Authors: Frederick Taylor
Kennedy’s FU speech may have been a less emotionally moving address than the one at the Schöneberg Town Hall, but it was actually truer and more constructive. This too was something Berliners needed to hear.
At around 17.45, President Kennedy climbed back aboard
Air Force One
. He had been in Berlin for almost exactly eight hours, lead actor in a masterpiece of political and diplomatic theatre. The President flew off towards Ireland, there to revisit his family’s Celtic roots and maybe garner a few extra Irish-American votes in the coming ’64 election. On the plane, he told Thene soth long odore Sorensen, his Special Counsel that ‘We’ll never have another day like is oas we live’.
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Kennedy left behind an adoring city that still remembers him with gruff affection. He created at least one extra, lasting legend. The story of the ‘jelly donut’.
For many years, a story has been entertaining the world, to the effect that when the President uttered those hastily included words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ outside the Schöneberg Town Hall, he was committing a laughable grammatical
faux pas
. By inserting the indefinite article (‘ein’), he was calling himself not a citizen of Berlin, but a jelly donut (known throughout Germany-but not in the capital itself-as a ‘Berliner’). This led, it is said, to great hilarity among the listening crowd.
Wonderful as this story is, it does not seem to be accurate. After all, when he was composing the phrase he had with him Rober Lochner and Theodore Sorensen, both of whom-especially Lochner-were fluent in German. The construction he used was an unusual one. Normally, a German simply describing where he comes from would say ‘Ich bin Berliner’ (or Dresdner or Münchner). But Kennedy was not actually from Berlin, as everyone knew full well. He was rather making a rhetorical flourish, including himself in the abstract club of being a Berliner in spirit. The insertion of‘ein’ made this clear. One German author explains it so: an actor introducing himself at a party would simply announce, ‘Ich bin Schauspieler’; but if he was making a big issue of being an actor, claiming that his calling was relevant to some important matter, he might say: ‘Ich bin
ein
Schauspieler.’ The alleged amusement among the crowd seems to have been added afterwards as the story got around. The general view at the time held that the audience felt profoundly moved.
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‘ So the President left a legend behind and, thanks to his second speech, a somewhat reassured Brandt.
The West Berlin Mayor had spent the past two years originating a new policy that would take account of the new situation in divided Germany, and also of the obvious disinclination of any of the occupation powers to pull the German nation’s irons out of the fire. The division of the country (mirrored in Berlin) was a fact. So what to do? Adenauer, now eighty-six years old and nearing the end of his long period in office, had been wrong-footed by the Wall. His government continued to loudly affirm the sole right of the Federal Republic to represent all Germans, and to complain about the illegitimacy of the East German regime and the barbarism of its border measures. However, neither the Chancellor nor anyone else had come up with a new policy that could offer hope of change or improvement in the situation.
By the end of 1963, Adenauer had been forced into retirement, Kennedy was dead from an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, and Prime Minister Macmillan of Britain, wracked by scandal and exhaustion, had tendered his resignation to Queen Elizabeth II. Even Khrushchev would last only another ten months into 1964.
In the meantime, Willy Brandt had developed a policy which, controversial as it was to many nationalist and conservative Germans,
represented a practical response to the facts on the ground in Germany. It would go under the name of ‘Eastern Policy’ (
Ostpolitik
).
Willy Brandt’s most recent biographer sees the bloody events of August 1962 as the impulse to this new way of approaching the German problem. From this time, the Mayor started to move gradually, even furtively, towards a new, less uncompromising policy towards the East.
If a crisis showed a cathartic effect [writes Peter Merseburger}, then it was the one surrounding Peter Fechter. The Mayor toured factories and branches of the administration, trying to bring home to Berliners what was and was not possible. It was not possible to talk away, or curse away, or bomb away the Berlin Wall-but perhaps it was possible to create holes in it and make it transparent so that West Berlin could come to an arrangement with, learn to live with the hated monstrosity.
