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East Germany looks different. In order to concentrate on industrial rebuilding, the Communists left much of their cities in rubble. Twenty years after the war, wrote Israeli Journalist Amos Elon in his Journey Through a Haunted Land, "when you are in East Germany, it appears as if the war were only yesterday." The countryside, with its villages, horse-drawn carts and unmechanized farms, looks as if the clock had been turned back 30 or 40 years. The highways are potholed and traffic ranges from light to nonexistent. The blue haze of soft-coal smoke seems to shroud the cities, adding to the ever-present smells of cabbage and disinfectant. The cautious satirists in East Berlin's Distel (Thistle) cabaret suggested one socialist solution for some of East Germany's ills: nose plugs.
Planning East Suicide. Still, for all its drawbacks, Germany looks—and is—a lot better than a few years ago. Ironically, the Wall−which Ulbricht calls the "antifascist defense shield"−made the difference. Before the Wall went up in 1961, East Germany's economy was on the ropes, as many of the brightest workers, scientists and technocrats joined the exodus of 3,000,000 East Germans who voted with their feet and went Westward. Since then, 24,500 East Germans have managed to escape (137 were killed in the attempt), but most people have accepted the idea that they are trapped and decided to try and make the best of it. It was this Wall-inspired attitude that enabled Ulbricht to get down to the task of strengthening the economy and starting to nurture a separate national identity.
Though most of its industry was either bombed out or carted off by the Soviets as reparations—they drained East Germany of some $16 billion and have not stopped yet—East Germany now ranks as the second greatest industrial power in the East bloc (after the Soviet Union) and as ninth in the entire world. It is building new plants and new industrial towns all over, has developed a thriving shipbuilding industry from scratch. Such traditional East German industries as chemicals and optics are again enjoying international prestige. East Germany's economy is considered a growth economy, advancing about 4% a year.
The economy might be far healthier if it were not tied so tightly to Russia, which continues to extract favorable deals from its satellite. Ulbricht in 1965 committed 45% of the country's exports for the following five years to the Soviet Union at ridiculously low prices—an act that caused East German Planning Chief Erich Apel to commit suicide on the day the deal was announced. As a result, East Germany is forced to ship eastward many of the machines that it needs to modernize its own factories and many of the exports that it needs to increase trade with the West.