Our friend, the GDR

By Jaakko Hautamäki
     
      In October 1974, Tampere Mayor Pekka Paavola had the coveted task of giving a speech at a 25th anniversary celebration of the German Democratic Republic in the East German city of Karl-Marx-Stadt, a city that was twinned with Tampere.
      "The GDR has shown its viability, and with carefully thought-out work, which covers the various areas of society, it has developed into an industrialised state whose achievements in the social security and well-being of citizens are exemplary on the global scale", said Paavola in his address.
      It was certainly an honour to deliver such a speech, but there was nothing particularly unusual about it. At that time, Finns and East Germans had a special and an extensive relationship.
      Paavola estimates that several thousand residents of Tampere alone got to know the GDR.
      Friendship was the way things were handled. Cooperation took place in hope of getting favours in return, and out of a desire to help and to learn, as well as a fascination with Germany, and out of curiosity.
      When a Tampere figure skater needed coaching information, the GDR was the place to get it. When bishops were ordained in Finland, there was an East German representative on hand. When the country's only commercial television broadcaster at the time wanted foreign affairs credibility for its news programme, the managing director would travel to East Berlin.
     
Now there are calls to make public a list of 18 friends of the GDR, whom Stasi considered to be interesting names from the point of information gathering.
      Eighteen is a small number, if it is compared with the fact that the combined membership of Finnish organisations that joined a committee supporting diplomatic recognition the GDR was "over a million individuals", as Pekka Paavola said proudly at the 25th anniversary celebration of the GDR.
      At the end of his talk he expressed congratulations to the GDR, calling it a "state of peace built by the world".
     
At 74, Pekka Paavola recalls his GDR experiences in his small office in Tampere. He currently serves as the politically independent chairman of the Tampere City Council.
      During his time as Mayor of Tampere, from 1969 to 1985, Paavola visited Karl-Marx-Stadt about five times. The city was considered a model city of the German Democratic Republic, whose more mundane name is now Chemnitz.
      The speeches held by Paavola in the GDR can be found in the Tampere City Archives. One of these is the report, in which the head of the city's schools, Alpo Reinivaara praised the school dedicated to the memory of the murdered Chile's murdered President Salvador Allende.
      Tampere was an important friend for Karl-Marx-Stadt. The reason was simple: the GDR needed support for its recognition.
      East Germany wanted to use Finland to promote its campaign for recognition in other capitalist countries - with the help of folk dance groups, for instance.
     
Contacts between Finland and the GDR intensified in the early 1960s. For instance, in 1964, 45 different delegations from East Germany visited Finland. Even more Finnish groups visited the GDR. At the end of the 1970s, 17 Finnish cities were twinned with a city in East Germany. Helsinki's assigned city was naturally East Berlin.
      Even the conservative National Coalition Party established official relations with the GDR in the late 1970s. Thanks to East Germany's ostensible multiparty system, the National Coalition Party was twinned with the East German National Democratic Party, the NDPD.
      Of all Western countries only West Germany had more contacts with East Germany than Finland did. Tens of thousands of Finns from all levels of society got to know the country, from Finnish communists to conservatives, from bishops to plumbers.
     
Tampere Mayor Pekka Paavola had the task of creating the necessary preconditions for varied cultural exchange in the East and the West. In the name of geopolitical balance, Tampere was also twinned with a West German city - Essen.
      East and West kept their eyes on each other, so the people of Tampere had plenty of international traffic to deal with. Cooperation with the GDR slacked off a bit after Finland had recognised the country in 1972. Diplomatic relations were established in January 1973.
      Finland had become partly unnecessary from the point of view of the GDR, but Finland still had its own foreign policy goals.
      Delegations to the GDR led by the Tampere mayor usually included one Social Democrat, one representative of the National Coalition Party, and one from the Finnish People's Democratic League (SKDL - a leftist umbrella organisation including the Finnish Communist Party).
      "One day might be spent looking at one suburb. These were usually pretty big colossuses. Typical sights to see included schools and day care centres. The dinners had a high liquid content. People got to drink quite a bit", Paavola recalls.
      The Tampere visitors were also eavesdropped on at the city's guest house.
      The guest house naturally had a sauna. The sauna had a Finnish stove, but the benches were covered with steel plating. Paavola would stand on the floor, too embarrassed to criticise the sauna of his hosts. However, in Finland, he took his guests to a proper smoke sauna.
     
