I had a good friend, an economist, who said to me once, many decades ago, “I can’t believe somebody with your broad range of interests has no interest in economics! How could you not? It’s what makes the world go around!”
I responded defensively. “Well, there are lots of things I think I should show more interest in - global warming, the abuse of political power, abused and starving children…”
Watching the German documentary, A Perfect Crime, (German title: Rohwedder) the other day, my mind went back to that conversation. Yuusuke, my friend’s name was, managed to guilt me into admitting I had a huge gap in my general knowledge. I had never taken a single course in economics, and although I’ve tried to fill in gaps here and there over the years, I have never been able to approach economics issues with the interest they probably deserve. I’ve treated the conflict between wealth generation and wealth distribution as a political issue. It would not hurt if I could view it through the lenses economists view the world, as well.
I raise this question not just to personalize this viewing event (although I admit, I like to use this blog as a way of sorting out in my own head how to process my own history and experiences), but to justify my endorsement of this film series. Anything which can be seen from multiple perspectives is bound to be of greater interest than would a single tale, simply told.
The context for Rohwedder (I’m going to use the German title) is the incorporation of the DDR, the German Democratic Republic, referred to by most outside of Germany as “East Germany,” into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the German Federal Republic, before reunification referred to by most as “West Germany.” More specifically, it was a comparatively simple issue to combine the two Berlins and to “add” the five East German states: Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia to the eleven states of West Germany and call it reunification. “Reunification” is a much better word than “incorporation,” because it implies an agreement by two equal powers to join forces. “Incorporation” would only reveal what many, including most East Germans at the time, were calling a kind of colonization. A takeover. Not as bad as incorporating Algeria into metropolitan France, because the two Germanys were, after all, one nation until as recently as 1945 when the Allied Forces pulled them apart. But a takeover all the same. The Germans bypass the issue by referring to it as neither "reunification" nor "incorporation," but as "die Wende" - best translated as "the turnaround."
And that meant, in effect, you had a winner and a loser in the Cold War, and the winner was going to call the shots from here on in. The German soul dreamed of reunification, and the West German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, saw himself as the man who would make that dream come true. There would be tears of joy, sincerely felt, running down the cheeks of anybody with a German soul. But Helmut Kohl had a practical job to do. He had to take the basket-case the planned economy of the East had become and get it to work as a market economy. That meant making industry competitive and that meant removing the non-productive props that had made full employment possible. There would have to be widespread restructuring of East German corporations, and widespread lay-offs if East German companies were ever to become profitable. The only real question was should this be done fast and efficiently, with lots of pain now. Or slowly, and more cautiously, spreading the pain out. It was going to be painful either way.
Kohl preferred to rip the band-aid off quickly, and as the victor in the two-state confrontation, he got his way. The East had already set up an organization known as the Treuhand Institute (Treuhandanstalt) to do the job. Kohl appointed Detlev Karsten Rohwedder, a leading West German member of the Social Democratic Party, who was recognized as a capable manager, to head “die Treuhand” and get the job done.
From all reports, it was working, but when the layoffs began to be felt, Rohwedder quickly became arguably the most hated man in Germany - in East Germany, at least. And on April 1, 1991, somebody fired three bullets through a window at Rohwedder’s home in Düsseldorf, killing him and wounding his wife.
Rohwedder/A Perfect Crime is a four-hour documentary on the killing, produced by Netflix Germany. It begins with the leading theory, that this crime was committed by the anti-capitalist group RAF, the Red Army Faction, but complicates the story by raising two other possibilities: One of these is that the killing was done by renegade members of the Stasi, the hated East German secret police, in order to prevent further investigation into their activities. The other is that it was done by some sort of deep-state organization in the west who believed by demonizing either of these groups - the RAF or the Stasi - they could generate public support for speeding up the privatization process. Not that it needed support; within the first three years, 90% of the former East German industry was already in the hands of either West German corporations or former Communist managers who had become overnight capitalists and seized the chance to grab the treasures of the nation for themselves, much as has happened in the former Soviet Union.
That 90% figure taken out of context is deceptive, however. Rebuilding the infrastructure of the East has cost the West an estimated two trillion euros and most East Germans today believe reunification has served them well. The Pew Research Center reported in 2019 that 90% of Germans in both east and west are happy with the changes, and it's worth noting that the number of positive reports in the East is even higher than it is in the West.
There are several lenses through which to view the documentary. You can watch it as “third way” social democrats - I include myself in that number - do, as a failure to pick through and save at least some of the ideals of the former DDR while avoiding a takeover by Western vulture capitalism. You can watch it as a cynic or a conspiracy theorist might, and wonder at the colossal failure of the Düsseldorf police to provide adequate protection for somebody as vulnerable as Rohwedder was. Or you can view it as a historian or economics theorist might, and ponder the multiple ways of making a market economy out of a controlled economy, each with their own real-life costs.
It may take more than one watching to digest the testimony of those involved, policemen and others, in bringing in new information - DNA results, for example. If you’re like me, you’ll find yourself drawn into such questions as “can there actually be a third generation of the Red Army Faction - have these 60s types not all burned themselves out by now?” and “is it true that the RAF just doesn’t have the military expertise to pull off a stunt like this assassination - but the Stasi does?” and “could somebody actually shoot and kill the head of Treuhand by shooting him dead from the bushes across the street and then escape in a boat up the Rhein?”
Whether you see yourself as a student of politics, a historian, an economist, you’ll have to admit Netflix has gotten pretty good at producing great streaming series.
No comments:
Post a Comment