The Berlin Wall (18 page)

There was also a general store where fresh food and (usually imported) household necessities were available, though, given the astonishingly reasonably priced menu, functionaries and their families tended to eat at the club restaurant. The store, like the club’s restaurant, was guaranteed the best produce at all times, including foreign and Western goods accessed through
Stasi
channels.
¹⁵

According to one account, when Lotte Ulbricht, the First Secretary’s wife, conceived a passion for ‘Jonathan’ apples, couriers were despatched to Bulgaria to get some.
¹⁶
Ulbricht himself rose at six a.m. every morning, regularly worked out, took long walks, rowed on the lake, often appeared on television swinging Indian clubs or leading enthusiastic GDR citizens in mass callisthenics sessions. Well into old age, he remained a ferociously competent table-tennis player. He often ate meals confined to raw vegetables and eggs.

As the years went on, up to thirty gardeners were employed, and a series of large greenhouses produced a constant supply of fresh vegetables and flowers for the settlement dwellers. Grotewohl’s successor as prime minister, Willi Stoph, was a keen vegetable gardener and would even press his
Stasi
security detail into work on his produce beds if he felt they had nothing better to do. Stoph, considered cold and inhumane, was reportedly the least popular of the high-ups the staff had to deal with.
¹⁷

The area where the bosses and their families lived was known as the ‘Inner Ring’. Of the 600 or so servants, officials and security staff who serviced the Politburo settlement, many lived near by in much more modest homes in the ‘Outer Ring’. They were all, even the cooks and housekeepers and gardeners, responsible to the ‘Main Department for Personal Protection’ of the
Stasi
and were paid according to
Stasi
graduations of rank. For some reason, cooks were not allowed to rise above the rank of lieutenant.

The employment conditions of the settlement staff were very demanding. A circular to the domestic help from
Stasi
minister Erich Mielke admonished them that ‘by showing an amenable and professional attitude, and by sensitively carrying out of their duties, {they} should constantly foster the subjective well-being of our leading representatives’. This was wryly referred to by staff as the ‘Love-Me-Directive’.
¹⁸

For all the egalitarian rhetoric, the atmosphere was not unlike a traditional feudal estate. The gamekeeper upon whose shoulder the ageing Honecker rested his gun when he took aim and fired at the wildlife, went deaf in his right ear.
¹⁹
All the same, jobs at the forest settlement were much sought after. Nearness to power brings reflected prestige even to the humblest drudge. And there were all those imported goodies, which tended to trickle down.

During the 1960s, the high officials would also be allowed access to the hunting reserves that lay twenty or thirty kilometres to the north, straying over into the huge area that once been the preserve of Hitler’s old crony and Reich Master of the Hunt, Field Marshal Göring. Göring had built a great house that he called, in memory of his Swedish first wife, Karin, ‘Karinhall’. The house was demolished after the war, but Göring’s hunting lodges and the houses belonging to his huntsmen still existed and were reserved for the exclusive use of Politburo members at peppercorn rents. Foreign visitors, especially Soviet grandees such as Khrushchev’s successor Leonid Brezhnev, were treated to lavish hunting parties in the wild-animal reserve adjoining the ‘forest settlement’. The hunting lodge on the Döllnsee was also used for high-level weekend conferences of the GDR élite.

The settlement sometimes seemed like a kind of leafy political reservation. Every night the system gathered its rulers in, as if to leave
them wandering about outside might be dangerous, both for them and for the people at large. Despite the luxury of life there compared with elsewhere in the GDR, few if any of the élite seem to have lived there out of preference or desire. Many of the settlement dwellers confessed later to a distinct sense of claustrophobia.
²⁰

Günter Schabowski, who moved there in the 1980s when he joined the Politburo, said that there were was no place for real friendships, no truly authentic social life. Anyone who socialised too often with specific fellow Wandlitz-dwellers would be suspected of conducting intrigues, of ‘forming a faction’. Walter and Lotte Ulbricht never socialised with other residents. The only outsider to enter their home except on official business was their daughter, who would come up from Berlin at the weekend. When she did so, the staff were sent out of the house. The Ulbrichts wanted to keep their private life private.
²¹

