Thinking about the issue from the Communists’ point of view, Kennedy could even sympathize with their desire to shut down West Berlin: after all, the place was draining East Germany of vital manpower. “You can’t blame Khrushchev for being sore about that,” he allowed. But you could blame the West Germans and West Berliners for insisting that America do their dirty work for them while they focused on getting rich. Bonn wanted the United States “to drive the Russians out of East Germany. It’s not enough for us to be spending a tremendous amount of money on the military defense of Western Europe . . . while West Germany becomes the fastest-growing industrial power in the world. Well, if they think we are rushing into a war over Berlin, except as a last desperate move to save the NATO alliance, they’ve got another think coming.”
As it turned out, Kennedy’s private tirade proved to be more predictive of U.S. policy on Berlin than his public stance. He too was hoping for a “change” in the Berlin situation that would eliminate it as a dangerous bone of contention in the Cold War without necessitating a huge sacrifice of Western prestige.
By the spring of 1961, it was clear that some kind of solution would have to be found soon. In 1959 the number of East Germans fleeing to the West through Berlin had dropped somewhat, but since early 1960 the exodus had turned into a veritable flood, increasing from month to month. Factories in the East were curtailing production for want of workers; some shops had closed because their clerks had gone west. The Soviet threat to sign a peace treaty with the East only increased the flight, since people reasoned that they had better get out while they still could. Berlin, to return to Khrushchev’s pithy metaphor, might indeed have been the tender testicles of the West, but it was also the loose sphincter of the East.
The People’s Army soldier Conrad Schumann leaping to freedom, August 15, 1961
9
THE DIVIDED CITY
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.
—Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”
DURING THE YEARS when Berlin was divided by its internal barrier, air travelers approaching the city had to strain to see the famous Wall. As Peter Schneider observes in his novel, Der Mauerspringer (The Wall Jumper, 1982): “Seen from the air, the city appears perfectly homogenous. Nothing suggests to the stranger that he is nearing a region where two political constructs collide.” Once on the ground, however, the differences became very perceptible indeed. East and West Berlin looked different, smelled different, and above all felt different. The two halves of Berlin had been growing apart since 1945, but the Wall ensured that the dual cities were more distant from each other than if they had been separated by a continent. Saved by its sealed border from continuing to lose its best people to the West, East Berlin solidified its position as capital of the GDR and show window of East German communism. West Berlin, now cut off more thoroughly from West Germany and the Atlantic world, became a somewhat marginal player in the political and economic framework of the Federal Republic.
Despite their differing fates in the post-Wall world, there were surprising parallels between the two Berlin’s. Both were lavishly subsidized by their national governments, which were anxious to hold them up as symbols of the superiority of their respective systems. Both thought they had reasons for self-satisfaction: East Berlin touted itself as the most prosperous city in the Eastern bloc; West Berlin saw itself as the only “real city” in the Federal Republic. At the same time, both suffered crises of identity: East Berlin because it had difficulty gaining recognition or respect from the West; West Berlin because its primary function was simply to survive and show the flag. Both claimed to be full of cultural vitality, but in reality the artistic achievements were spotty, illustrating the dilemma of building a first-rate culture through subsidies and government incentives. Dissident elements in both cities claimed to perpetuate Old Berlin’s vaunted tradition of opposition to established authority, but in each case the claim was somewhat spurious: in East Berlin antiregime forces remained largely quiescent until the last months of the GDR’s existence, while in West Berlin political protest degenerated into sterile and self-indulgent terrorism.
Operation Chinese Wall
On August 11, 1961, the rubber-stamp parliament of the GDR announced, somewhat cryptically:
The People’s Assembly confirms the impending measures to protect the security of the GDR and to curtail the campaign of organized Kopfjägerei [head-hunting] and Menschenhandel [traffic in human lives] orchestrated from West Germany and West Berlin. The Assembly empowers the GDR Council of Ministers to undertake all the steps approved by the member states of the Warsaw Pact. The Assembly appeals to all peace-loving citizens of the GDR to give their full support to the agencies of their Workers-and-Peasants State in the application of these measures.
Upon learning of this announcement on the following day, West Berlin’s mayor, Willy Brandt, spoke of “Ulbricht’s Enabling Law,” a reference to the blank check for dictatorial measures given to Hitler by the Reichstag in March 1933. Brandt predicted that the ominous pronouncement would dramatically increase the number of East German citizens fleeing to the West through Berlin. “They will come out of fear that the walls of the Iron Curtain will be cemented shut,” he said.
The Berlin Wall
A woman climbs out of her apartment at Bernauer Strasse to freedom in West Berlin
In issuing this dire prediction, Brandt had no idea that it would come to pass so quickly. In the early morning hours of August 13, 1961, a Sunday, East German troops and SED labor gangs began drilling holes and pounding fence posts in the streets along the border between the Soviet and Western sectors of Berlin. Then they strung coils of barbed wire between the fence posts. At the Brandenburg Gate armored cars took up positions between the columns while soldiers installed machine guns around the monument. All the streets running between the eastern and western sectors were blocked off, as were the U-Bahn and S-Bahn stations in the east. Some parts of the border were difficult to close off. Such was the case at Bernauer Strasse, where the pavement and sidewalks were in the western district of Wedding but the apartment houses on the southern side of the street stood in the district of Mitte in the Soviet sector. Here the houses themselves were made part of the barrier by closing off their entrances and boarding up the windows (at first, only the lower-story ones). The work progressed at a frantic pace, and by Monday morning, as Berliners set out to work, the first phase in what was to become the most infamous edifice of the Cold War was already completed.
Authorization to erect a fortified border in Berlin had officially been given to Ulbricht by Khrushchev at a Warsaw Pact meeting on August 5, 1961. Ulbricht had been pleading for months for permission to build a “Chinese Wall” in Berlin—an analogy he liked because it suggested a defense against intruders rather than a barrier to departure. As recently as March 29, 1961, the Warsaw Pact had voted to deny Ulbricht his wall on the grounds that it might provoke a war. The SED leader nonetheless went ahead with secret preparations to construct a barrier, which he entrusted to one of his favorite satraps, Erich Honecker. At a press conference on June 5 Ulbricht almost let the cat out of the bag by blurting out: “No one intends to build a wall.”