Politics & Power Quote by Walter Ulbricht

A bland-sounding sentence that does heavy ideological lifting: Ulbricht turns a geopolitical standoff into a moral census. By invoking "the plan" (never detailed here), he frames policy as proof of collective character, as if an administrative document can certify the inner lives of 20 million people. That scale is the point. It converts a contested state into a unified public will, smoothing over dissent with arithmetic.

The phrasing is pure Cold War judo. "Think only of peace" reads like reassurance, but it also preemptively disqualifies criticism: if the GDR is peace itself, opposition becomes warmongering or sabotage. "Freedom" gets a similar makeover. In East German official language, freedom is not liberal pluralism; it is freedom from capitalism, from Western "provocation", from instability. Pairing it with "peaceful prosperity" offers a consumer-friendly promise without conceding the West's standard of living as the benchmark.

The context is Ulbricht's lifelong task: making a Soviet-aligned, security-state project sound like the natural outcome of democratic desire. Note the repeated "democratic" - the German Democratic Republic, the democratic sector of Berlin - a branding campaign embedded in grammar. In a city carved into zones, naming becomes an assertion of legitimacy.

The subtext is less about peace than about control. In 1950s-60s Berlin, "plans" meant borders, restrictions, and the management of movement. Declaring that millions "are working for" freedom reframes obedience as agency, turning state directives into popular aspiration. It's propaganda with a calm face: the promise of serenity, backed by the insistence that only one side truly wants it.