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former times the church had had a say in the running of the state. Now the state encroached on the church. In the name of "socialist morality" (i.e., whatever fosters socialism is moral), Walter Ulbricht proclaimed the "Ten Commandments of Socialism." The state pressed its own forms for baptism, confirmation, and marriage, and discouraged religious education. Recalcitrant clergymen were browbeaten, or even jailed.
Presently, after years of feuding, church and state have learned to coexist, although not always comfortably. The regime continues to grant small subsidies as in pre-1945 days, tolerates religious training, and permits pastors to speak out against state-sponsored atheism but not against the socialist state itself. For its part, the church has forsworn open political opposition and, under extreme pressure, broken ties with the church in West Germany. Viewing this developments, some observers have seen the regime trying for a genuine modus vivendi, but the situation appears to be more a case of the state, by cat-and-mouse tactics, turning the church into a cooperative subject.
Overall, the regime has been more watchful of its intellectuals than its churchmen. Religious expression may be dismissed as anachronistic and irrelevant; cultural expression is officially regarded as a modern-day too for upholding and exemplifying the state. From time to time, as in the early Honecker days, the regime deems it wise to relax its hold, but normally intellectual dissent is rooted out far more quickly in insecure East Germany than in other, better established East European states.
The regime has failed rather woefully in enlisting the full cooperation of its most innovative people. It has permitted them to travel abroad, provided them with social clubs, showered them with honors, and made them financially secure. Yet, it has not seen fit to supply the degree of freedom that even avowed Marxists demand. Some of the most able of German Marxists—Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Zweig, for example—chose to reside in East Germany following World War II, and by their presence lent prestige to the regime. The situation soured, however, as many of the great talents rebelled or dried up, and few replacements were found in the younger generation. To some extent the collective excellence of orchestral and theatrical ensembles has filled the voice, but individual genius remains a dear commodity in a land of group conformity.
Lifestyle: Political and Economic (c)
As a political entity, East Germany is the product of interlocking wills: that of German Communists to fulfill their destiny as set down by the patron saints Marx and Engels and that of the Soviet Union to build for itself the broadest possible buffer zone in central Europe. The event that historically was supposed to bring forth a German Communist state—a violent class revolution—never materialized. This omission constitutes a serious departure from orthodoxy for a highly doctrinaire regime. A successful revolution, however, was never an immediate prospect for struggling members of the radical left, who ultimately found in Russian expansionism their instrument for victory.
The Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the direct antecedent of the East German ruling party, was founded at the end of World War I following a split of the Socialist Party. True to Lenin's vision, it sought by all available means to promote an upheaval on German soil as the precondition for revolution everywhere. At the time of Hitler's accession to power in 1933, the KPD had 300,000 members, a total second only to the Soviet party in the Comintern. Over the next 12 years Nazi persecution and party factional strife thinned the ranks and hardened the survivors in their determination to build a new German state following World War II.
Communist rule in the Soviet Zone of Germany commenced on 30 April 1945 when the "Ulbricht group" arrived from Moscow. Operating under Soviet aegis, it offered the semblance of a democratic system. As the Cold War came on and the time for mollifying the West passed, a new reality appeared: an authoritarian state patterned on the Soviet model and subservient to it. All power was lodged in the Socialist Unity Party (SED), the party formed by the forced merger in April 1946 of the Social Democratic Party
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APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2009/06/16: CIA-RDP01-00707R000200110020-1