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So far, so logical. Bur could he take his. people with him? Brandt gave his major policy speech three weeks after Kennedy’s visit. His venue was the Evangelical Academy in Tutzing, on the idyllic Starnberger See lake, between Munich and the Alps. Here he found himself in the conservative south of Germany, hundreds of miles from Berlin, confirming that he should be reckoned a national figure.
The Mayor’s speech was little more than a repeat of the address he had given earlier that year in English at Harvard University, and in many ways echoed Kennedy’s words at the FU in Berlin the previous month. Despite this, it attracted huge attention. This was not really because of what Brandt said, bur because of what his press assistant, Egon Bahr told that very same audience that same evening.
Once more, chance played a key role in events. Brandt was held up on his way to the meeting. In order to keep the audience occupied, Bahr delivered his own prepared remarks, not as an afternote to the Mayor’s, as planned, but before.
Bahr’s talk, entitled ‘Change through Convergence’ (
Wandel durch Annäberung
) had been calculated as a low-key illustration of how his chiefs ‘big-picture’ policy of tension reduction might be realised on a
practical level. Bahr declared that, so far as German reunification was concerned, the policy of ‘all or nothing’ had failed. So what could be done for Germans in East and West? The idea of reunification would not be abandoned, but instead of being a great dramatic act it might rather become ‘a process with many small steps and stages’. In a world divided along ideological lines, the GDR was a reality, and so long as the Soviet Union continued to support it militarily and in other ways, the Communist German state, abhorrent as it might be, had to be lived with. The aim must be to make life easier for East Germans through mutual trade and contact. It the Communist regime survived for the moment, then that was just too bad.
Brandt had been gently creeping towards just such a public view-it reflected the private conversations that had taken place within his entourage and with the Americans over the previous months. However, Bahr’s speech, especially since it now seemed to appear as the main item of the evening, aroused enormous attention, by no means all favourable. Bahr himself claimed to be astonished:
When I dictated the ‘Change through Convergence’ speech I had no idea that I was being courageous or that I needed to be careful. I was just making concrete what was in Brandt’s speech, weighing it up, thinking it through more precisely; the discussion was supposed just to be taken a little further.
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That evening in July 1963 none the less represented the beginning of a new era in relations between East and West Germany, and the beginning of what would become known as the
Ostpolitik
. This policy would recognise the facts of the post-war settlement, which had removed large areas of ancient German territory and awarded them to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and (in the case of the area around Königsberg-now Kaliningrad) the Soviet Union.
There was uproar in the press, especially in outlets owned by Springer. The CDU protested. Bur the fact remained that the conservatives did not actually have an alternative. Once the immediate brouhaha had settled down, this point seemed to percolate into the minds of the general population.
In West Berlin, as autumn drew on, the Mayor’s representatives sat down and hammered out ‘crossing-permit agreements’ with East German representatives. The involvement of the West Berlin administration might have seemed like a major concession but, in fact, ever since the late 1940s, middle-ranking East and West German and West Berlin officials had quietly discussed mutual trade and transport concerns, with binding agreements arrived at. This was the reality on which Bahr planned to base his ‘convergence’.
The West German conservatives might attack the ‘convergence’ idea as treachery, but the East was, in its paranoid way, more clear-seeing in this matter. The Communist regime was torn between its yearning for international recognition and a ‘convergence’ with West Germany which, as the GDR leadership realised, might lead to rather more intimacy than was strictly desirable.
In the September 1965 elections, the SPD made further gains. Brandt again failed to achieve victory, but the Social Democrats’ share of the vote continued to edge upwards. The conservatives’ share continued its decline, while the liberal Free Democrats lost quite heavily. But the conservative/liberal coalition, led by Adenauer’s successor, Ludwig Erhard, hung on to power.
