Joy, Not Jubilation

Long the Reddest, deadest corpse in the Soviet satellite closet, East Germany showed faint stirrings of unnatural life last week. East German guards were busy knocking a 5-by-9-ft. hole in the Wall as officials of both Germanys signed a pass agreement permitting West Berliners to visit relatives in the East zone five times a year. At the same time, thousands of East German pensioners began registering to go West with the cagey blessing of Communism's chief zombie in the Soviet zone, Walter Ulbricht. And when the satellite's nominal No. 2 man, Premier Otto Grotewohl, died of a stroke, he was promptly replaced by ascetic, articulate Willi Stoph, whom the Communists have artfully put forward as the kind of man the West can deal with.

Though the changes are more cosmetic than cosmic, any loosening of East Germany is an improvement, an ambiguous mood summed up in West German Chancellor Erhard's reaction to the pass agreement: "The German people will certainly feel genuine joy and satisfaction, but there's no cause for jubilation."

Hardship Clause. The pass agreement, the fruit of hard bargaining over eight months between West Berlin and East German officials, grew out of temporary visits permitted last Christmas. Now, some 800,000 West Berliners with relatives in the East will be able to make as many as five family visits a year at holiday times. In addition, West Berliners can cross the Wall within 24 hours if there is a family emergency (sickness, death, marriage or childbirth). This is permitted under a hardship clause, which also allows the East zone member of a married couple sundered by the advent of the Wall to emigrate to the West.

Ulbricht's motive in letting East German pensioners (men over 65, women over 60) visit the West is less humanitarian than it might seem. He has already let 70,000 aged and ailing East Germans emigrate since the Wall went up, saving the Republic nearly $45 million in pensions and state medical care. His new liberality will give 3,000,000 more of the unproductive among East Germany's 17 million population the chance to escape to freedom--and reduce the Communist dole roll.

Red Triumph. The death of long-ailing Grotewohl at 70 left Ulbricht as the only, lonely survivor of the old guard of East German Communism. A tragic anti-hero who might have stepped from the pages of a Graham Greene novel, Grotewohl, as leader of the Social Democratic Party in the Soviet Zone after World War II, had one brief moment of importance. He used it to ally the Social Democrats to the Communists, symbolized in his famous walk from the right of an East Berlin operetta theater in 1946 to shake hands center-stage with Communist East German President Wilhelm Pieck. The gesture gave Moscow the fac,ade of legality that it wanted to create the German Democratic Republic in East Germany. Though Grotewohl got the premiership as his reward, Ulbricht and Moscow thereafter ignored him, letting him indulge the good life he enjoyed: he once even bought his mistress a red Triumph sports car.

New Premier Willi Stoph, in contrast, is a tough, up-from-the-ranks native German Communist with a puritanically proletarian private life and a good chance at 71-year-old Ulbricht's job as boss. Starting as an economic aide to Ulbricht after the war, Stoph displayed such administrative talents that he was given the job of organizing the Communist security apparatus, later commanded the People's Army.

Saddled with the monolithic image of hard-necked old Ulbricht, East German propagandists for months have worked overtime to build up Stoph as a man who, though dedicated, is not hidebound, and though tough, can be accessible and pragmatic. True or not, the reasons for the seeming effort to give East Germany a new look through Stoph and the pass agreement are not hard to find: Moscow has never given up trying to make the division of Germany more palatable to the West; and with the rest of the Communist European satellites in motion, the East German corpse by contrast has looked seedier than ever. In particular, Khrushchev sorely needs to build up East Germany's image for the visit to glittering West Germany that he expects to make this winter.

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