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Although East Berliners and other GDR citizens were fully aware that the standard of living in their country was inferior to that of West Germany, they could take consolation in the knowledge that they were generally better off than the citizens of any other East-bloc state. This was an important factor in blunting the development of a strong opposition movement. On the other hand, as the socialist “brother-states” of Poland, Hungary, and even the Soviet Union began to reform and become freer in the 1980s, East Germans were confronted with what Timothy Garton Ash has called a “double contrast”: that between their own society and the West, and that between their intransigently repressive system and the suddenly innovative East. It was bad enough to be “behind” the West, but to be behind the Poles was galling in the extreme. To cope with the fears and frustrations of everyday life, many East Germans retreated into the private sphere, a tactic reminiscent of the “inner emigration” of the Nazi era. The GDR advertised itself as a model of social cohesion and community, but in reality it was a Nischengesellschaft (society of niches) marked by the protective clinging to one’s family and to small groups of kindred spirits.

The consolations of close social ties, low rents, free day care, good beer, and, not to forget, champion Olympic teams (the pharmacological bases of whose successes came out only later) were insufficient to deter a sizable number of GDR citizens from trying to move west, one way or another. They could tender an official application to leave, and under Honecker a few hundred were allowed to emigrate each year provided that they sold their property and valuables to the state at artificially low prices. Of course, people could also attempt to flee illegally, but in addition to the risk of being shot at the border they faced a jail term if captured. Parents caught trying to escape with their children risked having their kids taken away from them and placed with foster parents.

The Stasi maintained a number of prisons around the country specifically for political prisoners. Bautzen II, a high security facility in Saxony, was the most notorious of these. Opened in the early 1950s, it supplemented an existing prison in the same town that had been built in 1904 and used by the Nazis and Soviets before becoming a normal GDR jail. East Berlin itself had three Stasi prisons, each of them a hellhole where torture was a regular part of the “reeducation” process. In a report on his incarceration at Berlin-Pankow and Rummelsburg in the early 1970s, Timo Zilli, an Italian-born socialist, described a regimen of daily beatings, weeks of solitary confinement in a windowless cell, and hours of being hanged by his wrists with his feet barely touching the floor. A Jewish prisoner in Pankow who had spent five years in a Nazi concentration camp made the mistake of addressing his guards as “SS-Gestapo” and giving them the Hitler salute. As the guards beat him senseless, they shouted: “You Jewish swine think you can put on such a show because the Nazis let you survive. . . . We’ll finish the job.”

The one consolation for GDR political prisoners remained the prospect of being “bought free” by the Federal Republic. This program was expanded under Honecker as a way of bringing in much needed hard currency. In 1977 a covert organization called the “Commercial Coordination Area,” or CoCo, which had been set up ten years earlier to help with the human transfers, negotiated a hefty price increase for these transactions. Previously, prisoners serving short sentences went for about 40,000 marks, while long-term cases fetched three times as much. Now Bonn agreed to pay a uniform price of 95,847 marks a head. Occasionally the Stasi also sold prisoners directly to their relatives in the West, but in these cases the price was even higher: around 250,000 marks a head. By the time the Wall fell, almost 34,000 people had reached the West through buy-outs of one kind or another, which earned the GDR over 3 billion marks. This human export turned out to be one of the GDR’s most lucrative means of earning hard currency.

Cultural Dissidence: A Sinking Ship?

Of course, not all East German citizens who were disenchanted with conditions at home wanted to move west. Many dissidents continued to have faith in a socialist system whose principles, in their view, were being betrayed by their government. They remained convinced that socialism was fully compatible with, indeed dependent upon, free expression. Rather than abandoning the GDR, they wanted to make it better.