What Ulbricht Doesn't Know

I AM thirty-six years old. When I escaped from East Berlin, which was my birthplace and my home all my life, it was not the first time I had managed to escape from behind barbed wire. I was in a British P.O.W. camp when the war ended, but I can tell you that escaping from the British was kid stuff compared with getting out of the German Democratic Republic. My first thought, on finding myself free in 1945, was to look for my mother, for our flat in Kreuzberg had been completely bombed. I found her at last in Köpenick in the Russian sector.

I set to work — hard work for a kid of my eighteen years — to earn a living for Mother and me. I got a job in East Berlin in a cableand wire-rolling plant which used to belong to the largest German electrical manufacturer but which had been completely dismantled by the Russians, nationalized, and opened, with the most primitive machinery, under a new name.

My job was to pull the white-hot ingots out of the furnace with long-handled tongs. I was on the second gang, rolling the hot metal with hand tools into wire and cable. The lengthening strip used to run at terrific speed through and around the huge workshop as it thinned out, and though we wore protective aprons and mittens and heavy wooden clogs, it was hard and dangerous work without the proper tools. The metal would often slip out of its runway and have to be caught. Sometimes it slammed against our legs, so we needed high boots, though often a man would be lashed by the metal strip and injured. I have a few scars myself. These were electric cables, and we worked on about fifteen different kinds, mostly of copper. Many times we had to use aluminum — a poor substitute for copper, but in East Germany there never was enough copper. The work itself was all right, and I got along well with my fellow workers. After three years of waiting, Mother got a little cottage in a back courtyard—just two rooms and a kitchen, but at least we had it to ourselves and no longer had to live with two other families.

Times were very hard then: there was not enough food, and was no variety; there were shortages of clothing, household goods, and repair materials for patching up the bombed and ruined houses. But we were used to all that. It is not material want that breaks your heart, for you get used to the low standard of living, and I, if not Mother, had never known anything else. I could have had it easier if I had joined the various Party organizations and taken part in politics. But I never did that; I never even went on the marches and demonstrations. The only time I marched was not for the government but against it, and that was during the uprising of June, 1953. I marched with a column of workers on June 17 and shinned up one of the masts at Alexanderplatz and tore down the Red flag. We had a bad time after the uprising, and I had to hide with some of my workmates for a time, changing my address almost every night; but the strike was so universal that the regime had to call an amnesty to get the men back to work, so I was able to return home and to the factory again.

Since I have worked in a Ruhr steelworks in West Germany I have realized how inefficient and uneconomic the factory conditions are over there in East Germany. I have read a bit and looked about me, and I think the main cause of the inefficiency is the way the state plans everything in detail. It is logical, when every process is laid down in the plan, that when there is some breakdown, anywhere, it reacts at once on the following process and causes delays; sometimes the whole plant stands still for lack of some tiny part, and then contracts cannot be kept and the whole plan is thrown off schedule. Complicated processes like steel-cable manufacture cannot be worked out in every detail with dales and quantities in advance.

Then, too, the factories are overburdened with bureaucracy. There are dozens of planning officials, and supervising them are the senior planners and the political officials. In every medium-sized and large factory are the Party functionaries, the trade union officials, the women’s organizations, and the youth organizations, each with its offices and secretaries. Each organization has a representative in each department. And they all have to be paid by the factory. They are there to watch everyone, to give political talks, and to organize political activity, such as demonstrations for peace and friendship with the peace-loving nations.

Trade unions in the D.D.R. are quite different from what they are in the West. In the D.D.R. they are branches of the Communist Party (the Socialist Unity Party is its correct name). They constantly demand extra shifts — shifts to build socialism, shifts to show solidarity with some Communist cause, shifts to take the place of the men who are members of the factory armed guards. Those factory guards are a sort of spare-time army. All the Party boys belong and parade around with rifles, playing soldier, while the rest of the workers have to keep production up to the level it would have been at with their assistance.

The trade union men have the whole thing worked out; they have staff lists hanging up in the factory with the number of special hours every man has worked for socialism. It’s just too bad if you are low down on those lists. You’ll never get a TV set, because you have to get a permit from the union clerk before you can even order the set. No radio dealer— they are all state shops, of course — will put you on the waiting list without that permit. You wait for your set according to the amount of voluntary extra hours you have worked. Good boys wait three weeks to two months; I waited two years for a TV. It was the same with holidays. I got the longest holiday time you can get in East Berlin, twenty-four working days, but I never once got away to the beach or anywhere. If you want hotel rooms and a railway pass to leave Berlin and tickets, you have to get them from the union representative in your department. Often even those men who were popular with the comrades couldn’t get permits for hotels because the hotels were filled with Party officials and their families. I never asked for holiday permits; I knew I wouldn’t get them.

The trade unions in the D.D.R. are not real unions, made up of men who appoint their own spokesmen. I know that in Western countries the trade unions are often run for the benefit of their officials, but, after all, that is the fault of the members who are willing to put up with rackets. But in East Germany the unions are part of the state setup, and their function is to see that the Party plan is carried out and nothing else. You might say they stick to the name of trade unions because it sounds somehow respectable to the outside world.

