Walter Ulbricht

German politician

• Born: June 30, 1893
• Birthplace: Leipzig, Germany
• Died: August 1, 1973
• Place of death: East Berlin, East Germany (now Berlin, Germany)

As Moscow’s loyal ally, Ulbricht helped to found East Germany and make it into the most stable and prosperous socialist state in Eastern Europe during his lifetime. His oppressive rule in the 1950’s and 1960’s, including the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, prolonged the Cold War and cemented the political division of Germany.

Early Life

Walter Ulbricht (EWL-brihkt) was the son of an impoverished Social Democratic tailor. Young Ulbricht learned about radical socialism at home and in the city’s seamy Naundörfchen workers’ district. The family’s poverty forced Red Walter as he was known to classmates to leave school at the age of fourteen and apprentice himself to a cabinetmaker. Ulbricht’s political education continued, however, first in Leipzig’s socialist youth movement, and, after his journeyman travels across Europe in 1911 and 1912, in the Social Democratic Party (SPD). It was in this prewar, proletarian environment that his dogmatic Marxist outlook took shape.

World War I pushed this shy but talented young socialist in radical new directions. In August, 1914, he joined revolutionary Social Democrat Karl Liebknecht in condemning his party’s support for the kaiser’s war. Drafted in 1915, he served unwillingly on the Macedonian front and, in 1918, on the western front, where he twice tried unsuccessfully to desert. Following the November, 1918, revolution, Ulbricht returned to Leipzig, where he helped to found the local Communist Party (KPD).

The 1920’s provided Ulbricht with the opportunity to work his way up through the ranks of the Communist Party. By 1921 he had been named to a salaried party post in Thuringia; in 1923 he was elected to the KPD’s central committee and transferred to Berlin as a paid party functionary. By the end of the decade he had also taken charge of the party’s pivotal Berlin organization. In addition, Ulbricht was elected to the Thuringian State Assembly in 1926, and then in 1928 to the Reichstag, a seat he held until 1933.

Ulbricht’s steady advance was the result in large part of his organizational talent, tireless capacity for work, and personal dedication. Another reason was his ability to avoid taking sides in factional disputes within the party. By proclaiming his loyalty to Moscow and the Communist International (Comintern), he elevated himself above party wrangling. Trips to Moscow in 1922 and 1924 sealed Ulbricht’s allegiance. Thereafter he dutifully followed the Comintern line, including orders in the early 1930’s to attack Social Democrats and the Weimar Republic rather than National Socialism.

Life’s Work

When Adolf Hitler came to power in January, 1933, Ulbricht was forced to emigrate, first to Paris, where he joined the KPD’s exile organization, and eventually to Moscow, where he served as the KPD’s permanent representative to the Comintern from 1938 to 1943. He loyally defended Joseph Stalin’s every move, from the bloody purges to the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, and thus survived the violence that eliminated so many other German exiles. During World War II, he distributed Soviet propaganda among German prisoners of war and prepared small groups of German Communists to implement Stalin’s plans for a postwar bourgeois democratic republic in Germany.

The most crucial phase of Ulbricht’s career began on April 30, 1945, when he and a small handpicked group of German Communists returned to Berlin in a Red Army plane. Subordinated to Soviet military directives and overshadowed by better known KPD survivors such as Wilhelm Pieck and Otto Grotowohl, Ulbricht nevertheless exercised considerable influence over postwar reconstruction in the Soviet occupation zone. He engineered the reorganization of local administration, helped to create the Communist-dominated Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1946, and took charge of de-Nazification and economic recognization. When Moscow’s plans for Germany changed and integration into the Soviet bloc became the top priority in 1947, Ulbricht ruthlessly pushed through the required Sovietization.

