East Germany

KHRUSHCHEV’S visits to Berlin have become the most significant single feature of the East German year. In 1957 the Soviet Premier bestowed his blessing before the Volkskammer on the plan to form a confederation of two equally entitled German states. This gave the Ulbricht regime an indefinite lease on life. In July of this year Khrushchev promised aid which, he claimed, would raise the East German above the West German standard of living. The Soviet Union will deliver more coal, fertilizers, and crude oil; will build a pipeline from southern Russia; and will forego a German financial contribution to the twenty-five Red Army divisions in East Germany. This contribution totaled 800 million marks in 1957 and 450 million this year.

No vital decision is made in East Berlin without at least the tacit approval of the Kremlin. But this does not mean that no initiative is shown by East Berlin. In May Ulbricht sent his trade minister, Heinrich Rau, to Moscow to argue the case for greater material support for East Germany. Rau pointed out that East Germany was the only country in Central Europe which still had to ration food, that it was building houses at the rate of 30,000 a year — against 500,000 in West Germany—and that its standard of living suffered from comparison to that of the West German state. Rail’s arguments were heard with sympathy, for Khrushchev himself is keenly aware of the need for raising living standards as an essential part of the Cold War.

Rau did not come away empty-handed. In order to bolster the state reserves laboriously built up by his own government he secured the promise of immediate Soviet supplies — 30,000 tons of beef, 30,000 of pork, 15,000 of butter and 10,000 of other fats, 75,000 tons of bread grains — all to be delivered by September. He secured a second 500-million-ruble Russian loan, one third of it in convertible currency. The Soviet Union promised to extract more foodstuffs from a willing Bulgaria and a hesitant Rumania.

Rau’s mission brought quick dividends. On May 28 the East German government was able to abolish food rationing and peg prices of derationed foodstuffs (meat, fats, sugar) at reasonable levels. On July 7 a number of pegged prices were reduced by as much as 15 per cent. This may not have been as spectacular as headlines in the East German press suggested. But it was a step in the right direction.

East German food prices still remained in many cases 40 per cent above the West German ones. The disparity in the prices of many other consumer goods was even greater. But a feeling of constraint had been removed, a step forward taken. Of the East Germans, only pensioners and private employers — who were called upon to pay higher wages to employees — were not happy.

Pressure on the Soviet Union

The East German Republic has successfully applied pressure on the Soviet Union in order to obtain a higher living standard. But it has also applied a more subtle political pressure by creating, or at least magnifying, an internal ideological crisis and asking Moscow to draw the obvious conclusions from it.

Early in February Ulbricht’s Socialist Unity Party ejected from their posts Deputy Prime Minister Fred Oelssner, party boss of administration Karl Schirdewan, and former Minister of State Security Ernst Wollweber. Fritz Selbmann, minister for heavy industry, was threatened but escaped with a warning. This was the first party purge since January, 1954, when ideologists Dahlem and Herrnstadt and Minister of State Security Zaisser were disgraced.

Much has come to light since the February crisis. Oelssner wanted to slow down the campaign to force farmers into the state cooperatives (so far 7800 have been organized, comprising 29 per cent of all farming land). Schirdewan wanted more direct efforts to Secure reunification. Selbmann wanted a reduction of work norms (East Germany has the Stakhanovite system of payment by results); but fortunately this was not regarded as a heresy, only as a mistake. It is not clear what Wollweber wanted; he may have just been selected as a scapegoat. Naturally, the East German government has taken steps to prevent the burgeoning of the “defeatism” allegedly preached by these rebels.

There is always an element of the ludicrous about Communist concentration on its objectives. A Socialist Unity member in Bad Doberan was ejected from the party because he allowed the ashes of a private landowner to be placed in the family vault, which had been confiscated by the state. A party official in Magdeburg was deposed for having allowed a tax rebate to be paid to a private seed merchant.

A bid for prestige

The Schirdewan-Oelssner revolt has in any event been skillfully exploited by the Ulbricht regime, which desires prestige more than anything else in the world. This would be attained if it were recognized by Western governments, indeed by just one Western government.

On May 3 Moscow allowed the East Germans to clamp down tolls on Western barges using the canals between Berlin and the West. On June 8 the Soviet authorities handed over to the East Germans nine U.S. airmen who had been forced down in their helicopter near East German Chemnitz. On July 6 the Russians attended a “Baltic Week” at Rostock, where the East Germans called for a nonaggression pact to be signed by all countries on the Baltic seaboard. On July 11 Khrushchev confirmed the East German decision to turn down the proposals of West Berlin Lord Mayor Willy Brandt for closer contact between the two parts of the city.

Mildly ludicrous again: on June 26 East Berlin Lord Mayor Friedrich Ebert announced that “West Berlin is the citadel of militaristic gangsters. But East Berlin is the capital of the German Democratic Republic and the heart of the German people.”

Ebert told how 4000 homes had been built in East Berlin in the first half of this year (since 1950 East Berlin has built 24,000 homes. West Berlin 115,000). Ebert called for East German designs for a new city center, which would rival those being produced in West Germany on Brandt’s suggestion by the best architects of the free world.

It would be pleasant to record that the limited advance in material prosperity and the clutching of a few straws of prestige are diminishing the persecution inflicted on 18 million long-suffering East Germans. This is not the case. The Ulbricht regime sees enemies on every side. The campaign to nationalize the farms is only one form of current persecution. Three others require special mention: the intermittent warfare waged on intellectuals and on the Christian churches, and the deliberate aim of the regime to freeze human contacts between East and West Germany. All three are serious, the third desperately so.

