Word: ulbricht
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...
...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...