Ten Commandments of Socialist Morals and Ethics

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5th party congress of the SED in the Werner-Seelenbinder-Halle in Berlin, 1958

The Ten Commandments of Socialist Morals and Ethics (also: 10 Commandments for the New Socialist Man ) were promulgated by Walter Ulbricht , then First Secretary of the SED , at the fifth party congress of the SED (July 10-16, 1958). Formally based on the Biblical Ten Commandments , they summarized the political duties of every GDR citizen, were included in the SED's party program at the sixth SED party congress in 1963 and were there until 1976.

text

The 10 commandments for the new socialist man

The commandments were:

  1. You should always stand up for the international solidarity of the working class and all working people as well as for the unbreakable solidarity of all socialist countries.
  2. You should love your fatherland and always be ready to use all your strength and ability to defend the power of the workers and peasants .
  3. You should help to eliminate the exploitation of man by man.
  4. You should do good deeds for socialism because socialism leads to a better life for all working people.
  5. When building socialism you should act in a spirit of mutual help and comradely cooperation, respect the collective and heed its criticism .
  6. You should protect and increase public property .
  7. You should always strive to improve your performance, be thrifty and consolidate socialist work discipline.
  8. You should raise your children in the spirit of peace and socialism to be all-round educated, strong-minded and physically tempered people.
  9. You should live cleanly and decently and respect your family.
  10. You should show solidarity with the peoples who are fighting for national liberation and those defending their national independence.

Political-educational context

The rules were related to the SED's church and cultural policy, which was tightened after the uprising of June 17, 1953 . They followed the youth consecration introduced in 1954 , at which they were often read out, and were intended to educate GDR citizens to a stronger work ethic and ideological atheism . The background was the Marxist-Leninist theory that religion would soon die out under socialism, which had not arrived in the GDR despite the nationalized means of production . The SED leadership therefore tried to actively promote this process by trying to replace church traditions with state ideology (similar attempts were made with the “ socialist marriage ” and the “socialist name consecration ”). According to their understanding, the morality of individuals should bring the behavior of the working population into harmony with the “objective social requirements” it has recognized.

In 1959 the FDGB introduced “brigades of socialist work”, which were supposed to strengthen the workforce's willingness to perform. The initiators of the campaign referred in particular to the 5th, 6th and 7th commandments of Ulbricht's catalog of rules. When they were accepted into the SED program, they were made binding as “socialist laws of morals and ethics” as maxims for action for all members. In 1976 the ninth SED party congress replaced all ten rules with the obligation "to comply with the norms of socialist morality and ethics and to put social interests above personal ones".

However, they were hardly known among the GDR population and played no significant role in the public life of the GDR, but were mainly propagated within the party. Similarly, there were the “Laws of the Young Pioneers” for children aged six to nine, and the “Laws of the Thälmann Pioneers” from the age of ten to fourteen (see pioneer organization Ernst Thälmann ).

literature

  • Sandra Pingel-Schliemann: Zersetzen: Strategy of a dictatorship , Robert Havemann Society, Berlin 2003. ISBN 3-9804920-7-9 , p. 49.
  • Heinz Mohnhaupt, Hans-Andreas Schönfeldt, Karl A. Mollnau Klostermann: Standard Enforcement in Eastern European Post-War Societies (1944-1989) , Volume 5/2: German Democratic Republic (1958-1989) . Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2004. ISBN 3-465-03300-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Declaration by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation on the entry in the FDGB lexicon
  2. ^ GDR knowledge: Ten commandments of socialist morality and ethics
  3. ↑ Detlef Urban, Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, TV show Nah dran , April 21, 2004: Children of the GDR - The youth consecration and the church ( Memento from April 3, 2005 in the Internet Archive )