East Germany’s traumatised former citizens offered free counselling

More than 30 years after East Germany ceased to exist as a state, fresh approaches and resources are being deployed to tackle the trauma of those scarred by the communist dictatorship.

Berlin has appointed a new federal commissioner for victims of East Germany’s ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) while the neighbouring state of Brandenburg this week introduced a programme of counselling appointments at no cost for people still scarred or burdened by encounters with the East Berlin regime.

The pilot project was set up following a survey two years ago, commissioned by Brandenburg state commissioner Dr Maria Nooke.

“Some 70 per cent of respondents said they were still dealing with psychological effects that continued to have an affect on their daily life,” says Dr Nooke. “Many had often tried and discontinued therapy and they said counselling support nearby would be a help. Still, we didn’t know if it would take off.”

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The two-year pilot project, now extended until the end of 2024, has so far seen 37 people take up the offer of counselling in four different towns. The largest age cohort is 50-65 but five people over 80 have sought counselling as well as three aged 50 or younger.

Some 33 years after East Germany vanished, lead counsellor Petra Morawe says the wide age spread reflects the far-reaching affects of trauma through decades and generations.

The most frequent reason for seeking counselling, she says, is an effort to understand the consequences of some of the injustices they have experienced.

“To this day many don’t understand why they have developed a particular characteristic, such as an inability to trust people – sometimes even their own children, even though they have done nothing to them,” says Morawe. “Some just want to be able to sleep through the night. One said, ‘If I sleep better, then the day is better’.”

The monthly counselling appointments, with follow-up phone appointments available in between, are not full therapy sessions. Instead, says Morawe, they are about helping people understand how past experiences affect their present and giving them visualisation tools to influence the effects of their trauma.

An estimated 300,000 people were held and interrogated on political grounds during the postwar Soviet occupation and, from 1949 until 1989, in the East German Democratic Republic (GDR). About half a million children spent time in residential homes, with 70 per cent experiencing physical or sexual abuse.

Following German unification in 1990, parliamentary hearings heard testimony about people’s daily lives – and struggles – in East Germany.

Subsequent legislation was passed to compensate and rehabilitate those who had been wronged – as well as publicly funded institutions across eastern states to research East German repression and explain survivors’ suffering to future generations.

Rehabilitation laws allow people to apply for one-off, means-tested payments for injustice suffered – such as €307 per month in prison – while those imprisoned for 90 days or more for political reasons are entitled to apply for a victim pension of €330 a month. Nearly 90,000 people draw down this pension, and debate is ongoing over financial assistance for those who suffered in East Germany and fled west.

Dr Nooke, a former opposition activist, says the resources are the result of constant political lobbying by survivors and their allies. “The difficulty for many people seeking rehabilitation is that they feel their stories are not acknowledged,” she says. “Also difficult for them is how [East German] perpetrators and conformists are, today, mostly materially better off than them.”