1 Ulbricht's Berlin Problem

c01.qxd 1/7/04 2:51 PM Page 5 1 Ulbricht’s Berlin Problem Early in the year in which John F. Kennedy became president of the United States, apprehension about Soviet foreign policy was high. Nikita Khrushchev was in power, and his rhetoric was threatening. Historians looking back on the crisis centering on Berlin, 1961, now mostly agree that it was not on the scale of what would come one year later over Soviet missiles in Cuba, but at the time, Khrushchev’s claims, and the bellicose language he used in pressing them, made it sound as if World War III were imminent. The threat by the noisy first secretary, boss of the Soviet Union and of the Eastern European Communist world, was that he was prepared to write a separate peace treaty with East Germany. The situation Khrushchev was exploit- ing was the result of what Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt had agreed upon at Yalta in February 1945. What they had done there was confirmed and embellished at the Potsdam conference in July and August 1945 and expanded in sub- agreements over the ensuing months. The design was to invest formal authority over Germany in the victorious powers: Soviet, British, and American. To their number France 5 c01.qxd 1/7/04 2:51 PM Page 6 6 THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL was added, with the war’s end, something of a collegial gesture by Britain and the United States. These powers would jointly govern Germany and, within it, Berlin. For administrative purposes, Germany was divided into four zones, Berlin into four sectors, each assigned to one of the occupying powers. But it was assumed that the four powers would make policy jointly, and that the personnel of each of them, military and civilian, would have unimpeded access to all four sectors and zones. The Soviets had unilaterally violated these understandings from the outset. They began to make their own policies in the part of Germany, and of Berlin, that they controlled, without a nod of the head to their co-responsible allies. Early in 1948, the Soviets stopped even dispatching a representative to joint occupation meetings. At that point the Western occupying powers, which believed it was time to start gradually devolving upon all of Germany the authority to rule itself, decided to go ahead with the part under their control. This had approximately 51 million inhabitants, as against 16 million for the part under Soviet control. The West Germans were now allowed to set up their own parliament, but it would still be a long apprenticeship back to sovereignty. They had no authority to mobilize an army or to make policies that had military implications. The American representative in Bonn was still called the U.S. high commissioner, retaining plenary contingent authority. Not until 1954 did the Western powers grant substantial sovereignty to the Federal Republic of Germany, the high commissioner becoming, simply, ambassador. In 1949 the Soviet Union granted ostensible authority to the German Democratic Republic—ostensible, because c01.qxd 1/7/04 2:51 PM Page 7 ULBRICHT’S BERLIN PROBLEM 7 the GDR was of course a satellite nation. Walter Ulbricht, who had been the third-ranking member of the original government of occupied East Germany, rose quickly to de facto chief of government. His formal portfolio was secretary-general of the Central Committee, the counterpart of Stalin’s and then Khrushchev’s ranking in the Soviet Union. He was also deputy premier, but, as Moscow’s man, he wielded far more power than the actual premier, Otto Grotewohl, or President Wilhelm Pieck. A divided Germany and a divided Berlin, formally under occupation authority, was still the status quo as of 1958, when Khrushchev first threatened to sign a separate peace treaty with East Germany. Whenever he or his spokesmen elucidated on the point, they reasoned that World War II was long since over, and therefore there was no need to hold Germany in subjugated status. Why should we not, Khrushchev asked, proceed to make a final settlement? This was more or less what the Allies had argued in 1954. What was different, and alarming, was the Kremlin’s attitude on Berlin. When, in November 1958, Khrushchev announced his plan for East German sovereignty, he made it clear that he was not only talking about the Soviet Zone. He was also talking about all of Berlin. Under his plan, West Berlin would become a “free city,” and authority over it would reside solely in the GDR. Khrushchev conveyed through Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, the grim successor to the grim Vyacheslav Molotov, that he would give the West six months to respond to his request for negotiations. If nothing was accomplished by what counted down to May 1959, Moscow would proceed with the entirely reasonable next step, which would be unilateral c01.qxd 1/7/04 2:51 