Dimensions of German Unification: Economic, Social, and Legal Analyses by A Bradley Shingleton

Author:A Bradley Shingleton [Shingleton, A Bradley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367016883
Google: bqx0xgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 49252570
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

I heard many such stories from eastern German acquaintances, stories of extreme punishments meted out for modest displays of rebellion. Barbara Schumann (age fifty-two), Slavic affairs expert in the Office of the Brandenburg Premier, described witnessing the arrest of a seventeen-year-old boy at a Free German Youth Conference in 1956. Bored by the long speeches, the teenager drew across a picture of Lenin. For this act of “defacement” he was incarcerated for two years at the infamous prison complex in the city of Bautzen near Dresden to which political prisoners were sent.7 (In 1989, discovery of the remains of more than seventeen thousand political prisoners from the Soviet occupation era confirmed Bautzen as the site of the largest mass grave of post-World War II Germany.) In his groundbreaking work, The Captive Mind, Polish-born writer Czeslaw Milosz graphically illustrated how the intimidation tactics used in Communist countries affected individual behavior:

Before it leaves the lips, every word must be evaluated as to its consequences. A smile that appears at the wrong moment, a glance that is not all it should be, can occasion dangerous suspicions and accusations. Even one’s gestures, tone of voice, or preference for certain kinds of neckties are interpreted as signs of one’s political tendencies.8

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