By Michael Faulkner – April 11, 2010
Until the end of 1989 anyone visiting Berlin by rail or road
from anywhere in Western Europe underwent a rather extraordinary experience. First,
after driving from the West German Federal Republic to the East German
Democratic Republic through the most frequently used border crossing at
Helmstedt on the Hanover plain, one was struck by an immediate change in the
landscape. Via autobahn or railroad one passed from a world of seemingly
self-assured affluence, populated and busy with movement of traffic, brightly
lit and punctuated by colourful advertisement hoardings: our world – the
natural world, the one which is as familiar to us as the air we breathe. This
was immediately replaced by a landscape of colourless drabness. Few cars or
people were evident; the villages or isolated buildings that dotted the
landscape appeared grey and shabby; there were no advertisement hoardings, no
bright lights. It was rather like passing from Technicolor to monochrome. Then,
after travelling for over a hundred miles through this drabness, just as
suddenly one crossed the border into West Berlin; back again into ‘our world’
of lights and Coca Cola, neon signs, multi-coloured buildings and advert
hoardings. Our sensory deprivation was at an end.
Such was the experience of crossing the frontier of the Cold
War in Europe from the 1940s to 1990. For very many, this experience confirmed
their belief that capitalism represented individual freedom and diversity while
socialism or ‘communism’ crushed the human spirit into a stifling, colourless
conformity. Berlin itself was a microcosm of the Cold War divide. There was no
generally accepted way to describe the city. Indeed, for forty years it was
very much a ‘tale of two cities’. For the authorities in the East (GDR), the
eastern part of the city was ‘Berlin’ – to which was always appended the
designation ‘Capital of the German Democratic Republic’. For those same
authorities, West Berlin was ‘Westberlin’, an entity they regarded as an
outpost of West Germany, the FRG, illegitimately sustained on the territory of
the GDR. For the western authorities, West Berlin was an island of freedom in a
sea of communism.
Between 1961 and 1989 the Berlin Wall symbolised the Cold
War divide between East and West. For foreign visitors to the city, crossing
into the East from West Berlin was an even more bizarre experience than
travelling from the territory of the FRG to the GDR. By the mid 1950s West
Berlin had been largely rebuilt after the destruction of the city during the
war. Marshall Aid had poured into West Germany and the western part of the city
was reconstructed as a ‘Schaufenster’ (shop window) of ‘free world’ capitalism
in the middle of the ‘Soviet Occupation Zone’ of East Germany. The Soviets,
determined to extract from Germany the reparations they had been promised at
the Yalta Conference for the unparalleled destruction they had suffered at the
hands of Nazis, stripped their zone of much of its industrial infrastructure at
the very time that the USA was providing the means that made possible the West
German ‘economic miracle’ of the 1950s. As West Germany recovered, the GDR
suffered a brain and skilled labour drain which by 1960 amounted to about 3 million people emigrating from
a country of about 20 million. Most of these simply crossed the Brandenburg
Gate into West Berlin and made their way to the Federal Republic. The wall was
built to stop this. It stopped the haemorrhage of the population and enabled
the GDR to begin its economic recovery in earnest, turning the country within
about ten years into the economic showpiece of the eastern bloc with a higher
standard of living than all its neighbours, including the Soviet Union. But, this was accomplished at a great
cost. The majority of its citizens harboured deep and bitter resentment about
their forcible separation from relatives, friends and fellow-countrymen in West
Berlin and the FRG. For them the grass would always be greener on the other
side. While they all had jobs, health care and cheap rents, they lived much of
their lives imagining a utopia beyond the wall, their imagination stimulated by
daily doses of West German television. The authoritarian regime’s awareness of
the real sentiments of so many of its citizens led to the institution of a
surveillance system second to none: the State Security Service (Stasi). The
gulf between the propaganda image of a thriving, happy socialist community
united in its endeavours for the advancement of the “workers’ and peasants’
state”, and the reality of a largely de-politicised, cynical population, many
of whom were fixated on a romanticised image of West Germany, could hardly have
been greater.
