Even with the defeat of his last major opponents in 1958, Ulbricht's problems
were by no means over. In July of that year the Fifth Congress ordered the
final collectivization of agriculture and a sharp rise in industrial output.
This was part of a Seven-Year Economic Plan to bring per capita consumption
in the GDR up to the level of West Germany. One major loophole in Ulbricht's
scheme of things remained-the open border to West Berlin through which hundreds
of East Germans daily left the country. Nearly all of them went by underground
or S-Bahn, undetected among the thousands of commuters who worked or shopped
in the West. Regular spotchecks by the police on anyone carrying a suitcase
had little impact. Most people easily evaded them by making repeated journeys
with a few belongings at a time.
For years Ulbricht had hoped to end the exodus. His first preference was
to convince the Russians to take over West Berlin once and for all. This
could have been done by repudiating Berlin's Four-Power status and proclaiming
it part of the GDR. But until 1958 Khrushchev wanted peaceful co-existence
with the West above all else. Ulbricht's pleas went unheeded. Then in November
1958 Khrushchev for the first time publicly endorsed Ulbricht's line that
"all of Berlin lies in the territory of the GDR. The Western powers
no longer have any legal, moral, or political basis for their continued
occupation of West Berlin." The Soviet leader demanded that West Berlin
be turned into a demilitarized "free city" within six months.
The Western powers ignored the ultimatum. Khrushchev's bluff was called.
When the six months were up, he did nothing.
For Ulbricht it was a fiasco, and the situation was even worse than before.
The continued tension during the six-month period had only increased the
flow of refugees who feared that time was running short. When the ultimatum
ran out there was a brief respite. But as the effects of the Seven-Year
Plan began to be felt, the flow of refugees rose again.
Forced collectivization raised the amount of land in cooperative hands from
45 percent to 85 percent in the first five months of 1960. It also led to
a new exodus of disgruntled farmers to the West. At the same time the pressure
for increased industrial output was alienating factory workers. From a total
of 144,000 in 1959, its lowest annual figure since the GDR's foundation,
the number of refugees rose to 199,000 in 1960. In the first seven months
of 1961 the flow almost doubled to 207,000. The exodus included hundreds
of professional people, a brain drain which few countries could have afforded.
In 1960 688 doctors, 296 dentists and 2,648 engineers went West. The only
comparable phenomenon in recent times has been the departure of panic-stricken
settlers on the eve of independence in Algeria, Kenya and Angola.
In the summer of 1961 Ulbricht persuaded the Russians that force was the
only way to stop it. On August 13, 1961 the Berlin Wall went up. It was
a humiliating admission of failure which long remained one of the ugliest
sights in Europe. Ulbricht later admitted to visitors that it was his greatest
propaganda defeat and that every bullet which the GDR fired at an escaper
was a self-inflicted wound. But he claimed he had no alternative. Certainly
the official GDR line at the time that the Wall was a "frontier of
peace" was half-true in the sense that the Wall was no different from
any other part of the heavily guarded frontier between Eastern Europe and
the West which until recently ran all along the GDR, Czechoslovakia, and
Hungary. It seemed worse in Berlin because it was and is so visible, and
bisects a city with all the obscenity of division which that entails.
After the initial shock most people adjusted to the fact of the Wall. If
1958 had shown the party opposition that it had no chance of changing the
situation, the Wall did the same for the population at large. People now
knew that no one could easily opt out. Gradually there developed a new "shared
consciousness" in the GDR, which laid the basis for the reforms of
subsequent years. Although the Wall was a propaganda defeat for Ulbricht
vis-a-vis the West, it was a victory vis-a-vis the Russians.
It was the culmination of more than five years' pressure by Ulbricht for
some action on West Berlin. Originally he had proposed two options: either
a separate peace treaty between the Soviet Union and the GDR and the recognition
of GDR sovereignty over the access routes to West Berlin, if not over the
city itself, or else a Wall. Krushchev's decision to build the Wall was
meant to end Ulbricht's demands. But even after the Wall was built, Ulbricht
continued the pressure in public declarations for a peace treaty as well.
This was too much for Khrushchev.
