Berlin Between Two Worlds

Ronald A. Francisco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429711848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

Berlin has been a central issue in the postwar dispute between East and West and was often the spark that brought the Soviet bloc and the West to the brink of confrontation. Although the city's role in international politics has been muted in the nearly quarter century since the erection of the Berlin Wall, its political status remains unsettled, and its potential to precipitate a crisis and even a military conflict has lessened only by degree. The contributors to this volume discuss Berlin's future from the perspective of all the major national actors involved. Just as the Quadripartite Agreement of 1971 was a necessary prerequisite for East-West detente, any future change in the division of Germany or in East-West relations will require fundamental shifts in long-held positions on the status of Berlin. The authors show how the perceptions, stakes, and even risks of the Berlin issue vary by nation and explore the reasons why Berlin is likely to continue to be an obstacle to East-West cooperation.

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Introduction: Divided Berlin in Postwar Politics

Ronald Α. Francisco

Berlin has been a central issue in the postwar dispute between East and West. Often it has been the site of political tensions that brought the Soviet bloc and the West to the brink of open combat. Its geographic location, unique political status, and dramatic division have made Berlin an important symbol in the struggle for the control of Germany and central Europe. Berlin's present role in international politics is noticeably muted. Yet its political status remains essentially unchanged. It remains sharply divided between East and West even after the past decade's concessions from both sides. Its geographic locations is now no less important strategically or politically.

The Berlin of the 1980s owes its relative quiescence to the diplomacy of the 1970s. By the late 1960s most of the relevant national actors had sufficient incentive to work to defuse the tension that had grown out of the conflicts and raw politics of the previous two decades. Yet because Berlin's political status remains unsettled, its potential to precipitate a crisis and even a military conflict has lessened only by degree. Berlin's future lies in the hands of a diverse set of actors that operates on three basic levels: East versus West; East Germany versus West Germany; and to a lesser extent East Berlin versus West Berlin. The combinations and permutations that occur within and between these levels have become increasingly complex, and are reflected in the multiplicity of international perspectives represented in this volume.

This introduction explores Berlin's international position by reviewing the major events of the postwar era in the context of the foreign policy perspective of the major actors. As the subsequent chapters show, the motives and goals of these actors have varied widely and often conflicted directly throughout the postwar period. In fact, much of the intensity of the Berlin problem can be traced to the fact that its postwar structure was jointly designed by allies who failed to anticipate the fundamental political struggle that was to grip Europe in the wake of World War II.

Postwar Arrangements and the Onset of Conflict

Planning for the postwar occupation of Germany began as soon as the war turned in the Allies' favor. The foreign ministers of the United Kingdom, United States, and Soviet Union met in Moscow in autumn 1943. They established an apparatus, the European Advisory Commission, to devise a common strategy based on the principle of joint occupation of Germany. Within a year the European Advisory Commission had established prospective occupation boundaries and agreed to a separate, joint occupation of Berlin. In November 1944 an Allied Control Council was proposed to coordinate the policies of all zones and sectors of occupation in Germany and Berlin.

The agreements were ratified in early 1945 by the three powers at Yalta, where France was added as an occupying power. Planning was thus quite complete when the Red Army succeeded in its conquest of Berlin in May, and when Germany surrendered formally a week later. In June American, British, French, and Soviet military commanders signed the Berlin agreement, formalizing their supreme authority in Germany. British and American forces arrived in Berlin in July and the formal sectoral occupation of Berlin commenced.

The centrifugal force inherent in a structure of four separate national occupation zones certainly carried the seeds of conflict in Berlin. But this situation was exacerbated by events beyond the city, and even beyond Germany. Berlin became a kind of crucible of East-West conflict. As local political and administrative issues began to reveal recognizable differences between the Soviet Union and the Western powers, matters were worsening elsewhere. The United States and United Kingdom had differed sharply with the USSR at the Potsdam conference over the amount of German reparations and the Soviet role in Eastern Europe. When the USSR refused to vacate the northern provinces of Iran after the war, the Western allies forced action in the United Nations. The USSR sided openly with the communist forces in the Greek civil war. The United States responded directly with the Truman doctrine. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union's policies in its zone of occupation outside Berlin stirred concern among the Western allies.

All of these problems had an indirect but cumulative effect in Berlin. Berlin was one of three instances of common governance in the world where the principal actors of the two emerging ideological blocs not only met directly, but also forged common policy.1/ The Soviet Union devoted considerable energies to the political reorganization in its own mold and consolidation of its zones of occupation. It sought nonetheless to retain the quadripartite character of Berlin and allowed the first scheduled postwar municipal elections (in October 1946) to proceed in the Soviet sector.

The Soviet entry in the election was the newly organized Socialist Unity party (SED, Sozalistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands). The party was the product of a forced (and eventually incomplete) merger of the revamped Social Democratic and Communist parties.2/ The election was a rare instance in which the USSR took the political risk of open public rejection in an area under its military control. The Soviet-backed SED lost badly, even in (Soviet-controlled) East Berlin. It was clear that the Soviets would now need to intensify their political authority in East Berlin in order to achieve the sort of monolithic political hierarchy they were building elsewhere in Eastern Europe.

The focus of East-West conflict shifted away from Berlin following the municipal elections. This was a period of generally poor relations, with major disagreements appearing over Greece and continuing Soviet policies in Eastern Europe. Most relevant for Berlin, however, was the Anglo-American economic merger of occupation zones in December 1946. Soviet intransigence in Four-power talks had convinced the United States and United Kingdom that genuine quadripartite administration of Germany was incompatible with economic progress and political development.

