The Unpleasant Reality

Near the East German village of Wandlitz, nine miles to the east of Berlin, is a most unusual settlement. It is a walled-in compound of semi-forested land and wide lawns, within which sit some 20 spacious ten-to twelve-room houses. The houses contain marble from Italy, art from several countries, Renaissance and Baroque furniture from France and Belgium and plentiful expanses of plate glass from West Germany. The area is patrolled night and day by 160 well-armed guards, many of them equipped with submachine guns.

The compound contains the homes of East Germany's Communist leaders, who like to stick together, and perhaps need to. In all the people's republic, it is excelled in luxury--and remoteness from the people--only by the 25-room residence of Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht at Schorfheide, 32 miles north of Berlin. Ulbricht's home, with its movie theater, glass-enclosed garden, private lake front, shooting range and volleyball courts, is often used by the party leadership as a secret conference site. Of both enclaves, West German Author Uwe Johnson (Two Views) says: "They have built themselves their own concentration camps."

The country they rule, at least, remains something of a concentration camp. Its capital city not only shuts its people in with an infamous wall, but its western borders bristle with 860 miles of fortifications--with machine guns pointing inward at the East Germans themselves. East Germany is still a police state, in which political prisoners by the thousands languish in jails.

Like the self-conscious Communist enclaves, it is also a study in contrast--although the contrast to its free and far more prosperous West German neighbor is invariably an unfavorable one. Just as its Communist masters studiously remain remote from their subjects, East Germany itself remains remote not only from its German brothers but even from its socialist neighbors in Eastern Europe, who have no great affection either for Germans or for Walter Ulbricht's Stalinist style.

Nothing in Common. Today, East Germany is a land whose soul is being sundered even while its body is at last growing healthier and more robust. Westerners have long believed that, despite the Wall, Germans remained Germans, and that formal division of the country could not last forever. For 22 years, spade-bearded Ulbricht has worked to prove this hope wrong by trying to establish his bailiwick not only as a separate German state but as a nation distinct from West Germany in as many ways as possible. The fact is that he is beginning to have some success. Last week, as East Germany prepared for this month's quadrennial Socialist Unity Party Congress--which will be graced by the presence of none other than Soviet Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev--banners from the Baltic isles to the dour villages of Saxony proclaimed that "nothing unites us with imperialist West Germany."

Ulbricht tries to make that slogan work, sometimes acting as if he had even stricken the word Germany from his vocabulary. A party-lining East German no longer speaks of himself as a German at all but as a citizen of the D.D.R.--the Deutsche Demokratische Republik. East Germany's culture minister used the recent 300th anniversary of the Dresden State Theater to proclaim that there is no common German culture, and a Foreign Ministry officer recently declared: "The word Germany now is only a geographical concept." Ulbricht even changed the name of East Germany's Secretariat for All-German Affairs to the Secretariat of West German Affairs, to show that the two Germanys no longer have anything in common. All of this, he said in his New Year's message, "should help overcome any remaining illusions about reunification. The task is to make clear that socialism and capitalism can never unite."

Dull Paradise. Because of Ulbricht's efforts, East Germany today is a country that looks different, thinks different and even smells different from West Germany. Hanns Eisler's anthem speaks of an East Germany "risen from ruins and turned toward the future." In fact, Ulbricht has turned his country toward the East--for that is where he sees the future. He regards the Soviet leash as his regime's lifeline. A Soviet field marshal commands East Germany's 200,000-man army, its 600-plane air force and its 200-ship navy. The Soviet ambassador frequently sits in on meetings of Ulbricht's Politburo. More than 72% of East Germany's exports flow eastward, and East German tourists generally head the same way. License plates from Poland, Hungary and the Soviet Union dot East Germany's sparsely traveled highways, and its famed spas and museums echo with the labial lilt of Slavic voices. Soviet troops--350,000 of them--have created enclaves of little Russias, little Ukraines and little Georgias in the heart of East Germany.