Take safety rules, for instance. I started work as a boy under conditions where safety rules were a joke. There just weren’t any rules, because there wasn’t proper equipment or tools and the furnaces were old and worn-out. Steel rollings—hot rolling — is always dangerous, and safety rules are more important in this trade than in any other, with the exception of mining. But in East Germany, the safety rules are secondary to the plan fulfillment. Efforts have been made. I must say, in all fairness. There are security inspectors now, and much has been done in recent years. There now is proper timekeeping, so that men will not work too long and get overtired, and proper rails to prevent the hot steel from running out of the beds into the shops. In Duisburg, West Germany, these safety measures are taken for granted, and nobody would work without them. But they represent quite recent advances in East Germany. Even as late as 1961, it was the rule that when a quota had to be reached, the safety precautions went out the window — just when they were most necessary, when the pressure was on.

In East Berlin men are not so keen on extra money, for it buys nothing. For years we tried to get the work week reduced, and though my weekly wage here in West Berlin is just about three quarters of my wage in East Berlin, I can buy nearly three times as much with it. Furthermore, there are things to buy. The union men always took the view that shorter hours would endanger the plan, which was never really fulfilled. When the shorter hours did come in, it was really because so many men were emigrating to the West that a concession had to be made. But works meetings were an empty show. The union men were all Party members, and you had to watch your tongue in arguments at works meetings; I know several mates of mine who landed in jail for saying something too freely at works council meetings when we were supposed to be talking about our own interests with our representatives. At one meeting the union boss lost his temper with our arguments and shouted, “If you don’t all shut up immediately, I’ll have you all arrested.” You can’t call that trade unionism.

I can tell you, it is hard to watch your tongue constantly, and not only because you can lose your temper and say more than you mean to. There is another danger. In and around Berlin, the radio and television reception from the West is good. Almost everyone hears and sees them at one time or another, and most working people all the time. So we knew a lot more about what went on in the world than we were supposed to know. That was a real danger, and you had to keep it constantly in mind. Among the men it was a joke. At work I would tell a friend some bit of news or a joke I had heard on television and he would say ironically, “And just where did you hear that, comrade?” We called the Party men “comrades.” It’s depressing when you think about it, because the word means just the opposite of what it is supposed to mean. We always could tell after a few days whether or not a man could be trusted; you develop a sharp instinct when living like that. But no matter how careful you were, there was always a danger that you might let something slip within hearing of one of the comrades. I think that was probably the worst aspect of life over in the East.

Other things were a constant strain too. I know in the West people think it is the lack of goods which is depressing. But you get used to rationing. What is much worse is the feeling of being watched and listened to. You can never speak freely, not really freely; you always have to look over your shoulder first to see who is standing around. And the politics

— was as bad as the enforced caution. You start with politics when you brush your teeth in the morning, a Party man said to me once, and it’s true. Take sport, for instance. I remember I went one Sunday to watch a bicycle race. It was a road race, and there was a big crowd watching, and I just wanted to enjoy the race for the sport of it; but the next day I read in the papers that all the people who went to watch the race were also “demonstrating for peace” because the event was called a Peace Race. That made me mad. I just wanted to watch cycle racing; I wasn’t demonstrating for peace or anything else.

And the discrimination, You work with a man in the shops; you both do the same things, the same hard work, and get the same pay. But if he joins the Party or makes himself popular with the comrades, then you suddenly hear that he has an apartment in one of the new blocks and is going to the Baltic Sea coast for his holiday for a price that doesn’t even cover the cost of his food. If his kids are sick, they get into the hospital at once; his boy can go on from school to specialized training or to college. It happens not just occasionally but all the time. No matter how clever a youngster is, he won’t get anywhere without the favor of the Party behind him. Idiots of boys get the college places because their parents work more extra shifts than anyone else. Even if there is a breakdown, the men who are popular with the Party still get credit for work.

The breakdowns in work are a constant worry. Minor things such as a screw breaking off or a tangled cable can stop the whole process for hours. Ours was an old factory. When new machinery was delivered, it would stay packed in crates for months because it would not fit the old belts. In the first years after Russian dismantling, even ordinary screws were impossible to replace. You couldn’t send to the stores for another screw. They just didn’t have any screws! And since the old machines were not standardized, every breakdown had to be repaired by hand with any old parts that happened to be in the stores. Parts were made even out of scrap steel. Sometimes a couple of mechanics would be filing down a part for hours while we all stood about doing nothing. There was no such thing as servicing in those days; the machinery ran until it broke down and then was patched up the best way possible.

New machines sometimes made things worse because they worked so fast that we would be turning out unfinished cable at twice the rate at which the next processing plant could take it. The whole area, corridors and all, would be stacked high with strips and wire waiting for transport. The troubles seemed endless. Just as soon as the new machines were made to fit with the old ones, either the electricity would fail or there would be a lack of coal. Sometimes machines were ordered without proper checking, and they came with modern electric equipment that didn’t fit the old junk we already had. Or drive belts would be a different width or thickness and would not run off to the other machines.

