World Festival of Youth and Students 1973

> *"The young world is visiting Berlin, and it doesn't care if it suits the enemy".*
>
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 **The X. World Festival of Youth and Student** took place in 1973 in East Berlin. The Platz was one of the central venues during the festival.

### Meaning in ∇

With concert stages on the large stage of the Volksbühne, the Roter Salon and in front of the Spielplatz, a not inconsiderable part of the program took place on the Platz.

In 2003 a summer seminar of the Federal Agency for Civic Education under the title *World Festival '73 - Heroines, Bands & Class Brothers* in Roter Salon was dedicated to the topic, the accompanying festival also took place in Babylon.

### General

In 1973 the World Festival of Youth and Students, first held in Prague in 1947, took place in East Berlin. 8 million people came together during the nine-day youth festival, including 25,000 foreign guests from 140 countries. The games took place in East Berlin from July 28 to August 5, 1973 under the motto “For anti-imperialist solidarity, peace and friendship”.  On the one hand, the GDR leadership wanted the country to be cosmopolitan and self-confident by hosting the Xth World Festival stage, also for the West German media that visited the festival. But it was important to her not to let the encounters between the young people become too free, to control and monitor them. The State Security was therefore firmly involved in the organization of the World Festival from the start.

East Berlin had already hosted the World Festival once before, in 1951 for the III. World Festival. But at that time the West Berlin mayor Ernst Reuter had invited the participants to West Berlin, where the occupying powers and various organizations organized rallies and events and lured them with free theater and cinema tickets, books and brochures. Because there were also bottlenecks in the supply of food during the World Festival, the participants switched to the soup kitchens in West Berlin. There was no way that 1973 should happen again.

#### Concerts, discussions, demonstrations

The program included 1,500 events on 95 stages, including concerts by choirs and singing clubs, the youth wind orchestra of the FDJ, rock and beat concerts, panel discussions and working groups, dance groups and memorial events. Individual days were dedicated to solidarity with socialist movements in other countries or regions, then there were corresponding events and festivals that were supposed to bring the culture and music of these regions closer. There were also demonstrations, including the large-scale demonstration “The youth of the GDR greet the rest of the world”. The participants in this demonstration were consciously selected in advance and all program items were carefully planned.

#### "Suddenly the GDR was very colorful"

For the people, especially the young people in the GDR, the World Festival offered an international exchange that especially the younger ones did not know. For nine days they got to know people from other countries. Friendships and love affairs arose, people discussed with each other until the early hours of the morning in the best summer weather. “That was great! Well, that never happened in the GDR, that we heard different political opinions, that we could freely discuss. We were able to write texts like “Chains are getting scarce” or something that we would otherwise never have gotten through in normal GDR times, ”says Klaus Renft, who performed with his band at the World Festival. "Suddenly the gray GDR was very colorful," remembers the saxophonist Ernst-Ludwig Petrowsky, who played in the Tiergarten during the World Festival.

#### "Action Banner"

The employees of the Ministry for State Security were always there, however, because nothing should jeopardize the media success of the games. To this end, the MfS called the “Aktion Banner” into being: Over 4,000 MfS employees took part in the games disguised as FDJers. They were specially prepared for this mission in order to be able to stand firmly in discussions for the positions of the SED and the government of the GDR or to collect leaflets that were distributed by West German groups. But repression took hold even before the games: around 2,300 people were arrested, 800 had to leave East Berlin, and the MfS prevented 2,700 “negative people” from entering East Berlin. Almost 500 people were admitted to psychiatry.

The more than 330,000 participating young people from the GDR had been trained by the Central Council of the FDJ: They should be able to argue convincingly for socialism and not be inferior to the guests from West Germany. For this purpose, the secretariat of the Central Council of the FDJ conveyed to the participating FDJ members: “Notes on argumentation. The historian Dr. Stefan Wolle, who was studying at Humboldt University at the time, was involved in such discussions: "We were then sent somewhere where 'the focus was on the discussion', where West Germans or other groups appeared, where a bit of a backdrop was simply needed, then we were called up, so to speak, by phone call. Then 100 FDJ students were asked or 500 or 1,000 and that went bang, bang, bang. "

## References

1. ↑ https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/event-52662
2. ↑ https://www.bpb.de/geschichte/deutsche-geschichte/weltfestspiele-73/ 65341/introduction
3. ↑ https://www.tagesspiegel.de/gesellschaft/weltfestspiele-der-jugend-1973-love-und-peace-in-ost-berlin /8522146.html
4. ↑ https://www.bpb.de/geschichte/deutsche-geschichte/weltfestspiele-73/65346/hinter-den-kulissen-des-x-festivals?p=all