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Thomas Fleischman, "Communist Pigs: An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall" (U Washington Press, 2020)
01:00:29
The pig played a fundamental role in the German Democratic Republic's attempts to create and sustain a modern, industrial food system built on communist principles...
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A
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B
Hi, everybody, and welcome back to the New Books Network podcast. I'm your host, Steven Siegel, coming to you from San Diego. And today on the New Books Network and New Books German Studies and New Books Environmental Studies, we'll be featuring Thomas Fleischmann, who is the author of Communist An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and fall, published in 2020 by the University of Washington Press and the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. Welcome, Tom, to our podcast today.
- [01:43]
C
Oh, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
- [01:46]
B
So I'm really excited about this interview. To talk about the animal history of East Germany, a little bit about Thomas Fleischmann. He is an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester, and he's a historian of modern Germany, environmental history and animals. Thomas work has won support from the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University, the Jordan center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University, the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Fulbright Program. So we'll talk about Communist pigs today. Tom and I want to start with the first question. It's really about you. Why pigs? And why Communist pigs? I'm dying to ask this question, and I don't know another way to ask it, but how did you come to this topic?
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C
Yeah. Well, my interest in East Germany is really where it began, because after college I went to the former East Germany on a Fulbright. I taught in a gymnasium for a year, and I lived really in the middle of nowhere in the state of Mecklenburg Vorpommen. And I lived in this little city called Gustro, which is about 30 minutes from a city of note, Rostock. And this town had many of the problems that have affected much of East Germany since reunification, which is this skewing of the demographic composition of the city. So what you have is a lot of retirees, people in their 50s and 60s, and then a few young families with kids going to school, but very few people in their 20s and 30s. And when I moved there, I really didn't have much of a social life in this little city. And if I wanted to find people, I had to go to Rostock or Berlin. And so I spent a lot of time on the train. And on those train rides, I would look out the window, and what struck me almost immediately was the agricultural landscape around me. And in the springtime in particular, they grow a lot of rapeseed in the former East. And those flowers, if you've ever seen them, are this sort of fluorescent neon yellow. And it really catches your eye, but it really shows the size of these fields, which were enormous. And I was really struck by that at first. And then after a while, I started to realize I never saw anybody working outside. When I got to graduate school and started thinking about East Germany and beginning to think about dissertation topics, I sort of was reminded of that and thought about, well, what is the history of this part of Germany? Why are these fields so big? And then also, why do I never see anybody working in it? So I started with this idea that I would write about the environmental history of agriculture. But, you know, I wasn't really sure what aspect until I started digging in the archives. And when I went to Berlin and I was at the Bundesachiv, you know, I just started ordering files. And then it struck me after a couple months of sitting there that I was just reading file after file about pigs. Pigs were everywhere. You know, problems with feeding pigs, problems with dealing with pig manure and pig waste, problems of distributing pork. And the more I thought about it, it seemed like the pig was a nice avenue for pursuing this history. That's how it started. Of course, I was then influenced by a lot of my readings in environmental history about how to use and think with animals, to write about the past.
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B
Yeah. And I want to bring US into East Germany. So what was the pig population? I don't know if anyone has ever asked this question, but I mean, I think maybe as a demographic issue. Could you talk a little bit about what the pig population was in the GDR and what it looked like?
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C
Well, if we're talking about the factory farms, we'd probably be talking about anywhere between 10 and 13 million pigs. It fluctuates between the 60s and 80s. And what my book really focuses on is this push to really expand that program and really build it up. And so I usually say about 12 to 13 million in the farms, but then you also have any number of pigs on private plots which weren't necessarily counted, or I never found statistics that put them all in one place, but they are definitely not counted alongside the 13 million on the farms themselves. And then you have somewhere around, you know, this is also a number that's hard to nail down. But the wild boar population, if we really want to get specific, is also growing exponentially over the course of the 70s, you know, going from the tens of thousands into the hundreds of thousands over a ten to fifteen year period.
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B
Yeah, and I'm interested in the book, how you decided to start. Could you talk about the writing process? I mean, you have Animal Farm, of course, you have Orwell, and there is an allegorical narrative and a story to East Germany. So where do you start in East Germany? Is it from below? Is it from the Party? Is it from the farms? Where's your vantage, let's say?
