Ulbricht, Walter (1893–1973)

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ULBRICHT, WALTER (1893–1973)

East German politician.

Born into a tailor's family in the Leipzig working-class milieu, Walter Ulbricht joined the socialist youth movement already during his apprenticeship as a carpenter in 1907. After military service in World War I, he cofounded the local section of the Communist Party of Germany (CPG) in his hometown in 1919 and soon became one of its leading full-time functionaries in Germany, also representing his party in the Communist International in Moscow.

After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Ulbricht became a member of the foreign leadership of the CPG in Paris, participating as a member of the International Brigades in the Spanish civil war and finally going into exile in Moscow in 1938. On 30 April 1945 Ulbricht led one of the three teams of high-ranking CPG functionaries dispatched immediately after the Red Army's occupation of central Germany. The "Gruppe Ulbricht" immediately reorganized political and economic life in the Berlin region under the close surveillance of the Soviets, thus securing key functions for loyal Communists on all levels of administration.

Already vice president of the Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany, or SED), a merger of Social Democrats and Communists forced by the Soviets in 1946 and soon to become the actual power center of the communist dictatorship in East Germany (GDR), he became its top leader in 1950. Ulbricht also held high-ranking state offices within the German Democratic Republic, serving as vice prime minister until 1960. In this year, his political career reached its apogee when he concentrated his powers in a set of newly created bodies: Ulbricht now chaired both the State Council of the German Democratic Republic (a body fusing supreme legislative, executive, and juridical powers) and the National Defense Council. Following an intrigue of his long-time disciple, Erich Honecker (1912–1994), with the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), Ulbricht was removed from the party Politburo and the National Defense Council in 1971, keeping the representative office as president of the State Council until his death in 1973.

Ulbricht's political career was marked by an astute capability to combine energetic initiative and careful foresight in order to continually maximize the powers both of his party and of his own person. The decisive base of his authority in communist East Germany was derived from his familiarity with the top levels of the Soviet leadership. In the last instance, he always opted for the security and preservation of communist state power, in particular in situations when the policy of communist transformation of East Germany brought on situations of revolt and claims for democratization. During the first phase of Stalinist reconstruction and militarization between 1948 and 1953 he imitated Soviet styles of personality cult, making him the prime target of the people's uprising on 17 June 1953 with demonstrators shouting "Der Spitzbart muss weg" (The goatee must go). As in the aftermath of this revolt, he also managed to survive politically after the onset of the thaw in 1956—demoting and persecuting his closest rivals in the SED leadership—because of his excellent connections with the Soviet leadership. In consequence, the GDR went through a very moderate phase of destalinization compared to other Eastern bloc countries.

Without any doubt, Ulbricht's infamous masterpiece as a politician was the erection of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961. Even as preparations and coordination with the Soviets were already under way, he denied any intention to build a wall at an international press conference in June 1961, coining the phrase "Niemand hat die Absicht, eine Mauer zu errichten!" (No one has the intention of building a wall) soon to become a popular epitome for the cynicism and arrogance of the communist tyranny in Germany.

The stability of the GDR as a state being secured after its closing-off from the West, Ulbricht displayed considerable zeal to reform its overcentralized and ineffective economy. Mobilizing the first generation of "home grown" intelligentsia and the young generation in general he tried to stem the conservatism and lethargy of the party machinery in order to catch up with West Germany's economic growth and wealth. The limits of this policy, however, were reached when claims for more cultural and political latitude were raised both within the GDR and in the Soviet bloc in general. Thus Ulbricht supported both the severe crackdown on artists and youth cultures in 1965 in the GDR and the military intervention of Warsaw Pact members against Czechoslovakia in August 1968. Opposing the West German policy of rapprochement between the two German states, the end of his career was spelled when the Soviet leadership embraced international détente.

See alsoBerlin Wall; Germany; Honecker, Erich; Warsaw Pact.