As Economics Minister, Professor Erhard had been the architect of the West German ‘economic miracle’ after 1949, but, like so many long-serving successful second-in-commands, once he finally heaved himself into the top position he swiftly confirmed why he had always been the deputy and not the chief. Erhard proved inept at both party-politicking and foreign policy. Moreover, for the first time since the end of the war, German industry went into recession and a ‘black hole’ appeared in the state finances. With half a million West Germans unemployed-paradisiacal, at just over 2 per cent of the work-force, as this may seem by twenty-first-century standards-in 1966 there was anxious talk of a return to the 1930s.
In the autumn of 1966, the political world turned upside-down. The SPD joined the government, and Brandt became Foreign Minister of West Germany. The free-market, middle-class liberals had walked out of the government after Erhard decided on tax increases to solve the budget problem.
A ‘grand coalition’ between SPD and CDU seemed the only solution. Brandt reluctantly agreed to leave West Berlin and go to Bonn as Foreign Minister. After Erhard resigned, Brandt and several other SPD ministers entered government with the old enemy, the CDU, under a new chancellor, Kurt Georg Kiesinger. A silver-haired, silver-tongued Swabian lawyer who looked the picture of a distinguished leader, Kiesinger laboured under the burden of having been a member for twelve years of the National Socialist Party and a prominent employee of Dr Josef Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. The East German propagandists could scarcely believe their luck.
Brandt started cautiously with his policy of ‘convergence’, first dropping the ‘Hallstein Doctrine’ and taking up relations with East Bloc countries, even though they recognised the GDR. However, not until he became chancellor himself, three years later, would he make meaningful progress on the question of East Germany.
Meanwhile, there was no point in waiting for political or economic collapse in the GDR, as the West Germans had hoped until the rude awakening of 13 August 1961. By the. mid-1960s, the East German regime had stabilised.
The day the Berlin Wall became a realiry has often been characterised as the ‘second birth’ of the East German state, the moment at which it became truly viable. Ulbricht was right. Without the Wall, the state he and his Russian protectors had created would not have survived. With it, though horribly and permanently compromised in the court of international public opinion, at least the GDR had a chance.
After the Wall was built, the haemorrhaging of the GDR’s working population from East to West Germany all but stopped. Robbed of the previous supply of new labour for its booming industries by the sealingoff of the East, in October 1961 West Germany took the radical and farreaching step of signing a treaty with Muslim Turkey, allowing for Turkish ‘guest workers’ to fill vacant jobs.
The German population between the Oder and Elbe rivers was now trapped in the narrow confines of the GDR, and Ulbricht had achieved the total control he always yearned for. The wave of arrests that followed the building of the Wall ebbed by the autumn of 1962, but the
underlying trend was still repressive. The number of
Stasi
officers increased from 17,500 in 1957 to three times that figure—52,700—in 1973, when Walter Ulbricht died, and this does not count the vast numbers of part-time informers or ‘Unofficial Co-Workers’ (
Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter
= IM).
In the forty years of the GDR’s existence, at least 600,000 individuals worked for the
Stasi
. Some experts claim it was as high as between one and two million.
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This applied to a population that fell from around eighteen to sixteen million over the period concerned. Even if we take only the number of official, salaried
Stasi
officers, this gives a figure of roughly one secret policeman per 320 East Germans. By contrast, Hitler’s instrument of covert police control, the Gestapo, numbered a mere 20,000 in 1939 out of a total Reich population (without Austria) of seventy million, amounting to about one per 3,500 of the population.
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It is hard to escape the conclusion that the Gestapo’s success in controlling dissent, with a mere tenth of the
Stasi
’s full-time strength, was helped by the fact that, for most of its existence, the Nazi regime remained relatively speaking as popular a dictatorship as the GDR was unloved.
The
Stasi
retained a partisan, narrow role that had been very precisely and chillingly defined a few years earlier: ‘The Ministry of State Security is entrusted with the task of preventing or throttling at the earliest stages—using whatever means and methods may be necessary—all attempts to delay or hinder the victory of socialism.’
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