The Rise of the "Other Germany"

The symbolism was unintended, but powerful nonetheless. A little more than six weeks after his death, the government of East Germany laid to final rest the ashes of Walter Ulbricht, who for more than a generation was the country's stern, Stalin-like dictator. The very next day East Germany was admitted to the United Nations, receiving the universal legitimacy and recognition that Ulbricht had both sought and feared.

Even more vividly than the Brezhnev-Nixon summit, the simultaneous acceptance of East and West Germany as members of the U.N. symbolized the beginning of an uncertain new period in the relations between the democratic-capitalist and the Communist worlds. At the same time, the admission ceremonies underlined East Germany's sense of inferiority to West Germany--the Germany in the eyes of most of the world. People who watch such things closely noted that as gray-haired, gray-suited Otto Winzer, the East German Foreign Minister, was led to his seat by the U.N. Chief of Protocol, there were 15 seconds of applause. A minute later, West German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel was given 32 seconds of cheers and clapping. The two diplomats later posed politely together for the cameras.

Their accents sounded the same, and the flags with black, red and gold horizontal bars that were raised on the U.N. Plaza were almost indistinguishable. But in many other ways--the ways that count--the two envoys and their countries could have come from different continents or different planets.

For East Germany, official recognition by the international community as a legitimate sovereign state is at once an enormous victory and a profound challenge. It also amounts to something of a surprise for the West. Long hidden in the shadow of its bitter rival, West Germany, the "other Germany" has become the ninth largest industrial power in the world--and by far the richest Communist state in per capita terms. Already the East Germans have surpassed the Italians and the Irish in per capita income, and they are closing in on the British.

Although smaller in land area than Cuba, East Germany now produces more than Hitler's mighty prewar Reich. Throughout the '60s, one of the chief tasks of Erich Honecker, now East Germany's No. 1 man (see box), was to boost production to ever greater heights.

The East German standard of living is still 30% below that of West Germany. It is, nevertheless, the envy of the other nations in the East bloc. When controls on currency exchange between Poland and the G.D.R. were relaxed last year, so many Poles poured over the border to buy higher-quality German goods that the G.D.R. suffered serious shortages of its own, and Poland became alarmed by its zooming trade deficit.

East Germany is probably the most subservient of Russia's European satellites; it supplies the Soviet Union with 15.3% of all its imports, a fantastic figure considering the disparity in size between the two countries. Nonetheless, the U.S.S.R. bans certain East German magazines --not because of their ideological content but because of pictures showing how well the German comrades live.

In a sense, the East German Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) is even more miraculous than the one accomplished by West Germany. The end of World War II left the West with the mines and factories of the Ruhr, an industrial base that had been only partly destroyed by British and American bombs. The East got the fields and forests of northeast Prussia and Saxony. Instead of standing for the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, the East Germans joked, the initials D.D.R. stood for Der Doofe Rest--"the stupid leftovers."

Brain Drain. What leftovers there were the Russians took away. Whole factories were put into railroad cars and shipped East. When the loot had all been carted away, the Russians even ripped up many of the railroad tracks and took them away too. While the U.S. poured Marshall Plan money into the West, the Russians siphoned off any spare cash from the East. All told, the East Germans paid Moscow an estimated $15 billion in direct reparations and untold amounts under extortionist trade agreements. When the Russians were finished the East Germans were left with only "Walter Ulbricht and some potatoes," as one East German bitterly puts it.

Even more harmful than the loss of factories and machines to the East was the loss of brains to the West. Between 1949, when the G.D.R. was created out of the Soviet zone of occupation, and 1961, when the hated Wall was erected, approximately 2,700,000 East Germans fled to the West, most of them young, talented and educated. Partly because of that drain, East Germany is still plagued by a shortage of labor. Some 35% of the work force is pension age; of the country's women between 16 and 60, 84% work outside the home--one of the highest percentages of any country in the world. Perhaps not coincidentally, the population growth is, next to Luxembourg's, the lowest in Europe.

With so many problems, how did East Germany manage to survive, let alone achieve such prosperity? The answer seems to be, as one Polish Communist official notes, that "in the final analysis, the East Germans are still Germans."

