Rumblings in East Germany
HENEGHAN, TOM
THE CRACKDOWN ON DISSIDENTS Rumblings in East Germany by Tom Heneghan Munich We live like strangers in our own house," Wolf Bier-mann told a West German audience last November. The Communist...
...Another strategy is invoking the section of the East German Constitution allowing a citizen to be relieved of citizenship...
...Soon afterward, on November 16, he was officially turned into a stranger when East Berlin stripped him of his citizenship for having "grossly insulted" the state, and announced he would not be allowed to return home...
...As the organ of the host Party, Neues Deutschland was obliged to print the texts of all the speeches...
...They point to underlined passages providing for family reunification and the free movement of people across borders...
...West Germany is too near and visible for the authorities to prevent people from comparing the two societies...
...Today we have grown up . . . We are beginning to lose the characteristics of a church...
...Biermann immediately protested...
...He was a prominent professor of chemistry before being ousted from both the Party and the Humboldt University about the kind of life they prefer...
...While loyalists like the Portuguese and most Eastern Europeans acknowledged the Soviet model, the Eurocommunists called for greater independence for the national par-tics...
...Biermann was bom in Hamburg in 1936...
...He is speaking particularly to the young, many of whom find the assignment too difficult and are opting instead for emigration...
...In September, a letter was read from the pulpits of all Protestant churches about the tensions in East German society pointed up by the Bruesewitz suicide...
...Similarly, the blustery anti-dissident crackdown that began immediately after Biermann's concert last month continues, albeit in a somewhat modulated key...
...As for Biermann, expatriation is likely to mean more than just a change of address...
...Whether Eurocommunist ideas are being debated within the SED is hard to determine...
...Persecuted by the Nazis for his Communist beliefs, Havemann moved from West to East after the War...
...And with detente "German-German" contacts have not only increased but in the East have begun to boldly point out what they consider their country's shortcomings...
...he was expelled from the Socialist Unity Party (SF.DK with Tom Heneghan reports regularly in these pages on European allairs...
...The action marked the intensification of a campaign to curb a growing restlessness in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and still the critical voices—of whose the 40-year-old Biermann's is the most persistent and best known...
...He had been regularly issuing demands for domestic reforms, including the introduction of a Socialist opposition party, a free press and autonomous trade unions...
...The phenomenon is quite new for East Germany, and the Party leadership has been split over how to handle it...
...Perhaps the prime catalyst for the change of attitude was the accord reached by the European Security Conference at Helsinki...
...After traveling to East Germany several times as a high-school student, he moved to East Berlin in 1953...
...Indeed, much of his work and reputation rested on his decision to remain in the East...
...security police disconnected Have-mann's telephone...
...He rails against the "monopoly bureaucrats" and mocks the hypocritical career-ism of Party members...
...In a statement after the concert, Biermann made several unexpectedly positive comments about the church, especially the "Red church" he saw developing that "emphasizes the Communist dimensions of the Gospels and thus criticizes [the East German...
...Never before had the church and the intellegentsia found any common ground at all...
...Nevertheless, he will probably always feel like a stranger in it...
...By comparison, in 1970—before detente?00 exit visas were granted...
...To obtain needed funds from the West, Honecker has accepted conditions imposed by West Germany that indirectly link credits to progress in human rights...
...If this does not work, they write to the United Nations—which East Germany joined in 1973—or to its Commission on Human Rights...
...And the church synod called on the government to join in a discussion of official discrimination against young Christians...
...But now the East German leaders seem to be bending in the opposite direction...
...Following this protest—the first of its kind in East German history—other intellectuals joined in, bringing the number of signatures above 70...
...This church-state relationship was upset in August when Pastor Oskar Bruesewitz immolated himself in protest against the Party's policies toward the youth and Christians...
...Brandt and his advisers seemed to favor easing West Germany's conditions for credits and aid to East GeT^my, a move intended to boost tht tc t's economy and imply support 'or its leaders...
...Biermann's repertoire includes numerous songs about staying "here" in the GDR...
...By the early 1960s, Biermann was writing satirical poems and ballads modeled on the work of Brecht and the French chansonnier Georges Bras-sons...
...The most obvious indication of the new popular mood has been a dramatic rise in emigration applications...
...given the Party's orthodoxy this seems unlikely...
...Its effect was to increase Bier-mann's audience and standing...
...He was aware, of course, of the irony of his situation...
...and the new connection—tenuous as it might be—set Party leauers worrying that they could find themselves confronting the kind of opposition that has been so effective in neighboring Poland...
