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National Geographic : 1974 Sep
Contents
valid. Hansel and Gretel no longer find pearls and precious stones in the witch's house. Our children cannot understand this anymore pearls and precious stones mean nothing to them. So we have them find a miracle pot, always filled with food." One thing the Birks hadn't changed. Gretel still pushes the old witch into an oven where she is burned up. "We had to keep that," Ursula said. "The children are always wait ing for that scene." Television Leaps the Wall As young minds are shaped toward a socialist culture, they are also shaped toward productive work habits. I glimpsed this pro cess at Stassfurt, where the state-run RFT factory produces some 40,000 black-and white television sets and 10,000 color sets a year. Black-and-white sets sell for 1,600 to 2,100 marks, color for 2,800. Boys and girls completing the GDR's re quired ten years of schooling vie for appren ticeships here. The brightest will go on to technical universities to become skilled elec tronics workers; the less talented receive "suitable jobs" at the factory. I watched one group repair sets returned for flaws. One serious youth told me that 60 percent of the boys in his brigade had enlisted for three-year hitches as army-officer train ees. "One cannot just take from the state, one must also give something back." The others would serve 18 months as conscripts. Later I talked with the youngsters in their dorm. Their questions revealed extraordinary concepts of the United States: "Why are peo ple starving in the streets in your country? How did you, as a journalist, personally con tribute to ending the killing in Viet Nam?" Ironically, the TV sets they build and service help overcome the lack of Western books, magazines, and newspapers, officially banned. Even the most dedicated socialist may be tempted to switch from a GDR work ers' amateur chorus to a West German tele cast of Liza Minnelli belting 'em out. Weimar Reveres Giants of the Past I traveled south to Weimar, the old ducal capital that embodies both the best and worst of German history. In the GDR, there is a use for both. Here Duke Karl August of Saxe Weimar in the late 18th century lured the geniuses (Goethe, Schiller, Herder, and others) who created the golden age of German letters. The state preserves their memory. School children and tourists march incessantly through the old houses, museums, and land marks of the period. I wondered how those literary titans, creatures of a bourgeois age who are equally revered in West Germany, serve in the new workers' and farmers' state? At the Institute of German Classical Lit erature, Professor Dr. Karl-Heinz Hahn said: "True, the period was characterized by the bourgeoisie, but it also saw the laying down of bases on which Marx and Lenin would build. For instance Goethe once wrote, 'We know of no world except that which focuses on the human being, we want no art that does not reflect this emphasis.' Most outstanding! This put humans at the center of things. "Of course the socialist view has moved on to a higher plane; we consider the human being as a social being. Oh, we are far from taking Goethe as a socialist, but the sun did not arise from nothing." Memorial to a Time of Evil Neither did the Buchenwald concentration camp just outside the city. Built in 1937 by the Nazis, it serves today as a national memorial. Some 56,000 perished here-Com munists and other political prisoners first, then Russians, Poles, and other conquered peoples, many Jews among them. Little remains. The gate with its infamous legend, "Jedem das Seine-To each his own"; a part of a factory, the cremation ovens, and several lampshades made of human skin. It is enough to provide an enduring lesson in man's capacity for evil. The GDR, through picture displays and lectures, preaches another dogma: That only in a capitalist society could such horrors flourish, that many Nazis later found refuge in West Germany, and that "such things could not happen in our socialist state." In Weimar I met Dr. Klaus Magdlung, a teacher of English at a local school. He con fided that he was celebrating two events. First, he had just taken delivery of his new Zhiguli, a Fiat-like car built in Russia. He had waited three years for it, and paid 19,800 marks-almost $8,000. Second, his family was having a reunion to celebrate the fiftieth wedding anniversary of his wife's parents. A sister-in-law was coming from West Germany, another from the United States. They had come together twice before. "It is a warm and pleasant National Geographic, September 1974 312
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