Correspondents' Correspondence

...By the end of 1937, the majority of the organization's Working Committee was accusing Ulbricht of "trying to create a Volksfront that would be led and directed solely by the Communist party...

...Ulbricht, the Communist representative, soon was in conflict with Mann and the other non-Communists...

...the bandits left the bank, taking with them four hostages whom they released during the night...

...exclaimed the general...

...One important period covered in Mann's letters was his Paris exile of 1933-40, in which a major figure was the same Walter Ulbricht who is now serving as honorary chairman of the Heinrich Mann Anniversary Committee...

...It's good," people say, "to know that the Elysee is occupied by human beings again...

...Still, 34 years later...

...I like Andre Malraux's story of the short-sighted Charles de Gaulle shaking hands in a provincial marketplace with a gorilla he took to be a priest: "Bonjour, monsieur le cure...

...Alors, bonjour monsieur le gorille...

...Indeed, the April 6 elections, which saw a remarkable 80 per cent of the registered voters go to the polls through chill and drizzle, confirmed that the broad-based coalition responsible for the election of Congressman Ronald Dellums last November has strong roots in Berkeley...

...He is widely considered a warmer, less pretentious man than de Gaulle, more down-to-earth and certainly more French--a bon vivant, interested in food and sport, and able to relax...

...Left-liberal Democrats, and radicals...

...their lone council candidate ran sixth, failing to place even with strong bipartisan backing...

...In fact, a substantial majority (63.5 per cent) of those polled indicated that they would find a Sapir-led government unsatisfactory even if Dayan and Foreign Minister Abba Eban were to stay on in their present Cabinet posts...

...For every Right-winger who tries to make an issue of holdups and juvenile delinquency there is a Left-winger with a list of police brutalities...

...Mann had been chosen in 1936 by German emigres in Paris to head the broadly based Volksfront against Hitler...

...Less than a week after the elections, the Berkeley Daily Gazette was already trumpeting its future plans--inaccurately citing the 2-1 defeat of the poorly written referendum to place the police under community control as proof of a "great, nonradical majority...

...It was the coalition's dogged insistence on addressing the vital questions of life in Berkeley in unequivocal terms that drew campaign workers and voters to their cause from all parts of the city...

...The public has little voluntary contact with les flics, as the Paris police complained in March when they sought to lessen public mistrust by distributing leaflets and holding street-corner discussion groups...

...In the intervening period, Dayan seemed preoccupied with the behind-the-scenes government effort to formulate a policy on the delicate issue of withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories...

...The old-line Berkeley Democratic Caucus fared little better: The top vote-getter in the council election was a liberal Democrat running with caucus endorsement, but he won only with the active support of every other moderate and conservative political force in the campaign, including the Right-wing Berkeley Daily Gazette...

...These figures no doubt also reflect Sapir's lack of popular appeal--though he enjoys considerable support within party ranks...

...The same has been said repeatedly of Beethoven and Goethe, although the latter did at least live out his years in Weimar, within the present territory of the gdr...

...President Georges Pompidou has changed the heads of the internal and external secret services and ordered the disbanding of one dubious special network...

...He had not made a controversial public speech since his "dovish" declaration several months ago urging Israel's return to the Jarring talks despite Soviet and Egyptian cease-fire violations...

...Even the ordinary urban police are not subject to local control...

...and then there are other, not-so-ordinary policemen with an interest in politics, into whose affiliation no wise citizen inquires...

...I should be glad to know what American police officers would have done...

...But couldn't the food and wine have been doped...

...In the final pairing Allon led Eban 54.4 per cent to 28.6 percent...

...His wife is undoubtedly a political asset...

...I oppose a meeting of the General Committee as long as U. is allowed to attend...

...Dayan's strength and Sapir's weakness were similarly evident in a series of two-man tests involving other leading Labor party figures...

...As the robbers drove off, hundreds of onlookers shook their fists at them and shouted "Assassins...

...The average man is quick to obey the police and show them his papers on demand, but he neither respects nor trusts them...

...The student community responded to this appeal with particular relish, engulfing coalition offices in the closing days of the campaign with far more workers than were needed...