PM Page 8 8 THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL recognition of the German Democratic Republic as a free and sovereign state. Khrushchev added his characteristic rhetorical flourishes at a celebration in Moscow honoring First Secretary Wladyslaw Gomulka of Poland. On that occasion, Khru- shchev asserted that West Berlin was not really what it appeared to be, one half of a great city administered under the aegis of France, Great Britain, and the United States. What it had become was a Cold War fortress. Not exactly a military staging area, though there were of course military forces in the Western sectors, as permitted by the four- power agreements. No, his complaint was not of a military buildup, but that West Berlin had become a launching pad for subversives bent on weakening East Germany. Khrushchev hedged his declaration by reassuring the world that the Soviet Union had no intention of using military force over the Berlin issue. However, he immediately added, if the West should elect to engage in hostile activity, the aggressors would be “crushingly repulsed.” Berlin was well shaped by history and topography for its role in the Cold War. It is a great, sprawling city, 344 square miles, eight times the size of Paris, three times the size of London. Its perimeter would encircle the five bor- oughs of New York City. Berlin turned out this way only in part because of organic growth. The decisive event in the city’s aggran- dizement was the annexation in 1920, under the Weimar government, of dozens of surrounding towns, villages, and estates into one administrative unit. Greater Berlin now c01.qxd 1/7/04 2:51 PM Page 9 ULBRICHT’S BERLIN PROBLEM 9 had not just one but two rivers, the Spree and the Havel, and canals linking them. Within the city limits were the Berlin Forest, the Green Woods (Grünewald), and many acres of land suitable for orchards and truck farming. In all, a third of Berlin was, and still is, covered with parkland, forest, farmland, rivers, or lakes. As European capitals go, Berlin is comparatively new. The first permanent settlements, along what is now Museum Island, in the eastern part of the city, date only from 1237—a dozen or more centuries after the begin- nings of many other European cities. Berlin grew slowly, set back by outbreaks of the Black Death, as also by devas- tating wars. Only a handful of buildings from the medieval and Renaissance periods survived the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648). The flowering of the city began at the end of that war, under the Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohen- zollern. It was he who envisioned a wide avenue leading westward from his castle. For aesthetic reasons, as well as for comfort in the summer, he planted trees along it. The avenue thus formed became the heralded Unter den Lin- den—Under the Linden Trees. Walking down that avenue in 1970, I thought, however wistfully, of a walk down the Champs-Elysées, both of them central, well laid out, leafy, but, in Berlin, neglected. Friedrich Wilhelm’s successors were great builders, turning Berlin into a baroque city. Among the most notable of the new structures was Schloss Charlottenburg, which Friedrich I of Prussia ordered built some three miles to the west of the city center as a country retreat for his queen, Sophie Charlotte. In their day, at the end of the c01.qxd 1/7/04 2:51 PM Page 10 Key 1. Havel River 15. Checkpont Charlie (Friedrichstrasse) 2. Tegel Airport 16. Museum Island 3. East Germans’ Pankow compound 17. City Hall 4. Spree River 18. Tempelhof Airport 5. Bornholmerstrasse border crossing 19. Landwehr Canal 6. Bernauerstrasse 20. Stasi headquarters 7. Reichstag 21. Karlshorst (Soviet headquarters) 8. Schloss Charlottenburg 22. Glienecke Bridge 9. Tiergarten 23. Steinstücken 10. Gatow Airport 24. U.S. Mission 11. Kurfürstendamm 25. Allied Kommandantur 12. Potsdamerplatz 26. Marienfelde refugee center 13. Brandenburg Gate 27. Teltow Canal 14. Under den Linden 28. Schönefeld Airfield 10 c01.qxd 1/7/04 2:51 PM Page 11 ULBRICHT’S BERLIN PROBLEM 11 seventeenth century, the royal party would have traveled from their main castle down Unter den Linden and through a large hunting preserve to reach Schloss Char- lottenburg. In the eighteenth century, that hunting preserve became a park, the Tiergarten, and the Brandenburg Gate was erected at the point where Unter den Linden comes up against the eastern edge of the Tiergarten. This immense gate, six columns topped with a chariot drawn by four horses, was modeled on the entrance to the Acropolis and became the universally recognized symbol of Berlin. In the late nineteenth century, Chancellor Bismarck was busy conquering Prussia’s neighbors in order to turn the Kingdom of Prussia into an empire and his king into Kaiser Wilhelm.

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