GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC
NATIONAL & POLITICAL FLAGS • 1949-90
The German Democratic Republic (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or DDR) was formed in 1949 on the territory of the Soviet zone of occupation of Germany. Though formally an independent state it remained firmly under Soviet control until the late 1980s. Politically the DDR was a party-state on the Soviet model, with the Communist Party dominant over the formal institutions of government. Supposedly the ruling party was a union of the Communists and the Social Democrats: the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands or SED). In fact this union had been imposed on the Social Democratic Party and the Communists were dominant. To provide an appearance of political plurality other parties were permitted to exist but they were all subservient to the SED, being required to belong to an umbrella organization—the National Front of the DDR (Nationale Front der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik)—and to acknowledge the SED's "leading role." The National Front also included various "mass organizations" such as the Free German Trade Union movement and the Free German Youth movement.
Until 1960 the head of state was the President of the DDR but after the death of the incumbent in 1960 the presidency was abolished in favor of a collective State Council (Staatsrat der DDR). Usually its chairman performed head-of-state duties but real power was in the hands of the First Secretary (later General Secretary) of the SED. The General Secretary was also the Chairman of the National Defense Council, with control over the armed forces and police and unlimited power in times of national emergency or war. According to the DDR's constitution the legislature, called the People's Chamber (Volkskammer) was the highest organ of state power but in fact it was under the thumb of the SED, serving merely to rubber-stamp party decisions.
The DDR was often characterized as the most successful of the so-called people's republics in the USSR's European sphere of control. But though the country was relatively prosperous its centrally planned economy was not competitive with the market-oriented economies of Western Europe. Moreover, behind the facade of democracy the DDR was a single-party dictatorship and police state, perhaps the most hard-line of the satellite regimes. The State Security Service (Staatssicherheitsdienst or Stasi) was an all-pervasive watchdog over the population, enforcing the SED's claim of supervision over all aspects of society—political, economic, social, cultural. A certain stability prevailed from 1961, when the Berlin Wall was erected, to the early 1980s. But as the decline of the USSR itself became more and more obvious the foundations of the DDR party-state were progressivly undermined. The end came with the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, making it clear that the USSR would no longer intervene to "defend socialism" in the satellite states. This proved fatal to the DDR, which collapsed with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and merged with the Federal Republic of Germany the following year.