- [07:35]
C
I would say that the archival material led me to begin from the planning perspective, from both the, you know, the economic administrators who are moving pigs and feed and manure around, so to speak, but also the Party itself, getting a. Getting a sense of their debates and how they thought about it. That's, that's where it started. But I also used the agricultural periodicals and newspapers as a way to get at a more on the ground look, to see what farmers would have been reading and talking about and using what are. Arguably they're state controlled. Obviously they're part of the party apparatus, these farming newspapers. And so they're certainly not giving a full picture, but there's definitely a way in which I found that you can read Party newspapers to get a pretty good sense of what's going on. And what shocked me, or not shocked me, what surprised me, I would say, is the openness to which people were talking about problems in agriculture, how to deal with shortages in feed, how to deal with too much manure on your farm, how to deal with your contract partners who aren't fulfilling their obligations to your farm. All that stuff is being talked about in these official party publications and platforms. And I thought that was a pretty useful way to get more of the bottom up look.
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B
Yeah, and I'm really curious about this. At a particular moment in time when the factory farms are set up in a, in a very sort of highly maybe modern or high modern way. Could you talk about the factory farms? I mean, when do they really, when do they start? Are they collective farms? Are they capitalist? What are they from when to when in this period of industrial revolution in East Germany?
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C
Well, what I would say is that the, you know, the principles of industrialization and the industrial organization of farm space is prevalent from the start of the gdr, but it's being introduced onto these newly formed collective farms that as I talk about, go through several rounds of reforming, reconfiguration from both the Soviet led land reform in 1946, all the way through a decade of collectivization drives over the 50s and 60s. And they are really dealing with attempts to sort of, you know, bring machinery to the farm, make new types of inputs like fertilizers and hybrid seeds available, introducing new machinery. That's all going on in the 50s and 60s. But what changes in the late 60s and 70s is the East Germans sort of decide that what they really need is to build these sort of exporting dynamos for animal flesh and really focus on these vertically integrated state owned facilities. And as we can talk about, as well as how those end up in East Germany and where they come from, what they really become designed for is to bring in revenue from abroad so that East Germany can produce enough pork to export it, but also produce enough to supply the capital city of Berlin and maybe the Soviet army that's encamped in East Germany as well. And so what you see is a bifurcated system. This is sort of advanced technological one that gets priority. And then the collective farms are supposed to sort of absorb over time the lessons and demonstrations of the model farms.
- [11:41]
B
Yeah, and that's really what I want to talk to you about at some length in the way that you set up the economic history as an environmental history and the import export problems, if we can call them problems of East Germany. But first, could you tell our listeners how you designed the book? So you've got seven chapters, I think.
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C
How.
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B
And how, and how did you, how.
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C
Did you do that?
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B
Could you introduce us a little bit to your chapters and what you investigate?
- [12:11]
C
Right, so you know, staying with the pig I thought the pig would be a useful way of telling this story. And the reason why is I kind of hit on that. There were these three archetypes of pigs. An industrial pig, what I call the garden pig, and a wild boar. And each one of them captures a different aspect of the industrialization of East German agriculture. And so I decided to write chapters that would place each pig at the center of the investigation. The industrial pig is definitely the major focus of the book. The first four chapters are about understanding how these Germans developed this industrial pig, what it looked like, how it lived, how its production changed over the 40 year history of the GDR. But then I also wanted to look at these other pigs that are less appreciated. This garden pig that I have come up with is this pig that stands in as a star species for a whole host of subsistence practices that undergirded the planned economy, that allowed the plant economy to actually function and filled in the gaps when it faltered. And then the last one is this wild boar that I discovered was exploding its population, causing all kinds of headaches. And I thought of it as a useful way to think about ungulate eruptions around the world today. If you deal with deer eating your garden or wild boars in parts of the United States as well in Europe. I thought this was a. What East Germany had, was they had experienced this problem that I recognize now that most people talk about fairly regularly. That I thought would be interesting to talk about an earlier iteration from 50 years ago to show that this problem isn't so new, and then to link it specifically to how the industrialization of agriculture remade the landscape to really support the flourishing of wild boars.
- [14:17]
B
Yeah, and actually, I would start with the industrial pig and the complex. Correct me if I'm wrong. Is it Eberswalde in East Germany? So what was this complex as a form of new East German industrial agriculture? And what was it modeled on?
