Not taking side on the topic here, just a quick note on the dicatorship classification.
While some folks think a dictatorship requires a single person or small group in charge, it is widespread opinion in Germany, that the GDR was is in fact seen as a "dicatorship by one party", the SED. Mostly (to my understanding) this is based on the lack of separation of powers found in the GDR.
The "dictatorship" question is regulary a topic of more or less philosophical but most certainly emotional debates with each side being sure they are right. I cannot tell the percentage of "dictatorship"/"non-dicatorship" proponents.
(I am no history nerd.)
edit: pls replace "that the GDR was is in fact seen" with "that the GDR is in fact seen" in your mind
> When was the German Democratic Republic a dictatorship?
If someone wanted to leave the GDR, were they able to?
If not, why do you think they weren't able to? Why do you think people wanted to leave, and why do you think people wanted to stop them? Why do you think they had to literally shoot people to stop them leaving the country if it wasn't a dictatorship and they were welcome on the other side?
Are you confused about the 'Democratic' part of the name? North Korea also calls itself 'Democratic' today.
> Elections were held but were effectively controlled by the SED and state hierarchy, as noted by Hans Modrow [communist premier of East Germany] and others.
The last premier of East Germany was literally convicted of electoral fraud after unification.
> Modrow did not deny the charges, but argued that the trial was politically motivated and that the court lacked jurisdiction for crimes committed in East Germany
It was a dictatorship. Any reasonable historian or even person there at the time will tell you this. The literal Premier himself didn't even deny it.
> If someone wanted to leave the GDR, were they able to?
Why do you think that has anything to do with whether it is a dictatorship?
Not having free elections makes it a dictatorship (or at least not a democracy). Not allowing people to leave makes it a shitty place to live, but that is separate from if its a dictatorship.
> Not having free elections makes it a dictatorship
There is a good sign that your free elections aren't when you have 99% percent approval rating on every election. A sharp drop in approval ratings once you no longer control the elections directly may also be indicative of problems with your implementation of democracy.
They were a communist single-party system, with properly rigged elections, leaders handpicked by Moscow from the finest Moscow communism schools and a watchful oversight from Moscow. Not just the citizens were kept in line with the rest of the communist block by troops from other communist states, that applied to the leadership as well. Prague spring was the czech leader Dubĉek trying to introduce reforms, angering Moscow, who then invaded and put a stop to that reform nonsense...
The GDR was a dictatorship good and proper. They just avoided giving the impression of having a single leader by speaking through the politbureau. And the local dictators were controlled by the ones in Moscow.
But jokes aside: if a very small elite clings to power and doesn't allow free elections, doesn't let people live in freedom, even kills them if they try to leave, and eventually is overturned by the people, these are all signs of a "lupenreine" dictatorship, no?
A fair point, despite the downvotes. The DDR could correctly be described as a one-party state, a totalitarian regime, or a puppet state of the USSR, but not a dictatorship. Some good evidence for this is that you can't (without Wikipedia's help or a very serious background in European history) name a single leader of the state, the dictator.
I don't think this is just a pedantic point. It's good to push back against the labelling of "everything you don't like" with the most convenient wrongthink labels: see the trend towards labeling $BAD_THINGS as communism, terrorism, or more fashionably these days, fascism.
If you look up definitions for dictatorship, few insist on the single leader (vs a group of people) and quite a few explicitly include a party as the group wielding power.
