Exploiting a Superpower Standoff
HEILBRUNN, JACOB
Exploiting a Superpower Standoff The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 By Frederick Taylor HarperCollins. 486 pp. $27.95. Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn Contributor, New York “Times...
...Absent the Red Army the regime would fall in an instant—as it did in 1989 when Gorbachev made it clear that sending tanks into the streets was not an option...
...If anything, it may somewhat soft-pedal the Stasi’s vigor, tenacity and brutality in pursuing its victims...
...It depicts the insidious nature of the East German Stasi, which had much of the population, including wives and husbands, secretly spying on one another...
...Yet the horrendous damage left behind by the East German regime remains...
...More recently, Good Bye Lenin...
...It didn't happen...
...Nearness to power brings reflected prestige to even the humblest drudge...
...Right-wing groups have fertile territory as unemployment hovers around 20 per cent...
...Berlin, the flash point of superpower conflict after World WarlLwasnowsundered in two...
...No longer was it possible to saunter over the border to visit relatives, friends and lovers, or simply to enjoy an evening in the venerable parts of Berlin where the Prussian kings had lived and the neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel had constructed one masterpiece after another...
...While West Germany, securely bound to Nato and the European Community, enjoyed a Wirtschaftswunder, the economic miracle of the Konrad Adenauer years...
...But keeping the GDR afloat was no easy proposition...
...The 600 or so workers, officials and security staff who serviced them lived in the "Outer Ring...
...He focuses on the siege mentality of a Communist leadership already shaken by the swiftness of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and painfully aware that it controlled only a rump section of Germany consisting of some 17 million citizens, while West Germany had about 70 million...
...Taylor reports that in 1961 a "Girrmann Group" managed to get 5,000 East Germans out using forged or altered passports...
...He was interested in a partnership with France and the United States, and hostile to the old Prussia that had brought about the ruination of Germany...
...In The Berlin Wall Frederick Taylor tells the story ofhow East Germany elite began the construction of a wall in August 1961 to pen in its inhabitants...
...Between 1949-61 about 2.5 million Germans voted with their feetby leaving the Eastfor the West Left unchecked, the flight would probably have undone East Germany by the mid-1960s...
...Anyone who socialized too often with specific fellow Wandlitz-dwellers," Taylor writes, "would be suspected of conducting intrigues, of 'forming a faction...
...Willy Brandt, then mayor of Berlin, disagreed...
...Moreover, East Germany was wholly dependent onSoviettanks to prop it up...
...According to Tay lor, Ulbricht deftly exploited the superpower standoff to increasethenumb er of internal security police in East Berlin, in preparation for building the Wall...
...Today few traces of the border rema in...
...The Potsdamer Platz is filled with large buildings and a new central railway...
...Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel, who grew up in East Germany, is a formidable politician who embodies the aspiration for atruly unified Germany...
...Tay lor believes Khrushchev may have hoped to avoid the embarrassment of a wall and reach an agreement with President John F Kennedy to establish a "free city...
...East Germany struggled to right itself...
...And what a story it is...
...They also had fresh food and foreign goods at the compound, known as the "Inner Ring...
...For one thing, the flinty Chancellor Adenauer was not hostile to the notion of an isolated Berlin...
...Instead, East Germany continually refined its border controls, until itbecamehermetically sealed...
...And this year’s Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others evokes the tenebrous character of the erstwhile German Democratic Republic (GDR...
...It will take decades before the devastation leftbehind by the attemptto construct a Socialist paradise is overcome...
...Reviewed by Jacob Heilbrunn Contributor, New York “Times Book Review,” “Wall Street Journal” IT COLLAPSED in 1989 along with the rest of the Soviet empire, but lately East Germany has been enjoying something of a renaissance, at least in the film world...
...But That was all in the future...
...followed in the Wilder spirit by satirizing East Germany...
...But despite its benefits, the compound felt claustrophobic to many of its inhabitants...
...Anyone wanting to understand how this odious little state could wreak so much havoc and exist for so long would do well to read Taylor's spirited and illuminating book...