War on the intellectuals

In the first half of this year, 120 university and technical college teachers sought refuge in West Germany. So did 27 per cent of the 1957 graduates of East Berlin’s Humboldt University and more than 400 doctors. Two distinct groups of intellectuals were affected: the remnants of the bourgeois professors who dominated German universities before the war, and the Left-Wingers, who rejected the Ulbricht line and who organized a revolt in Dresden University.

The exodus of intellectuals alarmed Ulbricht. It interfered with his teacher-training program and with far-flung plans to speed up technical training. The philosophical faculty was affected most, but there were grave losses in the medical and veterinary groups. Doctors were instructed to apply for permits before leaving their practices for even a few days. But Ulbricht decided to give the intellectuals a little more freedom. On June 15 he said that pressure on “intellectual backsliders” would be relaxed if they could give evidence of loyal cooperation. This is naturally no more than a temporary loosening of the screw.

Campaign against the churches

Government grants to the churches are now roughly 40 per cent of what they were in 1950. Ministers of the churches are the poorest members of the community. The Ulbricht regime hopes that financial need will gradually kill Christianity.

But this is not happening. One morning in July there were just five motorcars outside the Marienkirche, in East Berlin, but there was a devout congregation of 800 inside attending matins.

In recent months there have been many cases of individual persecution. In December Pastor Maercker of Pampow was sentenced to two and a half years imprisonment for urging his sons not to join the Peoples Police. In the same month several church journals were confiscated and two pastors fled for their lives to West Berlin. In February Bishop Dibelius was banned from entering East Germany, which includes 90 per cent of his Brandenburg diocese. In April the Ministry of Education forbade religious instruction in the schools and ordered fourteen-day courses in dialectical materialism, in camp, for children of preconfirmation age.

Constant pressure brought a big increase in the number of children attending the pagan “youth initiation” ceremonies (the town of Leipzig, for instance, claimed 70 per cent attendance of children of confirmation age). In May the civil authorities began instituting naming ceremonies as an alternative to baptism.

In June the government made a grant of half a million marks to the Pfarrerbund, a group of twelve leading churchmen ready to support a state church separated from the main body of the German Evangelical churches. At the same time the government announced that it would have no dealings with churchmen who were not resident in East Germany. “The unity of our Church is threatened,” Bishop Dibelius declared. “Militant atheism is on the march.”

Breaking the human ties

The main purpose of the campaign against the churches is to destroy their well-forged links between East and West Germany. Ulbricht’s greatest problem is to weaken the human contacts which bind the two parts of Germany together and which contribute more than anything else to the ability of East Germans to endure without being converted to Communism. Even visits to graves are rigorously restricted, and not allowed at all if the visitor is a West German and the cemetery in question is far from the boundaries of Berlin.

The passport law enforced last December makes travel in or out of East Germany very dangerous. Contravention of the law can bring a prison sentence of up to three years. As a result only 260,000 East Germans visited the Federal Republic in the first live months of this year; last year’s corresponding figure was 750,000.

The long road to unity

Can the Ulbricht regime get by with its policy of carefully measured out material benefits and carefully geared repression of beliefs, instincts, and human contacts? It seems to be managing with increasing success. Here are some reasons for believing so.

In June a West Berlin girl asked for a travel permit to East Germany in order to see her dying mother. The official at the East Berlin office told her, “You can wait until she’s dead. Time enough to go then.”

The morale of East German officialdom is higher than before. The armed forces have been given modern arms and German-type uniforms instead of the baggy Russian clothes they used to wear. They have reached a fair standard of efficiency, and few of them desert nowadays. The Peoples Police are much smarter than before, and they are polite. Units of the armed factory guards have been entrusted with armored vehicles, light field guns, and grenade throwers.

The 7000 political prisoners — once there were over 40,000 — are no longer grossly ill-treated. They are regarded as cheap labor, and even the Prominente—all in Brandenburg jail — can secure remission of up to one third of sentence by overfulfillment of work norms.

The flow of refugees to the West is decreasing steadily. Two million opponents of the regime have fled to the West in ten years. There are few outright opponents left. With improving conditions there will be fewer still, and it is hard for a spirit of resistance to linger. One East German said, “What should we fight them with? Sticks and stones?”

The Soviet Union intends to build up the East German state and has the means to do so. This was the purpose of Khrushchev’s visit to East Berlin in July. The other satellites will accept this piece of favoritism, if only because they do not want to see a united Germany.

Observant West Germans are becoming convinced that the road to unity is a very long one. Dr. Adenauer told the press that its duty was “to teach the German people patience.” West Berlin Lord Mayor Willy Brandt has said that he can see “no break in the political clouds.” The Ministry for All-German Affairs in Bonn is talking about a ten-year period of waiting.

Can the East Germans last that long without being Bolshevized? Brandt sees three reasons why they can: family links between East and West will last much longer than one generation; the youth cannot be completely Communized in a hurry — Poland and Hungary have shown that; and the whole satellite block is politically a shifting, stirring mass in which East Germany cannot settle automatically into the fixed mold convenient to the Kremlin. All this may be true, but it does not make the outlook for East Germany any less gloomy.