Breaching the Wall
SHANOR, DONALD R.
WEST GERMANY'S NEW 'OSTPOLITIK' Breaching the Wall By Donald R. Shanor The rigid parietal politics between the two Germantes appears to be slowly changing. Although its chief symbol, the Berlin...
...approval of German initiatives toward Eastern Europe...
...The Mayor and other leaders of his Social Democratic party (SPD) have recently made several d?©marches toward East Germany, including on the day before the visit, Deputy Chairman Herbert Wehner's proposal for an all-German common market...
...Next, the Socialists answered the East German letter, raising questions never before published in the Communist press, including the following: "How can open and unrestricted talks be held in Germany when people are being shot down because they simply want to go from Germany to Germany-to their relatives, their friends, their countrymen...
...After 1946, the late SPD leader Kurt Schumacher forbade contacts with Ulbricht's Socialist Unity party because the forced fusion of the Soviet Zone SPD with the Communists wiped out the Socialists in the East...
...they had studied the changes in the East...
...Yet until this past spring, when the East Germans celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Unity party and the SPD met in Dortmund for a re-examination of its Ostpolitik, there had been no real movement...
...in 1965, it did more than a billion dollars' worth of business with them-much of it in direct competition with East Germany...
...The Oder-Neisse border question must be settled before reunification, not after, he said...
...The Communist retreat, however, is not the reason the initiative was a success...
...The Berlin Wall is the symbol of East Germany's freeze that comes quickest to mind...
...Political action has begun to replace pious slogans about reunification, the Oder-Neisse line, and the Munich agreement...
...But one thing is certain: The publication of the SPD note on March 26 had a deep, far-reaching effect...
...In a sense, Ulbricht did succeed in dividing the parties, but in a way he and the other Communist leaders, schooled in factional fights and the closed, one-party system could never understand...
...Both the Christian Democratic and the Socialist policies were justified during the depths of the cold war, when they were conceived...
...Rainer Barzel, the CDU Bundestag leader, said "For murder and murderers, there can be no relaxation of the laws of prosecution.' Although the Bundestag did pass safe conduct legislation, the Communists could reject it as an example of Bonn's attempt to make laws for all of Germany "worse than Hitler's legislation...
...Much of their toleration of the Communist leadership, particularly in Prague and Warsaw, is based on fear of German revanchism...
...As with so much happening in Europe today, it is directly traceable to the liberalization in the Communist world...
...The refugee vote is too large, the myth says...
...There was no meeting largely because the Communists retreated, horrified by the stirrings of public opinion that even the preliminary arrangements had produced in East Germany...
...But the push for recognition is old and never very profitable...
...The Socialists swept the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, gaining 10 seats, and replacing the Christian Democrats as largest party in the legislature for the first time since the War...
...Erhard's statement also clearly shows that the Hallstein Doctrine, declared dead by Foreign Minister Gerhard Schr?¶der last year, will finally get its official burial...
...Propaganda victories over the Communists, particularly in Germany, are cheap and frequent...
...Germans who think Germany still is in possession of those thoroughly Polonized areas, Brandt declared, are suffering from illusions...
...But wide differences have now appeared as to the means of bringing this about, particularly on how to swallow the bitter medicine of dealing with the East German leadership...
...And with East Germany's involvement in West German politics, the 17 million East Germans, ringed by walls and barbed wire and deprived of their vote by 33 years of various dictatorships, are receiving at least a form of indirect representation at the polls in the Federal Republic...
...and his expectation that Brandt would turn down the offer...
...Don't risk it with the voters...
...West Germany's acceptance of the territorial status quo will not wipe out these fears, but it will help...
...The thaw, however, came late to Ulbricht's Germany, and in most areas of East German contact with the West, has not come at all...
...for as long as the Berlin Wall stands, Ulbricht will have difficulty in image-making...
...First, taboos had to be broken...
...The second Socialist note, however, was published only in truncated form with "slanders" removed...
...His propaganda could flourish only under the hothouse conditions of the Zone...
...The consequences of these changes, in turn, will be of tremendous importance for the people of Eastern Europe...