He was unwilling to give the GDR sovereignty over West Berlin's access routes
and thereby the power to provoke war with the West. The GDR already had
de facto control over autobahns and was able to manipulate tension by impeding
traffic. Instead of a peace treaty, Khrushchev signed a twenty-year friendship
treaty with the GDR in 1964. This went less far than Ulbricht liked. Although
qualified, it was a triumph since it set the seal formally on the guarantees
which the Soviet Union had given Ulbricht in 1961, when it authorized the
building of the Berlin Wall.
Ulbricht had achieved what even his enemies fifteen years earlier had hardly
thought possible. A man without personal charm, admired and trusted by few,
he had created a state out of a rump territory, a quarter the size of pre-war
Germany. He had ensured its continuity. He had pushed aside all domestic
opposition. He had endowed the country with a sense of permanence, which
its people could feel themselves. And he had given it an industrial potential
which its allies envied. Nikolai Fadeyev, the secretary-general of Comecon,
the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, put it like this in 1964:
"At present the GDR is one of the strongest industrial states
in Europe and the world. It has a highly developed modern industry, particularly
in machine building, chemicals and energy. With its industrial production
the GDR occupies fifth place in Europe and eighth in the world. With its
per capita production of electricity it is third in Europe, and of chemical
products second in the world (after the United States)".
Any suggestion that the Russians would be willing to give up an economic
powerhouse of this kind must have been finally laid to rest by those comments.
Of course the GDR of the early 1960 was worlds away from the dreams and
illusions of German Communists in the early 1920s. No one could claim that
the GDR had a highly politicized working class. Or that it had married the
traditions of bourgeois civil liberties to the advantages of a socialist
economy. Or indeed, as the early proletarian Marxists in a combination of
puritanism and Utopia had hoped, that physical labor would give way to the
creative enjoyment of education, culture, and new spiritual values-in other
words that people would be free to become consumers not only of goods but
of leisure, learning and the higher things of life. That was not to be.
The GDR's identity was already conditioned by the constant sense of competition
with the West. Economic results and "consumer" values were seen
as the criterion for judging the society's success or failure. From 1963
onwards "management" concepts began to be introduced increasingly
in the running of the economy. This was done by introducing the principles
of cost accountability, the use of new technologies, and more rational investment
procedures. It was called the New Economic System (NES). In an obvious attempt
to overcome the attractions of the West by imitating them, the GDR became
a career-oriented society. At a youth rally in 1963 Ulbricht called for
clear performance criteria to be set up in industry so that young graduates
would know for sure what they would be doing and earning.
A. Daniel Schorr (former Eastern European bureau chief for CBS):
I had gone to Berlin [in the summer of 1961] because it was clear
something was happening there. On August 12, 2,500 people crossed over [from
East to West]. The East Germans couldn't let this go on At 2:30 in the morning,
I got a call from my cameraman. He said something very strange was going
on at the sector border and that I should come down, so-grumbling-I got
out of bed and went. Under floodlights and guarded by soldiers, engineering
crews were using jackhammers to sink posts in the ground. Between these
posts they were unrolling sheets of barbed wire. By 7 a.m., West Berliners
were there, hooting and jeering.
There were amazing escapes. There was an underground network in Berlin and
many cases of collusion. West Berliners would come out with a fire net,
and pretty soon one, two or three people would jump into the net from a
building in East Berlin. I saw people from as high as three stories drop
into nets held by the West Berlin police. Within days the windows were bricked
up.
My scripts for the next few months reflected my pessimism. it was clear
that the Kennedy administration was relieved that instead of blockading
West Berlin, [the East Germans] had closed themselves in.#B. Wolfgang Leonhard,
a former member of the East German Central Committee who defected in 1949:
On August 13, 1961 [the day the wall went up], I was in West Germany. [In
a televised interview] I warned that the Western leaders must take action
within two, three hours or else it would be too late. We know now-we learned
later from refugees-that the leadership in East Berlin would have backed
down if the West had stood up to them. But the West, as usual, was too late.
It took several days, and then it was not the American president but the
vice president who came. The allies were not active in opposing the move.
C. Theodore Sorensen, special counsel to President John Kennedy:
I was in the president's office at the White House just after he heard
the news [about the wall]. My first impression was simply the inhumanity
of it all. My second thought was concern over the legal, diplomatic and
political position of the West. The president made it clear that under the
four-power treaty we would permit no interference with our presence in West
Berlin, our access to the city or the freedom of the people in West Berlin
to choose their own system.
