A Day at the Leipzig Fair:

...the cop replied lazily...

...Little groups of Russian officers (wife and daughter bulgingly clad in white-rabbit coats) were still making their way to the old Soviet shopping center in the center of town...

...I hurried to catch my train back to Berlin...

...But everywhere the same depressing shabbiness, a frozen pattern of poverty, brokenness and renunciation, as if life had been forced to stand still...

...But only the state could purchase books (and, at that, not a sale had been transacted...

...Hans Kelsen's critical analysis of Soviet Law, a study of Ernst Juenger by a Cambridge critic, a book on Albania, a biography of Malthus, James Wechsler's The Age of Suspicion, a volume on International Banking, Trygve Lie's In the Cause of Peace, and a scholarly Columbia monograph on Friedrich Wilhelm I ("father of Prussian militarism") called The Potsdam Fuhrer...

...Somehow, I half-expected to find the beginnings of a new city (so hardened has one become to the simplifications of one's own propaganda), the outlines here in East Germany's largest metropolis of a new urban center...

...I took the trouble to ask again, and the old lady who sold me a halfdozen picture postcards of Walter Ulbricht reminded me, with a gentle reprimand, of Blucher and Gneisenau and the day of the great Prussian victory over Napoleon...

...cried a woman...

...and, if rarely openly political, it was never unfriendly to the Bundesrepublik and the West and not uncritical of the land of the toiling masses...

...The show I heard was happily full of unBolshevik good humor...

...This particular ensemble, "Die Kabarettiche" from Munich, has apparently been enjoying special privileges from the Soviet Zone regime...

...Grumbling began...

...Then, too, censorship—and self-censorship —had cleaned up the lists into more or less presentable form...

...Still, I found a curious batch of forlorn volumes piled up in a corner, titles to the wall...

...all the titles were in Russian, and he hadn't thought it useful to write down the translations...

...No doubt about it, a vast empire has been conscripted along the path of a modern, if belated, industrial revolution...

...I walked down the broad street between Russia and China toward the century-old landmark of Leipzig, the Volkerschlachtdenkmal beyond on the hill...

...The man in the music shop apologized for not being able to say what records he had in stock...

...Two autos were slowly making their way across the Bahnhof square, and the People's Policeman directed them on...

...After an unconscionably long pause, the signal was turned to red...

...What had changed in the eight years since I had been here last, looking in the ruins for the traces of Leibniz and Wagner, Bach and Mendelssohn...

...the blues of the Volkspolizei, the browns of the Kasernierten, the furtopped greys of armed Rotarmisten...

...I had been told that they had been put on the Fair program as a sop to the tastes and temperament of the Western guests, but the audience I sat with was exclusively Eastern and they seemed to relish this partaking of forbidden fruits...

...Lenin had a love affair with electricity, was infatuated with factories, and where he and his men did not find a proletariat they were determined to invent one...

...The sad, unutterable greyness had not changed...

...The gallery of "decadents" and "reactionaries" seemed to be endless—Carl Jung, Lewis Mumford, Paul Hindemith, Ernst Cassirer, James B. Conant, Theodosius Dobzhansky (on genetics), Albert Camus, D. H. Lawrence, even Ezra Pound...

...Everybody raced across the street toward the Bahnhof entrance, but two young workers, angry and agitated, were held back from taking the matter up personally with the policeman only by the cautious and frantic coat-tugging of their friends...

...Poorly lettered slogans on walls, signs, houses admonished one to fight, to join, to love, to hate...

...I inquired of two other uniformed young Germans...

...I won't risk saying more than this, for in a brief tour one sees with one's eyes only, and who can tell whether that intricate apparatus in the center of the hall, the pride of Chinese engineering, with its finely whirring knobs and wheels and dancing instrument-dials, is one of thousands in continuous production or is a single exhibitor's showpiece (with, at that, a yellow oil drip in the left corner and a slight stutter in the right turbine...

...On my way out, I spotted a volume on the shelf, as real and earnest as life, which I couldn't quite believe to be there—Hannah Arendt's basic book on Totalitarianism...

...I found good standard histories of politics and literature, most of the English-language classics of novel and verse (and not merely the usual Eastern preferences for Whitman, Dreiser and Frank Norris), and a stimulating selection of school textbooks...

...Auerbach's Keller of Goethean fame was, as I had remembered it, smoky, crowded, mediocre...

...The other went on to explain, with dialectical ingenuity, that it was named (according to the old calendar reckoning) after "the Great October Socialist Revolution...

...Across from the candy-colored Chinese pavilion stood the Soviet Russian center, housed in that odd People's Baroque which mixes unappetizingly "Wedding-cake" and "Zwiebelturm" styles...

...There isn't another train for an hour...

...The vendor at the kiosk could only offer the Tagliche Rundschau, yesterday's Pravda and a copy of the Daily Worker from London...

...One should shoot creatures like that...

...mumbled an old man next to me...

...Next day...

...It was a shock to be suddenly set back in the past...

...Hey, you...

...I stopped a People's Policeman to ask the name of the boulevard, but he didn't know...

...And, as impassioned book-burners, they are erratic and inefficient to boot...

...The girl behind the bar was sorry she couldn't mix that drink...

...An everyday incident, symptomatic of the real state of East Germany...

