East Germany

FOR a long time it was fashionable to write of the impending catastrophe in East Germany, of chronic industrial stagnation, incipient economic collapse, even of famine. But, in fact, East German economic progress, though not as spectacular as that of the “ Golden West” of the Federal Republic, is steady and gaining in impetus all the time. As long as it continues, there will not be the slightest difficulty in holding East Germany in its appointed place in the Communist bloc.

It is still a popular pastime of the West German press to write of shortcomings in the East German economy as if they were the only things that matter. The inability of East Germany to deliver high-quality goods to West Germany, under the interzonal trade agreement, was duly noted at the Leipzig Trade Fair this fall. East German officials, while prophesying the doubling of interzonal trade to a negligible figure of $750 million a year, were quite unable to indicate what they could offer in return for West German machinery, steel, plastics, and other consumer goods. Attention has been drawn to East Germany’s lagging housing program. The West Germans are building 600,000 new homes this year; the East Germans by July had under construction only 18,000 out of their 1959 target of 70,000.

The East Germans are themselves lamenting the low production figures of their agricultural cooperatives (by August the East German state controlled 47 per cent of all farmland) and the shortage of electric power, of high-quality consumer goods, of qualified technicians (about 1000 fled to the West during the first half of 1959), and even of unskilled labor.

In this last respect, indeed, they have a big problem. Half of the 200,000 East German refugees who have been arriving each year in the Federal Republic are under the age of twenty-five; their loss grows more serious each year to East Germany, for a number of young East Germans leave school annually: 358,000 in 1955, 230,000 last year, and an estimated 160,000 in 1961. The only reserves on which the East Germans can draw are a residue of female labor — a small one, since every second worker is a woman — employees from the oppressed privately owned industries, and whoever can be spared from various paramilitary and security services.

Yet the East Germans can be more honest today than ever before about their economic difficulties. They can even publish firm figures, instead of the next-to-meaningless percentages of production which they used in the past in order to conceal their failures. The plain fact is that they are doing better than ever before. In each of the last two years, national income rose by 6 per cent (in West Germany it rose by 5 per cent and 4 per cent). East German industrial production is now running at 25 per cent above the pre-war rate — not a spectacular result, but one which must please all who suffered under the economic paralysis of the first post-war years.

East Germany is no longer paying crippling reparations to the Soviet Union. In fact, the only form of hidden reparations still being paid is the shipment, at cut prices, of uranium ores from Saxony, which are believed to cover about one quarter of the Soviet Union’s needs. Expenditure on East German defense is being held steady, since the armed forces were stabilized at 90,000 regular soldiers and 100,000 People’s Police.

Confidence in the future

While the gaps in the East German economy can still be easily discovered, there are plenty of signs of confidence in the future. By 1964, for instance, a ten-year school curriculum will have been established for all children. The East German government believes that the resulting drop in available labor will be more than offset by increased technical training and by the polytechnical education which sends children for a certain number of weeks a year into the factories, acclimatizes them to industrial conditions, and makes it much easier to spot and later utilize youthful talent. Fewer East Germans are seeking refuge in the West; the monthly average dropped from 17,000 in 1958 to 11,000 this year. Many East Germans, moreover, are returning home again, suffering from homesickness and the problems of making their way in a prosperous, sternly competitive society which lacks interest in them. In the past, about one East German refugee in ten returned home; today the proportion is one in five.

Confidence in the future of East Germany is illustrated also by the new line of talk which greets West Germans who visit there. No longer do East Germans ask about life in Western Europe with a wistful note in their voices; generally they do not ask about it at all. Instead they talk, for the first time since 1945, about “our republic” and “our socialist achievements.” West Germans were this year amazed to hear mention of “our Grotewohl” and his round of economic conferences with Asian and African governments. They found that their poor cousins took a Spartan pride in the toughness of life in the East German Republic (DDR) and valued their success all the more highly.

The Seven Year Elan

The economic turn-around for the DDR began in 1954. Until then the Soviet Union looked on its most western, unfledged satellite as a field for exploitation. It is estimated that during the first eight years after the war the Soviet Union took 16 billion dollars’ worth of reparations from East Germany, or 40 per cent more than was claimed at the Potsdam Conference. In 1954 Soviet policy switched to one of building up the DDR’s resources as a workshop for the Communist bloc. The DDR was brought into COMECON (Communist Council for Mutual Economic Aid), which has just celebrated its tenth birthday. COMECON plans for the DDR took definite shape when the East German Seven Year Economic Plan was formulated in 1958. The following were the most important features.

