Schorn and his wife have always been very much attached to each other, despite their political differences, and after he was released from Buchenwald, early in 1950, she helped him get a job in the accounting department of the Leuna Works. He began to study the theory of Communism, though for reasons his wife didn’t care much for. “It was clear to me by that time that the Communist system could be beaten only with its own weapons,” he told me. “I decided to study dialectics so I could convince the Comrades that they were wrong. I joined the German-Soviet Friendship Society at Leuna and was even elected secretary of its branch at the plant. My wife didn’t like that. ‘The fact that you can be elected to office in the Society shows a weakness in our system,’ she said.”
Last May 28th, the German government of the Soviet Zone—the Politburo of the S.E.D.—decreed a 10 percent increase in everybody’s production norm. The contents of Schorn’s pay envelope the following week shrank almost 15 percent, owing to the loss of a bonus he had been receiving for exceeding his old norm. A few days later, on June 11th, the Communist papers and radio made public an admission by the same Politburo that it had committed “serious mistakes” in failing to provide adequately for the people’s standard of living. On June 14th, the S.E.D. paper Neues Deutschland printed a severe attack on those in charge of the building industry, accusing them of using “sledge-hammer methods” in their dealings with the workers and warning them against trying to attain the new norms “by threats or force.” The Red Army paper, Tägliche Rundschau, announced that the East German government “recognized previous errors and failures.” One government leader after another publicly confessed that he had been guilty of mistakes. A fundamental revision of economic policies was promised. Farmers were told that the land would be considered theirs and that there would be no more attempts at collectivization. Workers were promised higher wages and better food. Refugees to West Germany were asked to come back, and assured that everything would be forgiven. The Volkspolizei became polite.
“It was obvious that something mysterious and possibly very significant was going on,” Schorn said to me. “For eight awful years we’d lived in almost constant terror—told what to think, what to eat, what to read. There was no happiness in the Zone, and no hope, only Galgenhumor [gallows humor]. Our pastors had been arrested. We’d seen relatives and friends carted away by the Soviet secret police—or been carted away ourselves. Ninety percent of the inhabitants of Soviet Germany had no use for the so-called German Democratic Republic. For years, the government had been promising that living conditions would get better. Instead, they got worse. My wife had a job, and together we earned eight hundred marks a month, which is far better than the average family, but sometimes after the fifteenth of the month we had no money left to buy food. We hadn’t seen butter, margarine, or any other fats for months. Potatoes, as you know, mean to a German what spaghetti means to an Italian. Well, potatoes were first rationed and then disappeared entirely. In recent months, there had been less food than ever. Whole villages had been abandoned. The farmers were afraid of collectivization, and ran off to West Germany, leaving their fields to go to seed. The authorities sent Free German Youth boys out to work the fields, but what could those kids do? Our bread became dark and very expensive. Bakers were forbidden to tell their customers what they put into the bread. The price of everything was going up all the time. The distribution system had broken down. Last Christmas, the H.O. [state-owned stores] were selling bathing suits, and when spring came they were selling ski boots. There was a widespread feeling that life simply could not go on like that much longer. But the government was apparently plunged in confusion and didn’t seem to know what to do about it. S.E.D. officials went around with a worried look on their faces. The entire Zone was a powder keg, waiting for a spark to touch it off. The strike of the Stalin-Allee workers was the spark.”
· · ·
Some of the people on the streetcar began to curse Walter Ulbricht, the Moscow-trained Deputy Prime Minister of Soviet Germany, whose name adorns the Leuna Works; as head of the S.E.D., Ulbricht is the most powerful man in the Zone. The two Vopos on the rear platform still acted as if they had heard nothing. Upon getting off the streetcar, Schorn made his way to the administration building of the Leuna Works and walked upstairs to the accounting offices, where he at once became convinced that the explosion of the powder keg was imminent. The time was seven-fifteen, the beginning of the day shift. No one was doing any work in the offices; everyone was talking about the Berlin uprising. About 80 percent of the employees at Leuna, whether factory hands or white-collar workers, are not members of the Communist Party. Of the 20 percent who are, three-quarters are “nominal members.” People in the Zone make a fine distinction between nominal members—those who have joined only to keep their jobs and whose sole Party activity is to hand over six marks in dues each month—and Antreiber, or agitators. Not even all the Vopos in the Zone are thoroughgoing Communists; many of them joined the service primarily because the pay is good and food is always plentiful. The lowest-rank Vopo gets four hundred marks a month, which is more than a university professor gets. An Unterleutnant in the Volkspolizei makes up to twelve hundred marks a month, or more than the manager of a factory, and some of these lieutenants are only nineteen years old.
