Near the East German village of Wandlitz, nine miles to the east of Berlin, is a most unusual settlement. It is a walled-in compound of semi-forested land and wide lawns, within which sit some 20 spacious ten-to twelve-room houses. The houses contain marble from Italy, art from several countries, Renaissance and Baroque furniture from France and Belgium and plentiful expanses of plate glass from West Germany. The area is patrolled night and day by 160 well-armed guards, many of them equipped with submachine guns.
The compound contains the homes of East Germany's Communist leaders, who like to stick together, and perhaps need to. In all the people's republic, it is excelled in luxury—and remoteness from the people—only by the 25-room residence of Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht at Schorfheide, 32 miles north of Berlin. Ulbricht's home, with its movie theater, glass-enclosed garden, private lake front, shooting range and volleyball courts, is often used by the party leadership as a secret conference site. Of both enclaves, West German Author Uwe Johnson (Two Views) says: "They have built themselves their own concentration camps."
The country they rule, at least, remains something of a concentration camp. Its capital city not only shuts its people in with an infamous wall, but its western borders bristle with 860 miles of fortifications—with machine guns pointing inward at the East Germans themselves. East Germany is still a police state, in which political prisoners by the thousands languish in jails.
Like the self-conscious Communist enclaves, it is also a study in contrast—although the contrast to its free and far more prosperous West German neighbor is invariably an unfavorable one. Just as its Communist masters studiously remain remote from their subjects, East Germany itself remains remote not only from its German brothers but even from its socialist neighbors in Eastern Europe, who have no great affection either for Germans or for Walter Ulbricht's Stalinist style.
Nothing in Common. Today, East Germany is a land whose soul is being sundered even while its body is at last growing healthier and more robust. Westerners have long believed that, despite the Wall, Germans remained Germans, and that formal division of the country could not last forever. For 22 years, spade-bearded Ulbricht has worked to prove this hope wrong by trying to establish his bailiwick not only as a separate German state but as a nation distinct from West Germany in as many ways as possible. The fact is that he is beginning to have some success. Last week, as East Germany prepared for this month's quadrennial Socialist Unity Party Congress—which will be graced by the presence of none other than Soviet Party Chairman Leonid Brezhnev—banners from the Baltic isles to the dour villages of Saxony proclaimed that "nothing unites us with imperialist West Germany."