Word: spitzbart
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...obstructionist tactics, which hampered Soviet attempts to capitalize on Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik in order to secure Russia's western flank. Wolfgang Leonhard, a visiting professor at Yale and former ranking East German ideologue, who knows both Ulbricht and Honecker, leans toward the theory that old "Spitzbart" (meaning pointed beard) was nudged. Leonhard, a former aide of Ulbricht's, notes that the Soviet press has recently slighted Ulbricht to an astonishing degree. An article on the 25th anniversary of the founding of the East German party in Kommunist, the leading Soviet ideological journal, totally ignored Ulbricht...
Security Gambit. As expected, Brandt said no to Ulbricht's demands, but he adroitly batted the ball back into the old Spitzbart's court. He refused to enter into talks on recognition on the grounds that while East Germany may be a separate state, it "can never be a foreign country for us." At the same time, Brandt offered to negotiate a renunciation-of-force treaty with East Germany, similar to one already being discussed by the Soviets and West Germans in Moscow. In Warsaw later this month, the Poles and West Germans will start talks...
From a reviewing stand on East Berlin's Marx-Engels Platz, Communist Boss Walter Ulbricht waved a bouquet of red roses as goose-stepping troops paraded past. Alongside "Spitzbart," as Ulbricht's unloving citizens call him because of his well-tended goatee, stood Soviet Party Chief Leonid Brezhnev and a high-powered array of other Communist visitors. The occasion was the 20th anniversary of the founding of East Germany's Communist state. What was perhaps most striking about the celebrations was not the relatively modest military show but the new skyline of East Berlin: ultramodern apartment buildings...
That was old Spitzbart's way of referring to his late brilliant planningcommission chieftain, Dr. Erich Apel, 48. Apel shot himself in his office three weeks ago, the same day that East Germany signed a $15 billion five-year trade pact with the Soviet Union -over Apel's bitter protests...
According to hopeful rumors and guesses, the Russians were about ready to abandon old Spitzbart (pointed beard), who is hated for his brutal methods and slavish subservience to Moscow, and replace him with someone more palatable. Runs the argument: now that the Wall is up to prevent major population leakage, Moscow might well be prepared to strengthen its satellite by trying a softer approach with the stubborn, restive East German people. Ulbricht's party organ, Neues Deutschland, noted the rumors of a Khrushchev-Ulbricht rift by elaborately denying...