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is important and probably came as a surprise to the authorities. One of the petitioners told me that Honecker himself had recently called him in for a talk, and had argued that the only alternative to shutting Biermannn out would have been to put him on trial. The GDR man in the street seems to think that on this issue Honecker is under pressure from hardliners in the Politburo. There is no real evidence of this but his personal involvment is an indication of the political importance of the affair. If there is to be more repression of intellectuals the Party now knows, if it did not before, that the elbow-room slowly won in recent years for a slightly greater degree of free expression will not be abandoned easily. Pressure on individuals, and therefore unwelcome publicity, will be necessary if the authorities are to tighten the screw. A delicate touch will be required with Belgrade on the horizon.
8. My third instance centres round not one name but 100,000 or more. That is the conservative figure for the number of GDR citizens currently applying for permission to emigrate. We lack details, but the group is believed to represent a fair cross-section of the population, with a good proportion of young people and with many, perhaps one-third, acting not out of any very clear political motivation, but out of a variety of personal grumbles or grudges. We have of course to remember that there are in addition a smaller group of GDR citizens, about 5,000 a year, who succeed in leaving without permission, many of them facing the immense hazards involved in crossing the wire and the minefields; and for every one who succeeds there are many who try but fail. But the " escapers " are a traditional feature of GDR society; the existence of so large a group making open applications is new. The applicants refer to Helsinki and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; they hope their cases will attract the attention of Western media or Western Embassies; and they seek advice from West German journalists on how to phrase their applications; a certain expertise is being built up in this field. A comment often heard is that people no longer seem afraid. The existence of this group and this mood presents the authorities with considerable problems. It is clearly unthinkable to let the 100,000 go. There were reports some weeks ago that the authorities were considering lowering the age at which GDR citizens are permitted to emigrate (at present men can leave at 65 and women at 60); but to act on these lines would set them on a slippery slope and in any event such measures would not meet the wish to emigrate among the younger GDR citizens. The response is likely to be, as in the cultural field, a tightening-up, but this again will come under the spotlight of West German publicity.
9. These then are three examples. I have not attempted to cover the whole internal field and have not, for example, dealt with the increasing economic problems the régime faces over the next five-year period and the difficulties in matching the improvements in living standards achieved during the last five-year Plan. The immediate political impact of these discontents should not be exaggerated; there are unlikely to be dramatic incidents or confrontations; the Party is in tight control and behind it stand the Russians. But what we are seeing here is the slightly, but at the same time significantly, greater difficulty in running a repressive society in the modern, post-Helsinki environment, at least in a country so exposed as the GDR. Under Ulbricht the remedies would have been rather more brutal and certainly simpler to apply. Now the GDR is out on the world stage, with certain pretensions to standards of behaviour. Its leader has tried to associate himself with a rather more sophisticated and humane policy; he wishes to maintain the dialogue with the Federal Republic; he needs West German money; and he is in any case subject to certain pressures arising from the Soviet wish, for their own good reasons, to pursue their version of détente.
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