Foreign News: DEUTSCHLAND ERWACHE (1946)

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TIME Correspondent John Stanton "was one of the well-guided members of a press party which last week toured the Russian zone of Germany. His report:

After a Russian supper of vodka, cherry brandy, sausages, fried potatoes, more vodka and endless cherry brandy bottoms-up, eight U.S. reporters and their three escorting Russian officers went out walking in Halle. Its streets were lit by a pale moon, traced by the grotesque shadows of bombed buildings. They had not gone a block before the first Germans joined them. By the second block there were 50. By the third every American was walking separately, surrounded by a milling group of Germans, pushing and shoving to say a few words into the correspondents' ears.

The whole mob, looking like De Gaulle's Paris Victory parade, moved slowly through the dark—wooden-soled shoes clonking on the cobblestones, voices jabbering in German and English. Shadows pulled and clawed at the clothes and arms of the Americans. Out of the dark came a ceaseless flow of questions. Have you any cigarets? We like Americans. When will the Americans fight the Russians? Is it true we get better rations than the American zone? Do you know my uncle in America?

Questions echoed in the streets—echoed those Germans who argue for ties with the west, echoed the eastward-looking propaganda of the new Fusion Party, echoed the late Dr. Goebbels on the inevitable clash between the east and the west from which Germany might again rise.

Hairpins & Toothpicks. Next morning, refreshed by a Russian breakfast of beer, schnapps, sausages, fried potatoes and more schnapps, we went out to see these Germans by daylight and found them like all Germans—shabby. Their faces were grey, for there is little soap for scrubbings. When they gather in crowds, as at the theater, they have a strong, sour smell. The Russian zone is not well fed, although it eats better than the American or the British.

These Germans are still dazed by defeat—but already new products are flowing from their factories. Since the war's end Saxony's chemists have produced a new flaky butter made of brown coal.

In Weimar, bulky Thuringian President Rudolf Paul spoke proudly of the way people had faced up to the reparations removals. Of the state's best enterprises, 310 were packed up and shipped to Russia. But by reassigning idle machines in the dismantled factories, by improvising with hairpins and toothpicks, So dismantled factories are in partial operation again. Although 14 of Saxony's 64 large beet-sugar mills were taken away, the state is producing as much sugar this year as last.

The reporters moved out over the Saxony plains to a great cluster of tall smokestacks marking the Buna plant built by I. G. Farben in 1936 to supply the Wehrmacht's synthetic rubber tires. The plant manager told them that while there had been 11,000 workers at the end of the war, there were now 9,000, producing 1,500 tons of rubber monthly, about 60% of the peak of war production.

Everywhere there is evidence that these Germans, even in defeat, are still the most vigorous and potentially the most powerful people of Central Europe.