Communists From Germany

"It had all been in vain. The prayers in churches and in mosques-all in vain. The invocations, the appeals to long-forgotten, long-ignored gods-in vain. And their final resistance with knives and teeth-in vain. Cowardice had also been in vain. Hiding, waiting-everything in vain. In vain, too, the promises, the hopes, the unexpected generosity of strangers. Whether their fathers had started plowing only yesterday or their forefathers two thousand years ago-it was all in vain. Men who looked death in the eye as they did life, coldly without blinking, and wore lions' claws made of iron on their belts, their courage was in vain; and in vain did the lion keep his vigil before the palace in the capital city. The conquerors rode astride his back and tore at his mane, yelling and hooting. Everything that had existed before had become incomprehensible. The totality of life and living, because it was suddenly all in vain. The simple yesterday and the day before yesterday that were clear to everyone, and the two thousand years that some men could look back on, the incredible, hazy yet real life, one's own existence from time immemorial-the one as much in vain as the other. If there is not going to be any future, then the past will all have been in vain. (beginning of "The Guide")"

"And yet although all this transit whispering made me feel quite miserable, it was amazing to think that even though thousands, no, hundreds of thousands, had died in the flames of the air raids and the furious attacks of the Blitzkrieg, there were many more who were born quite without being noticed by the consuls. They hadn't asked for letters of transit, hadn't applied for visas; they were not under the jurisdiction of this place. And what if some of these poor souls, still bleeding physically and spiritually, had fled to this house, what harm could it do to a giant nation if a few of these saved souls, worthy, half-worthy, or unworthy, were to join them in their country-how could it possibly harm such a big country? (chapter 8 p178)"

"He stopped before a shopwindow, and we recognized his face. On the left side of his forehead, just below the hairline, he had an incredible scar. He stood there, with this hole in his temple, in the middle of the colorful Parisian winter-evening throngs, like one risen from the dead, like the captain of a ship of the dead. Such people wear their own legend like a heraldic crest wherever they go. And whenever we see such people, their external appearance reminds us of this legend. (from "Meeting Again")"

"They're saying that the Montreal went down between Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine. The shipping company isn't releasing any information. It may just be a rumor. But when you compare it to the fate of other ships and their cargoes of refugees which were hounded over all the oceans and never allowed to dock, which were left to burn on the high seas rather than being permitted to drop anchor merely because their passengers' documents had expired a couple of days before, then what happened to the Montreal seems like a natural death for a ship in wartime. That is, if it isn't all just a rumor. And provided the ship, in the meantime, hasn't been captured or ordered back to Dakar. In that case the passengers would now be sweltering in a camp at the edge of the Sahara. Or maybe they're already happily on the other side of the ocean. Probably you find all of this pretty unimportant? You're bored?-I am too. May I invite you to join me at my table? Unfortunately I don't have enough money for a regular supper. But how about a glass of rosé and a slice of pizza? Come, sit with me. Would you like to watch them bake the pizza on the open fire? Then sit next to me. Or would you prefer the view of the Old Harbor? Then you'd better sit across from me. You can see the sun go down behind Fort St. Nicolas. That certainly won't be boring. (beginning of chapter 1)"

"If there remained in him only the strength for one tiny movement in the direction of freedom, no matter how senseless and useless the movement, he would still want to make it. (chapter III p173)"

"The whole town was a tortuous net in which he was already caught. He would have to slip through the meshes. (chapter III p173)"

"[He] got up out of bed and stuck his head out of his little window as far as he could. It was utterly quiet. But for the first time this quiet failed to give him a sense of peace-the world wasn't quiet, it was speechless. Involuntarily he pulled his hands out of the moonlight which, like no other light, has the faculty of clinging to every surface and penetrating every crevice. (chapter I p60)"

"One morning in September 1940, when the largest swastika flag in all of the countries occupied by Germany was flying over the Place de la Concorde in Paris, and the lines outside the shops were as long as the streets themselves, a certain Luise Meunier, the wife of a lathe operator and mother of three children, heard that one could buy eggs at a shop in the 14th arrondissement. (beginning of "Shelter")"

"A miracle that he was even speaking, and then to say what he had said. Usually you hear only about the things that excited people, never about what silenced them. (from "Tales of Artemis")"

"The Spaniards waiting there gathered around us, watching our reunion and smiling with the indomitable hearts of passionate people not yet hardened by war, detention camps, or the horror of thousands of deaths. (chapter 6 p127)"

"I felt anxious, the way you do when a dream seems too real and at the same time something intangible, imperceptible, tells you that whatever makes you feel happy or sad can never be reality. (chapter 7 p156)"

