DOVE OF PEACE “TOO PLUMP"

Press, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 26488, 1 August 1951, Page 7

DOVE OF PEACE “TOO PLUMP"

Communiat Copy Of

Picasso Model

(Rec. 8 p.m.) LONDON, July 31. A correspondent of the Berlin Communist newspaper “Berliner Zeitung” who inspected decoration* for the World Youth Festival which opens in Berlin on August 5 in the Russian sector of the city criticised the East German Communists’ peace dove symbol as “too fat, lazy, and sedate—rather like a sitting duek." says the Associated Press, The reporter found things generally praiseworthy until he came to the two big plaster doves of peace at the Marx-Engels Platz—East Berlin’s Red Square,

The man who made them was to have the model of Pablo Pieassp’s graceful painted dove which decorates the .Communist , peace propaganda. But the German made something plumper. The “Berliner Zeitung” itself com< mented: “Instead of the graceful alertness of the Picasso dove, what do we get? We get something so tat and lazily sedate that nobody would ever believe that the Berlin dove could fly. “It is something that should be filled with gas and hoisten like a balloon—except that plaster won’t take gas. “What will our young visitors from all over the world say when they see this creature?"

The West Berlin anti-Communist newspaper “Berliner Anzeiger” also had something to say. After criticising the dove in the song, “She's too fat for Me." the newspaper added; "The Communists are right when they say their dove cannot fly. And they should have added that it has nothing to do with peace. “But their suggestion to fill it with gas is good. We always thought their peace doves full of hot air anyway.”