East Germany: Walter Walled In

The old woman from West Berlin got off the train at the scarred old East Berlin railway station, carrying a heavy suitcase filled with butter and cheese, along with a great sack of cabbages and potatoes. The young nephew who met her shouted: “Why are you bringing all this food? Don’t you know that we have everything we need here in the German Democratic Republic?” His sarcastic words were greeted by loud guffaws from the bystanders, including Red German police. A few months ago, it could not have happened that way; the man would have been arrested, the food confiscated. The episode is typical of a growing, ever more public mood of dissatisfaction in East Germany.

When Walter Ulbricht built his Wall last August, a Western survey of East Berlin opinion showed that 80% were convinced by this show of force that East Germany would be able to dictate the future of West Berlin on its own terms. Many in the West feared the same. Ten months later, the Wall has become a 25-mile symbol of Ulbricht’s weakness and the most powerful rallying point for East German resistance to his regime.

Industrial Satellite. Buoyed up by its initial success last summer, the regime lost no time in making every East German sign a deeply resented series of pledges that committed him to build up the Communist state, increase production, volunteer for military, civil defense or nursing duty. The government made another psychological error in forming a “Walter Ulbricht Brigade” of volunteers, whose name and style bitterly reminded East Germans of the SS elite corps named for Adolf Hitler.

Ulbricht’s overconfidence sagged in October, when U.S. tanks probed the Friedrichstrasse crossing point and Soviet armor had to be brought to the border for the first time since the 1953 uprising in East Germany. Then Khrushchev dealt Ulbricht a severe blow by continuing his promises to sign a peace treaty with East Germany but failing to set a new deadline for the one that expired last December 31.

While he was being politically undermined by Moscow, Ulbricht plunged desperately ahead with attempts to salvage his trouble-racked seven-year plan. Accentuating East Germany’s dependent status as an industrial satellite of Russia, he eliminated production of virtually all goods that are not needed for export to the Communist bloc. Ulbricht’s riskiest move has been to demand more work for less pay. It was his previous boosting of work norms that triggered the 1953 uprising, and today East German workers are again threatening to strike. Says one: “We will go to prison, probably, but what’s the difference? We are already in a prison.”

New Sport. While the Wall succeeded in stemming the human outflow that has cost East Germany more than 2,000,000 of its citizens since 1953, it has also closed the only safety valve of East German discontent. Unable to escape except at great risk, the population can only feed on hatred and resentment. Existence behind the Wall, said a newly arrived refugee in the West last week, “is like too many people living in too small a house.” Another fugitive reported East Berliners’ favorite sport these days is to pick out the Communist officials they would most like to kill if trouble flares.

What East and West German governments both fear is the possibility of mass breakouts by hundreds or even thousands of armed citizens desperate enough to blast their way through the Wall. Last week East German police had to call for reinforcements—and permission to kill if necessary—for fear that queues for rations would touch off riots. But even though Ulbricht is re-creating almost exactly the conditions that led to revolt in Poland, Hungary and East Germany itself during the ’50s, Western observers see little likelihood of full-scale rebellion. The main reason, as one refugee shrugged last week: “There are 20 Russian divisions there to say Socialism has not failed in East Germany.”