Heroine in Berlin

Halfway around the world, blonde, blue-eyed Traude Eisenkolb, 19, also found the toiler's glory. She was a stenographer at the Maxhuette Steel Works in Saalfeld, a small industrial town in Germany's Eastern zone, when the Communists launched a drive to bring more young people into the steel industry. What was needed to put the drive across was a little sex appeal. The pressagents searched high & low for the kind of face that would look appealing in the glow of a blast furnace, picked Traude. Forthwith she became a "model" furnace worker, was billed as the "first woman rolling-mill engineer," and began wrestling with white-hot sheet metal instead of carbon copies. Her smudged but happily smiling face graced the front pages of Germany's Red press, and a Communist movie company made a picture about her.

Then Gerhart Eisler, the bail-jumping Communist propaganda chief, noticed Traude, started building her into a star attraction for the big Red youth rally scheduled for Berlin this month. She became the "ideal progressive woman," combining "beauty, Marxist dialectic and industry." In addition to her work at the mill, she had to join Communist committees and youth groups, had to travel around the country making speeches to workers and peasants.

When Traude, dog-tired, asked her bosses to cut out the publicity and just let her quietly attend to her steel, they accused her of deviationism and Western sympathy. Two weeks ago, pretending to be a pilgrim to Berlin's Church Day (TIME, July 23), she skipped to the Western zone, went into hiding. Last week Traude asked Western authorities in Berlin for asylum. Explained the ex-labor heroine: "I just got sick and tired of the whole thing."

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