In 1969, the West German Social Democratic Party (SPD), led by Willy Brandt, won a majority at the Federal elections and took office in a coalition with the Free Democratic Party, pushing the conservative Christian Democrats into opposition for the first time since the founding of the Federal Republic. Brandt had already served three years as foreign minister in Kiesinger’s Grand Coalition, and there, in close collaboration with the head of his policy-planning staff, Egon Bahr, he had begun to formulate a new departure for German foreign policy, a new approach to Germany’s relations with the Soviet bloc:
Ostpolitik
.
Hitherto, West German foreign policy had been dominated by Adenauer’s view that the new Republic, firmly tied to the West through the West European Union, the European Economic Community and NATO, must be unwavering in its refusal to recognize the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to its east. Claiming that the FRG alone represented Germany, Adenauer had also refused to recognize states that had diplomatic relations with the GDR, with the exception of the Soviet Union. His successor, Ludwig Erhard, had opened trade missions in Bucharest, Sofia, Warsaw and Budapest; but the first real breach of the principle had come only in 1967, when at Brandt’s encouraging Bonn established diplomatic relations with Romania, followed a year later by Yugoslavia.
Adenauer had always insisted that the division of Germany, and unresolved frontier disputes to its east, had to be addressed before there could be any détente or military disengagement in central Europe. But by refusing to contest the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the United States had demonstrated its unwillingness to risk war to keep the Berlin frontier open: and America, as President Lyndon Johnson confirmed in October 1966, would no longer allow its foreign policy to be held hostage to the principle of future German reunification. The message was clear: instead of insisting on the resolution of the ‘German problem’ as a precondition for détente, a new generation of German diplomats would have to reverse their priorities if they wished to achieve their objectives.
If Willy Brandt was willing to risk a breach with the conventions of West German politics it was in large measure because of his experience as Mayor of West Berlin. Indeed it is no coincidence that some of the most enthusiastic proponents of
Ostpolitik
in all its forms were former mayors of Berlin—Brandt himself, future Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker, and Hans-Jochen Vogel, Brandt’s successor at the head of the SPD. To these men it was obvious that the Western Allies would take no untoward risks to overcome the division of Europe—an interpretation reconfirmed by the West’s passive acceptance of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia. If West Germans wanted to break the central European stalemate, they would have to do it themselves, by dealing directly with the authorities in the East.
With these considerations always in mind, Brandt and Bahr devised their approach to the east in order to achieve what Bahr called ‘
Wandel durch Annäherung
’—change through rapprochement. The aim was to ‘overcome Yalta’ through a multitude of contacts—diplomatic, institutional, human; and thereby to ‘normalize’ relations between the two Germanies and within Europe, without provoking disquiet at home or abroad. In a characteristic rhetorical innovation, Brandt quietly abandoned West German insistence upon the illegitimacy of the GDR and the non-negotiable demand for reunification. Henceforth, Bonn would continue to affirm the fundamental unity of the German people, but the undeniable
facticity
of East Germany would be acknowledged: ‘one German nation, two German states’.
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Between 1970 and 1974 Brandt and his foreign minister, Walter Scheel of the Free Democratic Party, negotiated and signed a series of major diplomatic accords: treaties with Moscow and Warsaw in 1970, recognizing the
de facto
existence and inviolability of the post-war intra-German and German-Polish frontiers (‘the existing boundary line . . . shall constitute the western state frontier of the People’s Republic of Poland’) and offering a new relationship between Germany and its eastern neighbors ‘on the basis of the political situation as it exists in Europe’; a quadripartite agreement over Berlin in 1971, in which Moscow agreed not to make any unilateral changes there and to facilitate cross-border movement, followed by a Basic Treaty with the GDR, ratified by the Bundestag in 1973, in which Bonn, while continuing to grant automatic citizenship to any inhabitant of the GDR who succeeded in coming west, relinquished its longstanding claim to be the
sole
legitimate representative of all Germans; a treaty with Prague (1973); and the exchange of ‘Permanent Representatives’ with the GDR in May 1974.