One of the nominal Party members whispered to Schorn, “Now’s the time I’d like to see the regime blown sky-high. We can’t go on like this forever—saying one thing and meaning another.” Then two confirmed Party men came up, and the nominal member turned to them and said he thought that everything at the plant was under control and that the government should be tough in its attitude toward malcontents. At a nearby desk, a worker said to one who was passing by, “Hans, if I may give you some friendly advice, take your Party emblem off.” The other man walked away as if he hadn’t heard, but a while later he reappeared minus his Party emblem. Schorn was told by a friend that the members of the plant’s S.E.D. district committee had been summoned to an emergency meeting.
Schorn left his office and walked through the plant’s workshops. Everywhere the air was charged with tension. He found that some locksmiths in ME 15, the main workshop, were talking of going on strike. ME 15 had been in a rebellious state for the past two weeks, following the arrest by police of the State Security Service of fourteen workmen there who, it was said, were now locked up in prison in Halle, about nine miles away. Several men came up to Schorn and told him they thought the plant should support the Stalin-Allee workers. Schorn cautiously approached a few people in each workshop and asked them what they intended to do. He talked only to those whose Party loyalties he believed to be no more than lukewarm. Without exception, they said they were ready to go out on strike. Schorn walked slowly back to his office, pondering the situation. It was now twenty minutes past nine. Over the Werkfunk, the plant’s loudspeaker system, came the voice of the S.E.D. district-committee chairman. He asked the men to settle down to work. “You will get more to eat, but you must not stop working,” he said. “We must all exceed our norms. Get to work. You need the money.” In Schorn’s office, people began cursing the S.E.D. man. There were shouts of “Shut up, you Lump!” and “Pack your bags, Comrades, and go back to Moscow!” and “We want to be governed by German Germans, not by Russian Germans!” This last was an allusion to Ulbricht and Wilhelm Pieck, the President of East Germany, both of whom lived for years in Moscow and reportedly became Soviet citizens. The voice of the district-committee chairman was soon drowned out by the shouts and boos.
“Then I happened to look out the window at a large courtyard in front of our building,” Schorn recalls. “The big clock there said twenty-eight minutes past nine. Suddenly groups of men came running out of ME 15. They were shouting and waving their arms. I don’t remember exactly what happened next, but I found myself running out of the office and down the stairs. Everybody must have had the same thought, for there were people all around me, and when I got to the courtyard, men and women were running toward
it from all sides, shouting incoherently. Later that day, I asked some people what had made them run out there, and they all had the same answer—they said they felt they had to. They knew that this was the moment they’d been praying for all these years—the great, wonderful moment when they would again do what they wanted to do.”
A flight of perhaps a dozen steps led from the courtyard up to an entrance to the headquarters building, where the Russian general manager and the other Russian executives had their offices. The crowd converged on the steps, with Schorn in the vanguard. Some of the men were clutching hammers or other tools that they had neglected to drop when they ran out of the factory, and now they raised them threateningly in the direction of the general manager’s office. There were shouts of “The S.E.D. must get out of Leuna!” and “Strike! Let’s strike!” and “Down with the higher norms!” Evidently, the men were mostly concerned with better working conditions inside Leuna and had not yet grasped the larger implications of a strike.
