The Burdened Relationship between the GDR and the State of Israel

Abstract

IN THE COURSE OF ITS forty-year history, the GDR had no diplomatic relations with Israel. Even after the political changes in the fall of 1989, no ambassadors were sent to East Berlin and Tel-Aviv, although there was broad public interest in the matter. Apart from the anti-Semitic campaign following the Slansky trial in 1952-53, the government and political leadership of East Germany emphasized the necessity to differentiate between Jews and the State of Israel. This approach, stemming originally from the theories of Marx and Lenin on nationalism, class struggle, and the irreconcilable struggle between socialism and imperialism, also served to counter accusations of anti-Semitism. In this context, a specific relationship, or responsibility of the German people to the Jewish state, was denied. East German writer Stephan Hermlin, referring to this issue at the founding meeting of the GDR-Israel Society for Understanding and Cooperation on 31 March 1990o, stated, is not a state like any other. It is a state that emerged from the longest and most merciless persecution of a small people ... a phoenix arising from the blood and the ashes of the most terrible massacre in history. And there is a German shadow over this state.' In East Germany this people and this shadow were deliberately overlooked. As an historian, born and educated in the GDR, who started teaching history of Palestine and Israel in 1987 at Humboldt University and served as a Hebrew-German interpreter at the negotiations between the GDR and Israel in the spring of 199o, I feel a responsibility for analyzing the reasons for the approach of the GDRtoward the Jewish state, and for the one-sided policy of the East German political elite.