While West German cities glisten with activity and night life, the workers' paradise next door seems to be like most paradises: merely dull. Its cities die at dusk, and those of its citizens who venture forth show on their faces the ennui, the boredom, of people who are constantly subjected to ideological blasts. East Germany's 40 daily newspapers are full of cant and propaganda, and even an annual folk fair has to be called a "Festival of Creative Socialism." Its intellectual life is almost totally noncreative, since voices that speak or hands that write with less than extreme caution quickly get their owners in trouble.

East Germany looks different. In order to concentrate on industrial rebuilding, the Communists left much of their cities in rubble. Twenty years after the war, wrote Israeli Journalist Amos Elon in his Journey Through a Haunted Land, "when you are in East Germany, it appears as if the war were only yesterday." The countryside, with its villages, horse-drawn carts and unmechanized farms, looks as if the clock had been turned back 30 or 40 years. The highways are potholed and traffic ranges from light to nonexistent. The blue haze of soft-coal smoke seems to shroud the cities, adding to the ever-present smells of cabbage and disinfectant. The cautious satirists in East Berlin's Distel (Thistle) cabaret suggested one socialist solution for some of East Germany's ills: nose plugs.

Planning East Suicide. Still, for all its drawbacks, Germany looks--and is--a lot better than a few years ago. Ironically, the Wall -which Ulbricht calls the "antifascist defense shield" -made the difference. Before the Wall went up in 1961, East Germany's economy was on the ropes, as many of the brightest workers, scientists and technocrats joined the exodus of 3,000,000 East Germans who voted with their feet and went Westward. Since then, 24,500 East Germans have managed to escape (137 were killed in the attempt), but most people have accepted the idea that they are trapped and decided to try and make the best of it. It was this Wall-inspired attitude that enabled Ulbricht to get down to the task of strengthening the economy and starting to nurture a separate national identity.

Though most of its industry was either bombed out or carted off by the Soviets as reparations--they drained East Germany of some $16 billion and have not stopped yet--East Germany now ranks as the second greatest industrial power in the East bloc (after the Soviet Union) and as ninth in the entire world. It is building new plants and new industrial towns all over, has developed a thriving shipbuilding industry from scratch. Such traditional East German industries as chemicals and optics are again enjoying international prestige. East Germany's economy is considered a growth economy, advancing about 4% a year.

The economy might be far healthier if it were not tied so tightly to Russia, which continues to extract favorable deals from its satellite. Ulbricht in 1965 committed 45% of the country's exports for the following five years to the Soviet Union at ridiculously low prices--an act that caused East German Planning Chief Erich Apel to commit suicide on the day the deal was announced. As a result, East Germany is forced to ship eastward many of the machines that it needs to modernize its own factories and many of the exports that it needs to increase trade with the West.

A Certain Pride. Prudently, Ulbricht has allowed some of the economic rewards to trickle down to the consumers, who now enjoy the highest standard of living in the East bloc. The monthly average wage has risen 10% in the past six years, to $158, and there is more to buy on the shelves of the state-owned food and department stores than anyone can remember. Prices for basics are low: bread costs only 12-c- per loaf, potatoes 2-c- per lb., a haircut 20-c-. But anything beyond the basic necessities of life is more expensive in East Germany than anywhere in Western Europe. Coffee is $7.95 per lb., a blouse nearly $10, a TV set $490. Housing rents for $11 to $20 a month for a four-room apartment, including kitchen and bath--but try and get it! To relieve an acute housing shortage. the government is throwing up 68,000 new apartments a year. But the prospective tenant must "volunteer" to spend at least 600 hours shoveling dirt on the construction site before he can even hope to move in.

East Germany's relative prosperity has particularly impressed the country's youth, which remembers nothing but the drabness of the postwar period. Instead of reveling in the sadness of their plight, as they were doing only a few years ago, the young have been gripped by a certain pride of accomplishment. This pride is intensified by the fact that, next to industry, education has received top financial priority. Where there were only six universities with facilities for 8,000 students in 1946, there are now 44 universities and technical institutes with an enrollment of 220,000 full-time students. Many students feel that they get a better break in the East than they would in the West, since under Ulbricht 40% of the students come from working-class families (v. only 8% in West Germany). Not only is there no tuition, but 95% of all students receive scholarships to cover living costs.