"It happened the first week of April, I think. (beginning of "The Lord's Prayer")"

"What normally is spread over the span of a lifetime, over a number of years, an exertion of all of one's powers to the breaking point, the relaxing and yielding and painful straining again-all this took place in his mind in the space of an hour-while minutes changed. (Chapter V, p262)"

"Seghers is one of those rare twentieth-century German writers who had a need and a use for the short-story form throughout the entire span of her career. The genre enabled her to react relatively quickly to shifting situations. The stories in this collection span a period of just over thirty years-covering the Weimar Republic after the onset of inflation, the Great Depression, the Nazis' seizure of power, Seghers's escape to France, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and her emigration to Mexico, and extending on into the postwar period, the Cold War, the emergence of two German states, and the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1956, which exposed the crimes of Stalinism. There is no other writer working in the German language over that long span of time whose stories and novellas have such stylistic diversity and such a wide range of approaches and aims. Seghers wanted to describe the world in order to change it. In this sense, each specific time finds its embodiment in one of her stories."

""With me it's something else," he said. "I'm Jewish. For me the magnanimity of the German people was never even a consideration." (Chapter 4 p98)"

"The GDR has paved its way with achievements serving to strengthen our people in the knowledge of their power and of the worth of all efforts to establish a new, humane, complete life. Socialism and peace are, and remain, key words for that which we have achieved up to now, as well as that which we will continue to accomplish. We tackle the task with vigor and confidence. In its fifth decade, the socialist workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil will continue to prove – through its actions for the good of its people and through its efforts for peace, security and international cooperation – that its founding in October of 1949 was a turning point in the history of the German people and of Europe."

"Life in our country and international events presently pose questions which demand clear answers from a firm position. Our position does not come from one of the scandal sheets of the FRG, nor from the radio or television there; it has not evolved out of dated doctrine, but rather from the creative application of Marxism-Leninism, from the interests of the working class and all factory workers. In a word, our position is a policy based on the highest principle, namely, to do everything possible for the well-being of the people and a future in peace. Accordingly, we do not stop at the achievements we have made. Upon attaining something dependable, we leave behind that which is outdated and restrictive; we are progressing on our course of unified economic and social policy. In this spirit, we will also continue to develop socialist democracy in its many forms. Our aim is for citizens to participate more and more actively and concretely in the activities of the state."

"Whether Deng's example would now shake Gorbachev's authority remained to be seen. One European communist who hoped it might was Erich Honecker, the long-time hard-line ruler of East Germany. His most recent election, held in May, 1989, had produced an implausible 98.95 percent vote in favor of his government. After the Tiananmen massacre Honecker's secret police chief, Erich Mielke, commended the Chinese action to his subordinates as "resolute measures in suppression of . . . counterrevolutionary unrest." East German television repeatedly ran a Beijing-produced documentary praising "the heroic response of the Chinese army and police to the perfidious inhumanity of the student demonstrators." All of this seemed to suggest that Honecker had the German Democratic Republic under control—until the regime noticed that an unusually large number of its citizens were taking their summer vacations in Hungary. When the Hungarian authorities took down the barbed wire along the Austrian border, they had intended only to make it easier for their own citizens to get through. But the word spread, and soon thousands of East Germans were driving their tiny wheezing polluting Trabants through Czechoslovakia and Hungary to the border, abandoning them there, and walking across. Others crowded into the West German embassy in Budapest, demanding asylum. By September, there were 130,000 East Germans in Hungary and the government announced that, for "humanitarian" reasons, it would not try to stop their emigration to the West. Honecker and his associates were furious: "Hungary is betraying socialism," Mielke fumed. "We have to guard against being discouraged," another party official warned. "[B]ecause of developments in the Soviet Union, Poland, and Hungary . . . [m]ore and more people are asking how is socialism going to survive at all?" That was an excellent question, for soon some 3,000 East German asylum-seekers had climbed the fence surrounding West Germany's embassy in Prague and crammed themselves inside, with full television coverage."

"35 years of the German Democratic Republic have been 35 years of hard struggle for peace and socialism. Our people, under the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, has truly done great things during these years. We are filled with joy that you, under the sign of the rising sun, display the same revolutionary spirit for the strengthening and defense of socialism."

"Today peace is seriously threatened by the aggressive striving for supremacy of the United States and the growing armaments of NATO. First-strike weapons in Europe, above all in the FRG, have created a dangerous situation. There is nothing more important for us than to devote every energy to stopping a nuclear catastrophe. We want to create peace in the face of NATO’s weapons."

"The military and strategic balance must remain, with ever lower numbers of weapons. The limitation and reduction of armaments according to the principle of equality and equal security-that is our goal. The return to detente-that is our task."

