thatcherism everywhere, even in France. "Planification" is an illusion, even in Sweden. We have whole libraries of books on the subject and decades of experience with experiments. In the end, if you open the door to West German capitalists, you will go capitalist.
The problem is time, said a Western historian. The youngest and most skilled East Germans are pouring out of the country at a rate of between one and two thousand a day. Instead of stopping the hemorrhage, the opening of the Wall has compounded it by undermining the economy. East Germans can now sell their cheap, subsidized goods in West Germany for Western deutsche marks and then use the strong currency to finance further rounds of speculation. The GDR is being bled white, and no one is capable of saving the situation, because no one is in charge.
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