Triumph of the Wall
Baras, Victor
"Triumph of the Wall" upside down. Since Herodotus, China has best fulfilled the need for a happy land as far, far away in space and time as the spiritual 6migr~ felt from his own society. Throughout, Mao and his band...
...But the Honorable Antonio Rubi spread his hands in mock denial, and with a deprecating laugh dismissed my compliment: "So far, nobody's talking about ministerial posts...
...Goodnight, sweet-sour Machiavelli...
...While professional "youth leaders" from the GDR and the Soviet Union (including the familiar thick-necked types approaching middle age and a career in the secret police) delivered harangues on international revolutionary solidarity, the thousands of blue-shifted young people acted as if they were on vacation, which they were...
...The government has co-opted the smalltime black market, which is what the other East European countries did long ago...
...According to Sun Yat-sen, father of Chinese nationalism, when the British tried to get him to join in World War I he refused, because that would have led China to develop military forces of several millions, making it far more dangerous than Japan...
...On August 13 of each year, East Germany commemorates the anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall...
...Nor are there peddlers on the streets...
...Anything we don't recognize is from the West...
...Official rhetoric in the GDR is militant to the point of militarism, and it bears no apparent relation to the real concerns of the country's citizens...
...But why should that have dampened anyone's spirits...
...On one visit I was stripped to my shorts as part of a "routine" inspection...
...There is no doubt that things have changed...
...Long gone is the warning sign urging American civilians to register for their own safety before entering the Soviet sector...
...One side of Mao and the "rightist" factions chose the former and ended up rationalizing the 8-grade wage-scale, town-country and other kinds of polarization, techno-bureaucracy, and professionalism by the requirements of production and defense-security...
...they just knew that one is supposed to stay away from the Wall...
...unemployment and "parasitism" are illegal...
...If you left Italy in 1953 you'll not recognize our Party," the foreign affairs spokesman of the Italian Communist Party told me...
...Even crossing the border at Checkpoint Charlie is not the Cold War drama k used to be...
...It is a city of shops, offices, restaurants, and lines of people waiting patiently to be served...
...When I explained my quest, he flicked his thumb dismissively in the direction of the rival power and watched me suspiciously as I crossed the road...
...The authorities do not just let the day pass in silence...
...or, to be more precise, it produced a marked decline in the general level of grumbling...
...I inquired courteously...
...As they riot and form resistance groups, many use slogans about Mao's heirs, Chou, and Teng, or "socialist legality" because they are too "Maoist" anti-Maoists to know another vocabulary...
...in its place are neat rows of tank traps, a patrol road, and some manicured lawn...
...There was a good deal of flirting and altogether too much smoking of cigarettes...
...Such slogans rationalized a last-ditch struggle, in the manner of the last Dowager Empress, by ideologist-bureaucrats to stay (as they said during the anti-Teng campaign) "on top" at all costs, while pretending to give priority to "class struggle" against the new-rising technocrat class...
...The press, prominently displayed at sidewalk kiosks, is even more strident than the wall posters in denouncing West Germany, Israel, and the United States--in that order...
...It sounds too trite to be true, but apparently that's the obvious thing to notice...
...The museums, which during my last visit were closed because of a lack of supervisory personnel, are again open, providing perpetual delight...
...The Street of the Obscure Shops has the distinction of housing not only the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party but also that of the Italian Manufacturers' Association...
...Fifteen years ago he would not have been so reticent...
...That broad boulevard now stops abruptly several hundred yards before the boundary...
...The sleepy MP station on the American side offers no reminder of the day in 1961 when Soviet and American tanks stood nose to nose across the barricade there...
...A number of children asked their elders about West Berlin, barely visible in the distance...
...In Italian this means "Tell me...
...In recent years there has been some confusion in the GDR The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 15 resulting from the "freedom of movement" provisions of the Helsinki agreement...
...Crossing from West to East Berlin was as unpleasant as the East German authorities meant it to be...
...Yet life in the German Democratic Republic is incomparably "better" today than it was before the construction of the Wall--if one ignores the fact that people are no longer free to leave--and the improvement has come about largely because of the Wall...
...There is one public place where one can hear East Germans talk about the Wall, or how they avoid talking about it...
...The Brandenburg Gate straddles Unter den Linden, or rather it used to...
...During last year's celebration East German television showed schoolgirls presenting flowers to uniformed border guards while the voice-over boasted, "The children of the German Democratic Republic love their idols and heroes, the defenders of the state border...
...They know that their standard of living, the highest in the Soviet bloc, does not approach that of their West German cousins...
