GDR’s East Berlin:
portrayed as gloomy,
its future is bright

Around five in the morning, before the
night sky has begun to pale, East Berlin spr-
ings to life. Within minutes, Unter den
Linden, Friedrich Strasse, all the broad
thoroughfares into the city centre, become
fast-moving streams of traffic, an outpour-
ing of Trabants and Wartburgs intermingled
with West German and Japanese cars. By
eight at the latest, travelling by car, bus and
tram, by the S-bahn elevated and U-Bahn
underground railways, plant, office and
store workers all will be on the job.

In the German Democratic Republic no
one physically able to work is unemployed,
no one is laid off, no young person looks
hopelessly for work. Unemployment, now
rife in the German Federal Republic, ends at
the East German border, emerging again on-
ly in West Berlin where Siemens and other
big industrial concerns have laid off
thousands of workers.

Across the street I watch a little parade.
The nursery school teachers are taking their
young charges out. But this is not the
familiar straggle of tots anxiously shepherd-
ed along the sidewalk. Well bundled up,
cheeks glowing, these tots are seated in carts
three abreast facing each other across a little
table while their teachers push them along.

A short distance away, at the Spit-
telmarkt, I stop at the Kinderkaufaus, a
children’s wear store designed for children as
well as parents. A wooden horse in the
footwear section catches my eye. On each
side it is hung with three seats and in one of
them a small boy is being fitted with shoes.
The seats are exactly the right height to make
the fitting easy.

As I was to discover everywhere I went in
the GDR, the children themselves are the
best evidence of the care and affection
lavished on them, not only by their families
but by a society conscious that they embody
the socialist future it is working to create.

Retracing my steps, I cross a bridge over
the River Spree, pausing to watch two swans
gliding below undisturbed by the noise of the
traf fic, and make my way to a supermarket
catering to a complex of tower apartments
on the Fischerinsel, an island in the heart o!
the city.

The store, in layout much like any Cana-
dian supermarket, is busy but not crowded.
The shopping carts are smaller, for the daily
shopping habit common to most European
countries is still strong, but the well stocked
shelves offer a good variety of foods, beer
and wines. Like thrifty shoppers anywhere,
the customers are choosing carefully and I
watch a man methodically upending bottles
of beer and inspecting them for cloudiness.

What is different from Canadian super-
markets is the absence of junk foods, the art-
fully arranged inducements to impulse buy-
ing at the ends of the aisles and the prolifera-
tion , of everything from hardware to

clothing.

I pick up the few things I need, struggling
to recall enough of my first year German to
read the printing on the packages, and make
my way to a checkout. The line is short and
the service quick because the counter is clear,
uncluttered by all the displays that impede
service in Canadian supermarkets.

Having disposed of my purchases, I
decide to walk to meet Dr. Heiner Winkler,
editor in chief of Horizont, a monthly
review of international affairs, at his offices
on Mauerstrasse.

The now familiar route will take me along
Unter den Linden which becomes Karl
Liebnecht Strasse at Marx-Engels Platz; past
Bebelplatz, where in 1933 the Nazis staged
their infamous book-burning, and the
Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and
Militarism; past the bronzed Palace of the
Republic to the TV Tower with its
restaurants, gardens and fountains, now the
dominant city landmark, and on to Alex-
anderplatz, the vast architectural showplace
of East Berlin.

This is the new East Berlin, a blending of
patiently restored historic structures with
imaginative new buildings in a spacious
design threaded by waterways. I wonder
how anyone can describe it as ‘‘a human and
architectural landscape almost frozen in
time,’”’ as James Markham did recently in
the New York Times.

But the impressions of the GDR capital as
grey and dull is assiduously cultivated by the
Western media. The National Geographic
finds ‘‘drabness, a monotony in the plod-
ding respectability, and a lack of charm”’ in
East Berlin. A syndicated travel writer in the
Vancouver Sun contrasts the glitter of West
Berlin with ‘‘gloomy East Berlin’.

In the years immediately after the war,
when all Berlin was digging itself out of the
rubble, money poured in from the U.S. to
rebuild the Western sectors, to rehabilitate
West German industry. West Berlin was in-
deed to be the glittering showcase for the
West just as the federal republic was to be the
‘ew Germany”’ recast in more acceptable
form upon the same monopoly corporate
base that sustained both the Weimar
Republic and Hitler’s Reich.

By every enticement to those who had no
taste for the hardships of building a new
socialist Germany, what is now the GDR
was to be drained of the talent and man-
power so desperately needed for its
monumental task, a task as much the cleans-
ing of minds poisoned by years of Nazi pro-
paganda as the physical regeneration of the
country. —

The Berlin Wall and its extension the
length of East Germany’s border with the
West was the necessary physical response to
a continuing ideological assault the west is
now steadily losing.

