It would have been nobler had Brecht published this now-famous poem in his lifetime. But in reality it was not so much the GDR government that had disappointed the dramatist, but the East German workers themselves. As he sadly told his friend Hermann Henselmann after listening to some workers complain about their lot: “Hermann, I’ve seen the true face of the German working class.”
Two hundred and sixty-seven people died across East Germany in the June 1953 uprising, twenty-one of them in East Berlin; 4,493 GDR citizens were arrested, most of them workers. Following a series of kangaroo trials, some 200 people were executed, and another 1,400 received life sentences. The number of those disappearing into the East German gulag might have been higher had not thousands of East Germans decided that this was the opportune moment to disappear into West Germany via Berlin.
Although the Soviets and the East German government were quick to dismiss the June 1953 uprising as a “fascist putsch” orchestrated by the West, the affair was profoundly embarrassing to the Communist leaders, especially to those of the GDR. The East German system had been shown to be deeply unpopular with its own working class, the very population it was supposed to benefit. Nonetheless, the Ulbricht regime did not emerge weakened from the uprising, but strengthened. Beria still wanted to get rid of the SED chief, but to do so now would look like a concession to the demonstrators. In any event, Beria’s own days as a power broker were numbered, for during his emergency trip to Berlin his enemies at home, led by Khrushchev, had plotted his ouster. On June 26 he was stripped of his powers and arrested. In a political trial much like the ones he had once orchestrated for Stalin he was accused of all manner of offenses, from trying to sabotage the Soviet atomic bomb project to raping little girls. Sentenced to life in prison, he was murdered by his guards before he could serve much time. On July 7 Ulbricht was briefed in Moscow on Beria’s purge. Upon returning to Berlin he immediately purged Zaisser and Herrnstadt, the men who would probably have taken his place had Beria stayed in power in Russia.
Contrary to East German accusations that agents provocateurs from the West had fomented the June uprising, Western authorities had done nothing to abet it beyond broadcasting news of the demonstration on June 16. American, British, and French troops in West Berlin stood by and watched as the Russians, still technically their allies in the former Reich capital, helped the East German police beat down the protesters. What the Western Allies seemed to be saying was that the Soviets and GDR authorities had carte blanche in East Berlin, so long as they did not try to push the Western powers out of West Berlin. It was a message that the Soviets, the GDR government, and most of all the East German people, would not soon forget.
West Berliners were understandably appalled by what happened to their fellow citizens in the East on June 17. Some took out their rage on the Soviet war memorial just west of the Brandenburg Gate, but the British troops guarding the site beat them back. Groups from the West placed memorials to the East Germans killed in the uprising, and the West German Senate renamed the boulevard running through the Tiergarten (and past the Soviet memorial) Strasse des 17. Juni—another salvo in the street sign wars.
Like the West Berliners, the government in Bonn was obliged to stand by helplessly as the East German workers’ uprising was suppressed. Chagrined by its impotence, but determined to exploit the affair as a propaganda victory for the West, Bonn ordered that June 17 henceforth be set aside as a day of commemoration for the abortive uprising. For years thereafter West German politicians gave speeches praising the courage of the East German workers who—it was claimed—had tried to overturn the tyranny of communism and end the injustice of German division. Yet almost from the beginning, most ordinary West Germans treated this anniversary not as a moment for political reflection but as just another holiday. Dwelling on the problems of the East brought on unwelcome feelings of guilt. As early as 1954, Fritz Stern noted that many West Germans had begun to “resent the East Germans who stand as a muted reproach to their enjoyment of prosperity.”
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