East Germany: They Have Given Up Hope

“Never have I seen people who feel so alone, lost and abandoned. They have given up hope.” So reported a West German traveler after a visit to relatives in the East German city of Dresden, summing up the growing misery on the far side of the Wall.

Different Shops. One reason for despair is the cold war’s “lessening of tensions,” which inadvertently bolsters the hated regime of Soviet Puppet Walter Ulbricht. East German citizens oppose the U.S. wheat sale to the Russians because the West did not try to extract political concessions from the Reds in exchange. Talk in Bonn about $100 million in trade credits to the Soviet Zone inspired an avalanche of protest letters from the captive population to friends in the West. “We would starve,” said one correspondent, “if we could make the government fall.”

Even without a hunger strike, East Germans are barely getting enough to eat. Their faces tend to look grey because of the lack of citrus and other fresh fruits (the average consumer gets fewer than five oranges a year). With the exception of bread, meal, some baked products and margarine, most foods are rationed. In Saxony, for example, each person’s theoretical weekly allowance is one-half pound of meat, two eggs, one-half pound of hard sausage, and about six ounces of butter. The favorite strategy for buying up unrationed goods in short supply is to dispatch every member of the family to stand in line at different shops. Prices are about four or five times as high as in West Germany, and many families help make ends meet by selling such scarce items as coffee ($10 per Ib.) at a markup to people who do not have the time to wait in line for hours.

Reminiscent Repression. For other East Germans relief comes via food parcels from West Germans, who this year will send some 50 million packages to friends and relatives. What is not eaten is sold or bartered, just as cigarettes or nylons were used as currency in the chaos after World War II.

In contrast to most of the other Red satellites, political repression in East Germany is getting worse, and even more reminiscent of Nazi tactics. To combat widespread apathy among workers, which this year by the regime’s own estimate contributed to $180 million in lost industrial production, the Reds introduced a system of rank-and-file “control teams” with wide powers to crack down on dissidents. At the political prison in Hohenschönhausen near Berlin, a former Nazi forced-labor camp, the Communists recently revived the infamous system of “Kapos”—prisoners hand-picked for cruelty who mete out punishment to other prisoners for the sake of extra food for themselves.

One expression of East Germany’s hatred of its government is a short poem that sneaked past the censors early this year:

King Xantos of Thasos

From the day of his birth

Blind

Forbade

As an unnecessary luxury

The making of what people

Call lamps.