For these achievements, and in the aftermath of a moving pilgrimage to Warsaw, where he knelt in homage to the memory of the Warsaw Ghetto, Willy Brandt was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. He triumphed at home, too—in the elections of 1972 his SPD emerged for the first time as the leading party in the Federal Parliament. Despite side-stepping Bonn’s longstanding insistence that no final settlement of frontiers and peoples had been reached, that the Yalta divisions had no
de jure
status, and that the legal fiction of the continuity of the December 1937 frontiers of Germany must be maintained, Brandt was very popular at home in Germany.
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And not just in the West: on his journey in 1970 to the city of Erfurt, the first visit to East Germany by a West German leader, Brandt was greeted by rapturous crowds.
After Brandt was forced out of office by a spy scandal in 1974 his successors in the Chancellery—the Socialist Helmut Schmidt and the Christian Democrat Helmut Kohl—never deviated from the general line of
Ostpolitik
, pursuing it not only in public diplomacy but also through multiple links with the GDR, official and unofficial, all designed to facilitate human contacts, smooth relations, alleviate fears of West German revanchism and generally ‘normalize’ Bonn’s relations with her eastern neighbors—accepting, in Brandt’s words after signing the Moscow Treaty that acknowledged Germany’s post-war frontiers, that ‘with this Treaty, nothing is lost that had not long since been gambled away’.
There were three distinct constituencies whom the framers of
Ostpolitik
had to consider if they were to succeed in their ambitions. Western Europeans needed reassurance that Germany was not turning East. French President Georges Pompidou’s first response to the Moscow Treaty had been to make encouraging overtures to Great Britain—British membership of the European Community now held out the attraction of providing a counterweight to a less pliable Germany. The French were eventually appeased by German promises to anchor the Federal Republic ever more firmly in West European institutions (much as Pompidou’s successors would be reassured by Germany’s commitment to a common European currency following German unification two decades later); but in Paris as in Washington, remarks such as those of Finance Minister Helmut Schmidt in 1973, depicting a ‘changing world’ in which ‘the traditional categories of East and West’ were losing significance, were not soon forgotten.
The second constituency was Germans on both sides of the divide. For many of them Brandt’s
Ostpolitik
brought real dividends. Contact and communication between the two Germanies burgeoned. In 1969 a mere half-million phone calls had been placed from West to East Germany. Twenty years later there were some forty million. Telephone contact between the two halves of Berlin, virtually unknown in 1970, had reached the level of ten million calls per year by 1988. By the mid-Eighties most East Germans had virtually unrestricted access to West German television; indeed, the East German authorities even went so far as to lay cable into the ‘valley of the clueless’ around Dresden (so-called because of local topographical impediments to West German television signals), in the wishful belief that if East Germans could watch West German television at home they would not feel the need to emigrate. These and other arrangements, including the reuniting of families and the release to the West of political prisoners, redounded to the credit of
Ostpolitik
and reflected the Communists’ growing confidence in the West German policy of ‘stability’ and ‘no surprises.’
The rulers of East Germany had particularly good reason to be pleased with these developments. In September 1973 the United Nations recognized and admitted East and West Germany as sovereign states; within a year the German Democratic Republic was diplomatically recognized by eighty countries, including the USA. In an ironic echo of changes in Bonn, the GDR’s own leaders stopped referring to ‘Germany’ and instead began speaking with growing confidence of the GDR as a distinctive and legitimate
German
state in its own right, with a future of its own—rooted, they now insisted, not just in ‘good’, anti-Fascist Germans but in the soil and heritage of Prussia. Whereas the 1968 constitution of the GDR spoke of a commitment to unification on the basis of democracy and socialism, the phrase is absent in the amended constitution of 1974, replaced by a vow to remain ‘forever and irrevocably allied with the USSR.’
