A crackdown on nonconformity
The critique of the Communist Party's role in East German industry was tough and trenchant. "The indolence of the bureaucrat corresponds to the apathy of the worker, which, in turn, is matched by the disgust of the technical experts." The author was Rudolf Bahro, 42, a mild-mannered executive of an East Berlin rubber factory, and the quote was from his new book The Alternative—banned in East Germany, but a bestseller in West Germany. In an extraordinary act of defiance and courage, Bahro had agreed to be interviewed on West German television, which is watched by an estimated 1 million East Berliners every day. Bahro denounced Communist leaders as "exploiters" of the working class and proposed that true Marxists should rebel against the despotic socialism of Eastern Europe by forming a new League of Communists, harking back to Karl Marx's original group of supporters in London in the 1840s.
The day after that daring interview last month, agents of the East German Staatssicherheitsdienst (State Security Service) descended on Bahro's apartment and arrested him on charges of espionage. While he could be sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment, he is just as likely to be summarily exiled to the West.
Among Bahro's sympathetic listeners in East Germany was a high-level Communist bureaucrat who was moved to compose a laudatory article for the West German weekly Der Spiegel. The anonymous apparatchik declared that "Bahro's courage has earned him an honorable place in the history of the German workers' movement." Other officials were scarcely in agreement. Indeed, Bahro's broadcast has infuriated the East German leadership, which is determined to stamp out nonconformity, ranging from the manifest heresy of Bahro's book to mildly subversive rock-'n'-roll lyrics. Along with prison and harassment, East Germany's main weapon against protest is deportation. In the past few months, nearly two dozen ranking intellectuals and artists have been expelled from the country.
The first notable victim of the exile policy was Balladeer-Poet Wolf Biermann, 40, who was refused permission to re-enter East Germany last November after a tour in the West. Government officials, who charged Biermann with "defamation" of East Germany abroad, had evidently been stung by some of the jabbing questions raised in his irony-laden songs. The government's action provoked an unprecedented storm of protest, led by twelve prominent East German writers and artists. Many of those who signed the petition for Biermann's readmission were either coerced into withdrawing their names or fired from their jobs.