However one assesses the system of ‘actually existing
socialism’ that prevailed in the GDR and elsewhere, certain aspects of such
societies require serious consideration. In circumstances of great adversity
the GDR built an economic system based on the nationalisation of all industry
and agriculture which was able to provide for its population a reasonable
standard of living. Most people lived comfortably. Rents were extremely low and
did not rise substantially over decades. There was full employment. All
work-places provided crèches and kindergarten facilities which enabled all
women to work. All education and health care was free. People were entitled to
generous holidays and facilities were provided at moderate cost. Public
transport in cities was virtually free.
Against this, for most people, travel to the West was
prohibited. Ownership of automobiles was severely restricted by limited supply
of models of a basic and inferior design and quality. There was hardly any
access to the endless variety of consumer goods available in western countries.
Then there was the question of advertising. The overriding principle
shaping the economy was production for use. Economic production was centrally
planned. There was no free market. Because there was virtually no private
enterprise and therefore no competition or brand promotion, there was no
advertising. Production to meet a calculation of needs – use values
rather than commodity exchange values, meant that there could be no raison
d’etre for advertising. The complete absence of commercial advertising is what
struck the visitor from the West most forcibly and produced the greatest sense
of disorientation. There were certainly conspicuous visual displays. Most of
them were cultural or political. The political displays – filling the
spaces taken up in capitalist societies by multitudinous neon signs and advertisement
hoardings – were often of a simplistic propagandistic nature. But often,
they were very imaginative. For example, in East Berlin, one of the underground
stations ‘Rosa Luxemburg Strasse’ displayed a huge mosaic mural depicting
aspects of Rosa Luxemburg’s life. In Cuba, a few years ago, some of the
highways on the outskirts of Havana were flanked by huge hoardings depicting
caricatures of G.W. Bush, accompanied by sometimes very cogent and amusing
political commentary.
In the GDR there was no Coca Cola and no canned beer. There
were no plastic shopping bags and no logos. Until November 1989, the main
public square in East Berlin, the Alexanderplatz, was entirely litter-free.
With the first breach in the wall East Berliners poured through the gap, collected
the DM bank-notes distributed to them on the western side, and returned later
with plastic bags filled with cans of coke and beer. Within a short time
Alexanderplatz was littered with empty cans. They had had their first taste of
freedom. Within a short time thousands had lost their jobs as their industries
were bought up and closed down by West German entrepreneurs and their rents had
increased ten times as their apartment blocks were purchased for a song by
private landlords from the West. A year after re-unification, a refrain that
could be heard increasingly in the East was ‘It wasn’t all bad in the GDR.’
More than fifty years ago the U.S. psychologist Vance
Packard wrote a best-seller entitled ‘The Hidden Persuaders: An Introduction to
the Techniques of Mass-Persuasion through the Unconscious.’ It was a
devastating exposure of the methods employed by commercial advertisers to turn
us into insatiable consumers of things we don’t actually need. At the time it
seemed that such techniques had been refined to the ultimate degree and that
the promotion and exploitation of human insecurity and dissatisfaction could be
pushed no further. But that was far from being the case. Today the environment
in which most of us live has become saturated with images and exhortations
designed to create in as many people as possible an insatiable desire to
consume. The promotion of possessive individualism has become a driving force
of the economy. ‘Shoppen ohne Stoppen’ (‘Shop without Stopping’) reads the
exhortation on Berlin buses, testifying not only to the inanity of the
consumerist appeal but also to the debasement of the German language through
crass anglicisation. Packard entitled a sequel to ‘The Hidden Persuaders’, ‘The
Waste-Makers’. Since that was written, waste making – built-in
obsolescence - has progressed by leaps and bounds. Commodity fetishism and
waste making have now saturated western societies, contaminating the very
language used in ordinary discourse. ‘That is so last year’ is an expression designed
to feed the manipulated desire for the latest useless gadget.
Now that the Soviet Union and the countries of ‘actually
existing socialism’ in Eastern Europe have ceased to exist, it is widely
assumed that ‘there is no alternative’ to the system of ‘free market’
capitalism that dominates most of the world. But the financial crisis through
which global capitalism is now passing must cause us to look very hard at such
a claim. If indeed there is to be no alternative to a system which is one of
unsustainable development, then there is no alternative to ultimate disaster
for the planet – or at least, for the human species and many other
species. This system depends crucially upon advertising for its continued
development – a development that is unsustainable. In the words of U.S.
sociologist Michael Lowy, advertising is a serious health threat to the
Environment.
This theme will be taken further in the next Letter from the
U.K.