Normalisation across borders: official cooperation and contacts between East Germany and Czechoslovakia, 1969–1980

Taking East Germany as an example, this chapter examines what normalisation looked like across borders and how it helped to achieve stabilisation in neighbouring communist regimes in the 1970s. For the GDR’s pro-Moscow leadership and its internal security services, Husák’s Czechoslovakia quickly became an important partner in the quest to improve border protection, ideological unity and defence preparedness in the face of what was perceived to be the continued threat from capitalist West Germany and its NATO allies. After the bilateral agreement on visa-free travel for ordinary citizens in mid-January 1972, the normalised Czechoslovak system also provided reliable opportunities for youth tourism and teacher exchanges. By 1980, Poland, not the ČSSR, was clearly identified in East Berlin as the ‘enemy within’ inside the Soviet bloc.