The year 1948 brought a new nadir in East-West relations. Early in February a communist coup seized power in Prague and transformed Czechoslovakia into a Soviet satellite. American Marshall Plan aid was spurned by the USSR, which also forbade its Eastern European allies to accept any American funds. The growing "cold war" had intensified and soon settled with a vengeance on Berlin.

In March 1948 the Soviet military administration began to restrict traffic between Western occupation zones and Berlin. These restrictions grew throughout the spring. They represented the Soviets' response to rapidly developing efforts in the Western zones to establish a separate, integrated economic and administrative system. The Soviets had already done much in their own zone to organize an independent, Soviet-style political and economic order. Nonetheless, the USSR protested Western policies vigorously and then went so far as to merge the East Berlin police force with the forces of the Soviet occupation zone (a violation of Berlin's separate, Four-power status).

Ignoring Soviet protests, the three Western powers allowed control of economic policy to revert to German civilian authorities and sanctioned a currency reform that effectively separated the economies of the Western zones from the Soviet zone and Berlin. The USSR responded five days later with its own currency reform, designed for its occupation zone and all of Berlin (citing Berlin as an integral part of the East German economy). The Western commandants in Berlin ruled the Soviet order invalid for their sectors and protested against the sudden severance of electrical service to West Berlin. The following day West German currency was introduced in West Berlin. The two parts of the city now operated under separate currencies and economic systems. The formal division of Berlin was under way.

In response, the Soviets intensified their efforts to isolate West Berlin. Their blockade of land routes from West Germany was made nearly absolute. Land vehicles were prevented from leaving West Germany for Berlin. Stalin apparently felt that the risk of military conflict was outweighed by the potential gains from a direct challenge to the Western position in Berlin and Germany. The blockade was, according to Philip Windsor, "a substitute for war" from the Soviet perspective.3/

It is doubtful that Stalin had ever envisioned the West's bold and ingenious response: the Berlin Airlift. U.S. General Lucius D. Clay persuaded a skeptical group of superiors in both Washington and Britain that West Berlin could be supplied by air alone, given feasible additions to the available fleet of aircraft and improvement of Berlin's airports. For eleven months airplanes landed in Berlin every five minutes, ferrying the city's every needed resource, albeit never in completely sufficient quantities. It was a magnificent technical achievement and the Berliners united behind it with tremendous zeal.

The political embarrassment of the successful airlift and the growing effect of an Allied counterblockade against the Soviet zone led Stalin to resume negotiations and finally to lift the blockade. Yet the end of the blockade of Berlin was in no sense a return to normalcy. Germany and Berlin were now resolutely divided between East and West. West Berlin became a separate political unit, with Ernst Reuter as its first governing mayor. By the end of 1949 constitutions had been promulgated in both East and West Germany and new republics were proclaimed—two separate German states.

With the establishment of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) in the West and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the East, one of the fundamental postwar political struggles ended its first phase. For Berlin it was a time of great insecurity. The Western powers had forbidden the inclusion of West Berlin in the political competence of the new Federal Republic of Germany. Similarly, East Berlin was to remain, at least formally, separate from the German Democratic Republic. Berlin was to continue to be subject to the authority of the four occupying Powers.

With these developments the international picture became even more complicated. Already the cast of relevant actors was large. But now four new political units emerged and began to interact on the question of Berlin. These were, of course, the two new German republics and the two separate governments of Berlin. The network of relationships that formed around the Berlin question was clearly delineated between East and West, with very little communication or cooperation between actors at most levels. Even the interaction of East and West Berlin occurred mostly along functional lines, for example, some municipal services.

While the Soviet Union continued to consolidate its political control in the East, things were considerably different in the West. Berlin's new mayor found communication easier with the Powers that ruled his city than with the West German leadership in Bonn.4/ This was a problem that was to persist throughout the long tenure of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. It arose not only because of the Federal Republic's lack of legal authority over West Berlin, but also because of Adenauer's own views.

Adenauer was already an old man whose perceptions had been shaped with considerable definition by his environment and experiences. He had fought in his political youth against both the Prussian Protestant Junkers and the anti-clerical Social Democrats from Berlin. As Lewis Edinger points out:

He came to dislike both the "blue" and the "red" Prussians intensely, and he felt a far closer affinity with his coreligionists in Western and Southern Latin Europe than with his compatriots across the Elbe. The world of Berlin and East Germany . . . was alien to him—an outpost of Western civilization in a Slavic world shaped by Byzantine and Asian despots ... It was from the East, rather than the West that the war clouds seemed to come when the war broke out in 1914."5/

The fact that Reuter was not only a Berliner, but a Social Democrat, made matters worse. Adenauer's subsequent apathy toward Berlin was a problem for successive governing mayors. It necessitated greater reliance on the occupying Powers and propelled West Berlin's political leaders toward a disproportionately prominent international role.

Berlin as a Symbol in the Cold War

The stalwart resistance of the Berlin population during the blockade focused a great deal of attention on the city and raised the stakes in the continuing East-West struggle. As Soviet and East German harassment of travel and utility services persisted throughout the 1950s, the Western Powers steadfastly maintained their rights in Berlin. Berlin emerged in the cold war rhetoric as a beacon of freedom in the darkness beyond the iron curtain. A major factor in the perpetuation of this view and the public attention directed at Berlin in the West was the continuing flow of refugees from the East.

The refugee flow into West Berlin ebbed and flowed but never stopped. There is little question that the massive numbers of East Germans and East Berlin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction: Divided Berlin in Postwar Politics
• PART ONE THE WEST
• PART TWO THE EAST