Time & Perspective Quote by Walter Ulbricht

A revolution that doubles as a national redemption story: that’s the trick Walter Ulbricht is pulling here. On its face, the line is standard Marxist teleology - workers defeat exploiters, history lurches forward. But the sentence is engineered less as theory than as political fusing: class victory is not merely compatible with German liberation; it is identical to it.

That identity claim matters in Ulbricht’s context. As the Soviet-backed leader of East Germany, he needed socialism to read not as foreign imposition but as the authentic answer to Germany’s catastrophe: fascism, war, occupation, and division. By labeling opponents “exploiters and slave holders,” he collapses a wide range of targets into a single moral category: capitalists, landowners, industrialists, but also anyone resisting the new order. The language is deliberately archaic and absolutist. “Slave holders” isn’t an economic descriptor so much as a stigma, a way to deny legitimacy to rival parties and to cast coercive state-building as emancipatory cleanup.

The subtext is a demand for unity under the party’s definition of “the people.” If the working class’s triumph equals the nation’s liberation, then dissent becomes something darker than disagreement - it becomes betrayal of Germany itself. It’s a rhetorical preemption of pluralism: there can be no competing route to “liberation,” because Ulbricht has already welded the national interest to a single ideological outcome.

In the Cold War, that weld did real work. It reframed geopolitical alignment with Moscow as patriotic necessity, while turning the domestic consolidation of power into a moral crusade.