118 RALF AHRENS AND ANDRÉ STEINER
never offi cially recognized as regular foreign trade; ten years later, it only
amounted to about 1.5 percent with a slight upward trend.^54 The East
German economy was much more dependent on trade with West Ger-
many and West Berlin, which had grown to over 10 percent of the GDR’s
foreign trade in the second half of the 1950s before dropping to about 8
percent as a result of a policy of independence (called Störfreimachung)
adopted by the GDR after the West German government had suspended
the trade agreement in reaction to political quarrels.^55
The COMECON, which the GDR joined in 1950 and whose member
states rapidly came to account for about two-thirds of East German foreign
trade, ultimately transferred the systemic weaknesses of the participating
planned economies—the lack of effi ciency incentives in enterprises, the
limited informative value of prices and currencies, and lagging innova-
tion—onto the international stage. Moreover, since the level of industrial-
ization varied greatly between its member states, the more industrialized
states—the GDR and Czechoslovakia in particular—had to rely more
heavily on Western trade partners when it came to importing innovative
and high-quality industrial goods.^56 As a result of these problems within
the Eastern Bloc, inter-German trade on the basis of “accounting units”
that did not require foreign currency reserves and was supported by an
interest-free overdraft proved to be much more signifi cant for the GDR
economy than for that of the FRG.^57 Consequently, as early as the 1950s,
the GDR became dependent on the high-quality and relatively innova-
tive products of the mechanical engineering, steel, chemical, and optical
industries of the West. Over the course of the 1960s, the percentage of
inter-German trade within its overall foreign trade volume began to in-
crease slightly again.^58 Despite its growing overvaluation, the exchange
rate between the GDR Mark and the D-Mark was offi cially kept at 1:1 due
to political claims to equal status.^59
The reform eff orts of the 1960s did little to alleviate the fundamental
problems of the infl exible foreign trade system that insulated produc-
tion against the fl uctuations of the international markets. Around 1970,
debates over a reform of the COMECON by and large only served to re-
inforce existing mechanisms of division of labor compatible with central
plan coordination. The GDR reacted to this stagnation with a turn to the
West. The foreign trade share of the COMECON countries had already
been gradually declining since the 1960s, if the trading volumes with
the diff erent currency areas are calculated in terms of the actual cost of
production of export goods and the actual costs of imports (as opposed to
the offi cial statistics). This statistical trend corresponds to an unintended
but then later consciously espoused policy of importing capital goods
fi nanced on credit from the West in order to modernize the industries in