...With some melancholy, I stood before the monumental entrance, discomfitingly conspicuous, and copied out the text of the great bronze plaque?Work and Labor in the Soviet Union is a Thing of Glory and of Honor, a Thing of Daring and Heroism...

...Could any brief glimpse of an Index more searchingly reveal that combination of cowardice, crankiness and inquisitorial intolerance which goes into the making of the totalitarian mind...

...On the streets, I saw uniforms...

...When night fell, a dinginess came over the town, illuminated by weak, flickering gas-light...

...Here and there, a patchwork of reconstruction, occasional evidence of a burst of vague and usually misplaced energy...

...A few students, a handful of depraved intellectuals might take some new courage for their confusions...

...Most of the Western businessmen I met managed no more than I to get beyond this first tourist's impression, despite Comrade Mikoyan's personal encouragement (a friendly gentle appearance in East Germain the day after Bonn's ratification...

...Why don't you take the underground passage then...

...I walked for hours through the halls of the Fair grounds, peering in at the exhibits of Communist economic proficiency —a gigantic high-frequency transformer from Saxony, a vanilla-colored Skoda locomotive from Czechoslovakia, elegant limousines from Moscow, expensive furs from the Arctic north, complicated farm machinery from Peking and Shanghai...

...The safeness and soundness of the English shelves was guaranteed by the exhibitor, Collet's Bookshop in London, which is a Communist distributing point...

...The audience seized upon every political double-entendre (often spontaneously underscored with a smile or a knowing glance), and demonstrative guffaws and applause left no doubt in my own mind as to where this people stood...

...They succeeded, after a week of long-winded bargaining, in buying little, selling almost nothing...

...Knallkopf...

...The 600 volumes on display constituted, for my eyes, a most unusual exhibit of Western cultural and intellectual activities, the likes of which had not been seen this side of the Iron Curtain since Stalinist pressure had closed down the Western information centers...

...after their only performance in Berlin a few months ago, there was a small riot on the Kurfurstendamm and a few eyes were blackened in the free-for-all with people who felt that "comedians had no business running down the West in the service of Eastern propaganda...

...One replied, with Saxon nasality, "Die Strasse des 18 Oktober...

...Was it all a misunderstanding...

...I am pleased to report that it had been dog-eared by browsers' fingering...

...We're coming from work," a man shouted, "and we've only a few minutes to make the train...

...I asked the bespectacled young man from the State Office for Literature what they might be, and he replied with naive and disarming frankness that, ach, those were the books that had been found to be undesirable...

...The past had not yet been lost...

...In the movie-house lobby, I chatted briefly with Richard C. Hottelet, of CBS and The New Leader, who had just returned from the Spring Fair in the Soviet Zone...

...Where, this side of the Iron Curtain, would the citizen on the street almost engage the policeman on the corner in pitched battle over a minor trafficlight aggravation...

...We know, of course, that the unhappy laborers do not function well in those mismanaged plants, and yet, despite the self-confessed Bolshevik talent for sabotage and short-circuits, shiny, impressive, workable things are coming off the rear-end of the assembly line...

...At the traditional Leipzig Book Fair in the heart of the old city, there seemed to me to be new touches of color and variety...

...I record this for what it is worth...

...A visit to Communist East Germany in the spirit of coexistence' shows once again how drab and sullen life is for the citizens of a Soviet satellite A Day at the Leipzig Fair By Melvin J. Lasky BERLIN MY UNEXPECTED excursion to Leipzig began with a chance meeting at Gate of Hell...

...Despite the predominance of editions of MarxistLeninist tomes in all the spoken tongues from the Elbe to the Yellow Sea, there were titles and dustjackets that almost reassured one that the mind in exile might conceivably manage to keep itself alive—a handsome Prague study of ancient Chinese art, a large Warsaw portfolio on medieval Polish cathedrals, charming Oriental collections of folk-tales, nicely-printed volumes of standard nineteenth-century literature from Pushkin to Victor Hugo...

...No importer, with an eye on business prospects, would ship along "provocative titles," and so, although Harvard University Press was represented, there was not a single study from its prolific Russian Research Center...

...I drove down the next afternoon to the Soviet Embassy, received a visa and a Fair Permit, and, before I could take a sober second thought, found myself on the Mitropa express en route to Leipzig...

...he gave me a few of his impressions, and parted with the suggestion that I go down into Saxony and take a look for myself...

...Books, as the Bolsheviks know, are weapons—but how much damage, they seem to be asking themselves (it is a new shrewdness), could these outrageous slings and arrows do in a fortnight...

...Ramshackle taxis and trucks rumbled along, stifling the air with the exhaust of poor gasoline...

...Had they changed their program...

...The crowd of pedestrians was anxious to cross, but a truck was spotted on the horizon and the policeman kept his green light going and, with a careless, indifferent gesture, motioned the impatient ones back to the sidewalk...

...Genuinely startling were two exhibits on the third floor back, where, quite unexpectedly, one came up against two expansive walls crowded with books from most of the current publishers' lists in Great Britain and the United States...

...At the last minute, I managed to purchase a ticket for the final performance of a group of West German cabaretists, playing to standing-room-only in the Weisser Saal im Zoo...

...the guests who were having it had brought all their own "ingredients" along...