Politics & Power Quote by Walter Ulbricht

Ulbricht’s line is a neat piece of ideological jiu-jitsu: it pretends to defend democratic transparency while quietly redefining history so that secrecy becomes a national pathology and his own government becomes the cure. The opening question is bait. By asking “when has there ever been,” he implies the answer is “never,” then uses that vacuum to smuggle in a sweeping verdict on German statecraft: governments don’t disclose plans because their plans are crimes. It’s less argument than preemptive prosecution.

The subtext is double-edged. On one level, Ulbricht is delegitimizing the entire pre-1945 German political tradition, collapsing Kaiserreich, Weimar, and Nazi rule into a single continuity of militarism. That continuity conveniently positions the socialist East as a historical rupture, the first “German” government that can speak openly because it supposedly has nothing aggressive to hide. On another level, the claim functions as inoculation. If his own regime withholds information, surveils dissent, or tightly controls policy, critics can be framed as naive: secrecy is what Germans have always done, and the only reason to demand “detailed plans” is to weaken the state.

Context matters. As the SED’s leading figure in the early GDR, Ulbricht spoke from a system that did publish plans - five-year plans - but treated genuine political pluralism as sabotage. The rhetoric of transparency becomes a stage prop: the future is “revealed” as production quotas and ideological certainty, while real power remains off-limits. The line works because it weaponizes collective guilt about German militarism to justify a new kind of closure.