“Would it not be easier/In that case for the government/To dissolve the people/And elect another?” Bertolt Brecht’s satirical response to the claim by the East German Writers’ Union, in the wake of the 1953 popular uprising against the Communist regime, that the people had “forfeited the confidence of the government”, proposed an absurd solution that not even Walter Ulbricht, the Stalinist First Secretary of the SED, considered realistic.