There were also more immediate and mercenary grounds for official GDR interest in
Ostpolitik
. Since 1963 the GDR had been ‘selling’ political prisoners to Bonn for cash, the sum depending upon the ‘value’ and qualifications of the candidate. By 1977, in order to obtain the release of a prisoner from East German jails, Bonn was paying close to DM 96,000 per head. Among the diplomatic achievements of the new policy was the institutionalizing of cross-border family reunification: for this the authorities in Pankow charged an additional DM 4,500 per head (a bargain—in 1983 the Romanian dictator Ceauşescu was charging Bonn DM 8,000 a person to allow ethnic Germans to leave Romania). By one estimate, the total amount extracted from Bonn by the GDR, in return for releasing 34,000 prisoners, reuniting 2,000 children with their parents, and ‘regulating’ 250,000 cases of family reunification, was by 1989 close to DM 3 billion.
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One of the unintended consequences of these developments was the virtual disappearance of ‘unification’ from the German political agenda. To be sure, reunification of the divided country remained the
Lebenslüge
(‘life-lie’) of the Federal Republic, as Brandt put it. But by the mid-Eighties, a few years before it unexpectedly took place, re-unification no longer mobilized mass opinion. Polls taken in the Fifties and Sixties suggested that up to 45 percent of the West German population felt unification was the ‘most important’ question of the day; from the mid-Seventies the figure never exceeded 1 percent.
The third constituency for Bonn’s new approach, of course, was the Soviet Union. From Willy Brandt’s first negotiations with Brezhnev in 1970, through Gorbachev’s visit to Bonn nearly two decades later, all West German plans for ‘normalization’ to the east passed through Moscow and everyone knew it. In Helmut Schmidt’s words, ‘naturally, German-Soviet relations stood at the centre of
Ostpolitik
.’ Indeed, once the West Germans and Russians had agreed on the permanence of Poland’s new frontiers (respecting long-established European practice, no one asked the Poles for their views) and Bonn had consented to recognize the People’s Democracies, West Germans and Russians found much common ground.
When Leonid Brezhnev went to Bonn in May 1973, the first such visit by a Soviet Communist Party leader, he and Helmut Schmidt even managed to share warm memories of their common wartime experiences—Schmidt conveniently recalling that he ‘fought for Germany by day and at night privately wished for Hitler’s defeat’. In his memoirs Willy Brandt, who really had opposed the Third Reich from beginning to end, coolly observes that ‘when war reminiscences are exchanged, the fake and the genuine lie very close together’. But if the reminiscences were perhaps illusory, the shared interests were real enough.
The USSR had for many years been pressing for official recognition of its post-war gains and the new frontiers of Europe, preferably at a formal Peace Conference. The Western Allies, the US especially, had long been unwilling to go beyond
de facto
acknowledgement of the
status quo,
pending resolution of the ‘German Question’ in particular. But now that the Germans themselves were making overtures to their eastern neighbors, the Western position was bound to change; the Soviet leaders were about to realize their hopes. As part of their ambitious strategy of détente with the USSR and China, President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his National Security Adviser, were more open than their predecessors to negotiations with Moscow—and perhaps less troubled by the nature of the Soviet regime: as Kissinger explained to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sep 19th 1974, international détente should not be made to wait upon Soviet domestic reforms.
Thus, in December 1971, NATO ministers met in Brussels and agreed in principle to take part in a European Security Conference. Within a year a preparatory session was under way in Helsinki, Finland; and in July 1973, still in Helsinki, the official Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe opened. Thirty-five countries (including the US and Canada) participated—only Albania declined to attend. Over the ensuing two years the Helsinki conferees drew up conventions, drafted agreements, proposed ‘confidence-building’ measures to improve East-West relations and much else besides. In August 1975 the Helsinki Accords were unanimously approved and signed.
On the face of things, the Soviet Union was the major beneficiary of the Accords. In the Final Act, under ‘Principle I’, it was agreed that the ‘participating States will respect each other’s sovereign equality and individuality as well as all the rights inherent in and encompassed by its sovereignty, including in particular the right of every State to juridical equality, to territorial integrity.’ Moreover, in Principle VI, the participating States undertook to ‘refrain from any intervention, direct or indirect, individual or collective, in the internal or external affairs falling within the domestic jurisdiction of another participating State, regardless of their mutual relations’.