August 12, 1951. It’s a brilliant Sunday afternoon in the eastern sector of Berlin, the DDR’s capital, now an urban showplace of 1.7 million residents and proudly known on road signs as Berlin, Hauptstadt der DDR—a simple declaration of the SED’s ongoing claim to the entire city as DDR territory. The boulevards are clean and neat in Alexanderplatz, the downtown area of East Berlin. Windows are bedecked with flowers, and flags from every nation of the globe festoon the buildings, which are draped with tapestries displaying the goal of world socialism in dozens of languages: Friede, Pokoj, Paix, Beke, Pax, Pace, Peace. But a walk off the main drag casts doubt on whether there is much cause to preen: six years after the war’s close, block after block of row houses are still gutted. The decrepit trolley cars are slow-moving war survivors; postwar automobiles are nowhere to be seen, except for a few “official” vehicles of the government and People’s Police. Rubble lines every side street. The National Reconstruction Program, a much-publicized campaign to repair the DDR’s war-scarred cities, is not slated to begin until late fall. Economic reconstruction is barely under way. But ideological reconstruction is well advanced. Waves of Blueshirts, 100 abreast, pass at the rate of 30 ranks per minute in the gala marking the climax of the two-week World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace. Sponsored by the international Communist Youth Organization, this year’s festival dwarfs its predecessors in Prague (1947) and Budapest (1949), as well as the “Storm Berlin” Deutschlandtreffen (German rally) of 500,000 youth in May 1950. The theme for the 1951 festival is “Stalin’s Call to Arms for Peace.” The vast majority of the participants belong to the FDJ and JP, which together boast almost three million members. Down the treeless center parkway of Unter den Linden—the lime trees were cut down years ago—and from the side streets filled with debris sweep one million East Germans, along with 26,000 foreign guests from 104 countries.
Sapag, Pablo (2020) Syria in perspective. From externally aggravated crisis to national reconstruction. Madrid: Ediciones Complutense