Stanford Student Letters and Memoirs

May 20, 1960

Hello folks,

Goodness- George has been to Berlin and returned and even taken another excursion- and here I am, late again. Perhaps by now you are used to this routine. At any rate, as I wrote to him only last night, he just got to see Berlin in time with that Mr. K acting up. And, frankly, I shall be very happy to greet him on June 11th in San Francisco. Somehow we will prefer to have him on this side of the "pond" and he seems to be counting the days too.

April 28th, 1960

I have a few minutes before going to the Berlin Philharmonic so will start a letter to you.

We have spent both morning and afternoon in seeing the refugee situation. We began this morning at the main reception center here in west Berlin, where the refugees come first of all after crossing the border into east Berlin and then crossing again into west Berlin.

First of all we had a very informative lecture from the director of the center, himself a refugee in 1951. Some statistics he gave were well worth repeating: Since world war 2 there have been 3.4 million refugees from east Germany, not counting those from other lands such as Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland etc. Germany has a present popultion of about 54 million; of these, 13 million are refugees from somewhere behind the iron curtain- i.e. 25% of the whole population! That is a lot of people to absorb especially when three foirths had another language, customs, etc, and of, course, none of them could bring more than a suitcase or so with them, many of them not even that much, so it was also quite an economic problem and still is.

Even more interesting are the more current figures; for example, the monthly refugee flow so far this year: January 5,300; Feb. 5,900; March, 8,000; April to the 26th, 14,000. One reason for the rise since Feb. is that the Communists have put on a big push to collectivize the farms and also the handworkers etc who remain self-employed. This has, as the numbers show, driven thousands of farmers to make the very dangerous trip to Berlin to escape to the west, where they must now face the difficulty and hardship and uncertainty of starting life from scratch. The no. of farmers jumped from 200 in Jan. to 2,400 in the first three weeks of April, after the new laws came in. The phychological [psychological] importance of west Berlin as an escape valve for refugees from Communism cannot be exaggerated!

After the backgroung [background] speech we split up into groups of ten to sit in on the actual interviews given to all new refugees. These people must show good reason for having left the Communist country in order to be granted refugee status in west Germany (this preventing infiltration and also preventing the complete flooding of west Germany with refugees to house, clothe, and feed) and hence they are questioned by a committee of three former refugees to verify these reasons. We got to listen to four cases, were permitted to ask questions when we didn't understand something- this was, I thin [think], the most informative experience of the day, giving a unique insight into how Communism goes about its slow but relentless job of taking over the lives of the common people in service of the state.

-2-

The first case was a man and his grown daughter; the family had been operating a private laundry business in the suburbs of east Berlin. A couple of years ago, in order to put greater economic pressure on such private businesses (enforce them to form larger "people's factories") the State passed a law that a factory would now be any business employing mroe than 3 people (previously the number had been 11). Thus, the family had to begin paying factory as well as personal taxes; over the years these tazes [taxes] were raised to even more pressing levels. Also there are laws restricting the amount people can pay such private businesses (i.e. price controls to eliminate friendly assistance from neighbors and make profits impossible) and also restricting where their goods can be sold. Such economic pressures as this were eventually supplemented by direct threats that the business would be closed and the people forced to work in the "people's factories". At this point they fled as refugees.

The second man was a lawyer, had been working as a tax advisor in a town in east Germany. The State had, over the years, been collectivising farm and hand workers in his community, thus eliminating his clientele (who must then deal with the State's tax advisors). As a more imminent personal distress, one of the sons( there were 2 sons and wife who had fled with him) had been detected unfavorable comments in private letters to a freiend in the western zone. When this was somehow discovered he was brought up for punishment, given an alternative of joining the Secret Police and spying on his schoolmates (really this is no fictional horror story- it happened!!!) With the threats on his son and the pressure on the father to become a State lawyer (which means joining the party too), the family fled to west Berlin, will go on to Stuttgart where the man has a job arranged through friends.