In some ways they are more German than the Germans in the West--if a compulsion for keeping busy is considered a fundament of the national character. To gain a few extra marks, truck drivers frequently volunteer to work 12 to 15 hours a day; factory hands complain bitterly when their overtime is limited. Industrial charts show productivity gains that even West Germans envy.

"Their willingness to work and our capitalist system put together would produce incredible results," marvels a West German businessman visiting Leipzig.

The East German government is one of the most doctrinaire Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, in 1963 it flirted with the ideological heresy of "Libermanism," a theory that takes its name from its principal proponent, Evsei Liberman, an economics professor at Russia's Kharkov University. Libermanism emphasizes the profit motive and individual reward within the Communist system. Even today, the G.D.R. rewards increases in productivity more generously than any other East European country. As a result, there are East Germans--not all of them party insiders--who have accumulated enough cash to buy that most treasured of possessions, a foreign car.

Closed Society. Aside from native industriousness, however, the chief factor in East Germany's success is the Wall. Although it is one of the most formidable barriers ever built by man, approximately 375 people a year still manage to pierce it, and another 5,200 manage to sneak across other parts of the 860-mile border. Nonetheless, the Wall has succeeded in its goal: to keep East Germans inside East Germany. After it was erected, "the people agreed to come to terms with the regime," one U.S. State Department official put it. "They agreed that East Germany was the place they were in and where they were going to stay, and with typical German efficiency, they prospered."

But at a considerable, perhaps intolerable price. East Germany is beyond doubt the most closed society in the East bloc--more regimented in many ways than the Soviet Union itself. "We have had to be more Catholic than the Pope," explains one G.D.R. official, "simply because we had no identity, no past as a nation. We could not afford to relax or make mistakes." Even mild criticism of the regime still gets people into trouble, and sometimes into jail. A Leipziger who drank too much schnapps and insulted an official of the Interior Ministry in a pub, for example, was recently sent away for four years. Every factory has its party spies, and party watchdogs are among the delegates to all conferences, at home as well as abroad.

Most people react by refusing to discuss politics or their discontent with the regime. The boredom level is probably higher in East Germany than in almost any other country in the world. "If you live quietly and keep your mouth shut," says an elderly woman in Leipzig, "then nobody bothers you."

The greatest irritant to East Germans, amounting almost to an obsession, is their inability to travel to the West.

"Life here is like that at the new prison they built overlooking the city," says a secretary in Karl-Marx-Stadt's state-run computer center. "From the outside it looks nice and clean, like a girls' school. But the prisoners cannot see outside." Most G.D.R. cities are within range of West German television. Says a student from Dresden: "When I came to Erfurt [a town near the border] and saw a West German program, it was like a new world opening up."

There is an almost insatiable hunger for Western products. A cheap synthetic turtleneck that sells for $3.50 in Munich fetches $30 in East Germany's flourishing black market; a $1.85 box of colored pencils commands $7.50.

Busy repairmen who cannot be bribed with money to fix a broken washing machine or refrigerator will break all speed records if the bribe is blue jeans, one of the most coveted items in the G.D.R.

During the annual Leipzig Trade Fair, a favorite pastime of citizens is to stand on street corners and watch the visiting Western cars. Otherwise scrupulously honest, the East German has no qualms about stealing the distinctive star that adorns every Mercedes hood.

Adding to the average East German's irritation is the one-sidedness of the basic treaty designed to normalize relations between the Germanys. West Germans are relatively free to travel to the East, while only very few ordinary East Germans are allowed to visit the West. So many West Germans are giving money to their relatives in the East that the regime now allows them in special shops formerly open only to Western visitors--selling Western goods and taking only Western money.* For East Germans who do not have relatives in the West, the visitors are a source of jealousy and bitterness. "The West Germans come over here to see their poor cousins," complains one angry official, "and they try to create envy. They say they don't talk politics, but by displaying themselves they are political. They are trying to erode our system."

The presence of 61 million mostly prosperous West Germans looms over the 17 million East Germans, and for nearly 25 years the overriding goal of the East Berlin government has been to crawl out of their shadow. While Willy Brandt, the West German Chancellor, talks of "two states in one German nation," Erich Honecker talks of Abgrenzung--a strict separation. The G.D.R. and West Germany are "two sovereign states independent of each other and with different social systems," Otto Winzer emphasized last week in his maiden speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

"We always say that the U.S. is the biggest imperialist power," explains Ernst-Otto Schwabe, chief editor of the East Berlin international-affairs weekly Horizont. "But our struggle has always been with West Germany. This conflict directly influences our life every day in every field--even sports. A sports victory over West Germany is more important than a victory over the U.S."

