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283 CHAPTER 7 If, speaking broadly, the 1960s for East Germans had been characterized by a cautious hope and push for reform within the socialist system and the 1970s, by resignation and strategies of accommodation, the 1980s were marked by widespread frustration and despair followed by resistance. The problems that had long plagued the GDR did not lessen or improve in the later years of Honecker’s regime but instead grew worse. The kinds of sweeping reforms that were needed to correct the country’s deep, systemic problems were deemed too costly by the SED, requiring it to relinquish funds it did not have and power it was unwilling to renounce. As the distance between the promise of the future and circumstances of the present grew, the SED focused even more doggedly on the socialist ideal, ignoring the GDR’s increasingly dire reality. In previous decades, East Germans had been largely willing to overlook the regime’s hypocrisies in exchange for amenities such as low rents, affordable prices for staples like milk and bread, and free health care and child care. However, the dwindling quality of life in the GDR in the 1980s and the growing sense of insecurity in the country, together with the party’s seeming disavowal of the country’s problems , turned the tide of public sentiment more firmly against the SED, its duplicity and ineptitude too galling to ignore. Upon taking power in 1971, Honecker had made housing construction the centerpiece of his social and economic policy, claiming that, in doing so, he would bring about the “unity of social and economic policy” promised by socialism. The country’s limited construction resources were poured into Honecker’s Housing Construction Program (Wohnungsbauprogramm ), which focused primarily on the construction of new, prefabricated housing settlements. The program’s largest and ultimately its most famous, or infamous, undertaking was Marzahn, in East Berlin. Unlike previous efforts to resolve the country’s housing problem, Honecker ’s program included refurbishment of older housing in prewar districts, spurred by critiques of prefabricated settlements in the late 1960s and early 1970s and by early successes such as the renovation of the Arnimplatz SEVEN COLLAPSING BORDERS Housing, Berlin’s 750th Anniversary, and the End of the GDR 284 Collapsing Borders in the Prenzlauer Berg district and Arkonaplatz in the Mitte district of East Berlin. Reflecting the fate of the regime as a whole, Honecker’s Housing Construction Program met with early successes but ultimately failed to solve or even make a dent in the shortage of quality housing in the GDR, since it did not address the deeper problems in the country’s housing and building economies. Nonetheless, Honecker and the SED publicly and repeatedly linked the quality of housing in the GDR with the quality of the party’s governance. This move further encouraged the use of the prefabricated housing developments as a cultural symbol in GDR artworks. In, for example, films of the 1980s, such as Unser kurzes Leben (Our short life; Lothar Warneke, 1981), Insel der Schwäne (The island of the swans; Hermann Zschoche, 1983), and Die Architekten (The architects; Peter Kahane, 1989), prefabricated housing settlements become metaphors for the country as a whole. In the vision of “everyday” GDR in these films, the tensions between the ideal and the reality that characterized the depiction of daily life in The Legend of Paul and Paula have collapsed. The resulting vision depicts GDR society as stagnant , oppressive, and devoid of hope. Once viewed by many East Germans with a sense of optimism, prefabricated housing projects became symbols of the regime’s ineptitude—of Honecker’s failure to deliver on his promises —despite its claim that what the Eighth Party Congress had decided in 1971 would actually transpire. In such films, the housing projects, like the country itself, become holding stations, places to wait for a future that will never come. Despite or perhaps because of the GDR’s growing crises, Honecker and the SED spent considerable time and resources in the 1980s attempting to craft a favorable image of Heimat-GDR for viewers within the GDR and abroad. East Berlin continued to be the center of this effort, and, as in West Berlin, the advent of the city’s 750th anniversary was welcomed as an opportunity to reassert the SED’s official position on divided Berlin and to stage Heimat-GDR. The party also viewed the various events and activities associated with the 750th anniversary celebration, including building campaigns like the reconstruction...

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