Beetle Cuts. There are a few catches. To get ahead, students must belong to the Communist Free German Youth, and anyone who speaks too frankly about the regime may find himself expelled. Students must take tests in political aptitude before they can take end-of-the-year academic exams. Politics also color the curriculum: though East German instruction in the sciences is sometimes better than West Germany's, the humanities are warped by Communist propaganda. A seminar studying Reformation history, for example, will only emphasize Luther as a class-conscious leader of the peasantry.

For all that, most East German youths remain ideologically uncommitted; Ulbricht has not managed to produce any Red Guards. They want to save up for a motorbike, grow mini-Beatle haircuts and twist to Western rock-'n'-roll tunes. They resent East Germany's enforced isolation, which denies them the chance to read almost all West German writers and even cuts off the flow of literature from such slightly more liberal Communist regimes as those in Czechoslovakia and Poland. The few Western works that are allowed in are avidly read. Among the favorites: John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage and the collected works of Walt Whitman.

Pagan Rites. The last remaining links to West Germany are the Protestant and Catholic churches, which still operate as single organizations in both halves of Germany. More than 85% of East Germany's population is nominally Protestant. For years, Ulbricht harassed the church by withholding funds for repairs (2,000 churches in East Germany are still in ruins), jailing ministers, and setting up what amounted to a Communist equivalent of religion that has its own Ten Commandments ("Thou shalt perform good deeds for Socialism") and pagan rites that correspond to baptism, confirmation and marriage. Practicing Christians often found that they could not get into universities or earn better jobs. The pressures, plus East Germany's all-pervading apathy, have caused church attendance to drop as much as 75% in most towns. Two years ago, in return for the Protestant churchmen's agreement to recognize East Germany as their sole fatherland, Ulbricht somewhat eased the harassment of the clergy and stopped the automatic exclusion of Christian youths from universities.

Now, Ulbricht is out to sever all links that still unite the churches of East and West Germany. Obediently, "progressive" East German Protestant ministers and theologians last week issued a statement denouncing the unity of the Protestant Church because the two German states are "separated by different economic and social orders." As the Protestant Church prepared to hold this week's annual synod, which is usually held in the two parts of Berlin so that delegates from West Germany can go into East Berlin and mingle with their Eastern brethren, Ulbricht ordered the East German clerics to convene their own separate meeting in East Germany, 20 miles out of Berlin. The meeting could produce a breakaway movement for a separate Protestant Church in East Germany. Similarly, the government has started a campaign to try and force the Catholics to reorganize their dioceses so that East and West Germany will be served by different bishops.

Cold & Humorless. Though he is still surprisingly robust at 73, Ulbricht obviously cannot last forever as East Germany's leader. His heir apparent is a pretty good copy of the original. He is Erich Honecker, 54, a Communist since his youth, whose philosophy is more or less summed up in two of his more famous statements: "The party has never erred," and "The only book worth reading is Stalin's History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.'" Cold and humorless, Honecker spent the war in a Berlin prison, was tapped in 1945 by Ulbricht to organize the East German youth movement. With time off for a two-year leadership course in Moscow, Honecker has risen to No. 2 man in the Politburo, with special responsibility for the armed forces and the secret police.

When Ulbricht greets Leonid Brezhnev amid the banners and bustle of next week's party Congress in East Berlin, he will stand as a man who has ruled his part of Germany for almost as long as the Third Reich and the Weimar Republic combined. Speeches will celebrate him as the man who built a new Germany. But it is a "new country" only because it is walled in; and only if and when that Wall comes down will anyone know whether it can survive as such. Ulbricht himself must fear what others suspect: that, for all the improvements in East Germany, the disappearance of the Wall would still make the West irresistible to many East Germans. Without it, Germans might discover that their common heritage is too strong to be erased by two--or ten--decades of Communist rule.

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