Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Ulbricht

Ulbricht’s line is a bleak little theory of human nature packaged as political justification: solidarity, he implies, isn’t a normal condition, it’s an emergency response. Coming from the East German leader who helped build a state around forced “collective” life, the sentence does double duty. It diagnoses division as the default and then quietly argues that a responsible government must keep the public in a permanent posture of mobilization.

The subtext is where the machinery hums. “In the past” creates a convenient landfill for blame: if cooperation only happened under threat, then today’s coercive unity isn’t an aberration, it’s history finally being managed correctly. “Great disaster” is elastic language, the kind politicians love because it can mean war, famine, fascism, inflation, moral decay, Western influence. Once the category is wide enough, nearly any dissent becomes not disagreement but sabotage during a crisis.

Context matters: Ulbricht governed in a Cold War pressure cooker, where the regime framed the socialist project as a defensive necessity against capitalism and “revanchism.” East Germany’s legitimacy problem - people could literally leave until the Wall stopped them - demanded a narrative that made unity feel compulsory, not chosen. This sentence supplies it. If cooperation is only possible when catastrophe looms, then the state’s job is to keep the catastrophe visible, proximate, and politically useful. The rhetoric is less about the past than about permission: permission to discipline, to surveil, to demand sacrifice, all in the name of preventing the next “great disaster.”