At the foot of the steps, Schorn spoke to the men nearest to him. “This isn’t a matter of just Leuna,” he said. “It’s a matter of every German in the Soviet Zone. Everything is at stake. But violence isn’t the answer. If we overrun the plant and wreck the machinery, we’ll only have to rebuild it later. Let’s keep order!” Some of the men nodded in agreement, and two pushed Schorn ahead of them up the steps. Then someone began to sing “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” and the crowd joined in. No one has been allowed to sing the “Deutschlandlied” in East Germany since 1945. “Standing there and singing the ‘Deutschlandlied’ meant the same thing to all of us,” Schorn said to me. “It meant that we Germans wanted to be together again—East and West, from the Rhine to the Oder. Men and women put their arms around one another. Women were crying. There were thousands in the courtyard by the time we finished singing the anthem.”
The ranking German in the plant—Dr. Eckard—and several of his assistants came out of the headquarters building and stood on a small platform at the top of the steps. These men were skilled engineers, assistant managers, and department heads who, whether motivated by conviction or by opportunism, were on the side of the Russian management; Schorn calls them the Intelligenz. Behind the Intelligenz stood a couple of members of the Werkschutz, holding their guns ready. A microphone, linked to the plant’s loudspeaker system, was brought out onto the platform and Dr. Eckard raised his hands and began to speak. He urged the crowd to go back to work and assured them that their demands would be given “immediate consideration.” The crowd’s answer was a loud and protracted howl. No one moved. Dr. Eckard tried a more conciliatory line, expressing his understanding for “the legitimate demands you people have made,” as Schorn recalls his words, but by this time the crowd had become unruly. Again the men were gesticulating with their hammers.
“I was standing not far below Dr. Eckard,” Schorn told me. “The crowd had pushed me up there. One of the workers behind me, a fellow I knew, said, ‘Take over, Schorn, or something will go wrong.’ I stepped up toward Dr. Eckard, who was now talking about the necessity of fulfilling our norms, and said, ‘Pardon me, Herr Doktor, but I disagree with you.’ Then I stopped short. My voice had boomed all over the courtyard. In my excitement, I hadn’t realized that I was now standing in front of the microphone. The crowd down below began to yell and applaud. A man just behind me shouted, ‘You tell them what we want, Schorn!,’ and then Dr. Eckard was somehow pushed away and I found myself standing in his place. I wasn’t very representative of the factory workers, of course, but I was well known among them because I’d been in Buchenwald. People in the Zone don’t trust one another, but they know that a man who has spent four years in a Soviet concentration camp can be no friend of the system. I was what they call an eiserner Hasser [an ironhearted hater] of Communism.
“Well, Dr. Eckard and the Intelligenz moved back into the doorway, or perhaps they were pushed back by our men, who by this time were swarming around me. I can still see the surprised look on Dr. Eckard’s face. Some of his men appeared to be quite afraid. That encouraged me. I faced the courtyard and said, ‘I am taking over the microphone!’ An enormous roar went up from the crowd. There must have been twenty thousand people down there. Then I introduced myself and told them that, as they probably knew, there was a strike on in East Berlin and that we workers at Leuna should declare our solidarity with the strikers. There was terrific applause. I said it was no longer a question of going back to work under the old norms, or any norms, and then I brought up the demands that people had told me RIAS was proposing—the immediate resignation of the government, free and secret elections, the unification of Germany, an opportunity for all political parties to operate freely, a higher standard of living for everybody, the immediate release of all political prisoners, the disarming of the Volkspolizei and the Werkschutz, and the immediate reestablishment of the old norms. That all added up to quite a speech, and after each demand there was much cheering. Sometimes I had to repeat a sentence two or three times before I could make myself heard. While I was talking, somebody hung a big sheet of paper out of a window of the administration building with the words ‘WIR FORDERN FREIE WAHLEN [We Demand Free Elections]’ and ‘SEID EINIG, EINIG, EINIG [Unite, Unite, Unite]’ scrawled on it. People down in the courtyard began to shout, ‘Let’s get out of here! Let’s march into town!’ I raised my hand, and finally they quieted down a little. I told them that the maintenance crews must stay on the job in the plant. After all, you can’t just walk out of a large chemical plant like Leuna and leave it alone for hours. It would blow up and vanish. ‘We must be orderly!’ I said. ‘Let’s not do anything illegal. We have a constitutionally guaranteed right to strike, but we must not weaken our cause by crimes against life and property. Our position must remain strong, and it can remain strong only as long as we maintain law and order. Above all, let’s not forget that this is a strictly German affair. If we don’t offend the Russians, the Russians ought not to interfere.’ ”
Again the crowd roared enthusiastically. Dr. Eckard and his Intelligenz had disappeared. Schorn proposed that three volunteers from each workshop step forward to form a strike committee. The crowd shouted approvingly, and there was considerable shuffling and milling around until this had been accomplished. Then the names of the committee members were announced, and there was another ovation, after which Schorn was elected chairman by general acclamation. He made a short acceptance speech. “Friends,” he said. “I’m going to call you friends because we want no more of the Kollegen and Kameraden we’ve been hearing around here for the past eight years. Friends, our great Leuna Works will no longer be disgraced by bearing the name of Walter Ulbricht.” There was a jubilant outcry, and, with perfect timing, a giant picture of Ulbricht on the façade of the administration building was pulled down. Men and women shouted and embraced in a paroxysm of happiness.