In addition to municipal leaders, Tampere delegations of athletes and cultural groups would also visit the GDR.
      The contacts were often on a very practical level. For instance, Paavola once asked Kurt Müller, the Mayor of Karl-Marx-Stadt, if there might be a figure skating club in the city that could take a Tampere skater on a training camp.
      The Tampere people were at pains to find something that they might be able to offer in return to the superpower of competitive sports. Finally, an aide of Paavola came up with the idea of helping with the coaching of wrestling.
     
Although Paavola was a well-known Social Democratic figure, he was not quizzed on aspects of Finnish politics.
      "Sometimes they asked something about NATO. They said how bad it is."
      Paavola found a district of Tampere that was appropriate to show East German guests.
      "It was Hervanta. Certain aspects of it were familiar to the guests."
      According to Paavola, Finland's links with the GDR had something to do with the familiar German mentality.
      "And the GDR never showed us its bad sides."
      Or as he said in his speech in Karl-Marx-Stadt: "The GDR inherited only ruins from the Germany led by the Nazis. In their place, or in fact, on top of them, you have built, over these years, the economically prosperous and spiritually rich state, as we all know the GDR.
     
Unfortunately Pekka Paavola has to cut his GDR remeniscences short this time, because his official duties are calling him. Paavola has to write a speech for the 779th anniversary of the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod, which has also been twinned with Tampere.
      Paavola will probably talk about relations between the European Union and Russia. He is unlikely to mention that during the Soviet years, the city's name was Gorky, according to the Soviet Russian author Maxim Gorky.
     
But now let's get back to the GDR. In addition to municipal leaders from Tampere, many surprising visitors would also travel there - such as Finnish bishops.
      When Germany was divided after the Second World War, the important cities of Martin Luther, Erfurt and Wittenberg, were left on the eastern side. Luther's legacy is what linked the Finnish Lutheran Church with the GDR, says Professor Emeritus Eino Murtorinne.
      At age 76, Murtorinne has a thorough knowlege of German ecclesiastical history. His office in the Helsinki area of Etu-Töölö is likely to have the most extensive collection of literature in the matter in Finland.
      Many influential Finnish church figures had studied at German universities in cities that ended up in East Germany after the war. Some of them had experienced how the German church had been co-opted as a part of the Nazi system. Some of the Finnish clergy actually sympathised with the Nazis.
      "A schizophrenic situation", Murtorinne explains.
      In the 1960s he was allowed into the central archive of the GDR in Potsdam to study the relationship between the church and Nazism. He was allowed to go through the sealed folders only in the presence of a guard.
      According to Murtorinne, the most important part of cooperation with the GDR was the Nordic-German Church Convention. The programme included both theological cooperation and aid action.
     
The tack taken by the security service Stasi on religion were clear: religion is the most important fortress of imperialism, and the trickery of the bourgeoisie.
      Nevertheless, the church was allowed to operate in the margins of the GDR. In fact, there were several theological faculties, which Murtorinne also visited.
      At least the Finnish Lutheran diocese of Lapua, Turku, and Kuopio were twinned with diocese in the GDR. Finnchurchaid delivered wood houses to East Germany.
      Bishops of the GDR visited Finland to lecture and to bless Finnish bishops at their ordinations.
      "Many Finnish clergymen were very interested in the much-discussed critical solidarity that the church had toward the socialist system", Murtorinne says.
      The churchmen were also interested in the self-characterisation of the GDR as a state of peace, which emphasised world peace in ecclesiastical matters as well.
      The East German clergy who travelled to Finland comprised a small elite, who were given travel permission from the state.
      After arriving in Finland the visiting East German clergy would report to the Embassy of the GDR in Kulosaari.
      Eino Murtorinne plans to study what kind of information there is about him in the archives of the GDR. He says that there were up to 160 Stasi informers within the church organisation.
     