- [14:36]
C
Yeah, so Eberswalde. They couldn't have picked a better name for a city because Eber means Boer and walt means vald means forest. And so, you know, they picked the bore forest for their model industrial, vertically integrated facility. It was imported, I like to think of, brought in from abroad. I discovered that it was actually. Well, I didn't discover this in my research. I found that it had been constructed by the Yugoslavs, who entered this deal in the 1960s with the East Germans, that they would construct several vertically integrated factory farms to produce chickens, pigs, cattle, but also milk and eggs and dairy products. Through my research, I figured that the Yugoslavs had largely built their facilities through Western European and American expertise that had been a central platform in the Cold War strategy of the sort of. To sort of separate Yugoslavia from the Eastern bloc. The Americans and Western Europeans tried to bring them in through economic incentives primarily. And I think the Yugoslavs then used that expertise and that training and sold it to the East Germans who established this factory farm in Eberswalde, which had three major sections to it. One was a massive fodder complex that collected grain both from across East Germany, but also what was imported from abroad. And there they would process it into both concentrate fodder, the sort of highly specialized and scientifically determined dietary supplement, and then the large grain grain shipments as well, that they would feed to their pigs. The second facility was a breeding and fattening complex where they both reared sows and had them inseminated and then producing pigs. And then once they got the piglets out, they had to raise them to adulthood and fattening them the whole time. This is a facility that had raised about 200,000 pigs every five months. And then they would turn it over again, so about 400,000, maybe half a million pigs a year. And then the final complex was this advanced slaughterhouse that these Germans actually hired a West German firm called Berlin Consult to come into East Germany and build it. And in the contract, they specified that it had to be turnkey ready. And putting this all together, they required, for example, to import specific hybrid pigs for the factory farm from Yugoslavia. I start my first chapter with this sort of crazy airlift of hogs from Ljubljana to east Berlin in 1970, where they coordinated this basically chartered flight that over four months flew 9,000 breeding hogs to East Berlin.
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A
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D
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- [19:53]
B
I mean, I actually see a lot of echoes of Rachel Carson in your book. So it's, it's a social spring. But it's interesting to me because you're studying not just Eberswalde, which is close to the Polish border. Right. But also the other complexes as well. And I want to come back to a lot of questions about the nature of the economy, but in particular, how does agribusiness work? So there's a specific kind of transformation. You explore this through state planning and the convergence of communism and capitalism. Could you talk about the ideological element here? I mean, what is being transformed through the complex at Aberswalde and similar knockoffs.
- [20:41]
C
Yeah. So one of the goals I set out for the book was to make East Germany seem less strange and bizarre to people who don't know anything about the Eastern Bloc, state socialism, or communism during the Cold War. So, you know, a lot of the book does deal with questions that are rooted in the East German historiography and debates that have developed in that field since the 1990s. But I also wanted to write this book for US environmental historians who never actually considered the role of the Eastern Bloc beyond just sort of a footnote in the 20th century. And the way I wanted to demystify it and make it seem more familiar was to put into conversation with Transformations in American agriculture in the post war period. And what I found really striking was that the changes that were pursued in the name of agribusiness in the 1950s and 60s in the United States look an awful lot like what happened under collectivization in East Germany. You see the same types of demographic transitions. So oftentimes, East Germany sort of infamously derided for the construction of the Berlin Wall, which was created to stem the flight of East Germans from the country over the course of the 1950s. But you could also make a case that rural places like Iowa or Ohio are experiencing similar levels of rural emigration in the same period. And a lot of this is due to changes in agriculture. Another thing that you see that's happening both in Iowa and East Germany, for example, is you see the decline in the number of overall farms in operation, which is always accompanied by a growing expansion in the scale of these farms. You see both in Iowa and East Germany, a decline in the number of food types of food and crops and animals that are being produced on each farm. And you see this sort of drive towards specialization. You see the rise of this idea that farms are producing for national markets or international markets rather than for regional provisioning and supplying. You see the adoption of the same types of technologies. And ultimately, what I saw at first was sort of this parallel development where agribusiness and collectivization are occurring largely at the same time. And then what I saw was that in the 1970s, these systems actually converge and start to work together. And it's not just by accident, but as a result of both speaking the same language about agriculture. I always thought that if you took a manager from Abras Valde and you plopped them down at Hormel or Smithfield Foods, they would look at it and they'd go, oh, I know what this is. I know how this works. I can make it run. Right.
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B
There's an interesting moment of transition from Ulbricht to Honecker. You talk about pig bodies in the era of detente, and really, I have two questions for that. So what's the switch that happens in, say, 1970 or 1971 in the global economy? How it affects East Germany with cheap capital and grain and oil? And how do you see that through a pig's body?
