From Bricklayer to Organization Man

A deadly inhuman person," Willy Brandt said of Willi Stoph some years ago. Whether Brandt would like to revise that assessment after his meeting with East Germany's Premier last week at Erfurt remains to be seen. To be sure, the shy, introverted Stoph (rhymes with loaf) is not exactly the cuddly type. In a country where telling jokes about political leaders has long been a favorite pastime, no German--East or West--can readily recall any gags about the steely, erect and correct Stoph. But he does seem to inspire respect.

As day-to-day manager of the country since 1964, Stoph is admired as an able technocrat who has come closer than anyone else to making East German Communism work. His assistants call him simply "Der Chef" (The Boss) and, according to Werner Barm, a top East German party man who defected to the West last August, they defer to "his skill, his solidly based knowledge, his sense of justice, and not least his secure and reserved appearance." Yet it was Stoph who ran East Germany's brutal secret police after the war and, as Defense Minister later on, set up East Germany's goose-stepping army.

Mystery as well as contradiction surrounds Walter Ulbricht's "organization man," as Stoph is known. Party Boss Ulbricht, 76, and most of the aging men around him weathered the war in Moscow. Stoph, 55, who joined the Communist Party at 17 in Berlin, where he had followed his father in becoming a bricklayer, went to Russia too--as an artilleryman and driver with Hitler's forces on the Eastern Front. Between 1942 and 1945, the young Wehrmacht private first class, who was later to become an East German general, dropped completely out of sight. As some stories have it, Stoph was captured and sent to Moscow, where he picked up his fluent Russian. Another version is that he had been a Soviet spy all along. Stoph's official biography says only that he had been engaged in "antifascist activity" throughout the Nazi years. In any case, he surfaced in war-scarred Berlin in 1945 as Ulbricht's personal aide.

Westerners speculate that the pragmatic Stoph is East Germany's "liberal," the man who could some day recast East German Communism's rigidly doctrinaire posture. Stoph, his second wife (he divorced his first in 1945) and four children live in Berlin's elite Wandlitz suburb, as do Ulbricht and other East German leaders. The Premier drinks and smokes little, and his chief relaxation is weekend walks in the woods. He is not considered an ideologue on the order of Ulbricht or Erich Honecker, the top man (after Ulbricht) in the Communist Party and Stoph's main rival for future power.

While Werner Barm cautions that Stoph "is not a man to give up Communism," he concedes that "he is one of the few men in the party leadership who is seeking a reconciliation of Communism and the people." Clearly, Willy Brandt is hoping that the other Willi will some day start seeking the same sort of reconciliation between the people of East and West Germany as well.

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