The consequence of such anxiety-inducing rules of interaction was that people either stayed at home alone with their families, or they went to the F-Club, where they were safely visible and part of the ‘collective’.
²²
Ulbricht, who had spent the entire 1950s fighting off leadership challenges of one kind or another, liked having the rest of the party’s leaders at Wandlitz, where he could keep an eye on them. His underlings, powerful men in the outside world, were in a real sense under surveillance once they passed through the settlement gate.

Not for nothing, though somewhat tastelessly given recent German history, did Wandlitz become known among the general population of the GDR as the ‘Ghetto of the Gods’, or simply, ‘the Ghetto’. The imprisoners became the imprisoned. The ‘forest settlement’ was the GDR élite’s golden cage.

Surrounding the forest settlement at Wandlitz from the time of its construction in 1960 was a wall. This wall was eight kilometres long and two metres high, with manned guard towers at regular intervals. The entire, magnificently paranoid structure was screened by trees and newly planted, quick-growing giant shrubs such as juniper, mahonia and rhododendron. The casual viewer would never know it was there.

‘Five kilometres on from the Wandlitz autobahn exit, one took a left turn,’ as one account has it:

There stood two glass sentry boxes with uniformed guards…and a traffic light. Well before you got to this, of course, there were ‘halt’ notices, and warning signs that forbade ‘unauthorised vehicles’ from turning off the main road. Even after passing through this electronically regulated entrance, you had to look very carefully to make out, amidst the thick growth of the forest, a two-metre-high wall.
²³

Erich Honecker, as Secretary for Security, had directed the privacy and safety aspects of the forest settlement’s construction with great success. The next year, he would face his greatest challenge yet. Having sealed themselves off so carefully from the threat of a hostile outer world, the men of the East German leadership now had to see about doing the same for their fellow citizens.

All seventeen million of them.

7

WAG THE DOG

ON
20
JANUARY
1961, in front of a host of invited dignitaries and 20,000 citizens willing to brave (in the words of the
New York Times
) ‘a Siberian wind knifing down Pennsylvania Avenue’, bringing outdoor temperatures of minus seven degrees centigrade, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was sworn in as thirty-fifth president of the United States.

He gave a stirring inauguration speech that raised hopes of a new era in American politics. It made him a liberal icon. This was to a great extent justified, though much of the change that the Kennedy White House seemed to represent was more cosmetic than real—Jack and Jackie replacing Dwight and Mamie, elegant, Eastern culture-vulture socialites replacing plain-vanilla Midwestern mom and dad. The truth about the politics of the President and his family was, of course, more complicated.

Jack Kennedy and his brother, confidant and campaign organiser, Robert, were the sons of Joseph Kennedy. Joe Kennedy, an anti-Semitic, Communist-hating multimillionaire whose wealth, it is said, was of dubious provenance (bootlegging has been mentioned) had been an enthusiastic supporter of Senator McCarthy. This last aspect of the Kennedy patriarch’s world-view found an echo in the career paths of his clever, ambitious surviving sons (his eldest, Joe Jr, having been killed on active service in 1944).

As a junior congressman, Jack publicly praised McCarthy for his anti-Communist vigilance. Robert actually worked as a counsel on the Wisconsin senator’s then all-powerful Permanent Sub-Committee on Investigations. A senator since 1952, Jack was the only Democrat to abstain in the Senate’s vote of condemnation against McCarthy, passed by a majority of 67 to 22, which broke the demagogue’s power in December 1954.
¹

Moreover, Senator Kennedy, was not above playing the ‘Red scare’ card. Looking to place himself for a presidential run in 1960, he began loudly complaining that the Soviets were pulling ahead of the United States in the arms race. In a way that, for all its anti-Communist thrust, oddly colluded with Khrushchev’s self-serving post-
Sputnik
braggadocio, Kennedy made the alleged ‘missile gap’ one of the main themes in his presidential campaign.

