Is this Walter Ulbricht even worth remembering? “Nobody has any intention of building a wall,” he claimed as head of state and party leader on June 15, 1961 (here in the video). Two months later he had it built. It was probably the biggest lie in German history and will forever be associated with his name: the GDR dictator had his people walled in. Anyone who didn't move was harassed.
Walter Ulbricht was considered an aloof and completely humorless apparatchik, who was also uncomfortable with many of the SED comrades. In 1950 he took over the post of general secretary in the Central Committee and thus the leadership of the party, which was always right. After a good two decades he was removed from power - and the end in 1971 was ignominious, his own people humiliated him until he died two years later after a stroke.
Ulbricht's state, the GDR, has long since collapsed and his ideology, communism, has probably been discredited forever. So why should one bother with a concrete head whose most striking external features were his fistula voice and a strange goatee?
“I'm waiting for someone to discover Walter Ulbricht as a serial material,” says historian Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk. He has achieved the feat of dedicating a voluminous biography to Ulbricht. The second volume has just been published: "The Communist Dictator" shows him in all his power, how he dreams of a paradise for workers and farmers all his life and at the same time struggles to always maintain control - true to Ulbricht's motto when he left Moscow in 1945 Exile returned: "It has to look democratic, but we have to have everything in our hands." This has many tragic shades, but also some unintentionally funny ones.
Because he said strange things on the assembly line, Ulbricht was an easy target for ridicule. At the beginning of the 1960s, he initially stood for a cultural-political thaw, for a timid opening towards the enormously successful beat music and also bands like the Butlers, who were celebrated as the “Beatles of the GDR”. But then the hardliners of the SED prevailed - and at the end of October 1965 the "Leipzig Beat Demo" was disbanded with draconian severity.
“Is it really the case that we have to copy every piece of dirt that comes from the West?” asked Walter Ulbricht rhetorically (here in the original tone). "I think, comrades, that we should put an end to the monotony of Je Je Je and what it's all called."
more on the subject
Rock in the GDR: Paradise of the knife pushers by Christoph Gunkel
Music ban in the GDR: Water cannons against mushroom headsBy Katja Iken
A sentence for eternity - the usual SED gibberish has long been forgotten. As a pop musician, Ulbricht would probably have been more close to the Bee Gees camp. “If Ulbricht had become a singer, his vocal range (falsetto) could possibly have been his invaluable asset,” scoffs biographer Kowalczuk.
What is less known is that at the time of this statement, Ulbricht was already breathing down his future successor, Erich Honecker. Shortly before, Honecker had railed against “capitalist evil” and also attacked the popular East Berlin youth station DT 64. In view of the younger man's sharpness, Ulbricht also felt compelled to escalate the matter. “Like a skilled bullfighter,” Honecker knew how to “hold the red flag” to Ulbricht, Kowalczuk notes.
falsetto
Ulbricht's voice sounded like the soundtrack of a cartoon character: strangely pressed and clearly too high for normal sensitivity. How would he have affected people if he had spoken with a sonorous bass? His fistula voice was the result of a larynx disease that the young communist had contracted in his mid-twenties in 1918. Shortly after Ulbricht's death, a research ENT doctor wanted to know more.
Enlarge image
Speech to the FDJ, 1963: Rather than the voice of the people
Photo: Frank Sorge / IMAGO
The doctor asked Ulbricht's widow Lotte "with a socialist greeting" whether her husband "considered himself to have a voice disorder" and whether he "had ever had his voice treated." Whether he “complained often or rarely of voice weakness,” whether he “suffered from particular throat or larynx diseases and whether he had had this voice since his youth.” Previously, curiously enough, he lectured Lotte Ulbricht about “that in addition to WHAT is spoken, it also depends on HOW it is spoken. Only when the agitator's voice has cleared the channel for reception can the word take effect and become a weapon in the class struggle.
You couldn't score points with Ulbricht's wife with such thinly veiled nagging of her Walter. “Not answered,” she noted on the letter.
Lotte
It was thanks to his wife Lotte that Walter Ulbricht sometimes even seemed like a kind father. She was considered so unpalatable that even an unsympathetic person of Ulbricht's stature had to seem reasonably pleasant next to her. Domineering, cold, aloof, bossy, hair on her teeth: all of this was said by her comrades.
Perhaps there was also envy at play. Although Lotte Ulbricht primarily interpreted for her husband, she was paid like a top comrade. Some even speculated that she was actually running the affairs of state and directing her Walter.
In the decline and fall of the GDR - in 1989 no one had any intention of foregoing freedom - the flawless communist saw signs of a counter-revolution. She died in 2002 at the age of 99. Other people at this age fall asleep peacefully in bed and never wake up. Lotte Ulbricht fell from a book ladder and died.
