Germany: Partition and Revenge

...But at last year's Geneva conference of foreign ministers, the Soviets were given to understand that the West had, in fact, accepted the status quo of German and European partition, and were refraining from formal recognition of the East German regime largely for reasons of West German domestic policy...

...Only one explanation remains for this persistent Soviet concentration on Germany, which is that Khrushchev feels strong enough to pass politically from the defensive to the offensive at this critical point in the center of Europe...

...Nothing could have rounded off the renewed consolidation of that empire after the de-Stalinization crisis more satisfactorily than Western recognition of Walter Ulbricht's regime...

...The horrors of Hitler's war blighted the lives of millions of them, and they have not forgotten it...

...They may, of course, fear it on a more sophisticated level, as do many informed critics in the West: as a dissatisfied minor power—dissatisfied because of the country's enforced partition and, according to Germany's official declarations, also because of the Polish frontier...

...When the blockade failed, the Soviet offensive was halted...

...Khrushchev is concentrating on Germany, not because he fears West German aggression, nor any longer because he fears East German collapse, but because it is good Leninist strategy to concentrate on the weakest link in the enemy chain...

...and Eastern Germany was geographically and diplomatically—in the absence of Western recognition of its Communist regime—the most exposed part of the satellite empire...

...It was thus logical to interpret the new threat to the Western position in Berlin primarily as a bid to force that recognition...

...everybody understood that if he could inflict a symbolic defeat on the West at that critical point, its demoralizing effects would nip in the bud the recovery of Western Europe and the continent would be wide open to the further political, if not military, advances of Soviet Communism...

...On the contrary, they have gone out of their way, persistently and deliberately, to discourage the West German opposition, and encourage "the revanchist Adenauer regime" by repeated declarations that they will not abandon the East German regime under any circumstances, and do not care whether the West Germans choose to stay in NATO or not...

...Has he, then, given priority to the need to consolidate his vulnerable East German outpost...

...When Stalin imposed the Berlin blockade in 1943, nobody in the West suggested that he was frightened by the ruined and disorganized West Germany of that time...

...By Richard Lowenthal GERMANY: PARTITION AND REVENGE Western recognition of GDR would symbolize acceptance of status quo in East Europe IF WE WERE asking not what is in the mind of the Kremlin, but in that of the average Soviet citizen, the answer would be perfectly simple...

...Berlin is the weak point of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in a technical, military and economic sense, though not in a political sense...

...Yet Soviet pressure for a change in West Berlin's status that would cut its political and economic ties with the West has continued and been accompanied by a propaganda campaign showing that its main objective is to inflict a demoralizing political defeat on West Germany...

...Nikita Khrushchev and his advisers know perfectly well that present-day Western Germany, even apart from its pervading atmosphere of saturated contentment, is not in the "Great-Power League," and would not dream of launching a war of revenge against Russia...

...flict which, because of its membership in NATO, might start a major conflagration—particularly if it should ever get atomic arms...

...Yet the Soviets have never done this...

...Germany, the argument runs, may one day get involved in local conRICHARD LOWENTHAL often writes on Soviet affairs in these pages...

...This article is published by agreement with the London Observer, for which he is a roving correspondent...

...If it were, the Soviets would not have imposed and maintained the East German Communist regime in the teeth of universal popular loathing...

...Emboldened by the assurance that the West will not cause trouble, the Ulbricht regime has embarked on a program for the rapid total collectivization of its agriculture, unwor-ried by the flow of another wave of refugees to West Berlin...

...They would have long offered what Chancellor Konrad Adenauer's West German opponents—both on the Social-Democratic Left and the Protestant Conservative Right—have been asking for: reunification in freedom at the price of neutrality, controlled arms limitation and recognition of the Oder-Neisse border...

...NATO's link with West Germany is politically weak because it is vulnerable to emotional propaganda...

...Under the banner of peaceful coexistence, but with the backing of his new rocketry, Khrushchev is seeking to pick it up at the exact point where his predecessor was forced to leave off...

...As any Westerner knows who has had contact with intelligent Russians in recent years, they are genuinely worried by the alleged "rebirth of German militarism...

...Far from being moved by fear of the consequences of a German conflict and the wish to reduce tension at that critical point, Khrushchev therefore has deliberately kept that conflict alive, and from time to time exacerbated it—blaming Adenauer all the while...

...moreover, official propaganda has taught them to identify the bourgeois, philistine, comfort-loving West Germany of today with the power-mad, fanatic giant trained by Hitler...

...But that naive popular view is not the cause of official Soviet policy—it is its effect...

...Up to a year or two ago, that was certainly the case...

...They would not have tried the Berlin blackade in 1948, and would not threaten a new variant now...

...The Soviets' "defensive" political objective of consolidating their postwar conquests in Europe was thus achieved in fact, and Khrushchev's speeches have since shown that he is aware of it...

...But while this is prima facie a reasonable case for thinking twice before giving Germany nuclear weapons, Soviet policy towards Germany is not consistent with the assumption that fear of the consequences of local conflicts is its decisive motive...

...For years after Stalin's death, the Soviet bloc was on the defensive in Eastern Europe, even at a time when it was already clearly making new political gains in other parts of the world...

...nothing could have symbolized more dramatically Western acceptance of the East European status quo as permanent...