Ulbricht also used every opportunity to consolidate his own authority within the SED. During the occupation period (1945-1949), he outmaneuvered or neutralized political rivals who questioned his Moscow-backed authority. With the establishment of East Germany in 1949, Ulbricht stepped directly into the political spotlight, assuming the key post of SED general-secretary a few months later. A decade later he added the positions of head of state and chair of the National Defense Council. Thereafter he controlled every major decision affecting central economic planning, forced socialization, military expansion, and Soviet East German relations.

Yet governing a socialist state in Eastern Europe during the height of the Cold War was no easy task, especially when that country was German. For Ulbricht it meant a difficult balancing act that required him to implement Moscow’s orders, appease Eastern Europe’s suspicions, and maintain strict controls over an untrusting East German citizenry. As long as Stalin lived, Ulbricht could depend on Soviet backing and leadership. When the Soviet dictator died in 1953, however, Ulbricht encountered a series of challenges that tested his authority and demonstrated the precarious nature of socialist rule in Eastern Europe.

The most serious challenge came after Stalin’s death in 1953. As a post-Stalinist political “thaw” swept Eastern Europe, disaffected construction workers in East Berlin staged a public protest against increased work norms, which, on June 17, 1953, mushroomed into a nationwide uprising against the East German state. Soviet troops had to be called in to suppress this workers’ revolt against the workers’ state. Coming at a time when rivals in the SED and their allies in Moscow were poised to replace the general-secretary with a more reform-minded leader, the workers’ revolt discredited the opposition and saved Ulbricht’s political career. His harsh, Stalinist methods now seemed the only way to keep East Germany in the Soviet camp.

Another challenge to Ulbricht’s authority came with de-Stalinization in 1956. Shocking revelations about Stalin’s past raised new questions about the SED leader and forced relaxation of a number of arbitrary Stalinist controls. Before serious opposition to Ulbricht could form, however, revolts in Poland and Hungary once again undercut the reform movement, leaving the SED dictator free to restore his hard-line rule.

Economic problems also haunted Ulbricht in the late 1950’s. He might boldly promise that rapid socialization would enable East Germany to overtake West Germany economically by the 1960’s, but East Germans remained skeptical. In fact, lagging economic growth and ruthless agricultural collectivization in 1960 were driving thousands to flee the country through the open door of West Berlin. To halt this mass exodus of human resources, a flight that reached two thousand a day by mid-1961, Ulbricht demanded and received Soviet approval to begin building the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961. The Berlin Wall provoked yet another Berlin Crisis, and it was heralded in the West as a monument to socialist failure, but it also began an economic turnaround in East Germany that rapidly transformed this nation of seventeen million into Eastern Europe’s most prosperous state.

To Westerners, Ulbricht’s strict rule changed little during the 1960’s. His endless diatribes against West German imperialism, stern warnings to East European leaders about the dangers of reform, leading role in suppressing Czechoslovakia’s 1968 reform movement, and ruthless elimination of dissent at home inspired little but enmity and disdain. However, despite his well-deserved reputation as a servant of Moscow and Sovietization, Ulbricht spent the years after 1963 distancing East Germany from the Soviet model and emphasizing East Germany’s independent achievements. Outsiders overlooked Ulbricht’s flexibility in questions of economic reform, his progressive approach to education and social services, and the mounting respect he enjoyed in both Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

In the end, however, Ulbricht fell victim to his quest for independent leadership in the Soviet bloc. As Soviet party leader Leonid Brezhnev sought to ease tensions with the West in the early 1970’s, Ulbricht’s rigid opposition to détente, especially with regard to Berlin, became intolerable to Moscow. His recalcitrance combined with mounting SED reservations about Ulbricht’s grasp of contemporary problems (he was, after all, seventy-eight and ailing) led to his dismissal on May 3, 1971. He retained several ceremonial posts, including that of head of state, until his death on August 1, 1973, but his influence in these last years remained negligible. After a quarter century in power, not one foreign official mourner participated in his state funeral.

