(6 of 6)
When Ulbricht greets Leonid Brezhnev amid the banners and bustle of next week's party Congress in East Berlin, he will stand as a man who has ruled his part of Germany for almost as long as the Third Reich and the Weimar Republic combined. Speeches will celebrate him as the man who built a new Germany. But it is a "new country" only because it is walled in; and only if and when that Wall comes down will anyone know whether it can survive as such. Ulbricht himself must fear what others suspect: that, for all the improvements in East Germany, the disappearance of the Wall would still make the West irresistible to many East Germans. Without it, Germans might discover that their common heritage is too strong to be erased by two—or ten—decades of Communist rule.