- [24:29]
C
Great. Yeah. So for the first 20 years of East Germany's existence, the economic policy is revolving around sort of an autarkic organization of the economy. Everything will be produced within East Germany, and they pursue that. They try to grow enough grain to feed enough pigs to feed Enough cattle to feed enough chickens, and then that these things should all balance out. All plant economies have this sort of this fundamental idea that inputs and outputs always have to balance out. And the East Germans pursue this not just through collectivization in the 50s, but also once the Berlin Wall is built. East Germany's first leader, Walter Ulbricht, decides that he no longer. He feels a little more free to experiment in the economy. And he starts to see that collectivization isn't really going to produce by itself enough of a leap forward in economic production in agriculture. And that's why he actually turns to the Yugoslavs and looks for expertise about industrialization from abroad. And he says, you know what? We can. We'll build up our agricultural sector this way. And they import this factory farm. And it achieves some pretty striking advances. You know, East Germany is producing more food than that region of Germany had produced prior to the Second World War. By the end of the 60s, certainly, there's a material abundance that people didn't really know 20 years prior, and yet they are lagging behind the west, which is always held up. West Germany is always the foil that these Germans inherently compare themselves to. And in the late 60s, there starts to be, on the geopolitical front, a growing move towards detente, or as the West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, named it, Ostpolitik, this sort of moving away from Cold War competition to collaboration. And while these geopolitical communiques are starting to happen, while they're starting to think about changing those relationships, Western capitalism also starts to go through these massive transformations. These really important events happen almost simultaneously with the culmination of detente, which is you have the end of Bretton woods, the set of agreements that basically set up economic order in the wake of the Great depression and the Second World War. You have the oil crisis of 1973, and then you have in the middle there, this sort of less appreciated but just as important event, which became known as the Great Grain Robbery, as it was named at the time, or the Russian grain deal of 1972, where the Russians managed to corner the global market for wheat. And they did this through a series of negotiations with the United States and North American grain dealers, and without anyone really knowing what was happening before it was too late, or managed to get this grain at a very cheap price. And then when the supplies went down in the west, the prices went up, and then they sold it all back and made a huge windfall of profit. And this is one of the events that injects sort of instability into Western capitalism. And so because of these crises, the rules of Western capitalism change. We have sort of the return of finance capital, the beginning of the deregulation of state and private banks, and then of course, the notorious era of stagflation where interest rates and inflation is actually outpacing interest rates. So the cost of borrowing was essentially free. And this is mostly talked about usually in terms of the political crises of the 1970s, the United States and Western Europe, crisis of confidence from Jimmy Carter through Callahan in the uk. But then there's also, what's less? And then there's also a lot of research about what happened in Latin America with the coup in Chile and the junta in Argentina.
- [29:15]
B
Yeah, I mean it very easily. Sorry, it very easily becomes a kind of transnational diplomatic history on that kind of surface level.
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C
Right?
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B
Yeah, but I mean your angle is completely interesting. I mean it's different because you're getting at it, the story from the perspective of the pigs and, and the meat meatification as, as you call it, and I think some others have called it, of the global diet. So I mean, how, how do you get at that perspective then through, through your sources? I mean, are, can you inter, can you interview a pig?
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C
Well, yeah. So Tony, Tony Weiss is the, the person who coined the phrase meatification, this sort of idea that the world's rural spaces are given over to grain and oilseed production and then surrounded by these little archipelagos of concentrated livestock facilities. And how I see that happening in the pig is that there's not just any pig will work in a factory farm. What these Germans struggled with in the 60s was finding a pig that could not only survive, but flourish under the factory conditions of being confined to one spot all day, being sort of year round, farrowing, divided by age group and move to the production cycle quickly. And what they found was that not all breeds did well. And what happens that accompanies the meatification of agricultural spaces is also a change in what types of pigs are being bred in the world. And you see the sort of moving away from the classical breeds of the 19th and early 20th century. Your lard types, you often see, these are the sort of, the funny looking pigs that occasionally make their way to Twitter. And people describe, like, look at, what's the meme like, you know, look at this unit, you know, some massive hog with giant hams and a big head. But what you start to see instead is this move towards selecting pigs that can do well under factory conditions, that have large litters that can handle the stress of that Environment, which means putting on a lot of weight, being resistant to disease. And what you start to see is the East Germans move away from the classical breeds of the early 20th century and start experimenting and importing hybrid varieties that are known for this characteristic they all describe as vigor. And so this actually is when the East Germans start importing pigs from Yugoslavia. Those Yugoslav pigs probably came from experimentations in Yugoslavia, but also imported, I think, very likely from Western Europe as well, in that you sort of see this winnowing of, you know, the. The diversity of the pig gene pool in which they're all moving towards this particular type that survives in the factory farm. And. And that's what I found there for, For. For that part of the story is the ways in which East German planners are describing how they need this. This new type of pig, this hybrid pig. And they developed their own. They actually develop two kinds. And the one that I write about in the book is called the Lycoma Pig. Lycoma stands for the three cities that helped develop it. Leipzig, Copples and Magdeburg. And what's really ironic is they developed this hybrid pig for the factory farm, and they're very happy about it. But then today, if you Google Lycoma pig, you'll see a lot of discussion of how this is an endangered heritage breed. And so it's worked its way into sort of this sort of pastoral romanticism in Europe, that this is one of the pigs that is disappearing and going away, which I thought was.