So the young, handsome President who made such a brilliant inauguration speech that freezing January day, was something of a puzzling mixture. He was not really considered by the liberal wing of his party to be ‘one of them’.
²
It was not the sophisticated, Harvard-educated Kennedy but a conservative military man, the retiring President Eisen-hower, who warned the American people in his valedictory television broadcast about the dangers of the ‘military-industrial complex’.

Kennedy appeared the picture of the civilised liberal yet had no clear record of supporting liberal causes. He talked of peace and yet railed in aggressively anxious terms against the ‘missile gap’. He certainly seemed to have nothing much against the military-industrial complex. As another Massachusetts-Irish politician said of him:

There’s something about Jack—and I don’t know quite what it is—that makes people want to believe in him. Conservatives and liberals both tell you that he’s with them because they want to believe that he is, and they want to be with him.
³

In the weeks after Kennedy’s election, the Eastern Bloc’s leaders had a similar problem. How to handle the new man in the White House?

In September 1960, the former KPD chief and President of the GDR Wilhelm Pieck died at the age of eighty-five. Within weeks, the post of president was abolished and a ‘State Council’ set up to replace it. The council’s chairman was, of course, Walter Ulbricht. The First Secretary of the SED became also
de facto
head of state. It was thus an even more powerful Ulbricht who entered the crucial new year of 1961. In effect, a dictator.

The omnipotent one had much to do, many decisions to make. Detailed official briefings for Ulbricht broke down the new American
President’s support in conventional Marxist-Leninist terms, outlining Kennedy’s ties to Wall Street and the major corporations.
⁴

Fair enough. Kennedy came from money, and no politician got that far without corporate support. JFK’s appointment of the Californian-born president of the Ford Motor Company, Robert S. (for Strange) McNamara as Secretary of Defense fitted perfectly into this Marxist paradigm. The GDR officials did not fail to remind their boss, with some relish, that Ford had provided financial support for Hitler. Equally predictable for the East Berlin analysts was the presence of an ‘unrepentant Republican’ in the form of C. Douglas Dillon, Secretary of the Treasury. Dillon was a holdover from the Eisenhower administration. As a leading investment banker, he provided the new Democratic administration with a touch of non-partisan appeal and the much-needed
gravitas
of an establishment figure who could, as Kennedy recognised, ‘call a few of those people on Wall Street by their first names’.
⁵

The tendency in general among Kennedy’s advisers (his so-called ‘brains trust’) was, however, more biased towards academics, including such Ivy League luminaries as J.K. Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger and Seymour Harris (all Harvard), and the economic historian and expert on ‘overcoming backwardness’, Walt Rostow (MIT). Kennedy’s administration was the first one in which ‘think tanks’—especially the RAND Corporation—came to the fore, and memoranda on every subject from just about every conceivable angle started to flood into the White House’s in-tray.

Even Kennedy’s Secretary of State was no toughie Cold War warrior in the mode of the late John Foster Dulles but a conscientious, not especially combative Georgian liberal, Dean Rusk. The President in any case planned to make his own foreign policy. In this he was advised by his younger brother, Robert, whom he had daringly brought into the administration as attorney-general, defying inevitable accusations of nepotism.
⁶

The advice to Ulbricht from his advisers was that, while the new administration would still stand strongly on Western rights in West Berlin, Kennedy would be more flexible than Eisenhower when it came to the city’s overall status. Here was a faultline in the edifice of Western solidarity that might be exploited.

This view was shared by Ulbricht’s ultimate master, the mercurial Nikita Khrushchev, who by all accounts saw Kennedy as potentially weak, a rich man’s son whose daddy’s money had bought him a high position which might prove beyond his powers. And the new American President, at forty-three, still lacked experience at the highest level—he was, as Khrushchev pointed out, ‘younger than my own son’.
⁷