Authors: Frederick Taylor
The movie being shown at the town’s cinema that week was John le Carré’s
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
.
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THERE WERE SEVERAL REASONS
for the decline of the escape-helper networks within a few years of the building of the Wall. The increasingly effective fortification of the Wall was one, but there were other, more subtle influences.
For almost two and a half years, West Berliners had been all but barred from the East. After lengthy and complex negotiations in the autumn of 1963, a ‘crossing-permit agreement’ (
Passierscheinabkommen
) was signed. Under it, West Berliners were granted temporary permits to visit close relatives in the East during the Christmas/New Year period. Over 700,000 took advantage of the concession in 1.2 million cross-border visits. Once the holiday season was over, the ban was resumed for all but the most serious family-hardship cases, but a precedent had been set—a hopeful one and yet at the same time subtly corrosive.
From August 1961 to December 1963, no East German could go to West Berlin (apart from a few loyalists, usually on the regime’s business), and no West Berliner to the East. This was clear-cut. But once weeping, delighted families had been brought together again, if only for a short time, the hope of a more liberal visiting policy subsisted constantly in the background. It made the people of West Berlin suitable subjects for blackmail. The East Germans could threaten to snatch back the new ‘concessions’ if the West did not co-operate in, for instance, combating escapes.
Already while the first ‘crossing-permit agreement’ was being discussed, the West Berlin Senate had pressured escape groups to limit their activities, so as not to endanger the agreement. One of Wolfgang Fuchs’s tunnels, which had been due to ‘break through’ and start getting people out at Christmas 1963, was reluctantly delayed until 5 January, the last
day of the West-to-East visiting period. As soon as the postponed ‘breakthrough’ to the Eastern side was achieved, the organisers realised they had come out not in a basement, as planned, but in the neighbouring coal cellar. This would have been acceptable during the holiday period, but now the situation was much more risky. Sure enough, after a few escapers had been brought out on the first day, and despite efforts to camouflage the opening, the tunnel was discovered and reported to the Communist authorities—by coal-delivery men on their first day back at work after the seasonal break.
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In autumn 1964, negotiations began about another ‘crossing-permit agreement’ for the coming festive season. An agreement was arrived at, providing for two fourteen-day visit periods before the end of the year, including Christmas. Then came ‘Tunnel 57’ and the shooting of the East German soldier Egon Schultz.
After the ‘Tunnel 57’ tragedy, the East German negotiators began asking pointedly if the West Berliners wanted ‘crossing permits and visits for relatives or a prolongation of the Cold War’. Short visit periods were also agreed for 1965 and 1966, but many in East Berlin were already doubtful. As early as 1964, a
Stasi
report frankly told the East German leadership that such concessions could not be justified if Western propaganda continued to celebrate the agreements as ‘a successful penetration of the Wall’. Only if the ‘enemy’ agreed to respect totally the integrity of the GDR’s borders should this concession be extended. After one final Christmas agreement (1966), the concession was not renewed. It would be years before West Berliners could once again visit the East—as part of a more general settlement which went a long way to granting the Communist regime the recognition it craved.
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During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, almost everyone had expected the Soviets to apply extra pressure via Berlin. The Americans had, after all, demanded the right to board and inspect Soviet missiles bound for Cuba. There had been anxiety that the Soviets would respond with a similar move against Allied traffic going into Berlin. This would have amounted to an effective blockade and put the West in a difficult position.
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The failure of Khrushchev to make such a move against Berlin, or anywhere else in the world where American interests were vulnerable,
helped President Kennedy and his advisers to pull off a considerable victory over Cuba. After the failure of the West to prevent his imposition of a border wall in Berlin, Khrushchev thought he had Kennedy’s measure. This led him to a foolhardy attempt to station missiles on Cuba. By facing down the Russians there, Kennedy finally proved that he was as tough and as smart as the Communist leader. If not smarter.
The humiliating outcome of yet another Khrushchev-engineered international crisis would help start other leaders in Moscow thinking that their brilliant but impulsive boss might be more of a liability than a benefit. Two years later, almost to the day, Khrushchev was stripped of all powers in a bloodless palace revolution.
