COMMUNISM: The Rise of the Other Germany

The symbolism was unintended, but powerful nonetheless. A little more than six weeks after his death, the government of East Germany laid to final rest the ashes of Walter Ulbricht, who for more than a generation was the country's stern, Stalin-like dictator. The very next day East Germany was admitted to the United Nations, receiving the universal legitimacy and recognition that Ulbricht had both sought and feared.

Even more vividly than the Brezhnev-Nixon summit, the simultaneous acceptance of East and West Germany as members of the U.N. symbolized the beginning of an uncertain new period in the relations between the democratic-capitalist and the Communist worlds. At the same time, the admission ceremonies underlined East Germany's sense of inferiority to West Germany—the Germany in the eyes of most of the world. People who watch such things closely noted that as gray-haired, gray-suited Otto Winzer, the East German Foreign Minister, was led to his seat by the U.N. Chief of Protocol, there were 15 seconds of applause. A minute later, West German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel was given 32 seconds of cheers and clapping. The two diplomats later posed politely together for the cameras.

Their accents sounded the same, and the flags with black, red and gold horizontal bars that were raised on the U.N. Plaza were almost indistinguishable. But in many other ways—the ways that count—the two envoys and their countries could have come from different continents or different planets.

For East Germany, official recognition by the international community as a legitimate sovereign state is at once an enormous victory and a profound challenge. It also amounts to something of a surprise for the West. Long hidden in the shadow of its bitter rival, West Germany, the "other Germany" has become the ninth largest industrial power in the world—and by far the richest Communist state in per capita terms. Already the East Germans have surpassed the Italians and the Irish in per capita income, and they are closing in on the British.

Although smaller in land area than Cuba, East Germany now produces more than Hitler's mighty prewar Reich. Throughout the '60s, one of the chief tasks of Erich Honecker, now East Germany's No. 1 man (see box), was to boost production to ever greater heights.

The East German standard of living is still 30% below that of West Germany. It is, nevertheless, the envy of the other nations in the East bloc. When controls on currency exchange between Poland and the G.D.R. were relaxed last year, so many Poles poured over the border to buy higher-quality German goods that the G.D.R. suffered serious shortages of its own, and Poland became alarmed by its zooming trade deficit.

East Germany is probably the most subservient of Russia's European satellites; it supplies the Soviet Union with 15.3% of all its imports, a fantastic figure considering the disparity in size between the two countries. Nonetheless, the U.S.S.R. bans certain East German magazines —not because of their ideological content but because of pictures showing how well the German comrades live.