The East Germans fairly gloated when they won 20 gold medals at last year's Olympics in Munich to 13 for West Germany. Star Swimmer Roland Matthes of Erfurt, who took two golds, was idolized by his countrymen even more than Mark Spitz was by U.S. sport fans.

East German party ideologues describe their relationship with other East-bloc nations as miteinander, meaning "togetherness." Relations with West Germany are summed up as neben einander -- "alongside each other." The two republics carry on $1.7 billion worth of trade with each other, and are bound by ties of language, religion and culture that still have powerful appeal in the East. Nonetheless, the Honecker regime fights such links with every means available -- from the Wall, with its tank traps and killer-dog battalions, to untold hours of indoctrination.

"Our greatest problem," admits a G.D.R. official in Frankfurt an der Oder, "has been educating the people to the fact that they are different from the Germans of the Federal Republic. They are building the first socialist state on German soil, and we want them to be proud of that." A quarter of army basic training, for example, is given over to ideological propaganda. The schools spend much of their time "forming the child's socialist attitude," as one parent delicately phrases it. Asked what nationality he is, a well-educated young East German will say that he is a "citizen of the G.D.R."--he will never call himself a German.

Alongside undying hatred of West Germany's Federal Republic, the government preaches undying love for the Soviet Union. Speaking to the Eighth Party Congress in 1971, Honecker said:

"One's attitude toward the Soviet Union and toward the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was, is and remains the decisive test of one's faithfulness to Marxism-Leninism, to proletarian internationalism." Twenty Soviet divisions --300,000 men--still occupy the country, and the Soviet ambassador continues to sit in on some meetings of the East German Politburo. The East German ambassador to the U.N. is not expected to deviate from the Soviet position by more than a comma or two.

The only potential area of conflict is the East German suspicion that the Russians, in the Brezhnev era of detente, may be getting soft on capitalism. "It is possible for us to be more militant than Moscow," says Max Rausch, 75, a grand old man of the Communist Party. "After all, we live on the border."

Polish Jokes. The ordinary East German does not much like the Russians, and he makes his feelings known in any way that will not land him in jail. Hotel clerks save their haughtiest look for Russian travel groups. Even the B-girls are unfriendly. "We always recognize a Russian by his pointed shoes," says a miniskirted blonde at Dresden's Cafe Prag. "We refuse, of course." Not that the East Germans think much kindlier of their other East European neighbors. They have their own Polish jokes:

A smoke-filled room is called "Polish air," and a disastrous economic plan is called "Polish economics." The situation is not helped by the fact that thousands of Poles and Hungarians are imported to fill menial jobs in the G.D.R. because of the labor shortage.

Just as West German tourists have a reputation for boorishness in the West, East Germans are detested in the East bloc for being rude and arrogant. "They come over here with their heavy marks and they buy up all the fruit in sight," says a Czech official. "Then they lecture us about how much better life is in the G.D.R." The recent relaxation of travel barriers between the Communist countries has not thrilled anybody.

"East Europeans are not always very pleasant to us," says one East German worker. "We took a three-day trip into Poland recently, but we really would have preferred to be in East Germany."

Unable to travel to the West and not much caring to travel to the East, the East Germans remain, with the possible exception of the Albanians, the most isolated and in some ways the most xenophobic people in Europe.

The East Germans are truly Germans in at least one other respect--their stolidly bourgeois preoccupation with food and comfort. Recently the East Berlin regime began a concerted effort to increase the quantity and quality of consumer goods. Since Honecker exhorted the party in 1971--"to increase the material and cultural standard of the people"--Neues Deutschland, the party newspaper, has been filled with glowing reports of consumer production and has chided factories that continue to turn out shoddy goods. Centrum, East Berlin's giant department store, now refuses to give full payment to state factories that deliver inferior merchandise.

Production has risen dramatically.