Murtorinne explains the Finns' positive attitude toward East Germany by pointing to a considerable pro-German sentiment. Even the Germans of the East were ultimately ordinary Germans from the Finnish point of view.
      In addition to bishops, Finnish missionaries also visited East Germany.
      One of these was Pirkko Lehtiö, who came to Berlin to do missionary work in the late 1960s. She lived in West Berlin, so her daily commute to where she worked went through the American-manned Checkpoint Charlie on the border with East Berlin.
      As their language skills grew, Lehtiö began to hold Bible classes in the east. She worked for the Gossner Mission, which focused on social work: missionary work in the massive suburbs of the east.
      In the shoddy apartment houses, Lehtiö was struck by the way that East Germans would take care of each other.
      Lehtiö later wrote a doctoral dissertation on the teaching of Christianity in the GDR. Teaching of religion was allowed only in church congregations, and there had to be a two-hour gap between the end of the school day and the instruction.
      Lehtiö believes that she is "on some Stasi list in the archives".
      Lehtiö was probably also followed because she went to listen the protest songs of Wolf Biermann.
      Biermann was expelled from the GDR in 1976 in a great controversy. In Finland, Stalinists labelled Biermann a tool of the imperialists.
     
Lehtiö's relationship with the clergy of the GDR continued until German unification. She recalls that the local clergy repeatedly emphasised that the GDR was a socialist, not a communist state.
      "After the dissolution of the GDR, the work of 40 years was nullified. West Germany knew in its mind what to do, and occupied the church of the east. That felt bad."
      In 1992 Lehtiö was a candidate for the post of Bishop of Mikkeli - the first woman in Finland to to seek the seat of a bishop. The church in the GDR was ahead of Finland in at least in one respect: Lehtiö was allowed to serve as a pastor in the GDR before Finnish Lutherans even dreamed about ordaining women.
      She retired from a post as Professor at a theological seminary in Hong Kong.
      Lehtiö recalls that the dissolution of the GDR began with a wave of protests which emerged at prayer evenings at East German churches.
      There was no hint of any such waves of protest in the late 1970s.
      At that time, friendship with the GDR was being sought, somewhat surprisingly by the commercial television company Mainos-TV (currently MTV3).
     
In the late ‘70s Mainos TV was doing all that it could to get a licence to produce its own television news programme. Pentti Hanski, founder and managing director of Mainos-TV went to East Berlin to seek foreign affairs credentials.
      Accompanying Hanski on many trips was Tauno Äijälä 66, who retired from his post as deputy CEO of MTV3 a few years ago. Since then, Äijälä has worked as head of the digital TV project of the Ministry of Transport and Communications.
      "Hanski's wisdom was to go east through the kitchen", Äijälä recalls in his office on Helsinki's Esplanade.
      The kitchen was the GDR. The public service Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE) had blocked the roads to Moscow, so Hanski and Äijälä sought a partner in the GDR. With its help, Mainos-TV tried to get approval in foreign policy matters, and to persuade Finnish parties of the left to support their news programmes.
      Hanski agreed on cooperation with GDR Television in the autumn of 1977. The agreement was preceded by the standard protocol: sauna, negotiations, and finally various expressions of attention.
      The television committee of the Council of Ministers of the GDR gave Hanski a golden laurel wreath for his achievements in developing cooperation in the field of television between the countries. Hanski won the award twice.
      "We were crofters of YLE, and tenant farmers need to know their place. Hanski used foreign policy for purposes of domestic policy", Äijälä explains.
      Ultimately, the parties of the left did not support letting Mainos-TV produce a news broadcast, even though the Social Democrats tried to indirectly make money on the matter.
      One common feature that Äijälä saw between Finland and the GDR is that only in those two countries did the same broadcaster show news on two channels at the same time.
     
Tauno Äijälä does not recall ever talking about politics in East Germany, but the treatment that they received was very attentive. When the Mainos-TV entourage landed in a plane at Schönefeld Airport, a convoy was waiting for them at the steps of the plane.
      As a result of the cooperation, GDR Television delivered a full cassette of news material to Mainos-TV every week.
      "We never used the news films. It was their propaganda."
      Is that was Finnish-East German friendship was all about - just propaganda for the sake of appearances? And what has been left over from the friendship?
      In addition to banners, mementoes, the Tiitinen list, photographs, pins, and expressions of respect, not much else.
      However, for a long time there was one beloved figure from the GDR - the Sand Man, or Sandmäännchen.
      The Sand Man, who would throw sand at the end of the Finnish children's television programme Pikku Kakkonen on YLE TV 2, left the airwaves five years ago. Nobody knew any more who had the rights to the character.
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 9.9.2007


Previously in HS International Edition:
  TV-programme reveals: Finnish MP worked for East German intelligence during student years (6.1.2001)
  Secret lives in the old East Germany (17.9.2000)
  Bisky urges caution on Finnish handling of Stasi files (31.5.2000)
  Home in an East German suburb (15.3.2005)