...He has also instructed his Minister of the Interior to decrease violence in the streets: Troublemakers are to be neutralized but the crs must adopt a less provocative posture...

...But who can say today where the majority will lie in 1973?--Mal Warwick Recruiting the Dead Leipzig--Heinrich Mann is ours," Walter Ulbricht said in opening the nationwide celebrations honoring the centennial of Mann's birth...

...He is no longer the general's inhibited substitute...

...Most Frenchmen consider her good-looking in a jaunty, rather English way...

...The definitive expression of Mann's attitude toward Ulbricht is to be found in his letter to Alfred Kantorowicz, later the biographer of the Mann brothers: "You know, I can't sit at the same table with a man who suddenly maintains that the table we're sitting at isn't a table at all, but a duck pond, and who tries to force me to agree with him...

...Although Frenchmen dislike crime just as much as Americans, they tend to consider the police a remedy almost as undesirable as the disease...

...Since Kallgren's will be the crucial vote, he is under intense pressure from both sides...

...He did, however, leave a full record of his thoughts about totalitarian methods before his death in California in 1950...

...Ulbricht can say unabashedly: "We in the gdr proudly claim Heinrich Mann among our spiritual ancestors...

...In addition to swamping Sapir (73.4 per cent to 11.2 per cent), Dayan triumphed by a wide margin over Eban (67.8-19.7) and Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon (63.4-22.7...

...Though the city failed to elect the coalition's student candidate (University of California graduate student Rick Brown, who came in fifth by 23 votes), it was clearly the students and young people in general who provided the vital margin of overall success for the coalition...

...The remaining responses were "undecided...

...Frightened by the results of their half-hearted attempt at unity, the tradition-oriented of Berkeley, both Democratic and Republican, may now be willing to undertake a concerted effort to regain control...

...In its heyday Gaullist France was a fascinating place for the student of what the French call parallel police services, political networks and gorillas...

...The East German Party leader and chief of state thus added Thomas Mann's older brother to the list of famous Germans claimed by the German Democratic Republic (gdr) as its own--from Albrecht Diirer to Goethe and Beethoven...

...Ulbricht replied with accusations that Mann and the other bourgeois leaders were being manipulated by big business into an alliance with monopolists...

...Right-wing Catholics, and Reichs-wehr generals...

...And Widener did have the tacit support of a coalition slate representing students, blacks...

...Heinrich Mann is of course no more able than Goethe to disclaim gdr citizenship...

...Soon after dark they withdrew their cordons and switched off streetlamps in the quarter...

...Eliahu Salpeter...

...Although it formed again without the Communists, it never played an important role in the anti-Hitler movement...

...Sweeney's defeat also eliminated a potentially strong opponent in next year's congressional primary...

...In the most spectacular crime committed during the campaign, four bandits occupied a bank in the center of town for 10 hours, holding half a dozen hostages...

...But together the four will face three incumbents unsympathetic to their plans and Ed Kallgren, the only Democratic candidate to win election to the council without coalition support...

...The mayor's powers, however, are tightly circumscribed by a council-manager form of government written into the city charter half a century ago...

...at 9 p.m...

...The more remote historical figures are identified with the gdr by virtue of their humanist and revolutionary contributions before the advent of Marx...

...The gdr is the Socialist national state which Heinrich Mann desired...

...But the Defense Minister's absence from the headlines apparently has not diminished his popularity...

...Ray Alan Dayan's Charisma Tel Avrv--Moshe Dayan's hardline statement before the April convention of Israel's ruling Labor party ended an unusually quiet period for the outspoken Defense Minister...

...Widener has made it clear that on many crucial issues he will vote with D'Army Bailey, Dona Hancock and Ira Simmons, the successful coalition victors in three of the four open council races...

...A public opinion poll taken here by Dahaf Associates shows that he would be an overwhelming choice for the premiership, should Golda Meir decide to relinquish the post...

...The police, anxious for the safety of the hostages, complied...

...Ulbricht's tactics ultimately broke up the Front...

...When she saw the film Love Story, she wept as copiously as any suburban housewife...

