Correspondents' Correspondence

...Their harshest words are being aimed at what they call the "hate indoctrination" in the schools...

...Poet Reiner Kunze, whose incisively critical picture of East German life, The Wonderful Years, caused a stir upon publication in West Germany last year, felt compelled to leave in April...

...The resource-poor GDR is suffering from rising raw material and energy costs...

...Initially, four signatories were expelled from the Party, and six others were "reprimanded...

...At a special summer conference Werner Lamberz, the Central Committee secretary responsible for agitation, declared that the imperialist West was trying to escape its crises through "greater belligerence, the armaments race, and the counter revolutionary subversion of Socialism...

...They feel alienated from the bureaucratic state and are concerned about the future, the poet noted...

...What distinguishes this film from others about Hitler is the sound track...

...But the spirit is killed...

...Although Krug is hardly a traditional dissident, despite his signing the "Biermann Letter," he has complained that "you just can't work under those conditions...

...Party members were called upon to step up propaganda work, and citizens were urged to discuss political topics "in an aggressive and principled way" with visitors from West Germany...

...Some critics have charged that the journey is filled with far too much fond nostalgia, but Joachim Fest, producer of Hitler: A Career, says he merely meant to show how Adolf Hitler captured the German soul...

...This voice slowly but surely pressured and lulled the audience...

...This may be achieved in the short run by forcing its most vocal critics to pack up and leave, but it will not solve the underlying problems that the intellectual unrest is only one expression of.tom Heneghan Hitler Reruns Munichwest Germany's most controversial summer film attraction takes the country back about 40 years...

...Instead, in a step apparently intended to counteract all of the troubles it is facing, the Party recently launched an ideological offensive...

...In recent months, official pressure on even slightly critical artists and writers has driven a number of them to emigrate to West Germany...

...Some have seen in the ideological campaign, and especially in the drive against the dissidents, a new resurgence of anti-Semitism...

...then, within months, all were removed from their posts in the upper ranks of the Writers' Union...

...Interestingly, Biermann has joined the Spanish Communist party as a member of its Hamburg branch for Spanish immigrant workers...

...Playing in cities here since July, the two-and-one-half-hour "documentary" draws from Fest's own best-selling biography of the Fuhrer, and from stores of film archives mainly assembled by Goebbels' propaganda machine...

...That East Berlin is ready to pay this price for "stability" indicates that the Party leadership is more insecure about some of the country's recent social, cultural and economic problems than outside observers have assumed...

...In line with this, the press has been reminding everyone that "Aunt Frieda from Munich" may be a nice person, but she often brings along "whole heaps of ideological garbage" that must be resisted...

...By forcing out some of its most prominent artists, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) risks losing the respect its cultural figures have won it...

...Of late, however, pressure on the "undesirable" dissenters has been constant...

...In describing the letters and his answers, Kunze indirectly summed up the reasons why the GDR wanted him out: His appeal to disaffected youth, samizdat literature and church talks were simply seen as too threatening...

...One author was allowed to read from his works at a ceremony attended by Party boss Erich Honecker...

...The balladeer had come closer and closer to Eurocommunist ideas in the past years, and with his friend Professor Robert Havemann formed the nucleus of what Party officials saw as a dangerous ideological deviation that had to be stopped...

...The Church cannot, like an advertising firm, present its wares for inspection 'without obligation,' " Bishop Albrecht Schoenherr said...

...In addition, last year's drought had a significant impact on food supplies...

...At the very least, hundreds of thousands of Germans have been curious enough to see these Hitler reruns packaged in a way that subtly suggests the old, days weren't so bad after all.mark Hopkins...

...By the end of the year, almost 100 persons had signed the appeal...

...Soon after the November action, 12 intellectuals took the (for East Germany) unprecedented step of writing a protest letter demanding that "the measures taken be reconsidered...

...As if not to be outdone by the cultural and spiritual spheres, the economy has been another trouble-spot...

...While anti-Semitism has in fact never disappeared, the Party's major motivation at the moment appears to be to quiet things down...

...The target of Raddatz' slightly exaggerated metaphor is East Germany's treatment of dissident intellectuals...

...Others are expected to follow...

...At home, too, the government's legitimacy among its people, a perennial difficulty, is being undermined...

...Kunze, in his first interviews in exile, reported that he regularly receives numerous letters from young people who have read his work in samizdat or had heard him in churches...

...Clearly, though, there is a deep fascination with Hitler in this country where any inclination to "understand" the Fuhrer is enough to send shudders across Europe...

...Accordingly, much of the film focuses on the '30s, and Hitler himself is on camera for perhaps two-thirds of the running time...

...The Church should emphasize peace and understanding, a recent synod declared, and that means support for such issues as disarmament and conscientious objection...

...The first sign of insecurity was the expatriation of Biermann last November (see "Rumblings in East Germany," NL, January 3...

...We watch Hitler among his generals, too, and finally at the bunker patting teenage boys on the cheek before they go off to fight the Red Army moving through Berlin's devastated streets...

...Manfred Krug departed for West Berlin in June because film offers were being withdrawn and his concert audiences were filled with functionaries who sat stone-faced throughout his performances...

...Fest's narration is different...

...The voice invited one to feel close to Hitler, to try to interpret him, to understand him," Judging from the public reaction so far, West Germans are not quite ready for that...

...His wife and daughter were being continually harrassed, he said, and his frail health was not up to the strains placed on it...

...Putting it biblically, it has to go out and sell its precious pearls...

...West German film director Wim Wenders, writing in Die Zeit under a headline "That's Entertainment: Hitler," blasted the production not only for stringing together propaganda footage, and being therefore a "tribute" to Hitler, but for the way the material was presented...

...We are used to narratives that tell us Amid scenes (and a good many more than Fest shows) of the concentration camps, mass executions and destruction that Hitler was a demagogue, a dictator and a madman...

...the columns of goose-stepping troops...

...the women sobbing in adoration, like teenagers over a rock star...

...The little cars and the washing machines and the dachas remain...

...The authorities' response seemed confused...

...East German Jitters Munich-What the East German authorities have invented," West German literary critic Fritz Raddatz wrote recently, "is the cultural neutron bomb...

...That, the work's detractors argue, is strike one: The film's sources build in a pro-Hitler bias...

...Fest, co-editor of the respected Frankfurter Allgemeine, responds that his purpose was simply to show exactly how Hitler entranced the German people and managed to persuade them to follow him enthusiastically into disaster...

...A glance across the border toward Poland should convince East Berlin that prices must be raised, but after years of condemning West Germany's inflation and praising the price stability in the East, the GDR seems unwilling to face that reality...

...At the same time, some prominent signers were occasionally treated as if nothing had happened...

...The still short yet already impressive list of exiles ranges from outspoken protest singer Wolf Biermann to respected movie star Manfred Krug to Sarah Kirsch, one of today's most talented German poets...

...Some of the scenes are well-known, but even those being seen for the first time seem familiar: The mass rallies engulfed by swastikas...

...Protestant leaders, rather uncontroversial until a year ago, are today openly deploring the regime's push for atheism and its discrimination against believers...

...A novel by Christa Wolf, who is well-known in both Germanies, was printed on schedule and recommended as "compulsory reading" in a review by an important cultural functionary...

...Hitler pounding the air in beer-hall speeches, or (in color) cavorting with cohorts af his Alpine retreat...

...The increasingly critical stance of the Protestant Church is a major concern of Party officials...

...After seeing the documentary a second time, armed with a tape recorder, Wenders decided: "It was of decreasing importance what was said, and of increasing importance how it was said...

...International prestige and recognitionso important for the "other German state"is likely to be tarnished by these tactics...