Word: spitzbart
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...Communists' East German wall was virtually complete. Behind it, Red Boss Walter Ulbricht could whip his sullen millions into line without fear of an other mass exodus. But barricading Berlin was just the first surprise Old Spitzbart (pointed beard) had in mind for the West. Last week, pointedly, arrogantly, he began to reach for more, and as a result, on the tense and anxious Berlin frontier more and more armed men faced each other with weapons at the ready...
Virtually all the comfortable old neighborhood Bierstuben have been forced out of business. Today the German worker must take his evening glass of beer at the big, bleak, state-run HO halls, where portraits of Lenin and old Spitzbart (pointed beard, i.e., Ulbricht) look down mockingly from the walls...