What was life like in small-town East Germany?
A guest piece by Cordia Schlegelmilch
Shortly before she became the Chancellor of Germany in 2005, Angela Merkel said something remarkable about her own past. Having grown up in East Germany, she appears to have become increasingly frustrated that every time she spoke about that, the mostly West German journalists seemed to misunderstand or even misconstrue her words. “It is obviously incredibly difficult to understand and make comprehensible how we lived back then,” she grumbled and then largely gave up trying while in office.
My own experiences talking to Germans about the GDR in recent years suggest change. I’ve had plenty of feedback on Beyond the Wall from West German readers who found the book an interesting way into a chapter of their country’s history they knew little about. Interest is growing, I feel, but the problem now is that the people who remember living in East Germany are looking back with more than 35 years of detachment. I’ve found this dilemma challenging to navigate in my own interviews.
Now, one German author has published a book that tries a different approach. Cordia Schlegelmilch, the daughter of East Germans who fled to West Germany in the 1950s, developed her personal curiosity in the GDR not now but in 1989. When others looked away, keen to overcome historical memory rather than maintain it, she moved in and interviewed 173 residents of one small town in Saxony right after reunification. The result is an intricate microcosm of rural and small-town life in East Germany.
Cordia Schlegelmilch has kindly agreed to give us ZEITGEISTERS an insight into her case study of the town of Wurzen. I hope you’ll find her guest piece as intriguing as I have.
After the Wall: Conversations in one East German Town, 1990-1996
By Cordia Schlegelmilch, Berlin
In contrast to the years immediately after reunification, interest in the history of the GDR has grown in Germany in recent years. But who is entitled to tell this story? Should we not assume that there can be different and legitimate reasons for engaging with the GDR’s past – regardless of one’s background or age? What, for example, prompted me back in the summer of 1990 to embark on a case study of one town that has remained with me to this day?
I was born in Magdeburg in East Germany, and my parents fled to West Germany in the mid-1950s, taking me with them. The reason was that my father, then a trainee judge, might have had to hand down death sentences at a military court during the tenure of the then East German Minister of Justice, Hilde Benjamin, in the early 1950s.
In my family, our GDR past developed into a deep family trauma due to the difficult start we had in West Germany, a subject we were not allowed to discuss. At the same time, due to the division of Germany and the emergence of the Cold War, there was a sharp ideological confrontation between the victorious powers, which I, as a schoolgirl in the 1960s, perceived very clearly.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, I was among the first to say to myself: I finally want to find out, without fear or prejudice, what life in the GDR was really like. And I wanted to know how the people there would cope with this profound upheaval. So, in the summer of 1990, I looked for a suitable town that had history, a diverse industrial structure and a population of around 18,000 to 25,000. Eventually, I chose the town of Wurzen in Saxony, about 30 kilometres east of Leipzig.
I was captivated by the numerous industrialists’ mansions and old factories situated close to the historic town centre, which bore witness to a rich industrial history. The surrounding area was heavily agricultural. This town could serve as a representative example of other small towns in the GDR.
For the first year and a half, I lived permanently with a family as a lodger. Until 1996, I would then spend a few weeks in the town from time to time. I wanted to give the people of Wurzen space to tell their full life stories because I assumed that their origins and past experiences had a decisive influence on how they experience the present and the future. During this time, I took part in everyday town life and, over several hours, listened to and recorded the life stories of 173 people from all generations and occupational groups.
I listened without judging or trying to impose topics. I spoke with members of agricultural production cooperatives (LPGs) and production groups (PGHs), long-serving officials, plant managers, workers and employees from industry and commerce, representatives of the economic and educated middle classes, as well as staff from the education, cultural and social sectors and members of the church. The 424 audio tapes total around 600 hours of digitised audio material.
The willingness of the citizens of Wurzen to talk was still enormous between 1990 and 1996. Never again will memories of the GDR be as vivid and concrete as they were back then.
Many of my eyewitnesses have since passed away and can no longer tell their stories. Sometimes, as I listened, I asked myself: how would I have reacted if my parents had stayed in the GDR? The result was a veritable treasure trove of life stories from different generations and social backgrounds – stories dating back to the 1920s or even earlier. They impressively demonstrate how biographies and everyday life in a small town changed, time and again, amid shifting political circumstances.
Through people’s recollections, I learnt of a multitude of different life paths, experiences and attitudes. All too often, discussions about the GDR overlook that the difficult economic conditions from the mid-1980s onwards were merely the final phase of an extremely volatile economic and socio-political trajectory. Different sectors of the economy and occupational groups were affected by state restructuring measures at various points in time. The development of the GDR must therefore be viewed from its very beginnings and placed within the context of German history as a whole.
Many older people repeatedly spoke of the end of the war and the economic disadvantages that the division of Germany had meant for the GDR. “Who had to bear the brunt of war reparations?” they asked. “We, the East Germans!”
Set against the backdrop of GDR and local history, one can discern the regional differences that were decisive for the supply situation in the districts due to the economic profile and state centralism, and how the inhabitants coped with this. Life in the GDR provinces differed greatly from life in the major cities. For many of my interviewees, West Germany was far away – and so was East Berlin.
It is those who stayed in East Germany who have shared their life stories with me. For many of them, the decision “to leave or to stay?” arose time and again – at different stages of life and at different times. Despite the one-party regime and the construction of the Wall, there were numerous apolitical and meaningful ways of life for them. People stayed not only out of necessity, but also for the sake of family, friends or a sense of attachment to their home region.
Although people lived under restrictive political and economic conditions, they looked back on their life’s achievements with self-respect, even if the conclusion was simply: “We managed. It wasn’t our fault that the state collapsed.” During the period of reunification, all those interviewed felt, in various ways, under pressure to justify having lived in and remained in the GDR. Yet it was their life, with times that were sometimes difficult, sometimes happy.
A former city councillor, aged 48 at the time of the interview in 1990, summed it up as follows:
“Many people are not prepared to give up, along with the demise of the old way of life, the things they managed to wrestle from the circumstances. You can’t just throw everything away. We have our identity; we don’t want to be proud of the ruling party or the GDR state, but of the times we lived through. You can’t blame us now for having stayed here. I’m not ashamed of having been a citizen of the GDR.”
From this multi-layered, authentic narrative panorama, every reader can form their own picture, compare the different attitudes and make sense of where they come from. The accounts of the town’s residents from the early 1990s – which were still very candid at the time and are compiled in the book without judgement – constitute an enormous source for historians, including for new questions and interpretations.
Cordia Schlegelmilch’s book “A Town Tells the Story of the GDR – Wurzen 1945–1988” (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, March 2026) is available in Germany now. Its German title is: “Eine Stadt erzählt die DDR – Wurzen 1945 – 1988”.
Looks a good read 👍