...In the early years there were 165 guard towers and 232 bunkers and firing posts...
...The gamekeeper upon whose shoulder the aging Honecker rested his gun when he took aim and fired at the wildlife, went deaf in his right ear...
...At a June 1961 summit meeting in Vienna the two faced off inconclusively...
...His was a farsighted strategy that ultimately helped to achieve reunification by easing fears of German revanchism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, even if his Socialist Party went way overboard in pursuing the goal by the 1980s...
...He notes that "for all the egalitarian rhetoric, the atmosphere was not unlike a traditional feudal estate...
...When I happened to meet him (a more humane and kindly man is impossible to imagine) in Vienna in 1988, he told me it was as though a curtain had been removed to reveal an empty stage...
...In 1958 The Politburo decided it was h igh time to move out ofBerlin and into a protected compound in a small town to the north called Wandlitz...
...The response of the Western powers to this outrage was not swift Realpolitik carried the day...
...Eastern Germany itself has become even more hollowed out, as young and old abandon small towns for the more prosperous West...
...One of its biggest problems was keeping its population from fleeing...
...By the 1980s the Wall became its own kind of establishment, running some six miles deep with minefields and guard dogs...
...This prompted Brandtto embarkupon Ostpolitik, or détente with the East, in an attempt to reconcile differences between the two camps as far as possible...
...Brandt was a true visionary...
...An amalgam of Prussian authoritarianism, Nazism and Communism, East Germany became the Soviet satrapy most resistant to the reforms Party leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev introduced in the late 1980s, to the extent of censoring a Soviet publication called Sputnik...
...It was President Ronald Reagan's tough-minded foreign policy, coupled with détente in Europe itself, that would bring about the end of the Soviet empire...
...A skillful writer, Taylor excitingly recounts the run-up to the Wall's construction...
...The idea of reunification he regarded as a dangerous pipe dream, something to be paid lip service to but no more...
...The East German leadership had sealed itself off from the population...
...All the same, jobs at the forest settlement were much sought after...
...Long ago, movies like Billy Wilder’s 1961 One, Two, Three, starring James Cagney as a hapless Coca-Cola executive working in Berlin, captured the peculiarities of the East-West confrontation to comic effect...
...And there were all those imported goodies, which tended to trickle down...
...Hundreds perished trying to cross it...
...The Party bigwigs enjoyed a special clinic and private cars exempt from the speed limit...
...After the Wal 1 was bui It, the East Germans became progressively more inventive in outwitting the attempts of their masters to keep them imprisoned, using everyfhingfrom sailboats, airballoons and tunnels to earn freedom...
...It was the East German leader Walter Ulbricht who pushed SovietParty chief Nikita S. Khrushchev to sanction the construction of a wall...
...Then, on August 13, the East Germans launched an efficient military operation to seal off the border, placing sentries at seven foot intervals to prevent escapes as border troops and construction units barricaded streets with barbed wire, tank traps and concrete barriers...
...Although Czechoslovakia, say, or Poland, also boasted ruthless secret police forces, East Germany had older traditions to draw upon that may have made it exceptional in this area...
...By the 1980s an electric fence had been added for good measure, plus copious mine fields...
...Next it would seal the country itself off from the outside world...
...The author vividly evokes this lifestyle, so different from that of the average East German...
...For it the battle against Fascism never ended...
...Brandt, who incidentally was a contributor to The New Leader, was staggered by Kennedy's failure to make more than token protests...
...The one area that has made some progress is the former"red" Saxony, but even there discontent with the West, which is often viewed as an arrogant colonizing force by the locals, flourishes...
...Der Alte, as he was known, was a man of the Rhineland and his conception of German security was, in a word, Rhenish...
...The old guard in the Communist Party, like Erich Honecker, had come up during the street battles with the Nazis in the 1930s and survived either Stalin’s purges or Hitler’s concentration camps...
Vol. 90 • August 2007 • No. 3