"Frequently I have heard criticism and even accusations directed against me for my policy towards the countries of Eastern Europe. Some say that Gorbachev did not defend socialism in those countries, that he more or less 'betrayed his friends'. Others, on the contrary, accuse me for having been too patient with Ceaușescu, Honecker, Zhivkov and Husák, who had brought their states to the brink of catastrophe. I firmly reject these accusations. They derive from outdated notions about the nature of relations between our countries. We had no right to interfere in the affairs of our 'satellites', to defend and preserve some and punish and 'excommunicate' others without reckoning with the people's will."

"Imperialism bet its bottom dollar on counterrevolution. Under the circumstances, we combined political actions with administrative measures and, very shortly, we succeeded in isolating the counterrevolutionary forces from the working class."

"Leninism is said to be creatively applied in Poland. This is a pretext of the counterrevolutionary and antisocialist forces so that they may be able to succeed in diverting Poland from its course, in changing the Polish socialist system. Free elections are talked about more and more in Poland. What purpose is pursued by this? It is easy to understand. That is why, via the information mass media, all these issues must be well clarified. However, on November 7th a cartoon was published in Poland showing an executioner with an axe in his hand, bearing the following caption: services rendered to the population. There are lots of facts attesting to the fact that some Polish writers write material against the people's system in Poland."

"It has been said, with good reason, that a revolution can take place peacefully or unpeacefully. Being Communists, we must be ready to consider both ways and, in certain moments, to act in accordance with the situation that was created, using various means. However, if the fate of the people's power is endangered, we will have no other choice but to have the organs of the popular power act decisively. We state this fact on the basis of our experience and of the conclusions we drew regarding the events in 1953. The same thing is apparent from the events in Hungary in 1956, and from the events in Czechoslovakia in 1968."

"In Berlin, the city of peace, your unshakable will now more than ever to do everything for the strengthening of our socialist fatherland, the German Democratic Republic, and for the safeguarding of peace, will be reinforced."

"Before history we have accepted the responsibility of never again permitting war to begin on German soil. That is how we act. We do not want peace only for our and your generations. We want peace for your children and your children’s children. We want peace for all times, for ever!"

"We are in favor of freezing the arsenal of nuclear weapons and establishing nuclear-free zones, of freeing Europe from chemical weapons, of stopping the growth of military budgets and reducing them."

"Forty years of the GDR mark a totally new chapter in the history of our people. At the same time, these forty years have impressed upon our consciousness the absolute necessity and also the preciousness of long-lasting peace. Never again shall war emanate from German soil; this declaration arises from a decisive lesson of the past. It has become our state policy. It has been the top priority behind all we have done up to now and all we will do in the future, so that the socialist GDR continues to thrive and the family of European peoples can live in safety and harmony. Our nation is reliably satisfying its responsibility at the center of the continent, at the division between the two major allied blocs."

"The relentless, internationally coordinated slander campaign currently being led against the GDR aims to confuse the people and sow doubt regarding the strength and advantages of socialism. This can only serve to strengthen our resolve to continue in the future to do everything possible for a peaceful European house. The ability for states with different social orders to live and work together in such a house should be allowed to develop to the fullest."

"We consider the unrestricted application of these principles of security to be the basic prerequisite for the development of equal, mutually advantageous co-operation. Security provides a solid basis for co-operation. The German Democratic Republic is ready to work together peacefully with all States in the economic, technological and scientific fields, in education, culture and sports."

"Mindful of the bitter experience of two devastating world wars which started from German soil, the German Democratic Republic considers it its special obligation to do all in its power to guarantee lasting peace and security in the centre of Europe. Therefore our Constitution states that: “The German Democratic Republic pursues a foreign policy serving socialism and peace, international friendship and security.” This also determines our attitude towards the treaties and agreements concluded. We advocate their strict observance and full application in good faith."

"We note with concern that military detente is falling short of progressing political detente. The arms race, if continued, could endanger the hard—achieved results of political detente. The German Democratic Republic holds the view that also on disarmament and arms limitation resolute and effective measures must be agreed which meet the interests of all and which must not create unilateral advantages for anyone concerned. We are and continue to be ready to join actively and constructively in this endeavour."

"It is highly symbolic that the first conference of the European States, the United States of America and Canada is taking place 30 years after the peoples of Europe were liberated from Hitlerite fascism by the Soviet Union and the other States of the anti-Hitler coalition. Through its results the Conference contributes towards fulfilling the legacy of millions of sons and daughters of so many peoples who fought heroically against fascist barbarism. They laid the foundation stone for a secure and peaceful Europe."

