The businessmen of death
want to kill you, Comrade Angela.
But you will be free and will
become America's minister of education.
So goes a stanza in one of the pop tunes in East Germany these days. Comrade Angela, of course, is America's Angela Davis, the black revolutionary who has suddenly become the reigning heroine of East Germany. Leftists have demonstrated on her behalf elsewhere in Europe, but no other nation seems to be so deeply in the grip of Angelamania.
East German television features hour upon hour of "documentaries" about Angela. The radio broadcasts the latest bulletin about a protest rally in Tanzania or some other faraway spot. When Miss Davis was released on bail, East Germans took undue credit for springing her. East German children study about Angela in school. Students and youth groups collect money for her defense fund. In cities across the country, billboard posters and banners repeat one demand: Freedom for Angela. At the Leipzig Fair, one of Europe's oldest industrial exhibitions, the East Germans have put up a large display about Angela in the modernistic information center. Visitors are requested to sign a petition calling for Angela's release and to make a contribution. Hardly a day goes by that Neues Deutschland, the official party newspaper, does not run at least one article, and often two or three, on Angela. The paper's foreign editor, Dr. Klaus Steiniger, is reporting her trial from San Jose.
Steiniger does not pay much attention to the facts. Instead, he depicts the proceeding as a "monster trial," attacks the blatant "racism" of the jury, and insists that the young Marxist philosophy teacher is the victim of a frame-up. Angela is being persecuted, he reports, because she is black and a Communist, who is combating the monopolistic imperialist elite that rules the U.S. On the Communists' International Women's Day, Steiniger solemnly presented Miss Davis with 50 red carnations.
Why did the East Germans decide to champion her cause? Although Angela Davis is a plausible enough successor to Che Guevara as an ideal Communist martyr, and undoubtedly evokes sympathy from many German leftists, the real explanation for the growth of her cult lies in the shifting pattern of East-West relations. Until recently the East German regime concentrated its propaganda attacks on West Germany, whose free society and economic prosperity have for years exerted an almost irresistible magnetism on Germany's poorer half. In the past year, however, as Moscow and Bonn have sought to establish better relations, East Germany has had no choice but to tone down its attacks on the Federal Republic.
East Germany's rulers then needed a new external issue with which to whip up enthusiasm and militancy among their people. Thus when Angela was arrested and arraigned, the East German propagandists once again cranked up their apparatus. U.S. "racism" is hardly as threatening to East Germany as the visions that the propagandists once conjured up of a neo-Nazi invasion from the West. But at least it keeps the indoctrinated minds of the East Germans occupied until a more pressing issue comes along.