- [33:14]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I want to talk. I want to talk more about the party planners. So what. I mean, how do you read these economic plans, crises through environmental history? You have the Grunberg Plan, which you talk about, and maybe you could introduce, and something called the Manure Crisis, I think, is a great title for a chapter on East German history, because there is a dream among these state planners. Honaker, with all of his hunting expeditions and everything, and his collection of rifles, which you talk about. I mean, these are men who have a particular dream of state capitalism, but they're faced with mounting crises, and certainly in some ways, it begins on the collective farms. So could you tell our listeners about that? I mean, what are these crises and how do they escalate through the late 70s and early 80s?
- [34:11]
C
Right. Well, from Ulbricht to Honaker and all of the. The cadre of their supporters who work in the regime, they have basic commitments to, or they have basic beliefs about what state socialism should provide. It should provide affordable housing. People should have jobs. They should have education, they should have right to health care, and they also need access to cheap, affordable food. And for Honecker in particular, he is always worried about, in the back of his mind, a potential upgrade. Uprising. He's in the regime during the notorious uprising of June 17, 1953, when there's a spontaneous protests against increased price of food and a sort of downward pressure on wages leads to an outbreak of unrest throughout the country that has to be put down violently by the government. And he always swore that he would never go back to a place where people were revolting against the regime because of the cost of living, particularly around food. Then in the course of the 1970s, he assumes power in 1971 as the leader of East Germany. There are a number of protests, particularly in Poland, around the price of bread and food. And that's always in the back of his mind. He keeps making it a priority for the regime to produce as much foreign food, particularly pork, bread and butter, as possible to keep people happy. And so he does that, and he makes that the priority itself. And because that's the priority, there are all these knock on effects of this relentless drive to industrialization that will provide the cheap food itself. And so one of the knock on effects is this manure crisis, which is that concentrating pigs in facilities like this also produces a particular kind of waste. That is. I'm not sure if our listeners want to read about it or hear about it, but maybe I'll just talk a little bit about it. Describe it in great detail, please. Okay, well, what happens is, traditionally when you had pigs, you'd have 20 pigs, 50 pigs in a barn. And a farmer could traditionally deal with their waste by mixing it with dry matter, you know, straw, maybe silage from the fields. Anything that you had on hand, you could mix with it and then render that into usable fertilizer. You know, a traditional farmer will always talk about it as, you know, gold, really important to cultivate good manure. And I in, in the farming periodicals, you still see these people, you know, farmers writing into the newspaper and talking about how manure is gold. We have to protect it, you have to treat it correctly. But what's being missed and not accounted for by planters and East German farmers themselves is that when they move to confinement and keeping pigs not only confined indoors year round, but also in greater and greater numbers, was that the, the nature of their manure itself changed. It became much more toxic because they would place them in these long barns that had these concrete spalted flooring, and underneath it had These canals or channels that would collect any wet material that fell through and then that would be pumped out into a lagoon that was outside the facility. And there it would be, you know, encouraged to settle and the sedimentation would happen. And so the heavy stuff would fall to the bottom and the, the liquid stuff would stay at the top and then be drained off into a lower lagoon. But the problem with that is that in this collection of massive amounts of pig manure without any dry material in sort of encouraged anaerobic respiration amongst microorganisms mixed into the manure. And that releases all kinds of toxic gases that are poisonous to animals and people, but also becomes incredibly toxic to the environment itself. And anytime there was heavy rainstorm or spring flooding or what happened increasingly was that the lagoons themselves would fill up. They'd have nowhere to put the manure. And so it started being dumped in the woods or applied on fields that didn't need any more manure applied to them. And so it sort of saturates the soil and seeps into the watershed and starts to poison the drinking water itself. I have a large part of this chapter on the manure crisis where East Germany is having whole cities that need to have bottled water brought in because there are rising cases of this condition called Blue baby syndrome, where babies turn blue because there's nitrates in, in the drinking water and it's getting into the baby's bloodstream and it's inhibiting the take up of oxygen. It also, you know, the manure is also causing spikes in cancer and other kinds of bad illnesses. This is going on throughout the, you know, it's really building over the course of the 70s into the 80s, and the regime sees it as a crisis, but they can't, you know, take their foot off the pedal because they're balancing this need to keep cheap food and cheap pork available for the public at all times. But it's also being balanced by this need to continue to export pork abroad that actually these Germans decide they just cannot default on their loans to the west, even if it means having to cut back on supplies of pork to its people. So there's this fight within the regime between people who say, we, you know, we have to keep producing pork for the populace. And the rest are saying, no, no, we have to prioritize Western exports. Meanwhile, this whole system itself is poisoning people at an alarming rate. It was by far the worst, worst drinking water problem in all of Europe at that time, even by the East German zone admission.
