OBSESSIONS OF BERLIN
powers. Nevertheless, the propaganda offices are busy on both sides
and the referendum
is
part of the Russian program. And then it starts:
-The house-warden knocks on the door: "Have you added your name
to the list for the referendum?" He comes back next day with the same
question, and the day thereafter. The question is asked at street corners,
at the grocer's, in the factories and offices, everywhere, by a great num–
ber of unpaid functionaries in search of ration-card One, until every–
body feels sure that he is watched, that his indifference will not remain
unnoticed. The list of names demanding the referendum may be kept,
checked, and gone over again, as soon as the Allied powers have left,
on the day of reckoning when the unreliables are purged. Anyhow, it is
not difficult to sign a name, and thus they sign-just in case.
Of course nobody is fooled by these expressions of the people's will.
The Party is not gauging its ideological success but the amount of fear it
has been able to inspire. By means of the referendum, demonstrations,
elections, declarations of all sorts, it measures the degree of its power
over the people. It knows that ideological control is of small importance
in an age which has devaluated all ideologies, where ideologies are merely
labels for the controlling powers of one or another set of politicians who
base their rule not on ideas but on an effective organization of terror.
Life in the Russian sector begins to resemble life under Nazi rule, in–
cluding the arrests and disappearances of oppositionists in nightly raids.
Although as yet without uniform and with restricted authority, a red
"SS" is in formation. Discipline and the leader principle are stressed,
the party hierarchy and its system of privileges has returned. With the
division of the people into ration-card categories an inexpensive army
of functionaries and storm-troopers has been created. Being in possession
of a number One ration-card means to keep on living; outside this cate–
gory there is only slow starvation. The struggle for existence is a fight for
the proper ration-card, for the privilege of being used as policeman,
propagandist, informer, or executioner by the masters of the party–
machine.
Russian expansion is based not on consent but on force. It is a
military and police affair exclusively, notwithstanding all the doctrinaire
concern with ideological issues, for these, too, perform police functions,
leading, as they do, to the early discovery of deviations and nascent op–
position. It is not the change in the economic structure the Russians may
introduce in Germany that causes concern, but the political-social struc–
ture of their party-state. For the Berliners the "Iron Curtain" hides no
secrets. They have traveled across it, their relatives are living there,
visiting them from time
to
time, either legally or illegally. Uncensored
IllS
