124 RALF AHRENS AND ANDRÉ STEINER
political climate of the nuclear arms race between the two blocs.^80 This
money coming from West Germany was not spent on imports, but rather
invested in Western banks in order to demonstrate the creditworthiness
of the GDR. The fact that the use of the swing was curtailed despite the
parallel increase in the cost of currency loans was supposed to evoke an
impression of normality and independence from West Germany.^81
At the same time, the GDR intensifi ed its attempts to cushion the bur-
geoning economic crisis by cultivating relationships with the FRG outside
of regular trade relations. The production of Western consumer goods in
the GDR, which increased in the 1980s in light of the currency crunch,
brought East German society closer to West German standards of con-
sumption, thereby boosting cultural integration to a certain degree. But
the economic benefi ts of this trend were more than questionable. Cross-
trade agreements that obligated Western exporters to buy products from
the factories that they supplied or other GDR products were made in var-
ious industrial sectors. The stronger exploitation of the price diff erences
for crude oil on the global market and within COMECON, for example,
relied on the import of Western chemical systems whose products were
primarily exported to West Berlin and Scandinavia. In the 1970s and
1980s, West Berlin’s supply of gasoline, diesel fuel, and heating oil re-
lied heavily on GDR exports. The building of so-called “foreign currency
hotels” by Western construction companies was also part of this type of
foreign exchange, as was the “licensed production” of Western consumer
goods with imported machinery in which a portion of the products went
to the West German manufacturers and another portion was sold—some-
times in exchange for West German Marks in the Intershops—to the East
German population. The import of capital goods, paid for with all kinds
of GDR products, was also intended to replace the dependence on pre-
fabricated parts for manufacturing from the West. Yet the refi nancing
of machinery imports through countertrade by no means came close to
the shares originally intended. The improved supply of the country with
Western consumer goods therefore continued to put a strain on the for-
eign currency balance, and the cross-trade agreements eff ectively turned
the GDR into a kind of subcontractor for Western companies.^82
The transfers in “hard” West German currency that fl owed in through
other nontrade channels resulted primarily from the political entangle-
ments between the two countries, yet they bore enormous economic sig-
nifi cance for the GDR. Clocking in at about two billion D-Mark annually in
the 1980s—which was roughly equivalent to the two Strauß loans put to-
gether—these revenues from prisoner bailouts, road tolls, transit fees for
crossing the border, the minimum currency exchange required to cross
into the GDR, and other transfer payments and private monetary gifts