Interest Organizations of Former GDR Party- and State Functionary Elites in Unified Germany: Nostalgia, Strategies, and Identity Change

My PhD research focuses on the integration of former GDR state and military elites into Germany after 1990 by looking at the way in which such elites themselves have responded to the new political situation after the fall of “their” state. Through a study of the main network of former GDR elite interest organizations, the Ostdeutsches Kuratorium von Verbänden (OKV), I study how interlinked patterns of identity formation and interest representation direct the integration of “fallen” GDR elites into the unified German state.

Contrary to the common view of former GDR political and functional elites being “stuck in the past”, I argue that within the OKV these groups have developed a new identity on the basis of their past experiences, but with taking into account possibilities for action in the new state. In fact, the larger OKV organizations (ISOR, GRH) primarily function as interest organizations in struggles for very tangible legal and financial issues that regard former GDR elites (including pension reductions and persecution for activities as GDR functionaries). Likewise, former elites’ “nostalgia” for the GDR should be seen as a feature that enables their social and political activities in the present, by providing a common ground between individual OKV members who are not a homogeneous group, and who also have different experiences of the GDR. Yet what binds them is an emotional attachment to the former state, and the unwillingness or incapability to part with the political epistemics of the GDR – which for many OKV members forms a framework that gives meaning to, and in some cases legitimizes, their life activities and experiences.

Thus, in response to negative experiences after 1989 (loss of jobs and status, exclusion), OKV members constructed an oppositional sense of common identity around their positive evaluation of the GDR. This identity facilitates common interest representation, and in a feedback loop both derives from and is constitutive of the legal and political strategies selected by OKV organizations to attain their goals. Contrary from being oriented solely towards the past, by selecting from the start legal and political strategies (quite often newly) open to them in unified Germany, the OKV has facilitated its members activities within Germany’s democratic structures – even if as a disliked minority.