East German factories turned out 442,000 refrigerators last year, for example, compared with only 191,500 ten years ago. But quality has remained at a low level. Except for optical goods and such choice export items as fiber-glass boats and camper iceboxes, nearly every East German product, from chewing gum to paint, is inferior to its Western equivalent. Distribution is bad, and shortages of even items like toilet paper are chronic. People still line up for such things as fruit--grapefruits are sold only to diabetics. Shoppers often return home emptyhanded. "You always walk around with a pocketful of money," says a Leipzig woman, "because you never know what you may find in the shops."

The main streets of East Germany's major cities, like East Berlin's Karl-Marx-Allee, are lined with imposing new shops and offices. But the Miami-modern architecture is wearying in its sameness; doors buckle, and elevators work erratically if at all. A few blocks away there are buildings still in ruins from World War II air raids.

To most Westerners, East Germany is a colorless, Kafkaesque country, dominated by soldiers and bureaucrats and lacking any sense of fun. Despite the undeniable economic achievements of the East Germans and the surface gaiety of life in Leipzig or Dresden, the impression is largely correct. There is a defensiveness that boils over into hostility at the slightest unfavorable reaction by a visitor, followed by a memorized promotion of Communism's virtues. "It is not a stable political system," says Peter Ludz, a professor at the University of Bielefeld and one of West Germany's leading experts on the G.D.R. "It simply is not supported by the masses.

The regime's supporters number only in the hundreds of thousands--and these are its servants." When Willy Brandt visited East Germany in 1970 to meet with East German Premier Willi Stoph, he was, to the government's enormous chagrin, wildly cheered. He is undoubtedly the most popular man in East Germany today--possibly more popular than he is in his own country.

Mystery Man. In sharp contrast, East German Party Boss Honecker, 61, is something of a mystery man even to his own countrymen, who know of him dimly only as the perfect apparatchik.

Born in the Saar, Germany's westernmost province, he was delivering party newspapers for his coal-miner father by the time he was eight. At 14, he was a member of the Young Communist League; four years later he took his first trip to Moscow to attend the Communist Youth International School. In 1933, after Hitler outlawed Germany's Communist Party, he became an underground organizer, under the name Herbert Jung. In 1935 he was arrested by the Gestapo and sentenced to ten years in prison; he spent much of it in solitary confinement.

After the war, Honecker was put in charge of East Germany's Communist Youth Movement, which he turned into a paramilitary organization. By 1950 he was recognized as one of Walter Ulbricht's chosen few. A few years later he took command of the secret police, and in 1961 he was given the responsibility of building the Berlin Wall.

Clearly the No. 2 man in East Germany by the early '60s, he was Ulbricht's obvious successor in 1971, when the Russians needed someone more pliable to further the policy of detente. In the two years since he took power, he has loosened a few of Ulbricht's moralistic dictums--rules against long hair and mod clothes, for instance--but in every important way he has remained as rigid as his master.

Soviet Deterrent. So long as the humorless, Moscow-lining Honecker regime stays in power, no one expects a repetition of the Polish riots or the dramatic 1953 workers' uprising in East Berlin. The presence of Soviet troops is one deterrent to revolt; another is the muscular visibility of East Germany's 90,000 soldiers and 46,000 border guards. The people, indeed, appear more resigned to their government now than at any previous time. As living standards rise, more and more East Germans will be able to claim, fairly enough, that their lives are not all that bad. As a result of its acceptance by the non-Communist world, the government appears to be more secure and more confident than it has ever been before. It is actively seeking business with the West, particularly the U.S., and is eager to exchange ambassadors, a move that will probably take place at the end of this year or early next year.

After years of seeking German reunification, the U.S. has resigned itself to the permanent existence of East Germany. Its basic hope, in the words of one State Department official, is "to make it more human." That is probably a forlorn hope. Honecker's government will under no circumstance allow the people to be tempted by anything more dangerous than blue jeans or bluegrass. Peter Hacks, the most important East German playwright since Bertolt Brecht, sums up the plight of his countrymen in his drama The Troubles and the Power:

Take so much joy as your sorrows

know.

Take so much abundance as

privation now And paint with the gray shades of the

present The future's dappled picture.

In the dappled picture that is East Germany today, there is abundance as well as privation, some joy among the sorrows. But the present is painted in shades of gray.

* At the elevated railway station atop East Berlin's Friedrichstrasse, there is even a small duty-free liquor shop where tourists can buy brand-name Scotches ($4.50) and cognacs ($5.90), about half the West Berlin price.

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