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Most important, the GDR is under the constant glare of West German publicity: each dissident's criticism, each Government decision, is regularly taken up and analysed by the West German media and beamed back by way of West German television into East German homes. Greater repression is the inevitable answer of such a régime to such problems and this one will probably have to resort to it, but it will be a tricky operation. It will also take place against a background of considerable internal malaise. What faces the Party in the GDR is not always coherent or determined criticism, but rather unwillingness to express unreserved enthusiasm for GDR society as it is emerging and-what is new--unwillingness to conceal this view. This is not necessarily the stuff of riot and rebellion or even specific alternative policies; on the other hand it is not reassurance that the generation coming along will try to make the myth reality and will replace the rigid rules of Abgrenzung, the Wall and Neues Deutschland vocabulary with a strong personal commitment.
10. I am sending copies of this despatch to Her Majesty's Ambassadors at Moscow, Warsaw, Sofia, Prague, Budapest, Bucharest, Bonn, Washington, to the UK Delegation to NATO, and to the General Officer Commanding, British Military Government, Berlin.
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I have, etc.,
PERCY CRADOCK.