...Like the others, I bought ice cream from a nearby vendor and draped myself restfully over the barricade before resuming my stroll...
...He was, for eight years, the Italian correspondent for the Times of London...
...Retail trade in East Germany is handled by state bureaucracies, which means that one sees customers trying to buy rather than merchants trying to sell...
...Marx, after all, intended his revolution to take place in Germany...
...His father nodded glumly, "You think so...
...They knew when to cheer, but except for that they were anything but attentive...
...The East German regime is repressive, even by the standards of Soviet Eastern Europe...
...Since the Gate is the traditional symbol of the city of Berlin, the authorities permit people to gather there and even to take photographs, although the Wall, which runs right 16 The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 along the Gate, is normally off limits to photographers...
...The rubble of abandoned buildings has been cleared out of no-man's land...
...There are fewer cars than in the West, fewer pedestrians, and no hucksters at all...
...Abroad, Maoists are beginning to abandon their dead god...
...But now that Eurocommunism has become the great fashion in Western Europe, Italian Communists are claiming an even longer pedigree for their enlightened views, attributing them to the Party's Founding Father, Antonio Gramsci...
...The construction of the Wall led, after an initial period of unrest, to a tremendous improvement of morale in the GDR...
...In Italy confusion reigns supreme, and this applies as much to the Italian Communist Party as to any other group...
...Am I speaking to the future foreign minister of Italy...
...Shops in East Berlin are reasonably well stocked, although there are too few of them...
...The caf6s are full, and the little restaurants off the main tourist circuit are crowded with Italians still carefully selecting their menus and gravely consulting the proprietor about his wine...
...The variety of merchandise is limited, quality is uneven, and the availability of any particular item is utterly unpredictable...
...During the hour or so that I spent there, I heard at least five youngsters observe that the birds flying overhead did not mind the Wall...
...I was especially struck by this contrast on one sunny afternoon in early June, when I found myself in the middle of the closing ceremonies of the national "parliament" of the Free German Youth, the Communist youth organization...
...If we followed your suggestion...then the whole world, including your country, would probably fall prey to China's arms...
...Oxford English Dictionary) The Alternative: An American Spectator August/September 1977 17...
...With my briefcase and my Borsalino hat I looked eminently bourgeois, and as soon as I descended from the cab I was surrounded by four or five stocky, muscular men, one of whom stuck out his chin in my direction and spat out: "Diea...
...West Berliners and West Germans have also made their peace with Intersbop...
...The biggest nuisance at the border is the large number of travelers--Western tourists as well as Turks, Yugoslavs, and Arabs working in West Berlin--who clog the customs office...
...Indeed, Italy is so beautiful, pleasant, and full of charming surprises that a person who does not read the local newspapers and keeps away from the universities and industrial districts will F.S...
...Others listened to rock music from West Berlin on transistor radios...
...The Wall had two vitally important consequences for the GDR...
...The government will do whatever is necessary, as it did in 1961, to prevent free emigration...
...Three years ago, I had an appointment at the offices of the Manufacturers' Association, but since in Rome an address on the Via delle Botteghe Oscure means only one thing, the taxi-driver deposited me outside the Communist Party headquarters...
...Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
...It is also one of the few countries where service--in the oldfashioned, non-demeaning sense--still exists...
...The logical conclusion was Luddism, if not the annihilation of 2,000 years of Cambodian history...
...Now I wonder whether they have built an underground passage between the two headquarters, the better to coordinate their remarkably convergent policies...
...On my most recent visit, last summer, I did not even attract black marketeers...
...What cheer, Kim Il-sung ? [] Victor Baras Triumph of the Wall Iafe in East Germany today...
...For most East Germans, the Wall appeared to confirm the futility of overt dissent...
...On another occasion a customs official tried to pry open my metal token from a West German university dining hall...
...China sought a Teacher and got a nanny but, as a dissident said during Mao's 1957 attempt to "solve contradictions" by the "hundred flowers" movement, "the child is getting big and Nanny [i.e., the Party] will be out of a job...
...On a pleasant day in August, I was one of hundreds of visitors to this spot...
...This is true even in the showplace area around the Alexanderplatz, where the stores are always jammed with shoppers from all over the country and from neighboring Poland...
...I-1 F.S...
...Now, thirteen years later, the millions of visitors from East and West who pass through East Berlin every year arouse no visible interest...
...All of this happened within a ten-minute walk of the Walt...
...The sidewalks of West Berlin, by contrast, are cluttered with every kind of entrepreneur and crank, including abrasive young radicals armed with bullhorns and handbills...