It's hard to describe anything as outrageous or immoral as the wall as bringing
about a sense of relief, but compared to military alternatives or the continuing
destabilization of the area, the wall was better. We were afraid Khrushchev
would carry out his threat of halting access to West Berlin. The crisis
atmosphere only began to ease when the secret correspondence between Kennedy
and Khrushchev began in September.
I'm very proud of what we did. American patience and courage kept West Berlin
alive, kept hope alive, kept the alliance together, but did not precipitate
a war.
D. Walt Rostow, former deputy special assistant to the president for national-security affairs:
No one knew exactly what Khrushchev's ambitions were. At Vienna he gave
an ultimatum to President Kennedy: either you make a peace treaty with East
Germany or we'll transfer control over the routes to West Berlin to the
Eat Germans, and they'll cut off you access. When Kennedy left Vienna, he
said it would be a cold winter. Well, it turned out to be a hot summer.
As the outflow accelerated from East Germany, Soviet diplomats were saying
to us, "You realize your garrison there is helpless; you realize that
the French and the British don't want a war over Berlin." Our answer
was: the American flag is there and we're going to stay. It was a very ugly
period.
When we decided to send Vice President Johnson to Berlin, it was necessary
to underline the absolute nature of our position in Berlin. Given the nature
of the pressure the Russians were putting on us and everyone else, we had
to give an ultimate commitment to buttress that little garrison.
We had a mission, which was to make West Berlin viable in the face of the
wall. Khrushchev was saying that West Berlin would fall like a ripe apple
from a tree. We didn't know whether it would or not. Since 1961, it has
survived. We defended it, and the West Germans made something of it. if
there is virtue in what we did, it's not the money and the troops we committed,
but that we had the faith that truth would assert itself.
E. Gail Halvorsen, retired air Force colonel dubbed "the Berlin candy bomber" for his airdrops of candy to the children of West Berlin during the airlift of 1948
What was my reaction the other night? I tell you. I'm a hard old retired
colonel, but I had tears in my eyes. The right to choose is priceless. At
some point, it's worth more than life itself. To see people standing on
the wall, where once they would have been shot, I could hardly take it all
in.
Source: Newsweek: November 20, 1988, p. 38.
All summer long John Kennedy had brooded, waiting for Nikita Khrushchev
to make good on his theat to get rid of "the bone in my throat"-partitioned
Berlin. but he had not anticipated what would happen on that warm August
afternoon in 1961 when he set out from Hyannis Port, Mass., on the yacht
Marlin loaded with family and his favorite picnic dish, fish chowder.#When
the flash came from Washington that the Wall was going up, the Army major
on duty became so agitated that he walked into the surf in full uniform
to deliver the bulletin to Brigadier General Chester Clifton, the President's
military aide, who was swimming just offshore.
Clifton signaled the Marlin back and handed Kennedy the terse message. "You
all go ahead," J.F.K. told his family. "I won't be out."
He climbed into golf cart with Clifton and in silence rode to his house.
"Why in hell didn't we know about it?" he blurted, not expecting
an answer. "What can we do?" he asked, turning to Clifton. "What
cant he military do?" Cliftton told him that out of some 40 contingency
plans for Berlin, he could not recall a single one dealing with a wall being
built between the Soviet and Allied sectors. In fact, there was not much
he could do. Later, in the Oval Office, he sighed that the Wall would stay
until the Soviets tired of it. "We could have sent tanks over and knocked
the Wall down," he mused. "What then? They build another one back
a hundred yards? We knock that down, then we go to war?"
When Kennedy did see the Wall, the event became one of the great spectacles
of the cold war, his speech one of the most memorable in his presidency.
When Kennedy flew into Berlin that June morning, he had a text that did
not please him. "You think this is any good?" he asked the U.S.
Berlin commander, Major General James Polk, who had joined the Kennedy caravan.
Polk scanned the speech and replied bluntly, "I think it is terrible."
Kennedy agreed and began to write a new one. But before he taunted the builders
of the Wall, he rode four hours through the streets of West Berlin in the
midst of a human fury of adoration intensified by the city's constant isolation.
