As the 1960s came to an end, however, Ulbricht was himself in a position of weakness vis-à-vis his masters in Moscow. Leonid Brezhnev, chief of the USSR since 1964, was pushing for closer ties with West Germany in hopes of gaining access to Western technology and expertise. He found a willing partner in the Federal Republic’s new chancellor, Willy Brandt, whose Ostpolitik aimed at easing tensions with Eastern Europe and facilitating contacts between the two Germanys. Shortly after taking office in 1969, Brandt signed a Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty with Moscow and tacitly recognized the Oder-Neisse border between the former German Reich and Poland. In March 1970 he met with GDR Council of Ministers chairman Willi Stoph in Erfurt, the first such meeting between top representatives of the postwar German states. On this occasion Brandt breached the Berlin question, insisting that there was no difference between West Berlin and the Federal Republic. “Berlin is in every respect part of us,” he declared. Brandt’s enthusiastic reception from the people of Erfurt showed how desperate ordinary East Germans were to break down the barriers between the two countries. Ulbricht, on the other hand, stubbornly resisted the East-West rapprochement, fearing that it would undermine the legitimacy of his Communist government. His belief that the GDR could choose its own path in international affairs, combined with the failures of his economic policy, made him a liability for Moscow. In July 1970 Brezhnev confided to Honecker:
You can believe me, Erich, the situation which has developed in your country disturbs me deeply. Things have reached the stage where they are no longer simply your affair. The GDR is for us a socialist brother-country, an important outpost. It is the result of the Second World War, our conquest, won with the blood of the Soviet people. . . . We must and will react. . . . I tell you quite honestly, we will not permit him to go his own way. . . . After all, we have troops on your soil, Erich. I say this to you frankly, never forget that.
In time Honecker himself would forget who truly ruled the GDR, but for the moment he seemed a reliable replacement for the seventy-eight-year-old Ulbricht, and in May 1971 he was allowed to unseat his former patron with the blessing of Brezhnev. The old Communist warhorse, whose resignation was said to have been based on “health reasons,” was put out to pasture with several honorary posts and the job of handing out medals to second-tier heroes of the East German state. He died in 1973.
Honecker’s appointment as party leader was greeted with relief in East Berlin, especially among the intellectuals. Unaware of his key role in building the Berlin Wall, many GDR citizens believed him to be something of a liberal and expected him to promote more openness at home and greater contacts with the West. At first these hopes seemed justified. He ended the ban on watching Western television and allowed young people to wear jeans and other “decadent bourgeois” fashions. Boys were permitted to grow their hair long on the grounds that, as the new chief declared, it was more important what was in people’s heads than what was on top. At the Eighth SED Party Conference in June 1971 the talk was not so much about obedience and discipline as about variety, tolerance, imagination, and experimentation. Honecker personally stated that the chief goal of the party was to raise the material and cultural standard of living in the GDR, and to that end he endorsed a series of social reforms, including greater support for the old and sick, loans for young married couples, generous vacation pay, free day care for preschool children, maternity leave for pregnant mothers, and free abortions.
In the area of foreign policy, Honecker’s regime began with a major change in Berlin’s legal status: the Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin, negotiated by the four occupation powers in September 1971 and signed into law in June 1972. While not ending four-power control over the city, the agreement allowed Bonn to represent West Berlin in its external relations. At the same time, the Western powers tacitly recognized East Berlin as the capital of the GDR. (When Washington accorded diplomatic recognition to the GDR in 1974, it carefully described its embassy there as in and not to East Germany, and it characterized East Berlin as merely “the seat of the GDR government.”) Ancillary agreements guaranteed travel and communications between West Germany and West Berlin and stipulated that all future changes in Berlin’s status must be achieved through arbitration. Also in 1972, talks between the two Germanys yielded the Basic Treaty, which facilitated inter-German cooperation in such areas as telecommunications, waste disposal, pollution control, and postal services. The FRG and the GDR now formally acknowledged each other’s existence, though at the insistence of Bonn, which heretofore had refused to recognize any nation that recognized East Berlin, the mutual acceptance was qualified by the exchange of “permanent missions” rather than full-fledged embassies. Bonn was careful to stipulate that the GDR was a state within the German nation rather than a sovereign foreign nation. With respect to Berlin, the Basic Treaty established more liberal visiting privileges for West Berliners and West Germans wanting to pay visits to the other side of the Wall. Now they could spend up to thirty days a year in East Berlin, provided that they exchanged a certain sum of D-marks—five for West Berliners, ten for West Germans—each day they stayed. (On November 5, 1973, the required exchange went up to ten marks for West Berliners and twenty marks for West Germans.) Some telephone links between the two halves of the city were also restored. The Berlin Wall remained a formidable barrier, but it had developed a few cracks.
It soon transpired, however, that the “openness” touted by Honecker at the beginning of his rule hardly extended beyond such tentative liberalization measures. Indeed, even the modest opening to the West in the early 1970s represented a source of danger for Honecker, since his hopes for promoting the GDR as a fully sovereign state depended in part on the cultivation of a unique East German identity. Bonn’s leaders might speak of common German values, but Honecker adopted a policy of ideological apartheid he called Abgrenzung. In addition to cracking down on free discussion and artistic expression (about which more below), his regime sought to generate a sense of East German patriotism that might be strong enough to withstand the pressures of increased exposure to Western influences.
Manipulation of history played an important role in this endeavor. Previously the SED regime had eschewed building many bridges to the German past, insisting that the new socialist state represented an abrupt and necessary departure from tainted traditions. In the main, only working-class heroes and martyred Communists had been acceptable as historical models. Under Honecker, however, the state asserted its claim to a host of figures, institutions, and political legacies that heretofore had earned nothing but socialist scorn. Martin Luther, for example, suddenly went from being a lackey of princes to a social rebel and precursor of Marx. Luther’s rehabilitation facilitated overtures to the Evangelical (Protestant) Church, which had been rigorously suppressed under Ulbricht. By mending fences with the Evangelical Church, the regime sought to harness its considerable influence and to use it as an agent of social control. The great Protestant composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, was rehabilitated as a musician of the people, while Goethe was found to have championed positive social change. (The GDR regime became so enamored of Goethe that in 1970 it ordered a team of scientists to exhume and inspect his body, in the hope that it might be displayed in a glass case as a poet-saint of the people. The remains proved to be in such bad shape, however, that the scientists simply cleaned up the bones, coated them with chemicals, and returned them to their crypt in Weimar. Needless to say, this creepy operation was conducted in the greatest secrecy.)