ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Chapter 1 some of the background factors that provided the context for the 1953 revolt were addressed. They told a story of intensified coercion and poor living standards, of exactions imposed upon East German citizens in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Yet to explain how these factors may be taken to have caused the event is no straightforward task. One possible chain of reasoning proceeds as follows: assuming that the intensification of exploitation and the curtailing of liberties generates grievances, and the greater the intensity of discontent, the greater the magnitude of strife,1 the explosion of 17 June may be explained as a function of the accumulated discontent that had amassed over the preceding period. This is a line of argument that not only appears to account for the causes of the rising but also for an aspect that astonished and puzzled contemporaries, namely the startling rapidity with which the strikes and protests spread – the fact that insurrectionary acts, including the establishment of town and inter-factory councils, were organised within the space of a few short hours, between the morning shift clocking on and the imposition of martial law in the afternoon.2 For regime loyalists, the speed of the rising’s take-off coupled with the considerable congruence of the slogans raised across the country, sowed suspicions that these ‘had been created in advance’ or even that the rising must have been prepared in advance by the ‘class enemy’.3 Official GDR historiography explained the rising as a planned ‘putsch attempt’, with ‘illegal counter-revolutionary groups’ receiving instructions from ‘radio stations and agencies’ in the West.4 By contrast, an explanation based upon ‘accumulated discontent’ can dispense with this myth, and account for the demonstrable lack of planning, the spontaneity of the events, in terms of the exceptional degree of oppression and exploitation experienced in East Germany resulting in a population that was seething with anger, a mass of dry kindling that awaited only a spark before its inevitable explosion.