...Neither West German party, of course, has altered its commitment to the eventual freedom of the East Germans...
...It was this rigid attitude toward any contact with East Germany that gave the Communists the excuse they needed to call off plans for last summer's public debates with the Socialists in East and West Germany...
...Germany, he told the SPD Congress, had lost the War, and a defeated nation must expect to lose territory...
...All that was needed was an excuse to abort the debate...
...The real accomplishment of the Socialist initiative was that it ended two decades of inertia on reunification...
...The Germans are too anti-Soviet...
...And a few West German political leaders, most of them in the Socialist ranks, began to see the growing ferment in the bloc as a chance to improve the lot of the East Germans...
...No one was permitted to hear Brandt or Wehner ask these questions of Ulbricht before an East German audience...
...In the Eastern Europe of today, this usually means concession, not repression...
...If the Communists were waiting for such loopholes, why did they ask for the debates in the first place...
...One test was public opinion polls, which showed a marked rise in popularity for Socialist Chairman Willy Brandt after his change in Ostpolitik...
...But in 1966 the Social Democrats evaluated the situation differently: They had been defeated in national elections...
...West German voters, he said, want a "new policy" toward the Communist half of Germany, and voted Socialist to show their approval of SPD efforts...
...And with this hold on the populace gone, the Gomulkas and Novotnys will have to find other devices...
...But West Germany, too, has long had its less dramatic ways of inhibiting contact...
...The all-German talks did not take place last summer, but the exchange that did take place opened the way for future talks that will take place...
...Although it makes no attempt to stop any citizen who wants to go to the East, Bonn or local governments have discouraged cultural exchanges, outlawed the feeble West German Communist party, and banned the sale of East German papers (you can buy Pravda on West German newsstands but not Neues Deutschland...
...Little steps,' they hoped, would serve to start the contacts that some day lead to reunification...
...The East Germans published the questions as part of the agreement on preparation for the debate...
...The way to reunification and a European settlement will be built with such "little steps," and many of these steps will be backward...
...Finally, Erhard's stand reflects the sharp competition in the business of building bridges to Eastern Europe, not only from de Gaulle's travels and the British traders', but more importantly from the Social Democrats...
...More likely his primary reason for backing the debates was a desire to enter West German domestic politics, to drive a wedge between the major parties and between the people and their government...
...Although its chief symbol, the Berlin Wall, still stands, events over the last few months have breached several more subtle barriers, and two weeks ago West Berlin Mayor Willy Brandt, at the invitation of the Soviet Ambassador to East Germany, passed through the Wall itself for the first time since Easter 1961...
...It must have been a memorable day in the circulation statistics of Neues Deutschland...
...Brandt's response came in two stages...
...That Ludwig Erhard did so in an interview before his departure for these shores last month illustrates in a number of ways the changes taking place both in Bonn and Washington...
...They were not suited to the Europe that began to emerge after the historic 20th Party Congress...
...Their fate, long a subject of solemn pledges and no action, has at last become an issue in Bonn...
...All copies disappeared from the stands in a few hours, many reappearing on the black market...
...Ulbricht viewed this victory as one influenced largely by East German policies...
...But perhaps more significant than the overtures of the SPD, which has been gesturing fraternally eastward for some time, are signs of new flexibility on the part of the Christian Democratic government in Bonn-despite official disclaimers to the contrary...
...In the process, a myth is being destroyed...
...But for the first time since Ulbricht took power, questions were asked at Party meetings that could not be answered with the usual slogans and exhortations...
...Ulbricht, who has been guilty of oversimplification in the past, on this occasion ignored two facts: That his own leadership scuttled the debates, thereby diminishing the Socialists' achievement, and that the Ruhr victory was due to several factors besides the one he cited, most of them economic...
...To keep pace with the SPD, the Chancellor will certainly have to move faster than the decade it took to abandon the Hallstein Doctrine...
...they had watched France take the lead in benefiting from those changes...
...How did the shift in Ostpolitik come about...
