Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR ULBRICHT AND HARICH Political experts often find it easy to explain why certain things are the way they are and. if these things change, why they had to change. At the risk of...
...New York City Nathan L. Bengis...
...May I add that Simon's critique of Judy Garland's new films is the most scathing attack I have ever read...
...Perhaps Khrushchev reasons that just as Fascism was different in different countries...
...Anyway, I did not believe that I was dealing with a band of criminals and idiots...
...At the risk of stepping into that trap myself...
...He stated that "in frequent discussions with Bertold Brecht we learned of the bitterness and disappointment with which he viewed present conditions in the German Democratic Republic...
...The man I am speaking of is, of course, Wolfgang Harich...
...Among many of the students and young intellectuals, his word was gospel...
...only 26 years old...
...It is not possible to recapitulate here all of Harich's "deviations...
...Miss Garland deserves the greatest plaudits for the comeback she has made against odds that would have destroyed an actress of less stamina, less courage and less ability...
...After the establishment of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in East Germany, his rise was meteoric...
...I should like to observe that Walter Ulbricht's political longevity ("Ulbricht: Ten Years After Stalin," NL, March 18) is probably based on two things...
...yet our greatest reviewers know how to do so without destroying so heartlessly...
...Harich also pointed out that "the Communists have lost all influence on the West German working class...
...After a trip to Poland in 1956, he publicly announced that he had found in Poland what "had The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...He returned to Germany as a member of the Gruppe Ulbricht...
...Harich's arrest and trial caused a sensation not only in East Germany but in the West as well...
...if the impact is cumulative and if there is thematic development...
...It is a reviewers special province to criticize, and he cannot be blamed for finding fault with what he considers unpraiseworthy...
...only...
...To carry out Simon's metaphor, they all have validity in the same sense that the various themes of a great piece of music do...
...But a German Gomulka might mean endless trouble for Khrushchev...
...Soon afterward...
...he was the only Communist I ever met who had a genuine sense of humor (that quality alone...
...In Love at Twenty there was no concerted attempt to develop a theme, but merely to show five variations of a universal theme...
...He had been taken as a child to the Soviet Union by his mother, who had disappeared in the Great Purge...
...always been missing in East Germany: courageous thinking and revolutionary patriotism...
...Ulbricht is a very German Communist and runs East Germany well...
...New York City Konrad Kellen 'LOVE AT TWENTY' In his review of Love at Twenty (NL, March 4...
...Communism is likely to be different also...
...I was forced to this practice only later, against my will...
...thus, while the more volatile and fearless Poles can best be ruled by a Gomulka, the more authoritarian and easily intimidated Germans can be more easily ruled by an Ulbricht...
...He became a professor at East Berlin's Humboldt University, editor-in-chief of East Germany's most important ideological magazine, and the key man at Aufbau, East Germany's most important publisher of political books...
...I disagree that a collection of short stories on the screen can be effective, as Simon puts it...
...News about his secret trial spread everywhere, and, according to West German sources, Harich made the following statement at its end: "I never had any intentions to carry out my program in the East German Republic or within the Party in a surreptitious, conspiratorial or factionalist manner...
...Had I known this . . ." At this point, according to available reports, the judge, at the prosecutor's insistence, imposed silence on Harich...
...In it, according to the London Observer of March 17, 1957, Harich declared that in East Germany "internal Party discussion is being strangled: the press muzzled...
...Gomulka is a very Polish Communist, and runs Poland well...
...Six years have elapsed since then—a period of imprisonment after which, in Western countries, convicted men are frequently paroled...
...Harich gave space in his magazine to members of the Petofi circle, calling for the "humanization" of Socialism, for which he was officially warned by the Ulbricht regime...
...He even demanded that Communist ideology be "enriched by the thoughts of Fritz Sternberg and other Social Democratic theorists...
...Secondly, the retention of Ulbricht probably fits well into Khrushchev's (on the surface) pragmatic and fat bottom) dogmatic way of doing things...
...I tried to speak to leading SED functionaries about my platform because I believed I was dealing with fair, honorable people with whom one could talk sensibly within the framework of the Party...
...Der Spiegel devoted a cover story to his case...
...There was a German Gomulka, and I wonder whether the time has not come to remind the world of this long forgotten figure, and to prod Ulbricht on the man's fate...
...One is that from what little we "know" from Wolfgang Leonhard and others, Ulbricht did not play along with Beria at the time the latter was trying to "liberalize" things in his own fashion to save his own political neck, and this was very useful for Khrushchev...
...I fail to follow Simon when he says that "five unrelated short films . . . tend to create the effect of several movements of different symphonies played consecutively...
...Even when I became aware of the fact that such discussion was not possible with them, I still believed I was dealing at least with fair and honest enemies, from whom I was separated by many things, but with whom I was united by a common conception of life...
...To counter all this, Harich insisted on the most sweeping reforms of Party, State and theory ever advocated by a Communist...
...Finally, on March 9, 1957, Harich was sentenced to 10 years in jail and began to serve his sentence...
...During his trial, a memorandum was uncovered and widely promulgated in West Germany, as well as elsewhere in Western Europe, which came to be called Harich's political testament...
...I suppose, could not but be fatal for him in the end...
...Harich was finally arrested on November 29, 1956, and tried in camera...
...They began in 1953, after the East Germans had tried to rise against their regime...
...He was good-looking and, in 1947...
...Reviewers are not notorious for kindliness, but do they have to go out of their way to be ruthless...
...When I was a Military Government officer in Berlin after World War II, I knew Harich well and liked him quite a bit...
...No such cacophony existed for me...
...working-class discontent explained, in a completely un-Marxist manner, as the result of work by imperialist agents...
...John Simon shows considerable linguistic discernment in pointing out some serious mistranslations in the subtitles of the film's five stories, but makes no comment on any of the things I found most compelling in the production: the simplicity of the treatment in the French and German episodes, the build-up of tension in the Japanese, the deep insight into motivation and emotional conflict in the Polish, and the many instances of artful photography and fine acting in all the sketches...
...I wonder whether the time has not come to remind Ulbricht and the East German intelligentsia that Harich is still around, and to ask what they propose to do with him...
Vol. 46 • April 1963 • No. 7