Nothing before in Kennedy's exuberant political life had approached this
demonstration of between 1 million and 2 million cheering, roaring Germans.
At Checkpoint Charlie he asked that family members and other guests not
climb up to the viewing stand. Mouth set, Kennedy studied the strange, gray
emptiness before him. Then, in far windows in Eat Berlin apartments, three
women appeared waving handkerchiefs. "Isn't that kind of dangerous?"
wondered Kennedy. Yes, he was told. Kennedy stood several seconds in tributary
to those tiny figures.
The crowd that waited for him to speak in front of West Berlin's city hall
occupied every foot of the square and all the connecting streets. Kennedy
raised his jaw and chopped the air with his hand, his voice growing ragged
as he shouted his challenges to the other world and answered with his famous
refrain, "Let them come to Berlin." In that moment the tribute
Kennedy gave to those people was as honorably held, as profoundly pure as
anything he had ever said. It was made of truth and given to history. "Ich
bin ein Berliner."
Hugh Sidey, Time, November 20, 1989, p. 33.
The geography of the past is studded with walled cities. Jerusalem and Rome,
to name but two from antiquity, fortified themselves against enemies without.
Later, in medieval times, the citizens of London and Paris built and rebuilt
ramparts to safeguard their liberties, ones that many of their rural contemporaries,
burdened with the feudal status of serf, were denied. Only in the 20th century
has a city had a wall rammed through its innards, circumscribing the freedom
of two-thirds of its people, forcing upon them a serflike tie to the land.
Only in Berlin.
Images of the violation recur. When Berliners in the Soviet-run sector woke
on the morning of August 13, 1961, to find families sundered and the city
rived by barbed wire-and soon concrete-many frantically sought routes of
escape. The Berlin Wall was meant to halt a tide of migrants to the West
that had left Eat Germany short of workers and threatened the stability
of the Communist regime: more than 2.7 million had departed since the founding
of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, 30,000 in July 1961 alone.
At first, buildings along the new boundary afforded windows on the West.
Many refugees leaped, some into fire nets, others to the pavement; more
than a few died in the fall. After the regime bricked up the windows, the
resourceful tunneled beneath the 20-ft. "death strip" and its
mines and gun emplacements. The most daring efforts came from Wall jumpers,
who confronted head on the "antifascist protective barrier," as
the jargon of totalitarianism described the Wall. in their jagged sprints,
dodging searchlight beams and bullets, they created a theater of longing
where the value of freedom-and the maleficence of its denial-found an extraordinary
visual expression. In 1962, in one of the most publicized instances, 18-year-old
Peter Fechter, an East Berlin bricklayer, was cut down by machine-gun fire
as he tried to scale the Wall and, in plain view of Western policemen and
reporters, was left lying for an hour while he bled to death; finally East
German border guards retrieved his body. Fechter was one of an estimated
75 who have been killed over the past 28 years while trying to escape across
the barrier.
The significance of the Wall extended far beyond the city, far beyond Germany.
it became an epitome of the partitioning of Europe, the overarching symbol
of the cold war and one of the places where the Western alliance and the
Warsaw Pact came gunsight to gunsight. After the magnificent oratory of
John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech, it was de rigueur
for U.S. Presidents-and other Western leaders-to come and shake their fists
at the Wall and call down imprecations against those who had conceived and
built it. But the barrier also stood as a reminder of the limits of power
in the nuclear age. Paradoxically, the Wall, despised though it was, acted
as a bulwark for stability in Europe, ratifying two spheres of influence
and thus maintaining the alternative of cold war to hot war. It was the
most palpable evidence of a deep wound in European civilization-and it is
finally gone.
Daniel Benjamin, Time, November 20, 1989, p. 42.
Curtis Cate, The Ides of August: The Berlin Wall Crisis 1961
(London, 1978).
Jack M. Schick, The Berlin Crisis, 1958-1962 (Philadelphia,
1971).
Robert M. Slusser, The Berlin Crisis of 1961 (Baltimore, 1973).
Seven Days in August, Time-Warner Interactive CD-Rom (1993)
Send comments and questions to Professor
Gerhard Rempel, Western New England College.