THE ORIGINAL SIN OF THE INTELLECT
43
Who am I, and what is my modest thinking compared to this
system, which predicts, that when war has been abolished, there will
be
a Golden Age, a paradise on earth, deserts will turn into bloom–
ing gardens and the steppes into undulating fields of grain-through
the toil of slave laborers, of course, who will be dead by then, alas!
And the mummy of the last capitalist will be exhibited in the museums
and the sun will shine equally on the good and the evil, the just and
the unjust-I beg your pardon, the evil and unjust will have died out
by then. Justice and peace, happiness and prosperity will reign every–
where, for there cannot be "contradictory class interests" any longer.
In the Soviet Union they have already vanished. But where are
justice and peace, happiness and prosperity?
It is all the fault of the capitalist world outside, which is still
strong enough to retard development. But, according to historical
laws, this world is incurably ill and doomed to death. Time is on our
side. Onward, then!
If
we help the process along, we will shorten the
death struggle of capitalism, prevent the creation of new hecatombs
of war victims, and save millions from being dragged into the abyss.
Let us free the peoples ...
Hold on, I forgot the warrant. I am no longer "we." I fled the
liberators, left the camp of peace and progress, to go into the sinking
world in which there are no camps. I forgot the millions of arrests
necessary for the victory of socialism. I forgot Party discipline, with–
out which no party of the new type can exist. Had I not submitted
to it voluntarily myself, had I not demanded it from others and
sworn, "The Party is always right"? What will the students think,
whose education the highest Party interests had entrusted to me?
Bad examples spoil the best Party mores: some of those students
came to visit me in West Berlin during the FDJ World Festival of
Youth. Could it be that they thought more of my example than
of Party discipline?
Who am I, then? I have sentenced myself to death. My irony
has a grim undertone: I have chosen to sit on a rotting branch, and
it is only a matter of time until it breaks. Perhaps I will even
fall
off before, because the comrades are throwing stones at me, and
there are many of them- the concentrated energy of the organized
cadres, the single-minded will of the Party which penetrates the last
house at the zone border, just as it quivers in the last bayonet of
