EAST GERMANY: Making Dissenters Pay the Price

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They were unmistakable as they got off the Aeroflot TU-104 turbojets and into waiting Volga cars: somewhat shapeless heavy wool overcoats, dark gray felt hats and impassive faces that, to the knowing, suggest the KGB officer. Hundreds of them were flown in from Moscow to forgather in East Berlin's grim, hulking Ministry of the Interior, the headquarters of the nation's vast security-police network. Other Russian officers were dispatched to secret-police stations around the country. According to Western intelligence analysts, this activity meant that the Soviets were now directly supervising the campaign of repression that has shaken East Germany for the past two months.

Without a Trace. A number of dissidents have reportedly been confined to lunatic asylums for expressing unorthodox opinions. Hundreds have been arrested or put under constant police surveillance. Among the most recent targets is Physicist Robert Havemann, an open critic of East Germany's Communist regime. Seized late last month at his home outside East Berlin, he is being held under stringent house arrest. Another victim is a leading East German writer, Jürgen Fuchs, who disappeared without a trace after the police kidnaped him on a busy street in broad daylight.

One apparent purpose of the new crackdown is to so intimidate the country's intellectuals that they will stop the embarrassing practice of criticizing Party Boss Erich Honecker's regime from inside East Germany. A case in point is Balladeer Wolf Biermann, 40, a poet and songster who regards himself as a dedicated Communist and actually emigrated from West Germany to East Germany in 1953 because he wanted to live in a Communist-run state. Since then he has become an outspoken critic of what he regards as East Berlin's distortion of Marxism, and accuses the East German government of being "a dictatorship, but not a dictatorship of the proletariat."

Biermann's songs, though well known abroad, have been banned in East Germany since 1965. (One typical lyric ridiculing Communist bureaucrats, "Fat oxen belong in the pot/ Not in official positions.") Thus it came as a surprise when the East German authorities gave Biermann permission to go on a two-week concert tour of West Germany. Once Biermann left, the trap was sprung: his citizenship was canceled. Biermann was disconsolate, and has since pleaded to return.

Dissident artists and intellectuals are probably not the prime target of the new crackdown. It seems more designed to warn Honecker's 17 million countrymen that overt popular discontent will not be tolerated. In a recent reshuffle of the country's top posts, Honecker demoted some relative moderates and increased the power of the hardliners.