- [40:34]
B
Were you finding, Tom, this these sources in the party archive, where. What kind of sources were you, were you. And where were you finding the stories of pollution, pollution and the export business?
- [40:47]
C
So this may be surprising to non experts, but you know, the East Germans, while they had a terrible environmental record, actually established a Ministry of Environmental Protection fairly early. I believe it was established in 1970 or 71. And part of what they're doing is collecting information about drinking water and water contamination. It's there from the beginning. I think it's surprising because I think most people would assume that the communist regimes had no interest in paying attention to what's happening to their environment, which actually isn't true. It's just that the political pressure upon the regime, they're not as responsive to it. Right. They don't have to respond in the same way that western governments do. But that doesn't mean they aren't paying attention to it. And so I found several confidential reports sent to the Politburo, the regime, about this crisis. And I distinctly remember one report in particular. It was 150 pages of detailed studies of where the drinking water was really bad, what they were doing to fight it and what's, you know, the, I wouldn't say the tragedy, but there's, there is a recognition inside the regime itself. This is unsustainable. It's incredibly costly to have to, you know, dig new wells for towns to replace water lines to import drinking water. You know, it's starting to eat up, you know, most of the like. Almost the entire drinking water budget for all of East Germany is being eaten up by, you know, emergency water deliveries and the like. And so you see them saying, we have to make a big change. It's clearly coming from agriculture and agricultural runoff from our livestock facilities, but also from the fields themselves that are over applicated with, you know, not just chemical fertilizer, but pig manure. But at the same time they say like, you know, it's, we have to reckon with how to balance producing enough food for people at the same time. And they never actually come up with a solution, obviously, because a revolution happens and there's no more East Germany.
- [43:08]
B
Well, that's the perfect segue to what I want to ask about 1989 and the Socialist Unity Party, because I'm absolutely fascinated by your stories of continuity in the Landes group or, you know, I mean, it goes certainly back to the idea of the forest in German romantic literature and such. And there are all these uncanny parallels in the conservationism or conservationist movement and say the green movement today, which I think come as revelations in your book. So I mean, how do you, how do you take the story through with all of these various crises to 1989? What, what's the connection there in the story of East Germany is an allegorical connection or something more.
- [44:01]
C
So what I found really striking was that there is in the early 80s, a lot of dissent movement and early organization from the late 70s initially starts as opposition to nuclear weapons from the late 60s and 70s, and then by the late 70s it starts to transition to pollution. In particular, a lot of the focus is on brown coal or lignite, the burning of this cheap fuel that is blackening buildings. It's, you know, it's largely responsible for that environmental reputation of the GDR as well. And so some of the early organizing is around that. But what there's also organizing around manure, pollution. Now, I don't want to give the impression that 1989 is driven primarily by the environmental groups, but what I would say is that because participation is pretty small. Like what you see is we're talking hundreds of people at most, organizing in the early 80s. But it's important because it provides both a place, a platform and sort of a discourse with which broader critiques of the regime are articulated and developed over the course of the 80s. So by 1988, we have almost a decade of organizing around environmental pollution in East Germany. And when the revolution comes in 89, it's rather sudden, this flourishing that is informed a lot by what's happening in Hungary, in Poland, and then also what's starting to happen in Czechoslovakia. So it's importing a lot of that discussion about human rights, but it's also being mixed with the environmental critique. And you honestly can't have one without the other. And by the time 89 rolls around for me, what I saw was that a lot of East Germans then came to understand pollution as emblematic of the overall failure of the regime and emblematic of its failures in every other part of society.