...And he will have to overcome resistance in his own Christian Democratic party, where there remain many partisans of the Adenauer "policy of strength" of the '50s (although, judging from some of his recent statements, Der Alte himself is not among them...
...Socialists and Christian Democrats, miles apart on domestic issues, agreed on East Germany...
...Erhard said in his New York Times interview that West Germany's best interests, not "ideological doctrines," would determine whether diplomatic relations would be taken up with the Soviet bloc...
...Walter Ulbricht is too hateful...
...It will force the rethinking of many of the problems that now prevent change, particularly the question of the Oder-Neisse border and the renunciation of the Munich agreement, which still gives Germany a legal claim to Sudeten Czechoslovakia...
...This was mentioning the unmentionable...
...If the exchange proceeded no further, the Socialists would have made their point: Contacts across the border will improve the lot of the East Germans...
...First of all, it shows Erhard could count on U.S...
...The talks failed, yet in an important sense the Socialist initiative succeeded...
...Herbert Wehner observed at the time: "It cannot yet be foreseen how this exchange of opposing views on the situation of our people in divided Germany will continue...
...Donald R. Shanor, who teaches journalism at Columbia, recently returned from a summer in Europe...
...The SPD has tried to make its Ostpolitik into a major asset in West German politics...
...Still, there is no doubt that Brandt's attempt to arrange the debates caught the imagination of West Germans, whose approval was apparent from the vote totals in the nation's most populous state...
...West Germany has had far smoother relations with its other Communist neighbors for years...
...In dozens of lower and middle level meetings, functionaries were forced to justify the shootings along the border, or explain why Czechs and Poles can tour Italy or France while East Germans cannot...
...Building bridges to the bloc has been a recurrent Administration theme, in fact, and West Germany has lagged behind not only France and Britain but the United States as well because of the awkwardness of having to detour around East Germany in any move eastward...
...Brandt and the Ambassador presumably had much to discuss...
...now they had the backing and authority of official publication...
...A few years back, for example, a West German chancellor would not speak approvingly of diplomatic relations with the Soviet bloc on the eve of a visit to the United States...
...In the past, such questions could be rejected as slanderous or provocative...
...his claim to represent the "good Germany," the reasonable discussion partner...
...West German politicians have been bound for years by that myth, which says it is political suicide to try to modify the old Adenauer positions-reunification within NATO, return to the 1937 borders, the whole "policy of strength...
...This was readily supplied by the cries raised in Christian Democratic circles for prosecution of the East German speakers as soon as they entered East Germany to carry on their half of the scheduled debates in the Ruhr city of Essen...
...And the exchanged ended...
...In foreign policy, the Hallstein Doctrine had its counterpart in the Schumacher Doctrine of the Socialists...
...The effect of the printed word, with the thousands of letters to the editor and questions to the Party it generated, apparently convinced Ulbricht that personal appearances would be overpowering...
...Their offer brought about the first real differences in the approach to East Germany between Bonn and the opposition parties...
...The other was the July elections in the Ruhr...
...For two decades, West Germans had been told what is technically true: The Oder-Neisse territory, the former provinces of Pomerania and Silesia, are only temporarily under Polish administration...
...It set off a process of debate and action that is certain to develop, refine and transform the policy...
...The myth has been tested twice since the Socialists first risked political suicide...
...A number of reasons have been advanced, including Ulbricht's constant drive for recognition of East Germany...
...Then Ulbricht made his perennial offer to talk with the SPD, as representative of the West German workers, on the future of the two Germanies...
...Under the 1955 formulation of Walter Hallstein, then State Secretary in the Foreign Ministry, relations were forbidden with any nation, except Russia, which recognized East Germany...
...The doctrine's usefulness ended a year later with the Polish October uprising and the beginning of the fragmentation of Eastern Europe, but it has taken another 10 years to permanently set it aside...
...For the first time in 20 years, East Germany has become a real issue in West German domestic politics...
...Thirteen previous offers to SPD congresses had been ignored...
...Of course, the SPD letter did not knock down the Wall...
Vol. 49 • October 1966 • No. 21
