APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7
to acceptance of the system, and the regime was thereby provided with a hitherto unknown degree of stability. While some East Germans still risk their lives to flee to West Germany, most have apparently made their adjustment to the regime and have focused their energies on improving their material well-being within the existing system.
The SED seems willing to encourage a spirit of compliance with regime demands, up to a point at least, by toning down its insistence on complete ideological commitment. In the years immediately preceding the 1968 Czechoslovak crisis, the regime seemed more concerned with the technical competence of the managerial personnel staffing the country's economic apparatus than with their ideological purity. In that period the East Germans began to develop a sense of pride in their own accomplishments despite recurrent setbacks and the dim prospect for matching West Germany's high rate of economic growth and development. Following the Czechoslovak crisis, however, the regime decided to reemphasize ideological loyalty and moved to check suspected trends toward liberalism and independent thinking within the society. The stress on formal ideological correctness continues and seems even to have sharpened under the Honecker regime, but this has been accompanied by a series of practical measures to improve the material welfare of the East German citizenry, and to encourage within limits greater variety in literary and artistic expression. Through these improvements the SED hopes that it can persuade a skeptical populace that genuine happiness is possible in a Communist society.
B. Structure and characteristics of the society
1. Ethnic and linguistic composition
Except for Thuringia (centering on the city of Weimar), which has been occupied by Germans since ancient times, the present territory of East Germany was colonized between A.D. 900 and 1200 by German settlers from the west. Over the next millennium the underlying West Slavic population was absorbed, the Polabians in the north eventually disappearing in the early 19th century, and the Sorbs, also known as the Wends, of whom there are 38,000 (West German estimate) to 100,000 (East German estimate), reduced to two separated areas in the eastern portions of Cottbus and Dresden districts. The physical characteristics of the population, therefore, reflect not only those of the north and central German population, but also those of the neighboring Poles and Czechs. Despite the Hitler regime's adulation of the so-called Nordic type, Germans display a wide variety of physical characteristics, ranging from large numbers of tall, blond, blue-eyed individuals in the northwest to shorter, brunet, brown-eyed types in the southeast. In general, East Germans represent an intermediate stage between these two extremes.
After World War II, the four occupation zones of Germany absorbed about 12 million ethnic Germans from former German areas east of the Oder and Neisse rivers, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and other Eastern European countries. At the peak, the number of those expellees sent to East Germany reached about 4.3 million, or roughly 25% of the total population, but many of them subsequently moved on to West Germany. The ethnic Germans, who had lived for generations amid the local Slavic and other populations, tended to intermarry within their own group so that the postwar immigration resulted in comparatively little influx of new ethnic strains. The authorities integrated these immigrants politically and economically into East German society, which remains basically homogenous.
At the same time, however, the authorities have encouraged the indigenous Slav minority, the Sorbs, to preserve their identity, in contrast to the assimilative policies of previous German governments. For a number of years the regime paid lip service to the theory of a separate Sorbian identity, when in fact the Sorbs were well integrated into East German society. This in part responded to Soviet, Polish, and especially Czech concern for this West Slavic remnant. Special laws have been enacted to protect the Sorbian minority, encouraging their language and culture, and provision is made both within the Ministry for Cultural Affairs and in the national and district assemblies to assure Sorbian representation. In addition to their own "national" organization, the Domowina, the Sorbs have their own newspaper, publishing house, radio programs, museum, theater, and schools. Despite these measures, the Sorbs still feel themselves incapable of resisting Germanizing trends, especially since the opening of the Schwarze Pumpe lignite combine in 1955 near Hoyerswerda, in Sorb territory. The only other minority of any significance is the growing group of East Europeans, primarily Polish and Hungarian, workers employed on short-term contracts in numerous enterprises. These workers are not encouraged to bring their families with them, and no attempt has been made to encourage their integration into the German community. With the labor shortage more than likely to worsen in coming
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110024-7