The DDR must more than double its chemical production by 1965. In the Communist bloc it will become the biggest producer, after the Soviet Union, of petrochemicals, plastics, potash, and calcined soda. Plastics production will be raised, in the whole Communist bloc, from 350,000 to over 6 million tons a year by 1975. The Soviet Union will help the DDR by building an oil pipeline from the Ukraine to Schwedt by the end of 1963. Two years later it should be bringing 4.8 million tons of crude oil a year into the DDR.

The planned expansion of the chemical industry is already bearing fruit. In the first quarter of 1959, production was 9 per cent above that of the same period in 1958. During the Seven Year Plan, at least 9 billion marks will be invested in this industry, 3.6 billion in construction work alone. East Berlin is to be the seat of COMECON’s Commission for Chemicals.

The DDR will become the principal producer of zinc and nickel in the Communist bloc. Both industries will be centered round St. Egidien, near Chemnitz. The DDR will remain the biggest Communist producer of lignite, which will be increasingly used for specialized purposes, while fuel requirements will be met by larger deliveries of Polish and Czech hard coal.

East Germany has been given a big role to play in COMECON shipbuilding programs. While small ships will mostly be built on the Black Sea and the ships of over 15,000 tons on the Baltic by Poland and the Soviet Union, the DDR will concentrate on ships of between 5000 and 15,000 tons in its Rostock, Wismar, and Stralsund yards. The Warnow yard at Rostock is expected to complete the first East German nuclear-powered ship by 1965.

The DDR has also been selected, along with Czechoslovakia, as the Communist country best fitted to build sugar-beet and cement factories. The DDR will specialize, too, in optics and fine mechanics, and the production of heavy turbines and tractors, locomotives and rolling stock, and nuclear power. The first nuclear power plant should be working by the end of 1960, and the second by 1965. All these features of COMECON planning have been integrated into the East German Schwerpunkt Program, which provides for concentration on special economic sectors. Meanwhile, 75 per cent of the DDR’s imports and exports continue to be exchanged with other COMECON countries.

Of course, it is much too soon to predict unlimited success for the Seven Year Plan. But a basis for success is there. Food rationing has been abolished; the frantic muddles of the state farms have been ended by the introduction of the cooperatives, which leave the farmer ownership of his land and merely take his produce; there are no longer thousands of acres of farmland lying derelict; trade with the uncommitted nations is expanding; hard coal and steel industries have been built up from nothing.

Ulbricht’s waiting game

Economic stability is the main reason for the truculence with which the Ulbricht regime in East Germany has backed Soviet threats against West Berlin. East German leaders have echoed, parrotlike, the demand for a free city of West Berlin, for withdrawal of allied garrisons and transfer of control of Berlin’s communications from the Soviet to the East German authorities. At the Geneva Foreign Ministers’ Conference, the DDR delegation was delighted with the measure of semirccognition accorded to it and with ready-made chances of depicting the West Germans as the main stumbling block to a solution of the German problem.

After Geneva, Ulbricht coined the phrase “The DDR is the savior of the German people from a new war.” Unlike Dr. Adenauer, he was not embarrassed by the proposal of an Eisenhower-Khrushchev meeting. Ulbricht was able to maintain pressure for the “solution” of a German confederation of two equally entitled states and to accuse Dr. Adenauer of wanting to perpetuate the status quo, thereby blocking reunification.

Ulbricht has been able to go on making overtures to the West German Social Democrats and trade unions, inviting both to East Berlin and being little distressed by their instant refusal. At least the leftwingers in the unions and the Social Democratic Party have shown signs of weakening. This is enough; like Khrushchev, Ulbricht is in no hurry.

The jaunty Berliners

Ulbricht may have been disappointed by the lack of concern shown by the Berliners to the Soviet threat to their freedom and independence. It is a striking fact that this threat produced only a minor emigration from Berlin of old and rich people and has affected the nerves of the Berliners far less than those of other Germans. Their jauntiness and selfconfidence are indestructible. They have laughed to scorn East German offers of political friendship and economic aid.

But in other respects Ulbricht is a satisfied man. In company with other ministers, he has moved to a new and more luxurious “government ghetto” in a wired-in compound in the North Berlin suburb of Wandlitz. He has pursued his pet hobby of an anti-smoking campaign, after instituting an anti-alcohol campaign two years ago. Now no smoking will be permitted at any meeting which he attends. He has secured the East German skiers equal representation in the all-German team for the 1960 Olympics at Squaw Valley (this is the first all-German unit of any kind since 1945).

And he has commissioned his “tame historian,” Professor Jerusalimski, to produce the “true” explanation of the 1939 Hitler—Stalin Pact. Evidently it was signed because the Western powers sent delegates to Moscow, ostensibly to negotiate with the Soviet Union but in reality to encourage Hitler to negotiate with them. Their objectives were a Western-German alliance and the invasion of Russia. It is a sad thought that, as the two Germanies grow apart, more and more people on the other side of the Iron Curtain will come to believe this nonsense.