Part II recounts the formative period of East German economists’ intellectual coming of age during the period of the so-called Thaw. The years after the Soviet break with Stalinism created hopes for a more democratic and decentralized socialism, hopes that were crushed by Ulbricht’s so-called revisionism campaign. This chapter focuses on the short career of Arne Benary (1929–1971), an economist related to Friedrich Behrens at the Central Economic Institute of the Academy of Sciences and a first chosen victim of Ulbricht’s campaign. The field of knowledge at stake was the master discipline of the political economy of socialism, a thus far unwritten chapter in the Marxist tradition. What is a more “true” and less “revised” application of Marx? The top-down Stalinist centralism or more bottom-up approach as ventured, for example, in Yugoslavia, Hungary, or Poland? This chapter shows how the Stasi, similar to the well-known show trials under Stalin, staged a show debate that, in spite of its forced character, allowed Ulbricht to both resist the reform of bureaucratic centralism and claim his policies to be a scientific undertaking.