Dependent on West Germany for more
than half its revenue, West Berlin’s

EAST BERLIN . . . at top,

man fishes in the Spree Canal near Marx-Engels
Platz; old and new architecture on Karl Liebknecht

Strasse.

unemployment rate is more than 10 percent.
Its housing problems are worsened by
developers who find it more profitable to
build new apartments than renovate old
houses. Neighborhoods from which squat-
ters have been evicted lie derelict. Heroin ad-
diction claims two lives every week.

“Rast Berlin has none of these
problems,’’ Dr. Winkler remarks when | ar-
rive at his office. A tall stooped man with an
old world courtesy the New York Times
doubtless would find ‘‘frozen in time,’’ he
greets me warmly, recalling our meeting in
Vancouver during his cross-country tour of
Canada a few years ago.

“We still have a housing problem, but at
the rate of new construction we expect to
solve it by the end of this decade. Meantime,
we have renovated all the old flats until they
can be replaced,” he tells me.

“Inflation and unemployment are accen-
tuating the decline of West Berlin. Over the
last 10 years it has lost 300,000 people. We
shall see what solutions this new Christian
Democratic mayor, Richard von Weizacher,
offers, but I doubt if he can halt the
decline.”’

The contrasts between the two German
states are taking ever clearer form as the
“economic miracle’’ of the federal republic
falters under the ravages of the depression
while the democratic republic, untouched by
unemployment and inflation, recycling its
limited resources, continues to expand its
impressive achievements.

As I make my way back to the Unter den
Linden, I note the street signs symbolic of all
that is finest in more than a century of Ger-
man history — Marx, Engels, Liebknecht,
Bebel, Clara Zetkin, Rosa Luxemburg —

and reflect that the GDR is the living em-
bodiment of the aspirations of generations
of working people, crushed in the revolution
of 1848, betrayed by right wing Social
Democratic leaders and crushed again in the
revolution of 1918, decimated but not
destroyed when Hitler seized power in 1933.

In East Berlin’s Museum of German
History, pride of place is given to those,
hunted by the Gestapo, whose resistance
kept those aspirations alive.

The honor guard outside the Memorial to
the Victims of Fascism and Militarism on
Unter den Linden is an enduring reminder to
all who pass, not only of the horrors of the
past but of the infinitely greater horrors con-
templated by those who threaten them with
nuclear war.

Yet such is the venom of the media that
Anthony Bailey, in a series carried by the
New Yorker recently, can given the history
of the Schinkel-designed building, describe
the goose-stepping changing of the guard
ceremony as a link with Hitlerism — and
never mention that this is a memorial to
Hitler’s victims.

On Bebelplatz, as I pass, stands are being
erected for a great peace demonstration. In
their longing for peace, their determination
not to become the victims of U.S. ambitions, —
the peoples of the two German states are
united, for their memories embrace the d
of two world wars.

Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s decision t0
allow installation of new U.S. missiles 10
West Germany indicates that he has learned
nothing from history, unlike the three
quarters of West Germans who oppose that
decision. And it may well prove to be an act
of political self-immolation.

— Hal Griffin

The Soviet
view: an
honest book
from a U.S.
publisher

At a time when strident acrimony
against the Soviet Union has become the
rationale for U.S. policies, confusion
about Soviet positions is widespread.
Therefore a handbook of Soviet views, at-
titudes and policies is a most helpful tool.

The most recent addition to such works
is a series of viewpoints provided by Georgi
Arbatov to the Dutch journalist Willem
Oltmans. Arbatov is the director of the In-
stitute of United States and Canada in
Moscow, a member of the Soviet Academy
of Sciences and a member of the Central

Committee of the Communist Party of the -

Soviet Union. The book is based on 150
questions submitted to Arbatov.
‘“‘Among the questions I asked,’
Oltmans writes in the preface, ‘‘were quite
a few unpleasant ones, implying criticism
of Soviet life and the policies of the USSR.

THE SOVIET VIEWPOINT. By Georgi Ar-
batov and Willem Oltmans. Published -by
Dodd Mead, New York. Avail, at Co-op
Books. Cloth $18.95.

Professor Arbatov did not take them. as
unfriendly, realizing that those questions
were really on the minds of many people in
the West.”’

The questions and Arbatov’s concise
replies are presented in six chapters cover-
ing the most urgent questions of our time,
from the arms race to human rights and
dissidents.

The manuscript was completed in 1982
and therefore includes only the beginning
of the Reagan administration and the
resulting deterioration of relations between
the two countries. Still, the book addresses
the basic misconceptions and falsehoods

current in the U.S. media.

Former U.S. Senator and chairman of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee J.
William Fulbright, in an infroduction, puts
his finger on the importance of the book.
‘for over thirty years,’’ he writes, ‘‘two
schools of thought regarding Soviet-
American relations, the cold-war school
and the detente school, have competed for
the allegiance of the American people... |

“This unusual treatise presents serious
and responsible Americans with the Soviet —
point of view, It is vitally important to our
future that. we make no mistake in
understanding it.”’

The book is not only a valuable tool for
activists, it should be in every library asan |
easy reference on the Soviet viewpoint.

— Margrit Pittman J

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—NOVEMBER 16, 1983—Page 10