...When asked how they would vote if Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir received the Labor mandate, and Dayan resigned to pursue his program through another party, slightly over 50 per cent replied that they would back Dayan, and only 19.8 per cent said they would oppose him...

...Notably less hostile than his predecessor to objective tv reporting, Pompidou is playing everything cool...

...Sapir was beaten almost as badly by Allon (66.1 per cent to 16.0 per cent) and Eban (57.8-24.4) as by Dayan...

...As for the coalition, it does not yet have the votes to change the system...

...It called for a municipal alliance "among rational, nonradical people of Berkeley of all ages, races, sexes and persuasions" to guarantee the coalition's defeat in the 1973 city elections, when the terms of the three incumbent councilmen will expire...

...But, mon general, I'm one of your gorillas...

...A startling number of people, especially the young, are registering in the Peace and Freedom Party or declining to declare any political affiliation at all...

...While the debate continues about whether or not Berkeley is really the new political weathervane of the nation, there can be no doubt that the two-party system has fallen apart here...

...Since Dellums' endorsement of Widener and the coalition slate was loudly and frequently reiterated by campaign workers, the results strengthened his position...

...Nonetheless, he now impresses his fellow countrymen as a stronger and more interesting personality than when he first stepped out of de Gaulle's shadow...

...Perhaps most significantly of all, the election proved that fundamental issues can be made to override personalities and traditional allegiances...

...The poll may seem excessively hypothetical at the present time, because Prime Minister Meir shows few outward signs of quitting in the near future...

...In October 1937 Mann wrote his Social Democratic deputy, Max Braun: "As reluctant as I am to consider members of the German opposition as enemies, some apparently do not want it any other way...

...The Republican party was left with 20 per cent of the registered voters when the rolls closed in February...

...The vote in the densely populated south campus area ran so heavily in favor of Widener and the coalition candidates that massive turnouts in other parts of the city were not enough to defeat them--and that was without 18-year-olds voting as yet...

...This city, where blacks comprise only 24 per cent of the population, did elect 33-year-old Warren Widener mayor by a razor-thin 5 6-vote plurality over Wilmont Sweeney, a fellow black Democratic councilman ballyhooed as the savior of the local establishment...

...The defamatory campaign against Madame Pompidou during the last year of de Gaulle's Presidency was, in the end, so crude that it won sympathy for her...

...A ninth member may soon be chosen to fill Widener's old council seat...

...Unimpressed, the crooks coolly telephoned the police and ordered them to supply ham sandwiches and wine, two getaway cars and nearly $60,000, since the bank could only provide $22,000...

...The entire top brass of the regional police scurried to the scene to be in on the capture, Paris Match was rumored to have a photographer standing by, and several cordons of heavily armed gardiens were deployed...

...In post-Gaullist France, however, gorillas and other exotic fauna are going out of fashion...

...Diirer (whose 500th anniversary is also being commemorated this year in Nuremberg, his birthplace) is deemed to be East German because his paintings have "nothing in common with the anti-humanist, aggressive system of imperialism," and East Germany is therefore the only country where his work can be appreciated...

...and she is an asset to France's sagging fashion industry, modeling its better creations with taste and engaging pleasure...

...The gendarmerie and demonstration-busting Republican Security Companies (crs) are, notoriously, paramilitary forces commanded from Paris...

...Berkeley--Despite the unwarranted fear and excitement encouraged by media coverage of the "radical takeover" here, the immediate results of the April 6 vote are unlikely to be spectacular...

...Moreover, in this highly centralized country the people have disturbingly little control over their officers of the law...

...Nevertheless, it offers impressive evidence of the enduring character of Moshe Dayan's popularity among his countrymen...

...The President's popularity has slipped lately, mainly because of social and economic tensions, though these are currently less acute than in Britain, Italy and Spain...

...Donald R. Shanor Crime and Politics Toulouse--That perennial American favorite, "law and order," was entered in the recent municipal council race here but failed to stay the course, despite the unprecedented series of holdups, kidnappings and high-school disorders that marked the weeks preceding the balloting...

...Dayan's personal standing with Israeli voters is so high that he would retain the support of a majority even if he broke away from the Labor party...