...For a few clays during the Cultural Revolution, Paris Communes did appear, probably in accordance with the original vision of Mao and some of his "radicals," but they were dropped, mainly because "Communes are too weak when it comes to suppressing counter-revolution...
...It was first developed in 1956 by Palmiro Togliatti, then secretary-general of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), in the context ofNikita Khrushchev's de-Stalinization...
...On this side the Communists inherited the aims of the last great Mandarins of the Empire, who tried to save it through railways, arsenals...
...FriedrietSstrasse is the only station in the East that is directly accessible by subway from the West, and the store there is located outside the customs barrier...
...Earlier reformers had debated whether to rely on material modernization or socio-political changes...
...Propaganda posters, while less numerous than before, are still jarring in their crudeness...
...Since Italy is the cradle of this new, rapidly spreading creed, I decided to travel to Rome to discover the philosophers' stone" of Eurocommunism in the Via delle Botteghe Oscure--the Street of Obscure Shops (or shady deals, ff you will) that is the Italian Communist Party's own Vatican...
...The Wall itself is still a shocking sight, but it is now sleek and white, and electronic wizardry has replaced the broken glass and barbed wire of earlier days...
...In general, East Berlin today makes an impression of great stability and stolidity--a law-and-order man's dreaan...
...Nowadays there is no ideological stigma attached to stocking up on tax-free American cigarettes, Scotch whiskey, or French perfume in the GDR...
...So far...
...The Intershops along the Berlin autoba/m do a brisk business, as does the shop at the Friedri~hstrasse terminal in East Berlin...
...Western-style development which was precisely its poison...
...The Chinese, of course, also come in for rough treatment...
...Another youngster observed, "Our world looks nicer, doesn't it...
...Passes are evidently issued only to the soldiers who man the observation posts or patrol in twos and threes near the Wall...
...Brezhnev is featured on the walls of East Berlin almost as prominently as Honecker...
...Western passengers can come in, do their shopping, and return home without passing through East German border formalities...
...When I speak of confusion, I refer to the pays politique, not to thepays rielwhere, at least from the visitor's point of view, things function considerably better than they did, say, three years ago...
...On this basis the regime has reached an accommodation of sorts with the East German people...
...Despite my reasonable qualifications and my long-time association with Italian politics, the search for this particular philosophers' stone proved as elusive as that of the alchemists of yore...
...During the unenlightened days that stretched up to three years ago, the two powers would glower at each other across the narrow street...
...The "proper securing of the state border," as the official journal Neues Deutschland described it, has enabled the GDR to become the most prosperous Communist country in the world...
...The authorities tend to keep quiet about little things, like long hair, blue jeans, and watching West German television (a universal practice even before it was sanctioned by First Secretary Erich Honecker in 1973), and the people keep quiet about big things, namely politics...
...Throughout, Mao and his band may have honestly been out to modernize China...
...but the southern Generals are restive too...
...We've changed...
...That's why they built the Wall...
...On my visits to East Berlin last summer, I was struck by the relative quiet of that part of the city...
...for the stability of the GDR requires that its citizens accept the fact that they are all in it together--irrevocably...
...Foreign travelers are processed expeditiously, with only occasional spot checks to confirm the accuracy of currency declarations...
...The Cantonese authors of the wall-poster cited above have reportedly been arrested...
...That is, all East Germans are now permitted to possess small amounts of Western currency, no questions asked, which they may spend in the specially stocked "Intershop" stores previously reserved for foreigners and the East German elite...
...never realize the gravity of the crisis convulsing the country...
...Party moguls may reimpose "order" on the young workers, but they will be hard to keep down on the prison farm after witnessing the Commune...
...Shopping junkets from Poland are a source of constant irritation to many Germans, who accuse the Poles of making the lines longer and the shelves barer in the GDR...
...In contrast to my earlier visits, I was generally unable last summer to distinguish Western tourists from East Germans by their clothing...
...It is a city of reassuring and depressing ordinariness...
...A popular joke has it that when the East German Academy of Sciences offered a prize for the best book on African wildlife, the winning entry was The Soviet Elephant is our Idol...
...Because of a favorable rate of exchange, Italy is one of the few truly inexpensive countries in Western Europe, perhaps the only one...
...Until 1961, when the Wall was built, the GDR had been the only Soviet-bloc country whose borders were not totally sealed against escape...
...A young mother explained to her son, "That's where the fascists and militarists live," helping the boy to find his bearings by what he had learned in school...
...presence of 300,000 Russian troops...
...The heavies may still be around, but ff so they are kept well out of sight...
