The Workers Shook the Kremlin
HANSER, RICHARD
The Workers Shook the Kremlin The Explosion. By Rainer Hildebrandt. Duell, Sloan. 198 pp. $3.75. Revieived by Richard Hanser Author of documentary films. "Germany Today," "Berlin Powderkeg";...
...As founder of the Kampfgruppe gegen Unmenschlichkeit, he has performed invaluable service in exposing the workings of the police state in the Soviet Zone and keeping alive resistance there...
...By putting the tumultuous events of those two June days on the record in simple, vivid and--Above all--human terms, Rainer Hildebrandt has produced a book fit to become a permanent chapter in the unfolding chronicle of our troubled day...
...The news sent an electric thrill through the entire Zone: "The Red flag no longer waves over Berlin...
...The event stands as a highlight of the history of our time, charged with a meaning that no amount of Communist propaganda can ever talk away, pitiful in its brevity but unforgettably significant in its implications...
...And then the Red tanks rolled up, and Red machine guns menaced the streets, and Red infantrymen with loaded weapons patrolled the sidewalks...
...And who was the young truck driver who defied the guns of the People's Police by climbing the Brandenburg Gate and tearing down the Red flag that flew there...
...Horst Sowade...
...It was a shoddy performance we gave as the construction workers of the Stalin Allee in East Berlin began the march which set off the uprising...
...While the revolt was in progress, some workers gathered in a tavern in East Berlin to plan their next moves...
...Those who heard him were "workers and peasants from all around Bitterfeld, among them workers of the city's plants, white-aproned women employes of trade organizations and cooperatives, dark-clad miners straight from the pits, masons in their dust-caked smocks, shirt-sleeved chemists and lab technicians from the Wolfen Dye Works, men and women railway employes, engineers, doctors, lawyers...
...and The Explosion is an acutely timely and reverberating manifestation of his unquenchable compulsion to speak out...
...We didn't know what to say, nobody knew what to do, and when the rebels looked to us for encouragement and guidance we gave them watery words, cagey evasions, and no real support at all...
...When the Red tyranny first clamped its iron claws on the Soviet Zone, Rainer Hildebrandt coined the phrase, "Silence is suicide...
...translator, critic "After eight years of Communist tyranny, eight years of physical, mental and moral subjugation, we hail this day as our rebirth of freedom...
...His method was to talk to hundreds of participants in the revolt who fled to the West, getting them to pour out their stories while the memory of what had happened beyond the East-West border was still hot and fresh...
...Who remembers the names now...
...The shock of it shook the Kremlin...
...The value of his book is greatly enhanced by a keenly perceptic introduction from the pen of Norbert Muhlen, one of the most knowing observers of the current German scene...
...If only the West isn't asleep at the switch, as usual," one of them said...
...The West was asleep, as usual...
...For two tremendous days...
...The brute power of the "land of peasants and workers" crushed the German peasants and workers, and outwardly the revolt was over...
...For two tremendous days, spontaneous rebellion swept East Germany: Workers laid down their tools and marched defiantly through the streets, jails were stormed and political prisoners liberated, police stations were overwhelmed and seized, Red officials fled in panic...
...A young veteran of the anti-Hitler resistance, he has been in the forefront of the fight against the new oppression from the East...
...How many can place Horst Schlafke...
...But no tanks or machine guns could erase what had already happened...
...At the same time, thousands of other Germans were gathered in other cities and towns throughout the Soviet Zone, listening to impromptu speakers like teacher Fiebelkorn saying the same thing, and everyone believed it: "We hail this day as our rebirth of freedom...
...From this mass of living material, Hildebrandt selected the nine stirring stories which comprise The Explosion: The Uprising Behind the Iron Curtain...
...In this book their stories, their names are brought alive again in a world which too soon turned aside and forgot them...
...Muhlen throws the events of June 16-17 into sharp perspective, and has some restrained but scathing words to say about the Western reaction to the revolt...
...And the reader, absorbed and tingling, lives through the revolt with the men and women who made it...
...This day was June 17, 1953 and the speaker was a hitherto obscure school teacher named Fiebelkorn addressing 50,000 men, women and children jammed into the Platz der Jugend in the town of Bitterfeld, in the Soviet Zone of Germany...
...Schlafke's tale is here, and Sowade's, and that of the boy who climbed the Gale, Horst Ballentin...
Vol. 38 • October 1955 • No. 40
