THE EAST GERMAN PROTESTS OF 17 JUNE 1953 went down in history as the first major postwar uprising against an East bloc government. On 17 June, for the first time since the end of the war East Germans went out onto the street and protested independently. Their actions amounted to a general strike throughout much of the country. To a large extent the protests came from ordinary workers, the very proletariat whose interests the government claimed to represent. They therefore highlighted the chasm between rhetoric and reality—between the real-life working class and the officials who purportedly represented it.

The gap between the SED and ordinary workers soon found expression in a scolding article that Kuba, the first secretary of the East German Writers Union, published in the SED newspaper, Neues Deutschland, three days after the uprising. Kuba, who was a former construction worker himself, chastised the proletariat for rising up against “their” government. He described the protesters in generally positive terms: “sunburned faces under white linen caps, muscular arms and necks, nicely marbled.” And he declared to them, “you looked good.” The healthy appearance of the protesting workers in East Berlin proved, Kuba asserted, that the proletariat was thriving: “You have been eating well in our republic, one could see it.” The obvious implication was that East German workers were guilty of ingratitude toward the state that had done so much for them.

Following the general line of the SED and the East German government— a line also followed by Soviet authorities, who ultimately put down the uprising—Kuba blamed the protests on outside capitalist and fascist agitators who—or so he claimed—had misled all-too-credulous workers. “What,” he pointedly asked, “was an American automobile doing at a demonstration of Berlin construction workers?” Kuba charged that East Berlin's workers had foolishly put their faith in Western Pied Pipers.