State-Sponsored Students’ Cultural Activity and Opposition in the German Democratic Republic, 1953-1961. The case of Karl-Marx-University Leipzig

Germans after the unification Germany have noticed how the East German experience was still deeply influencing their mind and life despite that some scholars criticized the East-West dichotomy. In addition, the memory war between the East and West has serious meaning for the whole of Europe today. The former residents in East Germany played a special role in this memory war because of their experience in their “new” society over 40 years history as only one divided nation-state in Europe as a border region of the Cold War. After the Second World War, the GDR authorities strictly connected education and cultural activities with politics and remained the core of constructing a “new” socialist state. In spite of the Cold War confrontation, many East German students tried to find possibilities of discussion with the authorities and never fled to the West despite that all people in the GDR could flee the West until August 1961 if wanted. In addition, they had stood as the ruling position in the state when the Berlin Wall was collapsed. In other words, the experiences of the students who studied in the 1950s made the “new” East German society.
Of this reason, the experiment and experience by education and “new” cultural activities of the GDR in the 1950s offer an important stimulus to the history of Europe, where the citizens lived in Eastern Europe in the second half of the 20th century and faced similar projects by the communist authorities.
My research explores the cultural and social possibilities and limits in the GDR by scrutinizing the relationship between the state-sponsored students’ cultural activities and the students’ opposition against the regime from 1953 to 1961 with three cases: student’s religious organization, jazz activity, and the students’ cabaret group in Leipzig. Jazz and cabaret are the most popular and attracted culture for youth in the 1950s and early 1960s, and the most political state-issues for the authorities in those years, because jazz was connected with the Western, particularly American culture and independent religious organization organized jazz events with Western jazz musicians. Besides it, cabaret was the most important satire media for both West and East Germanies, which had a tradition from the end of the 19th century and originated from Paris, Wien, and Weimar republic.
In addition, the surveillance system and its method influenced the patterns of people’s everyday life and behavior, and how and where they gained the information in the GDR. The “secret” relationship in the surveillance system between actors and authorities also influenced the cultural activity among participants, since the more the SED encouraged the cultural activity among the students, the more surveillance system the Stasi spread into them. Therefore, the study argues the possibility and limits of cultural activity in the GDR with the assumption of the dynamic interaction between “ruler” and “ruled” by focusing on the excluded people from the GDR society due to their “failed” cultural activity and how actors made efforts to realize their own hopes from the position where they chose.
My case studies highlight also the importance of Central Europe in the 20th century, demonstrating a mutual relationship between the East and West during the Cold War through direct discussion between the GDR and West Germany, taking the historical and present context in divided Central Europe by examining political and ideological issues, and the impact as well as the importance of the divided Germanies in Europe after the death of the Soviet leader Stalin.