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A Certain Pride. Prudently, Ulbricht has allowed some of the economic rewards to trickle down to the consumers, who now enjoy the highest standard of living in the East bloc. The monthly average wage has risen 10% in the past six years, to $158, and there is more to buy on the shelves of the state-owned food and department stores than anyone can remember. Prices for basics are low: bread costs only 12¢ per loaf, potatoes 2¢ per lb., a haircut 20¢. But anything beyond the basic necessities of life is more expensive in East Germany than anywhere in Western Europe. Coffee is $7.95 per lb., a blouse nearly $10, a TV set $490. Housing rents for $11 to $20 a month for a four-room apartment, including kitchen and bath—but try and get it! To relieve an acute housing shortage. the government is throwing up 68,000 new apartments a year. But the prospective tenant must "volunteer" to spend at least 600 hours shoveling dirt on the construction site before he can even hope to move in.
East Germany's relative prosperity has particularly impressed the country's youth, which remembers nothing but the drabness of the postwar period. Instead of reveling in the sadness of their plight, as they were doing only a few years ago, the young have been gripped by a certain pride of accomplishment. This pride is intensified by the fact that, next to industry, education has received top financial priority. Where there were only six universities with facilities for 8,000 students in 1946, there are now 44 universities and technical institutes with an enrollment of 220,000 full-time students. Many students feel that they get a better break in the East than they would in the West, since under Ulbricht 40% of the students come from working-class families (v. only 8% in West Germany). Not only is there no tuition, but 95% of all students receive scholarships to cover living costs.
Beetle Cuts. There are a few catches. To get ahead, students must belong to the Communist Free German Youth, and anyone who speaks too frankly about the regime may find himself expelled. Students must take tests in political aptitude before they can take end-of-the-year academic exams. Politics also color the curriculum: though East German instruction in the sciences is sometimes better than West Germany's, the humanities are warped by Communist propaganda. A seminar studying Reformation history, for example, will only emphasize Luther as a class-conscious leader of the peasantry.
For all that, most East German youths remain ideologically uncommitted; Ulbricht has not managed to produce any Red Guards. They want to save up for a motorbike, grow mini-Beatle haircuts and twist to Western rock-'n'-roll tunes. They resent East Germany's enforced isolation, which denies them the chance to read almost all West German writers and even cuts off the flow of literature from such slightly more liberal Communist regimes as those in Czechoslovakia and Poland. The few Western works that are allowed in are avidly read. Among the favorites: John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage and the collected works of Walt Whitman.