...The end of the thoroughfare is marked by a modest roadblock and signs warning that the well kept lawn ahead is a restricted border zone, not to be entered without a special pass...
...That's the East Berlin side of the Brandenburg Gate, just around the corner from the American Embassy...
...Instead, the lobby is populated with presentable and extremely polite young men flirting with the even more present" Philosophers' Stone: A reputed solid substance or preparation supposed by the alchemists to possess the property of changing other metals into gold or silver....Being identified with the ELIXIR, it had also, according to some, the power of prolonging life indefinitely, and of curing all wounds and diseases...
...In the 1960s, Westerners who patronized these East German "hard currency" stores were still considered virtual traitors by their countrymen...
...The festivities were held in the shady expanse of Unter den Ia'nden, between the Opera and the university...
...they really celebrate--with public festivities, a parade, all the trappings of a national holiday...
...East Germans know, better than anyone, that the "anti-fascist defense wall" was built not to keep fascists out but to keep East Germans in...
...East Germans are well dressed, and fashions are about the same as in the rest of Europe, with the exception of women's undergarments, which have obviously not progressed to the "free spirit" stage...
...And in fact, the rulers of East Germany have good reason to be happy with their Wall...
...With his other side and the "leftist" factions Mao unravelled, as much as he wove it, the Sino-Stalinist synthesis of modern and foreign techniques with millennial and Chinese political culture...
...Why should a young East German, in the capital for an enjoyable weekend, bang his head against the Berlin Wall...
...Hua's press has explained that the Great Disorder Mao said would bring in a Great New Order was strictly for chez l'eunerai and not for periodic purges of Chinese revisionists (as hitherto believed), and that those who are for nonstop revolution and against socialism in one country are Trotskyites...
...Confucius wanted Gentlemen and got Players...
...This has led to a sharp increase in the number of East Germans requesting permission to leave the country, and the authorities are just now beginning to retaliate against the applicants...
...This, too, is one of Italy's perplexing contradictions...
...but a better translation would be a challenging: "Well...
...the government is kept in power by the Victor Baras teaches political science at the New School for Social Research and is a research associate at Haus Rissen in Hamburg, Germany...
...It is not uncommon to find a hot dog stand without hot dogs or a t,,vern without beer...
...Some of them played cards...
...The GDR is a welfare state in which everyone has (and must have) a job...
...The most rewarding conversations to eavesdrop on turned out to be those involving children...
...It could be that Mao's real claim to fame has been to hold China back, thus sparing the world upheavals, of which the rise of Japan from 1868 to Pearl Harbor would have seemed a mere kriegspiel in miniature...
...Now the Party's over...
...The trains are clean, punctual, cheap and their food is quite excellent...
...These Communist agitators are mercifully absent in the East...
...Especially striking is the effusive praise of the Soviet Union...
...The children didn't mean anything political...
...The second consequence is less widely appreciated...
...Like Risorgimento, Renaissance, and Roman Catholicism, Eurocommunism was born in Italy...
...There are, needless to say, no panhandlers in East Berlin, neither street artists nor beggars...
...East Germany today is the only place where one can see something like what Marx had in mind: the productive capacity of an advanced industrial society linked more or less successfully to a system of public ownership...
...The logical result was "revisionist" oppression...
...An older couple, grandparents with memories of grimmer times, nervously shushed their curious grandchild...
...But my East German acquaintances could still do it...
...Since the border is now essentially impenetrable, the guards are less nervous and not so heavily armed as before...
...When I first visited East Berlin in 1964, the country was still smarting from the construction of the Wall...
...East Germany, a country of seventeen million people, lost some three million of its best educated and most vigorous citizens through the open border in Berlin before 1961...
...I was accosted frequently by black marketeers, East Germans eager to talk about the West, and malcontents who just wanted someone to complain to...
...The old argument that cultural and political change was primary ended up caricatured in such forms as "factories are to produce revolutionized people rather than goods" (Lin) and "rather socialist trains late than revisionist punctuality" ("Gang of Four...
...When the speeches finally ended and the apparatchiks retired to their private banquets, the young people stayed for an open.air concert on the Alexanderplatz, where the more drunk among them stripped to their underwear and frolicked in the public fountains...
...They explained, "We know what is available in our stores...
...Manor Eurocommunism, the Italian Sausage The Italian Communists may not be ready to assume power, but they are assiduously working "from the bottom upwards...
...Police spies were everywhere, or at least people thought they were, and every conversation involved much looking over the shoulder...
...First, of course, it stemmed the outflow of population...
Vol. 10 • August 1977 • No. 10