Significance

Ulbricht belonged to the first generation of European Communist leaders. More “apparatchik” than political revolutionary, he rose to prominence because of his close ties to the Soviet Union. Yet his success also resulted from exceptional personal diligence and political acumen. To be sure, he lacked the personal warmth, public charisma, and intellectual temper to give communism a human face. He was too uninspiring, peremptory, and pitiless for that. Yet Ulbricht did possess the personal commitment, organizational talent, and administrative efficiency to make socialism work better in East Germany than in any other Soviet bloc country.

Despite his Moscow orientation, however, he always remained more German than socialist. Contemporaries remember him for his wiry goatee beard trimmed close in the imperial style, his fluting, singsong voice, and his strong Saxon accent. His penchant for Prussian formality and order and his clear feelings of national pride were also very German. He lived simply, devoting little time to family or personal interests except sports. Almost every minute of every day was spent attending to the affairs of state, and as time passed it seemed as if no detail escaped his personal attention. His authoritative pronouncements in later years covered everything from architecture to fishing, from history to art, and they raised eyebrows even among loyal East Germans. Despite advancing age and mounting infirmities, however, he never weakened in his determination to keep the SED in power and East Germany in the vanguard of world socialism.

Bibliography

Childs, David. The GDR: Moscow’s German Ally. London: Allen & Unwin, 1983. This is the most comprehensive examination of East Germany available in English. Childs locates Ulbricht effectively in the context of his times and crises.

Lippmann, Heinz. Honecker and the New Politics of Europe. Translated by Helen Sebba. New York: Macmillan, 1972. A political biography of Ulbricht’s chief protégé and successor by a former SED functionary who witnessed firsthand Ulbricht’s dominant role in East Germany.

Ludz, Peter C. “Continuity and Change Since Ulbricht.” Problems of Communism 21 (March/April, 1972): 56-67. This article provides an excellent analysis of Ulbricht’s lasting political legacy at home and abroad. The author, a professor of political science at the University of Bielefeld in West Germany, has studied the East German political elite for a number of years.

Major, Patrick, and Jonathan Osmond, eds. The Workers’ and Peasants’ State: Communism and Society in East Germany Under Ulbricht, 1945-1971. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Collection of essays about life in East Germany during Ulbricht’s regime. Examines the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED); Ulbricht’s state security and police forces; the position of workers, farmers, women, and young people within the nation; and other aspects of East German society and culture.

Sandford, Gregory W. From Hitler to Ulbricht: The Communist Reconstruction of East Germany, 1945-46. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983. An excellent study of the origins of Communist rule in East Germany that explains the transition from Soviet military occupation to SED rule. Ulbricht’s role is discussed only in broad outlines.

Sodaro, Michael J. “Ulbricht’s Grand Design: Economics, Ideology, and the GDR’s Response to Détente 1967-1971.” World Affairs 142 (1980): 147-168. This article describes Ulbricht’s unsuccessful attempt to develop an economic and political policy that would prevent détente with the West and preserve East German influence in the Soviet bloc.

Spilker, Dirk. The East German Leadership and the Division of Germany: Patriotism and Propaganda, 1945-1953. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Describes the division of Germany after World War II from the perspective of the SED, the Communist-led and Soviet-sponsored ruling party that Ulbricht led from 1950 to 1971.

Stern, Carola. Ulbricht: A Political Biography. New York: Praeger, 1965. The only full-scale biography available in English. The book attempts to assess Ulbricht evenhandedly but is limited by numerous gaps and its 1964 publication date.

Wilhelm, Berhard. “Walter Ulbricht: Moscow’s Man in East Germany.” In Leaders of the Communist World, edited by Rodger Swearingen. New York: Free Press, 1971. A short biographical article emphasizing Ulbricht’s fanatical loyalty to Soviet Communism and dictatorial control in East Germany. It is based on East and West German sources and provides important information about Ulbricht’s pre-1945 career and major challenges to his authority between 1949 and 1968.