The Ides of August: The Berlin Wall Crisis-1961
Cate, Curtis
BOOK REVIEW The Ides of August: The Berlin Wall Crisis-1%1 Curtis Gate / M.Evans / $15.00 Francis Fukuyama for at least a decade now, the locus of the Cold \frar has shifted to the Third World....
...The fact that they did so in Cuba doesn't give us much guidance with regard to Berlin, since their stake there was much higher...
...Everyone was expecting a repetition of the 1948 Berlin blockade, and not a single contingency plan had been laid to meet a closing of the sector border...
...that we would have faced the prospect of an unseemly and provocative game of leapfrog into East German territory...
...that advantage lay on the Soviet side in Central Europe...
...Ul-bricht's own "economic miracle" of the last decade and a half was made possible only by the miles of concrete and barbed wire strung through the middle of Berlin...
...Berlin in 1961 was a curiosity, a unified city with nonetheless radically different social and political orders in its Western and Soviet zones...
...Americans might think that the Shah was about as good as Iran could expect, but no one really professed to like him, and there is less concern whether Iran follows Afghanistan into the Soviet orbit...
...and of the Hansefl sisters, who lived in flats on either side of the sector border and awoke one morning to find themselves separated from each other forever...
...The consequence of this change is that the challenge offered by Communism has lost a good deal of its moral saliency...
...At the time, the CIA reasoned that any attempt to tear the wall down would only have led to its being rebuilt several hundred yards behind the sector border...
...As it is, we have a well-researched memoir of the Cold War which reminds us, often in poignant ways, of the human cost of Communism...
...This is an interesting and attractive argument...
...Cate reminds us of the quality of life in a Workcrs-and-Peasants state: the ration cards and queue lines for nonexistent foodstuffs...
...of occupation...
...Cate's intention to write a speculative and academic book of this sort...
...There is much pathos in the vignettes that Cate provides of Berliners whose lives were altered, damaged, or destroyed when the sector border was finally sealed on August 13...
...One obvious question comes to mind: Would the Soviets have backed down...
...The outflow of manpower to the West through Berlin seriously threatened the stability of East Germany and, in the long run, of Moscow's Eastern European empire...
...None saw fit to return to their respective capitals when the crisis broke, feeling that as long as Western access rights to Berlin remained unimpaired, nothing could or should be done...
...Cate gives us an equally personal account of the terrible indifference of Western leaders to the building of the wall...
...the kindergarten teachers who tricked their pupils into informing on their parents...
...It is striking how normal life could be under those conditions...
...maintained a healthy strategic edge throughout both crises, it could bring overwhelming conventional power to bear only on Havana...
...the propaganda of a regime perpetually denouncing the "headhunters, warmongers, Nazis and revanchists" of the Federal Republic...
...Moreover, though the .U.S...
...Gate believes that it does: In the epilogue he argues that our weak response to the wall led directly to that monumental piece of Soviet adventurism, the Cuban Missile Crisis...
...Their presence on the island was a luxury of sorts, like owning a Porsche: desirable but not necessary to the day*to-day business of running a tyranny...
...would have been, not a technical maneuver of this sort, but a decision to bring the full weight of our strategic preponderance to bear by issuing a Cuba-style ultimatum: Remove all barriers to intersector traffic or else...
...But surely the proper course for the U.S...
...The Berlin crisis opened in November 1958 when Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union could no longer tolerate this anomaly and would sign a peace treaty with East Germany, whereupon Allied occupation rights would be terminated and all of Berlin would become a "free city...
...and that as a last resort Ulbricht could have sealed East Berlin off entirely from the rest of East Germany...
...This relatively porous boundary was a source of hope to all East Germans who knew that, If things got sufficiently bad, they could abandon their occupations and friends to begin anew in the Federal Republic...
...Vietnam, Cambodia, Angola, Ethiopia, Iran, Afghanistan: The list of recent hot spots reads like the roster of an Afro-Asian Solidarity Congress...
...Yet it was clearly not Mr...
...On the other hand, the Soviets placed missiles in Cuba (by Cate's own account) for somewhat limited offensive reasons...
...Does all of this amount to a major indictment of the West...
...One Soviet purpose was clear: to stop the steady exodus of professional people and able-bodied workers to the West that threatened the economic and political viability of Walter Ulbricht's regime, Cate's account begins in the late summer of 1961, when the flight of refugees to West Berlin's Marienfeld center peaked at several thousand a day amid rumors that the border was to be closed for good...
...We had not bought safety for ourselves by supinely submitting to Soviet encroachment on the Four Power accords, since we were forced to the brink of nuclear war in the Caribbean in any case...
...On the contrary, Cate points out, the wall was a clear violation of the Four Power occupation statutes by which the Soviets had committed themselves to allow free intercourse between all sectors of the city...
...Nonetheless, the Western powers did not permit their Berlin garrisons to approach the wall as it was being built or to make a show of force...
...The Ides of August vividly recalls the personal meaning of Communism and Soviet power by recounting the effect of the Berlin Wall on the lives of a score or so residents of that city...
...On August 13 Harold Macmillan was on vacation in Scotland, de Gaulle was at his country home in Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, and Kennedy was in Hyannis Port...
...They did so only when TV host Jack Paar talked an American unit into making threatening gestures towards the East Germans for his cameras...
...There is the story of the Schenck boys, who carried their hysterical mother across the low barbed-wire barriers first put up, only to see their father return home that evening and be dragged off by the ubiquitous Vopos (border police...
...The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright, even suggested to the East Germans that they close the border since "they have a right to close it...
...Unfortunately, stringing out horror stories from divided Germany is not sufficient to convince us that Western leaders acted unwisely in treating the wall as something of a sidelight to the larger issues of the Berlin crisis...
...As many as 250,000 Germans residing in the Soviet Sector crossed the border each day to work in West Berlin, and a much smaller number commuted in the opposite direction...
...Each of these objections could have been answered in a more scholarly treatment of Soviet objectives in both Berlin and Cuba...
...As it is almost forgotten that the early decades of the Cold War were primarily a struggle over the fate of Germany, so the meaning and menace of totalitarianism seem increasingly ignored...
...Had we forced Moscow to back down in Berlin, we could have prevented East Germany's conversion into a. giant concentration camp...
...the perpetual raising of work norms...
...one only wishes that Cate had made it in a more thoughtful way...
...the formerly rich farmlands of Mecklenberg lying desolate as a fesult of collectivization...
Vol. 12 • April 1979 • No. 4