Meanwhile, the members of the Werkschutz had surrendered their weapons to some of the ringleaders of the crowd. (In some factories, the Werkschutz was disarmed by order of the management. Perhaps the only matter on which the Russians, the government, and the strikers were agreed in East Germany on June 17th was that bloodshed must be avoided.) Schorn issued orders that no one was to carry the weapons surrendered by the Werkschutz, and they were shut up in a storeroom. Next, he told the crowd that a group of volunteers was going to Halle immediately to free their fourteen fellow-workers in ME 15 from the prison there. Then the strike committee decided to send a courier to the Buna plant, at Halle, where more than twenty thousand workers were employed producing synthetic rubber. “We’re going to ask Buna to join our movement,” Schorn said over the loudspeaker. Just then, the main gate leading into the courtyard swung open and a man on a motorcycle drove through. He was from Buna. He was triumphantly taken before the microphone, where he announced that Buna had gone out on a sympathy strike with Berlin. Buna was asking Leuna to join.
“Then the crowd went really wild,” Schorn said to me. “I’ll never
forget that moment. Suddenly everyone realized that all over East Germany at that very moment people were rising and cheering for freedom, just as we were. Obviously, it was not just a coincidence that we and Buna had done the same thing at the same time, though there had been no communication between the two plants. We sensed that ten, fifty, a hundred miles away the same thing was happening in other plants. Here in West Berlin, I’ve since talked to men from the electrochemical Kombinat in Bitterfeld, the Agfa S.A.G. and the Farbenfabrik in Wolfen, and the Leipzig ball-bearing works. It was the same story everywhere. Yet people say that there can’t be a revolutionary mass movement without organized leadership. There was no organized leadership that day.”
· · ·
It was unanimously decided to march into the city of Merseburg, a couple of miles away, and hold a demonstration on the Uhlandsplatz, a square in the center of the town. Schorn and the other members of the strike committee marched at the head of what was to become a very long parade. “News of the events at Leuna travelled faster than we did,” Schorn told me, “and as we approached the city, workers from smaller factories came out of the side streets and fell into line. It turned out that there had been the same spontaneous uprising in every plant in Merseburg, and now the workers in them wanted to join Leuna, the largest plant of all. Housewives with shopping bags, men with briefcases, and carpenters and plumbers still carrying their tools joined us, too. Shopkeepers closed their stores and fell into step. The white-coated salesgirls of the H.O. stores deserted their counters and came with us. As we passed a grade school, we saw boys and girls throwing pictures of Stalin and Pieck out of the windows. Some painters from our plant had brought along buckets of paint and brushes, and when they saw a Communist poster, they would quickly paint it over with our slogans—‘NIEDER MIT ULBRICHT [Down with Ulbricht]’ or ‘LEUNA STREIKT [Leuna on Strike].’ They worked so fast that the people behind us in the parade wondered what had become of the Communist posters we’d all grown so accustomed to.” Most of the members of the Volkspolizei had disappeared, but a few of them tried to stand in the way of the parade. The workers just laughed at them. “Out of the way!” they shouted. “Stand aside or join us!” In two or three instances, the Vopos took off their caps and blouses and fell into step with the workers.
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