Beate
Advertisement
Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk
Walter Ulbricht: The communist dictator
Publisher: CHBeck
Number of pages: 956
Publisher: CHBeck
Number of pages: 956
Buy for €58.00
Price inquiry time
April 3, 2024 10:24 p.m
No guarantee
Order from Amazon
Order from Thalia
Order from Yourbook
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent. We usually receive a commission from the retailer when you make a purchase using the so-called affiliate links above. More information about this here
The entire tragedy of the Ulbricht family is reflected in the fate of their adopted daughter Beate. The girl was two years old when she came to Walter and Lotte Ulbricht in 1946. Because of her unpopular father, she had to endure all kinds of harassment from her classmates at school. When she began to rebel against her parents at the age of 15, she was exiled to a school in Leningrad.
Ulbricht’s parents’ operating temperature always remained icy. They gave Beate a refrigerator for her wedding. However, Walter and Lotte stayed away from the celebrations because they didn't like the groom. At the time, she was working "as a solderer in a radio factory, where she was again bullied, mistreated, humiliated and raped," as Kowalczuk reports.
In August 1991, a tabloid published a letter from Beate to her dead father. “Dear Dad,” she wrote there, among other things, “you had the wrong “friends” and “advisors.” And the wrong wife! You failed at all of this. Nevertheless, I will never forget you." A few months later, she was 47 years old and had been an alcoholic for years. She was found dead in her apartment in Berlin by police officers in early December 1991.
panic
In 1953, the stubborn Ulbricht was considered a shaky candidate in his sister country, the Soviet Union. Moscow considered replacing him with Otto Grotewohl; the Prime Minister of the GDR and former Social Democrat was much better received by the people. When workers rebelled against the GDR regime on June 17, Ulbricht lost his nerve and fled to Berlin-Karlshorst, where the headquarters of the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) was located.
The panicked GDR head of state then had his comrade Karl Schirdewan describe on the phone how workers tried to storm the building of the SED Central Committee. “Off!” Ulbricht shouted and lowered the receiver, pale. This ghostly scene was observed by SMAD interpreter Alexander Bogomolov.
After Russian troops crushed the uprising with tanks, Ulbricht had to face an embarrassing round of criticism in the Politburo. But in the end it was conciliatory. "If you listen more to the collective, if you stop your extravagances, maybe we can try together again," Ulbricht was told, as Politburo member Erich Mückenberger recalled.
Interviews
Unlike many other communist dictators, Ulbricht did not generally shy away from meeting journalists from the West. In 1957, for example, he arranged to meet representatives of SPIEGEL for an interview. “We enjoyed the spectacle of seeing the party secretary in action,” wrote SPIEGEL editor Rudolf Augstein. »What came next was not a conversation like we are used to, but a channeled torrent. We tried to object, but in vain. We tried to pin him down there, but again in vain. “Wait a minute,” he whispered, answering questions no one had asked. Or he ended the chapter with the insistent statement: 'That's the fact, right? That’s a fact’.”
Even on such occasions, Ulbricht remained all Ulbricht and "doesn't even try to convince, but he sits there willingly and snarks like he's being teased," Augstein reported to SPIEGEL readers.
The fact that his rigid manner always threatened to lead him into the open knife became clear in an interview with CBS correspondent Dan Schorr on December 6, 1961. The US journalist asked Ulbricht about the necessary de-Stalinization measures in the GDR, as she did in the Soviet Union. Ulbricht harshly declared such measures unnecessary because there was no Stalinism in the GDR. Schorr remained stubborn and pointed to the demolished Stalin monuments and changed street names in Rostock, which he had personally noticed. Ulbricht then nervously stroked his head and stopped the interview.
Egg crates
The trained carpenter Ulbricht was notorious for interfering in all sorts of state affairs and giving instructions like a senior teacher. He was particularly feared by architects, whom he enjoyed teaching. After viewing the prefabricated buildings in the newly built satellite town of Eisenhüttenstadt, he sneered: “These are supposed to be residential buildings for our working people? They’re egg crates with lids.”
Ulbricht's attacks on the city planners' models, which the GDR boss ruthlessly tugged and tore if he didn't like them, were also feared. That's why GDR architects started building flexible models in which individual components could be exchanged.
Power struggles
There was a joke circulating in the GDR that satirized the diadochi battles of the first SED guard to succeed Ulbricht: The top ranks of socialist officials had gathered at the bedside of the terminally ill man when Ulbricht, wheezing, suddenly scribbled a few words on a piece of paper next to him Willi Stoph (Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the GDR), who was with him, and collapsed dead shortly afterwards.
Stoph discreetly lets the piece of paper disappear into his pocket, but Erich Honecker has observed him and demands clarification: "Willi, what kind of piece of paper did you put in your pocket?" Stoph digs the piece of paper out. Ulbricht wrote on it in scraggly writing: “Willi, you’re standing on my oxygen tube!”