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A Bottle of Beer. To East Germans, each impersonal statistic had personal significance. Wolfgang Fritsch, 36, drove a truck at the open-face uranium pits near Gera, in Saxony. He, his wife and two young children were eating even worse than right after the war; Wolfgang (he said later in the safety of a West Berlin refugee camp) could not remember having had a bottle of beer to drink in six months. The children's clothes, of cheap cotton, were falling apart. The work was getting harder and longer, but the pay stayed the same. At the mine, there were always the "trusties" to listen for careless talk; at least a dozen of Wolfgang's friends disappeared that way.
Werner David, 40, of Wolfen, an ex-P.W. (in Britain) and a clerk in the Agfa film plant, saw a lot of the plant's accounts. There were 14,000 men working for the Russians, who owned the plant and sold the film to the satellites. The norms kept going up. For a while, a worker on the enlargement machines had to make 800 enlargements a day to earn his 1.50 East German marks (about 6¢) an hour. Then it went up to 880, too many for a man to do if he stopped even for a moment. In his off hours, David helped his wife Gertrude on her parents' farm. Not long ago, when a drought ruined the potato crop, Gertrude drew the family money from the bank and bought potatoes on the black market to make up the fall "delivery quota." Gertrude, though already ill with TB, was sentenced to a year and a half in jail for "economic crimes."
In eight years, the team of Moscow and Ulbricht created hundreds of thousands of dissatisfied Wolfgang Fritsches and Werner Davids. Proconsul Ulbricht, with his bodyguard of Vopos, his bulletproofed Zis sedan, his ten-room stucco villa in the Berlin suburb of Pankow, was aware of them but contemptuous. Arrests multiplied, the work norms jumped higher, and the zealous workers of the party fed more and louder slogans into the town squares and public-address systems. The Fritsches were unarmed and leaderless, and Ulbricht had the Vopos and the Red army at his back. And the grumblers were Germans. Had not Lenin once sneered: "When Germans want to make a revolution and occupy a railroad station, they first buy tickets to the train platform"?
"It's Happened." All the evidence suggests that it was not the Ulbricht regime but the Russians themselves who first saw that there might be trouble from the Werners and the Wolfgangs. From the Soviet command went orders to the East Berlin regime to ease up: no more farm collectivization, more liberty for the Lutherans, more food for families. When the construction workers of Stalinallee in Berlin marched against the latest 10% boost in work norms, the increase was abolished.