...In sparse vignettes,the book portrays the pressures young people face growing up in a bureaucratized society...
...In 1963...
...What is particularly disturbing to East Berlin is that a large proportion of the visa applicants are professionals—especially doctors—and young people...
...The message thus transmitted, things have settled down to vigilant enforcement...
...As for the West German concert tour that quickly resulted in his expatriation, if was undertaken following assurances from the authorities—who have long been offering him permanent exit visas—that no such move against him would be made...
...Havemann admits that removing the Wall would result in a "flight en masse" from East Germany, but he urges the state to fund trips to the West so that East Germans can make their own choices Biermann still defends the Communist GDR, singing and writing against people who would like to leave it...
...He has produced five books and five record albums in the West, and tapes and texts of his songs have circulated widely in the East...
...He sang his antifascist songs and argued with the Maoist hecklers...
...Church leaders did not approve of the pastor's act, but they admitted that it moved them to reconsider whether they were adequately representing their congregations' interests...
...Biermann feels this may have set off discussions within the German Party...
...Most people applying for permission to emigrate bring with them a copy of the agreement's Final Act, published in full by the Party organ, Neues Deutschland...
...Under Honecker, who became Party chief in 1971, East Germany has pursued a cautious detente with the West and permitted a certain loosening of the orthodox cultural policies...
...Within days of his performance, several of the singer's supporters were arrested...
...Within the past 15 months about 110,000 East Germans have applied for exit visas to the West...
...Approximately 10,000 persons received permission to leave in 1975, and the 1976 total should be about the same...
...The GDR has always had problems developing specifically East German loyalties among its citizens...
...His mixture of critical and melancholy songs made him popular with youth in both parts of Germany but unpopular with the Party...
...Kunze's expulsion from the Writers' Union did not arouse public protest, but 12 intellectuals did petition the leadership to "rethink" the Biermann expatriation...
...Leftists will consider him "too Communist" or "a revisionist" or "anti-Soviet," depending on which splinter group is doing the criticizing...
...Havemann was equally optimistic, declaring in several interviews that the Brezhnev Doctrine of international Communist unity was now "buried for good...
...The former chairman, Willy Stoph, became premier, replacing Horst Sindermann, who moved into the less influential position of President of the People's Chamber...
...The stricter work norms he opposed have reportedly come into effect in certain areas, and a general tightening of Party policy is visible...
...and the telephone was cut in Biermann's apartment, where his wife and infant son still live...
...Many youths see it as a kind of opposition," an East German writer told the news magazine Der Spiegel...
...Paul: "Moscow, where our dreams first began to come true, was for a long time a kind of Rome for us...
...the ban on publishing and performing coming two years later...
...Meanwhile, the delayed effects of Western inflation have combined with increasing demands from the Soviet-dominated Council for Mutual Economic Assistance to force East German compromises in the economic front, too...
...One of them, Reiner Kunze, was recently thrown out of the Writers' Union when his prose collection, The Wonderful Years, appeared in the West...
...But it was not the same as before...
...Today he is cut off from all that and it will not be easy for him to find his place in a Germany very different from the one he was forced to leave...
...Italian Communist Party leader Enrico Berlinguer spoke out for a nonideological state and freedom of religion and expression...
...During the September election campaign in West Germany those hopes had been heightened by the Social Democrats' announcement that a "second phase of Ostpolitik" would soon be launched...
...Recently 70 persons in the small Saxon town of Riesa did this...
...The others simply wanted to leave and were willing to accept the inevitable harassment, discrimination and unemployment confronted by visa applicants...
...The new restiveness is also being felt in the East German Protestant Church...
...Sindermann, on the other hand, was a Honecker appointee who fostered more flexible economic policies...
...There he studied political economy and philosophy, and worked in the late 1950s at Bertold Brecht's Berliner Ensemble...
...Santiago Carrillo, head of the outlawed Spanish party, made a presentation worthy of St...
...Nevertheless, Biermann apparently thought sufficiently important changes were under way to risk leaving his country for the concert tour in the West...
...He even turned his sights on West Germany, calling some local politicians "old Nazis" and poking fun at conservative election slogans...
...While his poetic sense and expressive guitar playing would have made Biermann a popular balladeer in any case, the political spice he adds makes his songs unique...
...The Communist balladecr was refering to East Germany's dissidents, a small group of intellectuals deeply committed to their country and its ideology but unhappy with the way the two have evolved...
...It was his spreading of these and other ideas through interviews on West German television and radio, which is received in most of East Germany, that apparently resulted in his being held incommunicado...
