Wealth & Money Quote by Walter Ulbricht

“Great enthusiasm” is doing a lot of work here: Ulbricht isn’t just asking for support, he’s prescribing an emotion as a civic duty. In the early Cold War, East Germany’s legitimacy problem was chronic: a new state, a damaged economy, and a population that could compare its conditions, in real time, with the West. So the Five Year Plan becomes more than an economic schedule. It’s a loyalty test, a mass ritual meant to manufacture consent.

The rhetoric is classic socialist-modernist uplift: the plan will “overcome all obstacles,” as if scarcity, mismanagement, and political repression are merely technical challenges awaiting collective willpower. That move quietly shifts responsibility downward. If targets aren’t met, it won’t be because of bad assumptions, rigid quotas, or a command economy straining under reality; it will be because the people didn’t bring enough enthusiasm. “Let us join together” reads inclusive, but the subtext is disciplinary: unity is not a choice when dissent can be labeled sabotage.

Ulbricht’s promise to raise “our own living standards to previously unknown heights” also carries competitive edge. It’s a bid to beat the capitalist neighbor at the one metric ordinary citizens feel daily: material life. In practice, plans often privileged heavy industry and state prestige over consumer needs, deepening the very dissatisfaction the slogan tries to preempt.

The genius - and the menace - is how the language fuses economics with morality. The plan isn’t just policy. It’s virtue.