Word: ja
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Germans took their first major free election since 1933 with a mixed sense of duty and fatalism. In Fechenheim, near Frankfurt, a worn-looking war widow puzzled over her ballot. An election official told an American bystander: "Under Hitler, the choice was simpler-each ballot had a big Ja and small Nein." A young man said: "The trouble is we do not really know what we are voting for. All the politicians talk about is what is wrong with the other parties and with the Allies. No one tells us how his party can end unemployment...
...Ja & Nein." As the train picked up speed, the city of Berlin rolled by, glittering under the bright afternoon sun. All along the route, Berliners waved and grinned up from the rubble and their potato patches. From the hard wooden seat in her compartment, Marie Goebel waved and smiled back. A white-haired old lady, Fräulein Goebel was proud as punch of being a Berliner. "In Berlin," she said, "the people are livelier. There's something about Berlin that makes you feel ten or 20 years younger...
...train chugged through Potsdam, past the tall pine trees that shade the Soviet Headquarters. When I sat down in Heinz Depper's compartment, he was looking at a big Red banner strung across a main street. The sign said: "Vote 'Ja' for democracy." It was part of a propaganda campaign for the Communist People's Congress "elections" this week...
...Vote 'Ja,' indeed," scoffed Depper, a ruddy, sandy-haired carpenter. "They pick a slate of their stooges and then ask you to vote yes so they can claim the stooges are democratically elected. The last time we had the choice between 'Ja' and 'Nein,' it was forced upon us by another great democrat named Adolf Hitler. Do they think we are crazy...
They also found themselves imitating their master's mannerisms. They scribbled furiously on the nearest blackboard, talked in soft, deep tones, combed agitated fingers through tousled hair, grunted an excited "Ja, Ja" or a nervous "Hunh, Hunh." They learned to careen along with a perpetual, preoccupied stoop; some even took up chain-smoking and blue shirts...