...The reshuffle gave Honecker added responsibilities, but it may have cost him the limited flexibility he had supported...
...His father, a Communist dockworker active in the anti-Nazi underground, was killed in Auschwitz...
...At his first concert "in exile," he started off with his popular "This Way or That Way, the World Will Go Red...
...Details were few, but the idea began to be taken seriously when Willy Brandt, who had avoided the question of East Germany since his reignation as Chancellor in May 1974, showed interest in "new impulses" to get the Ostpolitik out of the rut it has been in under Chancellor Helmut Schmidt...
...In addition to being a small group, except for Biermann and Havemann the East German dissidents lack the tenacity of their colleagues in Prague and have none of the influence gained by their counterparts in Warsaw...
...This has aroused the concern of other Politburo members, who speak fearfully of East Germany's growing dependence on foreign loans and the negative effects of detente...
...Havemann then began devoting himself to philosophy and politics and became a sort of spokesman for the East German dissidents...
...The meeting, intended to demonstrate the unity of European Communists behind the leadership of the Soviets, became a public manifestation of the fragmentation developing in the Communist movement...
...He grew up in what became West Germany, leaving it to live, as he put it, in "the better German state...
...Although it is 12 years since he was banned from giving public performances in East Germany, his songs against the Party bureaucracy and in support of "Communism with a human face" are popular on both sides of the Wall...
...Recent changes in the Party leadership indicate that the hardliners may be getting their way...
...East Germans should stay to improve the "important social experiment" they have created...
...This was our childhood...
...As part of the regime's current crackdown, the 65-year-old professor was placed under house arrest early last month...
...West Germany will no doubt provide a home for Wolf Biermann...
...The majority of religious East Germans are Protestants...
...declaring he would not apply for citizenship in the West...
...In any case," he said in an interview after the conference, "young people are passionately discussing the speeches of Comrades Berlinguer, Carrillo and Marchais...
...We spoke of the Great October Socialist Revolution as if it were our Christmas...
...The capitalist West is worse, he says...
...Despite his criticism, though, in 1964 for delivering a series of provocative lectures on Socialist Democracy...
...Even so, they present difficulties for the SED because of East Germany's special situation as part of a divided nation, and because of the important changes it is now experiencing...
...They are calling for stricter work standards and a tougher policy toward dissidents and detente...
...The authorities have responded with tough measures, jailing some protesters and severely pressuring others to remove their names from the list...
...It has contributed as well to the emergence of conflicting trends and opinions in the previously monolithic Socialist Unity Party...
...situation from a Christian-Communist standpoint...
...The performance was not publicized, but the place was packed with the singer's followers...
...He will be uncomfortable with those on the Right because he is a Communist...
...at least seven have been imprisoned, and the others are under official pressure to withdraw their applications...
...Stoph, Premier from 1964-73, is a respected politician and is expected to be able to introduce the tougher measures...
...Next, statements supporting the Party's get-tough policy filled the pages of Neues Deutschland...
...Less well-known, yet troublesome to the authorities, are a small number of writers and artists who sometimes manage to work within official Party policy and at other times draw the fire of the censor...
...The stronger and more self-confident the Party leaders are, proponents of the proposal argued, the less reluctant they will be to expand detente...
...Ultimately, it was further said, confidence within the Party leadership would also produce more freedom inside East Germany...
...This has dampened the hopes of observers previously inclined to the view that real possibilities for change existed in East Germany...
...Over the years, the church has been a compliant and therefore accepted organization, rendering unto Party boss Erich Honecker what is Honecker's and limiting itself to strictly defined pastoral work...
...The international recognition accorded the GDR in the past few years had already led to a certain liberalization, and even Honecker had hinted in conversations with West German officials that eased credit restrictions could prompt progress in human rights...
...The same month a Protestant church in Prenzlau defiantly hosted Biermann's first concert in East Germany since 1965...
...Another dissident who has felt the wrath of the government is Biermann's close friend, Professor Robert Havemann...
...Official artists, like those in the Writers' Union, are dismissed as "poets with sweaty palms...
...Many of the signers are prominent cultural figures...
...In a surprise move in late October, Honecker took over the chairmanship of the State Council, the GDR's number two job, while retaining the Party leadership post...
...Only about half of the recent emigrants were going to join relatives in the West...
...They become dropouts...
...all they say is 'I've got an application going.' " Biermann and Havemann believe that the conference of European Communist Parties in East Berlin last June also influenced the domestic scene...
...The Politburo is reportedly limiting emigration visas only tr those with close relatives in the West...
Vol. 60 • January 1977 • No. 1
