The executive chairs usually went to members of the West German elite. This provoked a cultural rupture. The scientific assistant who had just rejoiced because his boss had been “phased out” suddenly had to come to terms with a new boss, who brought with him a very different world of experiences and a very different sense of superiority. If the previous boss had understood the assistant’s background through shared experience, the new boss usually lacked any capacity for empathy. After all, he hadn’t become boss by climbing the ranks within the institute but rather had been brought in from the outside. And since the two German states were two different countries, a kind of feeling of occupation and thus a sense of alienation had to arise.
And the process continued. After the bosses had been replaced, one turned to the other members of the elite. For example, if teachers had initially thought that only school principals would be affected, then they quickly discovered that they themselves were also in store for an examination with potentially negative consequences. A similar fate befell scientists, members of the state apparatus, of the future public sector, and so on. I know a teacher at a vocational school who noted, with full Schadenfreude, how the bosses all around him were losing their jobs. But I also saw his horror when he suddenly had to fill out questionnaires himself and when he got the sense that he was becoming a target, too. It was only at this point that he developed a critical attitude toward the replacement of the elites.
The instruments and methods that were employed to replace the elites in East German society were highly differentiated and varied. It was particularly easy with artists; they hardly received any more commissions. GDR writers who had just been celebrated in the feuilletons of Western papers for their behavior before and during the Wende were suddenly judged differently. Previously they had been treated as German writers; now they had metamorphosed back into GDR writers. The important thing about Christa Wolf was no longer how critically she had dealt with conditions in the GDR, but that there had also been a phase when she belonged to the Central Committee of the SED.
Investigations were legally mandated in the institutions. The Gauck Agency* was an important instrument in the replacement of the elites. Whether employees of scientific institutions or the public sector, whether union or party functionaries or teachers, they all had to submit to agency review. If it turned out that they had had contact with the MfS [Ministry for State Security] at some point in their lives, they could be fired, and generally were. In the few cases in which they were allowed to stay, they were permanently disciplined. If the Gauck Agency review produced nothing, then came the next phase of the political evaluation. The investigation now focused on whether the persons in question had been members of the SED and what functions they had exercised within that party. Thus, additional reasons for dismissal presented themselves. One person had belonged to a county [Kreis] organization of the SED; another had been a deputy in a county or district assembly or even in the former Volkskammer; in a pinch, it was enough to have been party secretary at a school or a university institution. If one failed to get anywhere with this, a function in the Combat Groups [Kampfgruppen]** of the GDR, or something else, was enough to determine that the person in question was no longer acceptable, politically speaking. With state prosecutors and judges it was easiest to find charges or verdicts that, according to the new political standards, precluded that person from remaining in his or her position.
* Commonly used term for the federal agency with the unwieldy name “Federal Commissioner for the Records of the Ministry for State Security of the Former German Democratic Republic.” The agency was named after its first head, Joachim Gauck – eds.
** GDR paramilitary organization founded after the workers’ uprising in June 1953 – eds.
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