Plainly, people need goods and services even in communist countries. I presume there were shopkeepers and the like. But whenever I see movies set in East Berlin (or elsewhere in East Germany) it looks like half the population are police or military; and the other half shamble around in fear, scavenging for basic necessities. How did people earn their livings?
By having jobs.
What makes you think there weren’t factories and farms? Goods and food has to be produced by someone, and there has to be some way to move things around the country. While the government owned everything, that didn’t mean people didn’t have to work a regular job.
Shopkeepers, factory workers, and of course - collectives farmers! Basically, they did as little trade outside the bloc as possible, so all manner of good were allegedly made in-country. The difference was, instaed of allowing free-enterprise startups to do what they wanted, it was as if the “head office” dictated what was put where, and how much was needed. There was a whole central planning department, I understand, to set quotas and allocate funds based on 5-year plans to ensure needs were being met.
If you read some details of Soviet-era daily life, it’s pathetically funny. Glass quotas were set in square feet, so the plants made plate glass as thin as possible, to meet their quota with limited resources. As a result, a lot broke en route, so the construction teams did not make their quota. The fellow who stole a Foxbat and defected to Japan describes buildings where the concrete was so defective the buildings had reinforcement bars stuck right through the middle to stop the sides falling out. He used the one through his kitchen as a chin-up bar. The standing joke was “we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us” since the money was worthless and very little was available for sale. When it started raining, everyone pulled over and stuck the wipers on their car. You could’t easily buy new ones, so if you left them out on the car they would be stolen. To buy a car, you put down most of the price and waited years… Things “worked”, but not efficiently. People had jobs.
Not to say there were not some private small businesses, I have run across references to them - but the paperwork required to run one, licenses and all, to get raw materials, would be much much more challenging. Perhaps someone with some experience can elucidate?
The joke was that if anyone could make Communism work it was the Germans. They consistently produced better goods and made good money trading them with the rest of the Soviet bloc.
The movies you have been watching were cold war propaganda.
Even more to the point, the movies you were watching were movies. Movies and TV in general aren’t a good reflection of how people live. In particular, American movies and TV are mostly utter lies. Watch a bunch of American movies and TV shows. Note how many of the characters, based on how well they live and how much they consume, are in the lower 50% of the American population in terms of how much they earn per year. Don’t go by the jobs that the movie or TV show claims that they have. People in American movies and TV shows whose jobs would indicate that they would barely be scraping by are often show as living and consuming far too well for that income. American movies and TV give a very deceptive view of the bottom half of the population (by income), even when they bother to show them at all.
I have a concertina made in East Germany, so at least some of them were making concertinas for export. Doesn’t make a particularly pleasing sound, but fully functional after decades with no apparent maintenance.
That’s rather the point. Here, we were exposed to the propaganda/stereotype. What life was actually like behind the Iron Curtain, not so much.
My ex-boyfriend grew up in East Germany. His mother was an elementary school teacher and his father worked in a communal dormitory planning meals, ordering food, and keeping the kitchen organized and running. Oh, and he had a brother who was an electrician.
Just everyday jobs.
You want to know the truth about East Germany. I would be satisfied to know the truth about the U.S.
Although it doesn’t directly answer the OP’s question, it is worth noting that a hallmark of Soviet-style collectivism was the rampant corruption and thriving black market that it enabled. Patronage and cronyism rose to remarkable levels. The communist-bloc countries had their own version of the 1%-ers…well-placed bureaucrats and organized crime bosses that were milking the system and living like feudal barons. Some have said that during the final years of the USSR the system was so thoroughly gridlocked that it essentially ceased to function and the black market was the only thing keeping the country afloat.
East Germany was one of the more prosperous countries of the Soviet bloc. People in the USSR and other satellite states looked on enviously at the GDR’s standard of living. This relative prosperity may have been due to East Germany’s closer geographical, political, and cultural links to the markets of the west.
People were employed and earned salaries. There were very few privately owned businesses (although they did exist). Many worked directly for the government. Factories and other enterprises operated under a special legal status. There were hospitals, schools, universities etc.
The service sector was underdeveloped (very hard to find people who could repair stuff). In general, factories employed much more workers than they actually needed, workers mainly had just to make sure they showed up every morning.
Other than that, people in East Germany didn’t starve. Bread, meat, vegetables, dairy products, beer etc. were sufficiently available, but you didn’t get to chose among hundreds of different brands. You had a roof over your head (not a in a nice house, though) and heating in the winter. There was electricity and running water (mostly reliable, but not always).
If you waited for 10 years or so, you could actually get a car (sort of).
I still have my Praktica SLR that was made in East Germany.
The movie Good Bye, Lenin! deals with a man’s efforts to replicate Communist-era East Germany after the Berlin Wall falls, so as to not shock his mother. The ersatz East Germany he creates is much rosier than your usual Hollywood depiction of the time, though the movie still comments on how it was much more drab and less exciting than the West.
I never thought that a typewriter, let alone anything produced in East Germany could be beautiful, but those are works of art.
They all worked for the secret police. They never got paid, but who could they complain to?
To see life in East Germany as it really was try to catch the first part of the BBC series The Lost World of Communism. With the aid of incredible color home movies East Germans recall their lives under Communism (and some even miss it!) There’s a marvelous segment in which a guy who led a rock band with his lifetime friend reveals that his friend was an informer for the Stasi all along. They interview the friend too.
Most people (though not the Dresden area, due to the geography) could get West German television so they had a pretty good idea of what was going on on the other side.