Gifts to the Party and other Organizations
by Andreas Michaelis

The presentation of gifts and honorifics was of course not invented by socialism; and the motives for giving have always been on the ambivalent side. It was only as the relations between Communist and socialist parties and their organizations and institutions developed that the practice congealed into a ritual. Just as administrative cadres evolved a principle of anticipatory obedience, hastening to observe the demands of the upper echelons even before they were expressed, so too the exchange of gifts developed a logic and momentum of its own that are not easy to describe. Doubtless there were no instructions from any central body calling for regular presents to be made to Party congresses and functionaries; nor is any case known of action being taken against an institution or organization that had neglected to mark an event with a visible sign of appreciation. But then, in the giving of presents, everyone seemed anxious to keep up with the Joneses. A regional Party organization would not want people saying that the gift it presented to the congress was less valuable, dignified or inspired than that given by the neighbouring region. Businesses would be glad of an opportunity to appear in a good light to local Party authorities, be it because they had not met the targets set for them by the productivity plan, be it because they were hoping investment moneys might come their way. A prevalent anxiety not to disappoint the expectations (no doubt often imaginary) of the bosses led to a proliferation of presents particularly between different leadership levels of the SED. No one now can even make an informed guess at how many thousand gifts must have passed to and fro in the 44 years that the East German Communist Party existed, nor how much time, energy and material was used up in the making of those gifts - or, indeed how many headaches must have been caused the givers who had to think up suitable presents for their Party superiors. Comrades abroad, too, had their time cut out dreaming up ever-new presents for the SED and its leading functionaries.
The oldest item of this kind recalls the union of the two workers' parties, the Communist KPD and social democratic SPD, in Thuringia. At the congress held in Gotha to cement that union in March 1946, Wilhelm Pieck was presented with a cigarette lighter made out of a cartridge case. In the immediate post-war period, shortage of raw materials often meant that relics of the war were used in the making of utility objects.
In January and February 1947, an official SED delegation led by Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotewohl paid a first visit to the USSR. Every delegate was given a statuette of Lenin as a souvenir. The one illustrated here was in the possession of Max Fechner, and passed to the Museum für Deutsche Geschichte after his his death in 1973. The model is a copy of a work by a well-known Soviet artist, Nikolai Andrejeev, who specialized in figures of Lenin in the 20s.
When the Oder-Neisse frontier agreement between the GDR and Poland was signed on 6 July 1950, it was a major international moment in European post-war history, and the first international agreement signed by East Germany as a sovereign state (even if the content was dictated by the strategic interests of the Soviet Union). A sculptured conversation piece presented by a Polish youth delegation to the chairman of the German Sports Committee on the occasion of a peace visit in 1952 preserves the congratulatory mood of the two countries at that time: the base is inscribed with the words for peace in various languages - »Frieden, Pokoj, Paix, Peace«.
Most of the items in this chapter relate to SED Party congresses or visits to the GDR by Communist Party delegations. As a rule, the SED held a congress every four or five years. The people of the GDR were sold the event as the highlight of the social calendar. Every crucial policy decision in the country's political, economic and cultural evolution was taken at the congress. Delegates would include top-level officials from combines, regional authorities, and the Central Committee, and also prominent figures from the worlds of sports, the arts and science. In addition there were delegations from well-disposed Communist and socialist parties the whole world over. The gifts made by foreign visitors were usually mere tokens of politeness to the hosts; but those exchanged within the GDR's ranks represented a loaded homage to the »chosen few«.
The desktop implements given to Wilhelm Pieck at the 3rd congress by a deputation from the Ammendorf carriage works represent a distinctive part of East German history. The factory was one of the major powerhouses of »Transmasch«, a Soviet joint-stock company. Till the mid-50s it produced machines and equipment exclusively for the USSR, as part of East Germany's reparations. It was not until 1954 that the last of the Soviet joint-stock companies became nationally-owned companies that were permitted to manufacture for the East German market too. The model of a sleeping car, a faithful replica of the five hundredth railway carriage built for the USSR, was in Wilhelm Pieck's study at Niederschönhausen castle till the day he died, and subsequently entered the Walter Ulbricht collection.
Comrades from the Deutzen coal combine swore Everlasting friendship on their plaque for the 3rd Party congress. The emblems of the SED and the German-Soviet Friendship Association appear alongside an industrial plant »growing« out of a coal briquette labelled The Party -vanguard of the working classes. In the background the sun is rising symbolically.
The present made by a Magdeburg workman is in a class of its own. The decorative container made of pegs and cord was sent to Erich Honecker on the occasion of the 9th Party congress. In a covering letter, the workman thanked the SED First Secretary for the state's generous support of his large family, and wished the Party a successful congress. Individual presents of this kind were few and far between in the 70s and 80s, though. Instead, gifts were normally industrially made and impersonal - like the piece of an industrial plant from the Riesa pipe combine. Several copies would be made so that all the important social occasions in a given period could be catered for; the present items were given not only to the Riesa Steel and Rolling Mills Regional Conference but also to the 10th Party congress.
