Today is the 56th anniversary of the 17th-of-June-Uprising in East Germany. The textbook version says that the workers were reacting to reductions in wages and increases in work quotas. Economic factors were at play, and the political leadership of East Germany had, indeed, proposed oppressive changes in the workplace. But the textbook version leaves out another conflict which was at the center of popular unrest – the attack of the East German authorities on the Lutheran churches, and specifically on the “Youth Assembly” movement (“Junge Gemeinde”). In early 1953, the JG was denounced as an illegal organization, and those students who publicly identified with it were often subject to expulsion from high schools and universities. Many were bureaucratically denied their high school diplomas. The retreat centers operated by the JG were seized by the government and turned over to the Free German Youth movement (Freie Deutsche Jugend). the FDJ were militantly atheistic and made it their business to seek out and torment young people with the temerity to identify themselves as Christians.
On the 17th of june, 1953 over 400,000 East Germans gathered in Berlin to protest the actions of the government. The East Germans eventually called in soviet troops for backup. The soviets and the East German Vopos eventually opened fire on the demonstrators. Exact numbers of those killed are still in dispute. The low estimate is about 150. The high estimate is over a thousand.
Government police firing on unarmed demonstrators was too much for Bertolt Brecht, who, up until that point had been a supporter of the East German Government. He later wrote the following poem:
Die Lösung
Bertolt Brecht
Nach dem Aufstand des 17. Juni
Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands
In der Stalinallee Flugblätter verteilen
Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk
Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe
Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit
Zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da
Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung
Löste das Volk auf und
Wählte ein anderes?
The Solution
Bertolt Brecht
After the Uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in Stalin Street
On them one could read that the People
Had lost the trust of the Government
And only through doubled efforts
Could they win it back. Wouldn’t it
Be simpler for the Government
To dissolve the People
And elect another?
(English translation by RGS)
Note: in German as in English, the title “Solution” makes a veiled allusion to the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” (Endlösung des Judenfrage).