"The all-European Conference of States has no precedent in the changeful history of the European continent. Its conclusion is a success of the cause of peace, a victory of political realism and of reason. It has become obvious again that there is no alternative to the policy of peaceful co-existence."

"Nobody in (unified Germany) has the right . . . to charge me, let alone sentence me, for things I did to fulfill my responsibilities to the East German state."

"The peoples will judge the historic value and the validity of the results of the Conference on the basis of how they will be filled with life in practical inter-State relations. This will not be the work of a few days but the result of a continuous, persistent effort. In this endeavour we are encouraged by the fact that this Conference is itself an example of the varied possibilities of solving complicated international issues in the mutual interest. Nor do we overlook the obstacles still being put in the way of detente — obstacles which should be overcome with courage and determination so that the results achieved can be consolidated and improved."

"In solving these problems, we must never forget that the developments in this or that socialist land may take different courses. That is the result not only of different national conditions. The socialist society is still young. It is at the moment in the process of great transformations in the Soviet Union and other socialist nations. Despite all the gloomy predictions of people who understand nothing, absolutely nothing, about the laws governing human society, those who would happily bury socialism, I want to say clearly and firmly that the world is turning not in the direction of capitalism, but in the direction of socialism. That is unchangeable f"

"We are firmly persuaded that it will be possible to make this disarmament process irreversible, because we set our full energy toward strengthening socialism and holding a dialog with anyone in the world who, like us, is ready to defend peace and disarmament, both in the nuclear and the conventional arenas."

"Today, the GDR is an outpost of peace and socialism in Europe. We will never forget this fact; this keeps us, and should also keep our enemies, from misjudgment."

"I bear the main political responsibility . . . for the fact that people trying to cross the border without authorization were shot."

"Without the wall through Berlin there could have been a nuclear war with thousands or millions of dead."

"The States assembled in Helsinki confirm the turn from "cold war" to détente in Europe. It is for the first time on our continent that with the documents of this Conference what may be called a code for the application of the principles of peaceful co-existence between States with different social systems has been agreed under international law by all participating States and solemnly sealed by the signatures of their highest representatives. By now those major problems have been solved that were a burden on the relations between States in the post-war period."

"As an inseparable part of the socialist community the German Democratic Republic has had its share in the set of European treaties, and has thus contributed to the successful course of the Security Conference. At each phase of this process, which was not without contradictions, the German Democratic Republic has proved that it is guided in its actions by the interest in peace and detente, and that it is a stabilizing factor for peace in Europe."

"A socialist State in the heart of Europe at the boundary between the most powerful alliance systems of our time, the German Democratic Republic accords high priority to security. It is only if security and the sovereignty of States are guaranteed that fruitful, beneficial and mutually advantageous co-operation is possible. In view of the lessons of history and the immediate requirements of European politics, respect for, and recognition of, the principle of the inviolability of frontiers is the decisive point. Security for the European States has been and continues to be in the first place security for their frontiers. The terrible wars which devastated our continent in this century were the result of policies which, no matter under what pretext, started from the violation of existing frontiers, from disregard for the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other States."

"Recognition of the principle of the inviolability of frontiers remains the criterion of whether or not a policy really serves peace and thus the interests of man."

"Socialism has to be built in accordance with general principles. Hence the leading role of the party in the society: the party is the vanguard of the working class, the exponent of its vital interests. Many difficulties are known to have existed in the history of the revolution. For example, after the Great October Revolution, the Mensheviks said they would build a new society without Bolsheviks. The facts have shown, however, that only the Communist party is in a position to build a new society essentially different from the other societies."

"In order to defeat the counterrevolution, the [PUWP] must have a firm conception, a precise line, and these must be known by all Communists. The endless discussions about the mistakes made in the past will yield no results. The prejudice caused by propaganda is much more important. Naturally, we cannot admit the fact that the public opinion does not know the truth. It goes without saying that we must draw a line between the dissatisfied workers and the antisocialist forces. We must point out, however, who the enemy is, and what the causes of the current situation in Poland are."

"We take the view that the popular forces in Poland are capable of solving their problems to their advantage. It is inadmissible that strikes take place in socialist society. The strikes in socialist society are directed against socialism and are not useful to either the workers on strike or the working class in general. These demonstrations are directed against peace, security, and detente."

"Like the Soviet Union, which liberated us, and the People’s Republic of China, which is also celebrating the 40th anniversary of its founding, the People’s Republic of Poland, the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, and other socialist countries, the GDR will also cross the threshold into the year 2000 with the certainty that socialism is the future. Socialism is a young society, and yet it exerts a great influence on international developments. It has brought about significant social change and will continue to do so. Its existence gives hope, not only to our people, but to all of humankind."