As it happened, presidential adviser Walt Rostow visited Europe at the time of the Cuban Crisis and met Brandt. Despite the Fechter tragedy, which was still very much on everyone’s minds, he thought West Berlin’s morale was ‘pretty good’. He expressed the basic situation regarding the Wall at the end of 1962 quite frankly:
We should be aware that the impulse among students in West Berlin to take action to help refugees over and under the Wall is very strong. Brandt is aware of their activities and has decided that he cannot, in political safety, prevent them from carrying out such enterprises.
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Within a handful of years, the attitude towards the escape movement had changed radically. The inherently abnormal border situation had become, in effect, ‘normal’-proof, if anyone needs it, that people will get used to just about anything over time. The kind of polarised anti-Communist attitudes that had been general in West Berlin at the beginning of the 1960s had given way, for much of the population-including the political and media élite-at best to a more nuanced view of the Cold War, at worst to a bite-the-hand-that-feeds anti-Americanism.
After the Cuban Missile Crisis, the main theatre of the Cold War did not switch back to Europe. Despite crablike progress towards a half-tolerable status quo in Berlin during the rest of the decade, and the usual East-West name-calling, at no point did the city become a potential flashpoint for the Third World War as it had been between 1948 and 1963.
President Kennedy’s famous visit to Berlin in June 1963 represented a high-water mark in West Berlin’s self-conscious status as a beacon of freedom. The visit was part of a wider European trip, which included an official visit to West Germany. This had been planned for some time, bur only at the end of March 1963 did the President and his advisers finally decide to make a detour to Berlin.
The Adenauer government in Bonn had no interest in encouraging such a thing-as in 1961 during Vice-President Johnson’s visit, they were aware that it might redound to the benefit of Mayor Willy Brandt, who would be seeking election as German chancellor once more in 1965. They would rather Kennedy stayed exclusively in West Germany proper. Important figures in Washington, including Information Agency chief Ed Murrow, also opposed a visit by Kennedy to the walled city. Kennedy’s appearance there, Murrow felt, might imply that spirits needed lifting and would therefore would send a subtle message of weakness to the East.
Bur finally the majority, including especially the President’s brother Robert, was persuaded that the trip could do no harm and that
not
to go would send a depressing message both to Berliners and West Germans. The Wall had now been in place for almost two years, but no leader of the Allied protecting powers-neither Macmillan of Britain, nor de Gaulle of France-had seen fit to visit Berlin. De Gaulle had, in fact, performed an entire state visit to West Germany in September 1962, touring in a wide arc from Hamburg to Munich, bur had conspicuously ignored Berlin. For Kennedy, leader of the foremost and most passionately democratic of the protectors, to visit Germany and not go to West Berlin, would be to send an unmistakably dismal and discouraging message to its people and to the world.
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President Kennedy’s arrival at Tegel Airport at 9.40 in the morning of 26 June 1963 brought him to the last stop on his four-day tour of Germany. There had been plenty of press interest during Kennedy’s travels through the Rhine and Main valleys, bur his visit to West Berlin was the high point for press and public alike. Some 1,500 journalists from all over the world flocked to West Berlin to cover the events.
Most people recall the four emotionally powerful (and grammatically dubious) words of German that Kennedy uttered during his address to
almost half a million West Berliners from a temporary platform set up in front of the Schöneberg Town Hall: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’. Far from being a triumph, however, for his advisers and for the West Berlin administration the speech was altogether problematic.
Almost none of what now seems memorable about Kennedy’s speech was in the text, typed on roughly A 5-sized cards, that he carried up on to the platform with him. Prepared by White House and State Department experts, his address was supposed to be relatively low-key. The situation in Berlin was peaceful compared with two years earlier, and it was in everyone’s interests to keep it that way. His main priority was to encourage the city and its people-without provoking the Soviets or the East Germans into new aggressive measures.