The third and fourth cases were both farmers fleeing in face of the pressure to give up their private farms and join the Collective farms as I already mentioned. Here we observed, the stress has been more openly political. They (the party organization) call meetings in each town, request that the farmers voluntarily sign up for the party and collectiveization [collectivization] (thus they can say in propaganda that it was "voluntary") and had the peoples' support; Those who don't sign are then pressured to sign ("voluntarily", mind you) by city officials, visits from party people, even liud [loud] speakers going through the streats screaming the man's name as a "friend of Adenauer". If the "Voluntary" appeal doesn't work, the man is, I think, then required to join anyway, and of course his stalling makes him the less popular in the government's eyes. As one side note on the dangers involved in a refugee's flight to the west, one of these farmers came by train with his wife. He and his son ( with the son's wife and two Young children) had arranged to leave at the same time and travel seperately (for greater safety in smaller numbers). They were to meet in Berlin. But there is so far no sign of the son and grandchildren. They were either delayed or picked up by the Police. It is illegal to flee, try to flee, or even to know of someone's feelings without reporting it to the police! As I realized the torment this couple must be suffering, not knowing their son's fate, the personal brutality of the Totalitarian system really hit me, and I felt liberally almost like crying in sympathy.

May 4, 1960

I came to Berlin with certain misconceptions (as I can see now in retrospect) which I think arose from my reading of American newspapers and listening to American TV, and from my conversations with kids who had been there. Thus several of my own wrong inaccurate ideas are perhaps shared by most Americans. I expected above all to see in Berlin the comparison of the standards of living provided by Capitalist vs Communist economies. I also expected to observe clear examples of suppression of freedom of action and the "big lie", used to mislead epople [people] in the Communist system. My misconceptions lay in the simple images I had drawn of the evils of Communism vs the cirtue [virtue] of the free world- the contrasts that do exist are more subtle and not so readily visible to the eye.

One did see in Berlin the differences if physical appearance at the border in east and west Berlin. In west B. there is tremendous building activity both downtown and in the suburbs and the skyline is dotted with numerous beautiful, modern structures. There are endless new stores of all kinds, displaying a variety of consumer goods (fine ones) and the streets are crwoded [crowded] with shoppers. In East B. there are acres of war ruins, where only the loose rubble has been cleared away, leaving shells of bldgs. and here and there a lonely survivor head above the flat, bush covered ground around it. There is Stalin Allee as an example of the new construction style, but its tasteless design (after the Russian model) is all the more depressing, and its stores are obviously fewer and contain less in both variety and quality in the west.

But we msut be cautious in the conclusions drawn from these observations. West B. doesn't prove the success of Capitalism per se- it is economically a completely unnatrual [unnatural] situation in two ways. It is entirely cut off from its natural source of food supplies; it must there fore be subsidized by the west German gov't to the extent of $370 million dollars a year, and its industries are also given tax discounts etc. Neither do the conditions in east B. simply prove the failure of the Communist system; rather it probably illustrates deliberate choices on the part of the east gov't to develop factories ahead of consumer goods or housing projects.

When I turned to the subject of apparent freedom of action, I was again surprised. For, in walking around east B. the people we saw didn't look any sadder or more fearful than those walking around West B; they seemed to go on about their own business, etc. As to propaganda, again the black-white version was unsatisfactory. To begin with, one senses everywhere the presence of two propaganda lines, one from the Communists and one from the wests. They are quite alike in their exaggerations too:

The West says:

1. East Germany is a country of 17,000,000 enslaved people, held under the heel of Communism by Russian tanks and soldiers

2. West B. is a beacon of freedom to suppressed peoples in the midst of a Red sea

3. West B. must remain exactlly [exactly] as is and even to discuss changing the status-quo in any way is dangerous and unwise

The East says:

1. West G. is a hotbed of Naziism and militarism

2. West B. is the center of imperalism, espionage and agitation.

3. West B. mus [must] become a demilitarized free city.

-2-

Each side is stating a pratial [partial] truth and creating harmful misunderstanding in a tense, cold-war atmosphere.

Where then do we observe the dangers of Communism, if not in their abuse of international propaganda issues or their "reign of terror" over the people? It seems to me that their threat is even greater because it is subtler. The danger as I see it, lies in the integration of all activities under a central government authority. We saw this in the refugee interviews, as the State passed little, ordinary laws which graduslly [gradually] bring the economy to full socialization and central control, so that decisions on production on price are made according to national policy goals, rather than the demand of the consumers. In the sphere of personal action, the restrictions are just as subtle and unspectacular- the right of the police to take people off subways and demand to see their identification cards (to catch refugees or smugglers), the little signs in the stores and cafes which require showing your identity card before purchasing, the development of "sport clubs" etc so that more and more of the individual's time is spent in activity guided by the state. In the sphere of information and propaganda, it is the same story. On the main streets of East B. are permanent loud speakers (about every 100 yards at least on top of lamp posts) through which the people may be contacted and influenced at will without their own consent (they cannot even "turn off the radio"). In book stores we saw more; there were obvious propaganda books, on the virtues of Socialism, the progress of Sovier [Soviet] culture and science, militarism in West Germany etc. Shelf after shelf of such stuff. But more ominous is the presence of distortion and lie in seemingly innocent books on world geography, history, children's stories etc. There is no way for people to suspect this sort of distortion and they can only grow up believing it. Furthermore, I doubt that any central figure guides the publishing of all such lies- rather they are sort of passed on from author to author, from newspapers to books, in a vicious circle of ignorance breeding more ignorance.

