GDR

— Developments were markedly different in the Soviet zone, but ultimately ended in perhaps an even grimmer dead end: that of SED leader Walter Ulbricht’s thoroughly Stalinized German Democratic Republic (GDR). […] Subsequently, the GDR’s antifascist tradition would be diluted, distorted, and refashioned into an ahistorical national origins myth in which the citizens of East Germany were officially proclaimed the “victors of history,” but where little space remained for the real and complicated history, not to mention ambivalent role of Stalinized Communism, behind it.