Obviously this was not what the Soviets had intended when they launched their blockade, and therefore they decided to bargain. In March 1949, their delegate to the United Nations Security Council, Yakov Malik, began meeting secretly with his American counterpart, Philip Jessup. After lengthy negotiations, the Soviets agreed to lift their blockade if the West consented to hold a Council of Foreign Ministers meeting on Germany some time in the spring. When this deal was announced in early May, many Berliners remained skeptical, fearing a Russian trick. But at one minute after midnight on May 12, 1949, all the lights finally came on in Berlin for the first time in eleven months, and the trains started rolling again between Berlin and western Germany.
Berliners were understandably relieved when the blockade ended. People paraded through the streets, cheering as garland-bedecked trucks entered the city. But the relief was mixed with anxiety. Everyone knew that the Soviets could cut the place off again if they chose to. To drive this point home, the East German newspaper Neues Deutschland later threatened: “He who lives on an island should not make an enemy of the sea.”
Even before the blockade was lifted, Berlin was effectively split into two sections, with each part increasingly taking on its own character. As of August 1948, the city had two separate police forces. This came about because Police Chief Markgraf, the Soviet appointee, had begun ordering his men to arrest and even to beat up political opponents everywhere in Berlin, including in the western sectors. In response, the Western powers sanctioned a new police force for their half of the city; many of its members were refugees from Markgraf’s force. The Berlin city council also split apart. SED thugs had begun harassing Social Democratic delegates when they tried to attend council meetings at the Red City Hall in the eastern sector. Fed up, non-Communist representatives began meeting at the Technical University in the British sector. Later they would switch to the City Hall in the borough of Schöneberg, which became the seat of West Berlin’s city government. SED loyalists not only continued to meet in the East, but elected their own mayor, Friedrich Ebert, son of the Weimar president. (Having in his day hated the Communists, Ebert senior would not have been pleased by this development.) The former Reich capital did not yet have a wall running through it, but for all practical purposes it was now a divided city, the most prominent urban casualty of the Cold War.
Division
On May 23, 1949, the West German Grundgesetz (Basic Law) was published, providing the legal foundation for the Federal Republic of Germany. In August of that year the West Germans elected their first government, which was headed by the seventy-two-year-old Rhinelander, Konrad Adenauer. Theodor Heuss, of the Free Democratic Party, became the first federal president, a largely ceremonial post. The Bundestag began meeting on September 15. Shortly thereafter, on October 7, 1949, the German Democratic Republic was established on the territory of the Soviet occupation zone in East Germany. The German Reich created by Bismarck and brought to ruin by Hitler was now formally split asunder.
Germany’s division inevitably transformed the political status of the former capital, which, as we have seen, was itself now divided into two cities, West Berlin and East Berlin. The Federal Republic hardly wished to have its seat of government in a beleaguered enclave located deep inside a rival state. But physical location was not the only factor behind West Germany’s reluctance to make West Berlin its capital. Even before the German division was formalized, there had been considerable opposition in the western zones to retaining Berlin as the national capital (if and when the Allies permitted a new German nation to arise). The most vociferous opponent to Berlin was Konrad Adenauer, the future West German chancellor. He equated Berlin and Prussia with everything he hated: socialism, extreme nationalism, materialism, Protestantism. For him, in fact, the whole of eastern Germany was so unfathomable that it might as well have been in China. Once, when traveling by train through the Mark Brandenburg, he put down the blinds in his compartment so as not to have to see “the steppes.” And he liked to say that if he looked a little “Mongolian” himself, this was because he had a grandmother from the Harz Mountains. In one of his postwar speeches he articulated a prejudice shared by many western German Catholics when he said: “Although the Berliners have some valuable qualities, I’ve always had the feeling in Berlin that I was in a pagan city.” As early as 1946, therefore, he pleaded for a shift of power away from Berlin, “even if it were not occupied by the Russians.” He was yet more emphatic to his CDU colleague Jakob Kaiser, a native Berliner: “From the standpoint of the German south and west it is completely out of the question that Berlin could be the capital of a newly reconstituted Germany. It makes no difference if and by whom Berlin and the east is occupied.” In his opposition to retaining Berlin as Germany’s capital, Adenauer was joined by the British, who preferred that the capital be moved as far away from Russian (and Old Prussian) influence as possible.
Adenauer’s major political rivals, the Social Democrats, would normally have resisted his desire to shift Germany’s political center of gravity away from Berlin, since that was where their traditional power base lay. But as a result of the forced merger of the eastern SPD and the KPD to form the SED, the rump SPD had moved its headquarters to Hanover and begun to look at Berlin in a new, less favorable, light. As Carlo Schmid, one of the party’s leaders from the Southwest, put it in February 1946:
Berlin centralism has not been good for us Germans; it must not return, and perhaps we must even discuss whether Berlin should remain the capital; for my taste, it lies too close to Potsdam [the heart of Prussian militarism]. . . . In this regard, I know that I’m in agreement with many of our friends in North Germany and also with the Minister-President of Bavaria, [ Wilhelm] Hoegner.
But if the West German capital could not be in Berlin, where would it be? For some time, political leaders in the western sectors had been pondering this question, debating the pros and cons of a number of cities, from Hamburg to Munich. By 1948 the race had essentially narrowed to Frankfurt and Bonn. To many Germans, the former city seemed the ideal choice. It was centrally located, cosmopolitan, and it had a rich democratic tradition. Yet for many other inhabitants of western Germany, Frankfurt’s very attractiveness, its obviousness as a choice, made it undesirable. The impending Federal Republic was supposed to be a provisional state, a way station on the road to reunification. Frankfurt was too imposing to be the capital of a way station. Bonn did not have this drawback, to put it mildly. With fewer than 100,000 residents in 1948, it was a midsized town, not a real city. Detractors said that the most important event to have happened there was the birth of Beethoven, who had left as soon as he could. On the other hand, with the backing of the state of Rhineland-Westphalia and the British, in whose occupation zone Bonn lay, the Rhineland town won the right to host the parliamentary council, a forerunner to the Bundestag. The British then crucially threw their support behind Bonn’s candidacy for the provisional capital, since it was obviously in London’s interest to have West Germany’s seat of government in its zone. The Americans, in whose zone Frankfurt lay, did not push for the Hessian city over Bonn because they did not wish to pull out of Frankfurt to make room for a new German government. Important, too, was the pro-Bonn politicking of Adenauer, who came from the area and who regarded the town as the best choice. Mustering all his persuasive power, Adenauer was able to convince a narrow majority of his colleagues in the parliamentary council to see things his way. On May 10, 1949, the council voted thirty-three to twenty-nine to make Bonn the provisional seat of government for the emerging Federal Republic. On November 3, 1950, after the new government had already started to function, that decision was confirmed.