But Kennedy did not stick to the prepared version. Perhaps it was the emotional effect of the visit to the Wall earlier that morning-Kennedy had been visibly moved by his first on-the-spot view of the cement blocks, the barbed wire and the watch-towers-but the parts of his speech that he improvised were both more stirring to the audience and more aggressively anti-Communist than planned.
Apart from the ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ improvisation (which he conceived during an informal talk in Brandt’s office just before the speech, writing the phrase in his own phonetic code), Kennedy also departed drastically from the script by appearing, in a rhetorically powerful repetition, to preach not coexistence but a fundamental incompatibility between the Communist and capitalist systems. In these extemporised passages, Kennedy attacked those who saw no difference between the systems, who said democrats should ‘work with the Communists’, or who claimed that Communism was bad but produced beneficial economic results. After enumerating each of these sins, Kennedy-striking his lectern with an angry energy-declaimed: ‘Let them come to Berlin!’ And at the climactic end he repeated it in German: ‘Lasst sie nach Berlin kommen!’
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Kennedy went on to attack the Wall, calling it ‘the most obvious and vivid demonstration of the failures of the Communist system’. At the end of his speech he left the prepared text once more and uttered the famous words again, ending: ‘All free men, wherever they may live, are citizens of Berlin. And, therefore, as a free man, I take pride in the words: “Ich bin ein Berliner.”’
After the President finished, he stepped back quickly, almost abruptly. The vast crowd went wild. A chant went up, so ecstatic and powerful it could have been heard in every ministry and party bureau in East Berlin: ‘Ken-Ne-Dy! Ken-Ne-Dy!’
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Brandt waited for the roar to die down, then began his own speech. The Mayor seemed tense and nervous. During Kennedy’s attack on the Wall and Communism, instead of applauding he had stared stonily into the middle distance. During his speech, the excited crowd continued to chant Kennedy’s name and to interrupt with shouted comments and cheers. Brandt’s irritation was visible. It got worse when behind him the President and Adenauer responded to the interruptions with smiles and waves. At one point the crowd bellowed an Americanised version of Adenauer’s first name, Konrad: ‘Con-Ny! Con-Ny!’ The Chancellor, delighted at this reception in a city where he was usually far from popular, stepped forward in acknowledgement, while his political foe, Brandt, was still speaking.
Brandt was worried by Kennedy’s unexpectedly vehement anti-Communist tirade. There had been violent demonstrations by Western youths at the Wall the previous week, on the GDR’s national day. He feared that this throng, roused by the President’s fighting talk, could go out of control and turn Berlin back into a world flashpoint.
Above all, however, Brandt was surprised. Just two weeks previously, on 10 June, Kennedy had made an extremely important and wellpublicised policy speech at American University in Washington, DC. On that day, Kennedy had talked openly of his hopes for détente with the Communists, and had referred to the common interest in peace that united an otherwise divided world.
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Brandt himself was working with Egon Bahr and his other advisers on a new, more flexible approach to the Berlin question and the problem of the two German states. This did not fit in at all with an attitude which cast doubt on whether any kind of coexistence was really possible, as Kennedy’s just-delivered speech seemed to do.
The truth seems to be that Kennedy just got carried away. In the immediate aftermath of his speech, he was thrilled with all the applause and the excitement. Then came discussions with his advisers. McGeorge Bundy, for one, threw a douche over the mood when he told Kennedy
frankly: ‘Mr President, I think you have gone too far.’ Calming down, Kennedy seemed to agree. ‘If I told them to go tear down the Berlin Wall, they would do it,’ he ruefully told his military adviser, General McHugh.
Later, at the Free University’s Henry Ford Building, symbol of American largess to West Berlin, the President gave another major speech. He stuck to the script. The talk was once more of peace and understanding, and of the part that Germany and Berlin could play in the relaxation of international tension. German reunification, the President was quite specific, could be approached only as a long-term project. While expressing full support for West Berlin’s freedom, Kennedy made it clear, as the leader of a world power must, that the German question was part of, and not at the centre of, humanity’s problems, and that like those other problems it would not be solved overnight.
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