Wilma received a scholarship from the International Research and Exchange Council (IREC), a foundation funded by the American government that supported exchanges between the USA and the so-called socialist countries, to pursue her research on Grete Meisel-Hess for three months in the fall of 1985. Since I was on sabbatical, I was able to accompany her. We were accommodated with a doctor’s widow in Taucha, a small town at the end of tram line 13 on the northeastern edge of Leipzig. We lived in a bedroom without a desk or adequate lighting, which was just enough for sleeping. Our landlady was friendly and always greeted us at the door, unless, like many East Germans, she was passionately watching “Dallas.” For her and her son, who also lived in the house with his Brazilian girlfriend, the daughter of wealthy Brazilian communists, life only began in the West. The son, who studied Romance languages and hated the GDR, had joined the SED in the hope of one day having the opportunity to attend a conference in the West, only to then stay away. This rift between what one said in public and what one meant privately grew ever greater over the course of the 1980s, even among people like Berthold, who were also intimately close to the SED and were now becoming more open and critical…
Thus, we met two kinds of people in the GDR: on the one hand, scientists who, as members of the Academy of Sciences or universities, appeared publicly loyal to the party line, although some, like Fritz Klein, had expressed themselves openly and critically in personal conversations very early on, while others, like Berthold, only did so during the 1980s. On the other hand, the vast majority of the population, with whom one met on trains, in restaurants, on the street, or in taxis, had a generally hostile attitude toward the GDR regime. In this context, people often speak of the two German dictatorships, a comparison that had already occurred to me during my first stay in the GDR. But despite outward similarities, e.g., with regard to the role of the state party, the youth organizations, the rituals of public rallies, etc., there were nevertheless significant differences. I can still clearly remember the atmosphere of the 1930s, when people didn’t dare make any critical remarks, let alone tell a political joke. Things were very different in the GDR. However, I was unfamiliar with the GDR during the Stalinist period in the first half of the 1950s, although even then there had been lively discussions at Karl Marx University with the philosopher Ernst Bloch, the literary scholar Hans Mayer, and the historian Walter Markov. Bloch, who was forced to retire in 1957, and Mayer eventually emigrated to the Federal Republic in the early 1960s.
Nazi Germany had been openly terroristic, while the post-Stalinist GDR was a heavy-handed, repressive, but far less totalitarian regime, even though dissidents who expressed public criticism did indeed run the risk of ending up in Bautzen. This was partly due to the GDR’s cynical intention that they could bring in hard currency in exchange for ransom from the Federal Republic. By drawing on national traditions and ostensibly pursuing such national interests, the Nazi regime possessed a legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of Germans that the GDR regime, which for most of its subjects was merely a vassal of the Soviet Union, lacked from the outset. Precisely because they had the support of the majority of the population, GDR citizens could dare to be much more critical in private than they appeared in public.
Source: Wilma and Georg Iggers, Zwei Seiten der Geschichte. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, p. 209ff (translation)