FORMER WEST GERMANS AND THEIR PAST
547
economically compatible with it. As Peter
L.
Berger puts it, "Capitalism
is a necessary - though not sufficient - condition for democracy but
democracy is not a precondition for capitalism." Historically, capitalism
is the economic counterpart of liberal democracy, but it has proven its
compatibility with the most repressive political regime, German fascism.
Nazi ideology, which represented the complete rejection of liberal
democracy, combined the antithesis of democracy - the totalitarian state
- with democracy's economic groundwork: private property, the mar–
ket, and social pluralism. Stressing both the similarities and the differences
between fascism and Communism becomes important, when comparing
the transformation of fascist totalitarianism into West German democracy
with the transition from totalitarianism in contemporary East Germany.
We cannot comprehend the problems East Germany is facing in try–
ing to install democracy without emphasizing the mass exodus from the
former GDR more strongly than is typical. An understanding of the
combination of exodus and opposition - unique to the former Com–
munist world - is necessary to explain the East German transition from
totalitarianism. Between 1949 and 1989, more than three million people
left East Germany. This constituted a brain-drain unprecedented in mod–
em history. Expropriated entrepreneurs, farmers whose land was forcibly
collectivized, anti-Communist intellectuals, the entire
Burgertum
J
as well
as hundreds of thousands of people who were ready for active opposi–
tion, escaped or were forced to go. Those who left were convinced that
its political system was simply not worthy of existence. East Germany lost
its bourgeois elites in general and its potentially conservative elites in
particular. Many of the politically active people who stayed on to fight
with - and within - the SED preferred socialism and therefore preferred
retaining the GDR as an alternative to the Federal Republic.
Unlike the years of Nazi-dictatorship, when opponents of the regime
escaped and organized an external emigration from Nazi Germany, the
GDR-refugees were integrated into the
Bundesrepublik.
Because of the
mass exodus, the internal emigration, those people who stayed and op–
posed the Stalinist-type dictatorship was made up of socialists who
wanted to replace totalitarianism with democratic socialism, whatever
that meant. The mass exodus severely hampered the development of an
indigenous anti-Communist and pro-liberal democratic elite of opposi–
tion.
In
1989, therefore, there was no political leadership to express the
interests of people who differed with the leftist counterculture intellec–
tuals who determined conventional wisdom in the West. The latter be–
lieved that totalitarianism was only an accretion that spoiled and de–
formed socialism. East Germany's opposition was much more leftist than
