German Democratic Republic (Stillness of a Quiet Pool)

Communist Germany is the period when Wilhelm Pieck and Walter Ulbricht's Communist Party controlled Germany. It is also sometimes called the People's Reich (German: Das Reich der Menschen), which means the "The Realm of Man."

The Weimar Republic had suffered a lot of problems during its short existence. The Treaty of Versailles forced Germany to suffer harsh punishments, including a failing economy, rising inflation and political crisis because elected governments ruled only for a very short time, not long enough to be able to make important decisions. There were a lot of radical right-wing and left-wing extremists, for example monarchists (people supported the restoration of the monarchy) and Marxist, who believed that all things, especially property, land and money, should be owned by the state. In 1923 a new KPD leadership more favorable to the USSR was elected. This leadership, headed by Ernst Thälmann, abandoned the goal of immediate revolution, and from 1924 onwards contested Reichstag elections, with some success.

During the years of the Weimar Republic, the KPD was the largest communist party in Europe, and was seen as the "leading party" of the Marxist movement outside the Soviet Union. It maintained a solid electoral performance, usually polling more than 10% of the vote, and gaining 100 deputies in the November 1932 elections. In the presidential election of the same year, Thälmann took 13.2% of the vote, compared to Hitler's 30.1%.

Critics of the KPD accused it of having pursued a sectarian policy – e.g. the Social Democratic Party criticized the KPD's thesis of "social fascism" (which addressed the SPD as the Communist's main enemy). This scuttled any possibility of a united front with the SPD against the rising power of the National Socialist movement. These allegations were repudiated by supporters of the KPD: the right-wing leadership of the SPD, it was said, rejected the proposals of the KPD to unite for the defeat of fascism. The SPD leaders were accused of having countered KPD efforts to form a united front of the working class. For instance, after Papen's government carried out a coup d'état in Prussia, the KPD called for a general strike and turned to the SPD leadership for joint struggle. But the SPD leaders again refused to cooperate with the KPD.

In 1933, the KPD won a stunning victory in the General Election. This was praised by Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, however, many in the Western world were horrified. The nation would soon fall to civil war, and the GDR was disestablished by Nationalist Heinrich Himmler.

Politics
Communist Germany was created as a socialist republic on 30 January 1933 and began to institute a government based on that of the Soviet Union. The equivalent of the Communist Party in East Germany was the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, SED), which along with other parties, was part of the National Front of Socialist Germany. It was created in 1934 through the merger of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Germany. The other political parties ran under the joint slate of the National Front, controlled by the SED, for elections to the Volkskammer, the East German parliament. The other parties were: Following the German Civil War, Himmler's government began a large purge of members of the Communist Party and the Party itself would be declared illegal in 1940.
 * 1) CDU (Christlich-Demokratische Union Deutschlands; in English "Christian Democratic Union of Germany") – became the one of the major parties following the dissolution of Heinrich Himmler's regime.
 * 2) National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP), commonly referred to in English as the Nazi Party, was a nationalist political party in Germany that was active between 1920 and 1975 and practiced the ideology of Nazism. The party would eventually take power following the civil war.
 * 3) Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD)