Material and Social Trauma

The Second World War ended in the spring of 1945. With larger and larger areas of Germany being occupied by the Allies, the German army surrendered unconditionally at the beginning of May. Initially, Thuringia was occupied by the Americans, but on June 30, 1945, the American occupying powers exchanged it for an area of Berlin which up till then had been under Russian control. From that moment on, Thuringia became part of the Sovjetische Besatzungszone [Soviet Occupied Zone, further SBZ], just like Brandenburg, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Officially, these five federal entities only formed a separate state on October 7, 1949, but they were administered as a separate entity from the beginning of July 1945. Power was executed by the Sovjetische Militär Administration Deutschlands [Soviet Military Administration of Germany, further SMAD], working together with members of the German Communist Party and the Social-Democratic Party Germany.

In many ways the end of the war did not bring closure for the inhabitants of the eastern part of Germany, for there was more continuity between the final years of the war and the years thereafter than the word peace suggests. According to German ethnologist Ina Merkel, “chaos, collapse and misery” reigned, and “the end of war acts did not bring an end to violence and destruction.” The country's ruinous economic situation deteriorated even further after the war, causing tensions, mistrust and animosity to flare up amongst the population. Even without the macro-political separation, Germany would have been a deeply divided country in 1945.

The war begun by Germany had cost nearly fifty-six million lives, of which about six million on the German side. Bombs had flattened large parts of the country, and whatever faith still survived in the national socialist doctrine and national socialist world view was certainly shattered when all the details of Nazi war crimes were made public. Forty percent of the German population had lost everything. Some cities, like Dresden, were completely destroyed, and of the eighteen million dwellings in what would later be the GDR, about five million had been demolished. After the war, large parts of Germany were divided up between Czechoslovakia and Poland.