Gifts presented by official delegations from Communist and revolutionary parties throughout the world frequently featured symbols of the international labour movement or of socialism established and practised. A classic example is a gift from the Portuguese Communist Party, where a star with a portrait of Lenin rises from a hammer and sickle representing Soviet power. Marx's famous words from the Communist Manifesto, »Workers of the world, unite«, are emblazoned on a globe, and an inscription on the base avers the undying friendship of the Portuguese Communist Party and the SED.
A vase from Bulgaria features a photomontage by John Heartfield which originally appeared on the cover of a Communist paper in November 1933. It shows an outsize Georgi Mikhailovich Dimitroff striking a victorious pose before his accuser, Hermann Göring, in the Reichstag fire trial. The scene symbolizes the triumph of Communism over Fascism: in 1933 Dimitroff, a Bulgarian politician and co-founder of that country's Communist Party, was in fact acquitted of any involvement in the Reichstag fire.
The ancestral gallery of the Communist movement appears in eloquent style on a wall platter from Laos depicting Marx and Lenin triumphantly proclaiming their ideas to that country.
A collage representing the plenty of agriculture in Ethiopia inevitably strikes us now with a bitter irony, given the starvation that folowed Mengistu Haile Mariam's socialist experiment.Further items are from Israel, Chile, and the Democratic Front for Liberation of Palestine, the leader of which, Nawef Hawatmeh, visited the GDR in 1980 at the invitation of the SED.
For a short period in the 70s, East Germany had close relations with Somalia. Mohammed Siyaad Barre, head of state and of the Party, conveyed the fraternal greetings of the Somali Socialist Party to Erich Honecker and the SED in the form of two elephant teeth and a table decoration incorporating the arms of Somalia. Before long, however, the GDR found itself in a dilemma similar to that of their relations with the Sudan. In 1977 a bloody war broke out between the socialist brothers Somalia and Ethiopia; the GDR took the side of Ethiopia, and its former comrade Siyaad Barre was revealed overnight as a dictator and an imperialist lackey.
SED deputations regularly attended the Party congresses of Communist parties elsewhere. First Secretary Honecker visited all the Soviet Union's Party congresses held during his term in office personally. These occasions were seen (at least by the GDR) as being of major significance, and pointing the way ahead for the Communist movement as a whole. From them, the SED delegates routinely returned with souvenirs. Workers in the Chelyabinsk area presented the SED deputation with a composition incorporating various widely used Communist symbols. Marxist-Lenist theory, symbolized by the works of Marx, Engels and Lenin, is represented on a red star. Above it is the globe, with the Soviet Union highlighted, and a banner bearing the words, Workers of the world, unite!.
But the non plus ultra of political symbolism in our collection must surely be a sculpture given to the SED delegation at the 3rd congress of the Cuban Communist Party. The evils of the world - symbolized by a smashed swastika, a scattering of skulls, two nuclear missiles, a chain, and a bird of prey that stands for United States imperialism - are vanquished by a Picasso peace dove. That dove, first seen 1949 at a peace congress in Paris, became the emblem of the international peace movement; but in socialist countries it was also used as a symbol of the struggle against imperialism.
Further gifts were made to the Party or its leadership on the anniversaries of the Party's establishment; to mark special events organized or attended by the Party; or to mark the jubilees and other special occasions of nations, Parties and organizations elsewhere. Even sports clubs sometimes felt obliged to pay personal homage to Honecker; after all, it was an open secret among soccer fans that Dynamo Berlin's success in taking the championship ten times in a row owed something to the wish - and protection - of the very highest echelons, and assistance of that order called for tribute in recognition. Every year, the players and officials of Dynamo Berlin complimented their »highly esteemed comrade Erich Honecker« with some gift or other.
The Ministry of State Security (the Stasi ministry) was one of the GDR's institutions that received the most gifts. Everyone - SED regional officers, industrial organizations, state and social organizations, other security services in the GDR, as well as similar services in socialist foreign countries - felt obliged to mark the anniversary of the establishment of the ministry every year.
In the early 70s, when the Unidad Popular regime was in power there, East Germany enjoyed particularly close ties with Chile. Hopes that the South American country would join Cuba as a second stable partner for the GDR's political, economic and cultural interests in Latin America were of course brought to nothing by the military coup of September 1973 and the murder of Marxist President Salvador Allende. The SED continued its relations with parties sympathetic to Communism, however; and thousands of Chilean émigrés went into East German exile during the Pinochet dictatorship. The portrait photograph of Allende was a gift from his widow, who visited the GDR in September 1974. Her handwritten dedication thanks East Germany for its solidarity.
For one former East German, the ties which were established in those days with Chile's Communists and socialists have of course paid off: Erich Honecker spent his unanticipated retirement in Chilean exile.