You would go home tired and irritated after eight hours of that sort of thing and find that the neighbors’ kids had been asked in school if anyone in the house watched West Berlin television. Even in the kindergartens, the teachers used to ask the children what they had seen and heard on television and radio. If you have brought up a child to tell the truth, you cannot tell him he has to lie to his teacher. I didn’t understand that properly until I had a child of my own. Once, back home in Kopenick, I saw the kids in the kindergarten playing the October Revolution at school and pretending to shoot “bourgeois.” It gave me a shock, and I started to worry about the time when my son Joerg would have to go to school. There is too much pressure put on the children, and they are not able to protect themselves against it, for they naturally respect their teachers and feel that what the teacher says must be right.

The child in the first grade comes under pressure, and the teacher does it very cleverly. She doesn’t say, “Now, tell me if your parents see West Berlin television.” She just smiles at the kids and says, “Now, let us all play what we saw on television last night, shall we?” Then she knows, of course. Naturally, not all teachers are like that; some of them are decent girls, but, like the decent mates at work, they don’t make any progress in life.

When the child gets a bit older, all his friends join the Young Pioneers, and he naturally wants to go camping too. If you want him to go to church and be confirmed, he begins to think it all a bore because it isn’t what the others are doing. If the parents give in, every time the boy comes home he has some new game he thinks is clever and doesn’t understand the meaning of, like playing at the October Revolution and not thinking of killing people. I know that all kids are bloodthirsty, but in East Berlin you have to be careful about telling your child that it is wicked to hurt people and wrong to envy others their possessions, because he says, “Yes, Daddy, but these were only old bourgeois.”

It’s only a matter of time before all the young people are infected with these ideas. At the present time there is still the older generation that knew something better before the Nazis started ruining people’s minds. Grandmothers and grandfathers, being old, are not so frightened of the consequences, and they have a steady standard of judgment taught them in their youth. But as they die off or go away, or as the parents keep the children from them out of fear or because they want to get along in the world, the young people are left with only the Party to guide them. I can imagine that in thirty or forty years, with the constant Party pressure, the number of young people able to resist Communist ideas will get smaller and smaller. That is one of the main reasons people used to leave and come to the West; they couldn’t just sit there and watch their children change. It isn’t possible to listen to the same things day after day without beginning to think in those terms yourself. Ambitious kids go along with the Party line. Sometimes they take it lightly, and that makes them unconscious cynics believing in nothing; sometimes they fall lor it and believe it; but anyway, they get an opportunity in life. As a father, you have to think of that when you refuse to let your boy join the Pioneers.

BUT I left East Berlin because of Walter Ulbricht personally. He came to the factory to give us a pep talk, something about getting a peace treaty. At half past two on that Thursday afternoon the entire shift, fifteen hundred workers, streamed into the huge high-voltage hall to listen to the Chairman of the State Council and First Secretary of the Central Committee, the Spitzbart (“Goatee”), Walter Ulbricht. We waited, packed like sardines, in our overalls and wooden shoes, and some of the fellows climbed up onto the cranes and cable rollers. I caught hold of a big cable roller and sat perched way forward, out ahead of the rest, so that actually I was sitting right above the row of seated officials. The Spitzbart’s boring old clichés in that thin, highpitched voice of his began to annoy me, as usual, but it wasn’t until he said he had heard that a woman worker in the plant had asked a Party member why we didn’t have any free elections that I realized I was in a real rage. I began to clap enthusiastically. There was a deathly silence, and it seemed as if a thousand faces all turned toward me, toward where I sat, up on a tall roll of cable by myself above the platform. “Even if I am the only one to say it,” I shouted, “free elections!”

Ulbricht began to scream at me about “the people” and “the working class.” Some of the faithful old comrades broke in with “Hear, hear” and applauded him. I could see that from various corners of the big factory hall comrades were threading through the crowd toward me. I pulled up my knees so that they could not reach up and pull me down, and I shouted out the words which were quoted in all the papers: “Have you the slightest idea what the people really think?”

This really made the Spitzbart mad, and he started on a long tirade, yelling himself hoarse in a flood of words. And that saved me, because none of the comrades liked to interrupt dear Wally Ulbricht, and they couldn’t get at me without causing a noisy interruption. All the comrades applauded him madly, but hardly any of the workers lifted a hand. When he had talked himself out, he stormed out of the meeting — for once it had gone all wrong — and the comrades crowded after him to show how loyal they were.

My own friends advised me to clear out at once, but I turned up at the next shift as usual. There was a message for me to go to the management offices, where two members of the Central Committee of the Party and two comrades from the works were waiting to question me. That scared me a bit, but I wasn’t really afraid until I noticed that a gray car was following me as I went home. Later I saw that there was a man standing outside our house.

Now my wife and I have been in Duisburg for over eighteen months, living in this one room in an emergency block for refugees. We managed to get Joerg out too. When we get our flat, we shall be all right. But the people here don’t understand what it is like to live in exile. We were born in Berlin, and that is our home, and we can never go back. Sometimes I wish I had stayed in West Berlin, but there is only one steel plant where I could have found a job, and they have all the men they need. It hurts me to think of Berlin. It makes us lonely sometimes, we who are of and from Berlin.