Word: stoph
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Mystery as well as contradiction surrounds Walter Ulbricht's "organization man," as Stoph is known. Party Boss Ulbricht, 76, and most of the aging men around him weathered the war in Moscow. Stoph, 55, who joined the Communist Party at 17 in Berlin, where he had followed his father in becoming a bricklayer, went to Russia too-as an artilleryman and driver with Hitler's forces on the Eastern Front. Between 1942 and 1945, the young Wehrmacht private first class, who was later to become an East German general, dropped completely out of sight. As some stories have...
Westerners speculate that the pragmatic Stoph is East Germany's "liberal," the man who could some day recast East German Communism's rigidly doctrinaire posture. Stoph, his second wife (he divorced his first in 1945) and four children live in Berlin's elite Wandlitz suburb, as do Ulbricht and other East German leaders. The Premier drinks and smokes little, and his chief relaxation is weekend walks in the woods. He is not considered an ideologue on the order of Ulbricht or Erich Honecker, the top man (after Ulbricht) in the Communist Party and Stoph's main...
While Werner Barm cautions that Stoph "is not a man to give up Communism," he concedes that "he is one of the few men in the party leadership who is seeking a reconciliation of Communism and the people." Clearly, Willy Brandt is hoping that the other Willi will some day start seeking the same sort of reconciliation between the people of East and West Germany as well...
Nonetheless, as Brandt stepped from his special train in Erfurt one morning last week, 3,000 East Germans had gathered. When Brandt, accompanied by East German Premier Willi Stoph (see box) walked across a square to the Hotel Erfurter Hof, the cheers began: "Willy! Willy! Willy!" When the two men stepped inside, the crowd broke through the police lines and surged across the square. Then, as if to make sure that nobody mistook which Willy they meant, they shouted: "Willy Brandt ans Fenster [Willy Brandt to the window]!" Moved to tears, Brandt briefly appeared at a third-story window...
Empty Nutshell. Inside the hotel, seated at a rectangular table covered with green baize, Stoph spoke first. In a one-hour speech, he demanded immediate West German recognition of the Communist German Democratic Republic as a separate and sovereign nation. That was not new, but he also added an old demand that West Germany thought had been abandoned: $27.3 billion in reparations for the 2,600,000 East Germans who fled to the West between 1949 and 1961, when the erection of the Berlin Wall cut escape routes...