"It is the most important contribution we can make to speeding up reunification"
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Spoken in the clipped, utilitarian cadence of a party apparatchik, Ulbricht's line turns a national trauma into a managerial deliverable. "The most important contribution" sounds cooperative, even humble, but it quietly asserts ownership: the state decides what counts as a contribution, and the party decides what matters most. The phrase "speeding up" is the tell. Reunification is framed not as a moral reckoning or a people's demand, but as a timetable problem to be optimized by policy, discipline, and loyalty.
The context is postwar Germany, where "reunification" functioned less as a shared destination than as a propaganda battleground. For the GDR leadership, invoking reunification offered two advantages at once: it let them claim nationalist legitimacy while deflecting attention from the fact of partition they were hardening into permanence. Ulbricht repeatedly sold socialist consolidation as the surest path to unity, a rhetorical judo move that made dissent look not merely disloyal to the party, but opposed to Germany's future.
The subtext is coercive optimism. By treating unity as something you "speed up", Ulbricht implies that obstacles are internal: hesitation, sabotage, ideological impurity. If reunification is delayed, someone is failing to contribute. That's the genius and the menace of the sentence. It recruits hope as a tool of governance, converting an open-ended historical question into a test of compliance. Underneath the promise of togetherness sits a familiar Cold War logic: build your system harder, and history will eventually reward you.
The context is postwar Germany, where "reunification" functioned less as a shared destination than as a propaganda battleground. For the GDR leadership, invoking reunification offered two advantages at once: it let them claim nationalist legitimacy while deflecting attention from the fact of partition they were hardening into permanence. Ulbricht repeatedly sold socialist consolidation as the surest path to unity, a rhetorical judo move that made dissent look not merely disloyal to the party, but opposed to Germany's future.
The subtext is coercive optimism. By treating unity as something you "speed up", Ulbricht implies that obstacles are internal: hesitation, sabotage, ideological impurity. If reunification is delayed, someone is failing to contribute. That's the genius and the menace of the sentence. It recruits hope as a tool of governance, converting an open-ended historical question into a test of compliance. Underneath the promise of togetherness sits a familiar Cold War logic: build your system harder, and history will eventually reward you.
Quote Details
| Topic | Peace |
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