Free Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum

2 cover, which showed a blind man standing between the four flags of Berlin’s four occupying powers. The headline—“An Uncertain Future”—did not clearly blame either the Americans or the USSR for the division.
    This neutrality could not be maintained for long, and eventually Sandberg had to take sides. As East–West tensions grew, so did communist influence over the magazine’s content. Its satire shifted to focus more sharply on capitalism, on the United States, and on Germany’s helplessness in the face of Western “warmongering.” By December 1947, its Christmas issue cover featured a German child asking, blandly, “Mother, what is peace?” By the spring of 1948, the magazine had lost its American publishing license. In May, the first issue produced under its Soviet license showed several bridges: the ones marked “currency unity” and “economic unity” are still intact; the one marked “political unity” has been blown apart. 32
    Covers mocking Truman, de Gaulle, and Western promises of demilitarization followed, although Sandberg resisted becoming yet another propaganda tool. He took the “wrong” side in the formalism debate, insisting on expressing his admiration for “formalist” artists such as Pablo Picasso. This compromise did not last long. By 1950, the party Central Committee’scultural department could no longer tolerate anything other than total conformity. As one of its members argued, “We need support by our satirical press in the republic.” The magazine, another declared, was attempting to conform—“We believe that
Ulenspiegel
has constantly and intensively worked on improving itself”—but doubts remained. 33 None of this mattered, because its readership had collapsed. No one wanted to buy a satirical magazine that wasn’t funny, and the authorities shut it down in August. Although it was later reincarnated under the similar name of
Eulenspiegel
, it was never quite the same.
    Yet in private, behind closed doors and when they were on their own, even the authorities told political jokes. Günter Schabowski, an East German journalist and later a member of the last East German government, once told a British journalist, “At
Neues Deutschland
we told each other jokes in the canteen. We weren’t blind to the failings of the system, but we convinced ourselves that this was only because it was early days and the class enemy was perpetrating sabotage wherever he could. One day, we thought, all problems would be solved and there wouldn’t be any more jokes because there wouldn’t be anything left to joke about.” 34 There were even jokes about that. For example this one, quite possibly imported from the USSR, and alluding to two of the Soviet Union’s most famousGulag construction projects:
                   
“Who built the White Sea Canal?”
                   
“Those who told political jokes.”
                   
“And who built the Volga–Don Canal?
                   
“Those who listened.”
    Humor could not always be controlled. Clothing could not always be controlled. As it turned out, religious emotions could not always be controlled either. Some of those in communist Europe organized themselves underthe church’s umbrella in a careful manner, planning and measuring their involvement, calculating the personal price they might have to pay. Józef Puciłowski was part of a Union of Polish Youth section whose leaders made a decision to go, as a group, to a priest for private catechism instruction on a regular basis. The risk paid off: no one in the group ever told the authorities. 35 As a young man,Hans-Jochen Tschiche decided to become a Lutheran clergyman. Although at the time, in the late 1940s, he was able to study in West Berlin, he deliberately went back to work in the East in order to pursue his vocation there. Part of the appeal of the clergy for him was its openness: one was allowed to read a wider