- [46:27]
B
I'm also curious to hear your interpretation of the state elite. So I mean, what I'm talking about is the Communist Party elites, the Socialist Unity Party. So if you're an ordinary citizen in East Germany, and I don't know if there's any kind of correct version of saying ordinary, but certainly people have memories of the pork shortages and standing in line. So things like butter and sugar and pork are scarce right through the entire 80s, and still the agricultural planners are working in this kind of giant large scale industrial way. Correct me if I'm wrong, but there Are production quotas right up to the very end? So, I mean, how. How do citizens then interpret the actions of the Politburo? Is. Is it just something that's unchanging or what is it?
- [47:22]
C
I would say that. Well, first, I'd say that the shortages are periodic. You know, they. They ebb and flow. They're also geographically dispersed. And, you know, just. I talk a lot about this particular. I have a whole chapter about this poor crisis in 82, where this sort of cascade of shortages happens. But what I thought was interesting was the way in which a shortage in one part of the economy or a disruption in production in one part just ripples to other parts of the economy. And then planners have to adjust the movement of materials around the country. And they're not only adjusting to anticipate shortages from the production side, but they come to realize that shortages induce changes in consumer behaviors, like where people shop and what they're shopping for moves around cities in different regions. And so they're constantly running to plug in the gaps as people's behaviors change. So, for example, it's a perfect example is, you know, in 82, you know, there's a shortage of pork. The East Germans are always prioritizing East Berlin because it's the tourist hub, if you will, of, you know, it's the city that most Westerners visit in the 80s. And they're worried that Westerners are going to see East Germans queuing up for food. And so because they're worried about that, they always make sure that when there's a shortage, they supply the center of East Berlin with everything it needs. But every East German knows this as well. So when periodic shortages show up on the, you know, in the exurbs or the suburbs of Berlin, you know, people will go then shop in the center of Berlin because that's. They know that's where the port will be more plentiful, which means that there's a rush on. On particular stores, which leads to lines anyway. And then the east, you know, the Politburo starts to hang its head and goes, oh, my God, this is so embarrassing. But what you see in the. There are these petitions or eingaben that a lot of historians have used to write about East Germany, where people would write to the regime and basically complain. They complain about various things went wrong. It'd be everything from personal things like, you know, my father's retiring. He worked in this factory for 40 years. I think he deserves a Trabant. Could you move him up in the queue so he can have a Trabant. But then you also find people being like. You have people complaining about the shortages themselves. And you see in the petitions, people are conscious and aware that exports abroad are being prioritized. And so they might say, why are we exporting pork? We should be extending mopeds and lumber, is what I found one person saying. And so there is this sense amongst, you know, for lack of a better term, everyday East Germans that the regime has its priorities and the people aren't always at the top of it. And then this gets sort of exacerbated in the late 80s by, you know, of course, there's the privilege of hunting, which I talk about in the book, and we can talk about that more. But then there's also, you know, the East German Politburo lives in its own suburban settlement, this neighborhood called Vonlitz, which the East Germans referred to sort of humorously as Volvo grad. And because everyone drove a Volvo and the Volvo limousines that came out of there.
- [50:58]
B
Could.
- [50:58]
C
Could you.
- [50:59]
B
Could you talk. Could you talk about that? I mean, it also the impression of Honecker, really. I mean, there's this party elite that comes out of Animal. Animal Farm Allegory, please.
- [51:09]
C
Yeah. I mean, so, you know, they are, of course, privileged. They could get whatever they wanted. You know, by the late 80s, they're importing, you know, foreign cigarettes. I know Gerhard Kluneberg, who was the economic. The chief planner. He had diabetes. And over the course of the 80s, he had one leg amputated and then the other, and he had his leg imported from a Japanese company, built his leg. And then he had, you know, they had. For their hunting, I believe they had some Land Rovers. And he had, you know, they had every kind of gun they wanted. But then, you know, some. Some East German Politburo members collected all the TV. You know, could have like 10 colored TVs. And so you definitely get the sense that there's a privileged class being close to the party.
- [52:04]
B
Right?