As I realized the subtle, gradula manner in which the Communist system extends its authority over its citizens- passing minor laws, raising taxes etc.- I began to draw associations to our situation in the USA. For the Communists (in east germany at least) hold secrret [secret] ballot elections, have a national legislature, as we do. And we too have recently (over the last 60-70 years really) experienced increasing power and authority in our central gov't iver [over] more and more areas in our activities as human beings. There are really similarites in the two situations- east and west- and they may cause us to ask "Can this happen to us in the United States, too?". We see that freedom is just as effectively diminished through undramatic, steadywhittling as through great sweeping wars and revolutions. But it si [is] just as important to observe the differences between US and East Germany for it is on some of these differences that we can build the defenses of freedom for the individual. Ideologically, we out the welfare of the individual on top, over that of the state, and we don't overlook the individual to protect the "class", i. e. worked or farmer. We still count people one at a time, not by groups alone. Our legislature continues (at least to some degree) to represent the will of the people, or of the majority at least in most cases. Because it doesn't try to represent all of them at once- rather each representative jealously defends the particular interests of his constituents. Out of the competition of such factions, we form laws which generally do justice to more people than could a panel of planners trying to cinsider [consider] everything at once. It is then exactly when we disagree and fight for our own interests that

May 20, 1960

Hello folks,

Goodness- George has been to Berlin and returned and even taken another excursion- and here I am, late again. Perhaps by now you are used to this routine. At any rate, as I wrote to him only last night, he just got to see Berlin in time with that Mr. K acting up. And frankly, I shall be very happy to greet him on June 11th in San Francisco. Somehow we will prefer to have him on this side of the "pond" and he seems to be counting the days too.

April 28th, 1960

I have a few minutes before going to the Berlin Philharmonic so will start a letter to you.

We have spent both morning and afternoon in seeing the refugee situation. We began this morning at the main reception center here in west Berlin, where the refugees come first of all after crossing the border into east Berlin and then crossing again into west Berlin.

First of all we had a very informative lecture from the director of the center, himself a refugee in 1951. Some statistics he gave were well worth repeating: Since world war 2 there have been 3.4 million refugees from east Germany, not counting those from other lands such as Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, etc. Germany has a present popultaion of about 54 million; of these, 13 million are refugees from somewhere behind the iron curtain- i.e. 25% of the whole population! That is a lot of people to absorb especially when three foirths had another language, customs etc, and of, course, none of them could bring more than a suitcase or so with them, many of them not even that much, so it was also quite an economic problem and still is.

Even more interesting are the more current figures: for example, the monthly refugee flow so far this year: January 5,300; Feb. 5,900; March, 8,000; April to the 26th, 14,000. One reason for the rise since Feb. is that the Communists have put on a big push to collectivize the farms and also the handworkers etc who remain self-employed. This has, as the numbers show, driven thousands of farmers to make the very dangerous trip to Berlin to escape to the west, where they must now face the difficulty and hardship and uncertainty of starting life from scratch. The no. of farmers jumped from 200 in Jan. to 2,400 in the first three weeks of April, after the new laws came in. The phychological importance of west Berlin as an escape valve for refugees from Communism cannot be exaggerated!

After the background speech we split up into groups of ten to sit in on the actual interviews given to all new refugees. These people must show good reason for having left the Communist country in order to be granted refugee status in west Germany (this preventing infiltration and also preventing the complete flooding of west Germany with refugees to house, clothe, and feed) and hence they are questioned by a committee of three former refugees to verify these reasons. We got to listen to four cases, were permitted to ask questions when we didn't understand something- this was, I thin, the most informative experience of the day, giving a unique insight into how Communism goes about its slow but relentless job of taking over the lives of the common people in service of the state.