In a 1949 manifesto proclaiming the importance of Goethe for postwar Germans, the Socialist Unity Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei or SED) of Germany — soon to become the ruling party of the German Democratic Re-public — expressed thoughts that directly echoed those of Thomas Mann, and which helped to explain why authorities in the Soviet zone believed it was so important for them to secure Mann's visit to Weimar that year. Goethe, declared the SED's manifesto, “embodied German spiritual and linguistic unity in a torn and splintered Germany. He had a decisive role in the formation of German national consciousness.” Otto Grotewohl, a leading SED politician soon to be the first Prime Minister of the GDR, declared in a speech to German youth held in the spring of 1949 that Goethe had been the “symbol of our unified national culture,” and had, through his works, raised “our nation from the twilight of historical emptiness to the rank of a world nation.”