- [52:05]
C
I wouldn't. Of course, you know, it's nothing like the economic stratification we're experiencing today. It almost seems humorous and quaint retrospect. But it is powerful politically when people realize that the regime is getting everything it wants when it wants it, and most people aren't. Honecker himself. What I found really striking was the ways in which, by the 1980s, the East German regime came to find common cause and even came to develop personal feelings towards members of the cdu, Christian Democratic Governing Coalition led by Helmut Kohl. You know, the most infamous case is of Course, Franz Joseph Strauss, who is this Bavarian minister, he was notorious. He had left government in the early 60s because of a spying scandal with Der Spiegel. He has this reputation as an arch anti communist throughout this period. And yet he's the one in the early 80s who organizes. After the poor crisis of 82, the East German state is rescued by a billion mark emergency loan from the West German government. And it is brokered by and large by Franz Joseph Strauss. And because of that deal, the East Germans are able to stave off for a while economic collapse while maintaining their export industry. And you start to see that the cdu, anti communists and the East German popular start to really like each other. The East Germans really like how the, or rather, sorry, the CDU likes that the East Germans are against hippies, don't tolerate long hair, and the East German regime sort of likes the stinginess of their West German counterparts. And they found that they had a lot in common. And so I kind of, I used the sort of the last chapter of Animal Farm as a way to sort of bring this home, which is that the East German regime and the West German conservatives actually came to like each other quite a bit. And that reminded me of the end of Animal Farm, which is when the. The pigs now are walking on two legs and they're drinking whiskey and they're dressing in human clothes and they have their. Their former enemies, Pilkington and, and his and his men come over and they celebrate and toast each other. And in the last, very last line of the book, the other farm animals are looking through the window of this, of this dinner party where the pigs and the men are drinking together and they're toasting one another. And they go from toasting how much they have in common to devolving into a drunken brawl. And the last line of Animal Farm is of course, you know, the animals look from pig to man, from man to pig, and pig to man again, and neither could say which was which.
- [55:13]
B
That's right. On that note, I mean, I'd really like to get your takeaway points because you have in your epilogue, which I afterward, which I hope people will read, a commentary on the legacy of this. And in some ways it's like the erasure of the pig from Berlin. You don't find too many pigs left in Berlin. And the framing now in German, in terms of bio, everything. Right? Bio. Bio is, I think, really important to understanding the environmental history, not just in Germany, but elsewhere. So my last question for you, Tom, is if you could maybe talk a little bit about the takeaway points from your book for environmentalists and perhaps recommend some other books to our listeners.
- [56:05]
C
Sure, yeah. I think one of the takeaways, I would say is that that East Germany has been totally erased from the post unification history of Germany and yet its legacy is still there. What Germany is known for today, as Frank Oketor has said in his book the Greenest Nation, which is that Germany has this international reputation as the most environmentally conscious, doing the most about climate change. And yet a lot of that legacy, it dates back to reunification and by and large how the west saw the problems in the east and how it was West Germany's job to clean up the East. What is less talked about, for example, is the ways in which reunified Germany's environmental record is really balanced on the back of the rapid deindustrialization of East Germany, which is that the Federal Republic of Germany achieved these really striking drops in carbon emissions in the 1990s. But what's not talked about is that was basically won at the cost of basically shuttering all of East Germany's factories and power plants. And what's more is that as East Germany was derided in 89 and 90 and 91 for being this ecological outlaw, particularly for manure pollution, but also brown coal and the burning of lignite, is that a lot of those things are still going on today. And not only that, but they're actually worse. So livestock facilities are even larger today. The factory farm of Eberswalde now seems quaint. In the 70s it was the largest in the world. Today it's next to nothing. I'd also say that there's also, if you pay attention in Germany as well, there's a lot of fights today about brown coal has become this sort of replacement fuel as East Germany has shuttered its nuclear facilities. It's become the sort of fill in fuel source more recently during the shuttering of nuclear power in Germany today. So I want to encourage readers to think about the ways in which East Germany has created these deep structures in both politics, but also the environment and land of Reunified Germany. That's great, great.
- [58:39]
B
Thank you so much. So we've been speaking with Thomas Fleishman, who is the author of Communist An Animal History of East Germany's Rise and Fall. This is published by the University of Washington Press 2020 by the Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. This is an excellent series for anyone interested in environmental studies and environmental history. I want to thank you, Tom, for joining us on the New Books Network podcast today.
- [59:11]
C
Yeah. Thank you so much. It's been a dream of mine since I was walking my dog around park slope in 2010. Thanks so much. Thank you.